“I don’t see you in the book, miss, for having an appointment with Mr. Bysen.”
“Billy probably thought he could take me directly to his grandfather after the service.” I smiled easily: I’m not threatening, I’m a team player.
“Just a second.” She answered the phone again, putting her hand over the mouthpiece to speak to me. “You’ll have to talk to Mildred; I can’t authorize you to see Mr. Bysen without her say-so. You can sit down; she’ll be back in a minute.”
The phone kept ringing. Her eye on me, the assistant said in her prim, nasal voice, “Mr. Bysen’s office…It really was not a big serious event, but if you need to talk to Mr. Bysen, Mildred will get back to you to set up a phone meeting.”
I strolled around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. Unlike most corporate offices, there wasn’t any art to speak of, just photographs of Bysen. He was greeting the president of the United States, he was laying a cornerstone for the thousandth By-Smart emporium, he was standing next to a World War II-vintage plane. At least, I guess it was Bysen-it was some young man in a leather helmet and goggles with his hand resting on one of the engines. I gazed at him intently, straining to hear the argument in the inner office.
“Billy, there are a million sob stories and a million swindlers out there. If you’re going to take your place in this company, you’re going to have to learn how to recognize them and deal with them.”
This time the speaker was the reedy, petulant baritone who’d dismissed us from the prayer service: Mr. William, dealing sternly with his impulsive son. I looked longingly at the crack in the door, but the woman in the corner appeared primed to leap up and tackle me if I made a false move.
I wanted to go in before Marcena finished breakfast and joined me-I didn’t want her urge for an interview with Bysen to get in the way of my own agenda. And she was too skillful at getting people to notice her for me to have much hope of keeping Bysen’s attention once she’d joined us. She’d shown that again, when I left her in the cafeteria a few minutes ago-she’d persuaded the guy we’d been talking to to join her for a full cooked breakfast. Just as she had with the girls on the basketball team, Marcena understood how to make the guy (just call me Pete; I’m in procurement and whatever you want I can get it for you, hah, hah, hah) feel she was the perfect empathic listener. As they stood in front of the scrambled eggs, she had already gotten him to start talking about By-Smart’s history with union organizers. I could learn something from her about how to conduct interrogations.
I’d looked wistfully at the eggs, but picked up a carton of yogurt to eat as I hunted for Buffalo Bill’s office: not only did I want to see him alone, I also wanted to get to him while young Billy was still on the premises. I was hoping that Grandpa would have enough tenderness for his grandson to overlook the regrettable lapse made by the preacher, and I knew I’d do better with the old man if the Kid were with me.
From the sound of things, today was not going to be a good day for putting the bite on Grandpa. If a pastor preaching about fair labor practices was a welfare cheat, I hated to think what a bunch of girls who couldn’t afford their own coach would be called. However, the reedy baritone’s attack on Billy seemed to calm down the old man; I heard him rumble, “Grobian can put some backbone into Billy; that’s why he’s down in the warehouse.”
“That doesn’t make it any better, Father. If he’s so naïve that some preacher can take advantage of him, he shouldn’t be out on his own in the field,” Mr. William said.
At that point, so many voices jumped in at once that I couldn’t make out any individual sentences. Behind me, the phone kept ringing; the fracas at the service was apparently setting off seismic shocks around the company. As the assistant repeated her insistence that the sermon hadn’t been a big deal, a couple of men strode into the office.
“Mildred?” the taller, older one called.
“She’s in with Mr. Bysen, Mr. Rankin. Good morning, Mr. Roger. Do you want some coffee?”
“We’ll go on in.” The shorter, younger one, Mr. Roger, was clearly another Bysen-unlike Mr. William, he looked strikingly like Buffalo Bilclass="underline" the same stocky body, the same thick eyebrows and pincer-shaped nose.
When the pair pushed open the door to the inner office, I followed them, ignoring a flustered protest from the corner. Bysen was standing in front of his desk with Billy, young Mr. William, and Mildred, the skillet-faced woman from the meeting. Another man, tall and thin like Mr. William, was with them, but the two I’d followed ignored everyone but Bysen and Billy.
“Good morning, Father. Billy, what in hell were you thinking, bringing a rabble-rouser into the prayer meeting?”
Again an attack on Billy by one of his grown sons made Bysen rise to the Kid’s defense. “It’s not as bad as all that, Roger. We’ll have to spend the morning putting out fires, is all-half the board has heard about it already. Bunch of silly old women: the stock dropped two-fifty on the rumor that we’re letting in the union.” He cuffed his grandson on the head. “Just a couple of guys with more zeal than fore-thought, that’s all. Billy says this spi-Mexican preacher isn’t a labor leader.”
Billy was bright-eyed with emotion. “Pastor Andrés only cares about the welfare of the community, Uncle Roger. They have forty percent unemployment down there, so people have to take jobs-”
“That’s neither here nor there,” William said. “Really,
Father, you let Billy get away with murder. If Roger or Gary or I did something that drove the stock down that far, you’d be-”
“Oh, it will come back up, it will come back up. Linus, you get onto the corporate communications staff? They good to go? Who is this? One of the speechwriters?”
Everyone turned to look at me: the skillet-faced woman, who was standing next to Bysen’s desk with a laptop open in front of her, the two sons, the man named Linus.
I smiled sunnily. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Morning, Billy.”
Billy’s face relaxed for the first time since his grandfather had stormed from the meeting. “Ms. War-sha-sky, I’m sorry I forgot about you. I should have waited for you after the meeting, but I wanted to escort Pastor Andrés to the parking lot. Grandpa, Father, this here is the lady I told you about.”
“So you’re the social worker down at the high school, hnnh?” Buffalo Bill lowered his head at me like a bull about to charge.
“I’m like you, Mr. Bysen: I grew up on the old South Side, but I haven’t lived there for a long time,” I said easily. “When I agreed to fill in as a basketball coach for the girls’ team, I was truly dismayed by the terrible changes in the neighborhood and at Bertha Palmer. When were you last in the school?”
“Recently enough to know that those kids expect the government to hand them everything. When I was in school, we worked for-”
“I know you did, sir: your work ethic is extraordinary, and your energy is an international byword.” He was so surprised at my riding over his harangue that he stared at me, openmouthed. “When I played on the Bertha Palmer team, the school could afford to pay a coach, it could afford to pay for our uniforms, it had a music program where my own mother taught, and boys like you got to go to college on the GI bill.”
I paused, hoping he’d make a tiny connection between his own government-funded education and the kids on the South Side, but I didn’t see a dawning light of empathy in his face. “Now the school can’t afford any of these things. Basketball is one of the things-”