“Don’t worry about that. Funny. I don’t know where he stops.”
“I’ll find out from his secretary,” Eva chimed in.
“Good,” Lana said, “Sounds like we’ve got a conspiracy.”
We walked along together for a few moments in silence before Eva asked, “Manny, did you eat my onion?” Lana threw back her skull and laughed for what I think of as the last time.
The next day I met Eva for lunch. “Will he be expecting me?” I asked when she gave me the address. He’d moved in the years since I’d worked under him.
“Are you out of your ever-loving mind, sweetheart? Do you have any idea how close my desk is to Copal’s door?”
“Just asking,” I said.
Eva pushed her food around her plate. “Manny,” she finally said, “do you think Copal’s up to something?”
“Like what? Gunning for the Loud-Mouthed Bastard of the Year award?”
“I don’t know,” she said, staring at her plate. “Maybe there’s a reason why he’s tearing everyone down.”
I shrugged. “Does he need a reason to be an asshole? I never did.”
She raised her head to give me a glare. “You’re not an asshole, darling.”
“You didn’t know me when I was alive.”
Eva sighed and dropped her fork on her plate. She leaned forward, elbows on the table-top and her hands folded under her chin, and earnestly asked, “What do we know about Copal? What’s his background? How did he get this job?”
“We don’t ask those questions,” I answered. One of the unwritten rules in the DOD: everybody’s a bum so don’t pry into anybody’s past.
Eva leaned back and folded her arms. “I don’t just accept things, remember?”
“OK, but why are you so bothered?” I wanted to know. “Copal hasn’t been tearing you down, has he?”
“No. And why not?”
I shrugged again. “Because you’re not a sales agent, I guess. He can’t lay into you for not making enough premium sales.”
“Exactly!” Eva said like she was making a big point. “I’m not an agent so I get slightly better treatment.” She picked up her fork again to stab at her food. “But why should that make any difference to a guy who’s just an asshole? So he’s not an equal-opportunity prick?”
“Sonofabitch, Eva! How the hell should I know?”
“Maybe you should find out.”
“There are some questions we simply do not ask.”
“OK, Cal. OK. But if certain questions don’t get asked, how in this sick world will Yehuda be any help to you?”
Maybe Eva was the mind reader. I went to Yehuda’s home that evening. He fixed me a drink and then settled into his easy chair while I told him about our problem. When I’d finished, the tired old man said, “I don’t know what I can do to help, Manny. Office managers are rather autonomous, you know.”
“Yeah, but there are people above him, right? He’s gotta answer to somebody.”
“We all answer to somebody, Manny,” Yehuda sighed and shook his head slowly, “but the big boys downtown have larger concerns than our piffling office politics.”
“So what are you telling me? That all we can do is to wait until he or we are promoted out? That could take a while, you know.”
“Yes,” Yehuda said with a grimace, “I know.”
I had put my foot in it and didn’t I know it. “Sorry, mano, I didn’t mean to…”
Yehuda impatiently waved the apology away. “Never mind. I made the biggest mistake any man could. I accept my fate,” he said almost defiantly, “and so should you.”
“I don’t think Copal is fate, exactly.”
“We don’t get to choose who we work with. I believe I recall getting a few complaints about you in those first few months. But you improved. Remarkably so. I suspect Copal simply hasn’t had much in the way of management experience. And he may still be bitter that he isn’t allowed to go on to his rest. You must make allowances.”
“I’ll try. I don’t now about Lana, though.”
We found out about Lana soon enough. When I told her what Yehuda had said, she didn’t make any response except to shake her head and walk away.
I was filing my recent cases a couple of days later when Eva slipped quietly into my office. She looked shaken. She went to my premium clients cabinet without a word and took out the bottle of scotch I kept there. When she had taken a big swallow she told me what was up.
“It’s Lana,” she said hoarsely, and not only because of the low quality of the scotch. “She left town.” I could only stare. “Her driver tried to stop her. She made it as far as the edge of the forest, but then she walked straight into a web. The spiders had her in pieces in seconds.” Eva shuddered. “Bab is pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah,” I said pointlessly. “She’d been here so long. I was really pulling for her.” I gave the filing cabinet beside me a sideways punch. “Damn Copal!”
Eva took another slug of scotch. “If this can happen to someone like Lana, Cal, what chance do we have?”
I let out a slow sigh and tried to think of a decent answer. There wasn’t one. “Lana didn’t have to leave town, Eva,” I finally said.
“I think she did. I think she knew she had to try. There’s something in this office that gave her no choice.”
She was so earnest I almost believed her. But I shook my head. “No. She just didn’t think things through.”
Eva opened her mouth to argue, but Copal chose that moment to burst in. “So there you are!” he roared. “Just what the hell are you doing away from your desk!?”
“Lana left town,” Eva said in a low voice.
“Glad to hear it!” Copal snapped. “Maybe now I can get one decent agent in this office.” I ground my teeth but said nothing. Copal must’ve seen my jaw working because he paused tearing into Eva long enough to say, “Smart boy.” Then, to Eva, “So get back to work, you!” With that he spun around and stamped out of my office.
Eva hefted the bottle. I grabbed her wrist and pried the bottle away from her. “That’d be a waste of perfectly good rotgut,” I said.
“Are you just going to accept this?” she hissed.
“Give me another option!” I snarled, genuinely angry with Eva for a change.
She looked hard at me for a moment, decided against whatever more she might have had to say, and went out with a shake of her head. I glared at the bottle in my hand. “She could’ve at least left me enough to get drunk on,” I groused before downing what remained of the scotch.
An agent to replace Lana arrived the next day. If I had been under oath, I suppose I would have admitted that this was a good thing. The Bureau of Acquisitions simply cannot be short-handed. But, down in the guts I no longer have, I thought it stank. We should have had a mourning period. Lana was truly gone… gone in a way beyond what death means to the living. Lana was still there, but balkanized, rendered impotent, voiceless, totally incapable of leaving the Land of the Dead. That’s something people need to come to terms with. Instead, Copal thrust a new agent into the space of a soul he had—deliberately or not—driven into hell.
There are no words for how we hated Copal.
And we didn’t much care for the new guy. His name was Domino Hurley. We would have disliked him at first only because he had replaced Lana. That wouldn’t have lasted except he gave us other reasons. Offensively self-confident, he oozed insincere charm and friendliness. We quickly found out that he had no prior experience as a reaper, which was strange since our division was made up of veterans and the DOD normally liked to group agents by experience.