“That’s okay, Rawna.” Sheldon fixed his red power tie but it didn’t need it.
Rawna was looking at a button on the floor and at Kiki fixing her jacket.
“Uh,” Sheldon uttered. “Kiki’s, uh, back here now. She, she has, um, well, there was an accident. Um, so sh-she wi-will be back at her desk.”
“What?” Rawna asked.
“Don’t worry, Rawna, we’ll keep you. But it’s just that we didn’t know, and now, and now we do.”
For the first hour Kiki scrubbed her desk. Loose food attracted cockroaches and vermin. Wall Street was built on ancient basements that were filled with rats. There was once a woman who was attacked by a swarm of rats driven from their subterranean home by a demolition blast. They ran right up on top of her, right up under her dress. When Kiki saw her carried away to the ambulance she was screaming and blood was coming from bites on her cheeks and lips.
Brenda and Sarah and Rudolfo came to find out what had happened.
“When you never answered your phone, girl,” Brenda said to Kiki, “we thought that you had left. I knew you were looking for a job a while ago.”
“I wouldn’t leave without tellin’ you, honey. I might not tell them, but I’d tell my friends.”
When they heard that Kiki had been stabbed, they were all excited, wanted to know every detail. But they were really in awe when Kiki told them how she’d kept her job.
“You really opened your shirt?” Brenda asked, her eyes wide with bawdy wonder.
“And pulled down my pants so he could see some pussy too.”
Rudolfo, whose real name was Henry, did a dance around Kiki’s desk when she said that. He kicked his legs up high like a cheerleading majorette and crooned, “Oooooooooo!”
“How could you do that?” simple Sarah from Great Kills asked. She loved her friends but considered herself different from all Kiki’s and Brenda’s wildness. Sarah had a husband who traded commodities on the Floor and two children who went to elementary school on Staten Island.
“He would have fired me if I didn’t show him something. And I can’t lose my job right now. I got responsibilities.”
“He wanted to fire you?” Brenda shouted loud enough for Sheldon to hear in his office. “You could sue him for that. Him and this company too.”
By eleven, Kiki’s friends had to get back to work on the other side of the building. Over there the windows looked out over the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
By noon it was as if Kiki had never been gone. She searched around her top drawer for the box of single-edged razors. They were still there, at the back. She got the yellow pass from a hook on the wall behind her desk and took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor; the computer floor. The elevator opened into a small frigid room where she was faced by a large sliding glass window and a locked beige door. Through the window Kiki could see a chubby Asian man sipping at a straw from a large plastic Big Gulp cup. His sneakered feet were up on the table in front of him. His eyes were almost shut. He wore a woolen sweater decorated with yellow and brown skiers that seemed to be negotiating his large belly.
“Hey, Kiki,” he said.
“Hey, Motie.”
“You wanna come in?”
She nodded and Motie reached under the table. A buzzer sounded and she pushed open the heavy metal door. Inside the air was even colder. Air conditioning to cool off the millions of dollars in machines either leased or bought from IBM. The electric hum in the air was accented by a hucka-hucka sound of large paper machines that the operators called bursters. Behind Motie Kiki could see row after row of squat boxes, each one about the size of a washing machine. Disk drives. She needed to get into one of them.
“What you want?” Motie asked. He hadn’t gotten up. If he was still drinking scotch from the plastic cup, Kiki wondered that he was still awake.
“Fez around?” she asked.
“What you want with that motorhead fool?” Motie’s parents were Korean but he had been brought up on the streets of Newark. He was a homebody; raised on Motor City and weaned on brown sugar.
Fez, the big-bellied white-shoed giant, was also from Newark. But he was from the white side of town.
“I need him to do somethin’ for me.”
“What?” Motie sat half the way up in his chair. “I could do it too.”
“No, uh-uh, Motie.” She liked Motie and Bernard and DJ. She didn’t want to get them into trouble.
But Fez... Fez had raped Abigail Greenspan in the service elevator at the Christmas party last year. Everybody was drunk and Abby liked to flirt, but Kiki saw the bruises, torn skin, and teeth marks on Abby. Fez had told her to come with him down to the storeroom and then used his key to stop the elevator. He tore off her clothes and hurt her until she did all the things he wanted. When he was through they went back up to the party and Abby broke down crying in Kiki’s arms.
Kiki stayed with Abby for three days; until the poor broken girl got packed and went back to Boston, to her father and stepmother back home.
Kiki was sick for a month after Abby was raped. She looked for a new job all of January, but no place would pay near the salary that she made as Sheldon’s executive assistant at Marshall & Pryde. She avoided the computer room for a long time, and when she did go back she stayed far away from Fez.
In the janitor’s hopper room, where Kiki had taken Abby to wash out the bites on her arms and legs, Abby cried, “What am I going to do, Kiki?”
Kiki answered, “I’m going to take you to my place and when you can travel I’m going to put you on a bus for home.”
“Shouldn’t I go to the police?”
“No,” Kiki said in a small voice. “Better not. Just better get outta here. You know Fez is crazy and he’ll do something. Believe me, I could tell. You better just get away.”
“He’s down in his office,” Motie said. “Prob’ly playin’ with hisself.”
All the operators who weren’t white hated Fez. He called them names behind their backs; often loud enough for them to hear. But he was the big boss on the day shift, and he let all kinds of things go on. They had a daily number right there in the computer room and a running bar from the tape archives. If Fez didn’t like you, you got fired. Nobody wanted to fight him; he was big and rough, and had that kind of crazy look in his eye that let you know he wasn’t afraid to go too far.
Everyone was afraid of Fez. And he was the head of computer operations. Kiki was the computer room expert of her floor. She got her knowledge by hanging out with her operator friends. They’d go out for lunch together and smoke reefer and drink beers. She liked the operators because they weren’t stuck up like the men and women who ran the insurance floor.
The reason Marshall & Pryde paid her so well was that she knew computers and got along with the operators. She could get a computer job done twice as fast as anybody else. But Kiki tried to do her business with Fez over the phone. When she had to go to the computer room she talked to Motie or one of his friends.
Kiki was so frightened by Fez that sometimes she would leave a job undone rather than go to him.
But that changed in the hospital.
She was still scared, but now she wondered, what good was being scared going to do? Abigail was afraid. Did that stop anything? Kiki was afraid. That never stopped her father, it didn’t stop those boys.
Now, even though she was still a little scared, Kiki wanted to stand up to Fez.
“Yeah?” he called after Kiki had knocked on the glass door.
She slid the door open and walked in.
Fez was a gentleman. He stood up, all six foot four of him, and came around his desk to say hi. He wore polyester dark green pants with white shoes and a white sport coat. He couldn’t have buttoned that jacket over his stomach. His shirt was a tight orange skin of satin. He never wore a tie. Nobody wore a tie in the computer room. They were proud of being back office. They laughed at the programmers and office managers downstairs.