“Exactly.”
Laertes felt that there was deep meaning in the words they shared, but he still hankered after a well-made, not-too-sweet Manhattan.
“Ma’am, I was just about to go out. So if you want something, just ask, and I will try to answer.”
“Monday morning, seven forty-five, seventy-ninth floor,” she said. “Number two Broadway.”
“What are you talking about?” Laertes asked.
“I wish to discuss your job interview at Triple-M.”
“I’ll be there.”
Laertes didn’t remember much about the rest of that Saturday night. There was a bartender and a woman named Briance. He bought quite a few drinks, and someone might have helped him up the stairs. His sixty dollars were gone, but that was all, and in two days, on Monday morning, he had a meeting set with the CEO of Triple-M.
The hangover kept him from seeing his mother the following day. He wondered if Helena Havelock-Jackson would miss her husband’s weekly visit.
Laertes arrived at number two Broadway at 6:10 Monday morning. The security guard let him in after verifying his identity and looking his name up on the computerized schedule.
Howard Sansome sat at the receptionist’s desk on the seventy-ninth floor.
“Hey there, Laertes,” the squat, powerful vice president greeted him.
“This your job too?”
“Ms. Pomerantz wanted to make sure that it would be you who came.”
“Who else could it be?” Laertes asked.
“You got any listening or recording devices on you?”
“No, sir,” Laertes said.
The VP in charge of trouble grinned, then took a device from his pocket. It looked somewhat like an extra-thick cell phone.
“I’m just gonna run this around you to make sure,” Sansome said.
When he was finished, he asked Laertes if he wanted coffee “or something stronger.”
“No. I’ll just sit here and compose my thoughts.”
“Suit yourself.”
Sansome gave Laertes a nod and then departed through a doorway that had no door.
Laertes expected the man to return, but he didn’t.
Later the bank teller would see that brief space in time, the moments between Sansome’s departure and his interview with Millerton-Pomerantz, as the most important span of his life. He wasn’t concerned with a future job. What he thought about was Mona_Loa_Love and her, if indeed it was a woman, deep understanding, in simple language, of the thought processes he’d been swaddled in for so many years that he could no longer separate the bondage from the man.
I am my own prison, he thought. The truths I’ve wielded have hidden that fact from me. Whatever I do from this moment on will derive from those unassailable facts.
“Mr. Jackson,” a strong and yet melodious voice pronounced.
She had soft red hair and eyes the color of pale blue diamonds. Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz was tall and Laertes’s age but much younger-looking. She was slender like him, and there was a smile on her lips letting him know that she had been anticipating this meeting. She wore a blue and white woman’s business suit that might have been made from silk or maybe, Laertes thought, some space-age material.
“Yes,” Laertes said.
“So happy to meet you,” she replied, holding out both hands.
He rose and took those hands as he had his mother’s on Sundays over the past seven years.
“Would you like to go to my office or meet here at the front desk?” Winsome asked. “I gave everyone else but Howard the day off.”
“I leave it up to you, ma’am. This is your fief.”
The CEO grinned and said, “Follow me.”
Laertes remembered walking but not the spaces through which he traveled. His mind was on the topic of his imprisonment and the unlikely meeting with a woman of both beauty and power.
Ultimately they came to an office, the outer wall of which was a single pane of glass. From there one could see the entire panorama of Lower Manhattan and beyond.
“Let’s sit on the sofa,” Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz said.
It was a yellow divan upholstered in fabric that reminded Laertes of velvet-like pigskin. It seemed to hug him, to pull him in.
Winsome turned toward her guest and said, “Before we begin, do you have any questions?”
“Rahlina Rodriguez asked me that. Is that a prescribed beginning around here?”
The CEO smiled and shook her head, no.
“Then could you tell me how I got here?”
“Would you like me to start with the Jesus of Lübeck?”
It was Laertes turn to grin. He knew about the slave ship from 1564.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m just interested in why a major firm like yours would have me followed, questioned, and brought to this amazing place. I thought I’d been rejected by Ms. Rodriguez.”
“You would have been,” Millerton-Pomerantz said simply. “But when you announced to our recording devices that you wanted a copy of what had transpired, our lawyers got nervous.”
“Nervous about what?”
“We’ve spent more than fifty million on suits and settlements, lawyers’ fees, and golden parachutes. Our legal team has been trying to stem that flow.”
“So I’m here because you’re worried that I’ll sue?”
“No.” Her smile was lovely. “I sent Mr. Sansome to talk to you, and by the time he’d finished, the legal team said that there was nothing we had to worry about.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Howard likes to make full reports. He was, in his way, very impressed by your mind. He told me that almost everything you said surprised him and that you might be a valuable asset to our firm.”
“I don’t know what he means by that. I’ve been a bank teller for two and a half decades. The only promotion I ever got was from entry teller to senior cashier. Your boy told me how I didn’t have but a high school diploma.”
“He said that you told him that education was merely the process of applying thought to knowledge.”
“He remembered that?” Laertes asked.
“You are a unique individual, Mr. Jackson. You understand a world that most others don’t even suspect.”
“I can hardly walk a straight line without tripping over my own feet.”
“I believe that. Genius, true human genius, has no patience for the mundane.”
Laertes was suddenly aware of his heart beating. There was sweat on his hands, and his hands had never perspired before.
“Would you like some water, sir?”
“Are you telling me that you don’t think I can be a normal person?” he replied.
“Yes.”
“How come you know about the first slave ship?”
“I studied world history at Sarah Lawrence. I met a man from a wealthy family named Jared Pomerantz. We married, he died, and I assumed the mantle that he’d left behind. We are cut from similar cloth, Mr. Jackson. The only difference is that I’ve been lucky with money.”
“Not with love?”
“Jared was a pig. It shamed me that I was happy that he died.”
“OK, then,” Laertes Jackson said.
“OK what?”
“If you got a job for me I’ll consider it.”
4
Dear Mona_Loa_Love,
I got your e-mail and it nearly broke my heart. I always thought that it was my choice not to compromise, but when you said it was my inability I knew it was true. I was never going to reach out to you again but then something happened...
Laertes explained about MMM, Howard Sansome the Vice President of Trouble, and the CEO Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz.