There was a pause as he finished pouring the drink. I didn’t turn around.
He appeared next to me again and sat down at the desk. There were two glasses of whiskey, no ice, both half full. He slid one my way.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Nothing at all?”
I shook my head. Of course I had questions. All kinds of them; numerous things I’d pondered on those long drives. I’d planned to ask him about all of it. But here, in his office, alone with him, something screamed at me not to. That it wasn’t the right time. That asking questions was a bad idea, even though it was specifically what he was offering.
“Nothing that sticks out,” I said.
He nodded. “Very well.” He then raised his glass and invited me to do the same. “To new friends and positive ventures,” he said.
I nodded and we each took a drink. I swallowed and set my glass down, still full of whiskey. Vince downed the whole thing like water.
“Because, you know,” he said, setting the empty glass down, “if there was something you needed to know—if there was a question you had, that you felt was necessary to get answered in order to do your job effectively—then the proper thing to do would be to ask it. Dealing with your questions in any other way wouldn’t really fit with what we’re trying to do.”
He stared at me. The smile was gone.
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “So, being that you’ve indicated you’re happy with the job thus far…”
He raised a palm and waited for my acknowledgement.
“Definitely,” I said.
“…and you see yourself continuing with us for the foreseeable future…”
Another pause.
“Yes,” I said.
“…then the pertinent thing to do would be to ask any lingering questions that you may have. Because these things can affect job performance, and we need to get them taken care of and move on with the work. So, I will ask you one last time: is there anything you need to ask me?”
My palms sweated again. He looked straight in to my face. The glass of whiskey sat in front of me. The room was silent.
“Well,” I said, measuring my words carefully, “I guess I was never really told what it is we’re hauling, exactly.”
He sat back and bridged his hands. “Is this information required for you to perform your job duties?”
“I…well, no, I guess not.”
“Julian, I’d like to give you a small piece of advice: don’t concern yourself with things that don’t require your concern. Here we have a prime example: you’ve been making runs for me in an efficient manner already, without having knowledge of what, exactly—as you said—you were hauling. Clearly, you don’t require this information to do the work, and I can’t imagine another purpose for it.”
I nodded.
“Concerning yourself with these trivial things—that, quite frankly, are not your business—is not a good practice in commerce or in life. I did not get to where I am professionally by stressing over things that don’t further my cause. Am I making sense?”
“Yes.”
It was odd to think back to just over a month ago, sitting in the offices of one of the most powerful financial firms in the world and rubbing shoulders with old and esteemed gentlemen who were all filthy rich. Through it all, I couldn’t remember any of them speaking to me this way. Yelling, chastising, putting down, perhaps; these things were common. But they were direct. There was no room for interpretation. With Vince, right then, it was an encoded message disguised as a clear message.
“This information was not given to you, because you have no need for it,” he continued. “My advice would be to not stress about the things you don’t know. If you needed to know it, I would have told you.”
“I understand,” I said, and wiped my hands on my pant legs.
“As I thought you would,” he said, and the smile returned. “I believe we’re done here.”
I rose to my feet and tried to think of something to say, but he spoke again before I could.
“You’re not planning on leaving without finishing your drink, are you?”
I looked down at the glass. “I don’t usually drink liquor in the middle of the day.”
He gave a polite chuckle. “It’s eighteen year-old single-malt. I’m afraid it cannot be wasted.”
He stared at me and waited. I picked up the glass and examined it, then tipped it back and swallowed the rest of the liquid. It must’ve been three shots of alcohol, and unfortunately I was still unable to tell the difference between good scotch and bad scotch. My eyes watered and I forced a straight face.
“Atta boy,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder from across the desk. “Thanks for coming by.”
“Of course,” I said, and walked to the door. As I was leaving, he spoke one last time.
“Electronics,” he said.
I stopped and turned around. “Excuse me?”
“Electronics” he repeated, looking at his desk, then back at me. His voice was flat and dry. “Consumer electronics are what you’re hauling. I buy direct and act as something of a wholesaler.”
I paused and again tried to find words. “Okay then,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”
He nodded and turned his back.
26
After our conversation, I did not expect to be retained as Vince’s employee. It seemed I’d irked him in some way, whether he knew about me snooping around the trunk of that Chrysler or not. It was possible, I suppose, that our meeting was not out of the ordinary—that he was just “checking in,” as he said—but that was not how it felt. Leaving his house that day, I wondered if I had done my last run, and if that had been the case, it would have served as a relief.
But the runs continued—three in the next week—and the cash was piling up, easy and tax-free. No matter the denomination, there was something refreshing about not immediately handing a third—or, in my later years, half—of the money to the government. I kept what I made stacked in my sock drawer. I hardly had any expenses. When I was raking in the big bucks on Wall Street, it never felt like getting ahead, because more money was always quickly followed by more spending. New furniture, redecorations, extravagant dinners. Car payments, Manhattan rent, and mounds of student loan debt from both of us. But now, finally free of so many of those things, I made a point to limit my debt and financial obligations as much as possible. I’d paid off my credit cards shortly after arriving in Colorado, and after the most recent run, I found a buyer for my Mercedes in Denver and he paid me in cash. The sale was at a discount, but I didn’t care; I was free from car payments, and I didn’t need a luxury machine in the mountains anyway. I used a fraction of that money to buy an old Ford Explorer that smelled like mothballs but ran well and had four-wheel-drive. I was proud of myself.
Due to the odd meeting with Vince and the numerous runs I’d been on, my mind was mostly occupied with the job. In my downtime, my mind reflexively wandered into trying to solve the puzzle of everything I did not know. It became exhausting, to think about it constantly, and I asked myself whether I would actually be able to separate the things that concerned me from those that did not, as Vince suggested. Between the actual work and the ruminations about work, I did little else. The hikes stopped, the exploration stalled. I saw Suzanne occasionally, but hers was another puzzle I did not have the energy to try and solve. I thought of little else but the job and what to do about it.
One morning, that changed.
I strolled down to the local coffee shop after rolling out of bed around nine. The air was hot already; the weather report said we could be seeing highs of ninety in the mountains. Denver was bracing for record temperatures. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and black coffee. After I paid, I heard a voice to my left.