Page One

Chapter 10

I went down after him with the folder in one hand and the eviction notice in the other, and the elevator took eleven floors like it had all the time in the world.

Dani was behind me saying my name. Mrs. Delgado was behind Dani saying something about how a body shouldn't ride an elevator in her socks. The delivery kid was on the stairs, three floors down, taking pictures.

The lobby doors opened onto Sunday afternoon. Luis at the desk. The old man with his paper, still there, four hours later, like he lived in that chair. Two women in tennis clothes. A doorman holding the glass.

And through the glass, across the street, the black car.

"Miss Brennan," Luis said. "Don't."

"Luis, open the door."

"Miss Brennan—"

"Open the door."

He opened the door.

I went out onto the sidewalk in my socks with a manila folder and a government envelope and the whole lobby behind me at the glass, and I walked up to the back window of that car and I knocked on it with my knuckle, twice, loud.

The window came down.

"Ms. Brennan," Adrian Voss said. "You're not wearing shoes."

"I know what I'm not wearing." I held up the folder. "Page one. Your name. Adrian Voss. Is that real?"

"It's real."

"Is the money real?"

"Every dollar."

"Is the thirty days real?"

"Thirty days," he said. "Not thirty-one. I don't do thirty-one."

Behind me, the lobby door opened. I heard Dani's shoes and Luis's keys and Mrs. Delgado's housecoat in the wind.

"Then here's my question," I said, "and I want it loud enough for the man at the desk to hear it, because he's going to be a witness if this goes bad."

"Go ahead."

"Who are you?"

The driver got out. He came around the front of the car and stood by the front fender with his hands folded, and he did not look at me, and he did not look at the building, and he did not look at anything.

"I'm a man with a board that meets Thursday," Adrian said, "and a chair who wants to know why I've never been married, and a family that has opinions about it, and a company that trades on me being a certain kind of person. That's the answer to your question."

"That's the answer to a different question."

"It's the answer I've got."

"No." I put my hand on the roof of the car. "No. That's not — you know my mother's doctor. You know about a letter in a drawer. You had somebody reading my building's filings. That's not a board meeting, that's a file. That's a dossier. What did I do to deserve a dossier?"

The old man with the paper had come out of the building. The two women in tennis clothes had come out of the building. The delivery kid was on the sidewalk with his phone down at his side.

"Ms. Brennan," Adrian said, "get in the car."

"Don't tell me to get in the car."

"Get in the car," he said, "and I'll tell you everything that's in the folder, page by page, in the order I wrote it."

"I want to hear it out here."

"You don't."

"I do." I turned around, and I said it to the whole sidewalk, to Luis and Dani and Mrs. Delgado and the old man and the tennis women and the delivery kid. "I want to hear it right here where everybody can hear it, because I have spent seven and a half months being talked about in rooms I wasn't in, and I'm done with it."

The sidewalk went quiet.

Adrian Voss looked at me through the open window for a second. Then he pushed the door open and got out and stood on the sidewalk with the coat and the collar and the watch, and the tennis women took a step back.

"Page one," he said. "My name. Real."

"Page two."

"Thirty days. Real."

"Page three."

"Your obligations, which I will settle in full the day you sign. Medical arrears. Credit card. The eviction. Paid in full, no strings, no interest, nothing owed back. If you walk on day one, they stay paid. That's the page."

"And page four."

"Page four is a rule."

"What kind of rule?"

"A rule about questions," he said. "You ask me anything and I answer it. Truthfully. Every time. But you answer one of mine first, and whatever you tell me, you've never told another living soul. Break that and the thirty days become a hundred and twenty, and you don't get to argue about it."

The old man with the paper said, "That's a trap," out loud, to nobody.

"It's a trap," I said.

"It's a rule," Adrian said. "Every contract has one. Most of them are worse."

"And if I don't sign?"

"Then I pay the arrears anyway, because I already told you I would, and I don't say things I don't do." He put his hands in his pockets. "Then I get in this car and you never hear from me again. That's the whole thing. That's the folder."

I stood on the sidewalk in my socks and it hit me — not the folder, not the terms, not the money — the name.

Adrian Voss.

I had heard that name before.

Not from a building. Not from a hospital board. From a parking lot.

"Voss," I said. "Somebody said that name to me."

Adrian Voss did not move.

"Eight months ago," I said, and my voice was going somewhere strange. "In a parking lot behind a restaurant on Weller. Somebody said it to me and I didn't know what it meant and I forgot it by the time I got to my car. But somebody said it. To me."

"Ms. Brennan—"

"Who said it to me?"

And his face did the thing. The fish under ice. One flicker, and gone.

"Get in the car," he said.

"No."

"Get in the car."

"Who said it to me?" I was loud now. Loud enough that the old man's paper came down. "Was it Morgan? Did Morgan Hale say that name to me in a parking lot eight months ago?"

Adrian Voss looked at me for one long second.

Then he turned his head to the driver and said, flat as a table, "She's had a hard week. Let her tire herself out."

The driver opened the back door.

"That's not an answer!"

"Drive around the block," Adrian said, and got in.

"That's not an answer—"

The door shut. The window came up. The car pulled away from the curb without hurrying, and the driver went around the front and got in and it went down Baxter and turned left at the light and was gone.

I stood on the sidewalk with the folder.

"Miss Brennan," Luis said, from the doorway. "Come inside."

"Luis—"

"Come inside," he said. "Please. There's something I gotta tell you and I'd rather do it inside."

I turned around.

The old man had his paper up. The tennis women were walking away fast. Mrs. Delgado was holding the door. And Luis was standing in the doorway of my building with his cap in his hands, folded, the way men fold their caps when they're about to say a thing they've been sitting on.

"Luis."

"Tuesday," Luis said. "He was here Tuesday. Before any of it. Before the hotel, before the dinner. Tuesday, four in the afternoon, and I remember because it was raining and he didn't have an umbrella."

The door swung shut behind him with a bang that went off the lobby glass.

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Chapter 10 Ends