The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She did not answer. She simply walked to him and held his face to make sure he was all right. Then she kissed him. He withdrew in surprise, then gently returned it.

  “Samantha,” he said. “Jesus, Samantha, what the hell?”

  “They were going to prosecute you,” she said softly.

  “We need to get out of here. Is there a car nearby?”

  “There’s a cab waiting at the end of the lane.”

  He grabbed her and looked back at the front of the building, where a crowd was forming, presumably waiting for him. Someone’s amplified voice shouted at them, telling them to keep their distance.

  “They were going to prosecute you,” she said. “I couldn’t let you do that to yourself. I couldn’t. So I went to them and asked to speak to your lieutenant.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And I told him what had happened, what had really happened. And then he got his major. And I told him and he went and got the commissioner. And I told him and they all seemed to think for a bit.”

  Garvey shook his head and kept hustling her down the lane.

  “And then once I had them all in a room together I told them I had written ten letters, each to one of the major newspaper publishers telling them what had actually happened, about the… the assault and everything, and they’d be getting them by the end of the day. So either they could go public with the story or they would wind up fighting the papers.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “And I suppose they decided to let you go.”

  “God, Sam. That may make it worse,” he said. “That may make it worse for everyone.”

  “I don’t care. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right what they were doing to you.”

  They climbed into the cab. “Where’d Hayes stash you?” Garvey asked. “No. Wait. Don’t tell me. Just get us close and we’ll let you out.”

  Samantha gave the driver an address only a few blocks away. Garvey nodded, his face drawn and thin and white as a sheet.

  “They’ll fire you for this, you know,” he said. “This’ll be the end of it. Of your career. Jesus, Samantha, they’ll crucify you for this. Unioners may be after you.”

  “I know. I don’t care anymore. Will the Department ever take you back?”

  “Not after this, I don’t think. They said they were going to committee over it soon but they were hinting real hard that I should maybe resign. Maybe I should. Seems like the alternative would be a hearing.” He bowed his head and sighed. “You can love your job, but that doesn’t mean it loves you. You can love your city and you can love your country and your people, but they don’t love you back. They’re just things. Things that get too big and one day they just scrape you off their back. They don’t need you.”

  “I do,” she said. “I need you. I do.”

  He looked at her. His brow and cheeks lined and loose. Dark eyes soft and haggard. Then he leaned his head against hers and shut his eyes.

  “I know you do,” he said softly.

  “I’ll be there,” she said. “Wherever. When you’re ready.”

  They came to the safe house canal. He opened the door for her but did not get out.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I think we’re being watched. I think we have to assume that.”

  “By who?”

  “By the union. By McNaughton. Hell, by the police. So just for now, stay low. Stay clear. And I don’t think we should be seen together, Sam.”

  “Why? What more could they do to us?”

  “I don’t want to know the answer to that question. Just keep your distance. From me. From Hayes.” He reached out and took her hand. Then he pulled her close and kissed her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then she stepped back and he shut the door and the cab pulled away. Garvey did not look back.

  She walked back to the dusty little apartment. Hayes was not there. She waited for an hour and then she went and got the paper.

  The Department had acted on it just fast enough to look semi-responsible. She was not named, only listed as a “high-level McNaughton Securities employee.” Hayes was not mentioned, as she had kept him out of it. It seemed like just another lie in a heap of them. But that was the end of it, she knew. She no longer belonged to herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Hayes staggered out of the canal passageways as afternoon was darkening, then waited until he was steady enough on his feet to begin the hunt again. He was not really sure what time it was, but he felt it was far too late for his liking. The memory he’d stolen from Colomb in the trolley tunnels still burned bright in him, and he knew whatever transaction they were making was about to pass.

  He ran to his usual contacts first, asking if they knew the whereabouts of Mr. Colomb, yet found he was a leper to them now. They wouldn’t answer his calls, and when he persisted they threatened him. He was too hot now, they said, poison to everyone. No one wanted contact with a man who’d taken part in a union murder.

  In the end it didn’t matter. Colomb was such a visible unioner that even the lowliest and most ignorant of Hayes’s informants knew a little about him, and soon Hayes tracked his quarry to a shabby little inn on the south side of town. There he found a good vantage point within the grasping branches of a dying wax myrtle, and he sat and tried to steady himself when the world swam about him.

  He was still fairly wobbly. The place where the unioner’s wrench had hit him felt like ice fused into his skull, and every once in a while he’d have to turn his head aside and spit blood. He knew it was stupid to be out here, wounded and reeling, but he didn’t care. It was easier to keep moving than to stop and rest. This way he never had time to realize the mess he’d caused.

  He gritted his teeth and tried not to think of Garvey trying to pump life back into the dead man. Tried not to remember Samantha, her head leaned back against the safe house wall as she languished in the prison that her life had suddenly become. He shook himself and resumed watching.

  As night fell Hayes began to wonder if his informants had been wrong or if he’d somehow missed Colomb among the mists of his concussion, but finally the door of the inn opened and a little figure came tottering out, hat pulled low and mustache bristling. As he stepped below a streetlight Hayes saw Colomb’s face peeking out through the shadows. He gave him twenty seconds and then followed from the opposite side of the street.

  The little man went to a street-side trolley station and sat on one of the green tin benches. He smoked a quick cigarette and rocked back and forth, head darting around. When the trolley pulled up he jumped on and Hayes snaked through the doors at the other end of the car, marking the gray cap for the second time in two days. Hayes sat down with the rest of the south side rabble and pulled his collar up. Colomb did not notice him. His eyes stayed fixed on the floor, and he continued rocking back and forth with his back hunched, completely consumed by whatever was on his mind.

  They went far south, past Infield and the Brookshire plant, until Colomb finally stumbled off the trolley just a few blocks northeast of the train depot. Hayes followed and gave him a good lead. He watched as Colomb rushed down the street with a hitch in his step, then pulled a note out of his pocket and scanned it. He turned abruptly down a small lane and walked up to a squat little halfway house. He walked in without knocking and Hayes stayed behind, hidden in the brush of a dying park.

  After ten minutes Colomb came back out, now dragging a companion behind, a pale, drunken vagrant who walked with his head bowed, his beard piled up and hiding most of his face. If Colomb minded dragging such a filthy specimen he did not show it. They went farther south to where a shipping cradle loomed over the train depot, a rickety structure composed of rusted metal and creaking wood, the long chains for the loading lift rattling in the breeze. Hayes looked up and saw two airships circling in the sky like mammoth sharks, one near to the ground and the other far up. T
heir shadows traced across the train yard like small eclipses, the hum of their engines so faint the ear could hardly sense it.

  Colomb dragged his friend to the security officer at the cradle and they began speaking quickly. Colomb handed the officer something and the officer nodded as though he had expected it and all three of them climbed into the lift. The officer cranked a lever and the doors shrieked shut and they began to ascend out of sight, the chains clattering all the way.

  Hayes scouted around and found a nearby storage building. It was a short, fat cement structure next to a chain-link fence looped with barbed wire. He walked to the fence and crouched in the shadows, waiting and peering through the links at the graveyard of trains beyond.

  The pitch in the air changed. Hayes looked up. One airship began descending, its engines twisting to propel it down. Whatever the exchange was, it would happen in moments.

  He grasped the chain-link fence and began pulling himself up, delicately avoiding the barbed wire. As he pushed past the last ten feet it snagged his pants leg but did not catch flesh. He clambered up onto the tin roof, wincing as the metal flexed below him. Then when he was steady he lay on his belly and pulled a small spyglass out and looked.

  Colomb and his companion were still there, waiting on the cradle flats. The security officer stood nearby, watching the airship float down to them. Other workers shifted cargo and looked at them curiously. There were no other personnel, as this was specifically a cargo cradle and had no business with passengers. But still Colomb and the vagrant remained and watched.

  The airship dropped until it was two hundred feet off the ground, then banked to the left, its engines twirling in their sockets. Spotlights flashed on, and Hayes squinted as the cradle suddenly glowed magnesium-white. The crew ran its loops and extended the anchor arm and pulled the airship in. A blank metal sheet slid out from the cargo cell in place of the cauterized rubber tunnel used with the passenger airships. Then the bay door opened and men began wheeling off cargo and Colomb and his companion stepped forward to board.

  It was then that some errant gust of air from the engines seemed to catch them. They both threw up their arms and held their hats on their heads, but something flew up, caught on the wind, something small and hairy. Hayes followed it with his spyglass but could not see what it was. He focused again on Colomb and his friend, and as he did he noticed something was different about them.

  The vagrant. He was beardless now. He kept his head low to hide it but it was clear as day.

  Colomb hustled the vagrant aboard as the rest of the crew began loading pallets of whatever cargo. Piping, it looked like. Hayes strained to focus but the two men had their backs to them and he could make nothing out. Then as the vagrant entered the bay door he looked back to give Colomb a solemn wave.

  Hayes’s mouth opened when he saw him. He heard himself say, “What in hell?”

  The bay door closed. Klaxons sounded as the ship broke cradle and the anchor arm released. The loops slid off, now lax and slack. Then the tone of the engines changed once more. The airship slid smoothly out over the train yards, then went straight up like a balloon, moonlight spackling its worn hide. Colomb stayed on the cradle, lonely and little, watching the floating island disappear into the heavens. Then he went to the lift and slid down the skeleton of the cradle supports again.

  Hayes stayed for a moment longer, then vaulted back down through the barbed wire to the ground. He hobbled away and stood beneath a nearby tree and coughed for a good five minutes. His body hadn’t tried such activity in years.

  When he was done he waited for the security officer’s shift to change. As the new guard took up station Hayes sidled up and after a few minutes’ conversation he managed to bribe the man for the shipment’s destination. Stopping over in San Francisco, the man said. Then heading on down to Mexico, making its delivery in Tijuana. Hayes asked if he was sure, and he said he was. Hayes nodded and then walked back to the trolley station, disturbed and confused.

  He had been prepared to believe a lot of things about what was going on, about McNaughton and the unions. But this was something he had not expected. There was no mistaking that broad, honest face. Once the beard was gone, at least.

  Mickey Tazz, the hope of the downtrodden, the voice of the poor of Evesden. Leaving the city and heading to sunnier passages. In the middle of the night, at that.

  He took a trolley back to the Shanties. Then he got out and had a beer at a pub and thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “I wouldn’t say I’m angry,” Brightly said coldly. “Would you agree to that?”

  “I’m sure I can’t say, sir,” Samantha said.

  “No,” said Brightly. “I would say I’m disappointed. You understand my position, yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I hope so.” He leaned back in the chair at Evans’s desk. “Rarely have I seen someone with so much promise, and rarely have I ever seen it squandered so quickly. I mean, what were you thinking? What could have possibly possessed you to put yourself and the company in such danger?”

  Samantha considered how to respond. She was not prepared, nor had she expected or wanted to come here at all. She had returned briefly to her apartments to fetch some things, thinking it would be safe, but had found Brightly’s security team waiting for her, large men with passive faces and their hands calmly clasped behind their back like servants. They had brought her there to Evans’s office, where Brightly fumed and paced, waiting to turn his fury on her.

  “Mr. Hayes was there,” she said, “he surprised me, sir, I couldn’t-”

  “Mr. Hayes?” he echoed. “He surprised you, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hayes was the one you were sent here to control. It was your job to say no to him when he needed it. And I already knew he had been present during the whole debacle, thank you very much, I’m no idiot. If you and that damn detective are in some union hole at two in the morning then I can figure out what the magic link is.” He took a breath. “No, Miss Fairbanks, my problem is why. Why you allowed this. Why you were willing to let things get so far out of control.” He held a fist to his lips and thought. Then he dropped it and said, “You approached the union. Directly.”

  “Sir, I thought I could-”

  “I don’t care about what you think. I don’t care what you think or what you did. I care about what I said. I said in-house,” he said. “In-house. In-house. What was it I said?”

  Samantha hesitated, then said, “In-house.”

  “Yes, in-house,” he said. He stood up, fists at his sides. “Do you have any idea what you did? Do you have any idea what you endangered? My God, woman, I can’t even put words to it. You have endangered this company at its home, at its heart. You, personally. The cop was willing to stay silent and keep his story to himself, but you, you personally went out and put us all right in the middle of it. This, after the murders and the Red Star. Do you know how many goddamn disruptions we’ve had since the shooting? How you’ve endangered the situation abroad? How many shareholders have cut loose? How much money you’ve cost us? You may have ended several careers, ruined lives, just by writing some damned letters!”

  He sat back down and took a breath and swallowed, collecting himself. She got the impression of some giant sea creature, gathering its strength to spring up through the deeps at its prey. Once he was ready he calmly said, “It’s at times like this that I must look back on the path that has brought us here and see exactly when it forked. When it could have gone well, but did not, and instead went bad. There were many options along the way. Perhaps when you touched your pen to those letters and mailed them, maybe that was the moment. Maybe when I read your profile and looked favorably on it, maybe that was when this disaster began. Or perhaps it was before that. When I first thought Evans could make a capable administrator, it may have been there. I can’t say. I can only say that it won’t happen again.”

  Brightly took out a file and dropped it on his desk, then pus
hed it toward her.

  “What’s that, sir?” she asked softly.

  “Your dismissal papers. I suggest you go through them very carefully. Are you surprised?”

  “N-no. No, sir.”

  “Good,” he said. “You have no reason to be. What you did cost this company enormously. You can hardly expect me to tolerate someone who is so evidently willing to bring harm to us. Do you have anything to say?”

  She shook her head.

  “An explanation? An excuse? Something?”

  “He was going to force himself on me,” she said softly.

  Brightly was quiet for a moment. He tapped his pen against his knuckles. Then he leaned forward and said, “A mouse who wanders among adders can hardly be surprised when it is bitten. It was remarkably stupid of you to go to such a dangerous place.”

  “I know that. But Donald stopped him. He saved us both. I had to help him.”

  “He,” said Brightly, and he pointed out toward the city, “is a policeman. He belongs to the police department. You,” he said, now pointing at her, “were company. You were McNaughton. They have their interests, we have ours, and when it comes to the line, you go with the company. We’ll back you. We have the power to help you. We have your future in mind, because you’re one of ours. But you obviously don’t care for our interests all that much, which leads me to the decision that you’re not actually company after all. You’re not, and Hayes isn’t, and Evans isn’t either.”

  She blinked. “Evans?”

  “Yes. Evans.”

  “Evans is…”

  “I’m dissolving this entire section of Securities,” Brightly said. “It was not doing its job. Evans was your controller, you were Hayes’s, and the fault starts at the top and goes to the bottom. You’re all out. All of you. I already spoke to Evans. I’m assuming his office here, it’s the first time I’ve had a stable office for some time.”

  “But-”

  “Yes, a pity,” Brightly said, leaning back. “He was just about to retire. That’s another one Hayes has left floating in his wake. You can tell Hayes we don’t need him to come in anymore, if you can find him. I expect he’ll be relieved. It’s what he always wanted, deep down. To be free from us.”