Falling Sideways Read Online Free PDF

and burgundy-colored close-set eyes, small and very slender, though with wonderfully round breasts. Even as he considered this, the burgundy eyes turned toward Jaeger for a moment. He looked away and wished he hadn’t, remembered meeting her the Sunday before in the deer park when he’d had his little girls out to see the rutting deer. Birgitte had been out jogging and stopped to chat and had been so sweet with the girls, hunkering down to chat with them, her smile so light, before she’d jogged away again.
    Someone’s stomach rumbled. Ib Andersen straightened his posture and touched his middle. Guilty! But then he tilted his head and gazed quizzically at Jaeger, as if to cast the ball of guilt over to him. Stomach can’t take all that coffee, eh, Ib? he considered saying but decided it was better not to tempt the spin doctor to start spinning him.
    The sun had moved. The CEO’s shadow on the tabletop now slanted to his right, blurring at the far edge. Half his craggy face was now visible, the other half in shadow.
    Rather, Jaeger thought, the world had moved, not the sun. The sun was stationary in relation to the earth. That had been proven hundreds of years ago by someone. Who? Galileo? Who went to prison for daring to assert that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the planetary system. Yet we still talk about the sun rising. The sun, Jaeger remembered having read somewhere or other, suffers unendingly and owes us nothing. Jaeger owed things. He owed money to his ex-wife and daughters that had to be paid every month for at least twelve years, perhaps more if the girls went on to university, as he fervently hoped they would, debts he was grateful for and eager to pay. The girls were six and four years old, blond like their mother. But blond Vita’s shadow was dark as the pit.
    His eyes turned to the great oil painting on the wall at the opposite end of the conference table from where the CEO sat. The subject was hard to identify. It looked like some kind of deep canyon viewed from the rim above, red and blue at the same time, like cold flames, like those blue flames on a gas-run fireplace, like a chilly hell. He could not recall how long it had been there or who had selected it. Perhaps the immediate past administrative chief, a toad-faced blond-headed Clever Dick who lasted only two years in the organization and whose dislike of Jaeger was evidenced by his habitually forgetting to include Jaeger’s name on meeting invitations. He had even once invited the assembled staff to a reception at his own home without inviting Jaeger. But Jaeger was still here and Clever Dick was gone, a matter of grim satisfaction. Jaeger’s feelings had been hurt by the man, but he’d never disliked him, had wanted the man to like him, or at least not to dislike him. It had been clear Clever Dick had wanted Jaeger gone, and he suspected that Breathwaite had saved his backside for him. Not the only time, either. Why? Goodness of his heart? Or to stockpile favor vouchers?
    He glanced over at Breathwaite again, still doodling elaborately on the pad before him. Jaeger tried to get a glimpse of the doodles, but Breathwaite’s free hand was cupped around the pad. His gaze lifted toward Breathwaite’s face, took in his necktie, a broad, sporty slant stripe of silver and blue knotted neatly at his throat, and the sporty robin’s-egg jacket he wore. The lapels, Jaeger noticed, were hand-stitched. Elegant. The lapels of Ib Andersen’s gray jacket were hand-stitched, too, though a bit frayed. He wore the same jacket every day. Jaeger wondered when it had last been cleaned. Then he tried to remember when he himself had last cleaned the jacket he had on, one of two he owned, handwoven Irish tweeds he’d bought on sale at Cleary’s in Dublin some years before, on holiday when the punt was low. Pre-euro money. Before the green tiger. Before divorce. He couldn’t recall if the lapels were hand-stitched and didn’t care to bend his face