Falling Sideways Read Online Free PDF Page B

down now to see, but he was quite certain they weren’t, even if the jacket was handwoven.
    The CEO was tieless, wearing a black turtleneck shirt with the word Boss emblazoned black on black at the collar, his beige, glove-leather jacket on the chair back behind him. With a glove-leather jacket, you hardly needed hand-stitched lapels. But did a CEO really need a turtleneck shirt that said “Boss” at the collar, even if discreetly black on black? A mounting sense of insufficiency rose in him. He didn’t have money for a new jacket. He wondered if the other two men on his side of the table also had hand-stitched lapels, wondered if this was noticed about him. Cheap-ass clothing. He remembered … Lost the thought.
    The woman beside him, Signe Cress, head of the legal department, also one year younger than Jaeger and one step higher on the hierarchical totem, was taking notes with a silver Cross pen in a fine script he could not quite decipher. It worried him vaguely that she seemed to understand enough of what the CEO was saying to take notes. Maybe there really was something wrong with his ears. Or perhaps she was only writing a grocery list or some private ruminations. Perhaps she was planning the menu for a party she would host. Or writing a poem. Fat chance. Now Breathwaite might be writing a poem, although he was not writing at all at the moment or even doodling. He was only staring down into his glass of water—he never drank coffee at the meetings as the others did—as though he saw in its depths some foreign epic of great tragedy. Breathwaite was a great reader of books, which reminded Jaeger of the days when he himself used to read books. Jaeger was once placed at the international table of the annual banquet with Breathwaite and an American couple, the male half of whom had been trained as an astronaut and whose wife said that her husband read to her at night in bed. “What does he read?” Breathwaite asked.
    “At the moment he is reading me Lassie ,” she replied. There was a silence, and then she asked Breathwaite, “Read anything good lately yourself?”
    “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Neruda’s memoir.”
    “Who’s that?” she asked.
    “A Chilean poet. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971.”
    “Oh, how cool!” she exclaimed. “A poet !”
    Even if his English was not all it ought to be, Jaeger had enjoyed the exchange, although it made him slightly uneasy that while he did know, vaguely, who Neruda was, he had never read a word the man wrote—in Spanish, English, or Danish.
    The CEO cracked a joke, and everyone laughed. Jaeger heard only half the joke and did not get it.
    Birgitte Sommer, across the table from him with her exciting, curly black hair and narrow burgundy eyes, laughed by opening her mouth wide so he could see all her teeth and her tongue. The end of her tongue, a small red bulb, wobbled in the dark vault beneath her palate, and her round breasts jiggled alluringly.
    Jaeger tried to figure out the joke even as he laughed. He wondered if all the others understood the joke, whether he was the only one who did not get it, though in his own defense he reminded himself he had only been half listening. Idly he wondered what would happen if he said now, I don’t get it .
    He glanced at Breathwaite and noticed that there was no merriment on the man’s bulky, jowly face. Jaeger liked Breathwaite, a loner, a somewhat shadowy figure, though always approachable, always helpful and quick with sage advice. Nearly twenty years Jaeger’s senior, Breathwaite alone was not placed in the hierarchy of the department heads, for his sphere of responsibility was not linked with the others. Breathwaite was the Tank’s eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark. What Danes usually termed “the big world,” meaning the “real” world that did not really matter, for it seldom enough rippled the water of this little kingdom of islands. Such had it been since 1864, when the last great battle