Office at Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

her for an exorbitant amount. She realizes that she has no money at all, let alone the princely sum he is demanding, and asks if she can stay on credit. He picks up the phone to call the bellboy to eject her, but as he does so her hand, which has been wandering around in her bag, uncovers a thick wad of cash that she hands over to the clerk, who is placated.
    She is exhausted when she reaches her room but places a call to her father thanking him for putting the money in her bag. She tells him she loves him, then crawls into the bed and lies down and, for the third time since we first encountered her, sleeps. The next morning, having showered at length and generally tidied herself up, she goes to work. She finds her boss standing out on the curb in front of their building. He greets her, tells her he is waiting for someone, and asks herif she will run upstairs and grab something out of his desk drawer, some papers. As he asks her this, he lights a cigarette. She agrees, of course.
    When she gets up to the office, she finds it full of police. They want to know what the hell she is doing there, and she explains that she works there, that she has forgotten her wallet in the back room. The officer she is talking to tells her to get lost, they have an investigation going, but when he gets called over to look at something by an excited uniform, she darts quickly into the back room, opens the desk drawer, and removes its only contents: a bundle of correspondence. When she gets back downstairs, her boss is no longer standing there. She hears a psssst, looks up, and sees him across the street, beckoning from behind a newsstand.
    “They’re shutting us down, my dear,” he says. “Someone was brought down trying to pilfer from us this morning.”
    “Who got shot and who shot him?” she says.
    He raises an eyebrow and asks for his documents.
    “I’m going to need a new job,” she says.
    “Stay with me, my dear, stay with me,” he says, again asking for the documents.
    She tells him that whatever he does next, she’ll need a raise. He has his eye on the documents, but knows better than to try to take them by force.
    “Agreed, yes, a raise.”
    “A good one, something real.”
    “Yes, all right, a good one.”
    She hands over the documents. He takes them, then leans over and kisses her, chastely, on the cheek.
    “You have just saved my life, my dear,” he says.
    “A real raise, and never call me ‘my dear’ again,” she says.
    They part ways, and a moment later a car pulls up beside her. The man driving it is the one who came out of the river with her. She climbs in beside him and he eases away from the curb. He drives slowly and carefully. He reminds her that she will have to help him. She says she knows this. He hands her a pair of spectacles and she puts them on. He looks over at her three times, then says, “Nah, no way.”
    “So I’ll just go as I am?” she says, taking them off, folding them closed, and handing them back to him.
    “Just as you are,” he says.
    Which is where the story ends. Or the part of the storythat I have. The part I know about. The only thing I can add to it is that her name is Hester Chan, and the boss’s name is Abraham Chelikowsky. Yeah: them. I don’t know the name of the guy who climbed out of the river with her and took her for a ride in his car. I don’t know what she was supposed to help him with. I don’t know if she did, in fact, help him. I do know this was five or six years ago.

 

     
    O f course he keeps me hidden in the drawer. Of course he has forgotten that he keeps me here. Chelikowsky has circumstantial dementia. That may or may not be true. What do I know? I am wedged now at the back of the drawer, behind three legal pads and a peppermint stick. Which is to say it is dark but smells good. I was not well cleaned the last time he used me, so there is a powdery pool of blue that grows ever more slightly each time he shoves something else into the drawer and I am