The Question Authority. Rachel Cline

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СКАЧАТЬ in a few days like this case, I can add a boilerplate first paragraph requesting expedited handling but even then—what if Shonda is sick or on vacation? What if she has trouble finding the records—sometimes she has to resort to looking up paper files and must, herself, send a records request to the storage facility in Staten Island, and on and on. I write my request and set myself a reminder to follow up first thing in the morning. And although it is probably the least efficient way to find anything, I return to the accordion file and start to read.

      It surprises me that Singer went to Teachers College—in other words, he must have been smart and enthusiastic and all that once upon a time. TC is hard to get into, not to mention expensive. He could have gotten a job in a private school or out in the suburbs—so he is also an idealist of some sort. I guess he is the kind of pervert who thinks he is rescuing his victims from ignorance and poverty—but then how’d he end up at the Children’s City School in Murray Hill? It’s one of those school-within-a-schools that the ED started doing a few years ago—along with magnet schools, and outdoor schools, and charter schools, and anything else that might counter the overall impression of failure and despair. Anyway, Singer must be good at his job or they wouldn’t have hired him in the first place. Of course, there’s no reason a pedophile can’t also be a good teacher. I learned that from Rasmussen.

      9

      Nora

      Lunch is a confusing time of day for me. The apartment is a fifteen-minute walk, so clearly I should go home. No one here expects me to work through lunch, and even if I did, it wouldn’t count—I wouldn’t get paid for the time—but if I come back more than two minutes late, they dock my check and, after three lates, there’s some kind of probation or warning, so mostly I stay close. But all I can really get to eat in the immediate neighborhood is a burger, pizza, or “street meat.” Obviously, I should bring a sandwich and I have resolved to do this numerous times, but making myself lunch at eight in the morning is apparently beyond my capabilities as a human being. I’m sure that’s related to the fact that my mother never mastered that skill, either, and used to send me to grade school with atrocities like a jar of olives or a can of sardines—this was before the invention of the Lunchable. Maybe that’s part of why I wound up at the Academy. They served a hot lunch every day and every girl was expected to sit down and eat it.

      Anyway, it’s twelve thirty, I’m so hungry I could plotz, and I’m sitting immobile at my desk when my cell phone starts ringing in my bag, in the desk drawer. I don’t even keep it on my desk, because since moving back to Brooklyn and starting this job I have been as bad at keeping up my friendships as I have at making myself lunch. It’s an unfamiliar 718 number, but I’ve gone to the trouble of getting the thing out so I answer it.

      “Is this Eleanor?” says a male voice. No one has ever called me Eleanor. I can’t even imagine who would know that it’s my real name.

      “Yes,” I say, with some discomfort.

      “I think I have your cat,” he says. “I got your number from Sammy.”

      It takes me a second but I realize he means Sami, the man who owns Pets Emporium on Montague Street, and who knows everyone and everything in Brooklyn Heights. And because Sami lets me pay for cat food with checks that he often has to hold onto until payday, he has read my phone number off of one of them, along with the name printed above it, to this guy. I told Sami to keep an eye out for Tin Man when he first failed to come home.

      “Where are you?” I ask my caller.

      “Poplar Street,” he says. If Tin Man is in the neighborhood, he should have come home by now. He knows the way. So I am unbalanced by this news.

      “Is he okay?”

      “He’s fine. A little skinny, but fine.”

      “Where did you find him?”

      “The old playground on Columbia Heights.”

      “Squibb Park? But it’s closed. The entrance is all boarded up.”

      “Not to cats, obviously.”

      “And you were there looking for cats?” The old playground has not had playground equipment in it for some time, maybe since I was a kid when it had sprinklers and we would roller skate down the long ramp that led into the park, gathering speed until we thought we might careen right off the thing and into the river. Impossible, of course, but that’s my memory. Also, there were tough kids there—maybe from Farragut, the projects? But of course the adjoining neighborhood is no longer a wasteland, it’s DUMBO—full of wealthy white people living in converted industrial spaces.

      “I heard there was a cat down there so I went over the other night with some tuna.”

      He’s one of those cat-rescue people. I’m always surprised that there are men in that cohort. “Are you home now?” I ask. “Can I come get him?”

      This is a terrible idea because I can’t come back to the office with my cat, and anyway he’s heavy and I have no carrier, but now that I have taken in the possibility that he is alive, and nearby, I want him back desperately. In the past year, that cat has become my best friend, my boon companion. At times, I've slept holding his fucking paw.

      “I have to leave at four thirty,” he says. “Sixty Poplar. Apartment three.”

      “I’ll be there,” I say. “Probably not until four, but I’ll be there.”

      I hang up and realize I didn’t even get the guy’s name. He knows Sami, and he’s a cat rescuer so he’s probably not a murderer/rapist, but it hits me that I’ve just agreed to go alone to the apartment of a man I’ve never met at a time of day when, if I disappeared, no one would miss me until tomorrow morning at work. ( José the doorman doesn’t keep track of my comings and goings, although he does continue to ask after the cat—my mother must have been a good tipper.)

      I go down to the newsstand in the lobby and buy a Styro-foam bowl of Special K, a banana, and a mini milk, which I scarf down at my desk. I’ll still be ninety minutes short if I leave at three thirty, but if I can get this offer done before then, maybe Jocelyn will let me take it as sick leave or something. I trash the remains of my lunch and go back to the spreadsheet, but after staring at it for another minute or two, I decide to follow Jocelyn’s original instructions: just offer.

      I open my email and pull up the offer letter template. My normal procedure is to start with an obscenely low number and see what happens—the used-car-buying approach to justice. I take pleasure in typing the phrase “termination without severance or other ensuing benefits”—I guess I really am a bureaucrat. But before I can save and send the thing, an email message arrives and the transparent box that previews its contents informs me that it’s from Elizabeth Cohen, the guy’s attorney, apparently responding to the “here I am” email I sent earlier. I’m about to read it when I realize someone is hovering at the entrance to my cube. Two people, actually: Jocelyn and one of the attorneys, a large woman in a tight, flowered dress. For some reason, I feel as though I have been caught in a guilty act. Both women say, “Hi,” simultaneously when I look up at them.

      Jocelyn says, “This is Alessandro, she works in appeals. She’s my go-to for kiddie sex stuff.”

      Alessandro, to my amazement, hoots with laughter while grabbing my boss’s arm—as though Jocelyn’s a normal human being!

      “You are too much!” she says, and then to me, “Hi, I’m Gina.”

      We СКАЧАТЬ