The Proximity Contract

Chapter 13: The Client Dinner

The bottle on the table was a third gone. The private room at the back of the Marlow had its own door and its own bathroom and a table long enough to seat eight. The plates had gone back a while ago, the candles had burned down into the cloth, and the room smelled of whiskey and of the butter from a meal nobody had come here to eat.

Pruitt had been drinking since before the appetizers, and he did the pouring himself. He had done it from the first round. His company had been buying from them for eleven years, longer than Ostrow had held the title, and in all that time nobody had ever tried to take the bottle off him.

"One more," Pruitt said, "and then I'm putting you both in a cab."

He filled his own glass, then Ostrow's, then reached across the table and filled Elliot's to the same level as the other two.

Elliot had said *I'm fine* twice already. He'd said it the way you said it to a man with a bottle in his hand — evenly, with nothing in it that anybody could argue with — and it hadn't taken either time.

He could have laid his hand flat over the glass. He'd watched men do it. He'd also watched what came after, which was the rest of the evening spent being extremely polite to the only person at the table who wouldn't, and every person in the room quietly deciding something about him.

Ostrow watched the whiskey go in and said nothing at all.

Elliot let the pour stand. Getting through an evening with Gordon Ostrow meant not becoming the subject of the evening, and he'd learned that in his first week.

The rules for tonight had been handed to him in the car, Ostrow half turned in the passenger seat. Keep him happy. Keep him talking. Don't sit there with your phone out like a kid at a table.

Twice during dinner, when Elliot let his glass sit a minute too long, Ostrow had looked down the table at him — one flat look, no words — and Elliot had picked the glass up and drunk from it, and the account had stayed exactly where it was.

The internship was the whole plan. There wasn't a second one underneath it. However many weeks were left of the term, he needed all of them, and at the end of them there was a line on a page with a supervisor's name under it, and the name was sitting across the table watching a glass fill.

By eight the heat had come up in his face.

This face flushed early. It came up over the cheekbones before the alcohol had done anything to his head and stayed an hour past the point where it was true, and there was nothing to be done about it except stop drinking, which was not on the table.

The body he was in could hold more than one drink. He'd had six weeks to learn its numbers, and the numbers were fine; it carried liquor like a grown man. He kept his own count anyway, because the count was the one part of the evening he controlled.

Three, and a fourth he'd taken two swallows out of and set down at the far edge of his reach, where he'd have to want it to get it.

Pruitt finished the story he'd been telling — something about Ohio, an account that got away in the nineties — and looked at his watch, and stood, and the evening turned into handshakes. The number they'd come for had been agreed at seven-thirty, over dessert. Everything after that had been the part of the meeting that wasn't a meeting.

Pruitt shook Ostrow's hand, then Elliot's, and held onto that one a beat longer than the other, and looked at his face.

"You're all right," he said. "Next time make him do the pouring."

Then he was gone down the carpet with one of the restaurant's people walking him out, and the door closed behind them both, and the room went quiet enough that Elliot could hear the ice settle in the bucket.

He got his jacket off the back of the chair and didn't put it on, because he was going to be warm for another twenty minutes whatever he did.

"I'm going to head out," he said. "Thanks for the dinner."

The floor took a second to agree with him. He stood with one hand on the table until it did, and he was aware of how long that took, and he was aware of Ostrow watching him take it.

"It's not nine yet," Ostrow said.

"I know." Elliot picked his phone up off the table, checked the screen out of habit, put it in his inside pocket. "I've got an early one planned. Rain check."

"I've got something I want to run by you."

"Another time, though." He said it lightly. He had already decided not to say the word *no* in this room, not tonight. "I'm not great company, Mr. Ostrow."

"You're fine," Ostrow said. "Come on. Ten minutes."

Elliot didn't answer that. He got the folder off the table and went for the door, and the step went wide on him — the floor was on a slant it hadn't had an hour ago — and before he'd finished correcting it, Ostrow's hand had come down on his shoulder. It landed flat and unhurried and turned him toward the lobby without ever once gripping.

Ostrow was smiling.

It wasn't the smile from the table. Elliot had seen this one before — at the desk on a Thursday afternoon, at the printer, once in the stairwell when the stairwell was empty — and he had spent a week and a half arranging his hours so that he was never in a closed room with it.

"You don't look good, kid," Ostrow said. "There's a room upstairs. You lie down for an hour, I come get you, I drive you back myself. Nothing complicated."

He had to know how that sounded. He said it anyway, without a change in his voice.

Elliot could make a scene. He did the arithmetic while the hand steered him across the carpet. There were three staff between where they'd been sitting and the kitchen door, a bartender who had looked at him twice already, a desk somewhere behind a pillar with a phone on it. All of them belonged to the house. Ostrow knew the house by name — the house was part of the job — and every one of those people had a manager who had a reason to like him.

A scene would end this. It would also be a Friday night at a client dinner with a supervisor, and by Monday the story would have him in it, and he would still have to walk onto the twenty-second floor at nine in the morning every day after that, past every person who'd seen it.

So he walked. That was the whole calculation, and it came out on the side of going where the hand pushed, and he didn't like it, and he went anyway, because he could still walk on his own and he would rather do it that way than the other way.

The elevator bank was at the front of the lobby, past the coat stand, four cars and a panel of buttons. The restaurant was behind them now and the front doors were at their backs.

The doors opened.

Ostrow kept his hand on Elliot's shoulder and reached past him with his free hand, to the panel, pressing a button up near the top, and the doors began to close. Elliot went in ahead of him.

* * *

The supplier's people had wanted a bar.

They'd wanted it at the table, when the last page was initialed, and then again in the lobby when the older of them got a hand on Adrian's arm and made the same invitation a second time with a laugh in it. The second time he'd said no the short way, and Bell had gone for the coats, and that had been the end of the evening.

The contract itself was nothing. It had been nothing for three weeks — the numbers were agreed, the paper was paper — and all tonight had added to it was initials, in a hotel his own company owned, at the end of a week that had been ordinary in every way except for five minutes of it on the twenty-second floor.

He was four steps from the front doors when he caught the movement off to the side.

A back, half a lobby away, going the other direction with a man's hand on its shoulder, and something in the line of that shoulder stopped his feet in the middle of the carpet instead of at the end of it. He turned his head and gave it his eyes properly, which was not a thing he usually did in a lobby.

Elliot Vance. Red to the hairline, walking like a man on the deck of something, both shoes landing somewhere other than where he'd aimed them.

The man with him was from twenty-two — one of the supervisors, the one who'd done the talking in the room on Monday, the one who said *interns* the way other people said *costs*. Adrian had heard that voice a second time since, in a hallway on the floor, at a volume that only carried because the man hadn't checked who was behind him.

Both of them were in suits. Both of them had folders — the supervisor's under his arm, Vance's hanging down by his leg, back of the hand out.

A client dinner, on a Friday, in this hotel, run late enough that the clients had gone and the staff had started stacking chairs. He'd sat through the same kind of evening four times this month. He knew what the end of one looked like from the inside, and it did not look like a hand on a shoulder and a walk toward the guest elevators.

The doors opened. They went in. The hand didn't come off the shoulder on the way.

The doors closed, and above them the small brass arrow stepped off one and started climbing.

"Bell."

"Sir."

"Do interns go out on client dinners."

Bell thought about it.

"Not on their own," he said. "There'd be a manager with them, or a supervisor. Someone has to sign for the account." He glanced at the elevators, then back at Adrian, and didn't ask. "I didn't see him come in."

"Get the car."

"It's at the curb."

Adrian went out through the front doors and stood on the sidewalk with his hands at his sides. The cold came off the street in a steady way, and the picture came out with him and stayed.

Red face. Wrong walk. The arrow climbing past three. Floors four through twelve.

He had already dealt with this. He'd have said that out loud to nobody: he'd dealt with it. He'd had the numbers on the overtime on Monday, he'd gone down to the twenty-second floor and said the two sentences that needed saying in front of the room, and he'd come back up and closed it. There was a policy, the policy had a phone number, and a complaint went to HR the way an invoice went to accounting.

An intern's Fridays weren't his business. He'd decided that in daylight, and a man who made them his business had some other problem, and he wasn't going to be that man this week.

There had been a hallway. His hand had closed around a wrist — thin enough that his thumb and his middle finger met on the other side of it — and the whole arm had pulled back from him, hard, the way a body pulls when it has been taught what comes next. Then the pull had stopped. He could still feel where the bone had been.

Bell came out with the coats over his arm and stopped a step away, and the car sat at the curb with its engine running.

"Tell him to park in the garage," Adrian said. "Wait down there."

Bell's mouth opened on the front half of a question and closed on it. He didn't finish it. He went to the car, got the back door open, looked at the empty seat, and shut it again.

Adrian went back through the front doors.

The lobby had emptied out. Over the middle elevator the little brass arrow stood at five and kept climbing.

He didn't know which room.

He crossed the lobby.

Outside, the car pulled away from the curb and turned in at the garage ramp.