on the lamp, which cast the room in a much gentler light and made her feel slightly better. If there was ever a time when she had some control over her working life, she’d decided, she wouldn’t work under fluorescent lights. Was there some way she could work outside? She didn’t see how—she had an indoor skill set—but the thought was appealing.
“Have as much as you want,” Harvey said, “and then you might as well head over to the party. I’ll stay and finish this.”
“Aren’t you going to the party?”
“I like to make a late arrival.”
“Why are we shredding all these files?” She was midway through her first slice. It was ham and pineapple, the pineapple cloyingly sweet.
“That’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Harvey said. She watched him, but he seemed to have nothing further to say. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, considered a moment, then took a second slice.
“Are you going to answer it?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to offer some pizza to the others.” He left the room with two of the pizza boxes, and Simone finished her slice and left too, gathered her coat and bag at the reception desk and walked out. What was strange was that the day had been so long and so tedious and she’d longed for this moment, but now that she’d been released, she wanted to go back in. She felt certain that something was about to happen. She was increasingly curious about the nature of the time bomb in the office, and she wanted to be there when it exploded.
3
The door to Alkaitis’s office was still closed when everyone else on Eighteen left for the party. On Seventeen, we lingered and procrastinated, except Enrico, who was waiting to board an Aeromexico flight at JFK, and Oskar, who was presently in a nearby bar, looking at Astana real estate on his phone. Harvey was in Conference Room B, looking through the Xavier files. Ron was trying to get a spot of soup off his tie in the bathroom. Joelle was drifting through Facebook. But eventually we were all gathered in a restaurant a few blocks away, clustered by the chocolate fondue station. If it were just us, just the asset management unit, we wouldn’t have had holiday parties, or so we told ourselves later—we weren’t completely depraved—but it wasn’t just us, we were only one corrupted branch of an otherwise perfectly aboveboard operation, and the holiday party was a large affair, both the asset management group and the brokerage company, the hundred or so people who worked on Eighteen and didn’t quite know who we were.
Later, we all remembered the party differently, either because of the open bar or because of course memories are always bent in retrospect to fit individual narratives. We were gossiping and drinking when Alkaitis and his wife arrived, all of us except Ron aware of our impending doom, trying to distract ourselves with banal comments about the food circulating on little trays and by surreptitiously examining our colleagues’ spouses, who seemed shiningly exotic by virtue of not being people whom we saw every day. Ron’s wife, Sheila, had large startled-looking eyes, like a deer. Joelle’s husband, Gareth, was a slow-moving, lethargic person in a too-big suit, with a face so bland you almost couldn’t see him. (“He’s like a sort of black hole,” Oskar said to Harvey, almost admiringly. “He’d make a good secret agent.”) Harvey’s wife, Elaine, was a pretty woman who radiated silent resentment and left after forty minutes, ostensibly because she had a headache. And then Alkaitis arrived with Vincent, who always automatically outshone every spouse in the room. We watched them enter together, two hours late; Alkaitis in his sixties, his wife maybe in her late twenties, early thirties tops, a full-on trophy wife, absurdly gorgeous in a blue dress. There were tasteless jokes to be made but no one made them, although Oskar came close: “Where do you think those two fall on the May-December Gap Measure?” He was two drinks ahead of the rest of us.
“The what now?” Gareth asked.
“It’s Oskar’s personal formula,” Joelle said. “He thinks a relationship can reasonably be classified as creepy if the age difference exceeds the age of the younger party.” There were dark circles under her eyes.
“So if he were, say, sixty-three,” Oskar said, “and she were let’s say twenty-seven—”
“Oh, let’s not,” Harvey said, at his breeziest and most deflective. His written confession was up to eight pages.