Hardly Working (11 page)

Man-eater? Okay, Penelope, I thought, I'll show you a man-eater.

Ian said, “It's well past lunchtime. Should we get a bite?” He cocked his head to one side and added, “You know, I've been meaning to tell you, you have the most striking eyes. When I saw those black eyes of yours for the first time, I wanted to see what you looked like when you got mad.”

I do have striking eyes, if I do say so myself. Large and dark, and set off nicely by my thick glossy black hair. It's almost enough to take the focus off my thighs.

He said, “If looks could kill I would have been a little pile of ashes. You scorched me. I love it.”

And then he laughed again and poured a few more gallons of charisma over me.

So I let him take me out to lunch. It was a perfect opportunity to convert him to our cause.

We went to Diva at the Met. My choice. I liked its understated style, marble, wood, brass and glass, its open kitchen,
its unaffordable prices. Ian helped me off with my coat, pulled out my chair, stared at me, and smiled at me as though no one else in the world existed. I felt a little overwhelmed, like being under a spotlight, but I managed to hold my own.

Our conversation started off with Ian's opinion and rating of all the famous restaurants he'd tried in his lifetime. Not what you'd call a groundbreaking discussion but it didn't matter. He was mesmerizing to look at and if I timed my nods carefully, it seemed as though I was actually interested in what he was saying. And then when the moment was right, I would go in for the environmental kill.

I had the lobster risotto and chicken with truffles and Ian had the lamb shank and we shared a warm chocolate soufflé for dessert. The chilled Riesling went down too well.

The waiter wouldn't stop ogling Ian. He kept finding excuses to come over to our table, dropping things and taking forever to pick them up, and hovering and never once making eye contact with me. In an eyelash-batting marathon, he would have been a gold medalist. But Ian Trutch was watching me that day. Then I decided to turn the conversation in another direction.

“So…Ian. Now tell me all about yourself. I've been studying your dossier…”

“My dossier?”

“Okay, then. I've Googled you. More than once.”

Flattery. According to Cleo, they love it. They can't get enough of it.

“Ah.”

“Well, we have to know the enemy, don't we?”

He laughed. “Am I the enemy?”

“Of course you are. You're higher management. You want to axe a bunch of nice people who are trying to save the world. Now, according to your page on the company Web site, you're a Harvard Business School graduate.”

He didn't flinch. “Graduated in the top five of the class.”
He pressed his hands together, prayer fashion, and touched his forefingers to his lips.

“Modest, too, I see.”

“I had a plan.”

“I'll bet you did. Swoop into office like a higher management vampire ready to create a new army of undead.”

“Undead? Sorry?”

“Unemployed, Ian. Only with slightly healthier complexions, but still undead if you leave them without a job. Sorry, should have said leave ‘us.' I read the whole dossier. Including the gritty bits.”

He tried to derail me. “Those Harvard days were good times.”

“Uh-huh?”

“A lot of fun. Yeah. A lot of parties. Martha's Vineyard. Sailing into the Newport Festival. Me and Chaz Vanpfeffer.”

“A friend of yours, this Chaz Vanpfeffer?”

“We were great buddies. The Vanpfeffers are an old Boston family. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them.”

“Me, too.” I would have remembered a name that sounded like a Dr. Seuss character.

The conversation turned into a monologue on all the society parties Ian had been to when he was at university. I had to fight to keep my eyes open. He finally paid the bill and we drove toward my place in wine-fuzzy silence.

He said, “Today was fun, Dinah.”

Fun? You're about to nuke our workplace and you call it fun?

I needed to try a humanizing tactic. Maybe if he knew the office people better he might care about what happened to them.

I replied, “Ian, we're having a block party here on Halloween. I hope you'll come. Everybody from the office is coming too.”

“I might. I'll think about it.” He leaned slowly into me. In an ideal hard-to-get campaign I should have pulled away
but I wanted to hang for a guilty second on his leathery fragrance. I was expecting a dry peck on the cheek but he startled me by kissing me on the mouth. I faked indifference, got out of the car and walked up the path to my apartment without looking back.

Monday

I was in the office early. Roly's yellow slicker outfit was hanging from the coat hook when I arrived and he was already installed at Lisa's desk folding brochures. We figured his sleeping quarters must be a hot air vent nearby.

“Morning, Roly.”

He said a husky, barely-audible “Morning.”

I found Lisa and Cleo alone at the coffee machine upstairs, and told them quietly, “Meeting at Notte's after work. Just us and Ida and Fran. It's important. I don't want Jake there.”

Ian had been swallowed up by Ash's office again. There was no glimpse of him, but she kept coming out of her office to go into the bathroom and I have to say, she was a work-in-progress. She'd let down her long black hair and was wearing a hundred noisy silver bangles on her wrists. With her frump suit. Each time she emerged from the bathroom, her perfume brought tears to our eyes.

All morning, I made calls to the big businessmen I knew, trying to get information on the whereabouts of Hamish Robertson.

“Hamish Robertson? I thought he'd died,” said one.

Another offered, “Oh, a friend of mine spotted him in the Bahamas last year.”

Yet another said, “Didn't he move back to Scotland?”

The last person I talked to said, “I heard a rumor he'd been carted away to Riverview in a white dinner jacket. A total nutcase, apparently.”

Terrific. They knew as much as I did. But I trusted
Tod's word. He'd never let me down. Well, almost never, that is.

After that I left several messages for Rupert Doyle at the Eldorado Hotel to call me when he got in. We needed to talk about Hector Ferrer.

 

At Notte's, Cleo bit into her éclair and said through her mouthful, “We are in deep shit. Bankrupt. Tod, of all people. I don't believe it. Do you think he has other people's money down there in the Caymans? What's this going to do to Mudpuddle? Are we screwed or what?”

“Gosh,” said Lisa, “we'll have to cancel the whole thing. Two years of work.”

“
Many
years of work,” I corrected, “if you throw in all the university's effort.”

“Cancel, shmancel,” said Ida. “What's wrong with you girls? Where's your fighting spirit?”

“Do we tell Jake is the burning question,” said Cleo.

“I want to hold off on telling Jake a little longer. And we're not canceling anything,” I said. “We just need to find this Hamish Robertson and get his donation. Tod's word is as good as a signed check.”

All the other women burst out laughing. “Like his last check, right?”

“What crappy timing,” said Fran. “Just when we got Wonder Boy breathing down our necks. Mind you, I wouldn't mind a little of his hot and heavy on my neck, just as long as it's in the bedroom and not in the office.”

Tuesday

I dragged Joey with me to Los Tangueros.

“Oh my God,” he said. “It's a ballroom.”

“Tango only.”

“Dinah, you're trying to torture me. There isn't a gay man in the place. They're all metrosexuals.”

“How can you tell? We only just arrived.”

“I can tell. I can tell. I get my gay radar serviced every week.”

The room was surprisingly full. There were couples of all kinds, all ages, learning the basic steps from Victoria, who went through the movements slowly at the front of the room. Then she stepped back while Hector Ferrer wandered through the couples correcting body positions and barking insults at them.

That night he'd left the gangster outfit at home and he looked a lot better. The dancing duds he'd been wearing the other night had significantly exaggerated his worst features. Tonight he wore jeans, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Apart from the thickness through his waist, he appeared to be handsomer, more muscular than the first night I'd seen him. Tonight, as opposed to looking thuggish, he looked like the craggy tragic antihero of an off-beat European existentialist art film, something involving a girl and smoking gun.

His face was more expressive tonight. His eyes were dark and sad, with heavy purplish circles around them. Sometimes, a wry little smile would dart across his mouth and his face would light up. Then it would disappear and everything darken again. An eternal cigarette hung off his lower lip. He must have had the full respect of his students. Nobody dared protest when he breathed clouds of smoke into their faces.

I wavered between vague disappointment and fascination. At one point, when he was actually shouting—no, raging—at a pair of students, I thought about quietly slipping away and forgetting about him. The problem was, I would have to answer to Thomas. He would accuse me of supreme cowardice, take it as a personal failure, if I ran away.

My fabulous father, the bad-tempered Hector Ferrer.

And then Joey, who can never resist being the class clown, said just a little too loudly, “So what the Hec, eh?”

Hector turned his head abruptly and glared at Joey then at me. “You two. Be quiet or get out.”

I stammered, “We're here to look into lessons. I spoke to Victoria about it.”

“Ah.” He stared at me and blanched. He looked confused. Then he inspected me and nodded, his eyes brightening a little. “Talk to me at the end of this session. I am busy in this moment, as you can see,” he said in a surprisingly eloquent growl, a strange clipped accent with a tinge of something British and a tinge of something foreign and unrecognizable.

Joey and I sat down at one of the little tables and watched the lesson.

I forced myself to shut down my emotions and try to see him in an objective light, ignoring what I'd seen the first night and concentrating on the moment. After observing him for half an hour, I had to admit that he had a special quality. There was a stealthy menacing grace in his movements. Whenever he made the class stop to watch him perform or demonstrate a dance sequence, the air around him seemed more vibrant.

“
Caminata. Paseo…paso, paso, paso
…no,” he scolded a pretty young dancer. “It is just a walk. Do you remember how to walk or is this too difficult for you? Now, show me.” Hector's tone was so intimidating that I'm sure he had all of us doubting whether or not we knew how to walk.

“Try again,” he said.

One minute he was barking at one couple, the next, sinisterly crooning at another. He was a tyrant and I was dragged through every emotion by Hector during that lesson, even though I was only an observer. It was exhausting to watch
the way he treated his students. Empathizing with them, I felt like a beaten dog one minute, and an elated professional dancer the next. Elated because Hector was suddenly kind and gentle to a student, just like that, for no reason, out of the blue.

After an hour and a half of teaching the steps in unaccompanied silence, Hector surprised us. He walked down to the little stage at the end of the room, sank onto the piano stool and began to play. It was a surging, exciting, modern snarl of tango rhythms and jazz combinations. The people in the room perked up. They were being given their reward. They began to dance. The whole room turned to his piano music and when he stopped playing, I realized that he'd been improvising. Then he switched on the recorded music and the people resumed their dancing.

After that, he came over to me, an odd expression on his face. I wondered if Rupert had said anything he shouldn't.

“So you want tango lessons,” he asked, in a challenging tone. “Yes.”

Joey barged in. “She wants private lessons. With you and you only Mr. Ferrer. Just the two of you.”

I glared at Joey. He was jamming out on me. “Well…you do, don't you?” he said between clenched teeth.

“My lessons are expensive,” said Hector.

“That's…that's okay.” I'd have to put Thomas on the back burner for a while.

Hector was looking at me with a softening faraway expression. “Do I know you? Have we met before?” He actually smiled and there it was. A glimmer of his mystique.

Hector snapped his fingers and called out, “Victoria, the agenda,” as if addressing a servant. Victoria nodded and hurried off to get it. I loathed him again.

Wednesday

The next morning, Ian passed me in the hallway. His “Hello Dinah” was definitely distant and frosty. Maybe he'd somehow found out about Tod. I made a resolution to avoid him for the rest of the day.

A little later, two girls came into the office and asked for Lisa. They were volunteers, a pair of young, ditzy, annoying narcissistic girls, who had been sent by a big clothing company to donate their time to Green World.

Lisa left them in the main room and came back to consult with me. “What are we going to do with these two?”

“I don't know. I was hoping you'd have some ideas?”

Lisa said, “They're mentally and socially challenged. You remember our last event. Well, I had them filling up our basic GWI balloons and I'm telling you, there was no getting them away from the helium tank. They were breathing it in and squeaking and peeping like a couple of chipmunks on drugs. I couldn't keep them away from it. Just what I need. A pair of airheads with a helium dependency issue.”

“Now that you mention it, I remember that. It was dire.”