The Deed (9 page)

“So what are you going to do now?” Jason finally asked, tentatively.

Halloran shrugged, now standing. “Well, I’ve made my little phone calls,” he mumbled, “and I’m going to wait to see what happens. That seems to be how it works.”

“I still can’t believe they fired you,” said Jason. “Idiots.”

“Well, thanks,” said Halloran patiently, completing the catechism. “It’s not just me, of course—heads are rolling all over the company. Lots of wailing…”

He returned to his desk and sat down again as Jason fought with himself over whether to come clean about his foreknowledge. “Anyway,” Halloran went on, “I just wanted to keep you updated. I think you’re low enough on the food chain to be out of danger, but you may want to consider that résumé upgrade now. I
believe,
although I’m not certain, that Diana will be taking over my accounts. But whoever it turns out to be, the pace is going to be stepped up around here. Raises and promotions are going to be rara avis.”

“Oh, I can’t think about…,” Jason trailed off in knee-jerk protest.

“Please, don’t be coy,” Halloran implored. “We’re just friends, now, and I strongly encourage you to shop around, if you’re not already doing it. I know you, Jason, and you are not going to thrive in the new atmosphere.” He took a long drag from the cigarette. “You’re not what I would call a creature of discipline.”

“Diana, huh?” said Jason distastefully, to change the subject.

Halloran managed a weak grin. “You have no idea. Wait until you work with her directly. She’ll have a ball-level vise installed at every desk.”

“What do you mean, you
know?
” Jason demanded into the phone. “I just found out myself.”

“You’re all over the papers, dumbshit,” Nick informed him. “A whole layer of middle-management desk jockeys, chopped down in their prime.”

“It’s incredible,” said Jason. “I’m literally hiding in my office. I don’t dare leave the building—I might get locked out.”

“I’m telling you, this is the best thing that ever happened to you,” Nick replied. “Next to Louisa.”

“What are you talking about? Who’s Louisa?”

“You know, Louisa.”

“Are you actually going to make me say it again?” he asked wearily.

“Lou-i-sa,”
Nick intoned carefully, as if trying to overcome cellular static. “That sixteen-year-old townie. Wasn’t that her name?”

Jason sighed. “Her name was Lori, and she was eighteen, not sixteen. There, now I’ve told you an even five hundred times.”

“Oh,
eighteen,
” Nick scoffed. “Tell me you carded her.”

“I can’t remember why I called you,” Jason mused distractedly. “It can’t have been self-abuse. Hold on a minute, that’s my other line…. Hello?”

He recognized the voice instantly. “How are the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, my friend?” said Paul, another college friend, a frail and funny unapologetic nerd who quoted Shakespeare and Milton Fried-man with equal dexterity. Paul worked with an independent software developer; his current project, modeled on a computer’s spellchecker, was designed to seek and destroy trite phrases from text files, the “from the very beginnings” and the “more often than nots” and each and every “each and every.”

“Hey, Paul,” said Jason, relieved. “I guess you heard the news, eh?”

“Just the
Times
’ version. You still employed?”

“Yeah,” Jason confirmed, “but my manager isn’t, I just found out.”

“Really,” said Paul, intrigued. “You going for it?”

Jason smiled, wondering how his laid-back friends had managed to evolve this predatory instinct. “I’ll tell you tonight; I’ve got Nick on the other line,” he replied. “You’re coming out, right?”

“See you then,” said Paul. “Tell Nick his mom says hi.”

He smiled and flashed back to Nick.

“I hope that was a job offer,” said his buddy.

“That was Paul,” said Jason. “He says he just climbed off your mom.”

Nick ignored this. “Take my advice, Jason. Stop screwing around and start embellishing your résumé.”

“Whoa,” said Jason. “Why is everyone so anxious to get me out the door? Maybe I’m not going anywhere.”

“Well,” said Paul, “you’d better figure it out quickly. You’ve got maybe an hour before everyone else in your office shakes off the funk and starts flooding the market with phone calls.”

As he pondered this, his other line flashed again; this time it turned out to be Amanda.

“Hey, it’s me,” she announced with an encouraging familiarity.

“Hey, you,” he replied cheerily. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad. You?”

“Oh, everything’s cool,” he replied suavely. “Wait, what am I saying? My whole company’s gone kablooey. We were swallowed up by Disney or something. I actually just found out my boss was fired as part of the deal.”

“That’s awful,” she said sincerely. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said with forced levity. “But I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind coming into that legacy and putting all this workaday crap behind me. Can you hold on for just one minute?”

“How about meeting me for lunch instead?” she countered.

“It’s a little bit crazy today,” he replied. “I think I’m meeting a friend to work on my résumé. Guy on the other line, actually.”

“So, you
could
still cancel,” she said hopefully.

Jason smiled at her brashness. “Now why would I want to do that, sister?”

“Because,” she reminded him, “you have a fortune to discover. You don’t leave a twenty lying on the street because the nickel might fall out of your shirt pocket.”

“Yeah, but how do I know it’s a real twenty?” he countered.

“You don’t,” she acknowledged. “But it’s gonna blow away if you don’t reach out and grab it. And the nickel won’t go too far.”

This brought a grin to Jason’s face, and though he paused in a last-ditch show of free will, he’d been hooked. “Nice. All right,” he relented. “But I’m only going out of respect for your facility with a metaphor.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” she replied. “Where can we meet?”

Moments later Jason was back on with Nick. “Sorry about that, Nick,” he apologized. “Lunch is off—boy meets girl.”

“The chick from last night?”

“Yep,” said Jason. “It sounded like her, anyway.”

“I take it things went smoothly, then.”

“They did, they did,” Jason replied, nodding. “I’ll tell you all about it tonight.”

“I’d like to go on record as saying no good can come of this.”

Jason smiled. “Duly noted. Oh, hey, Paul just dropped your mom off for my lap dance…I gotta go.”

MIDTOWN
, 11:45
A.M.

Lurking among the steel-and-stone behemoths that formed the spiny dorsal fin of the New York skyline, the Midtown delis hummed in frantic anticipation. The excitement was almost palpable, like the backstage frenzy of motion and anticipation of off-off-Broadway on a dicey opening night. It was a quarter to lunch, and the salad bars, Manhattan’s signature quickfix, pay-by-the-pound midday eateries, all bright green awnings and outdoor racks of bunched overpriced wildflowers, made ready to pour out their cornucopias for the office workers spilling en masse from their skyscrapers like clowns from so many minivans.

Carefully nipped cauliflower and broccoli florets tumbled obediently into steamers; tomatoes fell into quick, perfect eighths at the touch of flashing knives. Prepared foods in all shades of brown poured lumpily into burnished steel pans: a removable feast of sweet-and-sour pork, sesame chicken, cubed roasted eggplant, and myriad other bite-size delights.

By the time Jason found Amanda tapping a booted heel on the sidewalk outside the Deli Lama’s door, the distribution engine was running at top speed. A steady influx of empty-handed hunter-gatherers neatly balanced an exodus of brown-bag-toting customers, keeping the revolving door in an almost constant spin cycle. She smiled on seeing him outside, and extended her hand as they exchanged the requisite greetings.

“It’s crowded,” she pointed out unnecessarily as they entered, and he nodded agreement. Hordes of lunchers swarmed about the buffet tables like cats at the kill.

“Yeah, this is a pretty good place,” he said loftily.

Amanda smiled impishly. “I’m sure it’s a wonderful salad bar,” she said sympathetically, eyes twinkling. Without awaiting a response, she patted his upper arm like a consoling coach. “Let’s dive in. I’ll meet you at the register.”

As they split up to assemble their personal food frescoes, Jason found himself surreptitiously watching Amanda, ogling her arms and torso through hazy sneeze guards, ready to avert his gaze into the broccoli pan if she looked his way. Their comfortable rapport was undeniable, but he wondered whether the flirtatious humor that had so far characterized their interaction, the heart and soul of his mating dance, meant anything deeper at all to Amanda. Ominously, Jason was unable to catch her looking at him once.

“You were right. This
is
a good place,” Amanda relented after they had paid and commandeered a table for two along one wall. “Look—real jumbo shrimp, not sea legs.”

“Don’t patronize me,” said Jason, and they peeled off rubber bands in tandem, allowing the clear plastic clams that held their salads to yawn open into their paper soup cups.

“You know,” said Jason after his first bite, “the salad bar is the perfect model for world peace. Culinary offerings from cultures all over the world, and everything costs the same. You can stick a bagel and a falafel right next to each other on your tray and they won’t dispute territory.”

“The joy’s in the juxtaposition,” agreed Amanda. “Look how everyone arranges their food so carefully. Nobody just slops the stuff into the tray. I think for a lot of people it’s a brief, shining moment of artistic freedom in an otherwise dull day.”

Naturally, this called for a glance at her creation, an impressionistic
objet
where thinly sliced beets and rings of red and yellow peppers danced against a background of subtly shifting greens. Jason looked down with dismay into his own tray: three kinds of sticky fried meat swimming in nondescript Chinese sauces, a side of wilted broccoli, some chunks of ham glumly riding a pineapple ring.

“I’m evidently a Dadaist,” he offered by way of apology.

Amanda smiled gracefully. “You’re just a starving artist.”

“Well, anyway,” said Jason, eager to change the subject, “here we are.”

“Here we are,” she agreed. “Aren’t you excited?”

He shrugged. “I’ve had salad lots of times.”

She shot him a withering look. “The way I see it,” she began, using her plastic fork as a pointer, “we have a three-step process ahead of us. We have to secure the document itself. We have to prove your lineage—trace an unbroken bloodline back to the ancestor named in the document. And then we have to prove the whole thing in court.”

“Do we have time to eat first?”

She blushed faintly. “Am I being overzealous?”

“No, it’s nice to see the enthusiasm,” he assured her. “I just can’t shift gears that quickly.”

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. But remember, I researched this for a long time without knowing if you even existed. I’m still on that first adrenaline rush.”