You Don't Love This Man (5 page)

It was Catherine and the police who were watching me right then, though, and waiting for something—the officers in earnest, but Catherine as a bit of playacting.

“Right,” I said. “Let's take a look.”

Catherine headed to her desk, as she had obviously already intended to do. Catherine often hesitated in order for it to appear that I did not. I never asked it of her, and I don't know, really, why she did it. I suppose it amused her.

The gentleman collecting fingerprints abandoned Amber's teller station and moved toward the front doors, muttering crossly to himself. Martinez and O'Brien headed in his direction, and though I was only a handful of strides away from the counter and could see the Rorschach-like swirls and eddies left in the powder upon its surface, I resisted the temptation to examine them. Instead, I followed Catherine to her desk.

“I don't understand why you're still here when there are probably a thousand things you need to do,” she said. “But here, if you're going to stay and bother me, you forgot to sign my transfer application, and it's due Monday.” And without taking her eyes from her computer screen, she took a form from her in-box and put it in front of me on the desk.

What she had said was incorrect, though. I hadn't forgotten to sign the form that released Catherine to apply for other open positions with the bank. I had ignored it. “So you really do find me a pain,” I said.

“Not true,” she said. “We've had this discussion. I just want to advance like anyone else.” On her screen, a tiny hourglass spun, emptying and refilling itself.

“It's not due until Monday. I'll sign it then.”

“You're taking the day off on Monday.”

She was right. I took the piece of paper in my hand and looked at it. It was just a form, bureaucratic and meaningless. “I sometimes wonder if you've forgotten the situation I got you out of.”

She sighed. “I have not.”

“You have, and now you feel like being a service manager is just treading water,” I said. “You're sick of digging through paperwork and of the drive to the northern district for the monthly meeting and of all the business with keeping the tellers sharp.”

“I don't mind any of that.”

“You must, or you wouldn't want to be free of it. But remember Tony Sacco, how he had you trapped in his branch dealing with his insanity day after day until he made the mistake of letting you go to that managers' meeting for him so he could play golf? And so there you were, asking me if there was any chance I could get you transferred out. And I did. It took a ridiculous number of very artful phone calls, but he let you go.”

“And I've always been thankful.” She shook the mouse impatiently, and the hourglass veered back and forth on the screen. “As I've told you every time you've mentioned it over the last ten years.”

“Oh? Do I mention it too often?”

“Not at all.”

“Because if I mention it too often, I'll stop.”

“I wouldn't want to forget,” she said.

Though she hadn't looked away from her computer screen, I could see enough of her face to note the raised eyebrows and slightly flared nostrils that she adopts when trying to act calm—it's the only way I know I'm getting to her. I folded the form and put it in the inside pocket of my suit jacket. “I need your help today,” I said. “And then I'll sign your transfer request and you'll be free to
run your own show. And I won't forget, because the form will be right here in my pocket.”

“What do you mean you need my help?” she said.

“The bride didn't come home last night.”

She turned, surprised. “Did you call the police?”

“Christ, Catherine. We're not there yet.”

The hourglass disappeared, and was replaced by a log-in box. “What should I do?” she asked as she typed in her password.

“Do you have the Kodak moment?” Martinez asked from across the lobby.

A small iridescent circle popped onto the screen and began to spin and pulse, as if it could see offstage and was greatly excited about what would happen next. “The system has been slow this morning,” Catherine told Martinez. “But we should have it any minute.”

The circle throbbed and spun, spun and throbbed. It should have been a stone a little man pushed up a hill and then watched roll back down. I stood there, motionless and watching it, for upward of a minute.

“I don't understand why this doesn't work,” Catherine said.

I leaned down close to her. “Kill it,” I whispered. “Fatal error, system down, whatever expression you want.”

“Don't you want to see the guy?”

“We get photos every time it happens anywhere in the region, and they're on the local news all the time—it's not thrilling. It's banal. A person wanted money, so he came in and demanded some, and we gave it to him.”

“Are you really that unaffected?”

“No, I'm just getting angry,” I said. “All of this technology in the branch doesn't prevent
anything
. You and I have to go through exact,
step-by-step procedures with all of these computer systems, but then when a guy walks in and asks for money, look at the computer—it doesn't help us. It's just a little machine that's confused and doesn't work well. The only people who are going to help Amber feel better are you and I. The guy is gone, and staring at the computer or filling out forms isn't going to change that.”

“I understand what you're saying,” she said. “But we don't really have a choice. We have to follow procedure, and the procedure is to pull the photos from the computer.”

“And it doesn't work. And I have contempt for things that waste my time,” I said. “What about our old stuff? The old video cameras are still running, aren't they? Can't we pull videotape?”

“Physical videotape? Only one of the cameras still records on actual videotape, and we're not allowed to pull the tape. We have to wait for bank security to do that. Everything else is digital.”

“So we can't touch the videotape without Mom or Dad here, but we also can't see the photos, because their expensive computer system isn't actually working.”

“Do you need to take a walk?” she said. “You seem incredibly upset.”

At a regional managers' meeting a few weeks before, one of the other managers, chatting amiably about the big new house he and his wife had just bought, had joked that even though he'd worked for the bank for twenty years, his mortgage statement showed that he owed the bank money, rather than the other way around. “I guess just about every penny they ever paid me I gave right back to them,” he'd said, and we had all laughed. But that sentence had stayed with me, repeating in my head. There was a condo down the street from my own—a unit exactly like mine—that had gone on the market two months earlier at a price below what I'd origi
nally paid for mine, and it was still on the market. I did the mortgage on my condo through our bank, of course, so I, too, wrote a check to the mortgage division of my employer every month—a check made larger by the fact that I'd also taken out a home equity loan to finance the cost of Miranda's wedding. When I applied the list price of the condo down the street to what I owed on my unit and the equity loan, though, the number didn't cover the debt. On our weekend morning walks, my Realtor ex-girlfriend Trish used to urge me to sell my condo and buy something bigger. People's homes were their best investment, she told me more than once—the values only go up. I didn't recall her mentioning the scenario in which, via my home, I had somehow ended up owing my employer more than I could pay.

It grated. And Catherine was right: the more I spoke about the bank and the robbery that morning—about the police and their theories, about the computers that didn't work, about all the detailed procedures Catherine and I would be required to carry out—the angrier I was getting. I felt like I was seeing, with perfect clarity, the degree to which all these measures actually made it
easier
to rob a bank than in the past. I doubted there was a single person out on the street looking for the guy who had stolen our money—everyone was too busy either posing as an expert or looking at screens. It was crazy. And I wanted everyone
to see
that it was crazy. “I don't need to take a walk,” I said. “Network problems, failing server, unable to connect—pick a term, it doesn't matter. Just announce it to everyone. I want to get going.”

“Get going where?” she said. “Ten minutes ago you told me there was no hurry.”

“That was before you got me going on this. I want out of here. What we're doing is pointless.”

Martinez returned to us then with heavy, jingling strides—his keys, handcuffs, and other paraphernalia lent him the effect of a Clydesdale at Christmas. “Seizing up on you?” he said, stopping next to me. We waited together, our eyes on the screen. The computer whirred. Martinez was shoulder to shoulder with me, and I wanted to move, do something, but with him right there, I felt like I had paid for a seat to a show and now couldn't leave. Amber was in my office, O'Brien was across the branch laughing with Charlotte and Tina, and Fingerprints was bent before the front doors, brush in hand, dusting the panes.

Catherine had asked if Sandra and I had called the police. Why would we need the police? I checked my watch as if I would find the answer there, but discovered only that it was ten-thirty, which meant nothing in particular.

Another insanity: the bank relied on sophisticated computer systems to keep funds secure and accurate, but they did not feel that having top-of-the-line computers was a priority at the branch level. I knew from daily experience that the little circle on Catherine's computer could spin for any amount of time. “I'm sorry,” I said. “But I have to make a phone call.” It was a lie, but at that point I would have said my hair was on fire if I thought it would allow me to walk away.

“Go ahead,” Martinez said, his eyes pinned to the screen, hypnotized. “We'll be here.”

 

T
HERE WAS A SET
of doors at the back of the branch, seldom used because they opened onto a less-traveled cross street. I unlocked them and pushed my way into the morning sunshine. Tall, thin trees lined the sidewalk, and a faint breeze sent the leaves
aflutter, their papery rustle mingling with the muted roar of traffic from the freeway overpass a block away. Decades ago, when the branch had first been established, the neighborhood had been a thriving industrial area. Those businesses had moved north, though, to land that accommodated bigger warehouses with larger loading docks, and in the intervening years, our location had become marginal: we were six blocks from the nearest retail street, fifteen from the nearest chain grocery store. Two blocks south, the street between the back of a beer and wine distributor and the front of a wholesale tile showroom wasn't even paved—it was just gravel poured over the rusting, decommissioned rail line that used to snake through the entire neighborhood before World War II, when manufacturers loaded and unloaded their own rail cars. An elderly customer once told me that the last time he remembered the line being in use, Eisenhower was president. What was left in the twenty-first century were old apartment buildings, a handful of empty structures once home to small manufacturing concerns, and an art college two blocks west, which occupied just one restored warehouse, and outside of which unhappy-looking young people would smoke for ten minutes before casting their butts to the ground and heading back inside. I already had the business of every going concern in the neighborhood—none of the competition had a branch of their own in the area anymore—but our branch still missed our monthly sales goals fairly often. Upper management rarely bothered to complain, though, because they knew the deal: location, location, location.

Down the street, I could see a motley group of five or six figures gathered in the shade beneath the overpass, dwarfed by the massive concrete pillars that held the freeway in place seventy feet over their heads. Some sat upon the concrete embankment,
others stood near shopping carts, and though they were a block away and in the shade, a few of the figures seemed familiar. Homeless people often brought cupfuls of change into the branch to be run through our coin machine. At a recent staff meeting, some of the tellers had complained that these people didn't have accounts, so why were we serving them? I'd asked if there had been any particular trouble, and the girls had exchanged uncertain glances until Charlotte had blurted, “One of them doesn't have a nose.” “He has nostrils,” Tina said. “But he doesn't have the top half. It's just a crusty hole, like a rat ate it or something.” The girls had laughed—at times, they acted their age—and when Catherine confirmed that this person had visited a few times and was not lovely to look upon, the girls admitted it was his looks, really, that scared them, but still, could we make him go away? “But what if his fortunes change?” I had said. “What if he wins the lottery? Maybe then he'll buy roses every week for the tellers who treated him so well when things were rough.” The girls had sighed, frustrated—they wanted better than roses, it seemed—but gave up on driving him out.

I wondered if this fellow was a member of the group I was peering at in the shadows beneath the overpass: the one leaning over his shopping cart with his ball cap pulled low, perhaps, or the one supine on the embankment with his arm over his face. When I looked down to dial my phone, a cackle of faint, disembodied laughter carried from that direction, and I looked up to find that one of them had turned and seemed to be looking toward the bank. I trained my eyes on the sidewalk and walked slowly along the back of the building, listening to the line ring, until I heard a woman's voice inform me that—Miranda cheerfully stated her name—was not currently available. Did that mean her phone was
turned off, or just that she wasn't answering? “Miranda,” I said at the tone, “it's Dad. I'm looking for you. Give me a call.”