Preview: Banksters, Part 2

And here's the next section of Banksters, due end of October/early November. Ride shotgun with a sociopath accelerating his ascent to corporate power.

Point of interest, Banksters was originally syndicated daily, as written, during National Novel Writing Month 2011. It's a funny tradition of mine, to peel back my skin a bit and share my work as it happens. If you want to tag along for this year's NaNo project, Twist, a psychological thriller, visit NicolasWilson.com and check the blog daily, beginning November 2nd. Performance art, but with only metaphorical nudity.

Previously:
Banksters, Part 1, Howdy

Banksters, Part 2, Secretive
I spent a few minutes at my computer after the meeting typing. Corporate communications are second-nature to me: cold and utilitarian and efficiently artless. I'd brought my old printer from downstairs, and printed the memo on it.

I looked at it a moment, to be sure it was exactly how I wanted it, and then took it down the hall. Security had its own executive level office- just not the title, and Daria was sitting in the same chair, at the same desk, as I had, the standard one. Which meant either she hadn't been offered the perks of the floor, or hadn't accepted them.

Daria Rheme. Beautiful. Obsessive. And potentially a very large pain in my ass. She had long, wavy, dark hair. Raven, I think, being the preferred term, and pale skin that complemented her delicate features. F; K if necessary, though if things went to plan, it wouldn't be.
She was in charge of corporate security. And she was really good at what she did. Thorough. Scrutinizing. I couldn’t have that. In the end, I wanted what was best for this company- which generally translated to what was best for the senior executives. But she was a firewall, standing between them and me. And that wasn't something I could suffer to continue.

I smiled nervously at her for effect. “Daria? It's my first day on the floor, and I'm still getting used to operating at this level.”

“The altitude this many flights up is killer,” she said with a smile. Under other circumstances, I probably would have found her charming. The smile faded as she noticed my hands. “But gloves? You're not planning a murder, are you?”

Planning one? No. But you never know. I stretched my fingers in my black leather gloves. “Bad circulation. My fingers get cold. Especially with the central air. Hopefully I'll acclimate.”

“Oh, I know. They can never seem to find a good medium. Most of the time, in the summer they keep it too cold, and in the winter I swelter until I've stripped down to my skivvies.”

“But, uh, I wondered if you could take a look at this memo. I don't want my first day here to be my last day.”

“Usually I'd have one of my,” she glanced at her computer, then the empty inbox on her desk, and didn't finish the thought. “Sure. Just don't expect it to become a habit.”

“Of course.” She scanned it. There was a typo in there she either didn't catch or didn't mention, but she did hone in on the important part.

“You're CCing and blind copying this all over your division, but you left in contact information for your executive VP. Most of these people would be able to get that, anyway, but as it's presented, he'll be the one inundated with concerns or questions, and Cliff hates that.”

“That's good, I hadn't thought of that” I told her, which was a lie. “And from a security perspective?”

“Otherwise it looks fine. If that were releasing to the press obviously it'd be different- the numbers and direct email, like I said- but for internal consumption it's okay.” She handed me the page back.

“Thank you,” I said, I did a little bow and left.

I walked back to my office, where I slid the memo into my desk drawer, and grabbed my coat. I pressed the intercom button to talk to Petra. “You about ready for lunch?”

“Really?” she asked, a little surprised I remembered.

“Of course.”

She was already wrapping herself in a fur-lined coat by the time I got out to her desk. She followed me down to the parking garage, and got into my car. “Where would you like to go?” I asked her.

“You're new to the floor, not new to the city,” she said. But I was new to the life, and when I didn't reply, she added, “Brooks.”

I drove us there, about a mile north. At dinner, Brooks would have been impossible to get a seat for without a several day old reservation, but the lunch crowd was thinner, since nobody's ever impressed or that impressive at lunch.

The host stared with some irritation at Petra. “Something wrong?” I asked him, giving him at least as good a glare as Richard used at the meeting earlier.
“Uh, no, sir,” the host said, and led us to our seats.

I helped her into her chair before sitting in my own. She was anxious, and the host's reaction to her had only justified her fear. “I really thought you were going to tell me 'no' about coming here.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I'm not dressed for this kind of place.”

“No, that's why you wish I'd said no. Not why you thought I would.”

“I'm just a...” she trailed off.

“Just a secretary? Is that what you are?”

“Well, administrative assistant,” she said sullenly.

“If I thought that, I'd fire you,” I said, and unfolded the menu to scan it. “Do you think that?”

She made an unexpected lemon face. “You're looking for 'no,' right?”

I looked up at her. “I'm looking for what you think. Do you think you're just an administrative assistant?”

“No,” she said quietly, but still tried to hunker down in her chair. The part she didn't say, the part she didn't want to admit, is that whatever her own grand designs, she was just an assistant, at least to the people she worked with. And that kind of marginalization weighed on a person.

I made a sweeping gesture with my arm. “Look around. That woman has had easily $50,000 worth of plastic surgery. The one at the back's wearing a $9,000 dress. It's a light lunch crowd, but the women in this dining room have spent, cumulatively, a million dollars to not look as good as you do, right now. Wearing what you wear into the office, on a typical day. This is you not trying that hard.” She bristled at that. She had made some token effort to clean up for the new boss, apparently. But that was far to the side of my point. “You look gorgeous, and I'm sure you know you have no reason to feel self-conscious about being here. But what I want to know, and I want you to really think about it before you answer me, is are you just an administrative assistant?”

She exhaled, annoyed at my question. But she looked around the room, and sat up a little straighter. “No.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I'd look capricious after telling Ed that I'd keep you if I fired you a few hours later.” Her eyes opened wide. “Trust me, when I say this, you never want to be saddled with anyone who is just anything- it's so limiting. I've never been just anything. I've always been in the process of becoming something else.” I noticed she was rereading a page on the menu a third time. “But on the subject of limitations, order what you like.”

“Really?”

“Money's no object. Besides, what you order tells me something about you, something far more valuable than what anything on this menu costs.”

“And what if I just wanted a salad? What does that tell you?”

“Lots of things, little things. One, you don't believe what I just said, about wanting you to order whatever you want.”

“Unless I just want a salad.”

“Nobody wants just a salad. It's not in human nature. It's settling for a salad. And there are lots of interesting reasons why you might settle. To impress your boss with your frugality. To maintain your figure. To punish yourself for something.”

“Or because I actually wanted a salad?”
The server came by. “Two salads, please, whatever's tastiest.” I said to her, barely paying her enough mind to decide F.

“To drink?”

“Two glasses of white wine, whatever you'd suggest to complement the salads.”

“Very good.”

Petra was in shock. “After all that, you just give yourself a pass and order a salad?”

“We spent so much time talking about them that I started to crave one. But what's to say I'm not prey to the same issues we were discussing?”

“You're a man, and an older man.”

“Older?” The server brought the wine first, and Petra waited until she left to react.

“Older than me, anyway. I'm a professional woman. I'm not allowed to let my figure go.”

“The social constraints are certainly different. But I have pride. I don't like the idea of needing new suits, or gaining weight.”

“But you're a man. That affords you the luxury of choice.”

The server returned with our salads, and set them discreetly down in front of us. “But you had a choice, too. And you chose a salad. And what's more, you chose to have this conversation in an attempt to give me nothing to know you better with.”

She thought about that for a moment, probing for a way she could contest it, but gave up. “You flustered me, with your logic and your piercing blue eyes.”

“Are they?”

“That's just a trick question, to get me to look into them some more, and get me more flustered.”

She did, and I fixed her with them for a moment, before asking, “Where did you go to school?”

“Who said I did?” she asked. She still felt combative, if playfully so, but then realized I wasn't batting at her anymore. “Columbia's journalism school.”

“So you wanted to be a journalist?”

“From a little kid, reading Lois Lane comics.”

“Are you really that old?”

“No; but the moment I found out they had Lois Lane comics, not just Superman with her as arm candy, but Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane comics. I was hooked. I had to crawl through musty old comic bins to find them, and they were cheesy and often kind of lame, but I gathered every single issue in the run, and that comic ran for years. They're not mint or anything, just...” she stumbled on the next step in her story.

“So what happened?”

“Journalism dust-bowled. There's hardly anyone actually writing news stories anymore. There's a handful of people who work for the AP, and then that gets reworded, rewritten or just plain linked to a hundred thousand times for different papers and blogs. I even tried doing entry level, like mail room kinds of jobs in the industry, and couldn't even find something that paid enough to cover my loans.”

“Until.”

“I started with a temp agency. Not exactly the glamorous world I was expecting on the other side of my degree. But it was the only place that would even entertain the idea of hiring me fresh out of school. And it turns out that most of my journalism skills translated decently well to secretarial work: detail orientation, taking dictation,” she licked her lips, and I told myself it had to be because she had some dressing on them. “But what's with the twenty questions? The only person who ever spent this much time trying to know me was Ed Noakes, and he lost interest in a real hurry when he realized I wasn't going to blow him on my lunch hours.”

“Because I wanted to know that you weren't just my assistant. And now I do. Right now that doesn't mean a lot. Right now, you just have a title, and not a very pretty sounding one. But in the coming days, that will change. I've found finance to be awfully competitive, and some days the work is more akin to battle than business. If I'm going back to back with someone, I want to know what kind of stuff they're made of before I turn my back. And I think we have a beautiful partnership ahead of us.”

I raised my glass, and she clinked it with hers.



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