The Ledger — Twenty-Three Names: 03

Gideon Rusk came at nine in the morning, which told Mira two things before he said a word: he was frightened, and he had never once in his life had to wait for a table.

He filled the doorway of her office the way money fills a room -- quietly, and in every corner at once. Sixty-two years old, silver at the temples, a coat that had been cut for him and no one else. Three years ago he had worn the same coat to the Halcyon Hotel and she had taken it off him herself, button by button, while he explained to her how much he trusted her.

"Sit down, Gideon."

"I'll stand."

"You'll sit," she said, "or you'll spend the rest of this conversation looking up at me, and you'll say something you regret."

He sat. The chair was too low; that was the point of the chair.

* * *

"You have something of mine," he said.

"I have a great many things of many people's. You'll have to be specific."

"Don't." His hands were flat on his knees, the knuckles pale. "The recording. The Halcyon. Three years ago in April."

Mira poured herself a coffee she did not want, because it made him wait, and because waiting was the entire business.

"I remember April," she said. "You wore a grey suit and you talked for forty-one minutes about your father."

His jaw worked. "That was the price."

"That was the conversation. The price came later." She sat down across from him and set the cup aside. "You came to me because a woman at your shipping company had filed a complaint, and you wanted it to stop existing. I made it stop existing. You paid me. The account was settled in June of that year, and I have not thought about you since."

"Then why is a lawyer in Chicago asking me about a tape?"

The room got very still. Outside, the rain had stopped for the first time in days, which she did not like at all.

"Say that again," Mira said.

"A lawyer. Chicago. He has a transcript. He has quotes, Mira, things I said in that room that nobody else was ever in."

"What did you say?"

He looked at the floor. She's going to make me say it out loud, he thought, and she'll watch my face while I do.

"I said she was a liar and that I'd have her out of the building by Friday."

"And did you?"

"I gave her a settlement and a reference and she moved to Seattle." His voice went thin. "I didn't touch her. I never touched her. I said those things because I was angry, and because I was drunk, and because you--"

"Because I asked you to." Mira leaned back. "You wanted the complaint to disappear so badly that you'd have said anything to the woman who promised to make it disappear. That was the arrangement, Gideon. That was the whole arrangement."

* * *

She had not been lying to him, exactly. She had been working.

Three years earlier.

The Halcyon suite smelled of cut flowers and old money. He had ordered champagne because men like Gideon Rusk believed that was what the evening required, and she had let him pour it, and let him talk, and let the recorder in her handbag do what it did.

"You're not like the lawyers," he said. "You listen."

"I'm listening now."

He told her about his father. He told her about the woman in accounts, and how she had misunderstood, and how a man's whole life could be ended by a misunderstanding. He said the word liar four times. He said he'd have her out of the building by Friday.

Then he kissed her.

She let him. That was the work: not the recording, which was already running, but the permission -- the arrangement of a man's evening so that he would believe he had chosen all of it.

He was clumsy and eager and his hands shook when he got her dress open, and she found that she did not mind. She took his coat off him, and then his tie, and then the rest, and when he pushed her back against the window with the city going on beneath them, she looked past his shoulder at her own reflection and thought, without heat, there. That's the last piece.

He was hard against her hip, breathing like a man who had been given something back. "Tell me what you want," he said.

"I want you to tell me the truth."

"About what?"

"About the woman." She reached down and took him in her hand, slow, and his hips jerked and whatever he had been about to say went out of him in a breath. "Say her name."

"Anna." His forehead dropped to hers. "Anna Mercer."

"And what did you do to Anna Mercer?"

"I--" He pushed into her hand, helpless. "I made her life-- God."

"The truth, Gideon."

"I ruined her," he said, and it came out wrecked and honest and entirely recorded. "Oh, God, I ruined her."

She let him finish. She even let him think he had been generous about it.

Then she put her hand flat on his chest, and stepped out from under him, and fetched his coat.

* * *

"Three years," Gideon said now, in the low chair, with the coffee going cold between them. "Three years and it comes back."

"Because someone kept a copy." Mira stood and went to the window. "I don't keep copies. I keep names. There is exactly one recording of that room, and it was supposed to be in a safe in this building with two other things I never intend to use."

"And is it?"

She turned.

"No," she said. "It isn't."

* * *

The safe was behind the painting of the harbor, and the painting was not very good, and Mira had chosen it for exactly that reason. The safe was open. It was the kind of open that a man leaves behind when he has been paid to be quick.

"There were three envelopes," she said.

"And now?"

"Two." She knelt and took out the first, weighed it in her hand, and did not open it. "So someone has been in my office, Gideon, and they took the thing you're most afraid of, and they are selling it to a lawyer in Chicago who has a copy of a transcript he should not have."

He had gone the color of the wallpaper.

"Who else knew about the Halcyon?"

"Delphine." She said it without hesitation, because it was true and because saying it out loud cost her something she did not care to examine. "And one man, who is dead. And you."

"I would never--"

"You would. You would sell your own mother for a favorable headline." She put the envelope back and closed the safe. "But you didn't, or you'd be threatening me instead of sitting in my chair asking questions. Which leaves one possibility, and I don't like it."

"Which is?"

"That whoever took it did it in the last four days." She looked at him. "Which means they were in this building while I was upstairs with a man who came here with a folder and a grudge."

* * *

Adrian arrived at eleven, which was not Thursday and not four o'clock and not anything she had agreed to, and he came through the downstairs door with the rain back on his shoulders and Delphine's voice following him up the stairs like a thrown shoe.

"Mira."

"Gideon, this is Adrian Voss. Adrian, Gideon Rusk. You two have something in common, which you can work out on your own time."

Adrian looked at the open painting, the safe, the envelopes. He looked at Gideon, who had gone very still, and at Mira, who had not.

"Someone robbed you," he said.

"Someone borrowed something."

"What did they take?"

She told him. He listened the way he'd listened at the Halcyon-- no, not that; she had never told him about the Halcyon. He listened the way he had listened in her flat, with his whole body and none of his hands.

"So you recorded a man," Adrian said slowly, "in bed. To take him apart."

"Yes."

"And the woman in Seattle -- her complaint, her job--"

"Was real, and is now settled, and she does not owe me a thing she doesn't know she owes me." Mira met his eyes. "That is the ugliest thing in this room, Adrian. A recording of a frightened man saying true things. I made it. I used it. I would do it again, and I would not enjoy it, and that is the difference between me and the lawyer in Chicago."

She means that, Adrian thought, and it frightened him more than the safe had.

Gideon rose, unsteady. "If that man publishes--"

"Then a lot of people find out that Gideon Rusk is a coward who says ugly things with his cock out." Mira opened the door. "I'll get you the name by Friday. You'll pay me for it, and then you'll never come here again. Do we understand each other?"

"Yes."

"Then take the stairs gently, Gideon. The third one's loose."

* * *

When he was gone, Adrian shut the door and stood with his back to it.

"You could have lied to me," he said.

"I could have."

"You told me the worst thing you've ever done, and then you told me why you'd do it again, and I am standing here trying to decide whether that is honesty or a very good trick."

Mira came across the room and stopped a foot from him, near enough to feel the rain coming off his coat.

"It's both," she said. "That's the part nobody tells you about this job."

He raised his hand, then stopped himself, and put it on the doorframe instead. The wood creaked.

"Friday," he said. "The name."

"You want in."

"I want to watch you do it," Adrian said, and the cold in his voice was not cold at all, and Mira felt the floor shift half an inch under her feet.

God help me, she thought, that's not fear. That's the door opening.

* * *

The rain started again at noon.

At 12:40 the phone on the desk buzzed once -- one message, unknown number again, the fourth this week. She did not reach for it immediately. She let it sit, and looked at the room, and took her time about it, because that was the whole business.

The photograph was of her office window from the street, taken at some point in the last hour, while Gideon Rusk was still standing at the safe.

Under it, four words.

You're running out of names.