Chapter 8: His Name Was Not on the List
The review opened at eight in the morning, nine days after my husband handed me an envelope between the oysters and the steak.
I was not in the building.
My conflict notice did more than keep my temper off the scorecard. It kept me out of the committee packet, out of the interviews, and out of the vote entirely. Ruth was permitted to send me exactly one message before she surrendered her phone for the duration, and she used it on nine words.
Victor's calendar. Independent committee seated. Review begun.
At two minutes past eight, Grant attempted to walk into his own firm's partner response meeting.
Martin rang me at eight twelve.
He turned up, he said. He is telling my assistant he is the relationship partner and that nobody can answer questions about the account without him in the room.
What did you tell him?
That he is also the conflict, and that his job this morning is to preserve records and stay out of the way.
Grant's name was on the review's subject list. It was not on the partner distribution list. That distinction moved him from a one-bedroom flat on Ninth Street to the office in fourteen minutes, which is faster than he has ever made that journey for a client.
I know the address because Owen's courier served him there. It is above a dry cleaner. There is one window and it faces a brick wall about two metres away. The lift has been broken since he moved in, so he carried his own boxes up three flights, and the night before the review he sent me three photographs of the place as though poor lighting were a cause of action.
LOOK WHAT YOU FORCED ME INTO.
The kitchen has a dishwasher and stone worktops. It is larger than the first flat we shared, the one on Bellhaven with the boiler that screamed. Hardship has evidently acquired stainless steel since 2011.
At the office, the receptionist asked him to wait while she rang upstairs.
For fifteen years that woman stood up when Grant Wexler crossed her lobby. On review morning she asked him to sign the visitor log.
He rang me from a chair in his own reception.
Tell Martin to put me on the partner call.
I can't.
You can do whatever you want. That's the whole problem, Nora.
No, I said. That's the first thing you've understood well enough to be frightened by.
I heard the lift announce itself. Going up.
The agenda's on the glass, he said, quieter. Every equity partner is listed.
Not every one.
Nothing for four seconds.
My name isn't here.
You're reading it correctly.
I built that account.
You billed that account, I said. The committee upstairs is currently deciding whether those were ever the same thing.
He breathed into the receiver once and didn't answer.
Then I heard him tell the receptionist he was going up for personal files, and heard her tell him an escort was required. He informed her that he had hired her. She told him, without any particular emphasis, that the firm had.
The lift chimed. He muttered about humiliation for eleven floors and I let him, partly because I had nothing to say and partly because I wanted to hear what he sounded like when he thought nobody upstairs could.
When the doors opened, the conversation on that floor thinned out around him. I could hear it happen. He kept the call alive the whole way, and I think it was because ending it would have meant standing in that corridor with nobody left to give an instruction to.
An escort asked him to keep moving.
Then he stopped walking.
Sabrina, he said.
A laugh cut off mid-syllable. Then a man's voice, close, asking whether everything was all right.
Marcus, Grant said. You've got the review binder.
I'm on the response team, Marcus Vale said.
You put him in the meeting?
Martin picked the team, Marcus said. You're not on it.
Then Sabrina, to Marcus, not to Grant: The review interview's starting. We should go.
We.
A badge reader chirped. A glass door closed on its damper, slowly, the way the good ones do.
Grant lifted the phone back to his ear.
She went in with him, he said.
Through the last inch of that closing door I heard her laugh at something Marcus said, and then the line went dead before I had decided whether to answer.
Martin's procedural log that afternoon recorded what a log can record: attempted entry, escorted access, access denied at three points, exclusion from the partner room.
It did not record who walked through the glass door with Marcus Vale. It didn't need to.