Banksters 43: Ultimatum

Petra did cook, and none of it looked like baby poop. But she barely made eye contract through the entire meal, which was made even harder by the fact that we were eating around a small, circular, black glass table in my cramped little breakfast nook.

After I’d taken my last bite, she bussed our dishes. But she came back with a stack of folders. “I don’t love easily,” she said. “And I could never be sure of you. There was always something aloof about you; something that made me afraid to connect with you. But you’ve really stepped up. The ring, the baby. Everything. I trust you. And that’s why I’m giving you this.”

“File folders? Don’t we have a virtually unlimited supply of those at office?” She laid the folders down in front of me, and opened them up to the first page. They were hand-written field reports, going back several weeks. She’d done me the favor of highlighting my name in them- and it was in them a lot.

“I finished typing them up, and sent them in. Without your name in them. In fact, I’ve written my reports around you, entirely. It would be harder now for someone else, coming in, to prove you had anything to do with any of the malfeasance we both know permeates our company.”

That was when I realized: it was a test. A cynical test, to see if I’d take my anonymity and run. And in all likelihood, she was lying, and there were copies, probably all over the place. In truth, I’d never been more attracted to her.

“I don’t want you to be putting yourself in harm’s way,” I told her. “This is your career, you’re talking about.”

“And your life, our lives, together. Not a very inspiring bedtime story, ‘you have a father, I just put him in jail for doing things that aren’t really that illegal, we just found a technicality.’”

“There’s a technicality?” I asked, somewhat genuinely.

“There’s always a technicality. Finance is all about technicalities. We find them, and exploit them, and next year the regulators close one loophole, so we find another. And that story might have been you find them, and I stop you; but I want it to be a different story. One with a happier ending.”

She collapsed into my arms, in tears, and I held her. 

I realized we had a comfortable life together. She was just clingy enough to be constantly available to me, but not so clingy as to interfere with everything else I had to do to get ahead.

I wondered how long I could keep her from realizing she wasn’t pregnant. The hormone shots would keep her from ovulating, and for the piss stick test I could always give her some hCG. But eventually she’d want to go to a doctor’s office, and trying to get the chemistry right to fool a quantitative beta hCG blood test was almost certainly beyond my means. And then there was the problem of her never showing.

So obviously, the answer was never going to be forever. 

The next morning I left her in bed for an ‘early meeting.’ Once I was out the door, I called Teryl Morgan on her cell. She waited several rings before she picked up.

“I was beginning to think I’d never hear from you again,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have,” I said, and left that to linger. “I was scared. It’s been so long since I’ve been happy, and, I was afraid it couldn’t last. I’m okay being lonely. But to have happiness dangled in front of me, only to lose it again… I don’t know that I could go through that again. Maybe I’m not ready for this. But I couldn’t stay away from you. Would you meet me for breakfast?”

“Sure. There’s a little sidewalk café below my apartment. I’ll send you directions.” 

It was basically on my way into work. But it was early, and the air was crisply moist, and biting. I ordered the warmest sounding things on the menu, coffee, toast, eggs and bacon. She had a bagel and a wedge of grapefruit. We sat on some metal patio furniture on the sidewalk. She didn’t invite me upstairs, which meant she didn’t trust herself around me.

“I never pictured you living in a place like this,” I said, nodding at her building while shoving half a piece of toast into my mouth without jam.

“I didn’t want to be one of those clichéd wives who kicks her husband out of the home he paid for. And I think… I was afraid that would push us into ending the marriage, back when I wasn’t sure that was what either of us wanted.” She was picking her words very carefully as she went along. She still felt guilty. I could work with that.

“Liz told me you were already divorced.”

“Separated,” she said, not quite understanding my tone. 

“I knew it,” I thrust my hands helplessly into the air. “I knew it was too good to be true. I can’t see a woman who’s separated. It’s practically adultery.”

She spoke very gently with me, but she was as much trying to convince herself. “I haven’t loved my husband for a very long time; and we hadn’t been happy a good deal before that.”

“But that doesn’t really matter- not in the eyes of God. He’s your husband. Jesus; I slept with a married woman.”

“I thought you knew.”

“It’s… it’s not your fault. I should have been more inquisitive; I rushed us into things. I just, I’ve never been so connected with someone so quickly before. I thought…” I didn’t finish the sentence. “But, if all that’s true, why haven’t you divorced him?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted after a moment. “It’s not something I’ve really thought about. But… I guess I didn’t want to admit that it was over. That I’d failed at married life. That Dick and I grew apart.”

“I don’t think I could see someone who’s married- separated or no.”

“Is that an ultimatum?” she bristled.

“I’m not telling you you have to do anything; I absolutely don’t want to pressure you. So if you want to take things slowly, I can wait. But the person who was married, you’re not her anymore. And that might be a scary thought. But you’re better than that. You’re better than clinging to an old life just so you don’t have to worry about who you’re going to be now that you aren’t that person anymore.”

“I think I need some time, to think. Can I have that?”

I took hold of her hand. “Of course.” I held her hand for a good ten minutes before she excused herself and went upstairs.

I called into the office, and told Petra I had another meeting, this time with a prospective replacement for Allistair Neville. Lucky enough for me, Janet Simmes was still in her office. “The job is yours,” I told her from her doorway.

“Really? Like that? You just walk in here and give me a job.”

“Exactly like that. The Senate won’t even give you an up or down vote on your current job- which means as soon as your temporary appointment expires you’re out the door. So you can stay here and let that clock tick down, or you can come work with me.”

“Not for?”

“You’d be heading the legal department in the same way I’m heading up strategy. We’d be more or less equals, and if anything, you’d be in charge of the older and much larger of the two departments.”

“So what does a chief strategy officer do?”

“Recognize opportunities, like the opportunity to headhunt a brilliant legal mind from an unappreciative government.”

“You’re not going to throw in some reference to how beautiful I am and how there’s a skirt maximum of mid-thigh? I could have sworn you were going to test me on sexual harassment law- I just get that vibe from you.”

“Nope. I come bearing a different kind of test.” I dropped a file onto her desk. “The first page is an employment contract, which you have to sign before you read any of the rest.”

“And the test is whether or not I sign documents I haven’t read?”

“By all means, read it. I’ll just hum the Jeopardy theme while I wait.” She scanned it, to make sure there wasn’t anything past boilerplate, then scratched what was probably an intentionally illegible signature at the bottom.

She took a few minutes to read over the documents to get a feel for them. And when she had the general idea she dropped the pages like a corpse onto her desk. “I can’t sign off on any this. It’s like the Repo agreements times ten.”

“And you can’t talk about it, either because you signed- wait, I had you sign a standard nondisclosure agreement along with your employment contract, didn’t I? I didn’t foolishly leave that at the bottom of that stack of papers, did I?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she flipped to the last page, where there was indeed an unsigned NDA. “Exactly what are you playing at?” she asked me.

“As I see it, you have two options. One, you bounce back these strategy documents to Richard Morgan, telling him he can’t do what he wants. Or two, you let any one of the yes men in your new department rubber stamp it; an excuse along the lines of ‘I’m still getting settled into the particulars of finance and the company’s culture’ ought to suffice. Then you rake Richard over coals with it at a barbeque with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

“Juicing my odds of confirmation, or just rubbing it in their snooty faces- whichever’s my pleasure. But what’s in all of this for you?” I whistled the first few bars of the Movin’ On Up theme song from the Jeffersons. “So you’re hoping I take out the King for you. No honor among thieves, huh?”

“I didn’t make pigs want to live in slop- I just gave one the opportunity.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you’re not a pig?”

“You can believe whatever you want. But if I were, it’d be awfully silly of me to help you get a job with even more power to go after people like me.”