Mathilda threw the compact back into her purse and the purse over her shoulder and left her office to go down to the other end of the hall. Phyllis Green was an American and the head of the auction coordination department. That way, Halbard’s had managed to promote her without moving her upstairs into the pure British precincts of upper management. Phyllis had decided to put up with this for reasons known only to herself. Unlike her staff—which was mainly made up of twentysomethings just graduated from the art history departments of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters—Phyllis was in her fifties and a veteran of the equal pay wars. If she hadn’t liked the arrangements at Halbard’s, she would either have left or hauled the auction house into court.
“Phyllis?” Mathilda asked, knocking on the open door.
Phyllis looked up from a pile of papers on her desk and waved Mathilda inside. “I thought you’d gone already. Aren’t you supposed to be in Maine?”
“I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Well, you’ll be lucky to get out of here. Do you know what I’ve spent my time doing all day? Going through the details of the Impressionist auction. Fifty paintings by Pissarro just sitting up there on the sixth floor, lying around like so many pieces of wood, and nobody’s cataloged them yet.”
“I thought that was Janey Lewis’s auction. What happened to Janey?”
“Jumped ship for Christie’s.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you’ve got to expect it,” Phyllis said. “Christie’s will actually promote Americans. So. Is there something you need from me, or did you just want to talk?”
Mathilda sighed. “Actually, I just needed an antidote to Martin Michaelson. I just got him off the phone.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I don’t know why I let him get to me, but I do.”
“He gets to everybody. He knows all the right buttons to push.”
“I guess I just wanted to hear you say I really was the right person to handle this auction, and Tasheba Kent isn’t going to loathe me on sight, and I haven’t lost my femininity, whatever that means—”
“It means you haven’t stopped making yourself look incompetent,” Phyllis told her. “Personally, I insist that the women who work for me lose their femininity as soon as they accept my offer of a job.”
Mathilda laughed. “I know I was being ridiculous. I just can’t help myself. That man just gets me going. I wish he’d do something awful and get himself fired.”
“Bring this auction off successfully and I’ll get you promoted to senior AC,” Phyllis said. “Then he can die of apoplexy.”
“He won’t, you know. He’ll just sit around at lunch and complain about how this company has been intimidated by the radical feminists.”
“Go to Maine,” Phyllis said.
Mathilda went back down the hall to her office instead. The phone was ringing, but she didn’t pick it up. It was probably just Martin, wanting to pick up where he had left off.
Mathilda got her file on the Tasheba Kent auction out of her file cabinet, spread the contents across her desk, and began to go over the probable sale lists one more time.
5
FOR CARLTON JI, JOURNALISM was not so much a career as it was a new kind of computer game, except without the computer, which suited Carlton just fine. Two of his older brothers had gone into computer work, and a third—Winston the Medical Doctor, as Carlton’s mother always put it—did a lot of programming on the side. For Carlton, however, keyboards and memory banks and microchips were all a lot of fuss and nonsense. If he tried to work one of the “simple” programs his brothers were always bringing him, he ended up doing something odd to the machine, so that it shut down and wouldn’t work anymore. If he tried to write his first drafts on the word processor at work, he found he couldn’t get them to print out on the printer or even to come back onto the screen. They disappeared, that was all, and Carlton had learned to write his articles out in longhand instead. It was frustrating. Computers made life easier, if you knew how to use them. Carlton could see that. Besides, there wasn’t a human being of any sex or color in the United States today who really believed there was any such thing as an Asian-American man who was computer illiterate.
Fortunately for Carlton Ji, his computer at Personality magazine had a mouse, which just needed to be picked up in the hand and moved around. It was by using the mouse that he had found out what he had found out about the death of Lilith Brayne. He didn’t have anything conclusive, of course. If there had been anything definitive lying around, somebody else would have picked it up years ago. What he had was what one of his brothers called “a computer coincidence.” The coincidence had been there all along, of course, but it had remained unnoticed until a computer program threw all the elements up on a screen. The trick was that the elements might never have appeared together if there hadn’t been a program to force them together, because they weren’t the kind of elements a human brain would ordinarily think of combining. Computers were stupid. They did exactly what you told them to do, even if it made no sense.