It had been a bad fall for personal problems, culminating in his second wife’s demand for a divorce, but by the time Calvin reached five o’clock on the sixteenth of November, he thought he was just getting a break. There was nothing like real work to take your mind off things. He’d had real work all day, combined with the nagging last-minute details of getting ready for the ride on the Pilgrimage Green. Calvin had found the combination irresistible. Even the typists’ feeble attempts to “celebrate” the holiday on office time gave him an emotional jolt, pathetic though they were. Calvin thought if he had to see another hollow chocolate turkey wrapped in badly colored tinfoil, he’d pop a blood vessel. He wanted to pop a blood vessel on general principles. On one side of his desk he had long sheets of computer printout full of columns of numbers, showing every possible permutation of the deal they were doing with Europabanc. There was a column for the stock Baird Financial would hand over to Europabanc’s officers and another column for the stock Europabanc would hand over to Baird. There was a column of figures representing cash on hand in the various accounts Baird Financial kept in various banks all over the world. There was even a column of figures representing office supplies, right down to boxes of pencils and cases of typewriter ribbons. These last figures were not necessarily accurate—they wouldn’t do a complete inventory of the two companies until the merger was finished and the two were one—but they made Calvin deliriously happy nonetheless. When they also made him tired, he turned his attention to the other side of his desk, where he had the list of things his secretary had packed for him to take on the Thanksgiving break. Jon’s Thanksgiving parties were the only exception Calvin had ever found to his distaste for out-of-office life. In spite of Jon’s fevered reveling in their status as descendents of men who had sailed on the Mayflower—which Calvin thought was silly—Jon’s parties were always better than tolerable. They sometimes even made Calvin think he was having a good time.
The discrepancy came in a cross-reference between the column of figures indicating cash on hand and the column of figures representing the cash infusion from the sale of the McAdam Investments junk bonds. The junk bond sale had gone off a little more than a week ago, and they had just this morning received word from the bank that the checks from the various participants had cleared. Calvin wouldn’t even have noticed the discrepancy except for the fact that he had been bored. As the day wound to a close and the vacation loomed, he seemed to be slowing down. He punched the cash-on-hand numbers into his hand calculator, added the junk bond infusion numbers, and checked the total against the number on his sheet marked “total available liquid funds.” And came up short.
It was five o’clock on a Friday night. Calvin Baird knew that. He could hear his secretary packing up to go home on time for once, and he knew that if he stuck his head out his outer office door he would see the place nearly deserted. Calvin even accepted, in principle, the idea that his employees had a right to desert him. The rights and responsibilities of employees were set out in detail in a brochure the firm had printed to give to all new hires, Working at Baird. Even so, it nagged at him. It worse than nagged at him. The discrepancy was probably nothing. It could certainly be corrected during the ten long days he was away. There was absolutely no reason why he should insist on having it corrected now. He just couldn’t help himself.
If he’d been entirely honest, he’d have admitted he didn’t want to help himself. Yes, the mistake could be corrected while he was away, but he didn’t think it would be. He truly believed that all his employees started frolicking as soon as his back was turned. They threw spitballs and did crossword puzzles and made personal phone calls whenever he was out of the office. The fact that there was never any evidence of any of this didn’t faze him. He was sure it was being done in secret, and that the secrecy was part of the point.
In the outer office, Sidney Stack was putting on her lipstick. Calvin knew that because he had heard her compact snap open and a sharp metallic ting as something—the lipstick tube’s upper half, undoubtedly—went down on the desk. Calvin thought of her going home on the subway to Queens, with the discrepancy uncorrected. He thought of Alexandra Haye, his special assistant, spending her night in whatever disco the single young of Manhattan were frequenting now. He thought of everyone in the office, off work and free of responsibility, leaving him with this mess.
There was another snap and another ting, Sidney packing up and ready to go. Calvin hurried to his office door and stuck his head out. He caught Sidney bending over to pick something up off the floor, presenting her ass to him like a beach ball. Any other man would have felt a faint stirring of desire or a spurt of adolescent appreciation. Calvin Baird didn’t even notice.