Fighting Chance(57)

“No, no,” Tibor said again. “I did not tell anyone that I killed someone. You must understand—”

“Bennis said that after what you said in court today, they could send you away to jail forever. I understand that.”

“No, no,” Tibor said again.

But it felt hopeless. Hannah was sitting over there on her side of the glass, glaring triumphantly, and he couldn’t think of another word to say.

And this had not relieved his loneliness.

It had made him feel as if he were the only person left on the planet.

2

Mark Granby had never liked his office in Philadelphia. There was something raw about it, as if it had never really been finished, or as if it was a sham, meant to fool people into thinking he was “an integral part of the Administrative Solutions family.”

That last bit came from the little brochure they gave everybody who showed up for orientation. They gave it to the incoming receptionists and the incoming secretaries and the incoming middle management. They even gave it to the hires they were serious about. Mark had thought, from the beginning, that it was as if the company wanted to pretend to be making a sitcom about an office, as if they wanted to pretend they weren’t doing the work they were doing.

The raw unfinishedness of the office always made Mark pause when he walked in. It practically screamed that he was expendable. If he had really been an important part of the Administrative Solutions family, his office would have been in Harrisburg, and it would look solid as a rock.

Mark had never liked being expendable, but he hadn’t really minded. You took what you could get these days, and if you worked hard enough, you could find yourself moved into the category of essential personnel. Then you could sit back and let other people take responsibility for your mistakes.

The present situation, however, was not his mistake. It was company policy, even though it was written down nowhere. Carter Bandwood had been completely clear about that. What Mark hadn’t quite figured out at the time was that the way this thing worked, the only paper trail anybody would ever find would lead directly to Mark Granby, and nobody else.

That was why, when the call came, Mark had almost lost his lunch. For a couple of minutes after he was sure he knew what it was, he’d had the impression that the caller was speaking a foreign language. It was only a foreign accent. It was thick, and the man’s syntax was too formal. It was not Spanish.

“There is your name here,” the man said. “In the contacts list. There are voice mails with your name on them.”

Why was it that the people who did these things were always so stupid? Not the man. Mark didn’t know if the man was stupid or not. It was Martha Handling he couldn’t believe. There she was, taking his advice, buying a prepaid cell phone that nobody could trace, buying half a dozen of them and throwing them out after a day or two. There she was, going to all that trouble, and then what did she do? She put his name in the contacts list for anybody at all to find.

At first, Mark thought that he ought to meet the man somewhere out of the office. They could run into each other at Starbucks. They could meet in a park with a bench. His mind kept racing through the possibilities as the man went on talking.

Then he realized that the one thing he could not do was to meet the man someplace else. If he was being watched, the implication would be that this was a clandestine meeting. He could almost hear some idiot in a courtroom somewhere, describing how he’d been skulking around, making it seem as if he were doing something wrong.

And he was doing something wrong. That would make it even worse.

He assumed that the man on the phone wanted money. People like that always wanted money.

At the moment, Mark didn’t have any money. And he had the distinct feeling that if he called Carter Bandwood, he wouldn’t get any.

He told the man to come by the office. He sat down behind his desk and looked at papers. There really wasn’t much in the way of work that needed to be done. When things were going the way they were supposed to be going, Mark only had to keep track of the upcoming cases throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and make sure the management at the prisons knew what to expect.

And, of course, he had to talk to the judges, and to make sure they were happy.

Waiting for the man to show up, he imagined all kinds of things. He imagined himself right into an episode of The Sopranos. He thought about all the stories he had heard about the Russian mob, and Bruce Willis movies, and Arnold Schwartzenegger—but no, the accent had not been German. He couldn’t really peg just what it was, but it definitely had not been German.

He left his door open while he waited, so that he could see who came in the door. And when the man did come, Mark was almost sure that he couldn’t really be the man. Because when the man did come, he was a boy.