Hardscrabble Road(18)

Gregor got out of the elevator on John’s floor and presented himself to the Ms. Campbell in training, whose name was actually Shoshona Washington. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before—which she had, so many times that he could have been a member of her family—and then checked her book for his name. Only then did she deign to call in to John’s office and announce that he was there.

It wasn’t John, but John’s assistant Olivia who came out to get him. Olivia was the latest embodiment of John’s theory of hiring assistants, as opposed to hiring receptionists.

“With receptionists, you hire pretty,” John had told him, when he’d first staffed this office. “With receptionists, you’re looking to hit people in the eye, and besides, they don’t do much anyway. But with assistants, you need brains, you need common sense, and you need organization. With assistants, you need church women.”

“Doesn’t this violate the separation of church and state somehow?” Gregor had asked him, imagining for a moment an entire Gospel choir taking up the space just outside John’s office door.

John looked disgusted. “It’s not about their religion. I don’t care if they strangle chickens and worship the devil. It’s about their entire mind-set. I mean, look at these women. They keep their churches running. They do the books. They schedule the pastor’s time. They clean the places out. They issues the press releases when they have to be issued. They run the Sunday School and the choir and all the projects. You get a bunch of them together on the bus, they can make a kid with a boom box turn the sound off by just staring at him. Church women.”

Olivia was a tall, heavy, dignified woman in her fifties. Gregor had always thought she could get a kid with a boom box to turn the sound off by staring at him all on her own. She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

“Good morning, Mr. Demarkian. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Mrs. Hall.” It had taken him a moment to remember her last name, because John always called her Olivia. But it also hadn’t seemed right for him to call her Olivia himself.

She was leading the way back to John’s office. “He’s very excited to see you. I don’t know what it is you have for him, but it must be more interesting than what we’ve got around here at the moment. Isn’t it a terrible thing, what happens in the winter? I’ve got no use for people who drug and drink and waste the only life the Lord is going to give them, but I don’t see leaving them to freeze to death in the street, either.”

“Maybe the campaign is getting him down.”

Olivia Hall turned to give him a long, cool stare. “We don’t talk about the campaign on police premises,” she said. “We don’t mix the campaign with the work here.”

“Of course not.”

She turned away again, and knocked on John’s door. “It’s the homeless people who are getting him down, and all this cold. Every precinct in the city has had at least one homeless death so far this season, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It depressed him. He’s the kind that wants to make everything right, and this is something nobody is going to make right anytime soon.”

“Of course,” Gregor said. He still felt like a third grader who had been scolded by the teacher in front of the entire class, in spite of the fact that there was nobody around who could have heard Olivia’s rebuke to him. Mrs. Hall, he reminded himself.

Olivia Hall opened John’s door and shooed him in. “I’ll hold the calls for twenty minutes,” she said, without being asked. “But you know that’s the best I can do, under the circumstances. It’s not my fault we’re under siege.”

“Why are you under siege?” Gregor asked, coming in and sitting down.

John sighed. “It’s the mayor’s office. They keep trying to get proof that I’m slacking off. They have somebody calling every minute or two to ask trivial questions and give even more trivial orders that I’m not going to follow and don’t have to, but the idea is to catch me not here, or something. They even phone me at lunch. It’s insane.”

“According to Mrs. Hall, we don’t talk about the campaign here.” “Right. Well, you know. The idea is to never mention it to employees and staff, because that way the people over there can’t say I’m campaigning while at work, or forcing people to support me, or something. He’s an ass-hole, you do know that, don’t you, Gregor? The mayor, I mean. He’s an asshole, and I deserve to win.”