One of the younger men in an expensive suit on the opposite side of the table broke into a tight, closed lip smile and whispered something into the ear of the clone next to him, who suppressed a chuckle.
“Oh, sorry.” He scrunched his eyes, consulted the ceiling, fluorescent lights far above them, as if trying to remember. “Mason Talbot,” he said, and then he was back to the business cards, stacking them in tidy piles.
The man to the left of him did not carry on. In fact, everybody still zeroed in on the CEO, fascinated by the oddity of one of the rare species not taking the floor in a burst of exuberant confidence, all of them waiting to see what he would do next.
Remembering the spilled coffee on the saucer, Camilla jumped into the void. “You know,” she joked, “the guy who’ll be paying most of your bills?”
Polite laughter as she caught the eye of the man to the left of Talbot and prompted, “And you are?”
She didn’t notice the rest of the names and bios so much as Talbot next to her reading those cards and scribbling on the back of each one, doodles when she looked closer, constantly adjusting and readjusting his position in his chair, jiggling his foot. Occasionally, he consulted the ceiling again.
A half hour later, as they were discussing the timetable, Talbot offered his first comment, to no one in particular, his eyes still on the cards. “This is wrong. I said I want to be done in a month. Not three.”
Rustling of papers along the table and she took a quick look at the schedule for the deal on the handout they’d all been given. The timing did appear to be about a month too fat, if not more. “What is this long span in the middle for?” she asked the other participants. “It just says diligence. Why would it take four weeks to go through a data room?”
Porter responded to her in low tones. “We need to inspect the factories overseas. Standard procedure. What firm did you say you trained at?”
“Where are the factories? The moon?” she whispered back.
Turning the pages of the handout, she said, louder, “No really. All kidding aside, where are the operations? It doesn’t say.”
Another gray suit down the table answered. “Eastern Europe mostly. But we’re also hitting some investor meetings while we’re over there. Western Europe primarily for those. Paris, Rome, London. Maybe Prague.”
In other words, a boondoggle on Talbot’s dime while he waited for his deal to close.
There was some uncomfortable shifting along the table as she left a long pause that indicated she knew it.
“I think we can whittle those four weeks down to one,” she said with a smile. “Don’t you?”
Talbot’s phone rang, and after listening for a minute, he leaned over to whisper to her, his breath tickling her ear as she fought down the slight twinge of pleasure from the simple gesture. “We have to get out of here. Weather. Can you make the excuses?”
She nodded and he was out the door.
It took her another five minutes to make her exit, but when she got back to the limousine and climbed in, Talbot wasn’t there. “Oh? Where is he?” she asked the driver.
“Didn’t he leave with you?”
“Before me.”
“No problem, miss. He must have turned the wrong way when he exited the building. He does that a lot. I’ll look for him.”
It was pouring outside, and Talbot didn’t have an umbrella. About to hand the driver the one he’d given her, she said instead, “No, I’ll go. I’m already damp. You stay here.”
Umbrella hoisted to cover as much of her first-day best suit as possible, she walked back to the entrance and then rounded a corner of the building, catching sight of him half a block away, crouched down, his back to her. Hurrying along, wondering if he dropped something, she realized he was having a conversation—completely oblivious to the rain, forearms perched on his knees—with a homeless man sitting under a cardboard construction. Her billionaire boss who couldn’t be bothered with an umbrella was drenched, and the man in the weathered army green jacket and scraggly beard was completely dry in his makeshift shelter. It must be cold for the poor man sitting on the wet ground, though. She wanted to give a donation, but then remembered she’d left her wallet in the car. Was that what Talbot was doing? She didn’t see a container for money. Not even the usual sign. Army Vet or Will work for food.
The homeless situation in New York was so sad. She knew there were problems all over the nation, she and her sisters had always volunteered in soup kitchens in Detroit, but nowhere was the issue more visible than in the Big Apple, where people with more money than they knew what to do with stepped over others who didn’t have any. Case in point with her new boss. Only he wasn’t stepping over this man. He was talking to him.