As the cab pulled up outside Torrent Industries headquarters, Maserov realised that he had forgotten to get a Cabcharge voucher to pay for the ride. But he didn’t care. He felt both employed and free. This must have been how people with jobs felt in the sixties when, his parents had told him, you could quit your job in the morning and have an equal or better one in the afternoon. He even tipped the cab driver the whole cost of the ride, so pleased was he by his changed circumstances. He had no idea how he was going to solve Malcolm Torrent’s problems but he had a year with a salary to do it and nobody on his back. He could, if he chose, spend half his time looking for other jobs.
As the cab pulled away, Maserov, having first wished the cab driver Eid Mubarak, several months too early, affected the sort of corporate facial set he felt was the sine qua non of a lawyer who could solve Torrent Industries’ sexual harassment problems. As he rode the elevator to Malcolm Torrent’s office it occurred to him that Torrent might have had second thoughts about paying him for a year. Or he might have forgotten all about their arrangement, one that while life changing for Maserov touched Malcolm Torrent’s world like the wings of a butterfly, no, a moth, a second-year moth.
Not likely, Maserov thought. He had a folded printout of the email to Hamilton. But what if Hamilton had persuaded him to renege? Then he, Maserov, would be in the same position he had been in before the conversation with Malcolm Torrent. No, he wouldn’t be. He’d be fired. But there was no intimation back at his workstation that he’d been fired. The door opened and Maserov walked towards Malcolm Torrent’s private office. There was the note from Human Resources asking him to call. Was that what it was about? Was he to be quietly fired?
‘Good morning, I’m Stephen Maserov,’ he said to Malcolm Torrent’s private secretary, Mrs Joan Henshaw, a woman with a pleasant but not easy to read face. Nearing retirement, she gave nothing away. Would she remember him? It was only yesterday that he wrote an email from her desk. Email! If Human Resources at Freely Savage wanted to fire him with urgency they would probably also send him an email, not merely leave a handwritten – scrawled, really – note on his chair. There had been no email when last he’d checked. Maybe he should check his email from his phone now. Didn’t want to. Talking to saviour’s private secretary. Can’t be rude. Better do it for peace of mind. Soon as possible. No. Don’t want to.
‘Oh yes, Mr Maserov,’ Malcolm Torrent’s private secretary said and internally Maserov celebrated wildly her remembering him. He thought of his sons. ‘Mr Torrent has asked me to direct you to Human Resources.’
‘What?!’ screamed a raucous voice inside the cavity of his mind.
‘Your Human Resources, right?’ Maserov asked her involuntarily in the low voice one uses when there’s no oxygen to be found on the planet you’ve been seconded to.
‘Well, yes,’ she replied with slight hesitation, unsure who else he thought she could have meant. ‘They’re on the fiftieth floor. Ask for Jessica Annand. I’ll write it down.’
As he got out of the elevator he checked his email. There was a message from Freely Savage Human Resources. Was this it? Was he going to have to tell Malcolm Torrent that Hamilton had already broken his word? Don’t open it. You have to. Suddenly Jessica Annand was standing before him.
‘You’re from Freely Savage?’
‘Yes,’ he said in a tone that couldn’t hide his own surprise. It was unusual to consider himself in this light, as the representative of his own oppressor.
Of Indian heritage, she was beautiful, frighteningly, with dark, soft eyes and the sort of bouncy black hair one only sees in advertisements for hair conditioners, lustrous yet manageable. It was not simply that he could imagine how he looked to her, with his pale, creased face, in need of a shave though he had shaved not two hours before, and his small exhausted red eyes, portals into a world of anxiety not quite hidden by something like a cross between conjunctivitis and strabismus. No, worse than this vision of himself through her eyes was the sudden panic which assaulted his sentience. Would this beautiful woman in her elegant corporate bodycon dress realise that he was there to, in effect, defend certain men in the company she worked in against accusations of sexual harassment by women, her former colleagues?
No doubt some of these men had looked at her in a way that intimidated or at least nauseated her. And here was he, Maserov from Freely Savage, with a brief to frustrate the litigation these women had launched. He heard his wife Eleanor’s voice, ‘You want life to go on for these executives as though nothing ever happened. It takes guts for a woman to bring an action like this, especially against her boss. Sexual harassment needs to be taken seriously. It’s not a chip to be bargained with for your career advancement.’ Maserov didn’t need Eleanor’s take on what he was doing. He had enough qualms of his own.
‘I’m Jessica Annand,’ she said, extending her hand. He took it to shake. Do it quickly, he thought. Don’t patronise her with a weak grip but nothing so firm it could be misconstrued as misogyny or neocolonialism. Her tone was friendly and relaxed. This was going to be terrible, asking this beautiful woman for help and waiting for her to realise what he was there for.
She said there was a vacant office waiting for him with a phone and a computer. He wondered if it was a real office, a room with a door, or if ‘office’ was, like at Freely Savage, a euphemism for a collapsible workstation. She led him down the hallway and, as he sneaked glances at the executives in those offices with the door open and tried to avoid looking at Jessica’s moving three-dimensional form lest he fix on it and get caught staring, she turned for a moment and gave him a gentle smile.
She gestured for him to enter an empty, pristine office with a door and a window view of the universe. ‘Here’s my card with my extension on it. Call me if you need anything.’
‘Thank you,’ Maserov said, looking at her card.
‘I should get you a security pass if you’re going to be here for a while.
If you have a card it’ll stop them getting your name wrong. Happens quite a lot around here.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, pulling out his wallet and taking out a business card to give her. Now there was perhaps the hint of an intimacy between them; him and her against the unthinking automatons who make security passes and get names wrong.
‘How long do you expect to be here?’
‘Oh, I’d say, give or take, in the vicinity of about . . . a year.’
‘A year!’
‘Unless they fire me . . . then it will be less than a year.’
‘Why would they fire you?’
Maserov looked up at Jessica from his new desk as she stood in the doorway of his new office. ‘You work in Human Resources, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Then you should have access to a list of reasons.’
‘Reasons why you should be fired?’ she asked.
‘Not me in particular. I don’t work here.’
‘Other than for perhaps the next year,’ Jessica added, intrigued.
Maserov looked at Jessica’s business card in his hand then up at her before continuing earnestly, ‘Ms Annand, may I call you Jessica?’
‘Yes, Mr Maserov.’ She smiled.
‘You look puzzled. Okay, well I work for Freely Savage.’
‘So your business card says,’ she added.
‘Which makes you my client,’ Maserov finished.
‘You mean it makes Torrent Industries your client, not me.’
‘For the purposes of this conversation I’m treating you as the representative of Torrent Industries.’
‘Okay, as long as it’s only for the purposes of this conversation.’ She smiled again.
‘Well, you’re in HR, so . . . At Freely Savage we have a certain . . . well . . . There is a common view of the human resources department.’
‘What view is that?’
‘You won’t be offended?’
‘Why should I be? You’re not talking about our HR department, you’re talking about yours. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I can’t be offended, can I?’
‘No, I guess not.’
‘But don’t let that stop you coming to the point.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not used to coming to the point first thing in the morning.’
‘I can show you where to get coffee if you think it will help.’
‘Oh God yes, please!’ Maserov said, rubbing his eyes with the palm of one hand.
‘Okay but first, what’s this common view of the Freely Savage HR department and who holds it?’
‘Everyone below partner level at Freely Savage considers the firm’s HR department to be . . .’
‘Yes?’ Jessica asked.
‘To be the equivalent of the Stasi.’
‘The Stasi?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘The East German secret police?’
‘Yes, that’s the Stasi we have in mind. Similar methods, similar goals, similar staff.’
‘Don’t be afraid. You’re here now,’ said Jessica Annand, amused.
‘Yes I am.’
‘For a whole year, possibly?’
‘Yes, for a whole year . . . unless they fire me.’