That was Wednesday night. I spent Thursday processing payroll and cutting checks, and Friday was payday, the day we ordered in pizza, the day the warehouse guys and the factory women all knocked off at 3 p.m. and any sales reps who were in town came over to see the operation. Rivka, Maria-Eva, and Liz all made a point of shutting down their own work and coming down to the factory floor, and Pat joined nearly every week. My role was to pass through the group handing out pay envelopes and playing Santa Claus.
I was halfway through when one of the factory women, Mariela, tapped me on the shoulder. “Visitor, Mr. Marty,” she said.
“Uh,” I said, shifting the box of alphabetized envelopes to my other arm. “Sorry, can you ask Rivka or—” I looked around to see who else from management was in sight. “Can you ask Rivka to get the door?”
“For you,” Mariela said. She was one of our youngest hires, the daughter of someone who’d been with us since the beginning. Barely out of her teens, with tailored blouses and her hair in a big, blow-dried sculpture.
The box of pay envelopes was still more than half full. I craned my neck to check the wall clock. Three forty-five. No one would leave before four thirty. I thanked Mariela and hustled to the door.
Shlomo Spinka did not look good. He stooped. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were bagged and red. He startled guiltily when I opened the door and checked both shoulders before he extended a shaking hand. His grip was weak and warm and wet.
“Shlomo?”
“Mr. Hench.” He looked over both shoulders again. “Can I speak with you?” The privately was unsaid but it didn’t need to be said.
“Come in,” I said. The ground-floor warehouse was empty—the guys were all upstairs, eating pizza—and I led him to the area in the back where there was a card table with an overflowing ashtray and a few folding chairs.
Shlomo pulled out a pack of Marlboros and lit one, giving me another chance to see how badly his hands shook.
He stared at the cigarette, put it down carefully. “You think you understand so much, but you don’t, you know.” His voice was as nasal as I remembered, but there was a gravity to it this time.
“Shlomo, brother, I’m getting worried here. You look like you’re having a hard time. There’s no reason we have to be enemies. There’s plenty of room in this world for both CF and Fidelity Computing. Competition is good for us both. Keeps us sharp. It’s—” Then words came up from the base of my spine and exited my mouth without traversing my brain. “It’s the American way.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. A few tears leaked down his cheeks.
“So explain it,” I said. “Honestly, I’ll listen. Come on, guy, we can work this out. Did they fire you, or—”
“Shut up,” he snapped. “You don’t understand anything.”
You said that already. I waited. Watched as this little guy—Art would have called him a schmendrick—mustered his courage.
“You think that Fidelity Computing’s business is just the Reverend Sirs and those girls in the field, the ones who sell the product. You think that if you hire those girls, steal our customers, that the worst thing that happens is that three old men will get angry at you.”
“I don’t think that’s the worst thing. They might sue us. They might send two tough guys to punch me up a little and kick me in the balls. They might destroy our factory. They might break into Rivka Goldman’s apartment and poison the air and smear a shit-swastika on her wall.”
He’d been looking at his hands, but now he gasped and looked straight into my eyes. If he wasn’t shocked, he was a master of method acting.
“That didn’t happen,” he said.
I shrugged. “The Reverend Sirs don’t like to be thwarted, I suppose.”
He gave a hollow, mirthless laugh. “You don’t understand anything. You think that the men you’ve angered are the Reverend Sirs.”
I catch on. Eventually, I catch on. “You’re saying that the buck doesn’t stop with the Reverend Sirs.”
He looked me in the eyes again for an uncomfortably long time, then he slowly shook his head.
*
The secret to Fidelity Computing was its close-knit faith communities, the religious bonds of trust that enabled Fidelity to recruit women who’d draw on their friendships to sell to their husbands and their husbands’ friends. It was the greatest marketing scheme ever devised, built on the folktale of the faithful helping the faithful.
For religious people who already made a point of doing business within their community, the idea of a faith-based computer was a double blessing: you could spend money with a fellow parishioner, and master the intimidating and complicated world of computers at the same time.
No need to patronize a fast-talking computer salesman—Fidelity salespeople carried VHS cassettes with commercials for Crazy Eddie, a New York computer salesman whose pitch confirmed every fear the customers had about how they’d be treated if they braved the digital waters on their own.
The formula was an instant success. Sales ballooned and the company’s factory in Provo struggled to keep up with orders, even after they found a factory in Taiwan that would put together the subsystems and send them to the U.S. for a final assembly.
The Reverend Sirs probably could have gone to a bank at that point, taken out a loan to cover the capital costs of their expansion. But why would they? There were wealthy men in each of their congregations, and those wealthy men had friends, and before you knew, it, a syndicate of investors had come together to—
“You’re saying that Fidelity isn’t just a way to separate poor parishioners from their money by selling them gimmicked computers. It’s a way to share the wealth with ‘community leaders’ in the Reverend Sirs’ charmed circle.”
Shlomo adjusted his glasses and then wiped his hands on his pants. Then he took his glasses off again and cleaned them on the tails of his prayer shawl and reseated them. He looked around the warehouse, at the floor, at his hands. He opened his mouth. He closed his mouth.
“Mr. Hench.” He spoke softly, like he was tasting each word. “The . . . gentlemen . . . that invested in the company are . . . not . . .” He took off his glasses again, got his sweaty fingers all over the lenses again, cleaned them again, wiped his palms again. “They are . . . They . . .”
“They’re what, Shlomo? They’re mobsters?”
He shrank back. “Not mobsters, no!” He thought for a while. “They’re, I suppose, well, they’re gangsters.” He expelled the word like it was a chicken bone he’d been choking on. I wanted to thump him between his shoulders to see if he’d dislodge anything else.
“All right,” I said. “Gangsters.” The word ricocheted around my mind: gangsters.
“They expect a certain . . . return . . . on their investments,” Shlomo said, looking off into space, contemplating the vast, uncaring universe. “Last week, the Reverend Sirs told them that they could not expect their next payment in full.” He put his hands under his armpits and hugged himself. “He told them why.”
I turned that over. “Shlomo, these three women have come in for a lot of hard-guy stuff. You’re saying that this was these mobster—” He held up his hand. “Sorry, gangster associates of the Reverend Sirs?”
He wiped his hands again. This time, he left visible streaks on his gray wool pants. “No, Mr. Hench. No, you’ve misunderstood me, I’m afraid.” Wipe, wipe. “I’m saying that all of that was what the Reverend Sirs did because they didn’t want their gangster investors to get involved.”
He ripped his glasses off his face and let them clatter to the table, then looked at me with those red-rimmed, liquid brown eyes. “Mr. Hench, don’t you understand? All of that was the Reverend Sirs’ version of gentle persuasion. What comes next will be terrible.”
Shlomo’s thousand-yard stare reminded me of the GI Bill guys from Vietnam who had attended classes with me, the sense that something had been seen that could never be unseen. A finger of ice crept up my spine.
He put his glasses back on. “There was a man who stole,” he said. “A trusted man. Well-placed. On the Catholic side of the operation, though that didn’t matter, the investors are . . . interfaith.” A mirthless bark, then, so dry it fell like a puff of dust. “The Reverend Sirs couldn’t call in the police, because that would have raised questions about the way the money was handled. The investors found out.
“It was a sizable sum.
“The man . . .” He swallowed and then stood abruptly. “I need to go,” he said, and began to speed-walk out of the warehouse, getting turned around and finding himself in a dead end of high cargo shelves stacked with boxes. I cornered him and spread out my arms.
“What happened to the man, Shlomo?”
For a second, I thought he’d rush me. But then he sagged.
“The police identified him from dental records,” he said. “It took some time, though. Some of his teeth were gone.”
I dropped my arms. Shlomo shuffled past me like a sleepwalker.
“To your right,” I said. “The exit is to your right, then your left.”
He stopped and turned around. “Thank you, Mr. Hench.”
“Thank you, Shlomo,” I said. “I know you didn’t have to tell me this.”
“I did it for the girls,” he said. “Rivka, Elizabeth, the sister. They are good people, I know. What’s coming next—”
“I’ll tell them, Shlomo. You’ve done your part.”
He nodded and then resumed his shuffle. I heard him thud into the exit door’s crash bar, then heard the door close itself and click shut.
I went back upstairs and handed out the rest of the paychecks.
*
Pat knew something was wrong, of course. We walked up Potrero, stopped so she could talk with the bouncer at A Little More, the lesbian bar on the corner, who sported a sleeveless Lydia Lunch tee that showed off her ripped biceps and her linked-Venus-symbols tattoo. I stood off a ways, smiling absently at the women who drifted in, dressed and eager for Friday-night clubbing.
Pat broke off and joined me. We resumed our uphill walk. “Danni says you could come in with me some time, so long as you behave yourself.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
She didn’t reply. We trudged uphill, and Pat handed dollar bills to the three guys who’d pitched tents on the sidewalk in front of SF General. They’d appeared a couple of weeks before and Pat, ever curious, had stopped to talk with them, learning that they were all ex–mental patients who’d been thrown out on the street when Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act. Two of the guys had tardive dyskinesia, which you got after years on schizophrenia drugs, and it was why they kept twisting their faces into gargoyle masks, sticking out their tongues, pursing their lips.
When I’d first gone past them, I’d assumed they were either tripping or trying for some kind of shock effect, and Pat’s explanation left me ashamed. The fact that she remembered to keep some singles in her pocket to help the guys out—and that she remembered their names and spoke with them whenever she passed them—made me feel like even more of a heel.
Once the guys—Liam, Bob, and Jay—were behind us and we’d turned onto Twenty-Fourth Street, Pat stopped walking abruptly and stood in front of me, hands on my biceps, staring intensely into my face.
“Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to guess?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The Friday-night crowd streamed around us on the sidewalk. Someone hip-checked me as they squeezed past. Pat’s small, strong hands stabilized me. “When we get home, okay? It’s not something I should talk about in public.”
She stared into my eyes, like she was trying to see through them into my brain, and I stared into hers. They were wild, those eyes of Pat’s, as full of chaos whether she was coding, moshing, or hissing dirty words while we slammed into each other at home. Meeting that searching gaze, I felt a little slip of the fear Shlomo had put into me. God, she was a good woman.
“Okay, jerk, I’ll wait until we’re home. But it had better be good.” We took a few more steps. “Do I need to buy a six-pack for this news?”
“Maybe a bottle of tequila,” I said.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “All right, tequila.”
*
It was mezcal, actually, a clear liquid that poured thick but went down as mellow as a bourbon. The clerks at the liquor store on our corner doted on Pat, knew her from her regular beer runs, and when she made a theatrical announcement that she needed a bottle of tequila to help her recover from some heavy news, they sprang into action, eventually bringing a bottle of Tehuana down off a high shelf. She peered at the dancing woman in a Oaxacan peasant dress on the label and then gave it the nod, handed the bottle back, and struck a perfect replica of the Oaxacan dancer’s graceful pose. That won her a laugh from the clerks and earned me a sizing-up glance that left me feeling distinctly wanting. These guys definitely thought she was out of my league, and I wasn’t about to argue.
I drank one shot of the mezcal quick, while I puttered around the kitchen nook, putting together a plate with crackers and some of the zesty cheddar I’d bought from one of those grocery-store free-sample ladies at the Safeway. She’d served it on crackers with sprigs of peppery watercress, and I’d bought some of that, too. It was a little wilted, but I rinsed it and picked off the saddest-looking leaves, then arranged it with the cheese.
Pat poured out two more shots of the mezcal and then looked this way and that at the cracker plate. “I’m impressed,” she said. She ate one in a single bite, dribbling crumbs on the table, chewed thoughtfully, sipped the mezcal. “Very impressed.” She slid the plate closer to herself. “You’re going to want to make another one of these for you.”
So I did, and by the time I got back, she had a copy of Maximum Rocknroll open on the table, spotted with crumbs. Her plate was empty. I gave her half my crackers and sat down and sipped my mezcal and ate a cracker. I didn’t taste either.
“I got a visit from one of the guys from Fidelity Computing tonight,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“He told me that things are about to get bad.” I told her about Shlomo. She sipped her mezcal and picked crumbs off the newsprint and nibbled them. When I was done, she poured more mezcal.
“It’s bullshit,” she said.
“What’s bullshit?”
“All of it,” she said. She rolled her eyes. “God, can’t you see you’re being played? These dirty priests tried everything, the girls beat ’em anyway, so now they’re sending this guy out to see if you can convince them to just surrender, right when they’re about to just destroy these three old guys.”
“Pat, you didn’t see this guy—”
“No, I didn’t, and isn’t that strange? Like, he knows Liz and Maria-Eva and Rivka. He worked with them. And yet he came to you. Why do you suppose that was? You think it was some kind of Orthodox thing, he thought they might be on the rag and didn’t want to catch period cooties?”
“Maybe it was because he knew them. Maybe he didn’t want to look them in the eye and admit that he’d been working for crooks all these years and he’d known it. Or hell, yeah, maybe it’s because he’s an ultrareligious male chauvinist pig. I don’t know why he came to me, Pat, but I saw him and—”
“And he was very convincing. Okay, so he’s a talented actor. Maybe he majored in theater at the yeshiva. Maybe he’s got a gift. But come on, you think he’s mobbed up? This is Silicon Valley, Marty, not Jersey. Take it from a Jersey girl.”
“Fine,” I said. “I don’t have any proof, I admit it. I just have the word of this guy who I don’t trust as far as I can throw up.” She smiled. What a smile she had. I hated arguing with her. She was a lot smarter than me, and faster, too. “But what if he’s not lying, Pat? What if he’s not lying and the next thing that happens is worse than anything that’s happened so far? Don’t you think we should have a plan for that? Take some steps to improve our safety?”
“And what if the whole point is to make us come up with those plans so we can’t do business because we’re too busy putting bars on all the windows and paying security guards to watch the door? Marty, you’re pretty good with computers and you’re a great accountant and you screw with a lot of style, but you don’t understand anything about security.”
“And you do?” popped out of my mouth before I could ask more about how I screwed.
“Of course I do. I grew up in Bell Labs, fella, which makes me a fully paid-up member of the military-industrial complex. I attended my first war game before I went to my first school dance. They’re trying to force us to play blue team.”
I must have looked confused.
“You know, blue team? Defenders. Right now, that’s them. We’re the attackers. They’ve built these fortresses, incompatible file formats and stupid games with printer sprockets and floppy controllers. The red team—that’s us, the attackers—we just need to find any exploitable hole in their strategy. To defend, they need to be perfect, to have no holes.
“So if they can get us to change sides, to see ourselves as the blue team, then we’ve got the hard job and they’ve got the easy job. This is a tactic, Marty, an old one. If we fall for it, that’s on us.”
She stared intently at me, lips compressed, eyes stern. I couldn’t help it, I giggled.
That earned me a cuff upside the head, but also a smile.
“I love it when you go all military-industrial. You’re a punk-rock hacker drill sergeant.”
That made her laugh. Oh, what a laugh. “Okay, great. So we’re in agreement.”
“Are we?”
“We are,” she said.
“What have we agreed?”
“We’ve agreed that it’s bullshit and we’re not going to worry about it.”
“We’re not,” I said.
“We’re not.”
“Are we going to tell Liz and Maria-Eva and Rivka?”
“Absolutely not.” She barely waited for me to get the words out of my mouth. “Those girls have more on their plate than they can handle already. You wouldn’t be doing them any favors.”
“But if it turns out that it’s for real—”
“It’s bullshit, Marty, come on. I mean these three guys are already a bad joke: ‘A priest, a rabbi, and a Mormon bishop walk into a Silicon Valley bar.’ But throw the Mafia in? Take it from a Jersey girl, that is not a Mafia operation.”
“But if—”
“If, if, if.” Her stern face was back. She slapped the table and made the remaining crumbs jump off the page of her Maximum Rocknroll. “Jesus, Marty, do you have any idea what kind of strain those girls are under already? Do you ever bother to check in with them to find out what’s going on in their life?”
“Of course I do. I see them every day.”
That made her unexpectedly angry. She glared at me. “Okay, so tell me, how are things with Liz and her family?”
“Uh,” I said. “A couple of her siblings are still talking to her, I think, using a pay phone, and—”
“No,” she said, biting down on the word and plowing on before I could continue. “Liz’s father found out about that and he beat those kids within an inch of their lives, then made them write Liz letters telling her that she wasn’t welcome in their lives anymore. They mailed them to her in a box with every birthday and Christmas gift she’d ever given them.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
That made her even angrier. Her being angry at me was making me angry at her. Before I could get a lid on that, she spat, “I suppose you know all about Liz’s bishop?”
“Bishop Clarke?”
“Who? Oh, the Reverend Sir? No, not that asshole. Liz’s bishop back home in Utah. He’s a part-time bishop, full-time dentist. Put braces on Liz’s teeth. He also excommunicated her.”
“He what?”
“Yeah.” She glared at me, then started again, talking like she was explaining something to a child—or a fool. “Liz sent him her tithing check as usual—”
“Her tithing check?”
She shook her head. “Liz sends—sent—ten percent of all her earnings from CF to her bishop. Tithing. Except he returned the last one, with a brief note telling her she had been excommunicated in absentia.”
“You’re fucking kidding me—”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Her face was stone. “Marty, I know you try to be a decent guy, but you are in your own little world here. You act like you’re in a hot technology start-up.”
“Gee, I wonder why?” I said, channeling my dad’s best sarcastic tone, the one that could reduce my mom to tears. “Could it be because we’re a start-up, that’s doing tech, and growing by hundreds of percent?”
“CF isn’t just a hot tech start-up, Marty. It’s a lifeline, and not just for Liz and Rivka and Maria-Eva. You know the factory girls?”
I got up from the table and took a step back, hands on my hips. “Of course I do.”
“Name them.”
“Of course!” I said again. I started rattling them off, ticking them off on my fingers: “Lucia Acosta. Tanya-Luz Alvarado. Anna Alvarez. Romina Ayala—”
“Alphabetical order.” She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Names on paychecks. Can you tell me anything about them? What about Romina—where’s she from?”
“Mexico—”
“El Salvador. Civil war refugee. Father was in the FMLN. They butchered him in front of her. Then they came for her. She escaped, naked, into the woods. She’s got a mother and a grandmother and a bunch of siblings left behind, she gives every penny she can to a lawyer who’s trying to get them status so they can come, too.”
I was momentarily stunned. “Jesus.” I fished for something else to say.
She didn’t give me a chance. “How about Tanya-Luz. Where’s she from?”
I tried to picture her. Dark eyes, shining hair, round face. A smile when I handed her the envelope on Fridays. Did she wear a pin? “She’s got a dead baby,” I said.
“Marty, what the fuck? What are you talking about?”
“She wears a pin, a picture of a baby, in a gilt frame.”
“That’s her granddaughter. She’s obsessed with the kid. The kid who is not dead.”
“Fine,” I said, “so I haven’t gotten to know the factory girls as well as I could. I don’t speak the language, we’re growing fast—”
“What about Rivka?”
“What about her?”
Now she was on her feet, arms crossed over her chest. “Marty, goddammit, you really don’t know?”
“What?” I said, a sinking feeling competing with the rising blood filling my fists, my cheeks, my ears.
“She almost quit,” Pat said. “How could you not know about this?”
“I don’t know! How could I know about any of that?” I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. I swallowed. “How come you do?”
“Because I listen, Marty. I pay attention. I know you want to be a caring guy, I can tell that matters a lot to how you see yourself, but you’re so wrapped up in your own trip that you miss the clues. Didn’t you notice anything different about Maria-Eva?”
I barely registered her question, because my brain went into vapor lock when she said I listen. Didn’t I listen? I mean, wasn’t that the skill I’d learned from Lucille, that full-body, full-brain listening?
And it didn’t help that Pat was still talking, and I wasn’t listening to her.
“—death squads murdered like six of her friends in Nicaragua, and she only just found out about it last week. These were other nuns, they tied them to trees and bayonetted them, left them there for the locals to find, like a message, don’t fuck with the Contras—”
“What?”
“Maria-Eva’s got a lot going on, Marty. The reason none of this shit with the Reverend Sirs touches her, she’s deep into some real struggles that make them look like kindergartners. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but she will, if you just fucking listen, and you should, because it does her good. Those murderous bastards are our bastards, after all—they’re the ‘good guys’ who are working to keep the commies out of the region. No one’s going to tell you about the bayonetted nuns on the six o’clock news, though. Maria-Eva’s got a line on something that no one else is gonna tell you about.”
“I thought I was a good listener!”
She whooped with laughter. It was clearly involuntary and maybe she regretted it, but both of those facts made it so much worse. I turned and picked up my backpack and, for some reason, retrieved my toothbrush from the bathroom.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I didn’t trust my mouth. Maybe it was the mezcal.
“Are you . . . leaving? Because I laughed at you? Because I don’t agree that you’re a good listener?” She was very good at sarcasm. She was better at it than me. She was better at it than my dad.
She’d been brought up among very smart adults, and had learned to hold her own with them at an early age. I’d been turned loose in the fields of Alabama while my dad chased the American dream in an oil field and my mother chased domestic perfection around our split-level home. I hadn’t had a conversation with an adult as an equal until I dropped out of MIT. I was out of my depth in that room, and my stupid mouth wanted to say something that would prove just how out of my depth I was.
I stooped to tie my shoes at the door and my backpack, slung over just one arm, flopped forward and whacked me upside the head. I fell over, literally fell on my face.
“Oh come on,” she said. “Be an adult, Marty.”
“Look,” I said, and my voice cracked and I swallowed as hard as I could, then did it again. “Look. Fine. You’re right. I’m a shitty listener. I’m a self-centered asshole. I don’t know what’s going on in anyone’s life except my own and that makes me a fucking meathead. Fine, I accept that. But you know what? I’m still right. Those people are in danger and they deserve to know about it.”
I sat on the floor and tied my laces, then climbed to my feet, holding my head and wiping tears from my eyes.
“Okay,” she said. She looked at me with pity and contempt and I couldn’t believe how much I hated her, especially because I couldn’t believe how much I loved her. “Fine, Marty. Maybe you’re right, maybe I’m wrong. And yeah, you’re an asshole. So you go wherever you have to go, do whatever you have to do.” She shook her head hard. “Maybe I’ll even talk to you when we’re done.”
I stared at her, wanting to say something even worse than what she’d said to me, like What makes you think I give a shit if you ever talk to me again? But my wise brain stilled my foolish tongue for once and I said nothing.
I should have been drinking in a last vision of her, in her great Mission apartment with its humming minicomputers, short and wiry and tough, smart and sexy and loving. Instead, I got an out-of-focus, tear-blurred image haloed in reddish black. A voice whispered You don’t have to go. You can apologize to her and beg for her forgiveness and spend the night in that bed next to her again. I ignored the voice.
“Goodbye, Pat,” I said.
The walk to the Twenty-Second Street Caltrain station took the best part of an hour, giving me ample opportunity to sober up and regret my choices. The train took another forty minutes, and by the time it arrived, I had numbered those choices and placed them in order based on how much I regretted them. When I put my key in the lock of Art’s apartment, where I still paid half the rent, I was ready to declare the whole Marty Hench project to have been an unmitigated disaster and scrap it.