He did not have time to give anymore. He had eleven days.
And then the old man looked up at him. Calmly. Without getting up. Without any of the small apologetic movements that people usually made when a tall salesman in a suit came and stood over them. He just sat there in Derek's chair, beside Derek's desk, beside the two sets of keys that Derek had laid out side by side for Anthony Pellegrino, who was never going to come, and looked up at him with dark, steady, patient eyes. As if he were waiting for Derek to say something interesting.
It was the patience that did it.
Derek felt his right hand come up. Palm out, fingers spread, a short dismissive wave in front of his chest, the way you wave off a waiter who is about to offer you dessert. No. Not today. Not interested. And as his hand moved, the words came out of him, sharp and clean and edged, in the voice he used at the end of a long day for a customer who had asked one question too many. He leaned on two of the words without meaning to. He leaned on them hard.
"Let's be honest, you can't afford anything in here."
And his hand completed its motion. It swept away from his body, out to the side, a flat, decisive, backhanded chop through the air toward the door, like a man brushing crumbs off a table.
The words rang out into the bright, quiet showroom. The great round lights in the ceiling hummed. The polished gray floor gave the sound back, faintly, a soft echo off the stone and the glass and the gleaming flanks of the cars. Anything. In here.
At the back of the room, Eli Brooks flinched as if he had been struck.
The old man did not flinch. He did not move at all. He sat exactly as he had been sitting, in the fawn-colored leather armchair, his hands folded on his knees, his back as straight as a seventy-three-year-old back could be, his eyes on Derek's face. If anything, he grew stiller. Like a pond when the wind drops.
Calvin Booker had been waiting for those words for fifty years.
Not those words, exactly. The red-faced man with the gold tie clip on Michigan Avenue had used different ones. The loan officer on LaSalle Street had used different ones. So had the maître d' at a restaurant in the Loop in nineteen eighty-one who had told him, when he came to pick up a client, that deliveries were around the back. So had the hotel desk clerk in Atlanta in two thousand and four who had asked him, when he tried to check into a suite he had booked and paid for in advance, whether he was sure he was at the right hotel. So had a dozen others, over half a century, in a dozen different ways. But it was always the same sentence, really. It had the same shape. It was always, underneath, the same thing being said by the same kind of person in the same tone of voice.
You don't belong here.
He had learned a long time ago that there was no point getting angry about it. Anger was heavy, and you only had so much room in your arms. He had learned, instead, to listen to it. Carefully. With interest. The way a doctor listens to a cough. Because it always told you something. Not about him. About them.
And what this one told him was that the young man standing over him was frightened.
He could see it. He did not know how the others could not. It was right there in the young man's face, under the polish and the anger. The flush high on his cheekbones. The tightness at the corners of his mouth. The tie pulled slightly crooked. The eyes, which were moving too much, from Calvin to the door to the parking lot to the clock on the wall and back to Calvin. The young man's right hand, after that dismissive sweep, had not come all the way back to his side. It was hanging a little out from his body, open, the fingers twitching, as if it did not know what to do with itself. Calvin had seen that hand before. He had seen it on young men at bus stops on the South Side who had just lost a job, and on young men in hospital waiting rooms, and on young men in courtrooms waiting for a verdict. It was the hand of a man who is about to lose something and does not know how to stop it.
Calvin found, a little to his own surprise, that he felt sorry for him.
So he smiled.