She typed back: "I'm fine. Sit wherever you like. I'm going to be extremely gracious."
Lena: "terrifying"
Then, a moment later: "did u hear anything else about who"
"Nothing. Gerald said 'very operational.'"
"lol what does that even mean"
"I think it means they own a hi-vis vest."
Lena sent three crying-laughing faces and then: "brenmoor ok?"
Vanessa looked at that one for a while. "No," she wrote. "Tell you later."
"coffee at 9:30 before the thing? 17 kitchen"
"Yes."
She put the phone in her blazer pocket and stood in the narrow kitchen with her coat over her arm and the tote on her shoulder, and for a second she felt the old, bottomless thing open under her, the thing she never let herself look at directly. It went something like: they can see through you. They always could. The polish was a coat of paint on a cheap door and everyone knew it except you. She had grown up in a flat above a dry cleaner's with a mother who ironed other people's shirts until her wrists ached, and her mother had told her, more than once, with no malice at all, that people decided what you were worth in the first ten seconds and you'd better make those ten seconds count. Her mother had meant it as protection. Vanessa had taken it as a creed. It had worked. Look at her. It had worked.
She put on her coat and went out into the rain.
The car had gone to Martin in the divorce, along with the house and the good knives, and she had decided she did not need a new one in the city. She took the train. It was eleven stops, thirty-four minutes on a good day, and she had come to like it more than she had expected. Nobody on the train knew who she was. She could stand by the doors and watch the backs of the buildings go by, the laundry hanging on balconies, the graffiti on the retaining walls, the long grey river under the bridge, and think.
This morning the train was crowded and smelled of wet wool. A teenager across the aisle had his hood up and his headphones on and was asleep with his mouth open, his backpack slipping slowly off his knees. A woman near the doors was eating a pastry out of a paper bag with tremendous concentration. Vanessa held the overhead rail with one hand and the tote's handles with the other, and she did what she always did on the train, which was to read people. It was a game she had played her whole career and was very good at. The man in the good overcoat and the cheap shoes was in sales and behind on his number. The two young women in matching black coats were junior lawyers, probably at the big firm by the courthouse, and one of them was trying not to cry. The older man with the folded newspaper and the paint on his cuticles was a contractor, self-employed, and doing fine. She had been told more than once that she had a gift for this. Clients loved it. "You always know what I'm going to say before I say it," Doug Fenner had told her once, delighted, at a dinner, and she had smiled and not mentioned that it was because she had watched him check his watch twice during the starter.
She opened the folio against her forearm and read her Brenmoor notes. The West corridor. Late carrier confirmations. That was dispatch, which sat on fourteen, which had been a mess since the rollout, which had been promised a fix by the end of Q3 and had not got one. She had sent three emails about it to the old COO before he left and got two replies, both of which used the word "visibility." Whoever came in today would inherit all of it. Maybe that would be the first test. Maybe the very operational person in the hi-vis vest would walk into dispatch and wave a wand. She would believe it when she saw it.
She thought, too, without wanting to, about the lobby.
Three weeks ago, on a Thursday morning, someone had walked into Calder Point behind a group of visitors, slipped through the speed gates on the tail of a man with a valid card, and come back out again eleven minutes later with two laptops and a handbag that had been left on the grey sofas by the windows while their owners went up to sign in a delivery. One of the laptops had belonged to a junior analyst on Vanessa's team, a sweet nervous boy who had cried in her office afterwards, not about the laptop but about the client files on it, which had thankfully been encrypted. The handbag had belonged to a woman from Legal who had told everyone for a week that there had been nothing in it but receipts and a hairbrush, and then, on the eighth day, had admitted in the kitchen that her mother's ring had been in the inside pocket because she had been meaning to take it to be resized.
Vanessa had written the memo. Nobody had asked her to. She had sat down the next morning and written two pages, clearly and firmly, to Gerald and copied Facilities and HR, setting out what had gone wrong and what should change. Visible badges at all times in common areas. Challenge anyone unfamiliar. No personal belongings left unattended in the lobby. Stricter supervision of the contractor guards on the desk, who had been, she wrote, "inattentive at best." She had used the phrase "a culture of standards." She had been rather proud of that phrase. People had agreed with her, loudly, in the week after the theft. Gerald had forwarded the memo to the building management company with a note saying he endorsed it. Marcus Bell from Facilities had come to see her afterwards and thanked her for her input in a voice that was very polite and very even, and she had understood, from the evenness, that he had not liked the line about the guards.
She did not regret the line. Somebody had to say it. Places slid. You let one thing go and then another and one day a stranger walked out of your building with a dead woman's ring in a handbag and everybody stood around saying they'd had no idea. Standards were not snobbery. Standards were the only thing that stood between people and that kind of carelessness. She believed that. She believed it completely.
The train lurched into her station. The sleeping teenager woke with a jerk, grabbed his backpack, and pushed past her toward the doors, and she pulled the tote tighter against her side without thinking about it, and then felt faintly ashamed, and then decided she was not ashamed at all. It was a busy station. Anyone would.
Marcus Bell had been in the building since 6:15, which was earlier than he needed to be and later than he wanted. He liked Calder Point best before seven, when the lobby lights were still on their dim overnight setting and the floor looked like a frozen pond and the only sound was the air handling, a low steady breathing he had stopped hearing years ago and only noticed when it stopped.