The Assistants (7 page)

I
NEVER IMAGINED
myself as someone who would be wined and dined by a man like Kevin Hanson. Then again, I never imagined myself as someone who could ever be blackmailed either, because didn't you have to have a terrible guilty secret in order to be a blackmailee? Who would have thought I'd have something more shameful to hide than the renegade hairs that sprouted on my chin every few days, or the way my breath smelled when I woke up, or that I sometimes ate a bag of Doritos for dinner?

But here I was, siphoning money to Margie Fischer to keep from being outed, just like I'd done for Emily, who—let's give credit where credit is due—was really the one to pop my blackmail cherry.

The process continued on in the same way: I would duplicate Robert's expense receipts and file them twice, once for him, and a second time for me, plugging in my own account information in
place of his. Emily would approve the false receipts and issue me a reimbursement check, which I would then cash and hand-deliver to Margie, concealed in an interoffice delivery envelope.

Again, the secret to our success was Emily doing the approving in lieu of Mr. Bow Tie. And now with Margie involved, we had one more layer of protection—though
protection
feels like the wrong word. Margie was like a mad dog that might turn on you at any moment, if you looked it in the eye the wrong way, or if you happened to smell like a rib-eye steak or whatever.

This was not a lifestyle that suited me. I am in no way an adrenaline-seeker. I'm much more of an irritable bowel syndrome kind of gal, really. And rest assured, my bowels were highly irritated by all the stress. They'd become like the Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David of bowels.

Emily and I didn't know whose eighty thousand dollars of student-loan debt Margie was paying off, but we'd narrowed it down. Margie had three accounting assistants in her department: (1) a middle-aged woman with a penchant for flamingos (she had flamingo earrings, flamingo office supplies; her skin even emanated a pink Floridian hue), (2) a nerdy young Russian named Yevgeny, whom everyone lazily called Eugene, and (3) the Lean Cuisine Lady—the crackpot who sat alone in the cafeteria every day, tending to the separate sections of her plastic tray with such measured movements you could just tell she counted how many times she chewed each bite of baked chicken before swallowing it down.

Emily and I knew it had to be one of the women, and regardless of whether it was Flamingo or Lean Cuisine, we were sure she wouldn't be told a thing about where the money came from. Margie would probably just surprise her one day with a big check, like
Ed McMahon used to do for Publishers Clearing House. And then we'd all go our separate ways.

It was the Wednesday after my date with Kevin, just past noon, when I was in the D elevator on my way up to Margie's office, clutching to my chest an interoffice-mail envelope full of hundred-dollar bills. Aside from a few texts, I hadn't spoken to Kevin since he hailed me a cab outside Nougatine—after I'd declined his offer to have one more drink, and he leaned in (ostensibly to give me a kiss good night) and I instead shook his hand.

“Thanks for dinner,” I'd said. “See you Monday.”

I shook the man's hand.

After relaying this story to Emily, she asked: “Do you have some sort of brain damage? Did your parents hit you in the head with a frying pan when you were little?”

Even I had to wonder.

Naturally, I'd been dodging Kevin ever since, so when elevator D stopped on the way up to Margie's floor, it goes without saying that it was Kevin standing there when the doors opened.

“Well, hello,” he said. “What are you doing traveling above the fortieth floor?” His eyes shot to the envelope I was hugging to my chest.

“Just making a delivery,” I said.

“Isn't that what messengers are for?” He stepped inside and the doors sealed shut.

“Robert doesn't always trust the messengers,” I said.

“Really? Even with all the cameras around?”

My bowels stirred.

“There's one now.” Kevin pointed up at a convex lens on the
elevator's ceiling. “Smile.” He pitched his head close to mine, like we were posing for a selfie.

Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I was being careful enough, wasn't I?

The letter envelopes I used for the cash were the un-see-through kind, and I brought them from home already sealed—there was nothing suspicious about that, was there?

“This is you. Forty-two.” Kevin woke me up to the fact that the elevator doors had opened again. “Be careful now; you're not accustomed to being up so high. Ha.”

I stepped out soundlessly.

He was staying on to forty-three. “Talk later?” he said.

I nodded as he disappeared between the closing doors, wondering: was he trying to tell me something? All this talk of cameras and being careful.

I considered the envelope inside the envelope in my hands. It would only look more suspicious at this point if I changed my mind and returned to my floor without delivering it, right? So I forged ahead as planned to Margie's office; handed her the envelope; recited my line, “Robert would like you to look at these documents right away”; and then bolted back to the elevators, before she could get a word out in response.

Back on forty, the moment I stepped through the glass doors, I knew something was amiss. Desk after desk, cube after cube, in our open-office space had been abandoned. Computer monitors flaunted screen savers of aquarium fish and outer space. Desk phones blinked red with unheard messages. Only a few unimportant women remained working at their stations, along with a
couple of interns. Then I noticed everyone else, fifteen or so guys, gathered around the big screen in the south conference room.

I should note here that the “few unimportant women” still at their desks were the other three women who worked on the fortieth floor besides me. None of them held any significant position of power, so they were as good as invisible in terms of access to Robert—or anything interesting going on in the conference room.

At first I thought it must have been a sporting event that had the guys so intrigued, but then I recognized one of the faces on-screen—it was Jason Dillinger, from our very own office. He was on one of those news shows where all the guests have totally opposite political views and they're just supposed to duke it out till one of them gets their mic cut.

Dillinger must have scored a point because Robert threw up his fist and the rest of the conference room cheered.

I paused to take in this scene for a moment because I'd recently finished binge-watching
Friday Night Lights
and was still particularly susceptible to the nuances of male bonding rituals. It was so clear to me (and perhaps only me) how every man in that conference room looked up to Robert, how they tried to talk like him, think like him. They rolled up their shirtsleeves to just below the elbow like he did, and wore their dress shoes, like him, without socks in the summer. When he threw up a fist, they cheered.

To the outside world, Robert had a terrible reputation. His ways of doing business were not always considered “politically correct” or “fair” or (if Margie Fischer was correct) “entirely legal.” But in this office, he was a role model, a maker of men—good old-fashioned, quintessentially American men. Men like they just don't make 'em anymore.

Hats off inside. Tuck in your shirt. Hold a door. Know how to change a tire, and for Chrissakes change your own oil. No Titan man who worked directly under Robert would ever be found
sitting
on the subway when a woman, child, or elderly person was in view; in fact, he would most likely be found standing even if the entire car was empty.

To the outside world, Robert's traditional ways could be misinterpreted as sexist, but really it could all be boiled down to a single maxim:
Don't be a wuss
. And it applied to everyone across the board, man or woman. Genitalia aside, if you weren't self-sufficient, if you weren't tough (
tough as stewed skunk
,
tough as an old boot
), Robert had no time for you. Which I believed was why he'd taken a shine to me. I wasn't one to ask for help when I needed it, just like a good ol' boy.

Robert spotted me gawking at the conference room then and waved me over.

I stepped just inside the doorway.

“Will you order us some sandwiches from the Eye-talian place?” he asked. (He meant Mangia, the pasta and panini restaurant on West Fifty-Seventh Street.) And before I could even grab a pen and a piece of paper, the guys all started calling out their orders, most of which I already knew by heart anyway.

Mozzarella and tomato on a brioche roll for Hayes. Salami, provolone, and roasted peppers on a baguette for Cooper. Don't forget to say “no watercress” on McCready's smoked turkey on ciabatta. Dillinger, had he not been on television at the moment, would have wanted the herb-roasted chicken breast on Tuscan flatbread—just like Robert—except with tomatoes.

My college degree never covered this sort of material; there
was no “Introduction to Remembering Breads, Toppings, and Condiments 101” at NYU, but it was cool—I could always recite a verse from Milton's
Paradise Lost
to impress the Mangia delivery guy if I wanted to.

I returned to my desk to place the order, and there I found a g-chat message from Kevin:
Another dinner date soon? I'll share all
my secret camera knowledge if that sweetens the pot.
The message was followed by a winking smiley face that I did not like the looks of one bit.

Was I being paranoid or was Kevin trying to communicate to me—using a complicated flirtation code—that he had heard something, noticed something, or figured something out?

Just the thought was enough to make me forget if Evans wanted basil chicken salad or basil Parmesan chicken salad.

—

E
ND OF DAY
, Robert had Jason Dillinger in his office for a drink, to celebrate his successful television appearance. They were seated opposite each other on the living-room-like furniture across from Robert's desk—Dillinger sitting up straight and rigid on the couch, and Robert lounging all the way back in his armchair, with his legs crossed. On the glass coffee table between them, there was a crystal ice bucket that I could see needed refreshing. Robert had no patience for watery ice.

So I stepped in, said, “Excuse me,” and reached for the bucket.

Robert was midsentence: “. . . and we put down new flagstone pavers and added lighting under the porch. It looks nice, real nice.” Then he paused, like he'd just noticed I'd entered the room. “You've never been out to the ranch, have you, Tina?”

I hugged the sloshing ice bucket close to my chest. “No, I haven't.”

No, I hadn't, but I'd heard all about it. Around the office, Robert's upstate ranch was spoken of in language so ardent and enthusiastic that, taken out of context, one might think it was hell on earth:
It's fucking sick. It's ridiculous. It'll make you want to kill yourself.
Of course, among the Titan men of the fortieth floor, this was the highest form of praise.

Unlike work parties, for which I always did the legwork, Robert's ranch get-togethers were all his own. They were special, coveted. And I probably don't need to tell you that Robert wasn't an all-for-one, one-for-all type. No. He'd pick and choose who got an invite, seemingly at random—some of the guys had been invited many times over, others never once—but as with everything Robert did, everyone assumed there was a cunning methodology to it. For this reason, an invitation to the ranch became just one more carrot for everyone to compete for.

“Well, why don't you come out this Saturday then?” Robert said. “I'm having a little barbecue. You can ride the train up with Dillinger and his wife. Do you. . .”—he stumbled on his own words for a moment—“. . . have a significant partner?”

A significant partner? The phrasing alone reminded me how little Robert actually knew about me. It was easy to forget because I knew everything—literally everything—about him, right down to his underwear size (42–44) and his favorite sock brand (VK Nagrani).

“No,” I said. “I'm alone, I mean, I—”

“You fly solo.” Robert grinned. “All right then. So you'll ride the train with Dillinger and his wife.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'd love to. Thank you.”

So bowled over I was by this surprise, this un-fucking-believable carrot dangled in front of my face, that I forgot for a moment that I was stealing from this man.

“You ever shot a gun, Tina?” Robert asked.

“A what?”

“Do you shoot?” He must have noticed a terrified look on my face because he added, “Not at people. I mean, skeet, cans.”

“No,” I said.

“Well I'm gonna teach you then. By the time I'm done with you, you'll be able to shoot out the eye of a needle.”

“You'll love it,” Dillinger said, never one to like being left on the outskirts of a conversation. “Robert taught me my first time out.”

Kiss-ass.

“I can't wait,” I said, and then just stood there awkwardly.

Robert's attention diverted to his phone, and I realized the ice bucket I'd been holding too close had seeped a wet island across the front of my white button-down.

“I'll be right back with fresh ice,” I said, and made my escape.

J
ASON DILLINGER
and his wife, Kathryn, sat facing me in our cozy Metro-North four-seater, so that I was moving backward. Dillinger had brown hair, brown eyes, and the palest, most translucent skin you've ever seen. He was tall, with long legs (thankfully hidden beneath powder-blue summer chinos) that took up all of what little floor space there was between us. Nobody in the office worked harder or longer hours than Dillinger, hence the never-seeing-the-sun thing. He was only thirty-five, but his interoffice competition was already complaining about how he was most likely to be Robert's successor.

“So this is your first one of these,” he said, making meaningless conversation.

I nodded. “You've been before?”

“Three times. But this is the first time I'm bringing Kathryn.”

Kathryn, who sat huddled against the window, was lost in her
Kindle and gave no reaction to the sound of her own name. She was good-looking, I'll give her that, like J.Crew-catalog-model good-looking. A surprising percentage of guys in the office had extremely attractive wives—wives who, as Emily would say, were not on an equal plane of hotness. It wasn't that these Titan men were wealthy, because most of them weren't, but working in media—news media especially—still maintained a certain cachet, in New York at least. Plus, nerdy guys were having a moment, weren't they? It was simply the right time in history to be a pale dude who wore glasses and had a really big brain.

“I was blown away the first time,” said Dillinger, who at least had the decency to wear contact lenses. “You really get to see a new side of Barlow. Though, you probably know him better than any of us ever will.”

“Probably,” I said proudly, for this was the one thing I had on all the guys with hot wives in the office. My access to everything Robert.

“Got any good stories about him?”

Nice try, Dillinger. Of course I had good stories about him, but if I'd learned anything in my six years of servitude, it was discretion. Robert trusted me because I was good at keeping my mouth shut. (
No ten-gallon mouths around here.
)

However, I did keep in my conversational arsenal a few choice tidbits that I'd toss to the needy in moments such as these.

“Well, I do have one favorite story,” I said, leaning in and lowering my voice in such a way that even Kathryn stirred. “Did you know he once got into a fight with George Clooney on a golf course?”

This was a safe story to tell, because I knew Robert loved people to know about it.

“I heard that once.” Dillinger's pallid face pinked. “Is it true?”

I nodded. “Apparently, Clooney left a bunker unraked after he'd bumbled his shot, and Robert is a real stickler for smoothing out the sand. So he marched right up to Clooney and told him to get back over there and get to raking—and don't leave any furrows either.”

I should mention here that when I first started working for Robert, I would spend my nights searching the Internet, diligently looking up all the words, names, and places he'd thrown at me during the day that I didn't understand. In time, I figured out how to talk about all the things Robert cared about. Golf, tennis, boating, Texas sports teams, luxury vacation spots, fine wines, and rare liquor. My knowledge was shallow, but it was enough to
sound
like I knew what I was talking about—which is all most people need anyway.

“So what happened?” Dillinger asked.

“What do you think happened?” This was the best part of the story. “Clooney got his ass over there and smoothed out the sand.”

Dillinger shook his head, rosy with admiration. “I could totally see that happening.”

“I know, it's so Robert,” I said. “But obviously never repeat that.”

“No, no, of course not.” Dillinger leaned back, silently deciding who would be the first person he'd relay it to.

“You know,” he said, “I asked Robert yesterday, what should we do if it rains today, because the forecast was predicting a storm,
and he answered, matter-of-factly, ‘It doesn't rain when I have a barbecue.' Then I remembered the last three times I came out were all beautiful days. And now look.”

Dillinger pointed past disinterested Kathryn, through the sunny train window, to the clear cerulean sky. On top of everything else, he now accepted as fact that Robert could control the weather.

When we arrived at the Poughkeepsie station, we took a ten-minute cab ride to the house—or the estate or whatever. To say it was vast would be an understatement along the lines of calling the Great Wall of China or Michael Fassbender's penis “long.”

The cab took us uphill along a gravel driveway, where the house—a white two-story colonial with dark trim—appeared to the left, upon another small hill. To the right there was a barn, and past that, a far stretch of grass that disappeared into a forest.

We stepped out of the cab just off the house's front porch, and there was Robert welcoming us, glass of bourbon in hand, wearing khaki shorts, loafers, and a striped polo. I'd never seen his knees before, and I was having serious trouble focusing on anything else. His wife (Avery, a former Texas Longhorns cheerleader) was at his side. She was the same age as Robert but didn't look a day over fifty-five, dressed casually in white cotton shorts, sandals, and a sleeveless top. Her auburn hair looked like she'd just stepped out of the salon.

“Y'all have a smooth ride getting here?” Avery Barlow had been to the office on a few occasions so this wasn't my first time meeting her, but when I looked into her bright hazel eyes, I still couldn't help but think:
You are married to Robert. You knew him when he was nothing but a brassy college boy who read too much James Lee
Burke. You married him before his first billion. What was he like back then? Did he always speak in commands? Was he even the natural leader of your friend group?

“Getting here was a breeze,” Dillinger said in response to Avery's question. “The train ride was a pleasure.”

Already he was laying it on a little thick.

Robert pointed toward the backyard with his drink. “Come on around back.”

We did as we were told, and, reaching the backyard, the stunning swimming pool was the first thing to catch my eye—followed by red-faced Glen Wiles lounging poolside, smoking a cigar.

Shit.

Wiles struggled up from his chair and over to us. He was wearing a T-shirt, which he'd already mostly sweat through; cargo shorts; and no shoes. I thought Robert's knees were bad. Glen Wiles's feet were like two ham hocks past their sell-by date.

I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

“Tina, you're hanging with the big boys now, huh?” Wiles gave me a smack on the back with his big bear-paw hand. “That's my wife, Carolena, over there, she's catching some sun. Say hi, honey.”

Carolena, in a gold lamé bikini that she absolutely had to have bought at a store for strippers, looked like a
Real Housewives of New Jersey
reject. Her skin was the blackened bronze of a tarnished penny, the kind of pennies I used to dunk in Taco Bell hot sauce to make them shiny again. She peeked at us over her enormous sunglasses, waved, and then turned over to sun her back.

“She's not a big talker, that's why I like her,” Wiles said, before re-pacifying himself with his cigar.

I followed Dillinger to the patio bar and poured myself a glass
of white wine. Dillinger had bourbon because Robert was having bourbon. Kathryn, who'd finally stowed away her Kindle, disappeared into the house with Robert's wife for a tour—because that's what women did. They looked at house stuff. Though biologically I, too, was a woman, I had zero interest in oohing and aahing over period details and antique linens, so I stayed put and took a seat at the patio table.

Robert pulled up a chair beside me, slid my wineglass aside, and placed a tumbler of bourbon in front of me. “You want this,” he said.

I looked at him with owl eyes.

“That's twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve.” Robert urged the glass to my hand. “Best bourbon you'll ever drink.”

I took a sip. He was right; it was good. And I wondered how he got it.

During the workday, Robert would often shoot me an e-mail along the lines of:
Can you run down to the liquor store and get me a bottle of Famous Grouse forty-year-old blended malt
 . . . And I would then spend the next four hours calling every liquor store in New York trying to locate the rare bottle, which I'd go pick up myself or have rush-messengered. He had no idea how much effort went into fetching such things, or how much money it ended up costing. All he knew was by six p.m. the bottle was on his desk.

So it blew my mind when Robert stood and fired up his own barbecue grill. He planned to do all the grilling himself, just like a regular person. And his wife started bringing out side dishes—carrying them herself—from the kitchen. Avery Barlow was serving us? I was expecting maids and butlers, white gloves. Maybe
even someone on standby to chew the bigger pieces of food for us, I don't know. Instead, Robert ordered Dillinger and me over to the grill to show us exactly how he buttered the steak.

“You have to do it this way,” he said, dipping a brush in a bowl. “This here is a mixture of butter and oil.” He painted each slab of thick meat on both sides, while Dillinger snapped photo after photo of the process with his phone.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why now, after six years, I'd finally been invited here to be fawned over and schooled in the essentials of barbecue grilling. And why I thought it was okay to come given the present (criminal) circumstances.

Robert turned each steak over with a pair of tongs. “You flip once,” he said. “That's it. You flip too much and you won't get a well-seared crust.”

What if Robert brought me here to soften me? To knead me with kindness, leaving me no choice but to come clean? He was such a brilliant manipulator, anything was possible. Then again, it was entirely plausible that it simply hadn't occurred to Robert until now to invite me out here. Like most powerful people with a lot on their mind, that's how he worked. The world around him functioned according to his whims.

“Now, you paying attention?” Robert removed all the steaks from the grill and set them on a cutting board. “You let them rest for about five minutes, it gives the juices time to circulate. And in the meantime you can refresh your drink.”

He stepped past me to the bar cart. “Another bourbon for you, Tina?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

When the five minutes of juice circulating were up, we all sat
around the patio table to eat. I was seated between Robert and Dillinger, and across from Glen Wiles. It was difficult having to look at Wiles while I ate, but the steak was so unbelievably delicious that—

“This steak is unbelievably delicious,” Dillinger said.

Robert nodded, pleased with himself. He was so much more relaxed here than at the office. Some of the wrinkles in his forehead had taken the day off, and his face had a glow about it. He told the story of how he and Avery first met.
She was the prettiest cheerleader on the fifty-yard line, pretty as a pie supper, and I knew right then we'd get married. It'll be forty-nine years in October.

Then he told another story, and another, and another.

Let me tell you something about crawfish . . .

We had a ranch hand once who . . .

My daddy back in his wildcattin' days . . .

And like Aesop's fables and the oeuvre of Eminem, many of these stories concluded with a moral.

There ain't no such thing as the wrong bait.

And that's why you never insult another man's wife.

Just because a chicken has wings don't mean it can fly.

I wiped the juice dripping down my chin with my cloth napkin. This was better than NPR's Story of the Day podcast.

“See that barn over there . . .” Robert gestured in the general direction of the barn, which was actually too far away for any of us to see from where we were seated. “You know who painted that barn? Billy from the office, the mail carrier.”

Dillinger halted midbite. “Are you talking about Patchouli? The guy who skateboards down the building's handicap ramps?”

Robert laughed. “He told me he used to paint houses, so I
hired him. I paid him well, and I gave him a bottle of vodka. It was a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka, and he drank half the bottle before he left. That boy got drunk as a skunk, couldn't see straight.”

Wiles forked at what was left of Carolena's steak, which was all of it. “If that kid had any clue how much that vodka cost, he probably would have sold it.”

Yeah, to pay his rent
, I thought, but everyone was having such a good time, I kept my mouth shut.

Robert refilled my glass again. “Tina, I have to say, I'm impressed by your tolerance. You can drink just like one of the boys.”

Wiles reached across the table and lifted the side of my empty plate, bloody with the memory of a buttery steak. “She eats like one of the boys, too.”

“I'm sorry, Glen,” I shot back without thinking. “Were you hoping to finish my leftovers?”

The table roared. Maybe the bourbon was having an effect after all.

Wiles was stunned to momentary silence, but Robert was clapping his hands. “Thatta girl,” he said. “You tell him!”

Robert's overjoyed reaction kept Wiles quiet, but you could see in his eyes that he was seething. He didn't have the self-confidence to take a joke.

I didn't either, obviously, but whatever.

“All right now. That's enough fraternizing.” Robert stood up. “We've got to get shooting while the light's still good. Tina, Jason, you ready? Glen, you coming?”

I'd forgotten about the forthcoming guns-and-ammo element to this visit.