A Thousand Pardons (15 page)

“And here we are at your office,” Yvette said suddenly. It was indeed an office—not a cubicle, as she’d feared—and she felt a surge of pride at the sight of her nameplate on the wall outside the door, even though the plate was attached with what looked like Velcro. She just wished she’d been paying better attention to how they’d gotten there. She laid her briefcase carefully atop the empty desk. Pictures, she thought—that’s what people put on their desks. Tomorrow she would bring in a few framed pictures of Sara, if she could figure out which still-sealed box she’d packed them in when they left Rensselaer Valley. “I’ll leave you to it,” Yvette said, still on the threshold. “You have my email if you need anything. Good to have you with us.” Helen smiled her thanks. The tour had lasted nearly an hour, and most of it had been about the aspects of office life that did not involve actual work; not once had Yvette referred to how Helen was expected to use her time when she was not exercising or smoking or eating or taking a Jacuzzi.

Though Mr. Malloy had been clear that this was a full-time position, still Helen had imagined herself, in the weeks before she started there, as something like a consultant, on call for new or longstanding clients in case of some extraordinary public-image emergency; she couldn’t imagine that there would be some crisis to deal with, some nominal fire to put out, forty hours a week. About that she turned out to be mistaken. Back at Harvey Aaron they had sometimes waited around for days with only scutwork to do, until some sort of scandalous event would trigger the process by which she worked and got paid;
here, though, as it turned out, the demand for their time was almost more than they could keep up with. Part of it was that the term “crisis” was defined at Malloy in a way that was sometimes so petty it would have seemed comic under less exigent circumstances: her first week on the job, Helen was called in on a Saturday because a Broadway play in which one of their clients had invested had gotten panned in
The New York Times
the day before. But part of it too was that Malloy was an operation whose true range Helen simply hadn’t understood when she signed on with them. They had thousands of powerful clients all over the world, and at every moment of the day there was at least one of them, paranoid and imperious, who was being perceived, fairly or otherwise, as having done something wrong, someone who saw where the story of his life was headed and wanted to redirect it.

She had a boss, or more strictly speaking a supervisor, a very good-looking young man named Arturo—gay, she was quickly and preemptively informed, as if the notion of a straight Arturo would keep her from being able to concentrate—who cultivated an air of knowing what you were going to say before you had quite finished saying it. Every morning at ten-thirty the Crisis Management group met in the conference room on the fifth floor, a room known among the staff as the Fishtank because of its glass interior walls. There was one of those single-cup coffee machines, and an array of pastries and fruit, though that had usually been thoroughly picked over by the nine-thirty meeting of the Promotions group.

Arturo’s oversight of the individual members of the group was intimidating but loose. The ten-thirty meeting was often the only time all day he spoke to them. Most crucially, though, he was in charge of assigning them to new clients, or to old clients with new crises, and in this area his disregard of Helen’s particular skill set, not to mention the limits of her previous experience, was so perverse she wondered if it was intentional. She had a hard time imagining that he wouldn’t have known she was his own boss’s personal hire. But Mr. Malloy was more of a specter than a presence there—his office, though only three floors above theirs, had its own elevator, so sightings of him were rare—and with a rigorous impartiality Arturo felt free to assign her to the aggrieved
Broadway investor, and to an online-gaming company whose IPO valuation was threatened because its CEO had just died, and to other clients who often seemed as puzzled by her anxiety as she was by theirs.

One Friday morning in the Fishtank, Arturo laid out for them the news that feuding board members at a cellphone-chip manufacturer they represented—one of those companies you’ve never heard of that turns out to dominate a whole vital corner of your world—had been secretly taping one another’s conversations, both on the phone and in person, and that the transcripts had been leaked to
The Wall Street Journal
, which was going through some high-level legal review, even as they spoke, to see what they could safely publish and what they could not. “Ashok will take you through our response,” he said, nodding curtly to another member of the group, a diffident young man (they were all young to her) whom Helen had pegged as decent, despite his nervous adherence to a handful of business school aphorisms.

“It goes without saying that we have to get out in front of this,” Ashok said, and everyone, including Helen, nodded; but it turned out that what he meant by getting out in front of it was that they should mount an all-out attack against
The Wall Street Journal
, focusing on the morality of profiting by someone else’s criminal act.

“Does that mean we can question whether the tapes themselves are even genuine?” said Shelley, who sat next to Helen at the conference table. Not by accident: Helen always tried, at these meetings, to sit beside either Ashok or Shelley, a rock-bodied young woman who also managed to exude a kind of good-heartedness despite the rapidity of her speech and the fact that she had a rather uncorporate and scary tattoo of someone’s initials on the back of her neck. You couldn’t always see it; it depended on what Shelley was wearing that day.

“Probably not,” Ashok said. “There are dozens of hours of these tapes, from what I’m told. I don’t think we want to engage them on the level of authenticity. Anyway, the first course of action, in this type of situation, is to dirty up the messenger, if that’s possible. And here it seems most definitely possible. Everybody hates Murdoch. Everybody values privacy, and this whole dispute has its root in illegally bugged convos, which are basically stolen goods.”

“What’s on the tapes?” Shelley asked.

Ashok frowned. “See, even just asking that moves the conversation—”

“I know,” Arturo said. “Still, it’s information they should probably have.”

Ashok sighed. “Price-fixing,” he said impatiently. “Buried in these hundreds of pages are some arcane discussions about price-fixing. But that is information that stays within these walls, because it is not relevant to the problem at hand.”

The hell it isn’t, Helen thought, but she stayed quiet as the requisite tasks were assigned, none of them to her. This was her first real experience with a corporate job and its attendant hierarchies, and her chief aspiration for now was to avoid giving offense. Older or not, she wasn’t so proud as to assume that her instincts were better than other people’s. Ashok enlisted Shelley’s help in writing an anonymous blog that would attack the
Journal
and Murdoch for their greed in rushing to cash in on someone else’s crime and thus interfering with the workings of the justice system. The fictional blogger, claiming to have a mole inside the
Journal
, would release piecemeal everything the Crisis Management group knew about conflicts inside the paper, as well as some other allusive nuggets Ashok would simply make up, for instance the suggestion that the
Journal
might have paid for the tapes not after the fact but before. Two other members of the team were directed to set up a nonprofit entity called Americans for a Responsible Press, which would begin placing print ads exploiting the average citizen’s push-polled contempt for the immoral tactics of the media. They talked about staging an actual rally outside the
Journal
editorial offices; but that would mean hiring actors, with obvious attendant risks, and so Arturo wistfully declared that proposal tabled for now.

They carried these plans out over the course of ten days, never knowing how close the
Journal
was to publishing its story. Helen spent the better part of those days on a different case, arranging photo ops for a hedge fund manager who had started a charitable foundation to overhaul public schools, first in the city and then, after what he viewed as his inevitable success at home, across the country. The photo ops had
to be the sort at which no reporter could ask this client a question, for his chronic problem was that he couldn’t keep himself from publicly insulting the teachers, administrators, families, and even children he had supposedly devoted his time and expertise to helping. “Charity” seemed to Helen an odd word to use in connection with what seemed more like a campaign of aggression, but she tried to see the best in people, and surely the goal was a worthy one. She went to every ten-thirty meeting and offered her update when asked, even though what she was doing didn’t seem to her strictly like crisis management work.

She ate in the cafeteria with Shelley and Ashok once or twice a week. The food was remarkably good, and their youth gave her cover. Shelley was maybe twenty-eight, but what made her really imposing was her level of physical fitness. Her arms alone, at which Helen had to remind herself to stop staring, must have amounted to a part-time job. Ashok, whenever the subject came up, looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a gym membership that he never had time to use. Though Shelley in particular loved to pump Helen for her backstory, neither she nor Ashok ever made much reference to their own lives outside the office. Once, when Shelley got up for another Vitaminwater, Helen—curious how well these two work friends even knew each other—asked Ashok with a conspiratorial smile what was up with that tattoo on the back of Shelley’s neck. Not to sound like an old lady, but weren’t they generally supposed to be somewhere less visible? Did everything these days have to be so out there? He did his best to smile back at her before answering.

“She lost a child,” he said. “Those are his initials.”

And as chastened as she was by that, Helen never forgot Ashok’s weak but carefully complicit smile, which was obviously meant to help her feel less guilty in retrospect for having accidentally made light of something tragic. She was right about him, she decided.

Her salary was now almost ninety thousand a year, plus insurance and access to a car service and other assorted little freebies such as coffee that her colleagues didn’t even take into consideration but that Helen, not long ago, was penciling into her budget every week. Suddenly there was money in her and Sara’s lives that was not only sufficient
but dependable. Certainly they could now afford to live somewhere nicer than the cramped two-room rental they’d been in since January. Looking for a place to live in Manhattan, though, was absurdly complicated and labor-intensive. Helen wasn’t really working longer hours now than she had been at Harvey’s office, but she did have much less freedom to take off for an hour or two in the middle of the day in response to yet another excited phone call from some broker.

“There’s Brooklyn,” Sara said when they were discussing it at breakfast one Sunday.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said, cutting in half a warm everything bagel, “I am going to let you in on a little secret. I am too old to figure out where everything is in Brooklyn.”

In the end, she decided that another rental, even if it were bigger than this one, would only put them through the trauma of packing and moving again; they would wait until it seemed reasonable to start looking for a place to buy. That day might already have been upon them had the sale of their old house in Rensselaer Valley, upon which their original plans had naïvely depended, not fallen through. The buyers had started postponing the closing with demands that escalated in ridiculousness—a second well test, a certificate from a tree surgeon, replacement of the foam insulation in the garage—and when Bonifacio began skeptically looking into them, he discovered that the husband had recently lost his job, and their financing had been pulled. He wanted to tell them to take a hike, but Helen had suggested waiting to see if they could bounce back and get approved for another mortgage. They couldn’t, though, and eventually they withdrew entirely, and Helen had earned her lawyer’s scorn by returning this time-wasting couple’s deposit even though they weren’t entitled to it. They had a one-year-old son.

In the end, the
Journal
mined the bugged phone conversations not for one story but for almost a dozen—one every day for a brutal two weeks, as if to manufacture the fiction that the tapes themselves were still being feverishly transcribed, with the most damning moments reprinted as eye-catching sidebars. It was a war of attrition, which Ashok and his team were ill-equipped to win. His grassroots offensive, however
loving the craftsmanship with which it was faked, was roundly ignored. Finally the day came when the CEO of the chip company tendered his resignation, along with most of the board of directors. Apart from a hopeful uptick on the day the resignations themselves were announced, the company’s stock fell steadily through the floor.

Helen took no pleasure in the air of panic and failure that seemed to suffuse the Fishtank during these weeks. She lay low and took meaningless notes. Then one Monday morning Arturo began the ten-thirty meeting by announcing that the chip manufacturer’s reconstituted board of directors had just fired them, and the recriminations began.

“Did anybody besides me even look at that blog?” one group member said disdainfully. “It read like a child wrote it. Even the comments sections were full of people calling bullshit on it.”

“It didn’t matter who wrote it,” said another voice, “or how well. It’s an old-school tactic. It’s a Neanderthal, first-year-business-school-textbook idea. Ivy Lee would have thought it was stale.”

Ashok, clearly panicked, hit the table with the heel of his hand. “How nice to hear from you,” he said, “finally, after all these weeks. I certainly didn’t hear a word from you back when we were looking for ideas. Of course it’s much easier to wait like a vulture and then say how you would have done things differently. And Ivy Lee was Ivy Lee for a reason, by the way—”