meticulously turned-out person perched behind a desk to go with the smooth voice.
At first, Sabat was chatty about payment schedules, Lafleur's arrival time, Lafleur's lodging, and about a host of details concerning the project. Lafleur bent over the counter in the booth and made copious, confused notes on tiny slips of paper. He didn't understand who was funding the construction. His set of plans had no government stamps, but instead the name of a corporation called International Data. When he asked about that Sabat abruptly become terse: “It's a storage facility.”
“Storage?” Lafleur had said. “I understood a prison.”
“Yes,” the voice said. “Storage.”
Lafleur said, “It is a public institution.”
The voice turned ice-cold: “We'll fill you in as soon as you get here.”
He'd pocketed his slips of paper and ducked through the rain to his pickup. By the time he got back to the toolshed, his paranoia had a grip on him. He shoved the clutter off a bench, spread out the plans, and worked through them. There was no question but that it was a prison design: the concrete, the walls reinforced with steel mesh, the security fence imbedded in more concrete, the razor wire, the controlled traffic patterns, the emphasis upon visibility, the observation decks, and the sheaves in the plans devoted to state-of-the-art electronics: lights on, lights off, lock-ins, lockouts, lockdowns, lights and outlets triggered in phases, electrified security grids, computerized electric eyes, and laser-operated alarm systems. He wondered if he had violated decorum with Sabat, somehow, or if it was just a question of semantics, of euphemism…storage.
He had a box of books and among them a dictionary, which he dragged out. He blew off the dust and came backward in it, seeking his bearings through the definitions that now, in Louis's office, he remembered this way:
Storage:
A supply, put in safekeeping.
A place for storing goods.
The components of a computer designed to accept, store, and recall information.
Prison:
A place for confinement.
From the Latin prehensio, as with the tail of a monkey adapted for seizing or grasping by wrapping around something.
Penitentiary:
A place for persons convicted of serious crimes.
For penance.
Latin poena, penal, punishment, pain, penance a sacrament for sin.
The words had spooked him in the toolshed, which pooled with darkness at its edges and under the benches. A bristling blackberry limb drooped over the bench and swayed in the breeze. The stove pipe hummed. A tree rubbed against an eave, and the hairy, excrement encrusted tail of a monkey looped down and twisted like a snake. He jerked back. The monkey tail vanished, and something strange came out of the words, then, the phantom, and out of Sabat's tone of voice on the phone another phantom. The two phantoms intertwined and encircled Lafleur:
The project was corporate.
But beyond the obvious, he didn't understand what that meant.
Here in Louis's fancy office the same prehensile tail seemed about to twist at him, but he forced himself back out into the light, saying, “Not slick at all. If you ask me, I'm pretty damn knobby.” Louis chuckled. Julia smiled. Lafleur said, “I wanted to hear this from you, that's all. Thank you.”
“Sure,” Louis said.
Lafleur remembered that he had a letter from Sabat in his pocket. He found it, ripped off the letterhead, which had both the Rome address on it and a Los Angeles address and the name of the client company, International Data. On this he wrote the name Clinton U, and underlined Sabat's name. He passed it to Louis. “If you run into anything concerning that company or those two guys, let me know, too.” Louis took the scrap and looked at it, then placed it on top of the other scrap of paper. Lafleur said, “This project's a prison.”
Louis nodded. “Right. Big.”
“I think it's a private project, though.”
Louis was unfazed. “They're doing that.”
“It bothers me that I didn't know out front, that Ned didn't tell me, avoided telling me, I think.”
“Call him on it.”
“Yeah. It still might bother me. I don't want to be Blaylock's or anybody else's Trojan Horse.”
“No,” Louis said. His face steadied and he gazed directly at Lafleur, as if he were searching for what went on beneath the surface. Then he said, “Investigation's not my bag, really.”
“I know. It's just in case you bump into something. The question is…” Lafleur stopped cold, uncertain as to what question he meant. He changed tack and said, “They're talking about incentives, too. For supervising.”
“That's good,” Louis said.
“Maybe, but for what? I'd rather just be paid for the work.”
Louis smiled. “Do you want to be your dad's Trojan Horse? Is that it?”
“I don't mind that.”
Louis murmured, then said, “Yes, you would, if that's all it turned out to be. You should be your own Trojan Horse.”
“Maybe,” Lafleur said. His mind locked up on a picture of himself hidden inside himself disguised as an ostentatious gift.
“Do you have enough doubts to not sign the papers?”
“No.”
Louis stood up. “Maybe it's pre-nuptial jitters.”
“Maybe.”
Louis went out to dictate a letter, leaving Lafleur with Julia Rose. The two of them moved to a table against a wall. She popped open her auburn-colored briefcase, removed a sheaf of papers and began showing him totals: what the company owned, what it owed and on what, what it owed Lafleur and his father, what they owed it, how much cash would pass to his father and Jewel. There were investments. There would be a bank note, a huge one with balloon payments to finance the Rome project, that cast everything into arrears. The tip of Julia's pencil trembled as she guided it down the columns to the totals.
It was just the woman's fatigue, Lafleur supposed, that made her hand do that, but he wondered what caused the fatigue: young children at home, excessive hours spent trying to get ahead, personal trouble…. In a few minutes Louis returned and plopped down in the swivel chair behind his desk. He revolved the chair and tipped it back. It clicked. Lafleur glanced back and forth between him and the papers. Louis had removed his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He picked his nose and stared contemplatively out his windows at a highrise that was going up a couple of blocks away. When Lafleur had first come in he'd looked at the twenty-story concrete slab. There was a crane poised on top and to the side a second crane mounted on its own derrick, scaffolding all up and down the slab, plastic sheeting to aid in curing the freshly poured concrete, and wet, everything wet and glossy under the dark gray sky. Tattered swathes of sheeting that had been used to close in the girders during winter fluttered from the sides of the slabs. Tiny men worked on top. Union carpenters and welders in yellow slickers dotted the scaffolding, where they built new forms and took down the old and worked on the weld plates. There were more men on the ground, where cement trucks steadily came and went, emptying their loads into the canisters that the cranes raised and lowered.
Louis no doubt knew what the building was for, who was financing it, what zoning regulations and political resistance had been battled and overcome in order to break the ground in the first place. Maybe that was what he thought of as he watched it go up—his world interlacing with what he saw—while Lafleur in one glance had read in an intricately interfaced schedule of work, of deliveries and routing slips, of change orders, of labor hired and released according