Death Benefits

2

“He’s asking people questions,” Maureen Cardarelli announced. She sat still, her eyes wide and expectant, waiting for Walker’s reaction.

“Like what—‘Can Cardarelli be trusted?’ ”

Her eyes took on a half-closed, suspicious look that still managed to be oddly seductive, her face lowered so a curtain of coal-black hair would fall to place it in half-shadow. “He hasn’t talked to you?”

“No,” said Walker. “Maybe he can tell I’m busy.” He let his eyes move significantly in the direction of the pile of papers on his desk, then back to meet hers.

She said with slow malice, “Odd that he hasn’t said anything to you, of all people.”

“Why me?” Walker pretended that her uncharacteristic lack of subtlety had not made his mind stall for an instant while he searched his memory for guilty secrets.

She shrugged and stood up, then said, “It’s a big building. Lots of departments, lots of places to camp out, but he seems to like it near you.” She smiled indulgently to imply that it had been a playful slap and he was still one of her closest confidants. “Well, I’d better let you go back to sleep.”

Walker watched her walk to the opening of his cubicle and spin around the corner to take her first few steps in that special way she had. It was at once too graceful to be conscious and too efficient and purposeful to be anything else. As she walked toward the elevators, everything from the set of her shoulders to the pock-pock-pock of her high heels on the terrazzo floor insisted that she was on a mission of importance.

Walker tried to force himself to return to his work. He looked down at the stack of handwritten papers on his desk, then surveyed the figures on his computer screen, but he could not keep his eyes from moving warily over the top of the monitor. There was Max Stillman again, just to the left of the opening in Walker’s cubicle, sitting at a desk in the open office everyone called “the bay,” surrounded by young typists and phone reps. Several times Walker had noticed, always with surprise, that Stillman was not an exceptionally large man. What he had was the curious quality of conveying mass and solidity, as though he were something very large that had been compressed into a dense, volatile object.

Stillman appeared to be about fifty, with more gray at his temples than brown, and a hint of gleaming cranium under thin wisps of hair on top. He hunched over the desk with his thick forearms resting on either side of an open file, his eyes fixed on it with cold concentration. He would sometimes glare at a page for five seconds, then set it aside and move to another one, and at other times he would sit, unmoving, for fifteen minutes. When he reached the end of a file, he would always close the folder, place it neatly on the stack at the right corner of the desk, and replace it with a file from the pile on the left.

Stillman had materialized nearly a week ago like something that had been conjured, already standing halfway down the center aisle of the bay just at noon, when the first shift of specialists and clerks and receptionists was streaming past him toward lunch. He seemed not to watch for anyone or even to pay much attention to them. He looked, Walker had thought, like a man standing in a room by himself, preoccupied with trying to remember something.

Walker still considered himself the first person to have noticed Stillman, although he knew that was nearly impossible. It would be very difficult for a stranger to make his way past the guards in the lobby, all the way to the seventh floor of the San Francisco office of McClaren Life and Casualty, without being asked some questions. This was headquarters, the spot where the firm had originated nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, and not a field agency: nobody sold insurance here. Walker had stepped out of his cubicle, smiled reassuringly, and said, “Can I help you, or give you directions, or something?”

Stillman’s eyes had darted to Walker’s face with an abrupt movement that had the alertness of a bird of prey, but his body had not stirred. An expression that was not quite friendly, but that Walker had interpreted as unthreatening, had come over his face. “Name’s Stillman. Did McClaren tell you to expect me?”

Walker had grinned. “McClaren?” He had to remind himself that it was not a ridiculous idea. He sometimes forgot that there actually was a Mr. McClaren, and rumor had it that he spent most days in an office five floors above them.

Stillman nodded. “Right.”

Walker had said, “He may have had someone call my supervisor. I’ll take you there.”

Stillman had followed Walker to the corner office. Joyce Hazelton had been standing at her window, staring out at the array of tall buildings across Van Ness Avenue, when Walker knocked. She had spun around, a distracted expression in her eyes.

Walker had not seen that she was on the telephone, because the receiver had been hidden by her dark hair, and the cord had been in front of her. “Sorry,” he’d said from the doorway, but he’d heard her say, “I think he’s here now . . . Mr. Stillman?”

Stillman had nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She had said, “Mr. McClaren wondered if you had a minute to talk to him.” She had handed Stillman the phone, then put her arm around Walker’s shoulder to propel him out of the office with her, and closed the door behind them. She’d stood outside her own office for a few seconds, and the novelty of it had made Walker consider asking her who Max Stillman was, but the impulse had lasted only a moment, because her manicured hand had made a little sweeping motion to shoo him toward his desk.

He had turned and gone back. The day’s figures for payouts in the casualty end of the business made a difference, but the unannounced arrival of some old rich buddy of the current McClaren was like a cloud passing a mile above him. There had been a shadow for a few seconds while it was overhead, but it had moved on.

When Walker had returned from lunch, Stillman had been planted at the unoccupied desk in the open bay that was usually reserved for temporary workers, and Joyce Hazelton had been scurrying around gathering piles of reports and policy files. Walker had taken a couple of steps closer to offer help, but she had acknowledged him with a perfunctory smile and given her head a little shake.

Late that afternoon, Bill Kennedy had slipped into Walker’s cubicle to deliver the morning’s figures from the field. “He’s still out there, I see.”

Walker had brought himself back from the structured, silent, logical world of statistics. “Who?”

Kennedy’s voice had gone lower. “ ‘What bear?’ huh? Good strategy, John. That’s why possums rule the earth.”

Walker had glanced over his computer monitor into the vast, open office. Stillman was glaring down at another file. “He’s just some friend of Mr. McClaren’s.”

“He’s a spy.”

“On what?”

“On whom. On us. It’s got to be. Accounting just cut a check for him. It’s a hundred thousand, listed on the system as ‘Security Expense.’ ”

Walker had shrugged. “Maybe he’s going to overhaul the computer system so your twelve-year-old nephew can’t break in and peruse the physical exams of actresses anymore.”

Kennedy had shaken his head in pity. “Take a look. Is that a computer geek? No. That’s what repressive governments send out if the general’s daughter doesn’t come home from the prom.”

Walker had looked at Kennedy wearily. “And why do you suppose this stranger showed up in our peaceful village? Could it be that they hired him to find out who the village idiot is, and watch him rushing from hut to hut raving and talking wild?”

“Good point.” Kennedy had smiled as he stepped off, then called back, “Sorry, got to get these figures delivered.”

During the next few days, Walker had found that he was receiving more frequent visits from acquaintances in other departments. The men tended to step into his cubicle and move uncomfortably close to Walker’s shoulder, where they could pretend to look down at something he was showing them on his desk or computer screen, then raise their eyes slightly to stare at Stillman without being caught. The women were more subtle. They would sit in the only visitor’s chair, in the corner where Stillman couldn’t see them, and simply watch Walker’s eyes to see if Stillman did anything unusual while they fished for information.

Walker didn’t have any. “If he’s a security consultant, I assume he’s here to make us more secure, right? So feel secure.”

Marcy Wang stood and stared into his eyes as she drifted toward the door of his cubicle. “He’s here to make whoever paid him feel secure. I didn’t pay him, and neither did you.”

This time, as Walker’s eyes returned to his work, they passed across Stillman. He was alarmed to see that this time Stillman was not in profile, bent over the desk he had commandeered. He was half-turned in his swivel chair, staring frankly at Walker. Their eyes met for a heartbeat before Walker was able to nod nonchalantly and force his gaze down to the safety of his papers.

Each morning for the next three days, when Walker sat in the tiny kitchen of his apartment waiting for the coffee to drip through the machine, he remembered Stillman and felt uneasy. He thought about him as he dressed and drove to work, hoping he would be gone. Then he took the elevator to the seventh floor, discovered that Stillman was there again, hung his coat on the single hanger on the wall of his cubicle, and tried to obliterate him by concentrating on his work until nightfall.

Walker had worked for McClaren’s for only two years, beginning the summer after he had graduated from college. When he was a junior, he had entertained a vague notion of working a year and then going to law school, but as his senior year went on, the idea of more school had receded in his mind, and the prospect of going to work had taken all his attention. When a man from McClaren’s had come to the University of Pennsylvania campus near the end of Walker’s senior year, he had signed up for an interview. The corporate mystique had intrigued him.

McClaren’s was the company that had insured clipper ships making tea runs to China, and had covered gold shipments coming down from the mountains to San Francisco banks. The original headquarters had been replaced by this modern steel-and-glass building, but the furniture in it was Victorian, made of heavy, close-grained wood that appeared to be relics of agents who had written policies on shiploads of elephant tusks brought here to make billiard balls and piano keys. There was a lingering hint of huge risks and huge opportunities. Even now McClaren’s kept a reputation for promotion from within that was rivaled only by the Jesuits.

When graduation had approached, he had still not received any offers that piqued his interest as much as the offer to work for McClaren’s. He had always imagined he would work in Ohio within a few hours of home, but on the day before commencement, he had talked to his father and discovered that his parents had never given the idea much consideration. He had quietly set the plan aside and signed a contract with McClaren’s. He had completed the training period of six months and been assigned to this cubicle on the seventh floor of the home office.

He had been placed under the distant but sane supervision of Joyce Hazelton. She had explained to him what an analyst did: “They give us raw data. We cook and serve.” Information about all company operations was brought in, and he would screen the numbers for meaning and write reports that revealed trends and anomalies. She had said, “If we suddenly have seven percent of our clients dying on a full moon, I want that in block letters. If it’s fifteen percent, I want it underlined too.” Since then she had left him alone except to smile cordially at him once a day and meet with him every six months to show him that his performance ratings were all excellent.

He had found an unexpected pleasure in his work. The analysts all made jokes about the job, but it was intoxicating. Examining the figures was like being a cabalist searching for messages about the future encoded in the Talmud. Some of the messages were reassuring. At certain ages people had children and bought term life. By consulting actuarial tables, he knew how many of the policies sold this year would come back for payoff at what future dates, and how many premiums the company would receive in the meantime. He could consult the company’s tables on historical profit on invested premiums to produce an estimate of total return. Because of the large number of policies and the long stretch of time, the individual deviations from the norm disappeared to produce reliable predictions.

The work of the analysts was solitary because it demanded uninterrupted concentration, so they tended to savor encounters with their colleagues, and they greeted each other with manic friendliness. That made his time in the office pleasant enough, but he had not detected much improvement in the part of his life that took place between seven P.M. and seven A.M., and that had worried and depressed him. He thought about it most often on the trips to and from work, when he passed groups of people about his age who were walking together, because they seemed to have found some solution that he had missed.

Each time he caught himself silently phrasing it that way, he quickly corrected himself: it was all right to pretend confusion and befuddlement to amuse people, but it was a pose, not an excuse he was allowed to use to quiet his own mind. He sometimes presented himself as though he were new to this planet, a rational observer who simply couldn’t understand the mysteries of human behavior. The truth was much more painful: he understood. He had been given his chance at love soon after he had arrived in San Francisco—maybe the only time in his life that it would come—and had wasted it. For a year and a half he had been trying to get over his loss of her, and his disappointment in himself for having somehow failed to keep her. It helped to immerse himself in the morass of details that the insurance business generated. And now and then there were distractions—like Stillman.

On the seventh day of Stillman, as Walker put his analysis of the quarter’s performance bond figures into the drawer, out of sight, and took a step toward the coat hanging on the single hanger in his cubicle, Max Stillman’s body suddenly filled the opening. “Time for lunch?” asked Stillman.

“I was thinking about it,” said Walker. “But if you need help or something, I can go later. My schedule’s pretty flexible.”

“No,” said Stillman. “Come on. I’ll buy.” He had turned and started off down the side aisle of the bay, toward the elevators, before Walker had managed to snag his coat.

Stillman’s body seemed to project around it a zone of silence. It took Walker a few seconds in the seventh-floor hallway to see that it was because whenever he was in a crowd, the people who worked at McClaren’s were acutely conscious of him, and the strain of thinking of small talk that was small enough to be said in his hearing made talk vanish altogether. During the ride down in the elevator, Walker became aware of sounds he had never noticed before: the distant groan of the electric winch that unwound the cable to let the elevator down, the sixty-cycle hum of the overhead lights. Everyone in the elevator assumed the same strange pose, facing the doors with the head tilted slightly upward to gaze at some distant, invisible point. People he had observed a dozen times chattering in the elevator as they left for lunch together appeared never to have seen one another before. He began to be aware that the people around him had taken note that he was with Stillman, and while he was wondering what they were thinking, he began to sweat.

It was almost a relief to follow Stillman across the lobby to the garage. He was going to find out what this man wanted. Stillman’s car was a big Chevrolet that looked like the same model the police used, but when Walker got in, he saw the keys Stillman turned to start it had a tag from a rental company.

The day was bright and clear, and Walker tried to feel pleased about the novelty of sitting in a passenger seat while someone else maneuvered through the crowded and frustrating San Francisco streets. He watched the route Stillman took, from Telegraph Hill to Lombard, down Stockton across to Sacramento, but then he somehow made it to Sutter and Grant above the mess at Market Street and below the place where Grant became one-way in the opposite direction. The car stopped in front of a hotel where loud reggae music blared from the lobby, and Stillman got out of the car to make room for a parking attendant to get in and take it away in a flash of metal and squealing tires.

Walker looked toward the hotel, but Stillman was walking up the incline between the two stone lions that guarded the entrance to Chinatown. When Walker caught up, Stillman explained, “I have deals with a lot of parking attendants. This way, the kid gets a few extra bucks, and you get back to work on time.”

“What about you?” asked Walker. He regretted the clumsiness of it, but he pressed forward. “You have to be back too, don’t you?”

Stillman shook his head. “I’m working now.”

Walker silently turned that statement around and around to study it, but Stillman said, “That’s the good part of being in business for yourself. You get to start and stop when you feel like it.”

“What’s the bad part?”

“Your boss is an asshole, and he knows that you feel nothing for him but contempt. Of course, I wouldn’t enjoy those compartments they put you in. It’s not that I can’t sit still or something.”

“I noticed.”

Stillman glanced at him. “Yeah, I guess you would have. But those little cubbyhole things . . . ” He shook his head sympathetically. “The problem with them is that they’re insulting. You’re locked up, but there’s no door to close, so people can look in on you.” He paused. “Ever been in prison?”

Walker’s head turned toward Stillman, but Stillman’s expression had not changed. This was just part of the breezy conversation. “No. Have you?”

“It’s like that, sort of. It’s about who has the options. Prisons are set up so there’s no question in the prisoner’s mind that he’s not going anyplace, but so he knows he can be watched—not that he is, but that he can be.”

Walker had not missed the fact that Stillman had not answered his question. He said, “The cubicles aren’t quite that bad. The wall cuts the noise and helps you keep your mind on what you’re doing. On a good day I look down, then look up again and it’s time for lunch. I come back, same thing. When it’s time to go home, I print a hard copy of what I’ve done, and the amount I’ve done surprises me.”

Stillman didn’t seem convinced. “How long have you been at it?”

“Almost two years; a year and a half in my cubicle.” It was almost reassuring that the questions were so transparent and simple. If Stillman were investigating Walker, he would already know all of this.

“Oh, yeah,” said Stillman. “That’s right. You were in the training class with Kennedy and Cardarelli and Snyder and Wang and those people.”

Walker nodded, then stared ahead as they walked farther into Chinatown, past shops that were as big inside as department stores had been when he was a child in Ohio, but filled with a jumble of cast-resin imitations of carved smiling Buddhas, T-shirts that said GREETINGS FROM ALCATRAZ, genuine antiques, and cases of jewelry that looked as though it might be spectacularly expensive. Stillman took him past restaurants on both sides of the street with oversized double bronze doors, but showed no interest in them. Walker decided that it was time to face the difficult part. He said, as casually as he could, “What are you doing at McClaren’s?”

Stillman showed no surprise. “Once in a while they call me in when something’s bothering them. I’m doing some investigating.”

Walker felt his heart begin to pump harder. The job at McClaren’s that he had liked shrunk and withered in his imagination. Enough, he thought. “Are you here to investigate me?”

“Hell no,” said Stillman. “I’m here to eat lunch.” He walked on more quickly, then turned a corner.

Walker followed him a few steps, then stopped abruptly.

Stillman turned in surprise, cocked his head, and waited.

Walker said, “I want to know whether I’m some kind of suspect.”

Stillman took two steps toward him, and Walker remembered that he didn’t know this man at all. From the beginning, Walker had noticed an air of barely suppressed violence about him, a permanent tension. Walker felt instinctively that if Stillman wanted to attack him physically, his best chance would not be to remain immobile and hope to fend him off. Stillman’s face was only two feet from his own now, and he looked enormous. Walker got ready, his eyes on Stillman’s and his arms tightening to strike first if he saw a sudden movement.

“Mr. Walker. John,” Stillman amended. “I hereby swear, what I’m investigating is not you. If you’ve done something, it might be me that catches you at it, but I give you my solemn oath that I don’t know about it now, didn’t come to your office for that purpose, and don’t give a shit about it. Now let’s eat lunch.” He remained motionless, like a wall across the sidewalk, his eyes holding Walker in place.

Walker stared back into his sharp, brown eyes. “If you were investigating me, would you tell me the truth?”

Stillman’s face tightened into a happy grin. “Fuck no,” he said, then turned and hurried into a doorway.

Walker followed Stillman into a dim alcove, then up a long flight of stairs lit only by a chartreuse and magenta neon sign in Chinese characters. When Walker reached the top and carefully pushed the door inward, he found Stillman in a bright yellow room where waiters bustled back and forth under sunlit skylights carrying large zinc-colored trays loaded with covered dishes. There were about thirty fashionably dressed customers sitting at black metal tables, eating and talking. A restaurant, thought Walker, and it was only then that he realized he had been convinced it would be something else.

They sat at a table near a window, and Stillman unabashedly amused himself by staring down at the pedestrians on the sidewalk below. When the waiter appeared with menus, Stillman said distractedly, “Just bring us whatever Mr. Fo had today.”

The waiter said, “Very good, Mr. Stillman,” and scurried off.

Walker said, “How do you know the owner didn’t have seagull brains sautéed in rancid yak butter?”

Stillman shook his head. “Fo’s not the owner. He’s just a friend of mine who comes here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It took him twenty-eight thousand meals to learn to pick out the best Chinese food, but I’m hungry today, so I don’t have time for experiments.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Life is too short to screw around trying to rediscover what somebody else knows already, so don’t waste your time with it. On the small stuff, find somebody who knows, and then give him the courtesy of humbly admitting it. That way you’ll avoid fifty years of heartburn and bad hangovers and stall-outs on freeways.”

He slipped into another topic. “So, do you hang out much with the people at work?”

“Not really,” Walker said. “Once in a while one of us will invite another to dinner or have a small party. But most of the time, to tell you the truth, we bore each other. I mean, we all smile and talk at the coffee room, but we all know the same things.” What he had just said was true, but saying it aloud made it worse.

Stillman nodded. “How about women? You’re not queer.” It was a statement, not a question.

Walker kept himself from looking around to see if anyone had heard. Stillman caught the expression and said, “Hey, it’s San Francisco. Anybody here look shocked? A lot of people from Ohio come here just to sign up for the parade. You didn’t. So why aren’t you married?”

“I haven’t met any woman I want to live with until I die,” said Walker. “Unless I could be sure of dying in a month or so.” He congratulated himself on saying the lie so fluently. He had met somebody, and he had let her slip away, but his life was none of Stillman’s business.

Stillman nodded. “Yeah. I saw you gaping at Cardarelli when she left your cage the other day. Don’t just ogle and wonder. Make a move on her. You might find that you wouldn’t want the month to end.”

Walker shook his head. “She’s nice to look at, all right . . . .” Walker stopped himself, shocked. He had almost been lulled into telling this stranger something that might harm her.

“But?” Stillman prodded.

Walker said carefully. “I guess sometimes relationships go that way, and sometimes they don’t.”

Stillman sighed happily. “Not with me. They always go that way. I’ve had three really poisonous marriages, and I still hope to have one that lasts long enough to be fatal. Since you’re young enough to learn, that’s another thing I can give you a shortcut on. So far, the only thing I can think of that’s worth any unpleasantness at all is a woman who’s amenable to your favorite pastimes, and whose voice doesn’t set your teeth on edge. Would I trade everything I’ve got for it? Sure. I’ve done it about four times.”

“I thought it was three.”

“I’m counting one who didn’t let it get that far. I loved her. I even learned to make martinis for her—spent several evenings watching the bartender at the Mark Hopkins and asking him questions. It cost more than medical school on a per diem basis, and nearly ruined my liver. One night she was at my place, and I went to the kitchen to make some drinks. When I came back, she had bolted. The door was open, swinging on its hinges. Later, I asked her why she didn’t want to marry me. She said, ‘The martinis weren’t strong enough for that.’ I always count her.”

He stared at the table for a moment in a reverie, then seemed to remember Walker. “Never judge people by what they have. That’s mostly luck. Judge them by what they want.” He waved his hand. “Do they want to mind their own business and be somebody decent, or do they never quite feel right unless they take what they get from somebody else and leave them bleeding so they can savor the contrast?” He lifted his eyes. “Ah, David,” he said. “What have you brought for us?”

The waiter happily rattled off a group of unfamiliar Chinese phrases as he set plates on the table and proudly whisked the tops off. Walker could see dumplings, pieces of chicken and meat that he suspected was pork but could conceivably have been duck, and vegetables that he had seen before. None of it looked particularly unusual.

“Wonderful, David,” said Stillman. “Thank you very much.” He heaped various things from the serving dishes onto Walker’s plate, and they began to eat.

Walker spent most of the meal wondering what Stillman was up to. If he had invited Walker here in order to get him to incriminate himself or someone else, he was doing a poor job of it. He continued to do two-thirds of the talking, and showed far less interest in McClaren Life and Casualty than in women, weather, the behavior of passersby on the street below them, or food.

Walker had been deceived by the appearance of the food. He took two bites and decided it was the best food he had tasted in two years in San Francisco, and he felt bereft at the thought that he would never come to this restaurant again. If he tried, he would probably run into Stillman. Even if that didn’t happen, he couldn’t imagine ordering whatever Mr. Fo had ordered. It occurred to him that he had no idea what the place was called. He assumed it was on the menu, but he had not seen a menu.

On his way out, he made one last try. He pointed to the neon sign and said to Stillman, “What does that say?”

“Good luck,” Stillman said. “They always say ‘Good luck.’ ”

On the eighth day of Stillman, at five minutes to twelve, as Walker was trying to compose the concluding paragraph of his interpretation of sea-loss figures for the quarter ending June 30 in time to go to lunch, he caught a shadow in his peripheral vision, and looked up to see Stillman in his doorway.

“Come on, kid. Time to go.”

“One second,” said Walker. He decided to skip some of the preliminaries and rapidly typed the words “Recommmend no action at this time,” then saved the report and let the terminal return to the main menu. He looked up again, but Stillman was gone. He supposed “Time to go” had been Stillman’s way of saying he wanted to go to lunch again. Walker took his coat from the hanger and stepped out in time to catch a quick almost-glimpse of Stillman turning the corner into the hallway near the elevators, just a vague impression that a charcoal-gray coat had been there an instant ago.

When he reached the hallway, Stillman was standing in an elevator holding the door open for him. The rest of the McClaren people were streaming into elevator number three, possibly too impatient to wait, but probably relieved at the excuse for staying far from Stillman. He released the door as soon as Walker was in, and the elevator began to descend.

Walker said, “Where do you want to eat today?”

Stillman looked up at the strip of black above the door, where the floor numbers were lighting up, one by one. “If the traffic’s moving, we might have time to pick something up at the airport.”