Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'You bastard,' he murmured, suddenly hating Richardson with an intensity he found alarming. 'I wish to God you were dead, you mother…'

'Kris? It's Ray. Did I wake you up? I did? That's too bad. Let me ask you something, Kris. Have you any idea what this building is going to be worth in fees to this firm? No, just answer the question. That's right, nearly $4 million. Four million dollars. Now, there are a lot of us in here working late on this one, Kris. Only you're not here and you're supposed to be the goddamn project manager. Well, don't you think that sets a bad example? You don't.' He listened for a moment and then started to shake his head. 'Well, frankly I don't care how long it is since you've been home. And I couldn't care less if your kids think you're just some guy their mother picked up in the supermarket. Your place is here, with your team. Are you going to drag your ass down here, or do I have to look for a new manager on this job? You are? Good.'

Richardson replaced the receiver and glanced around for his wife. She was stooped over a glass case near the stairs, examining a model of the Yu Corporation headquarters which, in real life, was now nearing completion on the Hope Street Piazza. 'I'm going to be a while here, honey,' he called. 'I'll see you upstairs, OK?'

'OK, dear.' Joan smiled and looked around the studio. 'Goodnight everybody,' she said and left.

There were a few people who smiled back. But most of them were too tired, even for polite smiles. Besides, they knew that Joan was every bit as monstrous as her husband. Worse. At least he was talented. One or two of the more senior designers still remembered the time when, in a fit of bad temper, she had thrown a fax machine through a plate-glass window.

Ray Richardson returned his attention to the monitor and, clicking the mouse again, changed the picture to a 3-D image. The drawing revealed a giant semi-circle about two hundred metres in diameter, gently disked like the city of Bath's Royal Crescent and surmounted by what resembled the wingspan of an enormous bird. There were some architectural critics, most of them in Europe, who had suggested that the wings were the wings of an eagle, and a Nazi eagle at that. For this reason they had already described Richardson's design as 'Post-Nazism'.

Richardson moved the mouse forward across its pad, bringing the 3-D image closer. Now it could be seen that the building was not one crescent but two, enclosing a curving colonnade separating shops and office buildings and the exhibition halls. These were the contract drawings, representing a statement of agreed information from the various consultants who would be involved in constructing the Kunstzentrum, and they were due to be passed on to the quantity surveyor when Richardson visited Berlin. Entering the colonnade, Richardson zoomed up to the ceiling and clicking the mouse twice, exploding a detailed diagram of one of the shape-memory steel tube supports for the photochromic glass panels.

'What's this?' he frowned. 'Look, Allen, you haven't done what I wanted. I thought I asked you to draw up both options.'

'But we agreed that this is the ideal option.'

'I wanted the other one, just in case.'

'Just in case of what? I don't understand. Either this is the best option or it's not.' Grabel started to twitch again.

'In case I change my mind, that's what.' Richardson performed a cruel but accurate imitation of Grabel's nervous twitch. Grabel took off his glasses, buried his unshaven face in his trembling hands and sighed deeply, stretching his cheeks towards his ears. For a moment he looked heavenwards, as if seeking guidance from the Almighty. When none arrived he stood up, shaking his head slowly and put on his jacket.

'God, I hate you sometimes,' he said. 'No, that's not true, I hate you all the time. You are a stray dog's rectal cancer, you know that? One day someone is going to do the world a big favour and murder you. I'd do it myself only I'm afraid of all the fan mail I might receive. You want it drawn? Then do it yourself, you selfish bastard. I've had it up to here with you."

'What did you say?'

'You heard me, asshole.' Grabel turned and started to walk towards the stairs.

'Where the hell are you going?'

'Home.'

Richardson stood up and nodded bitterly.

'You walk out now, you don't come back. D'you hear me?'

'I quit,' Grabel said, and kept on walking. 'I wouldn't come back here if you were dying of loneliness.'

Richardson exploded. 'You don't walk out on me,' he screamed.

'You're fired. I'm firing you, you piece of twitching shit. All these people are my witnessess. You hear me, Twitch? Your ass is fired!'

Without looking back Grabel held up a middle finger and disappeared down the stairs. Someone laughed and Richardson looked around angrily, his fists clenched, ready to fire anyone who stepped out of line.

'What's so goddamned funny?' he snarled. 'And where's my fucking coffee?'

-###-

Still seething, Grabel walked the short distance along the strip to the St James's Club Hotel where, as usual, he had a few drinks in the artdeco piano bar while he waited for a taxi. Vodka with Cointreau and cranberry juice. It was what he had been drinking six months earlier when the police had arrested him for driving under the influence. That and a couple of toots of cocaine. He had only taken the cocaine to help him make the drive home. He might not have been drunk at all if he hadn't been working so hard.

He felt better about walking out on his job than he had felt about losing his licence. If only Richardson had not called him Twitch. He knew it was what people sometimes called him, but no one had ever used it to his face before. Only Richardson was a big enough shit to have done that.

There was a cocktail waitress who worked in the hotel, a resting actress called Mary, who was sometimes friendly to him. It was as near as Allen Grabel got to having a social life.

'I just quit my job,' he told her proudly. 'Just told my partner to shove it.'

'Well,' she shrugged, 'good for you.'

'I've been meaning to do it for a long time, I guess. Never had the nerve before. I just told him to stick it. I guess it was either that or blow his friggin' brains out.'

'Something tells me you made the right choice,' she said.

'I dunno, y'know? Really I don't. But boy, was he mad.'

'Sounds like you made quite a performance out of it. The whole dramatic gesture.'

'And how. Boy, was he mad at me.'

'I wish I could quit my job,' she said wistfully.

'Hey, it'll happen for you, Mary. I know it will.'

He ordered another drink and found it disappeared even more quickly than the first. By the time Mary told him that his taxi had arrived he had drunk four or five, although he was so exhilarated by what had happened the alcohol hardly seemed to have affected him. He peeled a couple of bills off of his money clip and tipped the girl generously. There was no need, since he had been sitting at the bar, only he felt sorry for her. Not everyone could afford to quit their job, he told himself.

After he had gone Mary breathed a sigh of relief. He was not a bad person. But the twitch gave her the creeps. And she hated drunks. Even friendly ones.

Outside the front door Grabel ordered the cab driver to take him to Pasadena. They were only a few blocks away from downtown, heading south-east on the Hollywood Freeway, about to make the north turn towards Pasadena, when he suddenly remembered something.

'Shit,' he said loudly.

'Is there a problem?'

'Kind of, yeah. I left my door-key at the office.'

'Want to go back for it?'

'Pull off here, will you, while I try to figure out what to do?'

After such a dramatic exit he could hardly return. Ray Richardson would assume he was returning with his tail between his legs to ask for his job back. He would just love holding him up to ridicule. Maybe call him Twitch again. That would be too much to bear. The trouble with making a grand gesture was that it was easy to forget your props.

'So where's it to be, my friend?'

Grabel looked out of the window and found himself staring up at a familiar-looking silhouette. They were on Hope Street, approaching the piazza and the Yu Corporation building. Suddenly he knew exactly where he would spend the night.

'Here. Drop me here,' he said.

'You sure?' said the taxi driver. 'It's kind of rough around here at night, man.'

'Perfectly sure," said Grabel. He wondered why he had not thought of it before.

-###-

Mitchell Bryan was beginning to think that his wife, Alison, was actually getting worse. Over breakfast she had informed him, with an insane look in her eye, how she had read that there were certain South African tribes who believed that the product of a miscarriage could threaten or kill not just the father but the whole country, even the sky itself: it was enough to cause the burning winds to blow, to parch the country with heat and drive the rains away. Laconically, Mitch had replied, 'Well, I guess we got off lightly then,' and headed straight for the car, even though it was still only seven-thirty.

He did not think Alison had ever really recovered from losing their baby. She was more withdrawn than she had ever been before, neurotic even, and kept away from babies like other people avoided the South Central area of LA. There were times when Mitch could not help forcing the endoscope of his memory into the maw of their relationship and asking himself whether or not a child would have kept them together. Because twelve months almost to the day after Alison's miscarriage Mitch stopped making excuses for her eccentric behaviour and started an affair. He hated himself for doing it, knowing that Alison still needed a lot of care and understanding. At the same time he was aware that he no longer loved her quite enough to give it. He felt that what she possibly needed most was to see a psychiatrist.

Right now what Mitch needed was to be in bed with a woman called Jenny Bao, the project's feng shui consultant. Usually he drove straight to the office or the Yu Corporation building, but sometimes he found himself making an early-morning call on Jenny at her West Los Angeles home, from which she also ran her business. On this particular morning Mitch chose the now familiar route off the Santa Monica Freeway on to La Brea Avenue and, just a few blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, entered the quiet, leafy neighbourhood made up of well-built Spanish and ranch-style houses where Jenny lived. He drew up outside a pleasant grey bungalow with a raised floor and veranda, and an immaculate lawn. Next door was a house with a For Sale board that advertised it as a 'Talking Home'.

Mitch turned the engine off and amused himself for a moment by listening to the ninety-second description of the property on the designated wavelength he could receive on his car radio via a computerized transmitter inside the house. He was surprised that they were asking so much, and that Jenny could have afforded such an expensive neighbourhood. There must be more money in feng shui than he had imagined.

Feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of 'wind and water' land magic, involved locating sites and building structures so that they harmonized with and benefited from the surrounding physical environment. The Chinese believed that this method of divination enabled them to attract desirable cosmological influences, ensuring that they would have good luck, good health, prosperity and a long life. No building on the East Asian Pacific Rim, however large or small, was ever planned or constructed without regard to feng shui precepts.

Mitch had had considerable experience of dealing with feng shui consultants, and not just the one he was sleeping with. When designing the Island Nirvana Hotel in Hong Kong, Ray Richardson had planned on cladding the building in a reflective glass exterior until his client's feng shui master had told him that glare was a source of sha qi, the harmful breath of the dragon. On another occasion the firm had been obliged to alter its award-winning design for the Sumida Television Company in Tokyo because the shape resembled the short-lived butterfly.

He got out of the car and went up the path. Jenny was still in her silk dressing-gown when she answered the door.

'Mitch, what a pleasant surprise,' she said and let him in. 'I was going to give you a call this morning.'

He was already slipping the gown off her shoulders and pushing her into the bedroom.

'Mmm,' she said. 'What did you have, steroids with your Cheerios this morning?'

Half Chinese, Jenny Bao reminded him of a big cat. Green eyes, high cheekbones, and a small delicate nose he had decided was probably cosmetic. She had a bow mouth that was more Odysseus than Cupid and it was set between the parentheses of two perfect laugh lines. She loved to laugh. She carried herself well too, with the long, leggy, self-conscious stroll of the cat-walk. She had not always looked so good. When Mitch had first met her she had been maybe ten or fifteen pounds overweight. He knew how much time she had needed to spend in her local gymnasium to be in such fabulous shape now.

Underneath the robe she was wearing a garter belt, stockings and panties.

'Did the dragon tell you I was coming?' he grinned, pointing at the antique feng shui compass that was mounted on the wall above the bed's headboard. The compass was a circular disc marked with about thirty or forty concentric circles of Chinese characters, and Mitch knew it was called a luopan, and that she used it to assess the good and bad qualities of the dragon in a building.

'Of course,' she said, lying back on the bed. 'The dragon tells me everything.'

His tremulous thumbs gathered the elastic waist of her panties and plucked them down over the twin golden domes of her behind and back up over the suspended sentences and Sobranie filter-tips of her stocking tops as, obligingly, she brought her knees up to her chest. She straightened her feet and the little stealth bomber of black lace and silk was his.

Quickly he threw off his own clothes and rolled on top of her. Detaching mind from over-eager gnomon and its exquisitely appointed, shadowy task, he began to make love to her.

When they had finished they lay under the sheet and watched TV. After a while Mitch glanced at the gold Rolex Submariner watch on his wrist.

'I ought to be going,' he said.

Jenny Bao pulled a face and kissed him.

'What were you going to call me about?' he asked.

'Oh yes,' she said, and told him why she had wanted to speak to him.

-###-

As soon as Mitch sat down at his desk in the studio he saw Tony Levine coming towards him and stifled a groan. Levine was too pushy for Mitch's taste. There was something hungry-looking about him, a generally wolfish effect that was enhanced by the gap teeth shown through his near-permanent smile, and eyebrows that were joined in the middle. Then there was his laugh. When Levine laughed you could hear it all over the building. It was almost as if he were trying to draw attention to himself, and that made Mitch feel uncomfortable. But there was no sign of a smile on Levine's face now.