The Gift

  “Incredible.” Lou laughed, self-consciously looking down at his shoes. “I’ve never noticed you here before,” he thought aloud.

  “All day, every day,” Gabe said, with false perkiness in his voice.

  “Sorry…” Lou shook his head. “I’m always running around the place, on the phone with someone or late for someone else. Always two places to be at the same time, my wife says. Sometimes I wish I could be cloned, I get so busy.” He laughed again.

  Gabe gave him a curious smile, then nodded toward Lou’s feet. “Almost don’t recognize them standing still. No fire inside today?”

  Lou laughed once more. “Always a fire inside there, believe you me.” He made a swift movement with his arm, and, like the unveiling of a masterpiece, his coat sleeve slipped up just far enough to reveal his gold Rolex. “I’m always the first director into the office, so there’s no great rush.” He observed the time with great concentration, and in his head he was already leading his first meeting of the day.

  “You’re not the first in this morning,” Gabe said.

  “What?” The meeting in Lou’s head was interrupted, and he was back on the street again, outside his office, the cold Atlantic wind whipping at their faces.

  Gabe scrunched his eyes shut tight. “Brown loafers. I’ve seen you walk in with him a few times. He’s in already.”

  “Brown loafers?” Lou laughed, first confused, next impressed, and then quickly concerned as to who had made it to the office before him.

  “You know him—a pretentious walk. The little suede tassels kick with every step, like a mini cancan. It’s like he throws them up there purposely. They’ve got soft soles, but they’re heavy on the ground. Small wide feet, and he walks on the outsides. Soles are always worn away on the outside.”

  Lou’s brow furrowed in concentration.

  “On Saturdays he wears shoes like he’s just stepped off a yacht.”

  “Alfred!” Lou said, recognizing the description. “That’s because he probably has just stepped off his ya—” But then he stopped himself. “He’s in already?”

  “About a half hour ago. In a kind of a rush, by the looks of it, accompanied by another pair of black slip-ons.”

  “Black slip-ons?”

  “Black shoes. Male shoes. A little shine but no design. Simple and to the point. Can’t say much else about them apart from the fact they move slower than the other shoes.”

  “You’re very observant.” Lou examined him, wondering who this man had been in his previous life, before landing here on the street. At the same time, his mind was on overdrive, trying to figure out who these people were. Alfred showing up to work so early had him nervous, an emotion that was rare for Lou.

  Recently, a colleague of theirs—Cliff—had suffered a nervous breakdown, and this had left them excited—yes, excited—about the opening up of a new position. Providing Cliff didn’t get better, which Lou secretly hoped for, major shifts were about to take place in the company, and any unusual behavior by Alfred was questionable. In fact, for Lou, any of Alfred’s behavior at any stage was questionable.

  Gabe winked. “Don’t happen to need an observant person in there for anything, do you?”

  Lou parted his gloved hands. “Sorry.”

  “No problem, you know where I am if you need me. I’m the fella in the Doc Martens.” He lifted his blanket to reveal his high black boots.

  “I wonder why they’re in so early.” Lou looked at Gabe as though he could provide the answer.

  “Can’t help you out there, I’m afraid, but they had lunch last week. Or at least they left the building at what’s considered the average joe’s lunchtime, and then came back together when that time was over. What they did in between is just a matter of clever guesswork.” He chuckled.

  “What day was that lunch?”

  Gabe closed his eyes again. “Friday, I’d say. He’s your rival, is he, brown loafers?”

  “No, he’s my friend. Kind of. More of an acquaintance, really.” On hearing the news of this lunch, Lou, for the first time, showed signs of being rattled. “He’s my colleague, but with Cliff having a breakdown it’s a great opportunity for either of us to, well, you know…”

  “Steal your sick friend’s job,” Gabe finished for him with a smile. “Sweet. The slow-moving shoes? The black ones?” Gabe continued. “They left the office the other night with a pair of Louboutins.”

  “Lou…Loub—what are they?”

  “Identifiable by their lacquered red sole. These particular ones had one-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter heels.”

  “Millimeters?” Lou questioned. Then, “Red sole, okay.” He nodded, absorbing it all.

  “You could always just ask your friend-slash-acquaintance-slash-colleague-slash-rival who he was meeting,” Gabe suggested, with a glint in his eye.

  Lou didn’t respond directly to that. “Right, I’d better run. Things to see, people to do, and both at the same time, would you believe?” He winked. “Thanks for your help, Gabe.” He slipped a ten-euro note into Gabe’s cup.

  “Cheers, man,” Gabe beamed, immediately grabbing the bill from the cup and tucking it into his pocket. He tapped it with his finger. “Can’t let everyone know, remember?”

  “Right,” Lou agreed.

  But, at the exact same time, he didn’t agree at all.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Thirteenth Floor

  GOING UP?”

  There was a universal grunt and nodding of heads from inside the crammed elevator as the door opened on the second floor to an inquiring gentleman who looked in at the sleepy faces with hope. All but Lou responded, since he was too preoccupied with studying the gentleman’s shoes, which stepped over the narrow gap and into the confined space. Brown brogues shuffled in and then turned around 180 degrees, in order to face the front.

  Lou was looking for red soles and black shoes. Alfred had arrived early and had lunch with black shoes. Black shoes left the office with red soles. If Lou could find out who owned the red soles, he’d know who she worked with, and then he’d know who Alfred was secretly meeting. This convoluted process made more sense to Lou than simply asking Alfred, which Lou thought said a lot about the nature of Alfred’s honesty.

  “What floor do you want?” A muffled voice came from the corner of the elevator, where a man was well hidden—possibly squashed. As the only person with access to the buttons, he was forced to deal with the responsibility of comandeering the elevator stops.

  “Thirteen, please,” the new arrival said.

  There were a few sighs and one person tutted.

  “There is no thirteenth floor,” the disembodied voice replied. “You either want the twelfth floor or the fourteenth floor. There’s no thirteen.”

  “Surely he needs to get off on the fourteenth floor,” somebody else offered. “The fourteenth floor is technically the thirteenth floor.”

  “So you want me to press fourteen?” the muffled voice asked impatiently.

  “Em…” The man looked from one person to the other with confusion as the elevator ascended quickly. He watched the numbers go up on the monitor above and then dived into his briefcase to find his schedule.

  Lou pondered the man’s confusion with irritation. It had been his suggestion that there be no number thirteen on the elevator panel, but of course there was a thirteenth floor. There wasn’t a gap with nothing before getting to the fourteenth floor; the fourteenth didn’t hover on some invisible bricks. The fourteenth was the thirteenth, the very floor his office was on. Perfectly simple.

  He himself exited on the fourteenth floor, his feet immediately sinking into the spongy plush carpet there. He strode through reception toward his office and his secretary, arms swinging, lips whistling, while the lost man in the brown brogues wandered aimlessly in the wrong direction, eventually knocking lightly on the door of the broom closet at the end of the corridor.

  “Good morning, Mr. Suffern.” His secretary, Alison, greeted him without looking up from her pap
ers.

  He stopped at her desk and looked at her with a puzzled expression. “Alison, call me Lou like you always do, please.”

  “Of course, Mr. Suffern,” she responded, refusing to look him in the eye.

  While he settled in and Alison moved about her desk, Lou tried to get a glimpse of the soles of her shoes. Once again avoiding his eye, she returned to her desk to type, and as inconspicuously as possible, Lou bent down to tie his shoelaces and peeked through the gap in her desk.

  She frowned and crossed her long legs. “Is everything okay, Mr. Suffern?”

  “Call me Lou,” he repeated, still puzzled.

  “No,” she said rather moodily, and looked away. She grabbed the diary from her desk. “Shall we go through today’s appointments?” Standing, she made her way around the desk.

  Tight silk blouse, tight skirt. His eyes scanned her body before getting to her shoes.

  “How high are your heels?”

  “Why?”

  “Are they one hundred and twenty millimeters?”

  “I’ve no idea. Who measures heels in millimeters?”

  “I don’t know. Some people. Gabe.” He smiled, following her as they walked into his office and trying to get a glimpse of her soles.

  “Who the hell is Gabe?” she muttered.

  “Gabe is a homeless man.” He laughed.

  As she turned around to question him, she caught him with his head tilted, studying her.

  “Do you have red soles?” he asked her, making his way to the gigantic leather chair behind his desk, in which a family of four could live.

  “Why, did I step in something?” She stood on one foot and hopped around lightly, trying to keep her balance while checking her soles, appearing to Lou like a dog trying to chase its tail.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He sat down at his desk wearily.

  She viewed him with suspicion before returning her attention to the schedule. “At eight thirty you have a phone call with Aonghus O’Sullibháin about needing to become a fluent Irish speaker in order to buy that plot in Connemara. However, I have arranged, for your benefit, for the conversation to be in English…” She smirked and threw back her head like a horse, pushing her mane of highlighted hair off her face. “At eight forty-five you have a meeting with Barry Brennan about the slugs they found on the Cork site—”

  “Cross your fingers they’re not rare,” he groaned.

  “Well, you never know, sir; they could be relatives of yours. You have some family in Cork, don’t you?” She still wouldn’t look at him. “At ten—”

  “Hold on a minute.” Despite knowing he was alone with her in the room, Lou looked around, hoping for backup. “Why are you calling me sir? What’s gotten into you today?”

  She looked away, mumbling what sounded like “Not you, that’s for sure.”

  “What did you say?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve a busy day. I could do without the sarcasm, thank you. What happened to my eight o’clock meeting? And why isn’t there anything at nine thirty?”

  “I thought that it would be a good idea to make fewer appointments in the future.” She blushed slightly. “Instead of these manic days spent darting around, you could spend more time with fewer clients. Happier clients.”

  “Yes, then Jerry Maguire and I will live happily ever after. Alison, you’re new to the company, so I’ll let this go, but this is how I like to do business, okay? I like to be busy. I don’t need two-hour lunch breaks and schoolwork at the kitchen table with the kids.” He narrowed his eyes. “You mentioned happier clients; have you had any complaints?”

  “Your mother. Your wife,” she said through gritted teeth. “Your brother. Your sister. Your daughter.”

  “My daughter is five years old.”

  “Well, she called when you forgot to pick her up from Irish dancing lessons last Thursday.”

  “That doesn’t count,” he said, rolling his eyes, “because my five-year-old daughter isn’t going to lose the company hundreds of millions of euro, is she?” Once again he didn’t wait for a response. “Have you received any complaints from people who do not share my surname?”

  Alison thought hard. “Did your sister change her name back after the separation?”

  He glared at her.

  “Well then, no, sir.”

  “Again, what’s with the sir thing?”

  “I just thought,” she said, her faced flushed, “that if you’re going to treat me like a stranger, then that’s how I’ll treat you, too.”

  “How am I treating you like a stranger?”

  She looked away.

  He lowered his voice. “Alison, we’re at the office; what do you want me to do? Tell you how much I enjoyed screwing your brains out in the middle of discussing our appointments?”

  “You didn’t screw my brains out; we didn’t quite get that far.”

  “Whatever.” He waved his hand dismissively.

  Alison’s jaw tightened. “Oh yes, and Mr. Patterson’s secretary called to ask me to remind you not to miss any more meetings today.” She seemed to get satisfaction from relaying the message. “It seems Alfred mentioned to Mr. Patterson that you missed the meeting with Alan Fletcher yesterday.”

  “Alfred made that appointment after he learned I’d be out for an hour,” Lou said, shooting up from his chair. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” She smiled sweetly.

  “Did you tell Mr. Patterson that?”

  “No, I—”

  “Well, call him and tell him,” he snapped. “Make sure he knows.”

  Lou’s blood boiled. He spent his life running from one thing to another, missing half of the first in order to make it to the end of the other. He did this all day, every day, always feeling like he was catching up in order to get ahead. It was long and hard and tiring work. He had made huge sacrifices to get where he was. He loved his work, was totally and utterly professional, and was dedicated to every aspect of it. So to be called out on missing one meeting that had not yet been scheduled when he had taken an hour off angered him.

  It also angered him that it was family, his mother, that had caused this. It was she on the morning of the meeting whom he had had to collect from the hospital after a hip replacement. He felt angry at his wife for talking him into doing it when his suggestion to arrange a car had sent her into a rage. He felt angry at his younger sister, Marcia, and his older brother, Quentin, for not doing it instead. He was a busy man, and the one time he was forced to choose family over work, he had to pay the price. He hated the excuses that other colleagues used—funerals, weddings, christenings, illnesses—and swore he’d never bring his personal life into the office. To him, it was a lack of professionalism. Either you did the job or you didn’t.

  He paced by his office window, biting down hard on his lip and feeling such anger he wanted to pick up the phone and call his entire family and tell them, “See? See, this is why I can’t always be there. See? Now look what you’ve done!”

  “Right.” His heart began to slow down, now realizing what was going on. His dear friend Alfred was up to his tricks. Tricks that Lou had assumed, up until now, he was exempt from. Alfred never did things by the book. He looked at everything from an awkward angle, came at every conversation from an unusual perspective, always trying to figure out the best way he could come out of any situation at someone else’s cost.

  Lou’s eyes searched his desk. “Where’s my mail?”

  “It’s on the twelfth floor. The intern got confused by the missing thirteenth floor.”

  “The thirteenth floor isn’t missing! We are on it! What is with everyone today? Tell the intern to take the stairs from now on and count his way up. That way he won’t get confused. Why is an intern handling the mail anyway?”

  “Harry says they’re short-staffed.”

  “Short-staffed? It only takes one person to get in the elevator and bring my bloody mail up.” His voice went up a few octaves. “A monkey could do that job. There are peop
le out there on the streets who’d die to work in a place like…”

  “What?” Alison asked, but she got only the back of Lou’s head because he’d turned around and was looking out his floor-to-ceiling windows at the pavement below, a peculiar expression on his face reflected in the glass.

  She got up and slowly began to walk away. For the first time in the past few weeks, she felt a light relief that their fling, albeit a fumble in the dark, was going no further, because perhaps she’d misjudged him, perhaps there was something wrong with him. She was new to the company and hadn’t quite sussed him out yet. All she knew of him was that he reminded her of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, always seeming late, late, late for a very important date, but managing to get to every appointment just in the nick of time. He was cordial to everybody he met and was successful at his job. Plus, he was handsome and charming and drove a Porsche, and those things she valued more than anything else. Sure, she’d felt a slight twinge of guilt when she had spoken to his wife on the phone, but then it was quickly erased by his wife’s absolute naïveté when it came to her husband’s infidelities. Besides, everybody had a weak spot, and any man could be forgiven if his Achilles’ heel just happened to be Alison.

  “What shoes does Alfred wear?” Lou called out, just before she closed his office door.

  She stepped back inside. “Alfred who?”

  “Berkeley.”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. “Why do you want to know?”

  “For a Christmas present.”

  “Shoes? You want to get Alfred a pair of shoes? But I’ve already ordered the Brown Thomas hampers for everyone, like you asked.”

  “Just find out for me. But don’t make it obvious. Just casually inquire, I want to surprise him.”

  She narrowed her eyes with suspicion. “Sure.”

  “Oh, and that new girl in accounts. What’s her name…Sandra, Sarah?”

  “Deirdre.”

  “Check her shoes, too. Let me know if they’ve got red soles.”

  “They don’t. They’re from Top Shop. Black ankle boots, suede, with watermarks. I bought a pair of them last year. When they were in fashion.” With that, she left.