Chapter 6 - The Inventory of Bones
By Thursday morning, the city of Chicago had begun to dry out under a thin, pale autumn sun that smelled of burning leaves from the western suburbs.
The 46th floor of Vale Harbor Logistics was as quiet as a church before early mass.
At 7:45 a.m., the private elevator chimed.
The doors opened, and Dominic Vale stepped out, his dark gray cashmere coat unbuttoned, his briefcase in his left hand.
He stopped.
On the small walnut table beside his office door sat a porcelain cup.
It was not the chipped cup from the basement. It was a new piece—heavy white bone china, with a narrow gold rim that caught the morning light from the lake-facing windows.
Beside it, resting on a small square of linen, was an almond biscotti.
Dominic looked at it for five seconds.
Then he turned his head toward the end of the long mahogany corridor that led to the executive suites.
At the far desk, where three junior secretaries usually sat checking their compacts and whispering about the partners, sat Hannah Miller.
She was wearing a navy blue wool cardigan that was three sizes too large for her, her horn-rimmed glasses held together at the left hinge by a tiny brass screw that had been set by the jeweler on Michigan Avenue, and a pair of flat, black leather shoes that made no sound against the carpet.
Her face was still bruised—the yellow-green shadow along her cheekbone looked like an old leaf pressed between the pages of a dictionary—but her spine was straight, her chin up, her fingers moving across the numeric keypad of a terminal with the steady, rhythmic click-clack-click of an old machine gun.
Dominic walked toward the desk.
His boots sank into the deep pile of the runner. He did not speak until he was standing two feet from her elbow.
"You’re not in the basement," he said.
Hannah didn't look up from her screen. Her right index finger hit the Enter key with a dry, authoritative snap.
"The basement is damp, Mr. Vale," she said, her voice completely devoid of deference. "The river surge last night put two inches of water in the lower sump. If the manifests stay down there another week, the auditors from the Interstate Commerce Commission will have to use tweezers to separate the bills of lading."
"Marcus moved your desk," Dominic said.
"Marcus is very strong," she replied, finally turning her head to look at him. "And very persistent. He told me that if I went down those iron stairs again, he would have Lev weld the fire door shut."
Dominic reached out, picked up a printout from the corner of her desk, and scanned the columns of numbers.
"The grain shipments from Duluth?"
"Balanced," she said.
"And Miss Whitmore?"
Hannah’s left eyebrow rose slightly behind her thick lenses. "Miss Whitmore is currently in the ladies' room on the forty-fourth floor, attempting to remove 1982 carbon grease from her forearms with cold cream. I told her that pumice works better, but she seemed... unreceptive to my professional advice."
Dominic set the paper down.
"The coffee," he said.
"Vanilla from Madagascar," she said, her fingers already returning to the keyboard. "Two drops. The honey is from the apiary in Valparaiso. The jar in the executive lounge was clover; clover has too much water in it. It ruins the crema."
Dominic stood there for a long moment, looking down at the gray wool of her shoulder, at the small, neat bun she had pinned at the back of her head, at the quiet, unyielding stubbornness that seemed to have survived two cracked ribs and thirty years of being nobody in a city of eight million people.
"You should have stayed in bed until Monday," he said.
"If I stay in bed, Mr. Vale," she said, her fingers flying across the keys, "who is going to tell you that the fuel surcharges from the Ohio rail yards are forty thousand dollars light?"
Dominic didn't answer.
He reached into his pocket, took out a small brass key—the key to the private archive on the forty-seventh floor where the family kept the ledgers that were never shown to the banks—and laid it on the corner of her blotter, right beside her red pencil.
"What is this?" she asked, her hand pausing.
"That," Dominic said, turning toward his office door, "is the room where we keep the things that smell like vinegar."
Hannah looked at the key.
Then she looked at the back of his heavy, charcoal-coated shoulders as he reached for the brass handle of his suite.
"Mr. Vale?"
He stopped, his hand on the wood. "Yes, Hannah?"
"Your tie is crooked," she said.
Dominic’s fingers went to his throat. He touched the silk, adjusted it half an inch to the left, and stepped into his office without looking back.
May you like
The door clicked shut.
Outside, thirty stories above the river, the Chicago wind hit the heavy glass with a low, mournful howl, but inside the long mahogany hall, the only sound was the steady, unbroken cadence of an accountant who had refused to die, balancing the books of a man who had forgotten how to bleed alone.
