Chapter 5 - The Reading of the Note
The interior of the Bentley was quiet, save for the low, rhythmic purr of the twelve-cylinder engine.
Harrison picked up the note. The copper wire was cold, stiff, and greasy against his fingers. He uncoiled it slowly, his manicured thumb catching on a rough edge of the metal.
He unfolded the paper.
The blue crayon was smeared in places where damp fingers had pressed into the lines.
Dear Mister, We have $82.16. We need $300 for Mommy’s lungs. We have 400 cans in the alley behind the butcher. We cannot carry them all because the bag rips. If you take the cans you can have the money. Please bring the green bottle to 412 Elm Street Apartment 2B. Mommy is Clara. She is very nice. She works at the laundry when her chest does not hurt. Emma and Lily Wilson (age 5)
Harrison read it once.
He read it twice.
On the third reading, his thumb drifted down to the bottom of the page, where two crude stick figures had been drawn in blue crayon. One had long hair; the other had short hair. Both were holding hands next to a box with wheels that was clearly meant to be his car.
"Sir?" the driver asked again. The bank manager was now standing on the sidewalk in the rain, holding a thick leather folder, waiting for permission to approach. "Mr. Vance? The manager is outside."
Harrison didn't look at the window. "Tell him to leave the papers with the assistant in the morning."
"Sir?"
"Drive," Harrison said. His voice wasn't cold now. It was thin.
"Where to, sir? Home?"
"412 Elm Street."
The driver hesitated, his eyes meeting Harrison’s in the rearview mirror. "Sir... Elm Street is in the lower district. It’s... it’s not safe for the vehicle after dark."
"Drive," Harrison repeated, louder this time.
The heavy car pulled away from the curb, its tires humming smoothly against the wet asphalt.
Harrison turned his head to look out the window. The grand limestone buildings of the financial district quickly gave way to the narrow, gray streets of the lower ward. Here, the streetlights were out, their glass globes broken by rocks. Pawn shops with heavy iron grilles over their display windows sat next to vacant lots filled with weeds and discarded tires.
He looked down at the note again.
$82.16.
He thought about the meeting he had attended that morning at eight o'clock. His vice president of acquisitions had presented a proposal to buy out a regional logistics firm for forty-eight million dollars. They had spent twenty minutes arguing over a rounding error of sixty thousand dollars. Sixty thousand dollars—an amount Harrison spent on fuel and maintenance for his private jet every two months.
Sixty thousand dollars meant nothing to him.
Eighty-two dollars and sixteen cents was everything these two children had in the world. They had counted every penny. They had carried four hundred cans until their plastic bags tore.
And they had offered it all to him—a stranger in a black coat—because they thought three hundred dollars was a sum so vast it required a man with a heavy car to deliver it.
Harrison felt a strange, cold tightness in his throat. It was a sensation he hadn't felt in twenty years, not since his own mother had died in a public ward while he was in his first year at business school, working eighty hours a week to make sure he would never be poor again.
He had built a wall of four billion dollars to make sure he never felt cold, never smelled damp wool, never had to look at a pair of shoes held together by silver duct tape.
And now two five-year-old girls had thrown a piece of copper wire over his wall and hit him directly in the chest.
"We’re on Elm, sir," the driver said, slowing the car down to a crawl. "Number 412 is the brick three-story on the corner. The one with the board over the front door."
Harrison looked out the window.
The building was a decaying remnant of the city’s industrial past. The brickwork was black with soot, the fire escapes rusted into red lace. A single naked bulb burned over the entrance, hovering over three concrete steps where two men in heavy jackets sat drinking beer from brown paper bags.
"Stay in the car," Harrison said, his hand already on the door handle.
"Sir, you can't go in there alone," the driver insisted, reaching for his coat. "Let me come with you."
"Stay in the car, Thomas," Harrison said softly. "And call Dr. Mercer."
May you like
"Dr. Mercer? The chief of pulmonary at St. Jude’s?"
"Tell him to get a mobile team down here in twenty minutes," Harrison said. "Tell him if he isn't here with an oxygen unit and broad-spectrum antibiotics before seven o'clock, I’ll pull the funding for his entire research wing tomorrow morning."
