Oliver was all hale-and-heartiness. “Hey, Wilbur, old buddy. You’re good on time, too, huh? That’s great. Just what we need. Joe, how’s it going? You remember Delia, right?”
“Hello again, Joe.” Delia smiled, revealing teeth that had to have been surgically rebuilt, and displaying her purple eye shadow. She was an accessory to Oliver’s image that went with the manner, the coat, and the suit.
“Let’s see,” Oliver said. “Gimme a screwdriver, gin with bitter lemon and a slice of lime here, and another of whatever that is for Wilbur.”
Corrigan took three fresh glasses down from the overhead rack. Delia rested an elbow on the bar and watched him while Oliver started telling Wilbur about the volume of transactions that the firm had handled that day. A couple that Corrigan had been keeping an eye on by the far wall, arguing since they sat down, were losing their cool, the man getting angrier, the woman’s voice rising, both gesticulating. Healthy expressiveness. The Merlyn Dree fans had started acting out some of his skits. The pink fedoras had latched on to the two girls who found Wilbur glamorous and exciting. Sherri came back with more empties and started loading the washer.
“I’m an associate with Oliver,” Delia told Corrigan. “I don’t know if he mentioned it. Foreign stocks and bonds department. That’s the high-risk end, where you have to know your way around.” She waited, inviting a response, then went on when Corrigan just nodded. “But the money you can make! I’m not even going to say what commission I grossed last quarter. But it bought me a Hampton Riviera with no payments. Getaway cabin in Vermont, Queensland beach scene in winter. . . .”
Corrigan looked at her with a neutral expression and said, “That’s nice.”
Delia’s voice dropped to a more confidential note. “You get to meet all the right contacts, too. I pay less tax than I did five years ago. I practically bank my paycheck and live off the expenses.”
“That’s nice.”
Oliver picked up his and Delia’s drinks and looked around. “Let’s move to a table. There’s one over there. Come on, Jon, I’ll give you some inside secrets about how to screw the most out of clients. If they’ve still got blood left, we’re not doing our job, right?” He winked at Corrigan. “Talk to you later, Joe, okay?”
“Behave yourself, now.”
“Why? Where’s the fun in that?”
Wilbur took up his own glass and his briefcase, and followed the other two away. Sherri, who had been half listening, came up beside Corrigan to ring some cash into the till. Corrigan eyed Oliver and his two companions contemplatively while they seated themselves around the table, then said to Sherri, “Suppose you moved to a small town. And you found there were only two hairdressers: one whose hair was neat, the other a mess. You’d go to the one who looked a mess, wouldn’t you? Because it would be she who did the hair of the other.”
Sherri frowned for a moment, then smiled. “Yeah—true. What brought that on all of a sudden?”
“Oh, those three who were here just now. That fella Wilbur thinks Oliver is going to do him a good turn out of the kindness of his heart. He’s expecting he’ll be treated with fairness and honesty.” Corrigan sighed and shook his head. “Why do people insist on looking for something where it clearly isn’t? And then they blame the world when their hopes don’t materialize.”
“I don’t know how you stand that woman the way you do,” Sherri said. “She’s so gross with her `I’ve got this’ and `I’ve got that’ all the time. But you can just stand there and say `that’s nice’ like you do. You’ll have to teach me how to do it.”
Corrigan smiled wryly. “Oh, that’s an old Irish story,” he said. “You’d have no problem if you knew it.”
“Well, tell me, then,” Sherri invited.
Corrigan glanced around. There were no customers looking for attention just at the moment. As a rule he didn’t bother telling jokes these days. People no longer understood them. Oh, what the hell, he told himself. Give it a try.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Two women are sharing a hospital room in Dublin, you see. One is from Foxrock. That’s south of the city, where all the money is—she’d be one of your Delias. The other’s the complete opposite: bottom end of the social spectrum—what we’d call a roight auld slag.”