He was cold, and cramped, and hungry, and hurting, and scared. He stood up, bent with cramp and pain, and listened. Nothing. He slid his leather soles across the tile. Stood with his hand on the doorknob. Listened hard. Still nothing. He opened the door. The huge office was dim and silent. Empty. He padded straight across the carpet and stopped near the door out to the reception area. Now he was nearer the elevator banks. He could hear the cars whining up and down inside the shafts. He listened at the door. Nothing. He opened the door. The reception area was dim and deserted. The oak gleamed pale and there were random gleams coming off the brass accents. He could hear the motor running inside a refrigerator in
the kitchen to his right. He could smell cold stale coffee.
The door out to the lobby was locked. It was a big, thick door, probably fire-resistant in line with severe city codes. It was faced in pale oak, and he could see the dull gleam of steel in the gap where it met the frame. He shook the handle, and it didn’t move at all. He stood there for a long time, facing the door, peering out through the tiny wired glass window, thirty feet away from the elevator buttons and freedom. Then he turned back to the counter.
It was chest high, viewed from the front. In back, there was a desktop level, and the chest-high barrier was made up of cubbyholes with office stationery and folders stacked neatly inside. There was a telephone on the desktop part, in front of Tony’s chair. The telephone was a complicated console, with a handset on the left and buttons on the right under a small oblong window. The window was a grey LCD readout that said off. He picked up the handset and heard nothing except the blood hissing in his ear. He pressed random buttons. Nothing. He quartered the console, tracing his finger left-to-right across every button, searching. He found a button marked operate. He pressed it and the little screen changed to enter code. He pressed random numbers and the screen changed back to off.
There were cupboards under the desktop. Little oak doors. They were all locked. He shook each of them in turn and heard little metal tongues striking metal plates. He walked back into Hobie’s office. Walked through the furniture to the desk. There was nothing on the sofas. His clothes were gone. Nothing on the desktop. The desk drawers were locked. It was a solid
desk, expensive, ruined by the gouges from the hook, and the drawer locks felt tight. He squatted down, ridiculous in his underwear, and pulled at the handles. They moved a fraction, then stopped. He saw the trash can, under the desk. It was a brass cylinder, not tall. He tilted it over. His wallet was in there, empty and forlorn. The picture of Marilyn was next to it, face down. The paper was printed over and over on the back: kodak. He reached into the can and picked it up. Turned it over. She smiled out at him. It was a casual head-and-shoulders shot. She was wearing the silk dress. The sexy one, the one she’d had custom-made. She didn’t know he knew she’d had it made. He had been home alone when the store called. He’d told them to call back, and let her believe he thought it was off-the-peg. In the photo, she was wearing it for the first time. She was smiling shyly, her eyes animated with daring, telling him not to go too low with the lens, not down to where the thin silk clung to her breasts. He cradled the picture in his palm and stared at it, and then he placed it back in the can, because he had no pockets.
He stood up urgently and stepped around the leather chair to the wall of windows. Pushed the slats of the blind apart with both hands and looked out. He had to do something. But he was eighty-eight floors up. Nothing to see except the river and New Jersey. No neighbours opposite to gesture urgently at. Nothing at all opposite, until the Appalachians reached Pennsylvania. He let the blinds fall back and paced every inch of the office, every inch of the reception area, and back into the office to do it all over again. Hopeless. He was in a prison. He stood in the centre of the floor, shivering, focusing on nothing.