A glance into the cafeteria, occupied at this hour mostly by people waiting in line at the cappuccino bar, was enough to tell Helen that she probably wouldn’t be eating there all that often. She was now immersed in the world she had taken notice of when she first started job hunting in Manhattan, the world where people her age were nowhere in evidence, where she was, or felt, old enough to be everybody’s mother; she did not see herself sitting at one of those long tables in one of those clusters of skinny women in their twenties, complaining about whatever it was such creatures thought they had to complain about. Only some of them were from Malloy — they shared the building with, among other enterprises, a casting agency and a website devoted to shopping. The notion of cheap food did still have a strong pull; Helen had to keep reminding herself that she had not just a new job but a new salary, and so saving a few bucks on lunch was no longer the imperative it had been just a few weeks ago. Still, she thought she would bring her lunch most days.
“And here we are at your office,” Yvette said suddenly. It was indeed an office — not a cubicle, as she’d feared — and she felt a surge of pride at the sight of her nameplate on the wall outside the door, even though the plate was attached with what looked like Velcro. She just wished she’d been paying better attention to how they’d gotten there. She laid her briefcase carefully atop the empty desk. Pictures, she thought — that’s what people put on their desks. Tomorrow she would bring in a few framed pictures of Sara, if she could figure out which still-sealed box she’d packed them in when they left Rensselaer Valley. “I’ll leave you to it,” Yvette said, still on the threshold. “You have my email if you need anything. Good to have you with us.” Helen smiled her thanks. The tour had lasted nearly an hour, and most of it had been about the aspects of office life that did not involve actual work; not once had Yvette referred to how Helen was expected to use her time when she was not exercising or smoking or eating or taking a Jacuzzi.
Though Mr. Malloy had been clear that this was a full-time position, still Helen had imagined herself, in the weeks before she started there, as something like a consultant, on call for new or longstanding clients in case of some extraordinary public-image emergency; she couldn’t imagine that there would be some crisis to deal with, some nominal fire to put out, forty hours a week. About that she turned out to be mistaken. Back at Harvey Aaron they had sometimes waited around for days with only scutwork to do, until some sort of scandalous event would trigger the process by which she worked and got paid; here, though, as it turned out, the demand for their time was almost more than they could keep up with. Part of it was that the term “crisis” was defined at Malloy in a way that was sometimes so petty it would have seemed comic under less exigent circumstances: her first week on the job, Helen was called in on a Saturday because a Broadway play in which one of their clients had invested had gotten panned in The New York Times the day before. But part of it too was that Malloy was an operation whose true range Helen simply hadn’t understood when she signed on with them. They had thousands of powerful clients all over the world, and at every moment of the day there was at least one of them, paranoid and imperious, who was being perceived, fairly or otherwise, as having done something wrong, someone who saw where the story of his life was headed and wanted to redirect it.
She had a boss, or more strictly speaking a supervisor, a very good-looking young man named Arturo — gay, she was quickly and preemptively informed, as if the notion of a straight Arturo would keep her from being able to concentrate — who cultivated an air of knowing what you were going to say before you had quite finished saying it. Every morning at ten-thirty the Crisis Management group met in the conference room on the fifth floor, a room known among the staff as the Fishtank because of its glass interior walls. There was one of those single-cup coffee machines, and an array of pastries and fruit, though that had usually been thoroughly picked over by the nine-thirty meeting of the Promotions group.
Arturo’s oversight of the individual members of the group was intimidating but loose. The ten-thirty meeting was often the only time all day he spoke to them. Most crucially, though, he was in charge of assigning them to new clients, or to old clients with new crises, and in this area his disregard of Helen’s particular skill set, not to mention the limits of her previous experience, was so perverse she wondered if it was intentional. She had a hard time imagining that he wouldn’t have known she was his own boss’s personal hire. But Mr. Malloy was more of a specter than a presence there — his office, though only three floors above theirs, had its own elevator, so sightings of him were rare — and with a rigorous impartiality Arturo felt free to assign her to the aggrieved Broadway investor, and to an online-gaming company whose IPO valuation was threatened because its CEO had just died, and to other clients who often seemed as puzzled by her anxiety as she was by theirs.
One Friday morning in the Fishtank, Arturo laid out for them the news that feuding board members at a cellphone-chip manufacturer they represented — one of those companies you’ve never heard of that turns out to dominate a whole vital corner of your world — had been secretly taping one another’s conversations, both on the phone and in person, and that the transcripts had been leaked to The Wall Street Journal, which was going through some high-level legal review, even as they spoke, to see what they could safely publish and what they could not. “Ashok will take you through our response,” he said, nodding curtly to another member of the group, a diffident young man (they were all young to her) whom Helen had pegged as decent, despite his nervous adherence to a handful of business school aphorisms.
“It goes without saying that we have to get out in front of this,” Ashok said, and everyone, including Helen, nodded; but it turned out that what he meant by getting out in front of it was that they should mount an all-out attack against The Wall Street Journal, focusing on the morality of profiting by someone else’s criminal act.
“Does that mean we can question whether the tapes themselves are even genuine?” said Shelley, who sat next to Helen at the conference table. Not by accident: Helen always tried, at these meetings, to sit beside either Ashok or Shelley, a rock-bodied young woman who also managed to exude a kind of good-heartedness despite the rapidity of her speech and the fact that she had a rather uncorporate and scary tattoo of someone’s initials on the back of her neck. You couldn’t always see it; it depended on what Shelley was wearing that day.
“Probably not,” Ashok said. “There are dozens of hours of these tapes, from what I’m told. I don’t think we want to engage them on the level of authenticity. Anyway, the first course of action, in this type of situation, is to dirty up the messenger, if that’s possible. And here it seems most definitely possible. Everybody hates Murdoch. Everybody values privacy, and this whole dispute has its root in illegally bugged convos, which are basically stolen goods.”
“What’s on the tapes?” Shelley asked.
Ashok frowned. “See, even just asking that moves the conversation—”
“I know,” Arturo said. “Still, it’s information they should probably have.”