Holly had worked herself into a fine froth over the narrowmindedness of parents, the nosiness of aunts, and, particularly, the wholly unsatisfactory qualities of stepgrandmothers. “I mean, like she’s tried it! Huh! I bet she’s the villain in the book. Miss Skull would be a good name for her all right: she’s deadly. That Mr. Thaxter—but he was a jerk—and Uncle Geegee!”
“Mm,” Matt agreed, looking down at his nails. They needed work. His father had always used a pocket knife for that.
A moment of silence fell between them. Matt looked up, hoping another genial “Mm” and the way he had chuckled at all her anti-Ada remarks had given her to know she had nothing to dread. But Holly’s face was unreadable.
With one sweep of the hand, she swept the cookie crumbs from the table. “Well, I can’t complain,” she lied, standing up. “I guess it’s the season for fruitcakes.”
She marched from the lounge, tassels bouncing, leaving Matt to wonder whether this had been aimed at him or another.
Studying his scratch pad, he scribbled his name—Matthew Benz—and stared at the autograph, wondering whether it would ever be worth anything. A genuine page of Matthew Benz notes…. He glanced up with foreboding as two shadows approached the table, but these ignored him and passed on.
“Thought you’d’ve gone out of town for the winter,” said one to the other. Matt recognized the voice. These two men had grown old in the service of the city, and had now risen so high, and had memories so long, that no on dared risk offending them by suggesting retirement.
“Well, we generally go to Arizona,” said the second man.
“We generally go west.” Matt heard a chair being pulled away from a table.
“We have a…. Arizona’s west.”
“Is it? We generally go west.”
“Oh, well. Most years we go to Arizona. Out west.”
Matt wondered whether he wished both of them had gone west years ago. He decided he could not possibly hold anything against them when there was an apple waiting. Anyhow, there were people he could loathe with better reason. These two were the only headline-makers who ever wandered into the lounge, and whose acquaintance he could boast of. (Though they always mistook him, when they perceived him at all, for the vending machine servicer.)
He reached for the apple, slumping down in the chair a bit. A new shadow fell across the table.
Matt looked up. The shadow was Walter Prince. Matt let go of the apple and sat up again. Walter Prince had never, in his memory, ever set toe inside the lounge.
Vicious little eyes narrowed. “You’ll be going to that party, I suppose,” growled the top man of Down.
“Well, we, yes,” said Matt. “I was, er, planning to.”
Walter Prince nodded. :Good. The Department needs the exposure.” He turned away to clear his throat and looked again at Natt. “Got a ride?”
“Mm, oh, yes.”
Water Prince grunted, and pulled back on the much-occupied guest chair. Sitting down, he set the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other hand, and considered the effect.
“I suppose the Silberwetters will be there,” he noted, giving most of his attention to the fingertips.
“Um,” said Matt, taking a chance on reaching the apple again. His fingers brushed it just as Walter Prince looked up and then looked away, shrugging.
“Everybody’s up for parties, this time of the year. Just when we ought to be concentrating on the work to finish off the calendar year. Makes our A game impossible.”
“Um,” Matt replied. Was this a hit? Would Walter Prince prefer him to skip the party? He looked from his apple to the boss’s face, only to find Walter Prince’s eyes resting on him with impatient expectation.
This always happened. Whenever there was a pause in a conversation and Matt knew it was his turn to say something, he came down with writer’s block. “Um, ah. Well.”
Another furrow appeared between Walter Prince’s eyebrows. That wasn’t going to suffice.
Matt heard brainstorm thunder. Walter Prince had brought up parties, so why not do a little detective work? It wouldn’t do any good, probably, but it would bridge an awkward conversational gap.
“Oh, parties!” He tried to make it sound spontaneous. “Say, did you go to the Thanksgiving party at the Silberwetters’?”
The other man’s head rocked back and his eyes rolled up as if only the bottoms of them would do to gaze at Matt. “No,” he said. “No, no. No time.”
His head came down and, after an unconvincing chuckle, he went on, “I could make time, to be sure. Lots of things I need to make time for. I keep panning to make a day to go around the Department, asking around, just to find out what people think about…things in general. After all, communication is what makes the Department essential to City government.”
This was news to Matt. The way he’d heard it from Walter Prince at least four hundred times, Down had become indispensable due to the excellent filing system set up by Walter Prince’s predecessor, maintained by Walter Prince’s unceasing efforts in spite of the stubborn stupidity and uncooperative attitude of the staff.
“People get to feeling confined, of course, this time of year,” Walter Prince went on. “But even if we have disagreements now and then, communication keeps the Department running smoothly. We know what everyone’s doing, how they feel, and so forth. It’s not for Our Department, all the scheming and backstabbing that goes on in the other divisions. We can talk to each other instead of going over someone’s head to annoy somebody higher up.”
“Ah!” Matt observed. He shifted his apple from one hand to the other.
“That Holly…MacTaggart, you know…she threatens, but she’s just letting off steam, you know. Just sort of a joke. She’s an asset to Our Department, with that sense of humor, a fine worker.” Walter Prince swallowed and put both hands out flat, palm up. “To be sure, she’s young, but that’s to be expected at her age.”
Matt wondered if there was an unobtrusive way to bite into an apple. Walter Prince was apparently not here to deal out commands or reprimands, apparently: he was just concerned about his loaves and fishes.
There ought to be a way to put the boss at ease. After all, if Walter Prince started to consider him as a serious threat, the next budget cut might serve as a signal that certain high-paid positions would need to be terminated, just in self-defense.
“Um.” Matt rubbed one sleeve across the apple. “Really strange, wasn’t it, Mrs. Silberwetter turning up this morning. Why did she come to see us with that mystery author, talking about skulls? Miss Skull, was it?”
Those eyes, never very attractive at their best, rolled back again. Walter Prince cleared his throat. “I had…no idea they were coming.” This came out of the left side of his mouth. A quick nod followed. “Did you?”
“No, I….”
Matt fumbled the apple while passing it hand to hand. Shoving a foot under it averted serious bruising, at least to the apple. He stooped quickly to retrieve it, launching a cascade of pens and pencils from his pocket across the table.
“Well, you’ll want to finish lunch,” said his supervisor, a smoothness in the voice suggesting Matt’s innate grace had been a better testament to his harmlessness than anything he might have said. “Don’t dawdle. We have work to do, parties or not.”
He seemed content as he left the lounge. But as Matt crunched through the apple, their conversation ran on a loop through his brain, each word with a different intonation for every rerun. He hoped that no remark of his could be taken as evidence that he was planning a coup. But could he be sure?
He wondered if there was still time to head for Arizona. Out west.
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