Fatal Reaction

him out of the building.
    Standing in the parking lot, I realized the temperature had dropped sharply since morning and it had started to snow. The sun had already been down for an hour. A grizzled man wearing a hard hat and an enormous down-filled parka that made him look like the Pillsbury Doughboy came and introduced himself as the job foreman from Commonwealth Edison.
    “Security says they’ve got everybody out of the building, so I think we’re ready to rock and roll,” he told Stephen.
    “Just promise me you’ll be finished on Monday morning,” said Stephen.
    “No problem. We’ll have this baby up and running, all juiced up by six A.M.”
    The foreman raised his hand and gave the signal. Stephen looked like he was going to be sick. Then without a sound or any other kind of warning, the lights went out.
     

CHAPTER 23
     
    Mother spent most of Saturday driving me crazy. Actually it was Cheryl who bore the brunt of it. I was busy running a different part of the circus. For the past couple of days I’d been trying to convince Stephen that even if we didn’t need more lawyers, we needed more bodies. Takisawa, I pointed out, was bringing seventeen people to Chicago. For the purposes of “face” I contended that we needed to have at least that number on our side of the table. Whether he was swayed by my arguments or succumbing to last-minute anxiety, Saturday morning he finally agreed to let me pad the numbers for our side.
    Unfortunately that meant that I had to quickly come up with some new faces which I managed to scrape together from Callahan Ross. Included in the group was an associate who’d had some experience dealing with the Japanese. But everyone else was recruited just to fill chairs. Facetiously, Stephen inquired whether we might be better off hiring models in the interest of keeping the billing down.
    I spent the morning briefing the Callahan Ross contingent. It seemed only fair that they have some understanding of what was going on in order to help keep them awake. But my main message to them was that their job was to show up and shut up. What I was looking for was dark suits and closed mouths—something Callahan Ross had been serving up faithfully for over a hundred years.
    Through it all Cheryl kept sidling in with phone messages from Mother. There was some crisis with the flowers, the wine store had delivered the wrong vintage, the pianist who’d originally been hired had sprained a finger shoveling snow, and had I ever heard anything about the one they were sending in his place.... It was not that I did not appreciate these little missives from my mother, but at this point there was nothing I could do about it, and she was making everybody nuts.
    We broke for lunch at twelve-thirty and attacked a deli tray from Jacobs Brothers. I was just raising a pastrami sandwich to my lips when I heard myself being paged. I picked up the conference room phone and was surprised to find Elliott on the other end of the line. There were loud noises in the background like someone was sawing wood or running a vacuum.
    “What’s going on?” I bellowed, once he had identified himself.
    “I’m at Danny’s apartment. The biohazard people are here cleaning up,” he said, shouting over the noise. I put my finger in my free ear in the hopes that it would help. “I need to talk to you.”
    “What about?”
    “Childress.”
    “Can’t you go to a quieter phone?”
    “This was the quietest place I could find. I can’t leave. Can you come here?”
    It made sense that Elliott had to stay. Many of the companies that dispose of biologically active waste recruit their workforce from the ranks of the homeless and the otherwise unemployable. Knowing Elliott, he’d want to make absolutely sure that nothing of value walked out during the cleaning. Still, I didn’t really have time for this today.
    “When will they be done?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “When will they be finished?”
    “They said they’d be here all day.”
    I looked at my watch and decided to just get it over with. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
    Before I left I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin so that I could eat it in the car, but it had started snowing so badly that I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road. I switched on the radio to see if I could catch the weather and was dismayed to learn another six inches were predicted.
    “Please God,” I prayed, “just as long as they don’t close the airport.”
    When I