The Multitude, стр. 22
He scrabbled back to the reassuring reality of his workplace, a relatively reliable environment where midnight visitors didn’t disappear into thin air. Only money did.
Brewster grabbed a loan application from his in basket and tried to focus. The monthly payment was too high. He scribbled a note on the cover page, instructing one of his deal processors to reduce the interest rate.
Before the market crash, he’d kept a plaque on his desk proclaiming greed as good—a proclamation by false gods, as things turned out. He’d recently replaced this with a more practical framed cliché. Never calculate your yield before recovering your principal. A loan structured with unaffordable payments would eventually morph into a problem. In fact, the cabinets just outside his office overflowed with defaults.
He tossed the application into his out basket, noticed a day-old coffee stain on his desk, and grabbed a tissue to wipe it away. He’d recently axed the after-hours janitorial service in yet another round of budget slashing.
Crestview Finance’s losses had taken a heavy toll on what had once been a gleaming building full of carefree, prospering employees. Earlier cutbacks during the prolonged recession had already left the place with outdated phones, clunky laptops, and an Internet service often blinking out at the most inopportune times. Fading decorative plants pined for the care of a florist who no longer came at night to prune and water them. The kitchen fell short of condiments and plastic utensils, daily delivery of the local newspaper bit the dust, 401(k) matching contributions disappeared, and health plan premiums and deductibles spiked upward.
Frantic employees had done their best to embrace cost consciousness, but their attempts to keep the mother ship from listing typically proved more annoying than effective. Brewster had to grope his way out of the john recently when somebody switched the lights off to save power, unaware of his presence in one of the stalls.
He flicked a tiny red mite from his keyboard and looked up at the probable culprit. The dying leaves of a potted palm draped over the edge of his desk. The miniscule spider must have abandoned that happy home in search of a hot spot, spurred by a poorly maintained air conditioning system locked into ice-cube mode for the day. He brushed another mite from his screen but took care not to smash the thing, knowing from past experience the red smear would look just like blood.
With loan processing and pest control out of the way, he grabbed the placeholder card for Rag Thyme from his shirt pocket—proof he hadn’t imagined Carla’s visit. Yet the card didn’t have a phone number, and he’d failed to find any reference to her shop on the Internet.
He reached for the phone to try directory assistance, but it rang before he could lift the receiver from its cradle.
“Brewster!” The front-desk receptionist had lowered her normally perky voice to a hush.
“What’s up, Ronda?”
“There’s a customer here to see you. Igor Tesfaye. He’s waiting on the couch.”
“Very funny.” The employees of Crestview Finance and their customers never set eyes on each other. The company financed over-the-road truckers looking to buy big rigs, and like many lenders in the industry, they conducted their business behind a veil of anonymity, relying on the selling truck dealers to act as intermediaries. Applications came in over the computer, Brewster’s coordinators communicated approvals and declines by email, his loan processors overnighted closing documents to dealer locations for execution, and the truckers had their monthly payments automatically pulled from their bank accounts. Collectors closed the loop by hounding customers over the phone—the one’s whose payments bounced.
Crestview never included a street address in its documents or allowed one to be published in any directory. Borrowers could grow angry for any number of reasons in the lending industry—perceived overcharges, imagined insults by phone collectors, fear over pending repossession—and angry customers sometimes became dangerous. A shooting had been reported at a Joliet consumer-finance company only a few weeks earlier.
A customer such as Igor Tesfaye shouldn’t have had a clue how to find the place without some determined, creepy stalking. He was probably mad as hell about something.
“I’m not joking,” Ronda said. “This guy is waiting for you, and he doesn’t look happy.”
“Um, okay, look. Why don’t you offer coffee and slip into the kitchen to get it? That’ll give you an excuse for getting away from him.”
“What if he doesn’t want any?”
“Then tell him you’re getting some for yourself.”
“Okay…and…?”
“Take your time fixing the coffee until the police get here.”
“Oh. My. God!”
“Don’t get all panicky, Ronda. Just walk away.”
“Fine.”
Brewster called the cops. After being assured by a dispatcher a squad car was on the way, he went looking for Heather, the chain-smoking mother of two he’d hired a year earlier. Always a sucker for the hint of corrupted innocence, he’d lost all objectivity during her job interview when he noticed the sexy tattoo on the side of her neck. A butterfly. She’d proven to be a capable office manager despite being hired for all the wrong reasons, and Brewster had finally reached the point where he could talk to her without stammering.
He found Heather in her office. “We’ve got a visitor,” he said.
She fixed him with a blank look.
“A customer!”
“Oh!” Heather left her desk and hurried past him into the bullpen, emerging from the cluster of cubicles a few moments later with a straggling line of employees in tow. Brewster joined a step behind the company’s beleaguered staff and headed out a side door to wait for the cops.
A dozen of Crestview’s finest soon stood along the side corner of the building and lit up their cigarettes, out of sight and about a hundred yards from the front entrance lobby, where Igor Tesfaye cooled his heels. Heather took a