"A blast over here, too," demanded the distinguished white-haired gentleman who, to Harriet's dismay, was languidly scratching his privates.
"Hey, babe," shouted a little balding fellow toward the far end of the table.
Harriet worked like a dervish replenishing the empty cups as her boss tried valiantly to begin his speech.
"Gentlemen, our quarterly profit scheme—"
"Where's the frigging coffee?"
"I'm making a fresh pot, sir," came Harriet's meek voice from the doorway.
"The quarterly profits—"
"Screw the profits. Bring on the java."
"Gentlemen—"
"Soak your head, Blake," the balding fellow advised while assiduously picking his nose. The remark was met with loud guffaws from around the table.
Blake took in the scene with calm despair. The twelve men at the table, normally as hurried and brisk as he was, sat lounging and jawing like a bunch of Sunday picnickers, their jackets off, their ties hung in loopy lassos around their necks. Two or three of them were so relaxed, they were actually nodding off.
"Gentlemen..." Blake tried again.
The man from Miami Philanthropic blew a Bronx cheer.
With a sigh of resignation, Blake sat down and sipped at his cold coffee. Golf was rapidly becoming a thing of fantasy. Nine holes, maybe, if he could clear out this bunch of coffee klatchers within a half-hour.
The coffee. It wasn't bad at that. He took another sip. No question about it, that Harriet certainly knew how to start off the morning.
"Damn, that's good," he said after licking the last drop out of the cup with his tongue.
"No shit," the white-haired millionaire said, blowing his nose with a honk into a monogrammed linen handkerchief.
"Where's Harriet?" he yelled. The others took up the chant.
"Coming, sir. Sirs," Harriet squeaked, traveling as fast as she could down the hall with the overflowing coffee server.
The board room was a shambles. Several of the members lay stretched over the mahogany table, snoring loudly. The others swiveled in their chairs, scratching themselves and muttering incoherently. Drexel Blake rose shakily to his feet as she entered and staggered over to her. He grabbed the pot out of her hands and gulped down its contents, to the feeble protests of the other board members.
Then, with a smile on his face, he slumped bonelessly to the floor.
At 10 A.M., the board members were all sound asleep.
At 10:30, Harriet Holmes called in the company nurse, who prescribed aspirin.
At 11:00, Harriet called in the wives of the board members to take their husbands home.
By noon, sitting in a local restaurant with her friend, Ann Adams, Harriet was too exhausted to eat. While Ann stuffed herself with lasagna and burgundy, Harriet downed two cups of black coffee with trembling hands.
"It was the strangest thing I ever saw," Harriet said, recalling the bizarre events of the morning. "All those men scratching and snorting and yelling, and poor Mr. Blake flat on his face on the oriental rug."
"Sounds like somebody had one tee many martoonis," Ann Adams said, tittering as she repeated her favorite phrase.
"But it was the first thing in the morning." Harriet drained her second cup of coffee and collared the waiter for another. When it came, she swigged it down with expertise, wiped her chin savagely with her napkin, and heaved a deep sigh. "Balls," she said resolutely, her eyes glassy.
"Harriet?"
"Thash one fine cup of coffee."
"It's three," Ann Adams corrected. "Better watch it. You'll get the jitters."
Harriet responded with a reverberating belch. "Yeah. Jitters." She stretched out until she was on a diagonal with the table.
"Harriet? Harriet?"
"Jush taking a little resht, hon," Harriet said, sliding woodenly off the seat.
Ann Adams never finished her lunch. After pouring her companion into a taxi, she returned to her desk at the First National Bank and Trust Company, where the chief loan officer lay draped across her "in" basket. She called for one of the bank guards to remove him, but the guard was busy wetting his pants near the tellers' windows. She tried to get to the bank president, but he'd left for a breakfast meeting at 8 A.M. and never returned.
Ann Adams took the rest of the day off.
At home, she meticulously cleared her kitchen table and set upon it three sheets of white paper and two ballpoint pens.
This would have to be reported. It was her duty. She never liked preparing these reports. They reminded her of TV movies she'd seen about Communist Russia, spying on friends and all that. Turning them in to the Thought Police.
But the U.S. government wasn't anything like the Thought Police, she knew. It wasn't as if whoever was getting her reports was throwing anybody into jail or anything like that. In fact, no one seemed to be doing much of anything about the reports.
For twenty years Ann Adams had been receiving monthly checks from the Treasury of the United States of America in exchange for reporting any unusual activities at the bank where she worked; yet nothing whatever had been done about them. When she'd exposed the blonde hussy in the small-business loans department for her shameless carryings-on with one of the junior accountants, the government had not expressed even the slightest interest. Ditto for the ten pager she'd written on her upstairs neighbor who secretly harbored ten cats in her apartment. It wasn't banking business, but anybody who kept ten cats in the city ought to be turned in. Still, the government never lifted a finger.
There was, of course, the incident of the vice-president at First National who embezzled $18,000 before Ann Adams sniffed him out. That was a peculiar episode. She'd gone to the bank president about it, and was told she was mistaken. Then she'd written the report. As usual, no troopers came in to finger the V-P. She doubted seriously if anyone at the Treasury Department even read the reports.
Then, a funny thing happened. Three days after she mailed the report, the crooked V-P turned himself over to the police and returned all the money— 18,000 plus interest. And the bank president retired that very week on grounds of poor health and opened a gas station on Key West. It was a very weird coincidence, and it only went to show that Providence was on the lookout even if the federal government was sitting on its thumbs.
But worthless or not, the government reports were part of Ann Adams's patriotic duty. Also, the monthly checks would help pay the bills if the First National Bank and Trust folded, an occurrence that seemed imminent, considering the state the home office was in.
She organized her thoughts. Harriet Holmes's strange story about the board meeting of International Imports, Harriet's own outlandish behavior at lunch, the bizarre doings at First National— they would all be included in the report. She opened a new can of coffee, prepared a pot, and began to write.
Three hours later, she was still on the first paragraph. She tried to concentrate, but the words on the page kept melting together. She could barely keep her eyes open.
Funny, she thought. Instead of keeping her awake, the six cups of coffee she'd drunk seemed to have the opposite effect. Smacking her lips sleepily, she picked up her pen. But her fingers were out of control, tearing through the paper and printing wobbly block letters on the tabletop.
Something was wrong here, very wrong. Ann Adams picked up the torn sheet with its illegible scrawl and tried to read. Nothing made sense. Not on the page, not in her life. This was more important than the frowzy blonde in small-business loans or the embezzling V-P. More important, even, than her criminal neighbor with the ten cats. Something was happening to her, her body, her mind. And the same thing was happening to people all around her.
Think about it, Ann, she told herself, concentrating. That man who was weaving down the street in front of her when she walked home. The clerk in the grocery store, passed out in the tomato bin. She had passed both instances off as drunkenness, but then there was Harriet. Harriet didn't drink, not even eggnog at Christmas, yet she seemed as pie-eyed as the rest.
And now herself, Ann Adams, employed for thirty years by the First National Bank and Trust, confidant of the U.S. government, seeing double and feeling itchy all over and wanting only to sleep and never get up again.