Alex Z brought Shakir a cup of tea after Gage left and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You doing okay?” Alex Z asked.
“I guess.”
“You sort of faded out of the conversation.”
Shakir shrugged. “I’m not sure I’m in the right line of work.”
Alex Z pointed at the bandage on Shakir’s cheek covering the stitches. “Because…”
“No, not because of that. I could’ve just as easily been mugged walking down the street from my old job.”
“You mean you don’t like working for Graham?”
“It’s not that either. He treats everybody like an equal, never talks down, never snaps orders, never is afraid to admit he’s been mistaken about something. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where my boss took me so seriously.”
“Then what?”
“I…” Shakir took a sip of his tea, then held the cup in front of his chest. “I don’t think I can do what he does.”
“What’s that?”
“Hover.”
Alex Z’s eyes fixed on Shakir. “What do you mean, hover?”
“At the Federal Trade Commission, at least in the section I worked in, things tended to be black and white. You could spot telemarketing fraud or false advertising at first sight. And even if you were puzzled by something, you could make a call or do some research, and get it figured out by the end of the day. It was like there was always a solid place to put your foot down. But here it’s not that way.”
“I get you.” Alex Z held his hand out, palm down, and rocked it. “It sometimes seems like Graham floats.” He lowered his arm. “I’ve seen him work on a case, everything going every which way, him in three countries in four days, back home and gone again a week later. And he’s e-mailing and texting and calling me. ‘Can you find out this?’ or ‘Can you find out that?’ Sometimes he spends months and months and months with everything in flux.” Alex grinned and raised his eyes skyward. “Then all of a sudden we’re standing on top of a mountain I didn’t even know we were climbing.”
Alex Z’s grin faded, then he tilted his head toward their work area and asked, “What’s this all about?”
“I guess it’s about how these guys moved money through Cayman Island accounts.”
“Beyond that.”
“Brandon Meyer?”
Alex Z shook his head.
“Charlie Palmer?”
“Closer.”
“Socorro?”
“Almost.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“Tansy and John Porzolkiewski’s sons. The tragedy. Their suffering. That’s what anchors Graham in the world. Once we fight our way through all the words and all the paper and all the money traveling through cyberspace, for Gage that’s what’s real and at the heart of everything we’ve been working on.”
Alex Z looked away for a moment. “I never expected when I started working here that what comes to mind when I think of Graham is that he has a kind of tragic sense. It’s something he carries with him, but it never seems to weigh him down or paralyze him. Maybe it’s because of his mother dying from MS when he was young.” He gestured toward the window facing San Francisco. “Ask Spike and Tansy about his mother’s last years. Graham won’t talk about it, but they may. Spike knows about it firsthand, Tansy knows from old Yaqui patients of his father.” He paused in thought. “Maybe part of it was growing up along the border. In some places it was more like the 1860s than 1960s. His father helpless to save cotton pickers and copper miners dying from lung disease and chemical exposure. Sometimes kids can witness too much, too soon.”
Alex Z noticed a seasick look on Shakir’s face, revealing more than the vertigo of unknowing. “And that’s what’s really bothering you, isn’t it? It isn’t just the uncertainty, it’s the cloud of tragedy that seems to envelop what we’re doing.”
Shakir’s gaze fell on his now-cold cup of tea, then he sighed and nodded as he looked back up.
Alex Z pointed at him and asked, “You ever hear that line from Isak Dinesen, ‘All sorrows can be borne if you can tell a story about them’?”
“Sure. A lot of those new age self-help books use it and I’ve seen it on a bunch of places on the Internet.”
“You know how it ends?”
Shakir shook his head. “That’s all they ever say.”
“Graham told me once when I was trying to work it into a ballad. It goes something like ‘At the end we’ll be privileged to view and review it, and that’s what’s called judgment day.’ ”
Shakir’s eyes widened, then he nodded again and said, “I see why they leave the last part out.” Shakir shook his head, exhaling. “It seems to be saying that not just any story will do, not any life will do. But I’m not sure I can take that kind of pressure. I don’t think I’m tough enough. I’ve struggled for two years looking to find a way to tell my parents the truth about me and Rodrigo.”
“But you will.”
“I think so… I hope so. We’ve been trying to gather up the courage.”
Alex Z looked at Shakir as if at a younger brother.
“Remember this. Lots of people want to work with Graham, but he saw something in you and knew when the time came you’d see it in yourself.”
“But how do you deal with feeling like you’re out to sea?”
“My girlfriend, my music.” Alex Z smiled and tapped the blue-line image of Popeye on his upper arm. “And an occasional tattoo.”