Chapter VIII: The Proposal Job

May 29th, 1992 – 19:06

The hotel bar was the kind of dark that made secrets look expensive. Walnut paneling. Brass that had forgotten it was meant to shine. A pianist testing a minor key like it owed him money. Andrew sat at the end of the counter with a glass of rye he wasn’t drinking, the cube inside surrendering itself one edge at a time. He checked his cufflinks without looking like he was checking them. Tailor-black suit, throat easy in the collar. Negotiation took posture the way fighting took stance. He’d learned both the hard way. The concierge had placed the private room for him—second floor, corner—because people obliged men who looked inevitable. The contact arrived eight minutes late. Not swagger—hesitation disguised as power. Heavy ring. Laughter that checked the exits. He carried his certainty like it could be pawned. Andrew rose with a smile that turned down just before it reached the eyes. “Mr. Kaszmir,” Andrew said, offering a hand and not caring if he took it. “Upstairs.” They walked together, an accidental mirror in the elevator doors: Kaszmir’s bulk, Andrew’s precision. On two, the hall’s carpet swallowed their steps. The room waited with its chandelier dimmed to an expensive hush. Papers wore their paper-ness. There was a bowl of fruit that was there to remind men they had mouths. Andrew let Kaszmir choose a chair. Choice felt like winning. Andrew sat opposite, angled just enough to watch the door with the corner of his eye. “Your proposal,” Kaszmir said, already bored enough to feel safe. Andrew placed a slim folder on the table and turned it so the contents faced the other man. He did not speak right away. Silence had a weight ratio and Andrew knew how to load it. “This is the route,” he said finally. “These are the intermediaries. This is the timetable. Your current bottleneck—this”—he tapped a line with a knuckle—“becomes my problem, not yours.” “What do I pay for your problems?” “For me,” Andrew said. “Not my problems.” Kaszmir smiled around a toothpick he didn’t have. “And your price?” “You will transfer the licenses to a holding company that does not yet exist,” Andrew said, voice level enough to roll a marble on. “The company will be named within forty‑eight hours. You will re‑price your risk ten points lower. I will absorb it, because I am better at it than you are.” Kaszmir leaned back. “And if I say no?” Andrew’s smile became polite enough to end conversations. “You won’t.” “Tell me why.” “Because when you entered this building,” Andrew said, “my people entered yours.” He let the sentence sit like a lit match on a tablecloth. “No damage. Just presence. Paperweight on your desk that wasn’t there. Window that isn’t left that wide. Phone off the cradle by a fingertip.” Kaszmir made the face men make when they believe and hate themselves for it. His fingers went to the inside pocket of his jacket then stopped halfway, respect arguing with habit. “You would risk war,” he said. “I’d prevent one,” Andrew said. “With the math.” He slid the second sheet forward—a diagram in plain lines and numbers rather than threats. Shorter timelines. Fewer hands. Less rumor. He used his forefinger to move a single marker half an inch and the entire picture changed—risk bled out of it like a color he didn’t want anymore. Kaszmir looked from the page to Andrew and saw a man who did not need to be larger to occupy a room. “How long?” Kaszmir asked. “Sixty days,” Andrew said. “Forty if you learn to answer your phone.” A pause. Then the tiny shrug of a man coming to terms with a world that will not bend to his least disciplined habits. “You don’t smile when you win,” he said. “I smile when it matters,” Andrew said. “Does this matter?” “It will,” Andrew said, and the answer was not a threat. The signatures took the time they always take—deliberate, ceremonial, as though ink could bless anything. They shook hands because customs are scaffolding. Andrew walked him to the elevator and didn’t look back when the doors closed. He collected the folder, the paperweight he’d brought because he liked the click of it, and the quiet he preferred to applause.Mission complete, he could have said. He didn’t. Saying things twice felt like superstition. He returned to the bar. She was where he wanted her to be. Not because he’d asked—because the night had decided it. Dark dress that understood her frame. A glass of something colorless that let the room keep its shadows. She sat like the chair had been made for her, as if posture were a private joke. “Congratulations,” she said without looking up. “You heard a cork pop?” Andrew asked, settling to her left. “I heard a man who doesn’t smile when he wins,” she said, and lifted her glass. “Which makes the victory sound louder.” He turned enough to give her the knifepoint of his profile. “You timed your entrance,” he said. “You timed your exit,” she said. The not‑smile at her mouth made it halfway before it chose caution. He laid a card on the bar; the bartender nodded as if the card had opinion. The pianist found a key the room didn’t hate. They didn’t hurry their talk; rhythm sold more than content. “You work with numbers,” she said. “I work with behavior,” he said. “Numbers tell on it.” She turned her glass, watching the meniscus as if it promised something. “And what do mine tell on?” “That you arrived alone because you are never alone,” he said. “That you sat facing the door because you like yourself alive. And that your drink hasn’t moved in five minutes because you prefer to end the night remembering how it went.” She laughed—quiet, pleased to be seen and wary of being known. “So, behaviorist. Do you always talk like a thesis?” “Only when I’m nervous,” he said, and the lie was gentle enough to be flirting. They let the bar do most of the talking for a while—the clink of glassware, the way people pretended the piano hadn’t been hauled up a service stair. He watched her hands; she watched his watch. On his wrist it looked like it had been inherited from a better man. “Do you dance?” she asked. “I do math,” he said. “Same thing, fewer witnesses,” she said, and led him to a part of the floor that didn’t pretend to be a floor. He took her in at the distance appropriate to strangers determined not to be, and moved in time to the instrument that remembered being a body once. “You were right,” she said. “About what?” “About behaving,” she said. “Men who lose pretend they won. Men who win act like the next room is already waiting for them.” “And you?” he asked. “I keep score,” she said. The song decided it was finished. They stood another beat anyway, the shared breath a truce. “Walk?” she said. They walked. The hotel’s private garden had a path the architect had billed as contemplative and the guests used as a polite way to be less observed. The evening wore a late‑spring temperature and a plane you couldn’t see dragged its voice across the sky. Lamps lit in domes the color of brass remembered. He put his hands in his pockets. She folded her arms and unfolded them again, measuring her own weather. “You’re smiling now,” she said. “It matters now,” he said. “What changed?” “You arrived,” he said. It was not a line. It sounded like math when he said it, and that was the trick—how sincerity could wear a suit. They paused by the low wall where rosemary grew against glass. The city put itself on for them—taxi light, laughter in the wrong place, a goodbye made of two hands. “What’s your name?” he asked, finally permitting himself the question. “You already know,” she said, and in that sentence he understood that she had listened, earlier, when he had not asked. “Say it anyway,” he said. She considered and then spared him both the lie and the dramatic. She told him. The name moved between them like a password that unlocked nothing and everything at once. He stepped closer. She did not step back. He traced a line on the low wall with a finger like a man who believed in straight edges. “I close a lot of rooms,” he said. “Some because they need closing. Some because I can. One because I want to stop opening others.” “Is that your way of complimenting my dress?” she asked, eyes bright, voice easy. “It’s my way of telling you that the next time I sit down to negotiate, I want it to be at a small table where I only sign one thing,” he said. “Contract?” she teased. “Promise,” he said, and the word did not clank like the others. It landed soft and then held. She searched his face the way you do when you know the answer and still want the reveal. He reached into his jacket—not slow enough to be theater, not fast enough to be panic—and produced a small square that had weighed on his ribs all day. He did not kneel. He did not need to. “Marry me,” Andrew said. The garden did what gardens do when asked to witness—kept the air steady, allowed the light to pretend it knew what it was doing. She held his eyes and in them saw the math and the man and the part of him that stood still only when he had someone to stand with. She didn’t make him ask twice. “Yes,” she said. He smiled, and this time it arrived everywhere it needed to. The ring was simple enough to make a cathedral jealous. He slid it home and her breath left her like a held note finally put down. “You’re certain,” she said, softer now. “I am,” he said. “You don’t strike me as a man who builds his life on luck.” “I don’t,” he said. “I build it on decisions. This is mine.” They kissed like people who understood both collateral and yield. When they drew apart, the city had not changed, which felt like a courtesy. “Dinner?” he asked. “Tomorrow,” she said, smoothing a curl at her temple. “Tonight we tell no one.” “And tomorrow?” “We tell no one,” she repeated, smiling. “But we remember the way this felt and we keep behaving as though it’s true.” They walked back through the bar at a pace that suggested everything and confessed nothing. The pianist found a major chord as if he didn’t know better. The bartender set down two fresh glasses they hadn’t ordered. People glanced and then practiced forgetting. In the elevator, their reflections lined up, one on either side of a seam. He took her hand and the doors closed on them as if the building, too, knew how to keep a secret.