Fiancée of Record

The binder was four inches thick and had been open for so long that the spine had learned the shape of Wren’s left hand.

She sat at the kitchen table in the second-floor flat on Kinnickinnic Avenue with the radiator knocking behind her and sleet ticking against the window over the sink. Tuesday, a little after seven. Her tea had gone cold at four. Six years of the Lakeshore Steelworkers Local 1138 pension fund lay in front of her in tabbed sections: trustee minutes, actuarial valuations, custodial statements with the important pages missing, a newspaper clipping from the week the fund announced it could pay sixty-one cents on the dollar. She had the blue pen in her hand. She had been counting the same column of figures for forty minutes, and it was still two hundred and twelve million dollars short.

It was always two hundred and twelve million. The number did not care how often she checked it.

She heard the street door downstairs, then the stairs, a particular rhythm of someone taking them two at a time while carrying something hot. Wren closed the binder over her pen to keep her place. A habit. Her father had done the same with a screwdriver in his newspaper.

“Open up, Calloway, I am holding your dinner and my dignity and only one of them is warm.”

Wren unlocked the door. Mari came in on a gust of cold and cilantro, dark curls wet, a paper bag in each arm and a cardboard tube wedged under one elbow. Marisol Vega did not so much enter a room as take possession of it. She set the bags on the only clear corner of the table, looked at the binder, looked at Wren, and sighed.

“You have not eaten.”

“I had tea.”

“You had tea at four. I can tell because the bag is still in it.” Mari pulled out containers: pad see ew, a tub of something with lemongrass, the good dumplings from the place on Howell. She handed Wren a fork without asking and sat down with her coat still on. “Eat first. Then I tell you a thing. The thing is a little insane and I need you fed so you don’t hit me.”

“Is it about a man?”

“It is about a man.” Mari’s eyes were bright. “Eat.”

Wren ate. The dumplings were very good. Sleet kept on at the window. Mari talked about nothing for a while, a client in Waukesha whose books were a crime scene, a neighbor’s dog, and Wren let it wash over her the way she let most things wash over her at this hour, with the binder sitting between them like a third person at the table.

Then Mari wiped her fingers, reached for the cardboard tube, and said, “You remember Lena Fairchild?”

“The woman who took you to lunch when you left the Bureau.”

“Silver bob, cheekbones you could cut bread on. She runs Bellwether Discreet Services in Chicago. Very quiet, very expensive. They find people. Nannies for senators, drivers who cannot be subpoenaed, dates for men who are going to be photographed.” Mari pulled the cap off the tube. “Lena and I have a standing arrangement. She sometimes calls when a job has a financial shape. I look at it, I bill her, everybody is happy. Last week she called and did not tell me anything, which is how I knew it was big. Then yesterday she had two glasses of wine and told me everything.”

“Mari.”

“Gideon Hale is hiring a fiancée.”

Wren’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

She was aware of the exact sound the radiator made. She was aware of the dumpling, which she set down on the lid of its container with some care. The name had gone through her like a cold key through a lock she kept oiled for exactly this. Hale. Six years of the name on letterheads, on the donor plaques at the Marcus Center, on the side of a tower in Chicago that she had driven past once, slowly, on the Kennedy, in the rain, without telling anyone.

Then she laughed. It came out short and dry, the laugh of a person being told a joke at a funeral.

“The CEO of Hale Meridian Group,” she said. “Thirty-four years old. Hires a fiancée. From an agency.”

“Quietly. Eight months, from what Lena said. There is something in the family trust, some deadline, she would not say what. A contract. Money. A penthouse.” Mari shrugged, unbothered by the absurdity. “Rich people are weird.”

“Rich people are not that weird. Not in a way that puts it in writing.” Wren pushed back her chair. “Somebody is pulling your leg, or Lena is. Men like Gideon Hale do not advertise for a bride. They have a dozen women who would do it for free.”

“They have a dozen women who would do it for free and then sell it to a magazine.” Mari said it gently. “That is the whole point, Ren. He needs one who will not talk. A professional. Somebody who signs things.”

Wren heard the soft name and felt, for one second, how tired she was.

She laughed again, to cover it, and this time the laugh ran out before it reached the end. Because Mari had not smiled. Mari had set down her chopsticks and was unrolling whatever was in the cardboard tube across the table, pinning one corner with the lemongrass container and the other with the soy sauce, flattening the curling paper with the side of her hand.

A floor plan. Large format, architectural, printed on the good plotter paper Mari kept at her studio in Walker’s Point. Across the top in small square capitals: HALE TOWER, 300 N. FRANKLIN. Levels stacked like a cross-section of a shell. The thirty-eighth floor had a rectangle marked in red pen. Below, in the basement levels, B1 and B2, a long grid of rows with a typed legend.

“Where did you get that?”

“Public building permit files. City of Chicago. Anyone can request them, nobody does.” Mari tapped the red rectangle. “Executive suite. That is where they interview.” She slid her finger down the page, past the lobby and the parking decks, to the sub-basement. “And this is the Meridian Trust archive. Every custodial statement that company has produced since the nineteen sixties, in paper, in a room with a badge reader and one door.”

The sleet had turned to rain. Wren could hear it running in the downspout.

Six years. She had written to the Department of Labor. She had written to two congressmen and a reporter at the Journal Sentinel who still sent her Christmas cards. She had filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act that came back with four hundred pages, three hundred and eighty of them blacked out. She had spent a winter sitting in a rented car outside the Hale Foundation offices on a Saturday hoping a janitor would leave a door propped. She had no subpoena, and no standing to get one. A forensic accountant without books was a surgeon without hands.

She looked at the floor plan for a long time. She looked at the little rectangle marked B2.

“You printed this before you came here,” she said.

“I printed this before I called you.” Mari leaned back and folded her arms, and the brightness in her face turned careful. “I am not saying do it. I am saying I sat in my car outside Lena’s brownstone for twenty minutes after lunch and I could not stop looking at the address. You spent six years trying to get into that building through the front. I am telling you there is a door on the side marked for staff.”

“A fiancée is not staff.”

“A fiancée lives in the penthouse. Goes to the family’s lake house. Sits at their dinners. Gets handed the coffee and the keys.” Mari’s voice stayed low and even. “Nobody checks a fiancée’s bag at the door. Nobody thinks a fiancée can read.”

Wren stood. She walked to the window because it gave her somewhere to put her back. Below, the street was a wet black ribbon with the streetlights laid across it in pieces, and a bus went by with its interior lit and empty. Her own face hung faintly in the glass, dark hair pinned up with the same two pins, a line between her eyebrows that had not been there at twenty-four.

“It is insane,” she said.

“I told you it was insane.”

“It is also illegal, or near enough. I would be lying on a contract. Lying to him. To a man whose family did this to my mother.” Her voice did not shake. She was grateful. “I do not do that, Mari. I audit. I document. I am the one who reads the footnotes.”

“And the footnotes have gotten you what?”

Wren turned. Mari held her eyes without flinching. She had the decency not to look away and the greater decency not to say anything else. She simply reached into her coat, took out a small white rectangle, and laid it on the floor plan, directly over the thirty-eighth floor.

Wren crossed the kitchen and picked it up. Heavy stock, cream, the lettering pressed rather than printed so that her thumb found it before her eyes did. Bellwether Discreet Services. Lena Fairchild, Principal. A Dearborn Street address and one telephone number, nothing else.

The scar on her left thumb, the old paper guillotine scar, lay across the edge of the card like a second signature.

“Lena does not know you are here,” Mari said. “Lena does not know I have mentioned it. If you call that number, you are a stranger with a good résumé and I am not involved.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then you keep the binder.” Mari’s mouth moved, a small crooked thing, tender and not quite a smile. “And you are right, and you are tired, and I will keep bringing dumplings.”

The radiator knocked twice. Somewhere below them a door closed.

Wren looked at the card, and at the binder, and at the little red rectangle on the thirty-eighth floor. She thought of the custodial statements with their missing pages. She thought of her mother’s hands on a kitchen counter, the year the pension letters came. The rain slowed. On the table the floor plan began, very slightly, to curl back into its tube.

She set the card down on the drawing, squared its edges with her fingertip, and did not pick it up again yet.

“It cannot be done,” she said. “Nobody can do it. There is no legal path into that building.”

“No,” said Mari. She slid the card an inch across the paper until it lay against Wren’s hand. “Nobody subpoenas a fiancée.”

The summary ran to nine pages, and Mari had printed it on the cheap paper that smelled of toner.

Wren read it at the kitchen table at midnight with the floor plan pushed to one side and a clean legal pad on her left. She read documents the way other people read faces, looking for the flinch: the place where the drafting went oddly formal, or the defined term appeared once and never again. A clause told you what its author was afraid of. That was the first thing Tom Calloway taught her, reading union contracts at this same table when she was nine, a pencil behind his ear.

“Where did Lena’s person get it?” she asked.

“Somebody at a law firm in the Loop who bills by the quarter hour and talks by the glass of wine. Leaked, summarized, not quoted.” Mari sat cross-legged on the other chair, eating cold lemongrass out of the tub. “So anything in quotation marks is real. Everything else is a paralegal’s idea of what matters.”

There was only one set of quotation marks