Harry Desnik the president and founder of Desnik Research
strode out of his office towards her, smiling and extending a hand. Claire rose
to her feet and shook the proffered hand firmly; she didn't want to appear
nervous and was glad she'd chosen to wear the sober business suit for the
interview. His jacket had been discarded and he wore an expensive looking shirt
and a silk tie and his full head of white hair was immaculately styled.
"I'm Harry Desnik," he said,
releasing her hand and gestured her towards the open door of his office. She
had to resist the impulse to go and stare through the huge plate glass window
that subsituted for a wall behind his desk and overlooked the river and the
rest of the city. Instead she sat in the chair facing the desk and Resnik took
his own chair so that they were facing each other across the desk.
"You made quite an impression on Hannah
Kulpcheck, my head of Human Rescources, Miss Reinhart," he said. "Do
you prefer, Miss or Ms?"
"Miss or just Claire," she said.
"Ms is neither one thing or the other."
He laughed and nodded in agreement.
"Somehow I can't see you talking to a 'chair' either," he said and
shook his head. "Sometimes I think that the world's gone crazy. Whatever
happened to free speech?" He removed a slim file from his in-tray and
placed it down in front of him and opened it. He looked up, cocked his head to
one side and looking thoughtful he said, "OK, tell me about myself and
what you know about the company."
The question took her by surprise but she
recovered quickly. "You were born in October 1943, in the Bronx. Your
mother was a seamstress and your father worked at the docks. You have two
sisters, Katherine, born in 1948 and Amy who was born in 1951. You left school
at fourteen and..."
"Took a job delivering ice
blocks," he said interrupting her. He nodded in satisfaction.
"Congratulations, Miss Reinhart. You are indeed an extremely competent
researcher and I'm very impressed. Where on earth did you find out so much
detail about my background? I didn't think that it was on record."
"It's not," Claire said. "I wrote to your sister Amy, and
explained that I was applying for the job and asked if she would mind giving me
some background information about you and the company. She rang me and said
she'd like to meet me first and invited me over to her house."
"You've met Amy?"
"We had tea together last week and some
of those biscuits that she bakes herself. She gave me the recipe. I hope you're
not offended." She held her breath and waited for him to explode, to
accuse her of invading his privacy. Instead he pressed the intercom on his desk
and when he looked at her again he was smiling.
"Maria, would you be so good as to bring
in the coffees now,” he said into the intercom, “and some of those special
biscuits of mine." He sat back in his chair and said, "Amy must have
really taken to you, Claire," he said. “That recipe’s a family secret.”
"She was wonderful and made me feel like
family. I like her a lot."
He glanced through her file and then closed
it again. "You're twenty-three, single and have been with your present
firm since leaving college. I see that you were made head of research last year
and your chairman speaks very highly of you. So why do you want to leave them
and move so far away from home, away from your family and friends?"
"I don't have a family," she said,
her voice thickening with the memory. "My parents were killed in a road
accident when I was just a child and my grandmother raised me. She has
Alzheimer’s disease and is in a nursing home now. She doesn't even know who I
am anymore."
"I really am sorry, Claire," he
said. "That's a damned awful disease. It's something I've always been
afraid of getting myself and to be honest I can't think of anything that scares
me more."
"Me neither, but at least she got to
celebrate my twenty-first before she got too ill, but that's not the only
reason I want a change. I've been living with a guy for three years and a
couple of months ago he moved out. He told me that he'd met someone else and
that she was expecting his baby." She gave a wry smile. "It happens
and I'm almost over him now." Liar, she thought, scarcely an hour passed
when she didn't think about Roger and of how much she'd loved him but even that
wasn't the real reason that she wanted out.
In her mind she could feel Oliver Jinks,
her slime-ball of a boss, squeezing past her whenever she was bent over the
copier or accidentally brushing his arm across her breasts. He'd made it
obvious that he expected Claire to let him make out with her as his reward for
giving her the promotion. She couldn't even make a complaint of sexual harassment
because his secretary and PA, Joan Matthews, was always present when the
incidents occurred. Claire had once asked her if she'd be a witness if she made
a sexual harassment complaint. Joan had smiled at her over the top of her
glasses.
"Are you out of your mind? Do you think
I want to end up out of a job too? Get real and go and give him what he wants.
I'll go into the outer office and lock the door so you two won't be
interrupted." She must have noticed the Claire's shocked reaction and she
sighed. "I’m sorry Honey," she said; "it's just the way things
are around here. So you have to let him get it on with you occasionally, so
what? It will keep him happy and you'll be getting a nice fat bonus with your
pay cheque every month. What’s so bad about that? No one has to know, do they?”
There was a knock on the door and an
attractive woman who looked as though she was Spanish and who was a few years
older than Claire, came in. She was carrying a tray on which were three cups of
coffee, cream and a few biscuits. Putting the tray down on the desk she smiled
at Claire.
"He locks these biscuits away in the
safe," she said. "I think he even has them numbered."
Harry laughed. "Claire, this is Maria,
my personal assistant and she knows what's happening with the company better
than I do."
Maria shrugged dramatically and winked at
Claire. "And I don't even get to keep my biscuits in the safe," she
said.
“I’ve asked Maria to sit in with us during
the interview,” Harry said. “It’s against my policy to interview anyone on my
own,”
“With all these sexual harassment cases...”
Maria shrugged. “Things used to be better before we had all this PC shit! A guy
came onto you too strong and you just kneed him in the nuts and that was it!
Not like now.”
“I know what you mean,” Claire said.
The interview had not gone as well as she’d
hoped it would. Both Harry Resnik and Maria had expressed their concern that
she was running away from her problems rather than face up to them. They were
right, she thought as she left Harry’s office, he’d insisted on being called
Harry, and Claire had resigned herself to losing the job to the guy who was the
other person on the shortlist.
A man who was a Pierce Brosman look a like,
the other candidate, was sitting in the outer office. Claire smiled at him but
he simply scowled and ignored her. Shrugging Claire made for the elevator. She felt more confident of herself now and had made one or two decisions of her own. Number one,
Roger was history! She was finished with moping over him and whatever happened
she would leave her present job as soon as she could; and If Oliver Jinks made
another play for her, then politically correct or not, she was going to take
Maria’s tack and ram her knee right into Oliver’s nuts.
