The Bonus

“Do you have to keep any secrets, Martha?” Bob asked.

“What do you mean?” Martha gave him a grimace that she knew could be taken for a grin.

“You know, my girl friend says she smells smoke on my clothes.”

Bob and Martha stood under the “Smoking Area” sign in the building’s parking garage and looked out at the trees that lined the industrial park just north of Boston. The morning sun made them squint.

“I just blame it on you, because you keep giving me cigarettes,” he said chuckling. “Then I distract her by telling her stories about…pompous Karl.”

Martha’s nature was to avoid looking anyone in the eye. As she snuffed her cigarette, showing that she was ready to return to the office upstairs, she said, “He really is nice. He’s just so cerebral.”

“I believe I’ve heard you say that before,” he said to her back. “Wha’d he do? Plant a recording in you?” As she continued to walk away, Bob said, “On that note…” and followed her up the stairs.

Later, at 11:30 Martha was in a trance, making a long study of the deli take-out menu while she chewed on the leftovers she had brought from home. Karl startled her by plopping a multi-bloom flower arrangement on her desk right next to the menu. She smiled and cooed a thank you, but her eyes flashed a negative message, which Karl would not read. She humored him, as Karl, clothed in this best attempt at personality, lectured her on the reasons for exactly this horticultural arrangement. He ended with, “Have a nice lunch,” and quickly strutted hen-like into his office, shutting the door behind him.

Having grown up in north central Kansas, Martha recalled the phrase the native Kansans would use to describe Karl’s pelvis-forward strut: “He’s got a cob up his ass.” And she knew he was an ass. She could see that Karl was completely oblivious to the irritation he caused twenty-eight other people in the brokerage office with the continual noise of his rapid-fire foot-shuffle up and down the halls. His inability to understand humor endeared him even less. Because she worked for several brokers, Martha could see how Karl attempted to blind her to his faults with weekly flower arrangements, thereby hoping to attain more than his share of her time. She had to admit to herself it worked pretty well. But his scorn for the rest of the crowd was apparent when he used Kleenex to open his office door. And he kept that door shut day and night to fend off the germs. The few invisible diseases that might have leapt in at the opening of his door were quickly gobbled up by the HEPA filter in the large air-purifying unit planted in the middle of his office floor.

His tall, thin stature, pure Aryan features, wire-rimmed glasses, blond hair, extreme self-discipline, and his discrete, right-wing political views reinforced Martha’s belief that he would have thrived under Hitler. Although most stockbrokers are independent and self-reliant by nature, Martha found Karl’s secretiveness exceptional, if not unique. His aloofness grew with his financial success…reaped by cultivating rich, eccentric widows at teas in the Ritz Carlton Boston. He had sworn Martha to secrecy about what he was doing, as if someone would steal his idea. As he shuffled down the hall, Karl would only greet those whom he felt could contribute to his success...actively snubbing the rest.

While on the phone in his flawlessly arranged, diploma-lined office, Karl would sit with only one piece of seemingly unused paper at a time on an uncluttered desk. The fastidiously sharpened pencil arrangements indicated little use. Martha concluded that perhaps he was so brilliant that all his notes were in his head… where no one could steal them.

Yes, she thought he was an ass, but what did she win by talking with anyone about it? Martha discovered long ago that, when she kept silent, others felt they needed to fill the void...and she learned a lot. Maybe it was a farmer thing, but one thing she had learned from her father was “keep to yourself,” and she found that keeping to herself also increased her work capacity. Not only did she not gossip, but neither did she offer any of her private life to her peers in the coffee/copy room. Martha had learned that her silence seemed to put her at a controlling advantage to others. As opposed to all other staff, she even fought to keep her birthday uncelebrated in the office. She knew her general appearance was haute-Wal-Mart and that her frumpy hair-do didn’t match the more fashionable women brokers. But they had money. It was amazing what money could do. With a good hairdresser, she was sure her mousy, thin hair could be reverted to health. Some tastefully applied, luxurious makeup would make her sexy instead of “Kansas wholesome,” as some called her. Or they said, “Hey, Dorothy, where’s Toto?” Jesus, it churned her insides.

How often she had stood in front of the mirror and said to herself, “Come on, you are better than that!” But, in fact, she felt that she had let herself go, gaining her pear shape in the last two years, since she had found and moved in with a boy friend. With her children in their twenties and out of the nest, she was trying to devise a way she could make a life for herself with someone. As a food mart manager, her boy friend hardly earned enough. He was kind to her, but he had a dark side matching her own…which strangely excited her.

“Now look, Martha, it’s just an old man carrying the money down the back stairs. We don’t even have to hurt him. Just scare him enough and then run out the back through the loading ramp.”

Martha said, “And how do you propose to not be recognized by anyone who just happens to be behind the building? They’re not going to take note of some crazy running out the back door carrying a sack…a heavy one, at that?”

Even though she never took him seriously, she helped him keep perfecting his plan for a robbery. When they were at home together planning and plotting, they not only smoked up the room, but also many nights drank themselves into a stupor. In the no-smoking office, she felt anyone and everyone who was near her must smell her habits, but no one could say anything as long as she continued to be the most efficient.

Being most efficient wasn’t so tough. Martha knew that the young girls who normally took these jobs could have earned more at Burger King, but they wanted the status. Status lost its glamour soon enough, which caused a turnover in staff so fast that Martha was the most senior assistant within five years. In fact, Martha was the guru of the staff. Being the only assistant in the office bright enough to get a broker’s license made her even more valuable, and required her to be the only sales assistant at the weekly broker sales meetings. The only thing that kept Martha above water financially was that her brokers increased their bonus payments to her each year. But she never felt too secure about the bonuses. As she put it to her boy friend, “My dad would have said, if any of the brokers farts instead of paying me, I’m left with the stink.”

Because she was also Bob’s shared assistant and smoking confidant, Martha had learned more about Bob than she cared to know. Bob was somewhat newer to the office than Karl. Bob, in all his fifty-two years, had never met anyone he disliked so much instantaneously as Karl. Their personalities were at polar ends of life. In Vietnam, Bob had been a helicopter pilot. He continued piloting part time in the National Guard, until he became the “old man,” discovering that there was no further excitement as the new, no-war-experience pilots disappointed him with their lack of knowledge.

“Hell,” he had said, “I found I was putting the bird right over the tree tops just to scare the crew. Then I woke up one morning in a sweat and said ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” He retired. But he admitted to Martha that he missed his flying “big time.”

Martha presumed that Bob’s “yachty” hair, youthfulness, and excruciating good looks attracted the twenty-year younger female crewman, who developed into his roommate, and more recently into his fiancée. Further, Martha figured that the nubile’s inheritance and otherwise-undemanding life made Bob her window to something she couldn’t experience. He was probably her trophy-catch whom she loved to swaddle in campy nautical clothes. Martha could see that Bob’s age and poor finances allowed him to tolerate his young thing’s aggressive and daily criticism, as much as he complained about it to Martha. For the time being, his cynicism and quick tongue were reserved for others.

“Hey, Martha, you got a minute?” Bob’s voice ground at her headache through her intercom. With Martha’s watch showing twelve-noon, Martha knew this had to be a panic meeting about the approaching seminar. Bob, along with his friend Pudgy John, never missed a lunch. And sure enough, just as she sat down in Bob’s office, Pudgy John, sucking on his ever-present lollipop, stuck in his head and, with no hesitation, interrupted.

“Tell me, Bob. Do you have a million-dollar prospect coming in for lunch so that I don’t have to invite you to the deli.”

Bob didn’t look away from his computer screen flashing colored rows of stock quotes. “Yes, I do. They asked me to go to the Eastern Yacht Club with them, but since you asked, I will cancel that appointment just to be with you.”

Pudgy John pulled the lollipop out of his mouth and said, “Hurry up. I’m hungry.”

"How can you possibly be hungry when you suck on those things all day?” Bob slammed his pen down in mock disgust and rose to leave. “Come on, Martha, I’ll buy you lunch. I’m sure I owe you a ton for cigarettes. Can you tolerate the suspense of delaying our office tryst ‘til after our faces are fed?”

Martha lowered her eyes and nodded. A free lunch could make any headache go away as far as she was concerned. And it was about time. As they left the reception, she caught Pudgy John wrinkling his nose upon seeing Karl, who was standing erect and looking down at Martha’s desk. As the three took the elevator down two floors to the exit, Pudgy John ruminated, “Hey, did you notice Karl didn’t come to the last sales meeting?”

“Maybe he was out,” Bob responded. “Was he out, Martha?”

Before she could answer, Pudgy John said, “You slept as usual. He walked right by the room several times. Didn’t you see the look on our magnificent manager’s face? Karl isn’t in the big leagues with the others who don’t have to attend…yet. The asshole’s supposed to be there sitting obediently at the table with the rest of us peons.”

They had moved outdoors onto the sidewalk of the office park’s suburban roadway. As the Fall breezes shifted with the ocean and land temperature differences and rustled in the tree branches that lined the parkway, Bob, the consummate sailor, commented, “Man, oh, man. It’s September, the best racing month of the year, and I have to think about an asshole.”

Pudgy John went on. “I think it was your remark at the last meeting that did it.”

“Hey, I can’t suffer kiss asses,” Bob said. “To begin with, our for-lack-of-a-better-word-manager had asked for constructive criticism, and then Speed-Shuffle-Karl just raves about what a great manager Stubby-Brain is. You know damn well everybody else thought the same thing I did. I’m the only one who’s got the guts to put the asshole in place.”

“Okay, he’s a dork,” said Pudgy John. “I’m just saying Karl’s pissed and doesn’t like our company. And he’s willing to stand up to Stubby-Brain’s wrath.”

“Do you think I give a shit?” Bob asked. “He doesn’t like being with us mortals anyway.” Bob went back to studying the air currents. Martha, not feeling part of the conversation, took her lunch to go.

Back in the office, the lunch exodus left Martha and Karl alone. The office was standard brokerage plush with small private offices for the brokers surrounding central pools of secretarial desks. The dark wood and deep pile, money-green carpet were to convey wealth while, at the same time, dampening sound and allowing for privacy. Clients needed the feel of confidentiality.

She spread out her lunch on her desk with great anticipation. Having to always brown-bag it otherwise, she felt a rare deli lunch needed to be consumed slowly. She would even savor the pickle. Then Martha cringed at the sound of Karl’s office door. Without greeting, Karl stepped up to her desk and said in a whisper tone, “I’ve got something for your eyes only.” Then he started giving Martha an off-hand lecture on the effects of the Euro on the dollar. Martha tried to look interested. She wished she had stayed at the deli.

She was being handed a confidence. That wouldn’t require much effort. She had been keeping secrets a long time. Daytime TV scandal shows would have paid good money for Martha’s story. Her mother had died at Martha’s birth. It may have made her grow up faster, but in growing up, she had no role model for how to be with a man. She was a sophomore at Kansas State when she dropped out because her father’s farm failed and he committed suicide gruesomely in the baler to make it look like an accident. She married an older man who made her feel safe with his money, and the two moved East for his job. But, after six years, the job failed along with the marriage and she was left to raise two young boys. When she felt the boys were old enough and because she loved English literature and history, she enrolled in night classes. But she had to drop out and pay a lawyer when her boys were caught shoplifting. She never went back.

Besides, she had met somebody who grabbed her heart and then tore it out. Out of embarrassment and for fear of breaking into tears, she told no one about her second husband smooth-talking her insecure heart, scamming her into signing over everything she owned, and then forcing her to move into a neighbor’s house with her two boys…all within a year. Before she could take him to court, the ex died suddenly of heart failure. She was left with nothing except a scar on her soul and a dark, vengeful determination to make up for her mistake.

As he glanced around, Karl continued, “And with the Euro losing its current value against the dollar, bond prices are bound to rise caused by the demand from Germany and France for safety.” He took a pause, seemingly recognizing that Martha’s eyes had glazed over. He must have noticed the cigarette smell of her clothes because he tried not to breathe. In a low voice, more nasal than usual, he said, “I just want you to understand the workings of the market. You are going to find it important and I think you will understand why, once you have read my note here.” He handed Martha an envelope. “As you know, it is annual bonus time. Rather than give you the normal annual monetary compensation, I’ve written some out-of-the-ordinary, meritorious information about the possible future. I’ve noticed that you are the only trustworthy person around here. Just keep it undisclosed. I don’t know when, if ever, it may come to fruition. Things may just stay status quo. I don’t know. I’m sure you will appreciate what I am doing for you. For now, it is imperative that you tell no one, okay?”

Feeling apprehensive and hugely puzzled, Martha said, “Sure.”

“I trust you,” he said and strode off in his normal hurry, exhaling and inhaling deeply once he was a few feet away from her in his office.

She sat staring at the envelope while she reveled in her lunch. She measured whether she could wait until she got home to open and read it. It amazed her that keeping to herself supposedly made her “trustworthy.”

At the next Monday AM sales meeting, the manager felt something had to be said. “I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but Karl is furious.” Looking right past the other eight in the room at Pudgy John and Bob, the manager said, “Please, guys, leave Karl alone.”

Martha watched as the others in the room looked from one to the other in puzzlement. The air in the room was always stuffy from poor ventilation, but it became stiflingly apparent as the brokers waited in silence.

The manager continued his opening statement. “You know Karl is a little strange about clean. Well, one of you…somebody, put gooey, sticky stuff on his office door-handle.”

A chuckle went around the room. Bob said with a big grin, “You mean his Kleenex got all stuck?” More chuckles.

Martha noticed that the manager couldn’t help but smile as he said, “Okay, enough.” But controlling the room, he said, “Let’s get on with business.” The subject was changed with the obligatory operational and legal announcements, boring everyone in the room. As Martha doodled on her pad, she drew a bunch of smiley-faces and a knife sticking in Karl’s back.

A week later, it seemed like an indoor tornado blew past Martha through the hall as Karl made a beeline for the manager’s office while emoting, “Enough’s enough! Damnit! Somebody’s going to pay!”

It didn’t take long before Bob got a call on the intercom, interrupting his seminar preparation with Martha, requesting his presence in the manager’s office. After slowly and deliberately pressing the computer print button to get a copy of the text he wanted Martha to duplicate, Bob frowned and said, “Follow me in. You need to witness this.” He strolled down three doors to the manager’s office with Martha five feet behind.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?” the manager asked.

Martha watched Bob ignore the question, shift his weight from his left foot to his right, and stand silently with his hands in his pockets. Martha, a little nervous, leaned on the doorframe for support.

Ignoring Martha, the manager said, “Listen, Bob, I don’t know who did it, but you might.” He paused.

“What’s that?” Bob asked.

“Well, you see, Karl came tearing in here a few minutes ago and said somebody has been in his office and messed things up.”

Bob smiled and asked incredulously, “You’re serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Again, his door handle was sticky, but somebody also opened one of his desk drawers and jumbled up his stuff.”

“Oh, dear,” Bob said with great sarcasm.

The manager glared at Bob and said, “Listen, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but the guy’s a neat freak and you know it. I think we should just leave him alone.”

“We?” said Bob, raising both eyebrows. “Is that French?”

The manager looked Bob in the eye and said, “I think you might know who. I don’t know. But, if you do, tell ‘em to stop. It’s causing unnecessary disruption in the office.” He paused and, looking at Martha, said, “See if you can get Karl to cool it. Now get out of here, both of you. Get to work.”

Bob didn’t seem sure what to say, so he shook his head, turned, and brushed past Martha, scratching the back of his head without messing up his hair. Martha felt like a naughty little sister tagging along.

In the week that followed, Bob could never get Martha to join him in a smoke. She had to keep herself busy. So she would just hand him a cigarette from her purse and make an excuse. Once Bob told her that, since nobody else in the office smoked, “maybe I should get a patch on my ass and feel like an inner tube.”

When Karl produced his weekly flower arrangement in the middle of Monday morning, he did his attempted smile and said, “How are you, Martha? How was your weekend?”
Martha actually shuddered at the fraudulent grind of his words. “Oh, fine.”

“Martha, you sit right in front of my office. Do you have any clue as to whom it could be that is entering my office?” Before Martha could answer, he continued. “No, of course nobody would mess with my office while your were watching, but you just can’t believe how this messes me up. It doesn’t make me want to stay here and contribute to the office. It is so low class. I just can’t work under these circumstances. You wouldn’t think there were such people in this office. Do you have any suspicions?”

She gave him a short glance to read his eyes. They were not accusatory. “No, Karl, there’s no one I could imagine.” As coolly as possible, she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

That same week passed without further incident and without Karl at the next Monday sales meeting. When the manager exclaimed that he was sorry “some people couldn’t take time to show up,” Bob couldn’t help himself and said, “Did you ever notice how much less bullshit flies around the room?” A couple of guffaws followed, but there wasn’t much of a laugh since most of the others in the room, Martha could tell, weren’t sure they should. Martha’s doodling intensified. There was no further comment and the meeting proceeded normally through the hour.

On Friday, the mutual fund seminar hosted by Bob and Putnam Investments was being held at lunchtime. Martha and the switchboard operator had worked all morning setting up extra tables for food and robbing the offices of chairs to increase the seating in the conference room. When the switchboard operator remarked to Martha, “My, oh, my. I’ve never seen you so tense before a seminar,” Martha tried harder to calm herself.

“I’m fine,” she said.

The food was catered in and attractively laid out buffet style. The thirty-some expected attendees had begun to arrive, most of whom were elderly expert seminar-goers looking for that free lunch, which isn’t supposed to exist. Because the conference room was too small, the crowd flowed out into the reception area. The guests spoke in low, muffled tones to each other, while Bob loudly oozed greetings of cheerful enthusiasm around the room. The rest of the brokers and staff, who gained nothing from this seminar, stayed politely away at their desks and in their offices, so as to give room to Bob and to avoid the general distraction.

Martha noticed that Karl came in about 11:30, after most of the crowd had arrived. He had scuttled down the back hall to his office, she supposed, in order to avoid the bad air of crowded human exhalation. Then suddenly above the general din of the crowd, a squeal was heard in the direction of Karl’s office. The squeal was described later by Bob as sounding much like a pig he had seen slaughtered in Vietnam. Then a loud crash of a door slam was heard quite clearly by the hushed crowd. The thud of quick footsteps caught everyone’s attention. As Karl triple-stepped into the crowd, he stopped, his eyes and skin color broadcasting his anger. He said in his most disdainful, quaking voice, “You don’t want to deal with this company. You should go home. It is not a good place to be.” He then shoved his way through the crowd into the manager’s office.

With all eyes in the direction of Karl’s exit, twenty-six people, with plastic drink cups and half-eaten tuna sandwiches, stood in silence. Bob, making a recovery, said loudly, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry about the interruption. You would never guess the strange people that wander into this office. I’m not sure who that was, but I’m sure we will find out and we can tell you later. In the meantime, we can get started if you care to move in here.” He made animated gestures herding them into the conference room.

Karl’s loud voice in the manager’s office and the traffic of the curious office personnel streaming down the hall past the conference room distracted the audience. Someone had placed human excrement on top of Karl’s HEPA filter, and some would guess, by the “used” paper from Karl’s desk strewn on the floor, that someone had done “it” right there. Once Karl had opened the door, the odor had been horrendous. If fact, everyone evacuated that end of the office and, with the approval of the manager, went home for the afternoon. Martha felt tension in every muscle and was glad to get out of there.

The meeting called on the following Monday morning was fully attended by all nineteen brokers. Even the other four brokers’ assistants and four staff members were invited to this meeting. A clarification was expected. Martha acted calm and scribbled on her pad as she took it all in. The casual sports banter, which usually preceded the meeting agenda, was missing. Instead, each person sat in thought as a shelter from the tension of the awaited tidings. Because of the rising temperature and stale air in the room, Bob couldn’t keep quiet and said, “It smells like jet exhaust in here.” But no one responded.

Martha watched everyone focus on the manager’s facial expression as he entered the room. He looked around the room, glared at Bob, and only paused for a moment. “Karl has left us,” the manager announced. “He has become the junior analyst for the Fidelity European fund group. I don’t know how he managed to fix this job so fast; he must have had it in his back pocket from before. I don’t know which of you was doing this to Karl, but now it is academic. He’s gone, and perhaps he got his revenge. Karl had built quite an impressive book of clients in the short period he was with us, which normally we would have split up among you brokers here.” He paused. “However, at his request, and I could not talk him out of this, he has given all his clients over to Martha, his assistant.”

With raised eyebrows, all eyes turned on Martha. She looked down at the conference table without acknowledging she had heard a word. Can they see my heart pumping? The manager continued, “Since she is licensed and knows all the clients quite well, Karl felt that it would give her a new start in life and be best for his clients. I would ask you all to congratulate Martha and to give her all the assistance you can.” Martha grimaced a look around the room. There were a few congratulatory comments from around the room, but most of the voices did not sound elated. “We’ll have to look at how we need to restructure the office, but I think that is enough news for the day,” said the manager. “Let’s get out there and bring in the business. The distraction is over.”

In stunned, disappointed amazement, the brokers trickled out of the conference room, some gathering in offices to discuss the developments, but none with any answers.
Martha, feeling tense, needed to get out and was just exiting to the back hall when she heard Pudgy John say in Bob’s office, “I can’t believe Martha got all of his clients. That’s not the way things work. And we still don’t know who was doing that to Karl.”

Bob said, “Who gives a shit?”

Pudgy John said, “Somebody did.” He strained a laugh at the play on words, but with nothing left to say, Pudgy John moved on to his office.

Martha quickly descended the stairs to the parking garage. She reached in her pocket and took out Karl’s letter. She re-read the note telling her that, if ever Karl left the business, he would leave his clients to her. As she put the note back in her pocket, she realized that she had forgotten her purse upstairs with both her flask and her cigarettes. She looked west over the trees, shading her eyes with her hands, and for the first time in years, she broke out into a smile.