“No? Would the American authorities believe that? The Swiss?” He shook his head sadly. “You know, some people think all Arabs are terrorists.” He lifted his gaze and stared directly at Majid. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

Then he picked up the photo and slid it back into his pocket.

Partners II

PARTNERS II

Catherine supposed it was true what people said. How pleasant your job was depended on how good your boss was. Her new boss, newly transferred to Geneva, was worlds away from Barnstable. He was sixty years old and a native of East Tennessee with a trace of its warm drawl still in his voice, and he generally dealt with Catherine the same as if she’d been a man, or an animate lump of clay. On an occasion when he’d summoned her into his office and closed the door behind her and she started to tense up for whatever was about to come, what did come was his polite request to be able to call on her to give career advice to his college student daughter who was thinking of going into finance, since she (Catherine) was a woman and might therefore have insights on women in the field. So he had taken notice of her gender after all, but that was as far as it went. She supposed it was also true what people said about that—that fathers of daughters treated female colleagues differently, better.

It also didn’t hurt that she had been on a roll lately. The Central Asian mining warrants had paid off, and she’d uncovered a successful play in the retail sector. The stock prices of major retailers, at least the ones that had survived internet shopping and pandemics and the resulting bankruptcies that consumed half the field, had recovered to appropriate levels. So there was no upside in equities, but Catherine had found one in debt. Through tedious old-fashioned research, she identified a tranche of corporate bonds that was, purely by chance, heavy in retail. Its price had plunged when retail did, yet had not recovered when the stocks did. She moved into it for her clients and the firm and, when it caught up to where it should be, was rewarded with a handsome gain, and a bonus.

This (and the preceding mind-numbing research) had been almost enough to take her mind off Pleski and his threats and his suitcase of cash. The latter had been handily dealt with by her little platoon of boyfriends (another situation she preferred not to think about), so when she got word that he had come by the office and was waiting to see her in the fishbowl, she headed downstairs thinking he had come to appeal once more to remain her client (no way) and, failing that, a greasy but welcome farewell.