Sansome Street worked out fine.
A pair of Robert Rauschenberg prints hung in her thirty-ninth-floor office. As intended, the Segno Scriviana desk drew puzzled looks. With deliberate delicacy, the inviting room displayed a view of San Francisco out of towners found enchanting.
But it didn’t do much for the locals.
Everything in her new office seemed louder. It was as if the discord of the city kept drifting up from the wretched streets, swirling skyward, scarring the solitude of what should have been her enclave.
She preferred office voices soft and low, thoughtful and nudged along by a distant purr. What she heard was discord.
Most locals struck her as irrevocably at odds with their city, blasé and all too eager to tell her they wanted to move. Then again, the city could bounce back and they couldn’t see themselves living in Reno or Austin. That would be too much of a change, a plunge they were unprepared to take.
All this predictable and repetitive talk tired her. To listen properly was to step into a pile of boredom as irrelevant as clothing tossed on the floor.
If only they knew of her own plunge.
Three days after the New York investment bank she worked for reneged on her annual bonus, she resigned and went to work for an organization which had been wooing her for more than a year.
Her new employer was a Mexican cartel.
It was a second, more likely a third-tier operation. The cartel was either ignored or disparaged by its superiors. She figured if they stuck to their knitting, her employers could remain insulated and sidestep the incessant warring waged between larger players.
It was based in Veracruz. Two brothers ran the cartel, each straight out of central casting, the younger brother brash, the older one reserved.
Their stock in trade was opioids but changes were afoot. The older brother was shifting investments to the acquisition of American community banks. The younger brother kept stockpiling cash.
The older brother played bridge. The younger one whirled through clubs.
What appealed to her about the job was the deliberate financial distance kept between the two. They maintained separate accounts, different banks in different countries.
She channeled the meandering flow of funds for the younger brother. For the older one she informed investment strategies, mostly directing and reviewing due diligence on possible community bank acquisitions.
It was interesting work on Sansome Street, where bitter winds howled outside her thirty-ninth-floor office.
But time was running out.
She thought she was sighing more. Her breath felt full of gloom. Others might not notice, but some of the quiet triumph in her eyes was missing.
She knew the time was close at hand when the younger brother would log onto his computer and find his accounts drained.
Her overdue dream, soft and ivory, was soon to appear.
