Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [3]
I didn’t say anything. Neither did he, so I finally broke the silence. “Then I’m fired,” I said.
“Fired? Of course you’re fired.”
I nodded. “I knew it would have to happen sooner or later. It was too good to last.”
“Fired? What else could you be but fired? Promoted, perhaps? Rewarded with a raise?”
“I’ll miss working here,” I said. To myself more than to Finch.
He stood up. “Oh, we’ll miss having you, Clarke. I don’t know how we’ll get on without you.” He started to chuckle, then broke it off sharply and resumed the head-shaking routine. “Well,” he said, “I’ve had a check drawn. Your salary through today plus two weeks’ severance pay and six days’ sick leave.” He picked up a check and frowned at it. “Of course you weren’t here five years or you would have been participating in the profit-sharing plan. Suppose you’d stowed away for five years? Or forever? The mind boggles. Well, I don’t suppose it will take you long to find something suitable. We’ll give you a good reference, needless to say. We’ve had no complaints about your performance of assigned tasks, have we?”
I laughed politely.
“And in the meantime you can begin collecting unemployment benefits. A comedown from your present salary, but your duties will be essentially the same.”
“Essentially the same.” I took a breath. “Could you tell me how you happened to, uh, find out about me?”
“Your expense account,” he said.
“My expense account?”
“Part of the current austerity program. I had someone going over expense account records for the past half year to see who might have been taking a bit of advantage. And your records immediately attracted attention.”
“I never used my expense account, Mr. Finch.”
“Precisely. An editor who doesn’t charge a minimum of three lunches a week to the company stands out like a sore thumb. Surprising you weren’t detected earlier. Why, you should have been gouging us for an extra twenty-five or thirty dollars a week at the least.”
“It didn’t seem honest,” I said, thoughtfully.
“Honest,” he said. “Well,” he said. “I won’t keep you, Clarke. You’ll want to clean out your desk. If there’s anything in it. And you’ll want to say goodbye to some of your coworkers, if you’ve happened to meet any of them in the course of your stay here. It’s been a pleasure, Clarke. An educational experience.”
We shook hands. I said, “If you should ever decide to reactivate Ronald Rabbit—”
“Oh, we’ll keep you in mind, Clarke. We’ll certainly keep you in mind. Count on it.”
I got back to my own desk and sat at it and thought how I was going to miss it. I had a check in my pocket for almost a thousand dollars. There was another hundred in my wallet and something like fifteen hundred in our joint checking account. In a drawer at the apartment, there were bills running to perhaps a thousand dollars. Fran earned $130 a week before deductions, considerably less after them. Presumably we wouldn’t starve, with her salary added to my unemployment. Not right away, at least.
But what was I going to do?
It was a very weird moment or three, Lisa love. A very weird couple of moments indeed. Larry Clarke, Laurence with a U and Clarke with an E—and wouldn’t it be nice, by the by, to have a name one didn’t have to spell for people. Laurence Clarke himself, a poet whose Muse went into retirement a year and a half ago. Born thirty-two years and ten days ago, a Gemini with Scorpio rising and Moon in Leo. Unemployed, and presumably unemployable. A lad with talents unexciting enough in a booming labor market, and here we were in a labor market that could hardly have been less booming. If the economy got a little worse I could respectably sell apples on street corners, but what would I do in the interim?
Consider this: In all my life