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July 13, 1977
'Damn, it doesn't get any better than this,' Gary Adams thought as he leaned back on the large oversized office chair and adjusted his legs on the desk.
Perched on the center of the desk in front of the sandy haired nineteen-year-old was a thirteen-inch portable black and white television, currently tuned to channel seven and one of his favorite shows, 'Charlie's Angels.' An hour from now, he'd switch over to channel four and another of his favorites, 'Police Woman.' The picture on the screen was crystal clear, a lot better than he got on the larger and much more expensive twenty-one-inch console which sat in the living room of his family's house in Brooklyn. The reason for the disparity could be found right over his shoulder where, if he cared to glance out the long row of windows, he would see the Empire State Building less than a half mile away. The line-of-sight transmission from the now second tallest building in New York was an added bonus to his job. He'd read that they were planning to move the transmitters down to the new World Trade Center in Battery Park, but that was at least a year away, and Gary barely thought about next month, much less next year.
Seven months ago, when he'd dropped out of City College after only a single semester, his father had given him an ultimatum. If he wasn't going to continue his education, he sure as hell was going to work. He readily agreed, thinking he could string his father along for a few months and just give the appearance of looking for a job. But then the old man threw him an unexpected curve and said that one of his bar buddies had already arranged an interview for Gary at the Midtown investment firm where he worked, and that he should be there tomorrow at ten, wearing his Sunday best.
Gary dared not blow off the interview because his father would know it before the day was over. Still, he was certain that it wouldn't be too hard to convince whoever was giving it that he wasn't what they were looking for. After all, he'd only had a C average in high school and even that was due more to athletic accomplishments than academic ones. He wasn't stupid or anything, he just couldn't bring himself to apply his efforts to anything other than sports.
He showed up barely five minutes before ten, convinced that he'd be out of there in time to catch an early matinee at one of the Times Square theatres. The interviewer turned out to be some old lady that, much to his delight, appeared to disapprove of him after only a few minutes. The smile on his face quickly disappeared, however, when the gray-haired woman took a second look at his application and saw the name of his father's drinking buddy under references. Before he knew what had hit him, Gary was being directed down to human resources to fill out a few more forms and told that he'd be starting the following Monday.
The fix had been in because someone somewhere had owed his dad's buddy a favor. If all Gary could do was read and write his own name, he'd have still passed the interview. His dismay grew when he learned that while the hours weren't exactly the graveyard shift, being six to two, they were close enough to put a serious crimp in his social life. He was screwed, or so he thought.
By the time he'd been at the company a few weeks, he actually came to love his new job. True, the hours were a bit of a drawback as far as his love life went, but they turned out to have some benefits that almost made up for that.
The bulk of his job concerned separating reams of computer printouts that came in after hours from an offsite accounting firm. They would come in cardboard boxes, which he would set up in a machine that removed the carbon paper from in between the two sheets. The bottom copies would be put aside to serve as backups if needed, then the semi-perforated originals would be run through a second machine that broke them down into individual pages, which he would collate and deliver to the desks of their respective account managers. Finally, he would toss out the backups from the previous day.
On a busy night, assuming that the boxes were delivered by six, he was usually done by eight. The rest of his night consisted of filling any overnight supply requests and periodically checking the teletype which linked the New York office with the one in London, delivering any overnight telexes to the desks of the addresses. With what seemed like half the company on mid-summer vacation, Gary actually had to slow down his efforts so as not to run out of things to do before the managerial staff went home for the day, leaving him the rest of the night to lay back and relax.
'And for all this they're paying me two fifty an hour,' Gary thought as, once a commercial came on, he got up to check the teletype.
The bell on the machine had only rung once, signifying that it was a low-level communication, one that could simply be left on someone's desk. In his time with the company, Gary had never heard the bell go off more than three times, and that was when people were still in the office. He'd been told that if it ever rang that many times when he was the only one there, he was to call the on-call manager immediately and read it to him.
The commercial over, Gary tossed the jagged-edged sheet of paper into the wire basket where he'd left the two previous missives. He'd deliver them all at once at the end of his shift, just before the early morning clerk came in. During his brief indoctrination by that self-same clerk, Gary had been told he should immediately deliver the missives, even though there wasn't another soul in the place. He'd just nodded his head, thinking that he wasn't going to do anything so stupid.
Since it was the middle of the summer, the 'Charlie's Angels' episode was a rerun, with a plot that hadn't been difficult to figure out even when it had been new. But no one was watching the show that had been dubbed 'jiggle television' for the story. The Angels often went braless, especially Farrah Fawcett, whose nipples were not only prominently displayed on the TV screen, but also on a pin-up of her in a low-cut red swimsuit which hung on the wall of his bedroom.
'Police Woman' would also be a repeat, and Angie Dickinson never seemed to go braless, at least not that Gary had ever caught. But, even if he wouldn't admit it to his friends, he thought she was really hot, which seemed an odd appraisal to make of a woman who, at forty-six, was nearly his mother's age. Still, he tried never to miss an episode.
Gary looked up from the television as he heard the chime of the elevator echo across the empty office. Glancing at the clock on the wall, he saw that it was ten after nine and wondered who it could be. After all, even the cleaning crews were usually finished by eight. He debated for a second turning off the television but decided that, on or off, the fact that it was on the desk in front of him rather than in the break room down the hall was incriminating either way.
The sound of footsteps grew louder until Gary could see a shadowy form moving among the rows of cubicles, the frosted glass walls preventing him from seeing who it was. It wasn't until the figure turned the corner that he could get a good look, and once he did, he was flabbergasted.
Standing an inch or so above his five six, the Asian woman standing only a few feet away had dark black hair done up in a bun, and was dressed in a pink jacket, gray skirt and a white blouse. She also wore black plastic framed glasses and a few pieces of gold jewelry, notably a ring on each hand and a nameplate necklace. At least, Gary assumed it was a name, because whatever it said was written out in what he assumed were Chinese characters. He often heard people say that it was hard to guess Asian women's ages, so he didn't feel bad later when, after thinking that she was in her mid to late thirties, he found that he was nearly a decade short in his guess.
"Good evening," the woman said in a soft but strong voice, "I hope I didn't surprise you."
"No, not at all," Gary replied as he tried to remember if he'd seen the woman before, only to draw a blank. Which wasn't that unusual, seeing that the company had about two hundred employees, most of whom went home before he came in at night.
"I'm Laura Cheng, from Legal," the woman said in way of introduction, adjusting her glasses in the process.
"Can I help you with something?" Gary asked, hoping to distract her from the television which was still playing.
"I certainly hope so," the woman said with an inviting smile. "My boss is expecting a letter of intent from Mr. Burke in the London office and I was hoping it had already come in on the teletype."
"Don't things like that normally come in the mail pouch?" Gary asked, having been at the firm long enough to have learned a few things about how the mailroom operated.
"Normally yes, but he's a bit impatient to get the paperwork started on the deal, so they agreed to also send a copy over the transatlantic connection," Laura explained. "Have you seen it?"
Gary was about to say he hadn't, but then thought he'd better check just to be sure. He stepped over to the basket where he'd dropped the incoming telexes and sure enough, there on the bottom of the pile was the one Laura had come looking for.
"Is this it?" he asked as he held it out towards her.
Taking a few steps to close the distance between them, Laura took the paper from his hand and after taking a few seconds to examine it, said that it was.
Until this moment, it never occurred to Gary that, even if he never saw them, people might still be in the office working. Now he realized why his trainer had said to deliver any messages promptly.
"I was just going to make my rounds and drop these off," Gary lied, hoping that she didn't notice the time stamp on the top, which showed it had come in more than an hour before.
"Yes, I can see that you're quite busy," Laura said, looking again at the telex and then past Gary to the television on the desk. The expression on her face said she had noticed the received time.
Gary knew he was busted, the question was, how badly?
"I'm sorry," he said, thinking there wasn't much more that he could say.
