Mina read Kip's folder at seven-thirty the next morning, in the break room, before anyone else was in. I'd left it on the table next to the stapler. It felt like the right place.
She read the newsletter. She read the 1998 memo. Then she read the potato salad article too, because Mina reads everything on a page, and she had questions about the potato salad judging criteria.
"Sixty-one matches," she said finally.
"Undefeated."
"'I just wait.'" She touched the caption. "That's my line. I've said that exact sentence. To Clement, twice."
"I know. He wrote it on a sticky note."
She put the folder down and looked at the table for a long moment. Then she peeled her own sticky note off the Book of Elbows. It was the one that said Maybe 213 is enough. She folded it in half and put it in her cardigan pocket.
"She wrote the rule," Mina said. "She was the best at it, and then she banned it. Why would anyone do that?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I." She stood up. "But I'd like to ask her. And she only answers questions after somebody else gives up."
The final session was ten days away. Noordhaven had scheduled it at their headquarters, on the thirtieth floor, in a conference room Kip described as "mostly window." Every open point would be settled there: the name, the five junior jobs and Section 9.4.
Mina called a meeting in the break room at lunch. Nobody had to be asked twice. Half the office came, carrying sandwiches.
"I can't beat her at the table," Mina said, "because she won't sit at it. And I can't make her. That's rule one."
She looked around the room. "So I have to beat her at the other thing first. If I can outlast the pause, she has to talk. If she talks, I can ask her properly."
"And if she says no?" said Pauline.
"Then she says no, and I'll respect it. But I want her to hear the question."
Clement put down his egg salad. He stood up. He did it slowly, with great ceremony, like a man rising to give a toast at a wedding he had tried to prevent.
"I'll coach," he said.
Everybody looked at him.
"I am," Clement said, "the world's foremost authority on losing to Mina Kostas. Fifteen matches. I know exactly where it happens."
He folded his arms in thirds. "Nobody in this building has studied her failure points like I have. Mainly because she doesn't have many."
"Thirty-five seconds," said Mina.
"Thirty-five seconds," Clement agreed, with something close to pride. "That's when I start thinking about the thermostat."
Mina looked at him for a while. Then she held out her hand, and they shook on it.
"Rematch?" he said.
"Not yet," said Mina.
It was the first time she'd ever said yet. Clement went pink to the ears and had to sit down again.
Training began the next morning.
It turns out nobody knows how to practice silence. Pole vaulters have poles, and singers have scales. For staring at someone without talking, there's no equipment. So we improvised, which is what accounting firms do best when nobody's looking.
Clement's first drill was called the Thermostat. Mina sat at the table. Pauline sat across from her in the cape and said nothing. Pauline is a naturally silent person, but she lasted only ninety seconds, because she's also naturally cold.
"Can I just—" she said, half rising toward the dial.
"No," said Clement. "Again."
The second drill was Leopold.
Leopold had lost to the Pause three times now, and Clement reasoned that he had absorbed some of its power.
This turned out to be wrong. Leopold could only hold a stare for forty seconds before he started telling a story about 1984. Mina won every round, but it wasn't useful training. It was mostly a lot of stories about 1984.
The third drill was the whole audit team at once. Six people in a semicircle, looking at Mina, saying nothing. A client walked in to drop off receipts, saw this and left the receipts in the lobby. He emailed them later instead.
Mina got to twelve minutes. Then thirteen. Then, on the fourth day, she broke at eight.
"There," said Clement. He'd been watching with a legal pad. "You looked down."
"At the stapler."
"At the table. Every time. It's your habit."
He tapped the pad. "When you're arm wrestling, the stapler is fine, because there's a hand to read. In there, there's nothing to read. So your eyes go looking, and then your brain goes with them."
"So what do I look at?"
Clement thought about it. I watched him think. Clement thinks the same way he folds, carefully and in thirds.
"Her water," he said. "That glass she never drinks. It's always in the same place, and it never changes. It's the most patient object in the room."
Mina tried it the next day. Clement set a glass of water across the table from her and didn't drink it.
She looked at the glass for twenty-two minutes without saying a word, and the only reason she stopped was that the fire alarm went off. It was a drill, and we filed out. In the parking lot she was still holding the stare, at a fire hydrant.
On the seventh day of training I found Mina alone in the break room after six. She was sitting at the table without a stapler, without a glass, just sitting.
"Can I ask you something?" I said. "How did this start? The table."
She was quiet for a bit. Not a pause. Just quiet.
"My first job was at a big firm downtown," she said. "Two hundred people. I was twenty-three."
"I found a number that was wrong in a client file, and I said so in a meeting. A partner talked over me. Then another partner talked over him. Then they moved on."
"Was the number wrong?"
"It was off by four hundred thousand dollars." She smiled a little. "Later, in the break room, the first partner said something like 'You want to arm wrestle about it?' He was joking. He thought it would end the conversation."
"And it didn't."
"I said yes. I'd never done it before. I didn't know any technique."
"I just held on, because it was the first time all week anybody had to look at me."
She ran a hand across the laminate. "I held for fifty-one seconds, and he lost. Then he sat there and listened to me explain the number. All of it."
I didn't say anything. I'm IT. We're not built for that kind of moment.
"Nobody gets talked over at a table," Mina said. "That's all it is. Two people, one problem and a clock. You can't interrupt somebody's elbow."
Imelda finished Form AW-1 (Merger Edition) on the ninth day. It was seven pages. Page seven was titled Parties of Unusual Seniority. It included a clause about "executives of acquiring entities," and a box to check if the party had once held an inter-office title.
"That's very specific," I said.
"I'm a very specific person," said Imelda. She made four copies, because one copy, she said, is a single point of failure.
Kip came by that afternoon. He'd been helping us on his own time, mostly with Noordhaven's conference room layout and seating chart. He'd sketched the room on a napkin. It was, as promised, mostly window.
"I told Rosamund I was helping you," he said.
I nearly dropped my coffee. "You what?"
"Per my values," he said, with dignity. "I don't do things behind people's backs. I told her yesterday."
"What did she say?"
"Nothing. For a long time." Kip shifted his weight. "Then she said, 'Good.' And then she asked me what time the Kell & Moberly people would arrive."
Mina had been listening from the sink. She dried her hands and turned around. She looked at Kip's napkin sketch for a long time, at the long glass table on the thirtieth floor. Then she looked at our table, with its laminate and its stapler and the 2014 federal tax code holding up one leg.
"Russ," she said. "How much do you think this weighs?"
Up next: The Long Hold
Continue to Part 5 →