The audit began Thursday morning, between his second email and his 9:30 a.m. phone call with the Milwaukee distribution client. His completely mental audit, leaving no physical trace on any surface of the building, wasn't accidental; it was his method.
Maxwell sat at his desk, his notes from the Milwaukee call displayed on the screen, his face his usual self attentive, neutral, the expression of a competent man doing his job efficiently and reviewed the past 14 months at Hartwell & Associates like an engineer conducting a structural inspection: not looking for reasons to declare a building uninhabitable, but simply categorizing where the loads actually carried and where the bracing was merely decorative.
The review included the shipping billing cycle. The last quarter of the previous year, when Maxwell discovered a systematic data entry error in six accounts, had cost the company about $8,400 a quarter in settlement hours and customer issues. He corrected the model, retrained the junior staff who had been using it, and wrote a one-paragraph summary that Hartwell read aloud at the review meeting the following Monday as a "process improvement the team had been working on." Maxwell was listed as a "participant in the preliminary work." He did not correct this error.
Restructuring Whitmore Foods' route. February. Maxwell rebuilt the distribution model after a three-day analysis, cutting Whitmore's shipping costs by 11 percent, a concession they had threatened to make to a competitor to achieve. Hartwell presented the revised model at a lunch with the client. Maxwell prepared the slides. He did not attend the lunch.
The Carver Transportation situation. October. Their account manager, Pete Callaway, went on paternity leave due to an ongoing contractual dispute and a deteriorating relationship with the client. Maxwell stepped in on his own; Callaway simply wasn't there; the account needed attention, and Maxwell took over. Three weeks of communication with the client ensued. A dispute over pricing involved four phone calls, two revised proposals, and a conversation with Carver's vice president of operations, all of which Maxwell handled skillfully enough to secure a two-year contract extension instead of being fired. When Calloway returned, he thanked Maxwell. Hartwell never mentioned it. It wasn't recorded in Maxwell's official performance record.
He held no grudges. Grudges are feelings that lead one to believe someone owes them something, and Maxwell wasn't driven by that belief. What he was doing was different: he was building a case, and a case requires evidence, and evidence requires meticulous accounting. He was analyzing things brilliantly. He was analyzing himself.
After school, he drove to Pilsen.
Since he was 17, he'd gone to his father's garage every few weeks. He needed somewhere to spend his afternoons, away from school and home. The garage was both, and neither: it smelled of motor oil, metal, and old concrete, and it was noisy, with an unmistakable mechanical odor, but actually quite quiet after a while. And there was his father, who was important, something Maxwell never said openly, and probably never would.
Dragowski's garage occupied a two-door building on a side street off 18th Street in Pilsen, tucked between a tire shop and a tamale stand. The exhaust fan pointed directly at the east wall of the garage. The sign above the door was the original, the one Robert had bought in 1990. The "D" had faded so much that it looked like "Dragowski Auto" if the afternoon light hit it unfavorably. Robert had never changed the sign. Maxwell suspected he never would.
He parked the BMW by the garage and got out. Through the open door, he saw his father lying on a skid plate under the body of a brand-new Chevrolet Suburban, a faulty body light just above him, and the steady, rhythmic click of a wrench: it meant Robert had found the problem and was starting to fix it.
Maxwell stood by the car, waiting.
After forty seconds, the wrench stopped clicking. Robert climbed out from under the Suburban and slid onto the skid plate; a slow, deliberate exit, with the measured steps of a man who didn't switch tasks quickly because such abrupt changes led to unintentional mistakes. He stood up. He wiped his hands with an orange cloth he kept on his belt. He glanced first at Maxwell, a quick, mechanical look, like a father checking on his son after three weeks, inspecting him without really looking at him, and then his eyes fell on the BMW.
He stood up. He walked to the car at his usual pace, deliberately oblivious to the urgency of the others. He circled the street completely clockwise, pausing at every corner. At the rear, on the driver's side, he bent down and examined the sill, looking for rust and checking for previous repairs, running the back of his finger along the metal as if checking a gasket for sealant. His expression was the same as when he diagnosed an engine problem: distant, focused, and with a professional skepticism.
He opened the driver's door without asking. He looked at the odometer. He noted the wear on the steering wheel. He closed the door. He looked at the roof.
"What model is it?" he asked. It wasn't really a question because Robert Dragoski didn't consider most requests for information as questions, but rather as efficient access to a necessary file.
"2007."
"3 Series or 5 Series?"
"3 Series."
"Manual?"
"Automatic."
Robert made a low, muffled sound, a sort of murmur of assent, and the curt reaction of a man slightly disappointed by a decision he had no right to make. He ran his hand over the driver's side door panel once, not affectionately, but as a final check, to assess the welds, and then went back into the garage. He switched the malfunction indicator light back on and returned to the undercarriage of the Suburban.
Maxwell took a folding chair from its place against the east wall. He knew exactly where it was and sat down.
They didn't speak for 20 minutes. It wasn't an unsettling silence, but an intimate stillness between two people who had shared the space long enough not to need any more. Robert worked. The ratchet mechanism turned. Every now and then, he muttered a word to himself in Serbian, a language Maxwell had never learned, never been taught, and never asked about, the way one doesn't ask about personal matters even with someone one has known for a lifetime.
Finally, Robert said, without emerging from under the car, "Your mother called."
Maxwell absorbed the word. "About what?"
"About you." He paused. Then he repeated the question. "She says you seem different."
Maxwell glanced at the warning light projected by its yellow circle on the underside of the Suburban. "Different in what way?"
"She didn't specify." He repeated the question twice more. "She just said different." He paused longer. "She's usually right about those things."
"I am who I am."
Then Robert climbed into the tracked vehicle. He sat down and stared at Maxwell, with that scrutinizing gaze he directs at engines whose honesty he questions. His face was that of a fifty-four-year-old man, wrinkled as only a man who had worked with his hands outdoors in the Chicago climate for thirty years could have wrinkles, with an uneven tan and the bearing of someone who had seen most of the problems that could arise and solved almost all of them. His eyes were the same hazel color as Maxwell's, something neither of them ever admitted.
"All right," he said. Then he crawled back under the car.
Maxwell sat there for another half hour. When he got up to leave, he pushed the chair against the wall. His father's arm was visible over the edge of the Suburban's body, and the hazard light flickered as he repositioned it.
"Are you working hard?" Robert asked.
"Yes."
"Good."
Maxwell drove home through the city at night. Streetlights filtered through the windows of his BMW in a slow, repetitive motion: each light a pulse, amber then off, amber then off. Chicago seemed to surround him as always in the dark: vast and indifferent, and somehow, just the right size for the thoughts he needed. He thought about what his mother had told him. About looking different. He thought about the word and what it meant, whether it was a warning or an observation. His mother was always right about those things.
The system interface was at the edge of his field of vision, dark and motionless, as it always was when there were no pending notifications. He didn't open it. He drove. He watched the city. He thought about what he was building, what it would look like in a year, what it would look like from the outside, and whether he could bear the sight.
He drove. He got home, added three lines to his personal ledger, and went to bed at 10:48.
He slept soundly.
That was his habit.