Motionless and cool in the lamplight, faithfully discharging her preposterous duty in the awful hour of a day born prematurely, Sophie seemed a creature tinged with madness and beauty. She had undoubtedly been bogged down in attempting to put the intricacies of a second string felony into deathless prose. As her drugged senses struggled vainly to catalogue her features... she wondered what sort of chap the person was, this indispensable stranger. The person stared at her and with a last suspicious glance; she stumped off and exited the room with the exact swiftness she had entered with.
A few casual decorations dotted the room; they marred the picturesque qualities of the cement walls. Sophie tried to get on her feet and it was then that she actually noticed the ropes binding her limbs to a bed. The four- poster bed stood at the rear of the room, swathing hanging drapes and sunlight. Her fingers swished like a metronome as she struggled in vain to free herself. She lay there, helpless. It was incongruous that this tropical, humid place, with the crimson rays of the sun turning the skin of her arms a mild scarlet and the sound of bees sunning themselves, should remind her of their crumbling house in New York, which was draughty in summer.
She glared at the tastefully mismatched furniture that adorned the room. As she tried to swallow the nasty foreign coffee the person had left at her bedside, she wished she had the foresight to bring a tin of quick café in her jacket pocket. She flung herself back on the bed and rolled out the final couplet. Being a connoisseur of American painting, the compositions on the wall drew from her a smug assertion that she knew nothing whatever about contemporary art.
She felt herself receding, her mind unfurling, rolling back on its own when she heard the door creak and a middle- aged man walked in. her heart leaped to her mouth as the figure became vaguely familiar. She disliked the petulant pout on the man's face. The morose expression on the seal face was tanglisingly familiar. Sophie let out a disapproving grunt and mumbled some obscure quotation, "Michael Trenton?" subsiding heavily upon a chair, he spoke, "No, Evans. We've met before, how could you have forgotten."
His father had cuffed him into sobriety after his downfall. This reminiscence occasionally gave him qualms of apprehension; they might become potential rivals if they should emulate his own austere determination. "Your family crushed my father's reputation. You dragged his name through the mire. Now, I am going to ruin your lives. Starting with you," he explained, a little crestfallen. Sophie trusted the eccentricity that was his personality. She riffled through her mental card index as the events that had long since sunk into oblivion unfolded themselves in her mind.
*****
"Michael Trenton has called a meeting," the answering machine blurted out when Jackson pressed the dials. Michael was his boss and manager of the Carnord Company, which manufactured all kinds of medicinal drugs. They supplied the largest amounts to the hospitals in New York, Porterville and even as far as Detroit. Jackson had been working in that company for about five years now and was head of the stock department.
When he was first employed, Sophie, Dean and Ivan, had to choose between moving to New York with him and staying back at their old school. Finally, Dean and Ivan were sent to Australia and Sophie was left with no choice but to move to New York. "Screech..." Jackson's chauffeur- driven dark blue Bugatti had arrived. He grabbed his briefcase and dashed towards the front door. The fragrant scent of his cologne drifted off as his chauffeur coughed the engine and left a cloud of dust. The car swallowed the tarmac and became hazy from the distance. The car came to an abrupt halt outside the main gate of the Carnord Company. Jackson swiped his card on the gate and it flew open in an instant.
His personal assistant met him at the entrance to the building. They walked in silence to the conference room. Trenton had never called an urgent meeting before unless there was some fault somewhere. He slammed the door shut behind him after handing his briefcase to his assistant. True to his suspicions, Trenton was furious. He was pacing up and down the room restlessly. Everyone was already settled by the time Jackson was coming in. He took his seat and waited patiently. The conference room was large and spacious with leather- upholstered furniture worth millions of money.
The walls were painted white with a hint of peach. It was now filled with a consortium of like- minded businesspersons, this gossamer company, this roadbed of thistledown. Trenton was clad in a cobalt- blue shirt, a cherry- red trouser, jet-black shoes, a slate- grey coat, a salmon- pink hat and an emerald green ring to top it all. Jackson disliked and could not stand Trenton's holier- than- thou are attitude. Trenton had clear homicidal tendencies and seemed hell- bent on drinking himself to death.
He stood up and started the meeting, "Based on the company's most recent records, we are extremely low on supplies. This could herald a new era of bankruptcy. This expulsion of thousands of drugs represents a humanitarian catastrophe of enormous proportions. The company's success is within a hair's breadth of destruction. We need to strategize a way forward in order to avoid mistakes of this kind in future."
He hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands into his pockets. Jackson had noticed a certain hesitancy in his voice. He was convinced that Trenton had something to do with the regular disappearance of the drugs but no one would believe him until he presented concrete evidence. Trenton hooked his foot under the chair and dragged it over.