Chapter 21
1984
“I see your point,” said the finance-administrator, as they approached the little cemetery at that corner of the Common. “The bar’s there, across the street. We can grab some beers from the bar and go downstairs to the vault. The place used to be some kind of bank or jewelry-store or something. Not many people go down there. But we can.”
The finance-administrator bought the first round as Lev waited by the steps down to the vault. Down there was a room with tables and banquettes and a small unattended bar outside a vault with a steel door that might well have done for a bank in Lev’s and Billy’s earlier time, or for Celtic crown-jewels or for a cask of Amontillado. They had the room to themselves and sat at the table most equidistant from the rest of the room.
“So, finance-administrator,” said Lev. “What are the qualifications? What occurrences make Sainte Claire’s charity questionable? What’s the trouble?”
“It’s all quite basic,” said the finance-administrator. “Racial discrimination and fiscal corruption, and management too incompetent to hide the facts of that.”
“You sound like a typical disgruntled employee,” said Lev. “Except that you’re white, which makes the first thing you mentioned not your business.”
“I’m atypical in that I try to work for the guests and the donors and the taxpayers. I mean I’m typical in that the employment isn’t what disgruntles me.”
“Okay,” said Lev. “What does? What, exactly?”
Lev and Billy were tiptoeing around each other like heartbreaking new friends, as Jack Kerouac suggested all of us might well wish to do, while we stand or fall on less artificial formalities, forms that keep us out of others’ self.
“Exactly what it does,” said the finance-administrator, “is that none of this will ever make the evening news, or wind its way into a best-selling novel. But I’ll tell you anyway, because I’m still trying to figure out who I am. So:
“To me, it started with how a white Republican administrative assistant behaved toward a black Jamaican receptionist. I love Ludmila, as I love Hoagy Carmichael and Ray Charles, and so I know that basic fairness and simple decency wouldn’t have opened the position she’s filled. But that proved to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As time went by, I noticed other things. I saw more against les autres.
“We have a transitional housing program on our top five floors. HUD, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, pays for most of it. And it started with a loan of about $1.5 million we don’t have to repay if we keep the program running. Each year, over thirty years, the contract lets us write off a thirtieth of the loan. So, unless we screw up horribly, it’s a grant, not a loan.
“You can guess where I’m going with this. Boston is becoming famous for its big dig, maybe the biggest civil-construction cost-overrun in history, a project to dig tunnels and build bridges to improve traffic-flow in this city. That project is progressing more slowly than the need for improvement, while people are being caught wheel-borrowing cash out the Massachusetts capitol into their private bank-accounts.
“Our HUD project isn’t as big as the big dig, and the racism at L’Amore de Santa Clara may not be as horrible as the pedophilia in what Roman-Catholics call their church. But Claire and her Francesco also in the name of the Roman Catholic church took vows of poverty, and bigotry is the main scourge of humanity. Anyway, at one point, I discovered plain evidence of fiscal corruption, in my duties as finance-administrator, undeniable proof. And I showed it to my boss.
“It was plain and simple. It wasn’t enough to buy a new home, but it was plenty enough to furnish a room in a house. And, as I said, it was undeniable, plain facts of who was doing it and with whom, how and where and when.
“What do you think he said?” asked the kid.
“’Forget about it,’ maybe?” offered the count.
“Close,” continued the financed-administrator. “’I don’t see anything wrong with someone getting a dining-room-set out of a deal like that.’ That’s what he said.”
“Who’s your boss?” asked Lev. “Pun-man Ari?”
“No,” said the finance-administrator. “Ari has no notion what I do, except that I give him more cash than he needs for taxi fare and don’t wheedle him for receipts. So that’s another form of petty embezzlement. Did he take you to lunch?”
“No,” said Lev. “I ate with the guests.”
“Good man!” said the finance-administrator. “I’m proud of you. I used to eat in our staff dining room, until I got sick of the phonies that call themselves our executive staff. We’re supposed to pay a dollar for meals of the guests’ food, but they don’t. Then they talk about how wonderful they are to the rest of us. We pay the dollar and have to listen to them pretend while we eat. It’s crazy.
“Anyway, you’re lucky Ari didn’t take you to lunch. He carries no more cash than he thinks he needs to squeak through a day, and he folds that ten-or-twenty-dollar bill into a rectangle about one inch the long way and hides it deep in his wallet, where he can hardly find it. So, if he takes you to lunch, you throw your credit-card on the table in exasperation, before he finds it and unfolds it.
“He has a L’Amore de Santa Clara corporate credit-card, but he’s afraid to go on record for anything he does. That’s why he closes the door of his office whenever he hears anyone talking anywhere near it, and he hardly speaks a sentence in any other office either, before he closes that door, too. And he writes his speeches and reads them, even five-minute speeches, even jokes.”
“What do you think he’s afraid of?” asked Lev.
“Himself, I guess,” said the finance-administrator. “He’s not afraid of being greedy, just of being caught. I heard him begging the chairman of the board to give him a raise. I guess he was afraid to close the door on the chairman.
“’I deserve more,’ he said, ‘after all I’ve given to l’amore de Santa Clara.’
“It seems to me that giving to l’amore is a gift to oneself.”
“Have you ever told Betty Sue that?” asked Lev.
“I’m sure I have from time to time,” answered the finance-administrator. “I’ve worked with all those people more than five years. But I’m sure I haven’t said it to Ari, because Ari hardly ever talks with me, except to ask for taxi fare or other reimbursement, from petty cash, unaccountably.”
“So, then, who is your boss, finance-administrator?” asked Lev, frowning.
“The director of finance and administration,” said the finance-administrator.
“What’s the difference,” asked Lev, frowning now at the finance-administrator’s grin, “between a finance-administrator and a director of finance and administration. Do you lack direction they can favor or accept?”
“Pretty much so,” said the finance-administrator. “I do the billing and pay the bills and put the money in the bank and reconcile the bank accounts and allocate the payroll to our cost-centers to meet the demands of contract and grant stipulations, and I put the numbers from all of that into the books. Then I give my boss reports telling him what those numbers are, and he redirects them into formats that please the contractors and donors. In other words, his job is sales. Mine’s accounting.
“He also makes most major purchases, although I write the checks for them. That gives him plenty of room for dining-room-set deals, and he often pays more than he must for services like our telephone system and our computer-network administration. Those are contracts he negotiates, and we could do in-house a lot of the work we outsource, better and less expensively. But the biggest possibility for kickbacks comes from construction projects, like the transitional housing program and our elevator and HVAC renovation. The deputy director does most of that negotiation.
“Then there are consultants. We’re doing what we call a capital campaign. It’s a fundraising operation whose sole purpose is raising money for construction projects, and we pay consultants huge amounts of money ostensibly to help us with that, and we hired an in-house director for it. We pay the in-house director less than we do the consultants, and the deputy director keeps a tight lid on her, and she’s pretty sloppy anyway, but she’s African American. She’s our only African American manager and our only manager not permitted to approve her department’s expenses. Tokenism?
“And some of the construction projects are crazy to start with. When we started the capital campaign, Ari and the deputy director asked in a general staff meeting that all the staff submit recommendations for construction projects, and they implemented none of the suggestions. And a project that did make the campaign is to move the kitchen to the basement, and to extend the freight elevator to the basement to move the food from there to the serving line. That means literally burying the volunteers and literally risking the lives of the guests. I’m talking about human resources and sanitation.
“Then there’s the fact that, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars we’ve spent on elevator renovation, we can’t be sure our elevators are going to work on any given day, or in any given mealtime. In other words, in the name of capital improvement, we’re planning to demoralize our volunteers, risk the lives of our guests by increasing the time between preparing food and serving it, and risk not being able to feed the guests at all some days. So, other than the possibility of kickbacks from more construction, I can’t think of a motive for that project. And I’m trained in such matters.”
“Sounds to me,” said Lev, “that you’re a screen, a naïve person set to draw attention. Have you said anything about this to the deputy director?”
“Sure,” said the finance-administrator. “She offers two answers. One is that we’ll talk about it, but no later talk ever comes about. The other, when I argue a little, is basically that she’s a manager, and I’m not. That’s her argument against the fact that I’m trained and experienced in such matters, while she isn’t. In other words, she thinks that being the boss legitimizes irresponsible authority. Yet she has a master’s degree in social work. And that’s the part that drives me craziest.
“The transitional housing program has coin-operated laundry machines for the tenants to use, and my accounting showed that no one was reporting the collection of most of the coins during the tenure of the first person we hired to direct that program. First, in that, I wondered why we were charging the clients to use the machines, and second I wondered where the quarters were going.
“But, most, I wondered why we hired that director. He was supposed to be a social worker, there to help people get over their addictions and become productive citizens. But he had tattoos and earrings, and he died his hair orange like a punk rocker, and he moonlighted as a bouncer in a bar. And we had to garnish his pay for support for his children. What kind of social worker would hire him?
“But the deputy director did hire him, and she didn’t fire him for stealing the quarters. She fired him because he got us sued for not following due process of law in evicting a tenant. Afterward, she said she thought it was horrible that someone would steal quarters from homeless people, but that was while she was eating their food without following our requirement for staff to pay for what of it they eat. If she did think she was a do-gooder, it must have been with the rationale you attribute to Napoleon, that he thought he deserved perks from making the world a better place, maybe like Pat Garrett.
“But she and Ari are paid well anyway. Her salary is higher than that of most general managers of full-service luxury hotels, and she couldn’t touch the responsibilities of their job, either legally or socially, no way. And Ari, in the first year after he cried to the board about not getting what he had given to l’amore de Santa Clara, took out of there more than three times the deputy director’s compensation for that period. And, also, I have to wonder what they do with their money, with or without kickbacks.
“If Ari has any children, they’ve long been on their own, and he and his wife rent their apartment, and he’s been working at L’Amore de Santa Clara fifteen years. In five years, at a salary about half of the deputy director’s, I got myself out of credit-card debt from a bad marriage and saved enough besides to put 10% down on a condominium in Boston’s outrageous real estate market. That 10% was about what my debt had been, and I mortgaged for fifteen years rather than thirty and managed to save that amount again in the next year. But the deputy director takes payroll advances for vacations.
“I, while I was saving all that money to buy my home, took vacations to Central America and the Middle East, besides to New Orleans for French Quarter Fest and to New York for New Year’s Eve and the Belmont Stakes, still enjoying the wildness of White Oaks, though not the Lincoln County killing. Once, I started to tell the deputy director about my trips to Central America and the Holy Land.
“’I go to nice places on vacation,’ she said, and she turned and walked away.
“She also said she found Dr. Zhivago boring, because it was all about someone walking miles in snow, and she was talking about the film, not the book. I wonder if she’s read any of your books. Of course she hasn’t!”
“Maybe she’s jealous of Lara,” suggested Lev.
“Maybe,” said the finance-administrator. “She married someone she doesn’t bring to functions of l’amore de Santa Clara, after they were past the age of most marriages. And she said her father criticized her impracticality, something about installing closet-rods. That marriage of hers has lasted years, but without children.
“L’Amore de Santa Clara’s donors paid for a champagne party to celebrate that marriage, here in this vault. I drank beer on that occasion, as the shelter's clothing distribution supervisor emerged from a cardboard cake, with a rubber mask of President Clingon covering his face. A lot of people laughed, but I did not.
“I don’t know, but I think maybe that’s the answer. I think maybe it’s drugs, what they spend their money on. L’Amore de Santa Clara has no drug-testing policy for employees, and my boss says the reason is that it would be contrary to the culture there, which is supposed to be to free people from addictions.
“Ari buys books on clinical drugs, saying they’re for his continuing education, and we reimburse him for them while we have no one on our staff who can prescribe drugs. The deputy director wears the same shoes to work several days in a row, and my boss wears the same pair of trousers to work more than a week at a time, and our human resources specialist has a Jack Kerouac poster, on a wall of her office.
“Ari recruited a guy with whom he’d worked in New York, to direct counseling. That guy made speeches during lunch in the staff dining-room, promoting legalization of drugs. Once, while his wife was out of town, he asked me to go out and have a few beers with him. We went to Charles Street, the business street at the bottom of Beacon Hill, where I was renting an apartment then. After a few beers, we went to my place and ordered a pizza from across the street. When I returned from picking up the pizza, my apartment reeked of marijuana. I couldn’t not inhale the smell.
“I don’t know. But I know they all have serious ego problems. That director of counseling made no secret of the fact that he’d rather play piano in bars than direct counseling for a homeless shelter. Add that to Kerry’s contempt for vacationing in troubled lands and Ari’s argument that he wasn’t getting what he deserved, and you have what most often makes people turn to drugs, I think. They don’t feel the world is good enough for them, and so they try to run. Ari may be the worst example of that bunch of people. He seems more than ready to sell his soul. She smokes tobacco, too.”
“Who?” asked Lev, still somehow paying attention to this tirade.
“Kerry Wordy,” said the finance-administrator, “our deputy director.”
“A nasty habit,” said Lev. “Almost as bad as the snuff in Russia.”
“Yes, a nasty habit,” agreed the finance-administrator. “It’s an addiction, and she’s deputy director of an agency that’s supposed to help people get over addictions. Substance abuse is the most common cause of homelessness, and Kerry not only smokes and drinks but also advertises both. She talks and laughs in front of the guests about needing a cigarette or a drink. She’s supposed to be helping people get rid of their addictions. But she brags about hers, gloats about it. It’s crazy.
“She also arranged for an open bar at our staff Christmas party. I drink too, as you can see, but I don’t brag about it or promote it, and I’m not a professional social-worker, although I try to work for society, to make us all social, no blame or shame. And, in the spirit of Sainte Claire and the needs of the homeless, for the needs of the people most able and ready for social work, I didn’t drink at that Christmas party.”
Lev told me that by then he was peering into the vault as into a river.
“Do you think all homeless shelters are like that?” he asked the kid.
“I don’t know,” replied the finance-administrator. “But I’ve heard that the Pine Street Inn is, and it’s the biggest homeless shelter in this city. I heard they had to fire their executive director for checking out porn on the Internet. And, if you think that’s funny, I’ve got something weird to tell you.
“In my week in the Holy Land, I met but two Americans. One was a journalist at the church of the nativity, and the other was wearing a Red Sox T-shirt in a bar in Tel Aviv. I asked the guy in the bar whether he was from Boston, and he said he’d had my boss’s job for the veterans shelter here. He said his name was Finkle and that he was then teaching business courses at a university there.
“I couldn’t find him very credible, because he was drunk and bragged about having been drunker and planning to be drunker again, reminding me of Kerry Wordy. But he told me things that told me he knew some of what he was talking about, and what he mainly talked about was board-of-directors corruption. And the Boston Globe has reported on that shelter’s fiscal mismanagement.
“But, anyway, I had to think about how important the whole question is. Homelessness is how the strife in the Holy Land began, and it remains the basic issue as it was the basic issue in the Lincoln County wars and in the depression dustbowl: ‘This Land is Your Land’. Woody Guthrie! You know?
“I know the veterans shelter claims to let no boozing in the door.”
Lev told me all that paled him, appalled him. He told me his Russia was never so weird. He said he just sat there in that cellar and listened as the finance-administrator rambled on, about everyplace from Lincoln County to Vietnam, from Afghanistan to Formosa, from Israel to Birmingham, and back to Boston, to his little work.
“The racism points to that as well,” Lev said the finance-administrator said. “I think people are racists because they feel worthlessness in themselves, and so they’re desperate to think they’re better than other people. I’ve never seen racism as rampant as in that institution of people professing to be social-workers, the one named for the love of Saint Clare. Here’s another example, that points to the cause, if I see the fingers there. Keeping color from the dawn, you know?
“Two of the tenants in the transitional housing program had several similarities. Both were physically disabled, one with a heart-disorder and one with a nerve-disorder, and both were receiving disability-compensation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and indications strongly suggested that both were dealing drugs, to other tenants and guests of l’amore de Santa Clara.
“The requirements for entry into that program are that the client have a job and be clean and sober for more than six months and that they pay 30% of their income as rent and attend therapy-meetings. One difference between those two tenants was that one was black while the other was white, and another differences was that the black one complied with those requirements much more than did the white one.
“Another difference was that the deputy director called the white tenant ‘a nice guy’ and put him to work in our kitchen paying him more than his case manager, while the black one became the only tenant evicted since the departure of the tattooed bouncing program-director, for any reason other than nonpayment of rent.
“The written reason was the black tenant’s failing a drug-test, after being tested more often than the white tenant who didn’t pay any rent, even after we put him to work in the kitchen. The new program-director, the one the deputy director hired to replace the quarter-stealer, has another reason for anything.
“’Nobody every said life is supposed to be fair,’ he says.
“I say life is supposed to be fair,” said the ghost of Billy the Kid. “And I’ve spoken up accordingly, and I’ll probably be fired from my dedication to l’amore de Santa Clara. And, if I am fired, I’ll speak more loudly, beyond the people directly responsible, by taking the issue to the court of public opinion I hope I’ve learned is more powerful than gun-slinging. I don’t see much attention to your pen, but maybe I can speak in smaller words. More concisely. More plainly. You know?
“But I’ve already taken it to my nearest equivalent on the board of directors and received no answer from him. I received an answer, but from Ari saying I don’t know what I’m talking about and shouldn’t bother the board with operational matters. My next step will be to submit a formal grievance, according to the policies promised in our employee handbook, and the answer will be another denial. I’ll be told that the policy is in the process of revision, as it always is. It’s a moving target.”
“Wait a minute!” said Lev. “How do you know that? How can you be so negative? Don’t they have to comply with whatever’s written?”
The finance-administrator shook his head and laughed and frowned.
“No,” he said. “They’re revising it. They’re paying their law-firm thousands of the donors’ dollars to revise it, and they’ll pay their law-firm thousands of more dollars to get rid of me, if they have to. That’s like the question of why audits don’t catch the financial irregularities I see every day, and the answer to that question is in the nature of auditors and attorneys. Attorneys use the law to represent their clients despite the law, and auditors don’t get hired if they have a reputation for finding irregularities. Here’s another example from L’Amore de Santa Clara, of how all that insanity works.
“The executive staff hired a consultant to train all the staff in diversity. The consultant came to L’Amore de Santa Clara and spent many hours telling the staff how to get along with one another regardless of race, religion, etc. After all those hours, he made some recommendations, and the executive staff made a show of complying with some but eventually dropped or ignored all of them. Why did they do that?
“Two reasons. One is that, if someone tries to sue them for racial discrimination, they can say they went to all that trouble and expense to promote diversity in the workplace. The other is that they paid that consultant, who was a professor from Boston University, a wage that in a fulltime year would add up to about twice Ari’s compensation for the year after he cried to the board that he was under-compensated. University professors of social work ordinarily get less than a quarter of that, and I have to suspect that this one did not keep that much. It’s a sucking situation all around.
“Then there’s the board member to whom I presented my complaint and shall formally my grievance, because he’s the board’s treasurer while I’m our finance-administrator. His name is M. Mickey Muller, and I have to wonder already about someone who has a problem with displaying his first name, and I’ve proved already that he isn’t someone who would throw Satan out of Heaven, as the archangel Michael did. So indications of ego-despair and irresponsibility keep ramping.
“But here’s more. When I began for l’amore de Santa Clara, the chairman of its board of directors was a Franciscan friar. Now the chairman is someone I’m told has a lot of stock in Texaco, someone named King Jazzin. The deputy director’s name is Kerry, and the human resources specialist calls herself Kate. I’ve grown to think of the three of them as the KKK. I think you see my point in that.
“Anyway, when the Franciscan friar left our board to accept a position in a bigger city, our treasurer wandered the hallways of the fifth floor you visited, to solicit an audience. Before the audience of us, he proudly presented to the Franciscan friar an expensive golf-putter, and afterward I had to write him a check from general donations, to reimburse him for it. See what I mean?”
“Sure,” said Lev. “I see what you mean. What about ‘us’, the staff in general?”
“The staff in general is great,” said the finance-administrator. “And L’Amore de Santa Clara provides wonderful and noble services for the homeless, but that’s despite the executive staff. Most of the staff hates to go to staff meetings, even staff picnics and staff Christmas parties, because they’re sick of the obviously bogus speeches of top management and its toadies. Most of the staff regards Ari as a retarded buffoon and Kerry as an out-of-control control-freak and Kate Plate as a toady.”
“What about the board of directors?” asked Lev.
“The staff says they're snooty,” answered the kid.
“But, naïve or not, the us take advantage of executive lack of focus to do what we feel or think in ourselves is right. That’s easy to do, because management principles such as span of control and unity of command don’t exist there. Kerry tries to supervise everyone, and so she forgets most of what she tells people.”
“Okay,” said Lev. “But back up a second! Who’s Kate Plate?”
“She’s what we call a human resources specialist, and she personifies the executive attitude, as her title says she must. She told me the funniest thing she’s ever heard was a Monty Python skit mimicking the sound of Mary Stuart’s head bouncing down the steps of the tower of London. One thing many of the employees complain about is her preaching anti-Catholicism in the staff dining-room. Founded by Franciscans, L’Amore de Santa Clara is now ecumenical, from its Jewish executive director on down. But much of its staff remains true to the name, and truer to humanity than its legacy.
“Little despots make me sickest,” said Billy. “They’re the worst of the French corporals. But let me give you one more example of managerial insanity. We have another HUD-sponsored program, that’s becoming famous by the salesmanship of its director, who couldn’t administer his way out of a wet paper-bag. Like many sales-people, he talks a big show and easily forgets his promises, and so his subordinates resent his very existence, and so also act by their own hearts better.
“One thing that director does right is staff his program mostly with graduates of it, but one thing he does wrong is treat them as though they owe him their souls for that. One example is publishing an article entitled ‘The Junky Whore’ about one of his life-skills instructors, who had come there to leave that life.
“Her job for l’amore de Santa Clara is helping people in that program dress for success, and she is one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met, while also intolerant of lack of integrity. No one asked her permission to publish that article, and she complained. So they’ll probably also fire her.
“And something else about that beautiful woman is her fragility. Outside her work and her studies toward a graduate degree now, she is practically a hermit for fear of falling back into her old ways. If they fire her, she probably shall fall back into those old ways, and you can bet they’ll fire her, anyway.
“To me, that’s horror. But the craziest thing about that program director, who has adopted with his wife some mentally challenged children and tries to brow beat them into following his style of reasoning, is that he moonlights managing a skeet range. Think about that, considering Franciscan founding.
“Francis of Assisi is most famous for loving all creatures, and especially birds. L’Amore de Santa Clara talks and preaches and actualizes through its little honest people the spirit of that saint. Meanwhile, the director of one of its largest programs operates a training ground for killing birds as they fly.
“But what can one expect? The Franciscan board-chairman was wearing a polo-shirt when he accepted the putter, and Franciscans donate millions of dollars to L’Amore de Santa Clara. That may be good for l’amore de Santa Clara, but it by no means accords with Francis or his rules for his order.
“Francis forbade accepting alms beyond food and the basic brown garb. When the church offered him ownership of real estate for his order, he refused. Instead, he paid rent for that shelter, a basket of fish each year, fish his friars caught. But, then, if Francis loved all creatures, what about the fish?
“But I think you may be right, Lev. I mean about my being a typical disgruntled employee, like a typical disgruntled cow being led to slaughter or a typical fetus being aborted. Humans call humans beastly when they kill other humans, and they abort their own embryos. Beasts don’t do such things.
“And humans do it in the name of reason, which they say makes them superior to beasts. I think humans are inferior to beasts in that they are the only species capable of trying to make lame excuses for doing anything they feel like doing, and I think being a boss takes that to a level one step lower.
“Most of us feel compelled to explain what we do, by stating reasons for our opinions that make us do it. Bosses seem to me to get to be bosses by hiding their reasoning as much as they can, putting them a step less reasonable than people who say they have a right to their opinion.
“That, I think, is the least rational, because it angers and alienates anyone more reasonable, because it means bosses don’t have an obligation to find reasons for opinions or to learn. What’s up with that, I’ve had to ask. How crazy can we get?
“I did some deeds in Vietnam as well, and I’ve learned since then that the U. S. Veterans Administration is a lot like L’Amore de Santa Clara. I heard a V. A. employee say that her employment wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for the veterans.
“I also found that the Veterans Administration won’t hire criminals it claims to rehabilitate and to assist in employment! Doesn’t it believe in its own social-work or care about other society? How’s that for bigotry and hypocrisy?
“But, still, a difference as I said is that the little people working for l'amore de Santa Clara come there knowing and work there knowing full well the importance of whatever they can best do at that basically lovely place.
“So I posted the question on the World Wide Web, regarding l’amore de Santa Clara. I posted it on an Internet newsgroup for nonprofit organizations, and the main reply was that I was fouling my own nest.
“I hope and pray the nest is mine, and so I don’t see how I’m doing the fouling, if the nest is all non-profits. That reply reminded me of monsters terrorizing children.”
“Yes,” said Lev. “I love ballet and honor that Clara is the heroine of The Nutcracker! How can we raise children, if we can’t be fair and decent with adults?”
“Did you notice that this bar’s name is Remington’s?” asked the kid. “As in mass-producing rifles, and the Marine that killed Fits Jr.? Deep vault, huh?