Little Bee by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

season?”
    “It’s
terribly five years ago.”
    Clarissa
tilted her head at me.
    “What
are you telling me, Sarah?”
    “I’m
not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to tell. I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made
five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”
    Clarissa
smiled resignedly.
    “Fine. But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his
hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”
    “You
do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of
your natural life.”
    My
desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how
these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception,
sounding bored to distraction. At Nixie we used
reception as a sin bin—if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent
her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.
    “There are two policemen here.”
    “Oh.
They came in here? What do they want?”
    “Okay, let’s think about why I might have
dialed your number.”
    “They
want to talk to me?”
    “They did good when
they made you the boss, Sarah.”
    “Fuck
off. Why do they want to talk to me?”
    A pause.
    “I could ask them, I suppose.”
    “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
    A longer pause.
    “They say they want to shoot a porny film in
the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply
enormous.”
    “Oh for god’s sake. Tell them I’ll be down.”
    I
hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.
    “The
police,” I said.
    “Relax,”
said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature
piece.”
    Behind
her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was
laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that
summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you
put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some kind of orgasm that science
had somehow missed.
    I
took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police
officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their
hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one
was blushing horribly.
    “I’m
so sorry,” I said.
    I
glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect
blond side part.
    “Sarah
O’Rourke?”
    “Summers.”
    “Excuse
me madam?”
    “Sarah
Summers is my professional name.”
    The
older policeman looked at me with no expression.
    “This
is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”
    I
walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor. Tones of
pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.
    “Can
I get you a coffee? Or tea? I mean, I can’t absolutely guarantee it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our
machine is a bit—”
    “Perhaps
you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”
    The
officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like
black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer. One
older, the one with the bald patch. Maybe forty-five. The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe
twenty-two or twenty-four. Nice lips. Quite full, and
rather juicy-looking. He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the
way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course
there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel
off with the jacket, I suppose.
    The
two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated
the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same
moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had
precisely been attained.
    They
stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop—a text message
arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.
    “I’ve
got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,”