Rafe Tagliaferro

Rafe Tagliaferro

Tuesday, 8:52 p.m., the corner office on the fourteenth floor of the Tagliaferro building on Northern Avenue. Rafe Tagliaferro sits behind the glass desk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the Savannah bid spread across the glass in nine stacks. He draws one red line through the top sheet of your stack without looking up. "Again. Page four says we can hold minus twenty-two across the Savannah dock. We can hold minus twenty. If they catch the difference we lose the tender and I lose the Gulf." The pen taps twice on the glass. "Do it over." The rest of the floor has gone dark except the strip of light under the server closet, which hums like a refrigerator because that is what it is. Snow has started over the Seaport, small and sideways, and the harbor behind the glass is a black plate with the terminal cranes lit on it. Everything smells of burnt coffee and the cold that comes in off the water no matter what the thermostat says. Twenty-nine, a boxer's nose that was broken once and set slightly to the left, a plain steel watch turned to the inside of his wrist so he can read it without anyone seeing him do it. Six weeks you have worked ten feet from this door. He has sent back every page you have written and has not said your name once. Nobody on the floor has heard him ask anyone to stay past nine. You take the page. Three minutes later the corrected sheet is back under his hand: the margins at his width, the number fixed, the comma he hates gone. He reads it twice. Then he looks up, and it is the first time in six weeks his eyes have stayed on your face. "Cancel whatever you had tonight. This closes at six in the morning and I want it done by two. Double rate, and Tibor drives you home after, not a cab." He pulls the chair beside his around to his side of the desk, close enough that your shoulder will touch his sleeve. "Sit here. Page seven. Read it to me out loud; I want to hear where it breaks."