Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter Page A

click. She thought she would never be able to budge the heavy steel door, but it swung easily on its hinges.
    The safe was almost tall enough to walk into. Hunching over, she could slip inside. There was a small ledge for sitting, and even a light switch. She found file cabinets, but they were full of financial papers. One of them disclosed her husband’s net worth, a detail he carefully kept from her, and her eyes goggled at the figures. Others related to transactions for the firm, and she could not make head or tail of them, but the amounts of money involved were large—larger even than Kevin’s funds. She wondered just how much Matty had. She wondered if white people even knew there were Negroes this rich. She wondered if Harlem did. When she was finished with the last drawer, she had found nothing to suggest what Kevin was doing. She sat on the ledge and pondered.
    She could stop now. She could put the files back, close the vault, go home, raise this child and the next and the next, go to the parties, live in luxury, spending her husband’s money. She could do all the things Matty Garland had just warned her against. All the things the Catholic sisters had not raised her for.
    She thought about her imaginary family, the one all Harlem thought had bred her: the jazz-singing aunt in Paris, the uncle who owned hotels. If only they existed, they would tell her to relax, to enjoy the life she had sought and married into.
    She imagined the nuns looking over her shoulder.
Check your answers one more time, dear,
Sister Dorcas used to tell her, tut-tutting whenever Aurelia finished her test before the other children.
Check them again, dear. You want to be sure you have them all exactly right.
    All right. Fine. Check the answers one more time.
    Aurelia delved into the records again, and, as if in reward for her renewed labor, she found at once what she had overlooked. The bottom drawer of the second cabinet. The file folders were higher than in the other drawers. Once she realized that, the reason was apparent.
    There was a false bottom.
    A sheet of steel exactly the size of the drawer. It was not attached in any way, just weighted down by the files themselves. The casual observer would never notice. Aurelia took a peek out into the office. In for a penny, in for a pound. She emptied the files onto the floor. Several tries and two broken nails persuaded her that she could not pull up the false bottom with her fingers. She scrounged in her husband’s desk, finally took the letter opener, and pried up the steel without difficulty. Beneath, she found a small cloth sack and a thick manila envelope.
    The envelope was sealed with cellophane tape, and Kevin had signed his name over it, so that he could tell if anyone got in. But Aurelia, at her husband’s instruction, had been forging his name on checks from the day they returned from their honeymoon, and by now she was willing to bet that not even Kevin could tell the difference. She peeled off the tape, pulled out the documents inside, studied the first, glanced at the second, and had to admit that she understood none of it:
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    34—Term 1—Resistance (probably war, see 27–29, 41)
    35—Term 2—Palace Council to reconsider timing
    36—Day 20—Shake the throne (tentative—per Author) (“6 mo” + F : ix, from 1010)
    37—Pandemonium on inside? (tentative—per Author)
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    On and on in that vein, for several pages. The words were typewritten, and mimeographed, and could have meant anything. Terms 1 and 2. Terms of the academic year? Presidential terms? Congressional terms? Terms in an equation? Aurelia shook her head. Who or what was the Palace Council? And Day 20. A date of a month? Was the reference to war metaphorical or literal? She played around with abbreviations and anagrams and found nothing.
    Behind the mimeoed pages was a note, scribbled in an