Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim Page B

don’t remember any late-night walks in Brixton, darling.’
    ‘That’s different,’ she protested. ‘That’s just one neighbourhood. If I listen to you, three-quarters of this city’s off limits.’
    ‘So? Chicago just happens to have lots of Brixtons.’
    ‘The only place I see lots of black people is in the Loop; otherwise I’d have no idea this city is, what? Half black? Forty per cent?’
    ‘You’d prefer a smaller percentage?’ he asked, trying to make her laugh.
    But she just shook her head. ‘You know what I mean. It’s not right they’re so invisible.’
    ‘No. It’s just Chicago.’
    They were on Stony Island now, about to enter Jackson Park, touching directly on Hyde Park. If he changed one lane he would probably be able to see his father and stepmother’s apartment building, a thirties brick block, squat and solidly constructed. The light turned green, and as he drove forward he pointed westwards, towards the full weight of his childhood. ‘With Sophie out of school, maybe we should come down here,’ he said impulsively. ‘I could show her where I grew up.’
    4
    Dorothy Taylor was back, but all morning made no effort to say hello. Robert had a lunch on Printers Row in the south Loop, then met for coffee near the Public Library with an academic keen to edit a series on consciousness. Caught by a brief cloudburst on his way back to the office, his linen jacket was spotted like an ink-stained blotter when he stopped by Dorothy’s office.
    She was gazing intently at a terminal full of sales figures and gave him the barest nod. She possessed what Robert thought of as classic Wasp features, despite her manifest blackness: a short sharp nose, equally angular jaw, high-boned cheeks, and a tight thin-lipped mouth. Pert, handsome rather than pretty, with nothing soft about the eyes. She dressed smartly but not showily, carrying herself with a reserve that suggested considerable professional pride. Never raising her voice, Dorothy was formally polite with everyone except Robert, and very rarely smiled – she was not, as Robert once overheard the production controller complain, ‘exactly a barrel of laughs’.
    ‘Hi,’ he said cheerily. ‘Welcome back. Can we have a word when you have a minute, please?’
    She didn’t look directly at him but did a half-turn, gesturing with a flat palm for him to sit down in the visitor’s chair in front of her desk. He ignored this, saying, ‘Come down in a few minutes if you can.’ And walking off whistled a little to show that yet again, she hadn’t got to him. He had fired enough people in his time to know that if push came to shove Dorothy could go, too.
    He didn’t know very much about her, and as the organisation’s head didn’t feel he could ask around, in the standard way one learns about a colleague. Her CV was clear but uninformative: she’d attended a public high school on the West Side, then studied communications at the local college UIC for her bachelor’s degree. After five years’ work for a technical publisher, she’d joined the press as a marketing assistant, then managed a nimble move to take over rights, before becoming a commissioning editor. For the last three years she had been the publishing director, and it was clear to Robert from the start that she’d wanted his job as the press’s overall head. And expected it.
    He often wondered why she hadn’t got it. She was intelligent, thorough, reliable, and by now quite experienced. More important, a cynic might say, she was a woman and she was black – strong cards these days with a university as keen on equal opportunities as their employer. She was thoroughly respected, though not liked; if there had been an internal ballot for new director, Robert imagined she would have received very few votes. Yet popularity didn’t seem to count for much these days in the choice of management; sometimes it could be a positive liability. He could only imagine that the search committee had