The Circle

shoulders even seemed
     to smile. He was wry. He was funny. He had a way of speaking that was both lyrical
     and grounded, giving his audiences wonderful turns of phrase one moment and plainspoken
     common sense the next. He had come from Omaha, from an exceedingly normal family of
     six, and had more or less nothing remarkable in his past. He’d gone to Notre Dame
     and married his girlfriend, who’d gone to Saint Mary’s down the road, and now they
     had four children of their own, three girls and finally a boy, though that boy had
     been born with cerebral palsy. “He’s been touched,” Bailey had put it, announcing
     the birth to the company and the world. “So we’ll love him even more.”
    Of the Three Wise Men, Bailey was the most likely to be seen on campus, to play Dixieland
     trombone in the company talent show, most likely to appear on talk shows representing
     the Circle, chuckling when talking about—when shrugging off—this or that FCC investigation,
     or when unveiling a helpful new feature or game-changing technology. He preferred
     to be called Uncle Eamon, and when hestrode through campus, he did so as would a beloved uncle, accessible and genuine.
     “Like Bill Murray striding through Pebble Beach,” was how Stenton once described him.
     “Loved by all, and I think he really loves them back.” The three of them, in life
     and in this portrait, made for a strange bouquet of mismatched flowers, but there
     was no doubt that it worked. Everyone knew it worked, the three-headed model of management,
     and the dynamic was thereafter emulated elsewhere in the Fortune 500, with mixed results.
    “But so why,” Mae asked, “couldn’t they afford a real portrait by someone who knows
     what they’re doing?”
    The more she looked at it, the stranger it became. The artist had arranged it such
     that each of the Wise Men had placed a hand on another’s shoulder. It made no sense
     and defied the way arms could bend or stretch.
    “Bailey thinks it’s hilarious,” Annie said. “He wanted it in the main hallway, but
     Stenton vetoed him. You know Bailey’s a collector and all that, right? He’s got incredible
     taste. I mean, he comes across as the good-time guy, as the everyman from Omaha, but
     he’s a connoisseur, too, and is pretty obsessed with preserving the past—even the
     bad art of the past. Wait till you see his library.”
    They arrived at an enormous door, which seemed and likely was medieval, something
     that would have kept barbarians at bay. A pair of giant gargoyle knockers protruded
     at chest level, and Mae went for the easy gag.
    “Nice knockers.”
    Annie snorted, waved her hand over a blue pad on the wall, and the door opened.
    Annie turned to her. “Holy fuck, right?”
    It was a three-story library, three levels built around an open atrium, everything
     fashioned in wood and copper and silver, a symphony of muted color. There were easily
     ten thousand books, most of them bound in leather, arranged tidily on shelves gleaming
     with lacquer. Between the books stood stern busts of notable humans, Greeks and Romans,
     Jefferson and Joan of Arc and MLK. A model of the
Spruce Goose
—or was it the
Enola Gay?
—hung from the ceiling. There were a dozen or so antique globes lit from within, the
     light buttery and soft, warming various lost nations.
    “He bought so much of this stuff when it was about to be auctioned off, or lost. That’s
     his crusade, you know. He goes to these distressed estates, these people who are about
     to have to sell their treasures at some terrible loss, and he pays market rates for
     all this, gives the original owners unlimited access to the stuff he’s bought. That’s
     who’s here a lot, these grey-hairs who come in to read or touch their stuff. Oh you
     have to see
this
. It’ll blow your head off.”
    Annie led Mae up the three flights of stairs, all of them tiled with intricate mosaics—reproductions,
     Mae assumed, of something from the Byzantine era. She held the brass rail going up,
     noting the lack of fingerprints, of any blemish whatsoever. She saw accountants’ green
     reading lamps, telescopes crisscrossed and gleaming in copper and gold, pointing out
     the many beveled-glass windows—“Oh look up,” Annie told her, and she did, to find
     the ceiling was stained glass, a fevered rendering of countless angels arranged in
     rings. “That’s from some church in Rome.”
    They arrived at the library’s top floor,