The 'Cousins'

Part Fourteen: Big Questions For Greg?

A/N: Follows directly from where Jess ran out of Greg's motel room!

Jess's reaction and swift exit at the mention of Felix Gleitner's name surprised Greg and threw him off balance. The boy's panicky departure was as sudden as it was unexpected. Everything had been going along so well between them up to that point, but once again Greg had seen a capricious transformation in the boy. Greg stood open jawed and rooted to the spot where he stood, staring at the closed door for several moments. A niggling doubt gnawed away at him that something was seriously amiss in Jess's background; possibly something sinister that he ought to expose before he got himself in too deep with the boy. Greg ran his mind over their conversations several times trying to identify what else might have caused him to run away. Each time he came up with the same answer. The single name - 'Gleitner .' He mumbled through closed lips to himself 'This Gleitner character needs to be checked out and soon!'

Jess's heart rending question came next to mind "Why Me? Why are you doing this for me?" It was a question for which Greg had no ready answer and now asked it of himself "Why am I doing this?"

He looked around the room that had held such a cosy, almost intimate ambience a few minutes before. In an instant it had changed into a cold, impersonal emptiness. Where Greg had seen warmth, joy and closeness only moments ago, he saw now only the shabby, worn tiredness of the room's appointments. He noticed for the first time, the brown-rimmed hole in the sofa's yellow, plastic covering; burned by a long extinguished cigarette. The room became alien to him and it made him shiver. Greg recognised that it was Jess's presence alone that gave it any positive character and that stretched to his reason for being here. But why? It was a question for which he had no answer. Greg looked again at the closed door through which Jess had abruptly left and it reminded him of another recently closed door.

His mind strayed back to the day of his latest divorce settlement. He had looked on the iron bound, oak door of the courtroom that had borne witness to countless arguments and miseries, which also included his own misfortunes. To Greg the courtroom door at that time had symbolised a barrier to his life that he had to break down or overcome and now it seemed that this closed door of his motel room was another.

Greg felt weak at the knees and sat down to cradle his forehead between his hands to think. He had run away from his problems then and it was tempting for him to do the same again. Once more he felt bitterness rise in his throat as he thought back on his second, failed marriage. It had been his wife's small, provincial, family recruitment business that he had joined and moulded with his ideas and energy to bring it to national prominence. It had been his enterprise and drive that had embraced the opportunities of modern technology to shape the company into one of the most prominent managed service contracts providers in the country; supplying temporary workers to major conglomerates across the length and breadth of the land. He had done that by preaching his particular business 'gospel' to greedy executive ears. They could avoid the legal obligations and heavy burden of costs associated with employing permanent staff by taking on all employees, except vitally important personnel, on temporary contracts; the strict laws that applied to permanent workers did not apply to temps.

He had built a system where major firms could outsource their recruitment to his company. His company, Bailey's, would fulfil the client's requirements from their own banks of registered workers and those of other agencies, whom Bailey's contracted to supply them with temps in those places where they had no offices of their own. It was recognised as a masterstroke of business enterprise. The client received exactly the employees they required, and only when and for as long as they needed them. They did not have to maintain an in-house staff payroll under the Bailey system. The client's central human resources department had only to reconcile and pay one single, monthly invoice to Baileys, who did all the rest. Since most of the temps came from other outsourced agencies, Baileys had little to do but reconcile the invoices submitted by the subordinate agencies and bill the client.