Now, stepping through the door of the sprawling Spanish Colonial property on Jackson Street that Rose’s US realtor had found for them, she had to concede that maybe Sita had been right, and that if they really were going to be staying in the city until the job was done, they’d be more comfortable living and working in the same shared but fundamentally private space - a space where they could talk freely about the logistics of the con without worrying they’d be overheard, where Ruby could leave her reams of background research spread out across the kitchen table with impunity and Karen could set up camp in the basement with her PowerBook and her packing crates of wires and computer equipment.
For much of the fortnight they’d been there, El had joined her in the basement, assimilating as much information as she possibly could about artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology and the practical applications of age-progression software in the US - a decision that had nothing at all to do, despite Karen’s assertions to the contrary, with Rose.
“You’re avoiding her,” she’d said, the third morning they were down there - telling El, as much as asking her.
“Avoiding who?” El had answered, knowing exactly who Karen meant but refusing to acknowledge it aloud.
“You know who. Did something happen?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing’s happened. Everything’s fine.”
“Bollocks is it. One minute there’s stars in your eyes whenever you look her way and you’ve got everyone thinking you’re about to pop the question, the next you’re so scared of getting caught on your own with her you spend all day every day hiding out in here with me, pretending to care about Boolean conditions and DNA profiles. I don’t get it.”
“Everyone? Who’s everyone?”
Karen, exasperated, had shaken her head, delivered an admonishing click of her tongue and spun around in her chair to face her laptop, away from El and her apparently preposterous denials.
To El’s surprise, all four of the women were gathered together in the sunroom - a large, airy construction dominated by marshmallow-soft chairs and throw cushions that led out onto a wooden veranda and, beyond it, a backyard lined with blue gum eucalyptus trees dense and high enough to shield them from the prying eyes of neighbours. They were working, she saw - Karen typing frenetically into her keyboard at the coffee table, Ruby scrutinising the pages of what El inferred from the rainbow palette and portrait shot of kd lang on the cover to be a lesbian newspaper, Rose and Sita poring over the faded pen and ink letters scrawled across a creased, yellowing document that was either decades old or deliberately stained to suggest so.
On one of the marshmallow chairs, the flared ankles of her jeans dangling from one armrest, sat Sophie, her eyes darting back and forth between Sita and her mother and the graphic novel on her lap.
(“She knows,” Ruby had said, early on, when El had expressed discomfort at Sophie’s presence in the house for the duration of their stay; at the likely difficulties of pulling off a job while keeping that job hidden from an inquisitive, ever-present teenager with nothing to do all day but snoop. “Rose told her.”
“What does she know?” El had asked.
“About the job. About Wainwright.”
El had been speechless; had struggled to imagine how such a mother-daughter conversation might possibly have played out.
“Rose just… told her?” she’d said eventually.
“That’s the way I heard it. Seems she don’t want no more secrets between ‘em, after what happened with Marchant. After what nearly happened with the little ‘un. Can hardly blame her, can you?”
“And Sophie knows what we do? Who we are?”
“I should think so.”
“Hold on,” El had said, growing more flummoxed by the second. “Hold on. I want to make sure I’ve got this right: Rose’s daughter, Rose’s thirteen year old daughter, knows we’re cons? That her mum’s a con? And that we’re talking about flying out to America specifically in order to run a con on Wainwright?”
Ruby had found this reaction hysterical.
“What?” El had said. “What’s funny?”
“You are, girl!” Ruby had laughed, the grin on her face causing spiderwebs of wrinkles to break out along the fault-lines of her mouth and cheeks. “You should hear yourself, getting your knickers in a twist about young Sophie knowing what you get up to! It’s bleedin’ hilarious.”
“I don’t see why,” El had muttered.
“Tell me,” Ruby had said, still grinning. “How old were you again, when you started this game? When I started showing you this game?”
And El had flashed back, of course she had, to the night she and Ruby had met; to the angry, swaggering kid she’d been, the one with twenty quid of a mark’s money in her pocket and no real clue at all about the job or how to do it. To the first lesson Ruby had taught her, had let her learn, in a greasy spoon in Marylebone the year she turned fourteen.
“Okay,” she’d conceded, not meeting Ruby’s eye. “Point taken”).
“Go alright, did it?” Ruby asked her, not looking up from her newspaper.
“He’s on the hook,” El replied, kicking off her skate shoes and throwing herself down into another of the chairs. “Can’t say it was my finest hour, but he’s on the hook.”
“What’s on the hook?” Sophie asked, with an innocence that El thought was probably feigned.
Because she wants you to say it, she added to herself. She wants to hear you say it.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Rose said, shooting her daughter a look that suggested she shared El’s suspicions.
“It means we’ve whetted his appetite, darling,” said Sita, more gently. “It’s a kind of sales technique. Before a… let’s call them a customer, shall we? Before a customer can be persuaded to buy into a product, they need first to come to the realisation that they want that product. Or better yet, that they need it - that they couldn’t bear to be without it, whatever it might be. That’s what El’s been doing this morning with Mr Wainwright - cultivating that need.”
“It’s called the rope,” Ruby added, still studying the newspaper as if her life depended on it.
“And I’m not a roper,” said El. “So remind me again why it’s me doing this bit?”
“Think he’d buy one of them two as up-and-coming game developers, do you?” Karen piped up from the table, pointing first at Ruby, then at Sita. “I’m not saying they’re the wrong age bracket, but their idea of a console is a bit more Enigma machine than Super Nintendo.”
“Didn’t see you queuing up to reel him in, Little Miss Microchip,” said Ruby.
“Gonna find someone else to do all this for you, are you?” Karen replied, holding up the laptop.
“On which note,” said Sita, rerouting their verbal sparring with a deftness El wasn’t sure she’d manage herself, in her current frame of mind. “Were you able to track down the invitation?”
“Top of the cabinet,” Karen said, gesturing with her thumb to a heavy cream envelope resting on the marble sideboard behind her and turning her attention back to her screen. “By all means be yourself once you’re through the door,” she added to Rose, “but if anyone asks you when they check your ticket, you’re a movie producer named Linda Harrigan, and you’ve just ploughed all your money into a dinosaur film you’re hoping is gonna be the next Jurassic Park. Heads up: it won’t be. I read the last draft of the script she had saved on her computer, and it’s shit. You don’t even see a dinosaur ’til the second act.”
“And you didn’t have no trouble getting hold of it?” asked Ruby. “The invite, I mean.”
“Nah. Waited for the postman to come then took it straight out of Harrigan’s mailbox, easy as. If I were her, I’d be getting someone to keep a better eye on my post, next time I had to rush off to Auckland in a hurry to sort out an animatronic triceratops.”
El didn’t know what, exactly, Karen had done - or what tech-community favours she’d called in - to precipitat
e whatever on-set crisis had dispatched the real Linda Harrigan from her San Francisco base to the other side of the world. But she was, as always, thankful to have her inside their tent and pissing out, and not the other way around.
“And you’re certain there are two names on there?” said Sita, unsealing the envelope inch by careful inch.
“Have a look for yourself,” said Karen. “It’s Linda Harrigan and guest, see? She gets a plus-one. So you might want to give your mate Kate a bell and ask if she’s got a ballgown lying around. Or a tuxedo.”
A snake-oil salesman: that was what Ruby had called Kate Zhou, when her name had first come up in conversation.
“I ain’t criticising,” Ruby had added, lest El misunderstand the description. “She’s a nice girl. Smart, an’ all. It’s just a bit… American for my tastes, what she does. A bit PT Barnum.”
Kate Zhou’s speciality, El gathered, was the Magical Elixir - selling miracle cures for baldness, weight gain and erectile dysfunction to a diligently-curated portfolio of mostly older men who’d chosen, for their own reasons, to forgo the benefits of conventional medicine in the war they continued to wage against the ageing process.
“She don’t just con ‘em once, neither,” Ruby said. “She milks ‘em. Like I said: she’s a smart one. Chooses just the right marks - the ones who really believe, or the ones wanting a quick fix and who don’t care if they have to keep paying until they find the one that actually works for ‘em. So when she’s got ‘em on the hook, she can keep taking ‘ em - selling ‘em pill and potion after pill and potion until she’s ready to pack up shop and get out of Dodge.”
Like Barnum, she was a fast talker - confident, charismatic, articulate. A Bay Area native who kept a condo in North Beach but spent ten months out of twelve on the road, trawling hotel bars and the business lounges of Midwestern airports for new catches who might be amenable to spilling the details of their impotence or midnight hamburger habit after a drink or five, she was single, childfree, somewhere between thirty five and forty and - or so Sita, who had known her the longest, speculated - either a former attorney or a one-time jailhouse lawyer with a formidable knowledge of state and federal statute.
She was also, if El had understood correctly, set to be Rose’s date for what Ruby and Sita hoped would be remembered in the fullness of time as a very eventful evening.
The woman who landed on their doorstep just after six o’clock that night had on neither a ballgown nor a tuxedo, but a tailored black trouser suit, a pair of thick-heeled sandals that added three inches to her height and a tortoiseshell clip that kept her short dark hair out of her eyes. She was fine boned, louche and androgynously beautiful, and seemed entirely unfazed to discover El on the other side of the door, and not the older women who’d sought her help.
“You’re El, right?” she said, in a lazy Californian drawl that was friendly enough, but which El found immediately irritating, for reasons she elected not to analyse. “Or, wait… Karen? You’re not exactly dressed for a benefit, so I’m thinking you’re not Rose, and no offence, but you look a little older than thirteen, so I’m guessing you’re not her rugrat either.”
“Sophie,” El replied, sounding - even to her own ears - irrationally hostile, and unexpectedly protective of the child. “Her name’s Sophie.”
“Sophie, right. Sure. But since I’d put money on you not being her… which one are you? The grifter or the tech-head?”
“Grifter all the way, this one,” Ruby answered, coming up behind El. “Wouldn’t trust her anywhere near a computer. How you doin’, darlin’? You alright?”
She sidled through the narrow doorway, past El, and wrapped the interloper in an embrace - a move that, against all reason, exacerbated El’s irritation.
“Pretty good,” the woman said. “Getting a little chilly out here on the porch, though.”
She shot El a smile that was as lazy and infuriating as her accent.
“Can’t have that, can we?” said Ruby. “Come on in, love. She’s nearly ready for you.”
Ruby led her through to the sunroom, El trailing behind them. Neither Sita nor Karen were in there; just Sophie, stretched out across the same chair she’d been occupying since the morning, the graphic novel she’d been reading now traded for a paperback with a grimacing, red-mouthed clown on the cover.
She looked up from the book as they entered; took in the stranger who’d infiltrated their space.
“Are you here for my Mum?” she asked, without preamble.
The woman seemed thrown, for a moment, but recovered swiftly.
“I guess I am,” she said. “I’m Kate. And you must be Sophie?”
Sophie nodded, sombrely.
“Are you gay?” she asked.
“Here,” Ruby said, brows furrowing, “you can’t just go ‘round asking people that. Didn’t your mother never teach you no manners?”
Kate, though, seemed not to mind the question.
“I date women,” she answered, as casually as Sophie had asked. “Men too, sometimes. That okay with you?”
Sophie seemed to consider this, then nodded again.
“Mum’s gay, but she doesn’t date anyone,” she said. “I don’t know why. I asked her if she wanted a girlfriend, and she said no. I think she might have been lying, though.”
This peeling onion of revelations - that Rose had come out to her daughter in the months since Marchant; that she didn’t date, whatever that meant; that she said she wasn’t looking for a relationship but actually was, possibly - caused of bubble of anxiety to rise, unexpectedly, in El’s stomach; an echo of the awkwardness she’d felt the night that she and Rose had gone for dinner back in London, before Soames had made his malign presence known.
She swallowed it down; focused instead on the strange intergenerational exchange she was apparently witnessing.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Kate, bemused.
“I know it’s not a real date you’re going on,” Sophie told her. “But she still might not be very good at it, if she’s out of practice. So you should to be kind to her, even if she says the wrong thing or spills something on your trousers.”
“I’ll do my best,” Kate said, with a poker face that El thought was probably to her credit. “Besides, how do you know it won’t be me who spills something on your Mom? Could be I’m a lousy date myself.”
“Consider me forewarned,” said Rose, sweeping into the sunroom in a cloud of citrus perfume, a silver evening dress the texture of a mermaid’s scales covering her from calf to shoulder.
“I’ll play it safe,” said Kate. “Stick to mineral water.”
“Perhaps I’ll do the same,” Rose told her. “Spare us both the blushes, should any glassware go flying. My daughter has been interrogating you, I take it?”
“You told me to ask, if I had any questions,” said Sophie defensively.
“Ask me,” said Rose. “Not our guests.”
“I didn’t mind,” said Kate. “Besides, I got some useful information out of it. Right, Sophie?”
“See?” Sophie protested. “She didn’t mind!”
“Nevertheless,” said Rose, “there’s such a thing as politeness, as I’m sure El and Ruby would agree.”
She smiled at El conspiratorially, and El’s stomach dipped and rose again, entirely against her will.
“Should we get going?” Kate asked. “I don’t make it to a lot of these things - is it better to be early, or fashionably late?”
“Earlier the better, I reckon,” said Ruby, before Rose could answer. “Give everyone a chance to get a good look at you, before they kick off the auction.”
“There’s an Edward Hopper retrospective in the adjoining gallery,” Rose suggested. “We could kill a little time in there?”
“Why not?” said Kate. “I could go some urban realism ahead of watching you try to buy a yacht.”
“Operative word, try,” said Ruby. “I ain’t interested in spending the rest of this trip working out how to transport
some bloody great sailboat across the Atlantic. You want to be seen, that’s all. You want people to remember you.”
Kate made a show of looking Rose up and down appreciatively.
“Can’t see anyone forgetting her, in a dress like that,” she said.
El’s throat tightened, her fingers flexing involuntarily into fists.
“Let’s hope so,” said Ruby, throwing a quizzical glance El’s way. “Just make sure you swan about a bit, once you’re in there. And whatever you do: keep smiling for the cameras.”
Chapter 15
South of Market, San Francisco
September 1997
The US head office of The Fine Cloth Company was tall - not quite on a par with the Coit Tower or the Transamerica Pyramid or the other concrete spears and rectangles that punctured the curving skyline of the city, but high enough for El to have to crane her neck to see the top. Like its neighbours, it seemed to her faintly unreal - separated from the drugstores, coffee shops and animated foot-traffic of Market Street by a pedestrianised walkway, and dotted with Narnian lamp-posts that gave the whole enclosure the look of a film lot recreation, an artificial replica of a working office block.
She adjusted the laptop case that bisected her chest, ran a palm through the neon pink of her hair and pushed through the revolving doors and into the lobby, fortifying herself against the truculent receptionists and gatekeeping personal assistants whose jobs depended on their ability to deter walk-in visitors, to keep out people like her - and saw Wainwright himself, now in suit and tie, perched on one of the irregularly shaped stone slabs opposite the front desk that might have been benches, but might equally have been a stab at rough-hewn corporate sculpture.
His head turned towards her as she approached him, and there was relief as well as anticipation in the smile he gave her.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 13
