“But at the end of the day…”
Catherine wincing internally. At the end of the day DIYagnosis Personal Health Systems had no sales history, no cash flow and no realizable assets beyond the patents, which could not themselves be used as loan collateral because their true value was entirely dependent on the success of the rollout.
“Chicken-and-egg situation,” the young man said.
Catherine wanted to cradle her head in her arms and close her eyes. She wanted to drift into a dream and wake up very far away from these men.
“And from a banking standpoint,” the young man concluded, without even the courtesy to look uncomfortable saying so, “the only way we could try to help you here is with a personal loan.”
“He actually fucking said that,” she told Phil over the celebration lunch they’d planned for that Friday. “Personal fucking loan. What am I, just out of college?”
Phil was looking at her, amused. “Cate,” he said, “you’re saying ‘fuck’ a lot, and quite loudly.”
She sat back. Looked around. “Sorry everyone in this restaurant,” she said. They were eating Reuben sandwiches in a place a few blocks over from Phil’s office.
“So they said no,” he said. “At the end of the day.”
“That’s the thing. They’re such wimps, they try to pretend they’re not saying no. They try to pretend they’re helping out with this personal loan idea, all the while telling me I don’t have the assets to secure it. My ideas are brilliant, my company is a rising star, for sure. Absolutely. Everyone around the table is convinced of that. Had I thought about approaching another source of venture capital?”
Phil shrugged. “They have a point. Morris isn’t the only VC in the world.”
Catherine put her sandwich down. “Do I have to explain this? About me and VCs and the likelihood I’ll ever speak to one again?”
Phil chewed methodically, his big jaw working away. He swallowed and took a sip of ginger beer. Then he said, “I’m about to change the subject, but only slightly. I got a call from your intern, Arwen.”
“She’s a design assistant now, in fact,” Catherine said.
“Not calling about design, though.”
“Yes, was meaning to mention that.”
“She said you’d instructed her to make discreet inquiries about Kate Speir.”
“Well, I did say that,” Catherine admitted. “So what did she ask?”
“She wondered if I could confirm where Mako was based,” Phil said. He ate a few fries.
“And you’re wondering why I would think you’d ever tell her something you wouldn’t tell me.”
No, that wasn’t it. Catherine might be pushing this inquiry away from herself. Giving it to someone she trusted. “And though it’s highly irregular, on a human level, I do get it.”
“Well, thanks for that, Phil,” Catherine said.
He held up a hand. He smiled. He understood. He specialized in always understanding. “A detail. And this was news to me.”
Catherine waited for it.
“They’re not in Seattle, or not any more. Not sure how this came about but they’ve apparently moved to Vancouver. I told your assistant and she’s now working on an address.”
“Vancouver,” Catherine said.
“Seems so,” Phil confirmed. “But listen closely here, Cate. If you contact them, it’s none of my business and you never spoke to me.”
Phil finished his sandwich and smiled at her. Tapped his watch. He leaned across the narrow table for a kiss on the cheek. She watched him make his way up Hastings, westbound towards the glass towers. Big, confident strides. The detail obviously didn’t strike Phil as important, even if he could see in her eyes how it was to her. Money was borderless. It had no location. So he went back to work without a thought. And perhaps Catherine should have done the same. Catherine with a week remaining on that ticking clock. But she could not deny the way this one detail, this one bit of news sat with her. It wasn’t about Mako Equity any more. It was about Kate Speir. Speir in Vancouver. Speir close at hand. Speir closing the distance, hemming her in. Here was a person with an iron will about her, a cold gaze and a laser focus. And to Catherine it seemed so clear in those moments that this gaze and focus had now fallen on her.
Catherine was in the car, driving rather faster than she normally did. And entirely in the wrong direction. She needed to get back to work. The storm was rising, not levelling off. Seven days, and she had thinking to do, planning and strategizing. She too could muster an iron will. She could do the cold gaze and the laser focus. Circumstances now demanded it, even if she had no firm idea what exactly came next.
But she didn’t go back to work just then. She drove north instead, across the Lion’s Gate Bridge, up and up towards the looming blue-green mountains, towards the snowcaps and the perspective that she might gain by being there. She drove all the way up the Capilano Canyon to the big parking lot at the foot of Grouse Mountain. Then she paid for her ticket up on the gondola, standing with the crowds of kids heading to ski school, everybody’s breath making ghosts as they were cabled up over the towers in that big swinging car.
At the top she rubbed her hands briskly together in the icy chill. She heard the snow squeak under her boots, which were not snow boots, and which sunk awkwardly into the hardpack. She made her way to the wooden walkway, and from there back towards the brow of the hill, to the chalet. She was 1,200 metres above the crisp blue sea, a sign on the open observation deck informed her. And she stood with a coffee at the rail, icicles hanging from the eaves and a brilliant, porcelain blue sky doming overhead. The sun was a white hole in the western quadrant, not yet dropping, seeming as if it might never drop.
This was her city. The glistening glass of the downtown core, the cold inlets, the shipping terminals, those towering orange cranes. The slender bridges spanning the water. In the distance, the green thumb of Point Grey and the UBC campus where they would be, very soon, doing tests on the Red Pill 3.0 that she and her team had made possible. This was the place where she had put down roots that she had intended to nurture and make into a splendid thing, with branches that would reach to the sky.
What had Morris once told her, from the crow’s nest height of his own mahogany boardroom? Miracles, mystery and juice. The conquering powers. The fuel for a Promethean will. Red Pill 3.0 would be the miracle. And if Mako proved anything, it was that there would always be enough available juice.
The sun was making prism colours in the icicles, and casting around itself an enormous ring that fizzed with its own iridescence. Catherine breathed the clear, cool air and thought about the mystery Morris had proposed, a partnership that made no sense on paper, that people might question and criticize, but that would have in it the seeds of something powerful and enduring.
He’d been speaking of himself, of course. That’s what the boys did, most reliably. But in the city below, there was now some new presence, some new mystery. A new potential partner with whom Catherine saw that her own purposes and potential might be most compellingly aligned. No friend of hers. Her enemy instead. Not Morris, but Kate Speir. She had closed the distance, after all. And she would see the symmetries. Catherine made better sense as a partner than Morris, every time. Hadn’t Valerie seen that immediately? And Speir would get it too, when they were face to face. When the gaze met the gaze.
With that conviction, she descended from the mountain, plummeting fast. And when she strode into DIY, it was with a different sense of things. She returned energized and committed despite the threat. First time in a long time, she felt truly unbreakable. Her pod of desks. Her bright blue plastic chairs. Her chattering bro-coders, Metallica soundtrack, poster art, whiteboard hieroglyphs, line of deer antlers along one wall and sparrows in the rafters, yes indeed.
Friday night, 8:00 p.m., Catherine at her workstation, coming up for breath. And though there was by that point hardly a sound in the place but for traffic noise trickling in from Terminal Avenue, she saw she was not alo
ne. One other person was still there at that late hour. Someone with a task list and items outstanding. Someone doing this because they liked it enough to do it well. And it cheered her further to see that the remaining person, late on a Friday, was Kalmar.
“Hey,” she called.
He came over. “Haven’t seen you around, Red.”
“Busy, busy,” she told him.
“You look tired,” Kalmar said.
“No doubt. I’m beat.”
“Idea,” he said. “Go home.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “What exactly is there to do at this hour?”
“I’ve got a few things here.”
He stepped closer to her desk, tattooed hand brushing the top of her monitor. Blue torn sweater, black jeans, boots. Wool cap, check. Kalmar whose mother surely must have been a staggering beauty. “Well, I got a few more things too,” he said now. “And I’m still heading out.”
But he didn’t. He lingered. And Catherine didn’t mind, entirely. He did have that quality. You didn’t mind him close. Smelling his wool sweater and the faint aroma of shampoo. Lilac.
He was looking at his fingernails, immaculate. He said it finally: “So are the rumours true, or false, or possibly not for comment?”
She nodded. Okay. So obviously Kalmar would know. And as markets director, he might have wished to be told further out than a week before the deadline. “Who told you?”
He shrugged. He’d rather not say.
“I was going to talk to you all about it eventually.”
“That’s good,” he said, dark eyes up now and on her own.
“The rumours are true. The likely outcome is unclear.”
“Buy-sell?”
She sighed. “That’s right.”
“You just gotta swing that financing, I guess,” he said. “How’d it go with the bankers the other day?”
“Bankers are weasels,” Catherine said. “Never there when you need them.”
Kalmar nodded grimly. “Truth,” he said. “Go private. I know people.”
“Thanks, Kali,” she said. “I know you do, but I’ll figure it out.”
“Well, if you don’t,” he said. And here he fell to silence, either unsure quite how to say what came next, or perhaps unsure if it should be said. “If you end up taking the offer and leaving, whatever you’re doing next, if you can see a role for me I’d be interested. I like this.”
He made a gesture with his finger, back and forth between them. And Catherine, who had thought to stand right then, come around the desk and give him a friend hug of thanks, did not do that now. She just stayed seated and nodded.
“Thanks again,” she said. “But don’t plan on it. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good to hear,” he said. “Good to hear.”
“Sorry, Kali, I cut you off the other day. In the car.”
Oh that. He glanced up, remembering. Someone had visited the Warehouse that afternoon. Didn’t ask for her. Didn’t ask for anyone. Just walked in and started to look around. Like an inspection or something. A woman, late thirties maybe.
Catherine sat straighter in her chair. Kalmar only chuckled and shook his head with a confused expression.
“Okay what?” she asked him. “Kalmar, talk to me. What happened?”
“Nothing. No, no. It’s just weird. This one thing.”
“Tell me, please.”
Just this one funny thing, Kalmar said. And here he held his hands up as if to frame a picture of her face: her hair and eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. “I’m not talking identical twin stuff or anything. But this lady looked quite a lot like you.”
MAKO EQUITY LLC
“HI, IT’S ME. VAL, LISTEN. Okay, honestly I’m maybe just a bit freaking out here. Tell me please that you went down to DIY a couple days back and didn’t tell them you were my sister. I need to hear from you. I left a message on your other phone. Sorry. Okay, bye.”
It was after midnight. She was calling her sister’s cell, which was probably turned off and charging, sitting next to her on a bedside table while she peacefully slept, Mark spooned in behind her.
Settle down. Settle down. Have some wine. More wine, that is. No, don’t. Shit. It’s after midnight. When did I become a person who’s up after midnight surrounded by my only friends and they’re all in bottles? Pinot grigio BFF. Xanax, Klonopin, Paxipam, Valium, Ativan. I love you guys.
She didn’t take anything. She poured her half glass of wine down the sink. She was too agitated, too nervy to drink. Freaking out and not going to deny it.
You said you had something for me?
Catherine looked long and hard at the text she’d written to Rostock, thumb hovering over Send. Quivering there. Trembling. Then over to Delete. Gone. No way.
She was out on the street, in front of her building. At some point in the past half hour she’d exited her own apartment, descended via elevator or stairs, left the building and walked across to the park. She couldn’t remember a bit of it. She just seemed to wake up there, sitting on a bench in her robe and slippers.
“What’s happening to me?” she said aloud. “What exactly is going on?”
Her face in her hands, eyes pinched shut. Familiar feelings now. G-forces seeming to press her from all sides, compress her. Gravity threatening to do its work. Black shapes thudding around her, pressing close, feathers and beaks and claws. The sensation of falling.
Catherine on a bench in Kitsilano Park. Catherine being approached by a stranger, open hands in front of him, dishevelled, possibly drunk. “Are you okay? Do you need me to call anyone?”
“I’m freaking out in public,” she said to the stranger. “Wearing a bathrobe.”
“Are you hurt? Do you need help getting home?”
“I’m talking to a stranger in the park across from my apartment in the middle of the night.”
“I’m just going to help you cross the street, all right?”
She was safely escorted back across the street and dropped at her front door where she realized she’d locked herself out and had to retrieve spare keys from the back of the building where she’d hidden them behind a hydro meter box. She knocked over a recycling bin. Someone yelled from across the way. She fell asleep at 3:30 a.m. Woke up curled into a fetal ball on the couch. Woke to her phone ringing. It was Val.
“Oh God,” Catherine said. “What time is it?”
“So do I worry about you leaving me weird messages in the middle of the night sounding honestly like maybe alcohol was involved?” That was Val at her sharply caring best. They had mothered each other for a long time now. No changing that pattern.
“Ugh,” Catherine said. “Tell me now. Were you there?”
Val hadn’t been down to DIY, no. She’d never been down. “I don’t even know where it is, Cate.”
Catherine told her sister about the visitor. Kalmar’s comment. She heard Val breathing evenly at the other end. “Cate,” her sister said, “that is nothing to panic about.”
Catherine got off the couch and shuffled to the front window. The sky was laced with pink again, dark clouds in the east. She looked across the water to those buildings facing her from the far side of the bay. Kensington Place seemed to glow in special sharpness, butter-yellow accents winking across the waves. The light of the morning sky was reflected there and held her eye.
“Phil told me Mako has moved to Vancouver,” Catherine told her sister. “That means Speir is here. You can see why I’m wondering.”
“Like what, now Kate Speir looks like you?”
“I don’t know,” Catherine said. “Who else would just drop by?”
“Who else?” Valerie said. “It could be anybody. Listen. Has your intern found their office address yet?”
No, Arwen hadn’t come up with anything. But Valerie wasn’t deterred.
“We’ll find it. I’m good at finding things. Then you go talk to them. It’s just business, right?”
“R
ight,” Catherine said. “Just business.”
“It is!” Val said.
“If you say so.”
“Come on,” her sister said. “Rule of Stephens.”
Catherine let out a big breath. Sure, of course. Listen to sister Val. “Didn’t you used to go to fortune tellers?” she asked.
“Hey, sometimes they were scary accurate,” Valerie said. “But listen. You sit tight. Or better, go to work and get busy with something. Do not fret. And no caffeine, alcohol or red meat today.”
Catherine stood at the window, looking out over the park, the buildings on the far side. The sea. Boats and birds. Black birds in their dozens in the trees across the street. They would start up in a swirl, then resettle, as if the wind itself were tossing them, bits of paper or soot.
“So Rostock,” Catherine said. “He texted me yesterday. I ignored it.”
Valerie took a few seconds to respond. Then she said, “That’s probably best, really. For you, I mean.”
“Yeah, but then I tried to text him back last night.”
“Oh Catherine,” Valerie said.
“No answer, so I went looking online. He’s completely disappeared. You remember when he called and I Googled him? Got that one hit?”
University of Chicago, Professor Emeritus.
“The page is down,” Catherine said. And there was nothing else out there. No address. She’d tried texting but got no answer.
“Where are you going with this?” Valerie asked.
Catherine sighed. She didn’t know. Her mind was bouncing between things. “You think DIY has security cameras? I realize I’ve never even looked.”
“Why don’t you come over tonight?” Valerie said. “You really don’t sound great. Mark will make lasagna. We’ll watch Mamma Mia. It’s Saturday. So we watch Pierce Brosnan sing ‘When All Is Said and Done.’”
“I’ll try,” she said to Val. “I’ll really try.”
But of course she didn’t go. And she didn’t follow Val’s advice and go to work to stay busy either. She spent the night at home, fretting and watching television without remembering a bit of it. Then she crashed into a pinot-noir-and-Zopiclone-aided sleep at 10:00 p.m., curled up again, same spot, same sofa.
The Rule of Stephens Page 15
