Survivanoia

by Baroness Von Smith

  She rolled down the window and the spicy scent of his aftershave, like an exotic tea, pleasantly undercut the sugar smell her gum had filled the truck with.

  “Need something?”

  He identified himself as the neighbor from across the street. “I am wondering what it is you are doing out here at midnight in what appears to be a landscaping truck.”

  His voice hadn’t changed since she’d met him either, still today it held just a dusting of a combined accent, flattened New York vowels but honed W’s, like a Long Island Dracula.

  Dacianna handed him a business card. “Reclamations,” she told him.

  He looked the card. “Which means what?”

  “Depends. In your neighbor’s case here, he contracted a—” She checked the invoice on a clipboard next to her. “—seven thousand dollar landscape for which he provided a deposit equating to one third, roughly twenty-three hundred. The rest of the bill was never paid. Contact with him has not produced a complaint or reversal of any type on his part.”

  “Complaint?”

  “Dying plants, algaed pond, damaged sprinklers or plumbing, or poisoned pets or other animals.”

  “So you are doing, again, what?”

  “Taking back two-thirds of the landscape. Actually, a little more, to compensate the company for labor.”

  “Just what kind of person does a job like this?” He sounded curious, not accusatory.

  Dacianna cracked her gum at him. “Ex cons.”

  And as she said it her crew materialized, driving across the lawn in a mini dump truck twice as big as her standard pick-up. Their headlights caught her visitor and Dacianna noted that the grey pinstripe of his suit matched his wild shock of hair.

  He didn’t squint against the glare, but she flashed her own headlights at her crew and they dropped back to running lights.

  “Just what is it you do for this reclamations company?”

  Sydney had asked her.

  Again with the gum. She tossed the truck in reverse. “I own it.”

  When she’d arrived at her office the next morning, she found Sydney’s voice on the machine, asking her to dinner.

  Her father never stated explicitly that he didn’t think their relationship would last. But the man’s undisguised amusement and cavalier dealings made his opinion clear to Dacianna. In truth, she agreed. But Sydney Scalinescu fascinated her; she couldn’t get enough of him and his museum-like mansion. There were few people whose companionship she could tolerate, let alone desired. Syd doted on her almost as much as her father did, and he had money, which was Daci’s grandmother’s single criteria.

  “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich guy as it is to fall in love with a poor one,” her grandmother reminded her repeatedly. “And at least if it goes sour, and with you kids today it always seems to, you can get some money for your troubles.”

  So three years later, the end of summer, when she’d planned to, as an NYU graduate, get herself away from the Hamptons and back to Los Angeles, she instead found herself cross-legged on the wrap-around deck of her father’s rented beach house. Every year he’d said he wasn’t renting the following summer and then every summer he had, so Daci and her mother had that long, warm season mostly to themselves on the New York beach for every year Daci recalled. But this, she somehow knew, would be the last one for real.

  She munched a Chips Ahoy “soft batch” cookie, another new product from her freshly-ended college days. Not soft in any way resembling fresh cookies, and chemical in flavor, yet she went through nearly a bag of them a day. She plucked the last one from the flimsy white plastic tray, stopped listening to the waves near her on the darkened porch and paid attention instead to the conversation indoors, between her father and her hoping-to-be-husband, Sydney.

  “Just trying to be assured that you know what you’re in for,” her father’s tone revealed plainly his skeptical bemusement. Her father looked the way Sydney sounded. His pointy beard, shoulder-length graying hair and sharpened cheekbones marked him as East European, reinforced by his being a vintner.

  “You’re concerned about the age difference, yes?”

  “No. Yes. A little. Daci is twenty-two going on forty.”

  “We all know everything at twenty-two, yes? If I knew now all that I believed I knew at that age, I’d own the world.”

  “Not just a large paranoid piece of it?”

  Both men laughed at this reference to Sydney’s company, a corporation Daci did not understand and was not especially interested in.

  “The difference,” her father said, “is that when Daci is thirty-six, she will know everything she thinks she knows now. And she very well may own the world!”

  More laughter. “All the better for me!”

  “You’ll never control her.”

  “I have no desire to.”

  “She might destroy you.”

  “What better way to be brought down?”

  Her father’s grin came through in his voice. “I guess you do have all the answers. You’ve got my blessing, or whatever. Give it a shot. It’ll work. Or it won’t.”

  Of course it didn’t. It destructed fabulously and was still in the process. Yet here they were not unhappily sharing dinner.

  “You know what’s weird?” she asked.

  Sydney stacked the empty platters and pushed them aside.

  “In general or tonight?”

  “We made it through the hard part. Me being away.”

  Sydney’s face crinkled into a smile. “A lover away is an easy thing. Especially for the one who is gone. It’s when they reunite. That’s what’s difficult. Separated they have each created a certain perfect version of their partner. Then the real partner comes along and doesn’t live up. Dismantles everything. Isn’t that how it went? You thought I was a god? Turns out I’m only a man.”

  “I never thought you were a god, Syd. I thought, and still believe, that you’re decent and good and even generous. And I can’t reconcile who I believe you to be with the actions you’ve taken in the name of running this corporation.”

  “Well. Perhaps you can fix that for me.”

  “Reconcile myself?”

  “Reconcile me.”

  She thought, but did not say aloud, that this was exactly what he’d wanted from her since he’d uncovered her Romanian heritage. Sydney Elek Scalinescu had as convoluted a heritage as Dacianna herself—as most Americans. But Syd’s Americanization, which made all his disparate pieces acceptable and, if he so chose, irrelevant, was newly minted, a fact exclaimed by his accent. Despite his French prenume, to those with an ear for it his accent said Hungary. If you questioned him he’d claim Transylvania, now a part of Romania but at one time controlled by the Hungarian Magyars. Then he’d tell you he was Magyarian, how they occupied not only Transylvania but also Slovakia, and he’d grit his teeth and curse the Dacians.

  None of this had meant much to Dacianna when they’d met. It wasn’t until she traveled with her father in search of unique rootstock for his vineyard. Her father had been nearly suicidal with grief after the destruction of his Moldavian vineyard. Rather than attempt to preserve anything within the rabid animal of Eastern Europe, he decided to collect vine cuttings and bring them to the United States. No American president would be crazed enough to burn a vineyard in the People’s Republic of California.

  So her father combined his rootstock quest with her college-graduation trip. In Early Autumn of 1992—a few days after she’d gotten officially engaged and a few months before the wedding—he took her to travel the shadows of Europe, places tourists didn’t go, like the formers: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, as well as Chechnya, and of course Romania.

  During that trip, Dacianna came to appreciate, was made to appreciate, that she was Dacian, the only known descendants of the original Roman em
pire, and that marrying Sydney the Magyar would contaminate the blood line. “But so would marrying, say, Adam Brown, the Systems Administrator,” her father had assured her. It didn’t matter in the States. But it mattered, still to this day, in Eastern Europe. And Sydney-the-Magyar, in marrying her, would be taming himself a creature of stature and status to be spoiled and bragged about. (To his credit, Sydney had never done less. )

  This was the fiction Sydney forged for himself about her. That she was Haute Bourgeois Romania, not a princess, but a Baroness. Certainly no American Wildwoman. Could he be that naive? The acquisition of those rootstocks for her father’s winery involved transactions with a multitude of shady men. If Sydney had ever suspected or doubted her decorum, he’d never indicated it. Never accused her of trading sex for secrets (which she hadn’t—not intentionally) or her father of using her as bait (which he had).

  Daci peered now at Sydney. Wondered about his comment earlier regarding her father “staying in it.” The question she grappled for hadn’t fully forged itself in her head when Attalla arrived with his grin and dessert—another platter for sharing.

  “Here we have look like uzvar, stewed in vodka, medivnyk and makivnyk.”

  Sydney raised an eyebrow. “Have you gotten a new cook?”

  “Oh no. Our cook cooks from all over world, Mister Scalinescu. Look like even Slavic, yes?”

  Sydney stood, shook Attalla’s’ hand, patted him warmly on the shoulder. “Thank you, sir.” He sat, took the oversized spoon, and served Daci a large portion of the fruit compote. “I mentioned to him last time he was here that my son’s mother is Slavic and one thing I miss is her desserts. Look like sweet is gone, he said.” Syd set a piece of each of the cakes, one honey, the other poppy seed, onto Daci’s little dessert plate.

  She tried a bite of everything. Liquor just permeated the syrupy rich fruit of the uzvar, the honey cake was moist and just sweet enough to bring out the harmonious tannins in her coffee, and the poppy seeds were a bright contrast to all that. As she nibbled her sweets, she watched the gentleman across from her, refined and complicated and powerful, roll his eyes to the ceiling in silent thankful prayer, kiss his fingers and send the kiss to the sky. Such childlike glee at something so simple as a thought-gone dessert.

  She dipped her spoon into the uzvar. “Sydney?”

  “Ummm! Fabulous, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Did he give you any names?”

  GrandMama von Goethe—Dacianna’s father’s mother—sounded, as she always did when discussing Sydney Scalinescu, as if she’d accidentally eaten a lemon.

  Daci set her keys on the battered little table behind the couch and took from the silver dish there a wrapped candy, a caramel ring with a white, creamy center. Breakfast of champions.

  “Names of?”

  “Anyone! Scientists! People in the company to be wary of!”

  “He wouldn’t, GrandMama, he didn’t vote me in. Right?”

  GrandMama waved the conversation aside with a wide sweep of her flabby arm. “I already know he didn’t or you would have told me. So, good! I don’t have to feel guilty about giving money to those bartenders. Nothing gets staff yammering like a few free drinks.”

  “Bartenders?”

  “I know where your Sydney is most hours of the day. And I know most of the people who own those places. I could have him assassinated at the Double Tree if I wanted. Or if you wanted. Get a pen?”

  Daci pulled a Rottring from its space in her leather satchel, handed it to her grandmother.

  “You’d better write it, Kid, if you want to be able to read it. And sit down! You’re making me nervous.”

  Daci sat on the hideous plaid couch. Orange and black mostly, in thin-line plaid. When her grandparents first bought it, sometime in the…70’s? Was that possible? Dacianna had thought it was awesome, since she loved Halloween, and the couch seemed a tribute to the holiday. Now Daci recognized that it was awful, that the rust and black were ugly remainders of an ugly decade and she couldn’t understand why GrandMama insisted on keeping both it and the matching chair, a plaid box worn through like the couch at the arms but whose cushions remained obstinately resilient.

  GrandMama Von Goethe, once Ileana Moldovan, had built the nursing home and now lived in the facility’s penthouse suite. The fancy apartment measured 1,250 square feet, larger than the Cape Cod she’d moved out of when Opa Wolfgang had died and she’d discovered all that money she’d never known he’d had.

  The suite included a modest but well-equipped kitchen and GrandMama had a private cook, in addition to her private nurse and a driver she kept on call. She shared laundry service with the rest of the home, but had her own maid. Though clearly visible from the outside, the fact of a third floor was not advertised and the staff were discouraged from mingling. A metal flap requiring a key hid the elevator button. So things would remain until GrandMama died, at which point it would be up to Dacianna’s father to decide whether to preserve this family secret for their own continued use or open it to other patients.

  GrandMama pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from seemingly out of the air. She set her glasses, which hung from a string around her neck and tended to collect crumbs, on her nose, and frowned at the paper.

  “Okay, first order of business concerns one Geo Rivera, real name Jorge, he’s the….” She moved the paper almost to her nose. “I have some atrocious handwriting. Ah! Inside sales department supervisor. You write that down?”

  “You already have it.”

  “If I can’t read this you sure as hell can’t. There’s a note pad—”

  “In the coffee table drawer.” Daci opened the small drawer in the middle of GrandMama’s hideous rectangular coffee table, found a writing tablet and jotted down Geo Rivera. She wondered if he was the same Geo Rivera she knew of through Zane.

  “Does Geo make dirty movies, GrandMama?”

  “He does! But that’s not the problem. He was in with the last company president. Drinking and golfing.”

  “And hookers, oh my!”

  “Mmm hmm. So you’re going to want to come down on him right out of the gate.”

  “Couldn’t I just fire him?”

  “You could but you don’t want to. Because you’re going to want to hire his father. And even though all evidence says Geo and his father don’t talk anymore, it’s disrespectful to hire a man and fire his son.” She looked up from the paper suddenly, her ice blue eyes sparkling. “That’s the same about Syd Junior, you know. He’s probably dangerous. But if you need him gone, you’ll have to make him quit. If you fire him it’s the same as admitting defeat.”

  Daci nodded. She’d thought that situation over long and hard by herself already. “Tell me about Geo’s dad.”

  “Him and the rest of this list.” GrandMama shook the wrinkled paper in the air, “All names of scientists. I know how much you like them. So I hunted down the top thirty best in the state. Geo’s father, Arturo Rivera is the first name.”

  “Rivera is the best?” Daci thought she should have heard of him.

  “The best? How should I know. Arturo Rivera is the first name on the list because Arturo starts with A.”

  Daci laughed. She should have known. Her grandmother’s address book was arranged the same way, with Uncle Elwood under U, Rabbi Steinberg under R.

  “So why do I want him?”

  GrandMama consulted her crinkled sheet. “Arturo Rivera is a desalination expert? That mean something to you?”

  “Yeah! Survivanoia’s de-sal plant just opened last month. Saline Solutions?”

  “Okay. That makes sense. He’s the mastermind behind Saline Solutions, yes I wrote that. But Survivanoia never hired him, they contracted him. And apparently that’s a waste because he has a car. No!” She squinted at
the paper. “No, he has a car that runs on waste. Runs on desalination waste. Does that make sense?”

  Daci blinked. “Holy shit.”

  “Mmm hmm, the story is he can convert a car in three days. Okay, the next one is Bernie Goldblume. He’s got a…solar storage? System? Mean something?”

  “Holy shit, “ Daci said again.

  And on it went. A Seth Browder treating everything from autism to ulcers by harnessing the frequencies of purring cats. A physicist at JPL having success with teleportation of inanimate objects, another holed up in Riverside rumored to be levitating bowling balls and developing a perpetual motion machine. Biochemists who’d left USC after successfully transplanting eyes, and another team rumored to have split off from JPL, rumored to be growing new brain cells, and locating the origin of dreams.

  “Where’d you say you got this list?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Syd should have given this information to you, that was part of his arrangement. I’ll have him chewed him out tomorrow. How’d your first day go, anyway?”

  “Entertaining. At least for me.”

  “You don’t feel overwhelmed?”

  “No.”

  “Disenchanted?”

  “No, I’m not Dorothy and Survivanoia isn’t Oz, just whose side on you on here, GrandMama?”

  “I got you the job, didn’t I?”

  True. Daci’s grandmother had “pulled strings and cashed in favors” to get Daci to the president’s seat. The tenacious old woman had money and, as she put it, “At the Devil’s table everyone may use a long handled spoon, but they’re still all spooning from the same bowl.”

  GrandMama knew the silent partner. Did she have something on him? Were they lovers? Daci didn’t know and didn’t especially care. It got her where she needed to be. Daci had done reclamations of goods, and later of land. After she’d earned her Master’s in it, she’d taught Global Policy classes online to anonymous members of Congress and the UN who needed a crash course. She’d owned a pawn shop and she’d done much of Sydney’s acquisition research until she discovered his corporate secret. Then everything changed. Was still changing.