“What about school? I know I’m a fuck-up, but…I really like college.”
“Go at night. School is cheap there.”
Sydney’s eyes hooded. “Where?”
“Los Angeles. The company is in Los Angeles.”
Sydney flopped back in his chair. Breathed in, breathed out.
“Yes or no, Sydney. Decide.”
“Can’t I have, like, a day?”
“No.”
“What about Ma?”
“You will tell her.”
* * *
“Vat joo mean joo go! Your Da?” Zola Ratkovitch spit on the kitchen’s yellowed linoleum floor. “Trash! Like in zee street!”
“But Ma, I can’t—”
“Joo can shut up!”
He did. Sydney’s mom stood just over five feet, more than a foot shorter than her son. She still wore the shawls and heavy dresses of her native land, still clung to the old traditions and still carried deep-seated superstitions. When she cursed you, she really cursed you. Sydney had never shaken fully free of her mythology, and when she hollered in her native tongue—a language Sydney had forgotten on purpose in Junior High, and tried unsuccessfully to reclaim just after his 18th birthday—it made him shiver, even on a muggy day like today.
“Ma. Ma! English, please!”
She glared at him. English slowed her down, with her y’s like j’s, her rolling r’s and her skewed th’s that never came out the same twice in a row.
“Joo listen! Dis Company of his, just like gang. He tell you vat, zat joo in trouble? Zat you have to leave or joo die?”
Sydney stared at his mother, suddenly and inexplicably frightened.
“Oh, ya, joo tink joor muh-zer doesn’t know. Doesn’t know vat joo do. I know, Sydney. I know all about zat boy, zat Ion person.”
Sydney swallowed, wondering if she knew everything. He doubted it. She’d have thrown him out if she knew. There weren’t enough prayers in the world to save him from his best friend’s sins. Ian oozed meanness, seeped cruelty, which Sydney’s mother sensed. She’d banned Ian from the house by the time he and Sydney were 12.
“Joor fah-zer is just like Ion. Only he hides behind his big corporation. Did he tell joo vat kinds of tings he make? Protects from zee bio disease?”
“Yeah, he told me, Ma.”
His mother gazed at him for a long, silent, spooky, time. Sydney glanced at the old green couch, the cracked kitchen floor, out the screen-less window, anything to not have to look at his Ma. Because if he looked at her face he’d see it, if he listened too closely he’d hear it, just as from across the room he could feel her heart break.
She nodded finally. “I am vasting vords. Please, promise. Write me to from zees California.”
CHAPTER 12
“Scally” paced his new office, larger and brighter than his first apartment. Like his nickname, Sydney’s new office was something to which he quickly became accustomed. His nickname had come his first day on the job, when the break room scared him a little and reminded him of the stories he’d been told of Ellis Isle. Six different languages filled the place and nobody got to keep his name. Poo-ah-LAH-ni? How about we call you Loni? Scalinescu? S-c-a- Scally, got it, okay. Next! Thus he ‘d been christened by Mongo and Boozey, the maintenance manager and head mechanic, respectively, over sixteen years ago.
The new office had come just a few months ago as part of his new position—VP of Product Development. Along with the fancy title, they’d awarded him the center office on the second floor, overlooking the courtyard housed in the U of the new building. Survivanoia engineers had designed and erected this facility especially for the company, and it couldn’t have been better. The layout ensured everybody, even the production workers, a view of the outdoors. The managers, Scally included, all had balconies, in case they cared to use them.
At the moment, a Mr. Sanchez sat on Scally’s balcony, slurping coffee and gazing dreamily at the garden beneath him. A wooden box fraught with knobs and meters sat on Scally’s desk. Mr. Sanchez had brought it with him. Scally had recently tucked a set of plans for a similar product into a desk drawer. Those plans had come from a different man, a strange little scientist named Encludsmo Stuckhowsen who had come in days earlier to see the Baroness, the new company president.
The scientist had spoken such bad English that the Baroness switched him to German and translated for Scally. The little Doctor offered pages and pages of theoretical calculations explaining how pretension could be extrapolated from changes in micro-atmospheric conditions knowing this and that and blah. He’d described in vast detail the jobs of all the individual transistors, every bit of wire, each LED in his proposed “Pretentiometer”. What The Doctor hadn’t provided was a prototype.
Mr. Sanchez presented the opposite situation. The stocky, brown-suited man had shown up first thing that morning, unannounced, asking to speak with anybody in the Marketing group. They were about to shoo him out the door when Scally arrived, bleary eyed and clutching coffee, heard the man mumble something about “pretension meter” and saw the box in Sanchez’s thick hands. Scally had swooped him upstairs.
Now he picked the box from his desk. Nailed shut, couldn’t see the insides. Seemed lighter than what Stuckhowsen’s plans suggested. He carried it into the midday heat on the balcony.
Mr. Sanchez smiled. “Well? Is good, huh?” He patted his pompadour, greasy in the heat.
“It’s certainly a good idea, Mr. Sanchez. But I need you to prove how it works.”
“You want me to give away my secrets?”
“Not at all. But I wouldn’t, say, buy a car, without asking some questions, kicking the tires.”
“Do you know how your car works?”
Scally paused, laughed. “You got me there. But I’d take it for a test drive.”
Mr. Sanchez’s face split into a wide, toad-like grin. “Oh! That is yes. We must go inside, though.”
Scally led them back into his cool, crisp office. Sanchez hunched over his toaster-sized box and snapped one of its three switches. A needle on the face sprang forward and back, finally resting in the green range. “This is a prototype, you understand. The plans are for a digital one, but the money for that, I do not have.”
“Understood.” Scally peered at the meter. “Looks like it’s reading about two and a half.”
“Not bad! Most people are at least a three.”
“So that’s just me?”
“Correct.”
“How can I get it to measure a whole room?”
“Adjust the spanning range.” Mr. Sanchez snapped another knob to the on position. “It goes by feet, see? Diameter, one-to-three, that’s for one person. Ten feet to measure, say, a circle of friends at a party. Twenty feet for the average living room.”
“How about an art gallery or a performance at the L.A. Phil?”
“This one cannot do it, you’ll blow out the fuse. But can be done, yes, for sure. Now. You work in a large building, there is somebody here pretentious, yes?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Can we call that person to come into the room?” Scally punched an extension into his speaker phone. “This is Geo.”
“Geo, can you come see me in my office, please?”
“You mean right now? I’m swamped.”
“It’ll be quick.”
Geo—whose given name was Jorge, so not only had he Americanized his name but then shortened the bastardized version—finally made his appearance nearly twenty minutes later. Even the man’s walk—a loose lope that made his “hip”, scruffy dirty-blond hair fall into his eyes—even this made Scally cringe.
Scally kept a close watch on the instrument, still clutched in Sanchez’s hands, as the head of Inside Sales bounced through his door. The meter sprang to 6.8. He stifled a laugh. Sanchez snapped
the instrument off.
“Geo, this is Mr. Sanchez. He’s got a new little gadget he calls the poten-cho-meter. It measures the pretentiousness of people within a variable radius.”
“Really.”
“Do we currently have LACMA, the L.A. Phil, Spago, any of those places purchasing from us, or will these be cold calls?”
Geo raised an eyebrow.
“I’m just trying to get a sense as to how long it will take to launch a product like this and develop a market for it.”
Geo shook his head, an incredulous smile spreading across his well-featured face. “Why would a gallery want to know the pretentiousness—is that even a word? Why would they want to know that about their patrons?”
“Are you seriously asking me this? Marketing! As a way of defining demographics. Maybe they’ve got a whole mess of low-pretension level patrons who all turn out on Thursday. They could examine what it is about Thursday and try to recreate it on other nights to pull in more of that demographic on alternative nights.”
Geo scratched at his goatee for a moment. “I’ll look into it, Scally, and get back to you.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will you get back to me?”
Geo’s emerald eyes widened, in a my-god-he’s-serious way. “Soon! And I want to talk to you about this as well.” He slapped a ratty envelope onto Scally’s desk, then fled.
Mr. Sanchez patted his hair again, his eyes hopeful and questioning. Scally offered the man his hand. “I’m sold. And I’m going to work on selling the rest of my crew.”
* * *
“Scally. Got a minute?” The Baroness loomed in his office doorway. Her three-inch heels maximized her already remarkable height, bringing her over Scally’s six-three. She was the only person in the building that had the power to make Scally feel small.
She closed his door. Sixteen years ago, really even ten, he’d’ve envisioned himself stripping off her black tights with his teeth, indeed could have conceived no other reason why a woman would close his office door. But now, at 34, and her with that ferocity in her violet eyes, Sydney knew better.
The Baroness flowed into the chair across from his desk. The chair’s claret leather matched her hair, which she wore in a soft, complicated braid ending in a fishtail below her hips. Her ruby lipstick and well-penciled eyes made her look like a movie star, a modern femme fatal. She rested her hands on the chair arms and crossed her legs at the knee and for the life of him Scally couldn’t place whose gestures hers reminded him of, but it left him uneasy, that much he recognized.
“Akira tells me you stopped work on the Pretentiometer.”
“That’s right.”
“Can I ask you—”
“Because Mr. Sanchez’s design is—”
“—just who the hell you think you are?”
Scally’s jaw snapped closed. He’d been expecting, obviously, that she would ask him why, not request that he justify his very existence.
He needlessly cleared his throat, steepled his fingers. “I’m the Vice President of Product Development. Nice to meet you.”
“Uh-huh. Well, wise guy, Mr. Sanchez took his little three-knob box with him when he left, a month ago, correct?”
“Yes, it was his to take.”
“Therefore, we don’t have anything of his to study, correct?”
“We’ll get it as soon as we offer him a contract. I’ve kept in touch with him.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t promise him anything, did you?”
“Not yet.” Which was true, though his lie of omission involved a voice mail message to a certain small, strange scientist.
A crumpled and singed bit of paper magically appeared in the Baroness’s hand. “This,” she told Scally, “is all that’s definitely left of The Doctor.”
“The Doctor? That Stuckhowsen guy?”
The Baroness nodded. Scally blinked. Scrutiny revealed the paper to be an envelope, stamped and postmarked. “What do you mean ‘definitely left’?”
“His house.” She paused. “His dwelling has been destroyed. He worked out of said dwelling, so his lab equipment went, too. Notebooks, test tubes, all of it. The only thing I did find, besides a corpse that looks too big to be the Good Doctor, is this letter. It seems to be from a sister, who seems to be psychotic.”
Scally had too many questions to decide which to ask first. Why was the Baroness at The Doctor’s burned-up house? Who cared if he had a sister? And was the corpse him or not, and where were the police, and why—
“We both know,” the Baroness interrupted his brooding, “this Pretentiometer is a tiny little product that doesn’t. Fucking. Matter.”
“Yet here you are in my office.”
“Right.”
Scally took a deep breath. “You wanted The Doctor. Just to work for us, on anything.”
The Baroness smiled, whispered. “Right. He was a goddamn genius, Scally.” Her smile sharpened to a glare. “How are you going to fix this?”
“Ms. Von—”
“Baroness, please.”
“Baroness. I appreciate that you’re the President, but—”
“I’m glad somebody does.”
“—but as New Product Manager—”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I am?”
“Pardon?”
“A Baroness. European landowner, or feminization of Baron, as in powerful person, like oil Baron. Or wine Baron. Doesn’t the title intrigue you? Make you skeptical?”
Scally blinked at her some more. He hadn’t considered her title. Apart from the obvious mystery of why his father turned the company over to her, Scally hadn’t considered her much at all, aside from her height and that monstrosity she drove—that yellow Hummer. Rumor put snakeskin seats in that vehicle—rattlesnake hide. Looking at her, he believed it. Her vanity plate read “ROSN80,” which Scally’s girlfriend had surmised was a reference to Don Quixote’s broken down horse. This Scally couldn’t confirm or deny, couldn’t even opine, having only loose familiarity with the Don’s story or with the Baroness.
But to answer her question, “No, I guess I haven’t been skeptical.”
“If I were you, Sydney junior, I’d wonder about me a lot. Because I know all about you. You and Brooklyn and Ian.”
She could have kicked him in the balls. The past sixteen years of Scally’s life seemed to spin out away like water in a flushed toilet. Everything fell away from him, his season tickets to the Hollywood bowl, his membership at LACMA, his little house south of the Boulevard in Studio City. All gone.
Some primal New York instinct overtook him. It crept up from his belly and caught in his throat, made him stand up and spit some words at this sudden rival. “So what, you’re some friend of the Senator’s? I could have you killed with a phone call!”
The Baroness stayed seated. She licked her lips, grinning.
“I’m no friend to any Senator.”
“That won’t get you far in business.”
“Which business?”
“Any.”
She studied him. “You say that, yet you don’t practice it.”
Sydney took a breath. “Who are you working for? My dad? Send you to check on me? I’m doing fine.”
“Nope. I’m no friend of Daddy Paranoia-Bucks. That’s okay. I’ll give you another chance next time. What’s your story anyway, Thug Life? Has the corporate world left you soft?” She seemed amused. This unnerved Scally and made him feel like a jackass.
Rather than sit, which smacked of defeat, he came around to the front of his desk and leaned against it. “You know my entire life apparently, why don’t you tell me?”
The Baroness shook her head. “That’s what we call in the business a rhetorical question.”
“Why would you allow a gangster to continue working in…your company?”
“Good boy. But it’s not really my company and we both know that. You don’t think your daddy is a gangster?” Her voice carried a sudden edge, like his cats’ when they shifted from playing to fighting.
“So you do know my dad.”
She uncrossed her legs, sat forward. “More importantly, do you know your dad?” She smiled, like a coyote smiles. “Heed the words your mother says. Meanwhile, come up with an amazing reason for canceling Akira’s project.” She stood. “Everything in Stuckhowsen’s plans, as much as we were able to check before you shut the project down, clears. That little troll Sanchez gave you nothing.”
“He has a working model. How is that nothing?”
“Right. He has it. You don’t. And now The Doctor is gone. Where are the plans he left us?”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t use them without his consent.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway because what I wanted, what the company would have benefited from, is the inventor, not his invention. At least not that invention.”
“So why are we having this discussion at all!”
The Baroness grinned, apparently pleased to have riled him. “Just prepping you for the sales meeting tomorrow. Hope you have something stunning, Scally. Something truly marvelous.”
He listened to her clip down the hall to her own office. Then, as he always did in a crisis, Scally went downstairs to consult the Maintenance Manager.
Mongo Zeneca emptied the contents of a Styrofoam carton onto a dinner plate, warmed the plate in his personal microwave. The round, jowly man set his curious eyes on Scally. “Hungry, kid?”
“Nah.” Scally dropped into one of Mongo’s Victorian chairs.
Mongo had been friends with Syd senior, Scally’s father, longer than Scally had been alive. People took “maintenance manager” as a euphemism for janitor when in fact Mongo held a master’s in mechanical engineering. He knew every bolt and wire of the building, had access to all the engineers, and in turn, all the manufacturing lines as well as new products.
Scally wondered if such information illuminated things. He recalled his first days on the job, entering immeasurable amounts of data, much of it from the tattered, illegible notebooks of their engineering staff. Not the originals. Sydney’s department got photocopies with large sections blacked out in marker. All the databases were coded by number. Knowing what his company actually developed seemed impossible. Now as the VP of Product Development, not much had changed.
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