by Jack Fuller
“P becomes not p,” Rosten said.
McWade couldn’t have known what that meant, but he obviously didn’t care.
“I’m not sure who will get the DCI job,” he said, “but I know I’m going to need someone there with him. There’s a future for you in that.”
“What kind of future?” said Rosten.
“The DCI’s special assistant,” he said. “A lot more pay. Access. A room with a view. This is a great town for a young guy with power.”
“Doing what?” Rosten said.
McWade smiled as if to say: Anything you want, kid.
“Whatever the organization chart might say, in reality there wouldn’t be anyone between you and me,” he said. “Look, Fisherman’s getting a posthumous medal at Langley. He’ll be up there on the wall of stars. You deserve something, too.”
“I’d like to be at his ceremony,” Rosten said.
“He might have seen the humor in that,” McWade said.
“I wish I could tell you that I felt disgust,” Rosten told Grace. “I wish I’d still had the clarity I did when Fisherman glared at me from the parapet. But as I left and looked over my shoulder at the White House, I felt the pull of enormous gravity.”
“You don’t have to go on,” Grace said. He felt her weight shifting away from him. The darkness. The death. And he was not done yet.
“They’d checked me into the Hay Adams Hotel while I was with McWade,” he said. “In the lobby I passed men with tailored suits and sheathed women. The window in my room caught a corner of the West Wing. I had a big, four-poster bed with the finest sheets I had ever run my fingers over. The sun was streaming in, but my internal clock was still somewhere over the Atlantic. I lay down. When the phone woke me, I thought I was still in London. Then New Haven. I heard the voice as you.”
“You were sleeping,” the woman on the phone said.
“Who is this?” he said
“I have your ticket to the Fisherman event,” she said.
“Bradley,” he said.
“You might start calling me Ellen,” she said. “Look, our last dinner was not exactly a pleasure. I owe you one. This time I’ll be good. Shall we say tonight?”
“Have you already hired the actors?” Rosten said.
“I was thinking the restaurant at the hotel,” she said. “Shall we make it 7:30? Barring a world crisis, of course.”
“What exactly do you do?” Rosten said.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“I had a dream of you,” Rosten told Grace. “I never stopped having them.”
“That’s lovely, Tom,” she said. She was trying hard to find good in him. He could not leave it that way.
“You were bringing me alive with your lips,” he said. “I reached down to touch your head. My eyes opened. It wasn’t you. The hair was strawberry blonde.”
“Let’s stop,” Grace said.
“I didn’t stop,” he said. “Because I wanted it, even though I knew it was compensation for delivering Fisherman, a down payment on the sale of whatever in me might somehow have remained unsoiled. It only ended because she eventually said I had to make a decision: this life or an ordinary one. ‘It’s time to decide,’ she said.
“I fled. It wasn’t that I had found the right path. I was afraid of the dark, a coward. I ran to you because I could not think of anyone else who would have the man I had become. The man I am.”
“I need a taxi back to the hotel,” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
three
THE
SEVENTH
TYPE
1
Barbara Jean stood at the porch rail with the declining sun lighting her, a winter bird on a branch. Coming from the garage, Lawton said, “Tell me you haven’t been standing here since I called.” She spread the storm door like a great, transparent wing.
“It wasn’t so long,” she said.
“You are something,” he said.
“I heard your car in the alley and the garage door going up.”
He sloughed off his overcoat, which she hung on the brass rack then opened her arms to him.
“I told you it would be a good report,” she said.
Words were jinxes. Dr. Dick, usually so guarded, this afternoon had used the phrase “full function.” Lawton was afraid of it but asked when.
“You will know,” said Dr. Dick.
It did not pay to let expectation run. So far he could not feel much. Oh, perhaps a little less vulnerability to changes in his environment, a bit more energy walking back to the Dome, but today that could simply have been the effect of good news metastasizing.
The security scare seemed to be abating, too. It would have been better if they had been able to figure out who had pulled the prank, but prank it had obviously been. Joyce and he had been the only victims, and it had not recurred. Gunderman was still fretting, but Lawton had stopped monitoring the database altogether, delegating this to Greener, who took to the tedious task as if were the most important job in the company.
Joyce seemed to have put the incident entirely out of mind since the secret board meeting that wasn’t a secret. His attention now focused on the deal, and that mercifully left Lawton on the margins. He would have plenty of work to do if it ever reached the stage of due diligence, but for now all he knew was that Joyce had spoken with Gnomon’s CEO, a child king named Niko Nyström. Harms had found his picture on the web and pronounced him “a swarthy blond, with eyes as dark as an umlaut.”
Word had it that the first conversation had been cordial, but that since then ice had come into the fjord. This did not seem to have daunted Joyce. He and the deal team had been in perpetual huddles with the bankers and legal advisors, so Lawton and a few operational peers were able to run D&D without the distraction of visionary leadership.
“It’s a little early to think about dinner,” said Barbara Jean.
“I kept my calendar free after the appointment,” he said.
“And here we are.”
She took his hand and pulled him in the direction of the stairs. She took a step upward. He followed. Then another.
“The report wasn’t that good,” he said, gravity asserting itself.
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m just not . . .”
“Of course not,” she said.
He remembered when he was, but he remembered without feeling, the same way he desired.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, smiling down at him where he had balked.
“I wish . . . ,” he said.
“I read somewhere that when your skin touches the skin of someone you care about, it sets off a cascade of chemicals in your brain that binds the two of you,” she said.
“Even if . . .”
“Even then.”
He let her levitate him up the stairs and into the bedroom.
“I don’t want to be a disappointment,” he said.
“Let me have your hands,” she said.
He held them out. She put them on the buttons of her blouse.
“You can go right ahead,” she said.
Underneath she was alabaster. The first time he had seen her like this, it had frightened him, the way standing on a high board did. From having gazed at her fully clothed, he had anticipated the shape of her breasts, but the pink of her nipples had startled him. They were small and looked painful, though when he touched them, they clearly were not.
“My turn,” she said. “Now let’s see you.”
She worked on his belt after removing his shirt. Before, just her hand on the buckle would have raised him. Now the only sensation was a little tugging and the dull click of metal. When she had untethered him, he sat down on the bed and unceremoniously pulled himself out of his pants and socks.
“Let’s take a shower the way we used to,” she said. “Wash the doctor away.”
“Why don’t I just jump in?” he said, wishing he had his ro
be to cover the raw scar just above where his pubic hair was still growing in like a vacation beard. There was gray in it. Hers was tan, not as light as her hair, but he could see right through it.
“Shower alone? Not on your life,” she said. “We’re going to bathe in oxytocin.”
She was enjoying this, but he was unteasable. Un-everything. He reached for the soap. She got there first.
“I showered when you called,” she said. “This is all you.”
She started at his neck, pressing her thumbs into the muscles where age had gathered.
“Let yourself relax,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“It’s just kind of difficult for me.”
She worked the lather down his chest and then turned him around to do his back and buttocks, with special attention to Dr. Dick’s province.
“Tell me if any of this is uncomfortable,” she said and turned him back around. She ran her fingertips close to the scar. “This seems much better. Is there any tenderness?”
He shook his head. She shut off the tap.
“Out now,” she said. When he complied, she swaddled him in a plush towel.
“Don’t you get a chill,” he said.
“I’m warm all over,” she said. “You just get yourself into bed. I’ll be there in a sec.”
When he pulled back the covers, he saw the silk sheets they had bought on their first anniversary and had almost never used since. Surely she had no expectation. And if she had, his inertness under the touch of her slippery, soapy hands should have dashed it.
“You look good,” she said, emerging from the bathroom.
“Covered up,” he said.
“We’ll fix that.”
“Can we just hold each other?”
“The very thing,” she said, slipping beside him then covering his leg with hers so that he felt the tan hair against his thigh. Whenever he moved, she moved, as if he were leading.
“I would like to touch you,” he said.
She seemed about to laugh.
“You are touching me,” she said.
“I mean to make you feel good.”
“You do.”
“Really good,” he said.
“I’m feeling really good now.”
“For me then.”
She rolled onto her back. He rose on his elbows and kissed her from above.
“That was nice,” she said.
He drew back the sheet. Her breasts rose under his hand. Then he smoothed the tan hair below. It began to feel moist. He leaned down to kiss her belly and then shifted lower.
“I want you up here with me,” she said.
“But you love . . . ,” he said.
“Yes I do,” she said, lifting his head with her two hands until they kissed.
Soon he felt movement under his hand as he dialed in to her need. He thought he felt something himself, only a kind of quickening, the first prickle of a limb that has fallen asleep. She made a sound. Then another. When she came, she touched him where he had been dead, and he heard a small sound of his own.
Nyström had agreed to meet with Joyce in New York, where both companies had appearances at the annual UBS All Things Data investor conference. This gave them cover, since everyone who mattered was there. They did not book the meeting into D&D’s law firm. Joyce said that would be like asking a first date to meet you at a motel. They arranged a suite at the Michelangelo, where nobody from ATD ever went. The one-on-one was scheduled for an hour and a half after the end of Gnomon’s presentation. Day and Domes would be on stage the following morning, and Harms worried about facing questions so soon after a tryst.
“Nobody will be able to read my thoughts in my face,” said Joyce. “I mean, have you even once seen lust in my eyes?”
“Are we still talking about motels?” said Sebold.
“Easy, gentlemen,” said Snow.
As they waited, Harms suggested they occupy themselves by rehearsing their Qs and As. She posed the obvious Q about third-quarter expectations and full-year revenue guidance, but Joyce responded with another Q: “Do we know what kind of water Niko prefers?” Harms tried to bring him back with a loaded question on potential strategic moves. “Strategy?” he said. “You ask about our strategy? Day and Domes laughs at the size of the ideas you call strategy.”
He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. Harms’s hands squared her papers then squared them again.
“Don’t worry,” Rosten told her. “His irony was perfectly stable.”
“English, please,” said Harms.
“He’s jerking you around,” said Rosten.
To monitor Nyström’s presentation, Rosten had sent Gunderman, because nobody knew him. He was not a man for nuance, so he made a tape and brought it back to the Michelangelo. On it Niko, of course, sounded brash. He was always all about buzz, a regular cicada. According to Gunderman, he went to the dais alone, no CFO, no revenue person. Bet on me, this said.
“Good thing we won’t be talking price today,” said Joyce, looking at his BlackBerry. “His just went up like a hot-air balloon.”
“It’s only seventy-five cents,” said Harms, reading the quote on her phone.
“A one-point-three-eight percent increase,” Gunderman said instantly.
“You’re the kind of guy I hated in high school,” said Joyce.
“Niko isn’t exactly going to feel needy,” said Sebold.
“At this stage, we want our date to feel like the most desirable at the ball,” said Joyce.
Harms leaned close enough to Rosten that her hair brushed his neck.
“He doesn’t understand women, does he,” she said.
“Neither do I,” said Rosten.
“Had me fooled,” she said.
The team left Joyce at the Michelangelo to wait for Nyström and regathered in a salon at the site of All Things Data. There were great plates of sandwiches, salads, and the inevitable chocolate-chip cookies. Harms provided entertainment, imitating the child MBAs who would be doing most of the questioning the next day.
“What does the relationship look like between average kilowatt-hour rates and operating margins?” she asked, holding her BlackBerry like a notepad in her left hand and an imaginary pen in her right.
“Graphed on a typical Mercator projection, it perfectly describes the graceful rising curve of an extended middle finger,” said Sebold.
“Easy,” said Snow. “Crudeness is a form of harassment.”
“So is humorlessness,” said Sebold.
Eventually the fun in the salon faded. At about H hour plus ninety minutes with no word, things began to get tight. Finally Joyce appeared in the doorway.
“I see lust in his eyes,” Harms whispered to Rosten.
“Easy,” said Rosten.
Joyce hung his suit jacket on the back of a chair and sat down, obviously enjoying the suspense. After a couple of minutes of it, he said, “Niko gets it. He totally gets it.”
“You’ve got the gift, boss,” said Chase.
“He needs time to think, of course,” said Joyce. “I told him that I’m a patient man.”
“And he believed it?” said Harms. Chase could have learned a lot from her about how to flatter.
“I didn’t want him to,” said Joyce.
“Gesture of respect,” said Harms.
“He ate it up,” said Joyce.
“We need to think about next steps,” said Rosten.
“Always keeping me on task,” said Joyce. “But first we need to think about tomorrow.”
They sat at the conference table and ran through the script and slides until it was time for dinner. Joyce had chosen a restaurant where you really had to be somebody. He’d had Marcia order in advance, and when the waiters brought the entrée, he collected compliments on his taste. Rosten would have preferred room service and CNN. He would not have called Grace, but he might have picked up the phone and hung it up a couple of times.
The haute cuisine was paired with the old win
e of Joyce’s other deals. The alcohol kept coming, inflating him. CEOs did not realize how much this exposed their vulnerable parts.
“You did your share of acquisitions, Tommy,” Joyce said. “Was there ever one as big as this?”
Nobody had called Rosten Tommy since he’d asked his mother to stop.
“Not a one,” he said, as he was meant to. “And I was only a number cruncher, never the principal.”
“But you were there keeping the man honest,” said Joyce over his veal.
“Trying,” said Rosten.
“Tell us about Trinitrex and Global Dev so I can have a chance to devour this piece of art on my plate,” said Joyce.
Rosten spoke of it as distantly as if he had followed the transaction on a Bloomberg machine. Trinitrex made this move. Global countered with that. The strategy. The structure. The financial engineering. The tax methodology. The cash piece. In his telling, it was all columns and rows.
“You’re too modest,” said Joyce. “Leverone told me that if it hadn’t been for Tommy, Trinitrex would never have prevailed. He called him ‘the rock.’”
The waiter poured him another glass.
“I don’t think I have enough room even to look at desserts,” Rosten said.
“Anybody else?” said Joyce. “Don’t be shy.”
“Tomorrow’s a big day,” said Rosten.
“Bright and early,” said Harms.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Joyce.
“Some of us aren’t such long-ball hitters,” said Rosten.
“All right, all right,” said Joyce. “The rock has spoken.”
The check came, and Joyce signed it, but he still had wine in his glass.
“Do we dare start to leave?” Harms whispered, leaning soft into Rosten’s shoulder.
“You first,” Rosten said. And to his astonishment, she stood.
“Gentlemen, it’s bedtime,” she said.
“If only,” said Sebold.
Harms silenced Snow with a look.
