The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  “But come eight o’clock, James Aloysius Donovan – how could I forget that name! – would get in his six year old Honda Accord, drive home, throw a cheeseburger bag down by his couch-side, boot up his computer and enter the other world – as Sven, an unusually well-resourced dwarven barbarian. And join an army of 147 elite figures: priest-kings, the most powerful warriors of the realm, the highest ranking clerics and summoners, special teams of experienced healers for the inevitable field casualties… and up, up all of them would sail, up into the rare blue yonder with its twin suns, seeking out some marauding monster of the underworld who’d burst up into an adjacent land, terrorising women and children and cattle and generally wreaking havoc with people’s lives. And here James does make a difference. Here, nobody can doubt the essential contribution asked of him, willingly given. Here, James’ actions unambiguously make a memorable difference to the lives of thousands of others.

  “You see, Jim had always yearned to make this difference. To do something heroic, and noble. And yet all his previous attempts had been consistently and subtly shut down. His teachers inured him with a sense that there were no absolute truths – that good and evil were always relative. Under standardized tests, he discovered that he wasn’t as bright as the average classmate, whatever that means. He wasn’t particularly talented at sports either. Jim thought briefly about joining the military, but, not knowing anybody serving, he decided against. Fear of income failure and social ostracism followed. By-and-by, his life became a quilt work of little compromises, leading to his job at a Customer Assistant Manager at O’Hare. Such is the tragi-comedic nature of our Lebenswelt.

  “It was Tolkien, of course, who asked ‘why a man should be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he strives to get out and go home.’ Now there’s a figure who dared to dream of other worlds! – worlds rooted in myths that our modern society has so glibly overthrown. Were you aware that Tolkien conceived of The Hobbit while lying in the trenches of World War One?”

  “Perhaps we should all become dwarven barbarians like Jim then,” she said.

  “It’s not a question of becoming dwarven barbarians,” Towse said curtly. He was studying her closely now. “To start with, there are so many different types of warrior: paladins, knights, beastmasters, rangers, archers, thieves and rogues – just as there are myriad types of magicians, other than enchantresses that is: mages, wizards, spell-casters, sorcerers – to name but a few. Always wanted to be a musician? Why not become a bard, or an entertainer! An acrobat even, or a storyteller, or jester – the list is just endless. And if you’re not sure about any of it, then let us propose something: it may just be the thing you most deeply wanted all along, yet never knew till now.

  “Check.”

  The word echoed into the very cavities of her ears. His rook was threatening her king from three spaces away. Two moves from mate.

  “Natalie, what exactly is it that you’re not agreeable with this evening?”

  The question caught her off guard. “If I recall correctly what my father wrote,” she looked for the words, “liminality comes from the Latin word līmen, simply meaning a threshold. Not necessarily losing ourselves into a socially prescribed role, or any self-storied fantasy existence, but rather, a pulling away.” She managed to move a rook back to protect her king. “The deviation, rather, from those roles… This being what creates our true sense of selfhood… Meaning, our stability may come from solid social institutions, which we need, to feel we belong, but our true identities exist in the gaps… in these infinite little resistances, these… deviations…”

  “And what a solid socialist institution Le Monde was, Natalie. Tell me: was he a deviant father?”

  This time he didn’t exchange pieces, instead moving his queen up to guard his rook. Next move mate. There was a knowing look in his eyes, burning into her: “Did he take liberties with you, Natalie?” His voice came from afar away, like a recollection from another time and place. The lips curled into a smile: “It happens to one in three of us. Incest was quite common, back on the old frontier.”

  She grasped the top of her other rook, and sent it down, all the way down – to the far end of the board, where his king was still protected, still locked in behind that row of pawns.

  Check.

  Towse stopped dead.

  A hand fluttered up, then settled down again slowly. His eyes jerked round the board. None of his attacking pieces were in a position to return and guard his king now.

  Mate.

  He pawed the back of his neck, febrile. A minute elapsed, feeling like an hour.

  He regained composure, dabbing his lips: “I must leave you now.”

  Getting up, he sent shadows dancing into yet crazier patterns. He took one more look at the chessboard, his eyes narrowing to slits. “There is work to be done. I have much work to do.”

  And he left.

  She made for the doorway; the maid appearing and handing her a raincoat, mentioning something about a driver – and then Natalie Chevalier disappeared, out into the aqueous San Francisco night.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ben glanced at the display of his cell phone and contemplated calling her again. She’d promised to update him as soon as she was through with Towse.

  It was now 8:45 the following morning.

  He was standing beside Francesca Horniman, on the 39th floor – to which he’d just been summoned. “What’s this about?” he asked Fran for the second time.

  “Like I said, Steven just mentioned wanting to see you.”

  Ben wondered about that. Fran was cordial with him. Not complicit in his cause, like she’d been but a few days before. She returned to her typing, her fingers flat over the keys. Presumably to protect her nails. Occasionally she paused, running them through her long, straight hair. It was easy to underestimate just how much influence these executive assistants had. They pretty much ran the show, in fact. For one thing, they controlled access, determining who got to see whom. And then they were in a position to read all those emails. They just knew what was going on around the place. Fran’s behavior was a barometer, and Ben didn’t like today’s reading – and why hadn’t Natalie called him back?

  Fran pushed her roller chair away with her shapely legs, sliding over to the partially drawn Venetian blinds of Schweitz’s office. “You’d better go in or he’ll be late for his nine o’clock,” she said. “Just knock first.”

  He knocked.

  “Come.”

  There was a strangely oppressive air in the room. Schweitzer was sitting in his chair, same position as that Friday before, but silhouetted against the big windows was Leonard Carmichael, facing outwards. The fabric of his suit had a lustrous sheen – and a hard time arranging itself over his bulky form. But here was no mistaking where the power in this room resided. He didn’t turn.

  Schweitzer: “So just what is the problem with this IPO, Benjamin?”

  His face flushed. If it was an attempt at humor, he didn’t see the funny side. The problems with the Clamor IPO were certainly not of his making – but perception seemed to be otherwise, and up here on 39, perception was reality. Or soon would be.

  “Paul Towse ...” he started, but all three of them had been at the Woodside debacle. He started again: “We’re up against a couple of things here, Steven: a dead senior executive for one, and a homicide investigation opening up –”

  “Thought it was suicide?” Schweitz cut in.

  “No. The police may have said that, to protect the investigation, but it’s definitely homicide. I spoke with my dad about it.” He added for Carmichael’s benefit: “My dad was a homicide detective, recently retired,” but Schweitz waved him along. “We have a CEO, and a CFO, in no way assisting the preparation of financial forecasts. And we’ve got a significant investor who no one seems to know anything about. Though I did visit with Vogel, who’s OK with kicking Multiworld out.”

  At the mention of Vogel’s name, Carmichael turned his thousand-yard stare in to the room.
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  “Fuck Multiworld,” Schweitzer said. “We’re bringing this IPO forward before the sky falls in. I need you to bird dog Ensign’s CIO and make sure Yasan follows through on his commit. That’s the only way we’re gonna bring this thing in down the flight path. You think you can do that?”

  The orders were clear enough. Sheikh Yasan had apparently committed to investing; Ben was to focus on his pre-existing relationship with Yasan’s Chief Investment Officer. But Could he do it? – What kind of question was that? Carmichael Associates was a notoriously ‘up-or-out’ culture: was he no longer moving up?

  Then he had a different thought: was Carmichael the one in trouble? He tried to read into the Chairman’s inscrutable stare. Schweitzer had said the prior Friday that predators were circling Carmichael Associates with fat wallets. The bank was a niche player in a market where size definitely mattered: a ‘boutique’ in an industry increasingly looking like a giant mall. And why hadn’t Natalie called back? Had Paul Towse gone and swept her off her feet?

  Ben said: “What about the road show? – Constellation, the investors out east?”

  “Can you handle this piece of it or not?” Schweitzer repeated.

  “Yes, of course I can, Steven.”

  “Then get to it. That’ll be all.”

  Certainly his role at Carmichael felt a lot less “central” now. He walked straight past Francesca and away from the elevator, opting to take the stairs down to his floor instead. Still no messages or missed calls on his cell phone. Then he changed his mind altogether and rode the elevator down to street level, to grab coffee, some air – to see if he couldn’t reassure himself by focusing on one of his dad’s most often-repeated expressions: that things were never as good or as bad as they seemed.

  * * *

  Natalie woke in her room at the Keaton with a hangover, angry as a hellcat. She recalled going on to a late bar, and must have really tied one on, because she couldn’t now remember getting back to the hotel. Her clothes lay around on the floor. She grabbed the phone:

  “Front desk, good morning Miss Chevalier –”

  “Hello, this is rather embarrassing I know,” she began in a forthright tone, “but I don’t recall how, or when, I got back to the hotel last night. Is the doorman there to jog my memory?” Which sounded pretty odd indeed – even to Natalie, in her confused state. She added in feigned jest: “I may have been a little over-served.”

  “No problem, Miss Chevalier. It’s Rosanna here, the desk manager. It happens to us all. At least, I hope it does. Max, our night porter, was on last night. Let me call him and come straight back to you.”

  She felt badly about the night porter being woken up, but she needed to know. Memory of the prior night returned in instalments. She recalled the house at the very top of Pacific Heights, the shadow play on its walls like some very dark fairy tale. Waiting for the call back, she went into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror, in her underwear, as if to make sure that she hadn’t undergone some transformation like in the game.

  The phone rang, piercing her skull. She picked up the bathroom handset: “Hello again Miss Chevalier. Max said you came back towards two o’clock – yes, a little the worse for wear. A taxi driver apparently dropped you off, explaining that you may indeed have been over-served –”

  “But how – did I –?”

  “– and then Max helped you up to your room. He said that you looked fine, that you just needed to sleep it off.”

  “OK.” That seemed to be all. “Thank you.”

  She checked her phone: Ben and Detective Pulver of the Sunnyvale Police Department had left messages. She decided to call Ben; in his voicemail he’d sounded as flat as she felt, asking her to call him back asap.

  “Natalie! How’re you doing? How’d it go with Towse last night?”

  He was outside, in a street someplace. “Hi Ben. It was OK. We just talked a load of random nonsense, basically.”

  “About what, if I may ask?”

  It was still coming back to her, like a bad dream.

  “Eesh. He was holding forth on why these online gaming worlds are destined to become so big. The quest for the undiscovered. He reckons that we all have this deep-seated attachment to the adventure spirit of the Wild West, or something. His shtick was that, with the earth-bound frontier being long since ‘explored out’ – and space travel still a non-event, these new online worlds are the new frontier… I think.”

  “Huh?”

  “Then he got hold of one of my father’s theories.” This much she remembered well. “One suggesting we’re all role playing anyway. Playing roles we’ve chosen for ourselves, or that society has chosen for us, which we lose ourselves in. He claimed that most of us are so dissatisfied with these parts that we secretly crave this fantasy role playing stuff. Let’s see, he gave this example of an airline employee they’d focus-grouped –”

  “They’d?”

  “The MultiQuest dev team, I guess. Only, that’s not what my father actually said. What my father said was that sure, society creates roles for us, without which we’d be lost. But it’s our resistance to those roles – our deviations from them, which creates our true identity…”

  “I’ll buy that,” Ben said, slurping down his drink. “And you pointed out the discrepancy?”

  “Yes. More or less.”

  “What’d he say?”

  She paused, hearing the breeze flapping in the mouthpiece of Ben’s phone, her head still aching, deeply. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Wait, I’m confused: how d’you mean, you don’t know?”

  She felt herself become angry again… from the sense that Towse was acting like he’d actually known her father, in some way. But how? She wished her dad were still around, dammit, to ask about these things.

  She said: “He disappeared on me. Perhaps because of the chess game, I don’t know.”

  “You were playing chess? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he threw a complete hissy fit. You should’ve seen him the other night. Almost smashed up the joint! – D’you beat him? Betcha did, didn’t you? Damn, he’s an International Chess Master; that’s awesome, Natalie!”

  All she knew was that Paul Towse would forfeit more than a chess game if she had anything to do with it. “Ben, could we talk about something else? I just got a call from Bill Pulver. He wants me to go in for an interview this afternoon.” She chose her next words carefully, remembering her secrecy pact with Cindy Bayley: “You know how federal agents have been searching Malovich’s office?”

  She could hear Silverman saying something about “another double shot”.

  “Are you in a bar?”

  “I wish. No, it’s just a caffeine stop…” He wasadding something about “more caramel and whipped cream”, then to her again: “What’s that Natalie?”

  She repeated the bit about the FBI.

  “Makes sense,” he said, “with a homicide case this prominent.”

  “What I don’t understand is how both the police department and the FBI could be carrying out such separate investigations into Malovich’s murder.”

  “How do you know they’re so separate? Though yes, it often does go that way. The federals bring the resources – and the interference. But you needn’t worry about Pulver. He’s solid. He’ll be trying to speak with everyone. This is what the police do really well, even at a small department like Sunnyvale. They’re dogged. They’ll run down the leads. They won’t give up.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Natalie stopped in to see Tom Nguyen on her way down to Sunnyvale Police station, ostensibly about her security report – but really to take the temperature, following that phone message break-in. Nguyen had never sounded more busy. He told her they’d have to catch up another time. The implication seemed clear enough to Natalie: that Nguyen knew very well she’d hacked in to his voice messages.

  She drove on to All America Way. From the outside, Sunnyvale Police station had a fine sense of civic accessibility about it, su
rrounded with its mature trees and friendly signage. The temperature in the Valley had dropped to a pleasant seventy-seven degrees.

  But the interview room Pulver led Natalie into was windowless and battleship grey. It contained nothing more than three chairs and a table. She set down her tote bag. There was a strongly institutional smell about the place. A young officer with the name tag STEVENS accompanied Pulver. He was crew cut, uniformed and deferentially silent, placing a file down on the table in front of him. Pulver offered Natalie a drink, and she accepted: coffee, black, no sugar.

  The drinks machine was down the hall from the interview room. Through a small rectangular window, Natalie watched Pulver palm his face with his big, bubble-like hands.

  What was he thinking?

  They were almost four days into a homicide investigation. According to an old adage, the likelihood of apprehending a killer halved with every passing 48 hours. She thought about those reporters gathering at the crime scene and wondered just how easy it was to get any real detective work done with the modern, Internet-based news cycle. Specifically, how often the top brass needed updates – on the work that probably couldn’t progress, because of all the updating – that likely only heightened the need for updates.