Shadowlands

by Malan, Violette

  He inclined his head a couple of centimeters and brought it back up.

  “Also, the HR person who contacted me has heard some disturbing rumors.”

  “And were you…”

  “No. I specifically asked not to be told. Psychologists can be just as susceptible to finding what they’re looking for as the next person.” Again the shallow nod. It looked as though that was all I was going to get. Finally I asked what stage of the application the candidate had reached.

  For a minute I thought I was going to get the freezing smile again.

  “All of the senior people have given their opinions, some in writing.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

  I held up my hand. “No, I didn’t read them and, again, I’d prefer not to be told.”

  Again with the cold smile, as he glanced at his watch. I’m sure Alejandro would have been able to tell exactly what kind of very expensive watch it was.

  I stood up when he did, and followed him down the carpeted hall and into a wide conference room with a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall view of downtown Toronto, complete with CN Tower, and the blue expanse of Lake Ontario. Even from here you could tell the water was cold. Even in June.

  There were three people standing in the room when Nikos Polihronidis and I came in, helping themselves to coffee and pastries from an elegant wheeled tea table off to one side. It didn’t go with the room, and I wondered where it came from, though I wasn’t curious enough to touch it. I was introduced as a consultant, and there were handshakes all around.

  I sat where the lawyer indicated, diagonally across the table from the applicant, back straight, knees together, ankles crossed, my eyes looking at the notes I was taking with Alejandro’s Montblanc fountain pen. The notes were because, as Alejandro put it, “verisimilitude is the watermark of reality.” In other words, if I wanted to be mistaken for a psychologist, I should do the things people expected psychologists to do.

  Oh, and I should probably avoid real psychologists.

  On my left was the CEO, a compact British woman in her mid-fifties [once an Olympic class swimmer]. Mr. Polihronidis sat a little farther along the same side of the table as the applicant, and made himself as unobtrusive as such a striking-looking person could. Immediately on the CEO’s left was the assistant head of the HR department, a young man with an MBA [thought he’d be head of HR, if he told what he knew]. He was the one who’d actually contacted me.

  I settled in, listening and taking notes, waiting my turn to speak. I found it interesting, since I’m not sure I could have told he was lying without my special talent to rely on.

  Most people don’t realize it, but you have to learn how to lie. And, for most people, this learning process happens when you’re a child. You get taught—at first—to keep a certain kind of blunt opinion or observation to yourself, and not to repeat private information even when it’s true, and someone has asked you to tell. Eventually you learn not only these lies of omission, but lies of commission as well. You not only don’t tell your best friend’s mum that her mashed potatoes taste like wallpaper paste, you tell her they’re the best mashed potatoes you ever had.

  Like everyone else, I’d also had to learn how to lie. Unlike everyone else, I didn’t pick up these lessons slowly as I grew up—though I do vaguely remember my mother coaching me in keeping things to myself. At least I think I do. The man who took me from my parents had a more forceful method of training me to stay quiet until he told me to speak, whereupon only the precise truth would do. But how to actually lie to people? That’s something I’ve only learned in the last couple of years. Luckily, it hadn’t taken Alejandro long to teach me what he called the lie circumstantial, and the lie direct.

  About forty-five minutes into the session, after a break to refresh our coffee, it was my turn. I’d known everything I needed to know from the handshake, but again, verisimilitude.

  I asked him the questions Alejandro and I had worked out ahead of time, in the measured, calm voice I’d been practicing.

  “Dr. Weaver, can you tell me about your team at present? How many people work with you, for example, and what is your team structure?”

  “Can you tell me about your process for delegating work?”

  “I’m assuming you have ongoing research, what will be done to complete that?”

  “It is a little unusual for a person of your seniority to be relocating. Why are you leaving your current position?”

  “Dr. Weaver, what will you do if you don’t get this position?”

  I did my best to act like I was listening to the answers—took notes and everything—but of course I already knew the reason for the “bad vibes” I’d been told about. The only thing I found unexpected was that the images had come to me with an overlay of cold, and a smell of old meat. Something about Dr. Weaver was reminding me of the man on the subway.

  Oh. I almost smiled when the images finally fell into place. I was associating the smell with predators. That actually made me feel a bit better, since it was now even less likely that the man on the subway had anything to do with the man who took me.

  I really would have preferred not to shake hands again at the end of the interview, but there was no way for me to get out of it without being obvious about it.

  I fidgeted, helping myself to another pastry, until the Institute people came back to the conference room. The CEO resumed her chair, glancing at her legal counsel.

  “Well?” Mr. Polihronidis said to me.

  I shrugged. “I think you’ll find that it’s come to light he’s had multiple affairs with both his research assistants, and his graduate students.” I pretended to check my notes. “It might be interesting if it could be determined how much of his work is actually his own, and how much he’s just taking credit for.” The looks on their faces when I said this was a revelation. “In any case, the questionable sexual behavior will be the real reason he’s looking for a new position.”

  “His present employers have given him excellent references, both written and verbal.” There was no hint of protest in the CEO’s voice; she was merely stating a fact. “They’re a bit cool, perhaps, but then, he’s always been known as an arrogant, unpleasant man.”

  “Given the current political climate with respect to sexual harassment in the workplace,” I said. “I would suggest that there is some sort of agreement in place, that if he takes himself elsewhere they won’t prosecute him.” Nikos Polihronidis’ eyes hardened.

  “And they obviously can’t stand in the way of his taking himself elsewhere,” the HR guy said. “Hence the good references.” He looked toward the CEO. “Do you think there was any threat of legal action?”

  I didn’t really listen to the answer. I found myself thinking about the kinds of things Alejandro had had to do over the years to keep his own secrets. The relocations, the disguises, the false papers, and now, the whole network of fake Internet information. Suddenly, I realized they were talking to me again.

  “You are certain, aren’t you?” the CEO was saying. Not like she doubted me, but as though she was summing it up in her head.

  I nodded. “I’ll put my detailed reasons into the report: body language, micro-expressions, and so on. Right now I can tell you that the changes in his demeanor when he spoke about his subordinates were very significant. If he were an employee, you couldn’t fire him on the basis of my findings, but you could certainly use them to investigate further.” I stood up. I wondered how far I could go. My talent had given me more details than I could have reasonably received from the answers to my questions—no matter how well trained I was pretending to be. “You might think about interviewing current and past clerical staff as well. Often, no one pays them much mind and, like servants in a big house, they see more than their employers are aware of, and keep silent because they have more to lose by speaking up.”

  “You mean he’s been boffing the secretaries as well?” The HR guy really needed to toughen up. This was nothing compared to some of the stuff I’d seen.<
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  “I don’t think so,” I said. [No.] “But they’ll likely be able to name names. I wouldn’t ask his own assistant directly, but the administrative assistant likely works for the university, not for him. She’ll be less loyal, and just as likely to know something.”

  It wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course, but as Nikos Polihronidis himself escorted me to the elevators, I knew that they were going to do exactly as I’d suggested, and that things would turn out exactly as I’d predicted. And that there would be referrals in my future.

  We reached the elevators, but my escort didn’t push the button right away. He was looking at me in that narrow-eyed evaluating way he’d used earlier, but now the twinkle was back.

  “I have to say, I was skeptical about hiring you,” he said. “All you did was ask him the questions any HR suit would have asked, but you saw something in his answers none of us had seen.”

  “You’d seen them,” I assured him, making a mental note to come up with cleverer questions the next time. “That’s why you called me in the first place, right? ‘Bad vibes?’ And it wasn’t just what he answered; it was also how he answered. You’re a lawyer. You know better than most that people will always give themselves away if you give them an opportunity to talk, and if you’ve been trained in what to watch for.” I shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t question me too closely about what I’d just said. “You still have to check that my interpretation is valid.”

  “I think we both know it will be. Please send your report directly to me, by the way.” He handed me a business card, pushed the elevator button, and shook my hand again. This time he was the one who held it a little longer than necessary. [More fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle pieced together; the signet ring was his father’s. The father had been murdered by a neighbor when Nikos was thirteen. Everyone—including Nikos himself—thought it had been an accident.]

  Just as the elevator doors were closing, he said, “Your eyes are the color of caramel.”

  I went down in the elevator thinking of dark curly hair, warm hands, and sandalwood aftershave.

  I’d planned to have the security guard in the lobby call me a cab, but now that it was over, I felt high as a kite, like I could float all the way home. Or at least to the nearest subway stop. I was so buzzed I didn’t even think about phoning Alejandro—I wanted to see his face when I told him. The strange guy on the subway wasn’t even a blip on my radar.

  I’d done it. The first time I’d ever done a reading for money, the first time by myself anyway. All the rehearsing, the small practice jobs I’d done with Alejandro in the last few months, had paid off. I could do this. I could make a living—for myself, not just for others. Part of me had wanted him to come with me today, but all along I knew it wasn’t a good idea. We wouldn’t have looked like two colleagues; we’d have looked like a performer and her handler.

  I didn’t want the kind of clients who were looking for a psychic. All my papers, my degrees, my letterhead, my Web site—all said “psychologist,” and that’s how I needed people to see me. That other label was just too risky—as I’d already learned the hard way.

  The irony is, I really am psychic. It’s the papers and the degrees that are fake. Mind you, I’m not a telepath. I don’t read minds, though I realize it might look that way. What I do is read truths about people, sometimes truths they don’t know, or aren’t consciously aware of themselves, usually about whatever it is that’s on their minds right now. Like I said, strong emotion can distort what I read, that’s why objects are easier (people’s rings and watches are a godsend) or relatively calm people like the couple on the subway. Worried, but not hysterical. When the read’s good, I see whole pictures right away.

  Otherwise, what I get is fragments, images, sights, smells, sounds. Usually, experience fills them in for me, gives me a coherent picture. But sometimes, without a context, there’s no telling what I’m reading. When I was with the Collector, I was always given the context for the people he loaned me out to—usually businessmen, occasionally politicians, once a Cardinal of the Church. With the couple on the subway, the context was the fact they were a couple. Given that much, everything else fell into place.

  This talent didn’t give me as much trouble when I was a child as you might think. Somehow, my parents weren’t freaked out when they noticed that some of the things I talked about I couldn’t possibly have known. They didn’t shush me and pretend that there wasn’t anything weird about me. I realized later, when I was more grown up, that they must have known what I had. I don’t think they were psychics themselves, but maybe they’d had some other gifts.

  I remember my mother, before I was taken, teaching me how to hide mine—at least I think I do—as if she knew that what I had could bring the wrong kind of attention. But she never got a chance to finish teaching me.

  The Collector took me when I was four, or maybe five. I’d had a real blind spot when it came to him, at least at first—no context, you see? He’d told me he was only looking after me while my parents were gone, that they were coming soon. I don’t know, maybe part of me had known all along what was going on, that my parents weren’t coming to get me [not dead, though], that this hard, cold man was the only one who was keeping me safe. Like all kids, I fantasized about a rescue, about getting away from him, living my own life, maybe finding my parents, but mostly I knew that if I wanted to go on being safe and looked after, I should meet the people he wanted me to meet and answer the questions I was asked afterward.

  I even got to where I was happy to help out. Sort of.

  But, of course, I got older and better at what I did, and more knowledgeable and experienced about the world and how things worked. I got good enough, finally, that I could read him as well as I could anyone. His own specific talent couldn’t block me out anymore. I thought I had him fooled for a while into thinking I hadn’t caught on to him, but then I realized he was going to get rid of me anyway when I reached the right—or the wrong—age, just in case. And I mean get rid of me, not give me a handshake and a farewell dinner. Considering how much I knew about him and his business, to say nothing of everyone who had ever used me, it kind of made sense.

  That’s when I really started looking for a way out, and found Alejandro.

  These memories took me quite a way down University Avenue, and I was starting to think I should have asked the guard at the Institute about the subway after all. I didn’t turn back, though. I was still feeling the heady buzz of success—I found myself smiling more than once—and besides, I’d been kept indoors for almost fifteen years; I had a lot of outside world to catch up on.

  I had some things to learn about walking around outside, though, such as there was a reason I had a pair of flat shoes in my shoulder bag. There didn’t seem to be any benches I could use to sit and change my shoes, however, and I felt a little shy of just propping myself against a lamppost or something and going ahead. I caught sight of the elevated sign that meant a subway entrance, but debated, as I walked toward it, what I wanted to do. Part of me wanted to get home as quickly as possible and start celebrating with Alejandro. Part of me was reluctant to go back underground, as if the strange [smelling] man [predator] might be down there waiting for me. I managed to convince myself that it was a nice sunny June day, not too warm for my suit, and I was enjoying feeling like a regular person, and maybe even catching a few admiring glances from my fellow pedestrians.

  But to go on walking, I’d have to change my shoes. Luckily, my problem was solved by the appearance on my left of a wrought iron fence. The palings were well over eight feet high, with a design detail that gave every seventh upright a wider, leaf-shaped base just large enough for me to sit down on.

  I was maneuvering my shoes back into my shoulder bag—the space they’d formerly occupied having somehow vanished—when a dog’s head suddenly appeared, thrust through the foliage that grew along the inside of the railings. My life hasn’t exposed me to many household pets, but I knew what I thought I should do, and I
was already extending my hand, palm out, when I caught a whiff of old meat, and felt that now familiar chill.

  The world seemed to slow down. A disembodied voice yelled, “Don’t!” and my brain sent the signal “pull back,” but it was a long time getting to my hand. The dog’s head, with its liver-colored markings [what big teeth, what big eyes] stretched out as if it knew I was going to back away, and its teeth seemed to grow larger as they reached for me. A hand came out of nowhere, clamped down on my still outstretched arm, yanked me to my feet, and then we were running down the sidewalk.

  The images I got from him made me run even faster. I didn’t look behind us to see if the dog was still a dog. I just ran.

  I knew who my rescuer was long before he had us sitting in one of the booths of the Second Cup at York and Front Streets—I’d known the minute he’d touched me. What I still couldn’t be sure of [strong emotion combined with that odd fragmentation I’d picked up earlier] was how Nikos Polihronidis had managed to be where he was, when he was.

  Other than by following me.

  I’d managed to get a couple of other things from him along the way [much older than he looked; bitten/touched by a Hound once] but what had made me run as fast as I could was the image of bottomless, ravenous hunger in his psyche, and the echoing emptiness that hunger left behind.

  And I knew what that hunger was, though I’d never encountered it myself. The Hunt.

  “You were being followed,” he said now. He wanted something from me, and that’s why he’d been on the spot to save me. The calm exterior hid hard images of anger, fear.

  “By something besides you, Mr. Polihronidis?” I thought that would provoke him, and I was right.

  His face tightened even as he waved his hand in a pretty good imitation of a casual gesture. “Better make it Nik.” He picked up his espresso and put it down again. “You could have knocked me over when I saw you come into the office,” he said. “You’re the girl with the Rider, aren’t you?”