Blood and Ink

by Brett Adams

  Great if you were literary-minded; useless if you were looking for proof of the existence of the young American.

  Marten found herself humming the Bowie song as she scrolled with heavy eyelids through Li’s reaction to a critically-acclaimed novel, Freedom. She argued against the received wisdom, insisting that the emperor was in fact nude, and likely playing with himself.

  On the verge of giving in to the increasingly cranky demands of her body that she put it to bed, or at least reward it with alcohol, she clicked on the last social link in the profile, Li’s Flickr account.

  Marten had assumed it was like Pinterest, a curated collection of photography Li admired.

  How wrong she was.

  In no social stream had Li revealed she was an avid amateur photographer. In Flickr, Li documented everything in photo. Her account brimmed with documentary evidence of her life.

  Adrenaline spiked. Marten skipped off her chair long enough to pour herself a glass of Moscato, then began poring over the thousands of photos in Li’s account.

  Most were location-stamped, and clustered about Perth, Australia, where Lin had been an international student. She filled her photos with people—those who were obviously friends, but also those thronging streets, on the beach, in the dusky light of bars, of all moods—candid, thoughtful, and unhappy and clearly waiting for life to become desirable.

  As much as she hunted for it, Marten saw no face that matched her expectation of Hieronymus Beck. If Hiero was chestnut and handsome, a gregarious friend, then he was absent from this montage of a student’s life in Perth.

  Again, doubt tugged at her.

  At 3:43 AM, for Marten a time out of time when the previous day tipped into the next, and late became early, she clicked on the last photo folder in Li’s account.

  This folder she had left to last because, according to its summary, it only held a handful of photos, and it was titled, aureus-ambiguus, which sounded like taxonomic nomenclature.

  In the span of a split-second, Marten felt the momentary flicker of recognition. In the time it took for the fall of photons on her cornea, and the cascade of biological functions that fired to yield understanding to her conscious mind, she was struck by a frisson of intuition: she’d found it. The face.

  The photo was blurry, as though taken in haste, and framed at a severe angle, that if intentional expressed psychological instability. But there was no mistaking the chestnuttiness of the handsome young man captured, and features that were somehow an American brand, despite almost four hundred years dilution of the puritan stock.

  The only other explanation for the poor focus and framing was that the photo had been taken covertly.

  Marten stroked the touchpad of her laptop to place the cursor over the face, and was rewarded with a pop-up containing a text tag. It, too, sounded like a Latin construction, but here there was a sub-species suffix. It read, aureus-ambiguus-beckias.

  The knot that had settled in her gut since she watched Jack Griffen leave the cancer clinic in Oxford loosened in one glorious spasm. She stood, snatched up the Moscato, and swigged straight from the bottle.

  She smiled at herself in a wall-unit mirror. Something had just gone right in the war.

  “My god,” she said. “I think he’s telling the truth.”

  54

  My god, I thought. I think I’m going insane.

  The gale tore at my body, impelling me to the rail, and the watery death lurking there and everywhere beyond the ridiculously small island of life to which I clung.

  Water, water, everywhere, nor . . . shit, I’m going to die. That’s what Coleridge should have written.

  I was numb with cold, and in that numbness, gripping with fingers I could no longer feel, I remembered how it was I’d come to choose this particular boat for my US odyssey.

  Charles Blake Longman.

  Not a name known to many, which goes to show how ignorant the average man is of the levers that move the world.

  But I didn’t start there. I started with my need to get to the US by mid-November, three weeks hence. That was Hiero’s generous deadline.

  And working quickly down the list of possible means of conveyance for my eighty kilos to US soil, starting with the most comfortable and on down, I in short order ruled out:

  Teleportation, as being fictional (Area 51 rumors not withstanding).

  First-class air travel, as requiring me to run the gauntlet of way too many cameras and immigration staff on high alert for my mug.

  Dirigible, as requiring a dirigible.

  Cruiseliner, as requiring money I did not possess, and again falling foul of the problem of too many people trained to spot me.

  Ocean freighter. Now this I considered long and hard before reluctantly discarding. In my decision I had to reckon honestly with the gifts life had given me. Physical strength was not among them, and the ravages of the last weeks had left me looking closer to what I actually was, a fugitive. On the other hand, I am blessed (I humbly submit, although on re-reading this account, I do wonder) with a little intelligence, eloquence, and a certain gregariousness, once my introversion has been lubricated with esteem or alcohol.

  I didn’t think a freighter mess, collected together with a dozen officers, engineers, and gofers, would enable me to ply my gifts enough to divert attention from my need.

  So that left . . .

  A smaller craft? But again, my lack of strength and experience with the water would count against me. Was there a context that would allow that lack to be offset by my other qualities?

  And here I began to hunt in earnest.

  A quick web search led me to Crewmates, which existed for the sole purpose of connecting would-be crew members with yachts. Perfect. I trawled its notices looking for a crew of my age, which also had a bit of ‘fat’—that is, was large enough that a deadweight like myself wouldn’t send the yacht to the miry bed of the Atlantic to sleep with what was left of the Titanic.

  One crew-in-the-making seemed tailor made. A group of middle aged men and women, probably early retirees, so I’d have to put on some airs, but I could trade with the currency I had—repartee and intellectual sophistication.

  I submitted my candidacy to the pool, and began weaving myself into the message threads, which were laced with a disconcerting amount of sexual innuendo or else nautical jargon.

  All seemed to be going well until the conversation veered and plunged over a cliff called ‘let’s go to the Canary Islands first.’ Apparently late October was very early for a crossing, and someone complained that they didn’t want to ‘bump into that grouchy old fart, Longman, setting out.’ Another replied that, ‘Putting the wind up Chuck was precisely the kind of hijinks to add spice to the crossing.’ I piled on that argument with enthusiasm in proportion to my utter lack of understanding.

  But the lure of the nudist beaches beneath a dormant volcano of the Canary Islands proved too strong, and that pretty much scotched my attempt.

  Annoyed and despairing at the effort I’d wasted entertaining a bunch of adults who hid their world-weariness beneath forced levity and teenage voices, I wondered if my only option was to freeze-pack my carcass and FedEx it to US soil.

  Standing in the cold fog wrapping the marina, where I had been spying on the tweeny yacht (appropriately called, Neptune’s Flirt), I remembered that someone had said it was very early for an Atlantic crossing. Perhaps the whole endeavor had been a waste of time. If no one was sailing for another month, I would never make the deadline.

  It was a gut punch.

  But my mind was not done picking over the Crewmate conversations. On the heels of that first realization came another: there was at least one yacht leaving this early in the season. And it belonged to a Chuck Longman, whoever he was.

  Chuck Longman.

  Fine. I’d look him up. It would give me something to do while I worked out another plan. Maybe a cargo freighter, after all.

  Chuck Longman, it turned out, had come this close to being on the c
over of Time magazine—‘this close’ being the distance from the knuckle of his middle finger to its tip, which he had extended, photographed, and faxed to Time’s editor, on hearing he was at the head of the cover shortlist.

  Chuck Longman, it turned out, was beyond rich. He attracted money by merely existing, like a giant star sweeps neighboring space clear of gas, asteroids, comets. Planets. By pulling them into its orbit, plunging them into its fire, making them part of itself. He was big enough to be a line item on the US GDP ledger. Could have bought a US election from a standing start, if he’d so desired.

  But you’ve never heard of him. He isn’t a Trivial Pursuit answer. It turns out that if you take the total world wealth, some 250 trillion dollars, and subtract the top ten on Forbes’ richest people list, you’re still left with 249 trillion dollars—it’s Scrooge McDuck’s money bin, and there’s plenty of room left to swim.

  Charles Blake Longman was the youngest son of five born to Herbert and Ann Longman, and into a family empire that already owned hardware stores in three states. By age eight he was selling candy into his elementary school at a healthy margin. At eleven, watching his brothers cash out ahead of him, he asked for his inheritance—less the percentage pro-rata of the early vesting. He then promptly put it back into the family business, which went public two years later. When the Kennedy ‘Flash Crash’ of 1962 wiped 22.5% from the stock market, and with it the hardware business, Chuck asked his dad why they weren’t diversified. He was told, ‘It’s a solid business. It was my father’s before me.’ Chuck thought ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ was probably older wisdom. And when he picked up a book by Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor, which advocated buying groups of stocks that were under-valued, and learned of value investing, the fire was lit.

  Chuck took nearly all of his money out of the business, at a loss, and diversified on the numbers alone. He never looked back.

  His investments grew year on year, and in nearly twenty years he only neglected his own mantra twice to take a punt on two startups. In 1982, while everyone else was backing the big players—IBM and Hewlett-Packard—he bought a ten percent stake in a little company called Compaq, purely on the strength of their thirty-pound ‘portable computer’ which he toted across the country as he travelled. Twenty years later when everyone was fleeing the internet in the dotcom bust, Longman plumped for 125000 shares of an online bookseller called Amazon, at $5.97 a share, less than the company’s initial price of $18. At current value, his shares were worth 104 times his initial investment, more than 76 million dollars of gross return.

  But they were just two streams into his river.

  And as his wealth grew, his life didn’t change. He remained in the modest four bedroom house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which he’d bought with cash before he married. He continued to drive his first car, and changed the oil himself on schedule.

  Prior to the point when uncles, brothers, nieces, and nephews might have thought it worth their while punting on an opportunistic lawsuit for a piece of the family wealth, Chuck created Longman Capital Group, a private hedge fund, and invited any and all far-flung relatives to apply for appointment to the fund management, on one condition—they had to bring skills of value. Needless to say there was a rush to enroll children (and in some cases, parents) in night school finance courses. But only those that could be appointed on merit were taken. The rest he gave jobs, again on merit, within the collection of private companies wholly-owned by the fund.

  And his wealth continued to grow, like a tree with its taproot in the water table, which, short of an act of God, can do nothing but reach high and spread wide.

  But while he was obscenely rich, he did not, as a rule, attract the spotlight. Unlike Bill Gates, Longman was no geek entrepreneur who had put software on a billion computers. Nor was he the blond hair and Hollywood teeth and the rockets of Sir Richard Branson. Even boring Warren Buffet, with his fatherly advice about fiscal rectitude felt the spotlight. Every one of these world-takers were the portraits on the paper money.

  Chuck Longman was the paper.

  He didn’t make it onto the Forbes top ten richest people in the world for the same reason Forbes can’t confirm the suspicion that Vladimir Putin is the world’s richest man. The Forbes calculation relies on publicly accessible information or self-disclosure—the ledgers of public companies, or the confessions of prideful men will suffice. Beyond that, they’re as clueless as the rest of us.

  So Charles Longman was simply money. And money, in and of itself, turns out not to be all that interesting if nothing is done with it. He didn’t buy fast cars, or fast women. He didn’t carve out blocks of Manhattan and erect monuments to himself. He didn’t give Africa chickens, or cure malaria.

  He simply amassed wealth, and got older.

  And that, it turned out, was the one facet of his existence that eventually drew the light.

  Every kingdom, however peaceful, must at some time endure the trial of succession.

  Even here, Longman had managed so well that the transfer of power would have been entirely peaceful but for the stroke of fate—

  A sheet of rain and mingled seawater dashed against my face.

  The sudden cold took my breath away and broke my reverie. Somewhere, hidden from my view by the bulk of the cabin and its shroud of spray, Longman swore. Then, more distinctly, I heard: “Double-lash that dinghy, boy!”

  He meant me. The actual boy he called ‘Scrub’. But me? I was boy. And to reach the dinghy I would have to let go of the handrail.

  Scrub scampered past me, a blur of motion, sure-footed and fleet despite the water-slick deck and the corkscrewing craft. His gaze was a momentary glitter of distrust amid the flying spindrift before he began re-lashing the dinghy. In moments it was done with an efficiency and speed preternatural in one so young. Still he had yet to utter a single word to me. His silence and skill called the lie to his appearance. Perhaps he was a man in a boy’s body?

  He was also the one who stood in the eye of Fate. The fate I’ve mentioned that struck Longman’s world. Caused him to raise his middle finger and fax it to the editor of one of the world’s most powerful publications.

  Scrub was, somehow, the boy that dethroned the emperor.

  He appeared on the scene not long before Longman announced he was stepping down from the board of Longman Capital. The Time article was ostensibly about the retirement of the ‘Hidden Emperor,’ but in reality it was an exposé on the marriage of Charles’ youngest son, Thomas, to Alicia Manning. This hint of smut in an otherwise spotless career and life proved irresistible to the editors.

  Word on the street was that Alicia had first tried to seduce Charles, as his secretary, and when that failed, had set her sights on the youngest Longman. Thomas divorced his wife and took up with Alicia.

  And their son, Scrub, was left to float between his estranged parents.

  What he was doing on a yacht in the middle of the heaving Atlantic with Charles Longman I had no idea.

  This was the man on whom I was depending to make landfall on US soil by the 13th of November.

  I’m not sure at what point my interest in Chuck Longman as a means to an end turned into a true curiosity.

  Looking back, I could equally ask at what point his interest in me became more than a means to an end.

  55

  Sneaky. There was no other word for it.

  Li Min, for all her apparent self-disclosure and commitment to honesty and integrity, had retained, safely hidden away from the world, and particularly from Hiero Beck—thank the Maker!—a vein of sneakiness.

  Marten mined that vein with a fury.

  She began with the fuzzy photo of the could-be (has-to-be, my-career-depends-upon-it) Hieonymous Beck she had discovered in an out of the way folder in Li’s Flickr account. She had then looked to see if the photo went anywhere.

  It had not been shared with anyone from Flickr. Nor, on gaining access to Li’s Gmail account, could she find it attached to a
sent email.

  Marten filtered the sent items to only those containing image attachments. Many emails had attached photos, but there was no sign of the fuzzy snap.

  She relaxed the search to include any kind of attachment, and began scrolling through the much longer list. Most were documents in various formats—Microsoft Word, and portable document format. Some appeared to be collaborative projects, shared with a list of university email addresses. One email held an attached spreadsheet, according to Gmail. From the title it appeared to be statistics from an experiment. On a whim, Marten clicked on it, and waited for the online spreadsheet viewer to load.

  A spinner appeared in the browser and spun for seconds, before a message appeared, complaining that the spreadsheet was unreadable.

  Marten would have left it there but for one detail, which her ever-questing gaze noted. The size of the spreadsheet, indicated in kilobytes by the attachment, was exactly the same as the photo for which she was hunting.

  With another click, she downloaded the spreadsheet to her computer. She renamed the file, forcing it to be treated as an image file. Another click, and the image viewer opened.

  The screen filled with the fuzzy photo of a young man with chestnut hair.

  Sneaky girl, thought Marten. She had hidden the photo in plain sight.

  But the photo was immaterial now. She’d pulled on that thread. Marten now rapidly turned to where it led, the recipient. Because whoever that was, had clearly been expected to detect a hidden photo, and know what to do with it. And, more importantly, know what it meant.

  Someone out there knew the identity of the young man in the fuzzy photo. She squinted at the lone recipient, the moniker thereeldeel.

  “Whoever you are, thereeldeel,” Marten muttered, “you’re going to tell me everything you know.”

  56

  I make it a practice never to look up the author of a favourite book—I mean, who they are in real life. They’re bound to disappoint. Turn out to be a raging communist, or white supremacist. Or poodle owner.