by Bec Linder
I gritted my teeth. Eric had outmaneuvered me. We had agreed to meet later that day, during the conference’s designated lunch hour, but for whatever reason he had decided to change the plan without notifying me. I suspected that he just wanted to make me uncomfortable. Why did Elliott like this guy?
“Wonderful,” Eric said, all teeth and slick charm. “We won’t be long. I’ll have her back before you miss her.”
I really, really did not like the way he kept talking about me like I was an object, or a wayward pet. “You can show me all the sights,” I said, smiling, hating him. I prayed that Elliott would object and tell Eric I needed to stay, but he just shrugged and turned to speak with a woman who was approaching the booth, and it was clear there was no hope for me. I would just have to deal with this situation I had gotten myself into.
Eric and I left the vendor room and went up to the convention center’s main concourse, a huge and echoing space of glass and light. A few people meandered around, but we were more or less alone. He led me to a bench near the wall of windows and sat down, looking up at me expectantly.
I had brought this on myself. I sat.
“I’m looking forward to working with you, Sadie,” Eric said, which was essentially the conversational equivalent of trying to stick it in without any foreplay.
“Hold up,” I said. “I never said I would work for you.”
“Well, it’s a foregone conclusion, isn’t it?” he asked. “Especially after I tell you what I’ve learned about Elliott’s start-up.”
God, he was enjoying this. He was drawing it out and trying to make me squirm. Well, I wouldn’t squirm; I wouldn’t give him the pleasure. “Feel free to share that with me whenever you’re ready,” I said.
He chuckled. “All right. You may have noticed something unusual about one of his investors.”
“Unusual in what way?” I asked. I wasn’t going to give him anything.
“Very clever,” he said. “I know you noticed something, or you wouldn’t have responded to my email. But that’s fine. I’ll let you play dumb. He’s getting money from Uganda International Friendship, which doesn’t exist. It’s a shell corporation. Now, you may ask yourself: who would need to illicitly funnel money out of Uganda? I can’t say for sure, but there are plenty of unsavory types who would like to have a few million stashed in an account overseas, just to be safe. You never know when you’ll need to flee the country on short notice.”
The implications made my skin crawl. Was Elliott really in cahoots with war criminals? I found it hard to believe, but Eric didn’t look like he was lying, and it matched up with everything I’d found out on my own. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“Because I want you to come work for me, of course,” he said. “And I don’t see you jumping ship unless you can’t imagine staying.”
As if I would ever work for a back-stabbing two-faced creeper like him. “I thought Elliott was your friend.”
He shrugged. “He is. But business is business. You have to make some enemies on your way to the top.”
“Right,” I said, and stood up. “I need to talk to Elliott.”
“Of course,” he said. “Take as much time as you need. And feel free to tell him where you got your information.”
I would, even though I knew it would hurt him. I didn’t want him to keep being friends with someone like Eric.
I didn’t do it right away. I waited until the conference ended that evening, and we were packing up the booth. Elliott had secured an investor—signed, sealed, delivered; not a ton of money, but a good start—and I actually caught him whistling as he put away our remaining business cards. I hated to rain on his parade, but I couldn’t wait any longer to ask him about what Eric had told me. The knowledge was a hard, heavy knot in my chest, and I just wanted to get it over with, whatever it might be, whatever angry or sorrowful conversation we were about to have.
I started packing pamphlets into a box so I didn’t have to look at him. “Eric told me something today.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked, distracted, cheerful. “What’s that?”
“He said—he told me…” I closed my eyes. Spit it out, Bayliss. “He said you’re getting funding from an organization called Uganda International Friendship, but it’s not—he told me it’s a shell corporation.”
I glanced up him, afraid to see his reaction. He hadn’t paused in moving business cards, but his mouth had compressed into a thin, unhappy line.
“Elliott,” I said, terrified that it was true, and that he wasn’t the man I had thought him to be.
“We aren’t going to talk about this here,” he said, and I nodded, grateful for any reprieve.
We finished packing up the booth in silence. Elliott had arranged for everything to be picked up later that evening and delivered back to the office, and so when the final lid was on the final box, he turned and walked off without saying anything to me or checking to see if I followed.
I scurried after him. It didn’t make sense: he was potentially conspiring with evil people and doing very illegal things, and yet I felt incredibly guilty. “Elliott, wait,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He strode ahead, not looking back.
I followed him, hoping he would turn, hoping he would say something to acknowledge me, even one word. He didn’t. We went upstairs, past where I had sat with Eric earlier that day—guilty, so guilty—and down a wide hallway into the windowless depths of the building. Elliott stopped in front of a large door and pushed it open, and gestured for me to go inside.
It was one of the meeting rooms, empty now except for the stage and the chairs lined up before it. I turned to face Elliott as he closed the door, and then he said, “Tell me exactly what Eric said to you.”
“Not too much more than I already told you,” I said. “He said you’re getting money from an organization that doesn’t actually exist, and he implied that you’re, um. That you’ve been funneling money out of the country for, like. I don’t know. Joseph Kony. Warlords. Terrible people.”
“Right,” Elliott said, very stiff and distant, formal, like he was a million miles away.
“It isn’t true, right?” I asked him. “You wouldn’t—that’s not something you would do.”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that question,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know what to think!” I exclaimed. “Was Eric just telling me a bunch of lies? Are you getting money from Uganda International Friendship or not?”
“I am,” he said.
“You’re impossible,” I said. “Was he lying or not? Are you working for warlords? Why are you getting money from a shell corporation? Just please tell me,” I said, begging now, desperate for him to reassure me that he was still the good man I knew him to be.
“I don’t see why I should waste time defending myself,” he said, “when you and Eric have already played judge and jury. Why did he tell you all of this? What’s in it for him?”
“He wants to hire me,” I said, defeated. “He’s starting his own company.”
“Of course,” Elliott said, with a bitter twist to his mouth. “Very sensible of him.”
“Elliott, don’t be like this,” I pleaded. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. If you would just tell me—”
“And then what?” he asked. “You’ll believe me, and all suspicion will be wiped from your mind? You don’t trust me. If you can think this about me, that I would deliberately—that I would steal money, or whatever it was Eric decided to accuse me of—”
He was angry: voice raised, nostrils flaring. I took a step back, without really meaning to. His face crumpled. “Sadie…”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said quietly. “We seem to be getting mad at each other a lot, lately.”
He sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. “Fuck. Sadie…”
“Maybe you’re doing something fishy,” I said. “I don’t really know. Maybe it’s totally innocent. Maybe you got tricked. I don’
t know. I’m not going to work for Eric, though, that’s for sure. And you shouldn’t trust him. He is not your friend.”
“I’m getting that impression,” Elliott said.
“And past that, I don’t know,” I said, and swallowed, and then said, for once, exactly what was in my heart. “I’m afraid. You scare me. Maybe I was ready to believe Eric because it was the easy out. Working with you has been—you make me want to be a better person. I had stopped caring about anything except my own suffering, and you showed me a way toward living in the world again. And the way you touch me, like I’m—like I mean something to you… It scares me.”
He took a step toward me, closing the distance between us.
I backed up again, feeling like a skittish horse. If he put his hands on me now, I would crumble to pieces. “Anyway, I don’t think I can work with you anymore.”
He stopped, hands hanging loose by his side, green eyes dark in the dim light. “You’re quitting?”
“It’s too hard for me,” I said. “Working with you, and feeling—feeling—”
I couldn’t say it. I wasn’t even sure what I felt. It was too grand and formless for words.
“I’m bewildered by this entire conversation,” he said, rubbing his hands across his face again. “Let’s accept that we’re both stubborn and irrational people. I’ll write a strongly-worded email to Eric and tell my father to go fuck himself, and you’ll agree to be my girlfriend. We’ll bring Jim down from Boston and make a successful prototype that will net us several million dollars in investments. Water-borne diseases will become a thing of the past. Stay with me.”
I couldn’t. It was choking me. I shook my head, telling him no, telling myself to stop hoping for things I was unable to let myself have. He wanted me to be his girlfriend, like we were kids in the throes of puppy love. “Elliott, it won’t ever work. We have absolutely nothing in common. I’m a middle-class black girl from Queens, and you’re the son of a billionaire.”
He frowned at me. “Do you think that matters? The last woman I loved was born in a hut with a dirt floor, and she didn’t learn to read until she was ten. And you’re worried that—what, that you won’t know which fork to use during formal dinners at the family compound? We don’t have a compound. My father likes to eat at Burger King.”
I laughed, and then was mortified when it turned into a sob. I covered my mouth with one hand and turned away from him. I couldn’t bear to look at the desperate hope scrawled across his face. “I need to go,” I said.
“Sadie,” he said, his voice catching.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really need to go.”
And I left.
TWENTY-FOUR
Elliott
On Monday morning, I woke before dawn and watched as the first pale light hit my grimy, east-facing windows. I could rent a better apartment, now, with my mother’s money; but I had grown fond of my dismal shoebox. It was easy to keep clean, and it was close to work. I didn’t really know what else I was supposed to look for in an apartment.
Comfort, maybe. A sense of home.
Those were things that New York couldn’t offer me.
I walked to work through quiet, empty streets. A few taxis rolled past, and a man came out of a coffee shop and heaved a trash bag into a dumpster. Maybe there were parts of the city that never slept, but Midtown wasn’t one of them.
In the lobby, the security guard nodded to me from his post.
I still didn’t know his name.
The office was dark and silent. I turned on a few lamps, and sat down at my desk to read through my email. Nothing interesting. A mass email from the organizer of the conference, thanking everyone for attending. A quick note from an old friend who was now working against human trafficking in Cambodia, asking me if I had seen a particular article.
Nothing from Eric, or from Sadie.
I didn’t know what I was expecting.
I worked for a few hours, sending follow-up emails to people I had spoken with at the conference and skimming through my news reader, until it was past the time that Sadie usually showed up for work. I waited a while longer, thinking that maybe she had slept in, maybe… But soon it was clear that she wasn’t coming, and I gave in to the inevitable and made myself a second pot of coffee.
The righteous indignation I’d felt the night before had ebbed. I was sad, now, and a bit bewildered. I still wasn’t sure of Eric’s motive, or exactly what he had told Sadie, or how he found out about UIF in the first place. But my interaction with Sadie, after, was now, in hindsight, painfully clear. She had wanted nothing more than for me to reassure her, and I—all wounded pride—had been too busy blustering to set her mind at ease. A mistake. I should have unbent, and told her the truth.
It wasn’t too late for that.
I gathered the documents quickly: the initial emails, the signed contract. I wrote a note to her, explaining everything. I packaged it all up and took it down the street to a courier service. The bearded hipster at the front desk told me it would be delivered that afternoon. And then I would just have to wait.
I went back to the office and stared at my computer for a while. There was no point. I wasn’t getting anything done. I had some funding, now; I should email Jim and make arrangements for him to come down from Boston, find him a place to stay and some lab space for his experiments. I should contact Mark at Sekeley Lightner. It all seemed insurmountable. Without Sadie, I was adrift.
There was one thing I could do, though. One monumental task I could square away for good.
I put on my coat, and went to pay a visit to my father.
His lair was downtown, at the top of a huge skyscraper in the heart of the Financial District. I hadn’t been to the office in years, not since I spent a few months in New York before I left for Southeast Asia and then the job with MSF. Security had been tightened, it seemed: where before I could stroll into the lobby and take the elevator directly to Sloane Worldwide’s offices, I was now stopped by a burly man perched at the main desk, who said, “How can I direct you today, sir?”
Cerberus at the gates, I thought, amused. He didn’t care if I got lost: he was there to turn away the unwashed masses. “I’m here to see Rupert Sloane,” I said. “I’m his son.”
If I had expected him to be impressed, I would have been sorely disappointed. He picked up the phone at his elbow, spoke into it briefly, and then said, “Someone will be down to escort you.”
I slouched against his desk and waited. Men and women in business suits flashed security badges and passed by uncontested. Others paused and asked for directions, and the guard pointed them to the elevators or told them which floor to go to. Nobody else was forced to wait. A special privilege for those who wished to beard the lion in his den.
After about ten minutes—my father wanted me impatient and annoyed—a woman emerged from the nearest elevator, and I recognized my father’s venerable battleship of a personal assistant, Henrietta, who was eighty if she was a day and had been working for my father since the Johnson administration.
“Henrietta,” I said, straightening up. “What a delight.”
She pursed her mouth and said, “Mr. Sloane will see you now.”
Of course. No time for chit-chat. I followed her into the same elevator she had exited from. She swiped her security card and punched the single button on the control panel. A private elevator, then, with direct access to my father. That was new. I was surprised he didn’t intend to make me go through the servants’ entrance.
The elevator rose smoothly upward. We rode in silence, Henrietta staring straight ahead, oozing disapproval. She was loyal as a dog, and anyone who got on my father’s bad side became the immediate target of Henrietta’s wrath. I suspected brainwashing, but couldn’t prove it.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and we emerged into the waiting area outside my father’s office.
Henrietta went straight for her desk and pushed the button to activate the intercom. “Sir, your son is here.”
The intercom crackled. “Send him in,” my father’s voice said.
I went in. My father’s office was a cavernous space, dimly lit, with his enormous, antique desk backed against the far wall. It was a long walk across the carpet, and the effect was that of a displeased king awaiting some wayward knight. I could easily imagine hapless underlings quaking in terror as they made the approach.
Long practice had inoculated me against my father’s intimidation techniques. I strolled toward his desk, hands casually shoved in my pockets—a habit he hated; he said it was sloppy and unprofessional—and said, “Kind of you to make room for me in your busy schedule.”
“Elliott,” he said. He didn’t stand to greet me. “You know I expect you to call Henrietta twenty-four hours ahead of time if you want to see me.”
Talking to him was like entering a time warp. I was sixteen again: sullen, resentful, and tongue-tied. “It’s important,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Vastly more important than the conference call you just interrupted.”
I worked my jaw. Words piled up in my mouth, unspoken.
“Cat got your tongue?” he sneered. “Spit it out.”
I breathed in. I exhaled. There was a time when I hated my father, when every interaction with him set a terrible fire burning in my gut. I fought that fire now. He was a petty tyrant, a bitter man who found no joy in life except through making money. I wouldn’t end up like him.
I wouldn’t hate him any longer, I decided. I would try to understand him. I would be kind. I would feel pity for him instead of rage.
“I’m here to tell you that I’m done,” I said. “I won’t ever work for you. I won’t take over the company. I’ll go to your funeral, but I’m finished with being your son.”
He smiled. He thought I was playing the game with him. “I’ve cut you off,” he said. “You won’t last six months.”
“I know you have,” I said. “I’ve lasted this long. Go ahead and disinherit me for good. You can do it tonight.”
