Beating Ruby (14 page)

But it was gone already. And now I had to eat raw eel and I wanted to cry.

Near us, Ellingham was digging into his plate with a feral expression. I shivered at the sight of him munching on the reddish dices. March and Alex ate quickly as well, but out of a clear intent to shorten this regrettable
shibui
experience. Alex drank from his sake to help the last mouthful of eel go down. He then peeked down at my plate, still full, and at Ellingham, who was watching me expectantly.

I’ll never forget the expression on Alex’s face. The look of a man sacrificing himself, championing a damsel in distress. “I’ll take yours if you don’t want it.”

I gave a weak nod.

March stepped in. “It’s all right; I’ll have it. I can’t get enough of such a delicacy.”

Alex’s hand had already moved to take my plate; his eyes narrowed in response. My eyes traveled back and forth between them; I swallowed pitifully. “You . . . you can share if you want.”

I’m pretty sure neither wanted to both lose the cockfight
and
have to eat the beautiful dead eel, but they welcomed my offer like gentlemen and split the “delicacy” in half with tight jaws under Ellingham’s amused gaze. The lights returned, and Chef Mesa retreated behind the kitchen doors, presumably to oversee preparations for his next performance. The waiter came back with an assortment of
tsukemono
for us to nibble on while we waited for the rest of the show; I was grateful, because those traditional Japanese pickles, while coming with tart and strong flavors, were okay. Alex and March seemed to share my relief: they raided the long rectangular plates with deadpan faces. Alex even ate the little blue flowers in his, even though I’m almost positive those were for decorative purposes.

“Mr. Morgan,” Ellingham began, before biting on a crunchy piece of bright yellow
takuan
. “I was hoping you’d be able to enlighten me on a specific point.”

Alex schooled his features in a good-cop smile. “I will if I can.”

“I’m grateful—EMG is grateful—as you can imagine, that our government is helping us deal with this crisis. But I’m wondering why the CIA took over this particular case, rather than, say, the FBI.”

On my left, I noticed March’s shoulders straighten ever so slightly, and I realized that Ellingham’s piercing aquamarine gaze was no longer set on Alex, but on me. I gulped down a bite of sour and salty
umeboshi
and responded with an uncomfortable grin.

“What do
you
think, Miss Chaptal? Are you, like I am, left in the dark? You, whom I was requested—I dare not say ordered—to allow to help Mr. Morgan in his investigation, during your work hours . . .” His eyes had narrowed as he said this, and the fingers of his right hand were rapping slowly against the wooden counter.

A sheen of hot sweat formed on my brow. “I-I’m really just helping Agent Morgan with technical stuff and—”

“I’m sorry, sir, Miss Chaptal’s collaboration with our division entails high levels of confidentiality. I’m afraid we have to end this track of conversation.”

Ellingham’s eyebrows shot up—I bet it wasn’t often that he heard someone telling him to get lost—before he regained his composure. “I see. Well, let us hope that the opacity in which you operate is not a mere guise for incompetence.”

Ow.
I practically heard that banderilla stab Alex in the face. Leaving his victim to nurse his ego, Ellingham then looked at March. “As for you, Mr. November, I count on your involvement to speed things up. Our mutual friend spoke greatly of your ability to . . .
solve
such issues.”

March welcomed the compliment with the faintest smile creasing his dimples; my ears perked up.
Mutual friend?
What kind of friend? Could Ellingham know about March’s old job? Alex looked interested too, but we weren’t given the opportunity to further question Ellingham. Chef Mesa had returned, the lights were dimmed again, and this time, I got worried. I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat something that came served with Albinoni’s “Adagio” as a background soundtrack.

The chef brought his hands up, fingers curling and trembling, his face a mask of pain and concentration. “Life. The struggle for life.
Kodako
!
” he roared, throwing his fists in the air.

Sweet fricking Jesus.
I knew what
kodako
meant, but I had this moment of doubt when the waiter waited for the organ solo to bring four large black square plates. My mind couldn’t reconcile their content with the notion of edible food. Not just because this sensory
shibui
experience seemed to be squirming quite a bit, but because I had never envisioned eating a live baby octopus before. Especially one wearing a delicate purple wig made of re
d beet shavings. It was so cute. It reminded me of Katy Perry’s hairstyle.

I watched mine struggle to remove its wig, wading in what I understood to be a
mixture of truffle oil and
sudachi
lime juice. March and Alex seemed just as disconcerted, but when Ellingham picked his up mercilessly and shoved it inside his mouth with a sinister gulp, they took the hint and imitated him.

Alex’s wouldn’t let go of the black plate, its suction cups sticking to the smooth material in a desperate fight for survival. He kept pulling, stretching the tiny white limbs like gooey elastics until they let go with a series of wet popping sounds, only to wrap themselves around his chopsticks instead. His eyes screwed shut as he gobbled the helpless creature, munching on it with the face of a man about to throw up.

I fought a wave of nausea of my own when I watched him swallow with difficulty, his left hand clenched into a fist on the wooden counter. March went through the ordeal with more grace—mostly because his baby octopus had tangled its arms in the beet shavings, and therefore posed less of a challenge. I didn’t miss his trembling exhale as the invertebrate traveled down his esophagus, though.

“Won’t you eat yours, Miss Chaptal?”

I stared past March’s chalk-white face and into Ellingham’s eyes and their satanic glint. I looked down at my plate and gulped.

Mine . . .

Mine was courageously sustaining my gaze with its tiny beady eyes, rocking its beet wig with dignity in spite of the horror of the situation. Until it tried to escape the plate. And all that lime juice made it look like it was crying. I poked it back in a few times with one of my chopsticks, but it was no use—I was already thinking of names for him. I think it was a he—feminine intuition.

I couldn’t do it. My eyes fell on the glass of water the waiter had served me earlier; I made a lightning-quick decision. Grabbing Krakky—yeah, that was his name now—I pulled him out of the plate and threw him in my water glass, watching with relief as he settled there.

“I-I’m saving mine for later.”

That earned me perplexed looks from March and Alex, and a raised eyebrow from Ellingham. Which was nothing compared to the glare I got from the waiter when I stopped him from taking the glass away. I glared back. In that price range, I was entitled to do whatever I pleased with my life essence food.

I can’t describe the amount of joy I experienced when I saw Ellingham bow to Chef Mesa with his palms pressed together, soon imitated by pretty much everyone in the dining room, including me. The waiter came back a few minutes later with strawberry and eggplant
granités
, indicating that the meal had reached its end. I finished mine down to the last drop, having reached a point where eating raw mixed eggplant was more or less an antechamber to heaven.

After he was done with his own
granité
, Ellingham clasped his hands together and looked at us. “Well, I’m pleased we were able to have this conversation. I’ll leave you, lady and gentlemen, to your investigation.”

As if on a cue, the young Asian woman who had greeted us and had been waiting in a corner of the dining room with Ellingham’s bodyguards walked toward us, presumably to show us out. I took my glass—and Krakky—with me under the scandalized stare of our waiter. I hoped Ellingham wouldn’t tip that douche.

Our host cast the baby octopus a scornful look. Then his icy gaze traveled up, stabbing me like a million tiny daggers. “Miss Chaptal, you intend to keep this creature, don’t you?”

I took a step back, seeking refuge between March and Alex’s solid frames. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. I’ve heard they’re extremely smart and—”

Without a word, Ellingham took the glass from my hands. I let go with difficulty and cast a pleading look at March, while that monster held the glass in front of his eyes and examined Krakky with pursed lips.

“Denise.”

The elegant assistant nodded.

“Do you remember that octopus who could aptly predict soccer results? What was his name? Patrick?”

“Paul, sir.”

Ellingham frowned. “Yes,
Paul
. Do you believe we could perhaps train this one to anticipate market trends?”

“We’ll hire the best zoological specialists, sir.”

“Excellent. Find a suitable tank for it and put it in my office.”

Part of me wanted to protest, but being a good parent is also wanting what’s best for your kids, and I couldn’t deprive Krakky of this opportunity to slither up the corporate ladder. I watched with a heavy heart as he pressed his little tentacles against Ellingham’s fingers on the other side of the glass. He had probably already forgotten about me, and it was better this way. Hadrian Ellingham would be his new family. Which was really horrible if you think about it, since the man had eaten one of his siblings not so long ago. Such is the harrowing journey of a young octopus in this cruel world.

Ellingham handed the glass to his assistant and seemed ready to take his leave when I remembered something. This might, after all, prove my only chance to pierce the darkest secrets of a man who sent me quarterly e-mailings to remind me that he and I were working together as a team to build the future, because with EM Group, “Tomorrow Comes Today.”

“Sir, can I ask you a question?”

A contemptuous sigh escaped him. “You can always try.”

“What’s her name? Your new girlfriend?”

Behind me, March and Alex cleared their throats in unison. To my amazement, Ellingham sort of blushed. Not a full blush high on the cheeks—that would have looked very weird on him—more like a diffuse pinkness in his neck and ears. Then it was gone, replaced by flaring nostrils and arctic blue eyes.

“Out of my sight, Miss Chaptal.”

FOURTEEN

The Limbos

“They collided together like fiery particles, their joining a passionate fusion of every single atom in their bodies.”

—Christie Dolan,
Physical: A Hopegrove Nuclear Plant Novelette

“God, I need a cup of black to wash that stuff down!”

I would have agreed with Alex if I liked coffee; I personally contemplated forgetting the Mesa experience with a two-dollar cream cheese bagel. As for March, he had been silent ever since leaving the restaurant, lost in his own thoughts. I knew for a fact that he was almost as addicted to coffee as he was to mints, though, so I suspected he shared Alex’s opinion.

“So, are we still going to visit Thom’s place?” I asked Alex as we stepped out of the Time Warner Center.

“Yes, we’ll go there immediately,” March announced.

I looked up at him in mild surprise, and Alex cocked an eyebrow in a fashion I understood to mean “Who the hell put you in charge?”

“Follow me,” March ordered.

Alex and I exchanged puzzled looks but complied, allowing him to lead us around the building and to a line of cars parked on West Fifty-Eighth Street. He pulled out a key fob from his right pocket, pressed it, and the lights of a gray Lexus sedan flashed twice.

“What happened to the Mercedes?” I asked.

March let out an irritated sigh as he opened the driver’s door. “I understand that room must be made for Mr. Morgan.”

I fought a grin. “Thank you.”

“But you really didn’t have to,” Alex said.

The passenger door clicked open—for me, I assumed. I had a moment of hesitation. I gathered March expected me to sit up front with him, but I figured it would only piss off Alex further, especially after what March had done to his car. I shook my head with an apologetic look, and climbed into the backseat under March’s displeased gaze.

Alex was about to follow me when his head jerked up. A smile lit up his face at the sight of a tiny food truck parked a few yards away from us. “I’ll go get myself that coffee before we go. You guys want anything? Island?”

Oh.
In the mirror, I saw March’s eyes turn to slits. “Um, Alex . . . maybe we can stop for drinks later?”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry, I’ll drink it in the car.”

March’s tongue clicked in rising aggravation; I grabbed Alex’s sleeve before he could leave. “You can’t really do that in March’s car.”

His brow twitched, and he stared past my shoulder at March, but said nothing otherwise, consenting to get into the car. I gave him a thankful smile, buckled up, and . . . the car didn’t start.

God.
Mr. Clean was giving us the full Monty. I winced at the sight of March’s obstinate blue eyes in the mirror. “Alex, your seat belt,” I whispered as the stickman light kept blinking on the dashboard.

Alex’s mouth formed a little O of perplexity before he submitted to March’s iron rule with a diplomatic smile. I relaxed in my seat when the engine finally hummed to life, at the same time that the first notes of a neurasthenic country guitar rose in the car.

“Is that the only kind of music you have?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose with trembling fingers.
“Alex . . .”

“Conway Twitty earned forty number one Billboard country hits. He was a
genius
,” March hissed as he drove us toward the monumental steel frame of Queensboro Bridge.

I saw Alex’s mouth open, ready to discuss the merits of Conway Twitty’s musical contributions. I grabbed his right arm and squeezed it, shaking my head with a warning look. He nodded in understanding and took my hand, his thumb grazing the underside of my wrist.

In the mirror, March was observing us. I snatched my hand away with a faint blush and ignored Alex to focus on the traffic surrounding us, and Manhattan’s skyline stretching along the East River.

I’m gonna sound a little dramatic, but our arrival on Roosevelt Island struck me as a plunge into another world, the harsh red lines of the bridge a gate to quiet limbos where time had stopped. It probably had something to do with the dark clouds growing in the sky above our heads, and also it was only quarter to three, so everyone was either at work, school, or safely inside their apartments. There was something eerie about those deserted streets and parks, the lines of identical brick buildings. No passersby, not a sound except for an occasional birdcall echoing in the distance. The colors themselves seemed faded, blending into the ashen sky and giving me the impression that the entire place was shrouded in a gray veil. Granted, the fact that we were there to visit a dead man’s place didn’t help.

The Lexus glided down Main Street. I checked the numbers on each building. “465. March, it’s this one.”

He parked a little farther down the street, and the three of us stepped out. The spacious and brightly lit lobby was a sharp contrast with the dull external appearance of this soulless LEGO, with its white walls and wooden panels. Spotting Thom’s name on the intercom, I exchanged looks with March and Alex, silently asking for permission to ring. The jerk of Alex’s chin was my cue; I pressed the button and waited. In vain.

“They’re gone, you know—staying with the grandparents in Fort Lee.”

At the other end of the hall, the door to the super’s office had opened and a fiftysomething man with graying hair now stood in front of us. He scratched his beer belly absently through a brown plaid knit vest.

“Mr. Degraeves?” Alex asked with a friendly smile.

“The one and only.”

“You saw my colleagues yesterday.”

“You one of those Feds again?”

“I’m Agent Morgan—” He flashed his badge briefly, not long enough for the man to figure he wasn’t FBI, I thought. Then he pointed to March and me. “And these people are consultants working with me.”

There was some more scratching, and the super stared at us for a little while, cocking his head as if to better assess who he was dealing with. He pointed at the ceiling with his index finger. “You need to go up there again?”

“Yes,” Alex confirmed. “Can I ask you to open the apartment for us?”

“Sure. Come with me.”

Degraeves called the elevator, and we all joined him inside while he pressed the button for the tenth floor.

Now that I was standing so close to him, it was becoming obvious that the guy’s belly was, indeed, fu
ll of beer. From the corner of my eye, I registered March’s lips pressing in disapproval. “So, Emma and Tobias are staying with Thom’s parents?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s been tough. You know, all those cops, neighbors talking . . .”

“I understand,” I said.

The car stopped, its doors opening on a long white hallway lined with dark doors.

Degraeves pointed to the left. “This way.”

It was hard for me to place the feeling, but I experienced a sort of guilt when the super unlocked the door to Thom’s apartment. I had been there a few times, for dinner or the last-minute wrap-up of an important presentation. Now that he was gone, though, being there in his living room, surrounded by his son’s toys, his family pictures . . . it felt like invading his privacy, forcefully taking something he hadn’t offered this time. I looked around, filled by a sense of familiarity that was now laced with grief. Thom’s place reminded me of Joy’s and mine, only bigger. It was a heteroclite mix of styles and colors betraying a series of genuine attempts at interior design thwarted by the purchase of an eighties leather La-Z-Boy and
Star Wars
figurines.

Degraeves stood in the apartment’s doorway while March and Alex started examining the furniture, the lamps, the windowpanes, dissecting every detail of Thom’s life with practiced eyes. I left the living room in search of any computer or connected devices he might have kept at home. A pang of sadness tugged at my heart upon passing the door to little Tobias’s bedroom. It was slightly ajar, allowing me to glimpse a heap of stuffed toys and a few crayons on the floor. Next was a large bathroom with blue tiling, facing Thom’s bedroom—I didn’t enter either of them. There was something disturbingly intimate about touching anything in there while Emma and her son were away; I chose to leave that to March and Alex.

At the end of the hallway, a third door led to Thom’s office, with its shelves crammed full of programming books and, sitting majestically on the old black desk, an unfinished LEGO model of CERN’s large hadron collider—his latest magnum opus. I hoped Tobias would grow up knowing just how cool his dad had been.

I sank in the large blue gamer chair facing the desk. It was weird to see it empty like that. There would usually be at least two old Macs, Thom’s huge PC tower, several external hard drives, and an entire cardboard box of wires and mystery tech junk in a corner of the room. But I gathered Alex’s colleagues had taken all that stuff during their previous visit. I doubted they’d find anything, though, save for the most heavily modded install of
Skyrim
any mortal had ever witnessed.

My fingers played absently with the LEGO model in front of me. Something had happened in the past weeks, which had culminated last night, and led us here and now. Thom had been standing on the edge of a cliff, while I was too preoccupied about that stupid date to reach out to him.

I picked a blue LEGO plate to complete the dodecagonal barrel hosting the collider. What was I missing this time?

We’ve all been there: someone enters the kitchen, you’re standing near the oven with your sweatpants down, chocolate cake batter everywhere, a mixer in one hand, your stepmom’s cat in the other, and all you can say is “It’s not what it looks like.”

I kind of felt like this when March and Alex entered Thom’s office ten minutes later, followed by Degraeves, while I was sitting at Thom’s desk in front of several boxes of LEGOs, wires, batteries, and LEDs—I was almost done completing the circular particle tracker.

I looked up at them. Alex was scratching his chin, one eyebrow raised, while March’s hands had clenched into fists and his breath was getting a little short, like he was hyperventilating.

“It’s because it helps me think—” I whined, letting go of Thom’s LEGOs.

“Have you found anything yet?” March asked, scanning the mess on Thom’s desk with a frown.

I shrugged and shook my head. “No. Your colleagues took everything. If it’s not on his devices, I don’t think it’ll be anywhere in here.”

March pointed at the LEGOs scattered on the desk. “Do we still need these?”

“Not really, they’re—”

Before I had the time to finish, he had already moved, and the desk’s surface was being cleared at a surprising speed. Bricks were sorted by shape, size, and color, wires were untangled and coiled into neat bundles, and everything was stacked in the corresponding box. Once he was done, a contented smile stirred March’s lips.

Alex, on the other hand, seemed deflated; his “ace,” as he had called me, had ultimately proved useless. Well, almost, I thought, as I inserted a button cell in Thom’s LEGO model. The large hadron collider was complete.

“Check this,” I announced, watching the inside of the barrel light up thanks to an ingenious system of pink and orange LEDs. Very movie-like. I could tell March and Alex weren’t impressed yet, though.