Mind Games (35 page)

As he talks, I think about how a highcap with structural powers can supposedly get impressions of significant things that happened in and around a structure. Pretty handy for a detective. I think about what he told me about the secret history of the restaurant, his fascination with architecture, the way he rubbed the ledge at the opera house, as if to soothe and orient himself.

A plate of pineapple, cherries, and chocolates appears, along with Amaretto coffees. And then Shelby walks up. “Justine!”

Seeing her is such a relief I almost jump up and hug her. Otto stands and I introduce them. Shelby explains she was supposed to meet a date up in front some time ago. “I believe he will not come. I believe he did not want to know me after all.”

Otto invites her to join us for dessert. He’s insistent, even. It makes him seem like a normal and thoughtful date.

Shelby declines. “I no longer feel social.”

“Maybe it was a misunderstanding,” I say.

“It was not misunderstanding.” She eyes me significantly. “Is exactly as it appears, I think. Please. I did not mean to disturb your dinner.”

I stand. “Shelby, let me walk you out. Do you mind, Otto?”

“Of course not.” He rises again.

I drape a consoling arm over her shoulders as we go.

“Give him beard and long hair and he is face, yes,” she whispers. “Is Henji.”

“No wonder Helmut thought Otto was leading a double life. Not only is he a police chief and crime boss, he’s a highcap with highcap enemies stashed all over the city. One of the most powerful men in the city is a high-cap madman!”

“Who can kill with his thoughts. Who works with revisionist.”

I think about the old woman who witnessed the Brick Slinger’s suicide. Was she revised? “Why wouldn’t Packard tell us who we were up against?” I say.

We stop by the front door, just under the candle-in-the-window display.

Shelby looks at me hard. “Perhaps because of what will happen if you fail, Justine. If you are frightened, your chance of failure, it is too great. If you knew your target was Henji … this case gambles with all our lives, but most especially yours.”

“Because if he figures it out …”

“You die,” Shelby says. “And that is best-case scenario.”

“Great.”

“Worst he kills or hides Packard, and then we all become like Jarvis.” She gets this stunned look on her face. “Is it possible that our usefulness has always been for this? That we exist only to disillusion Henji and thus free Packard? That all cases before were buildup to Henji?”

It takes a while for me to digest the outrageousness of it all. “Oh my God—the Silver Widow and the Alchemist, they were just tests, practice runs—that’s what he meant by
phase
. He’d been keeping them in the hopper, waiting for somebody like me to come along; that’s why they appeared when they did. I once even
asked him, why not disillusion his nemesis? And Packard said if we knew him, we wouldn’t dream of it.”

“He is right in that. There is too much danger.”

“That is so Packard. How could he?”

“Packard would do anything to be free.”

“It would work, though. A disillusioned Henji would free his prisoners. Maybe the crime wave would end.”

“But Justine, you cannot be expected to destabilize Henji now that you know. I think when you did not know, you had far better chance. You cannot continue.” Shelby seizes my arm. “I will let you out of your word. We will go now to Packard. We will tell him we know Henji is Otto, that it is too much. The stakes in this, they are too high.”

It’s like the whole world’s spinning upside down. “It would work. It’s not a bad plan.”

She tightens her grip on my arm. “You cannot. …”

It’s here that I come back to my motto: “Promoting freedom and transformation.” I take a deep breath. “I can. I will.”

“No, Justine.”

“Henji deserves to be disillusioned. Packard deserves to be free.” I remove her hands from my arm. I feel new. Shaky, but new. “I promote freedom and transformation.”

Shelby furrows her brow. “You what?”

“Never mind,” I say.

“You are not scared?”

“I’m terrified. And Henji has this ability to make himself so likeable—he lulls you into this sense of enchantment. But he’s vulnerable to me. I’m going to destabilize the hell out of him. Maybe this is the way through, the way we all get free. Shelby, promise me one thing—if I disappear, no matter how sure you are that I’m dead—”

“I will find you. I will not let you die alone.”

“Even if you think you saw me die.”

“I will find you.”

“I have to get back. He’s going to wonder.” We kiss cheeks good-bye.

I rejoin Otto.

“Sorry to leave you so long,” I say. I’m looking at the beret. The beret is the key. The beret has to come off.

“You were being a friend. That poor girl.”

“She’s a very tragic person.” I tell him about her rough Volovian childhood.

“I find her very impressive,” Otto says. “In matters of the heart, people are rarely inclined to go with the evidence.”

I nod, wondering if he’s toying with me. He seems nervous, and I’m hoping this keeps him from noticing how nervous I am. I pop a pineapple chunk into my mouth.

He folds a foil wrapper from a chocolate into a tiny little triangle; then he unfolds it and folds it again. “I don’t want this night to end,” he says suddenly. “I want to bring you to my home.”

My stomach tightens. I knew this was coming, but now that it’s here, I don’t know if I can handle it. I don’t know if I can handle him.

“Please, I’m not expecting anything,” he continues. “I want to show you my night garden, and we could just look at the stars. You could leave anytime. My car and driver would be at your disposal.” He reaches across the table and covers the back of my hand with his. “You said you don’t want any pressure, that you just went through a difficult breakup, and I respect that. And maybe I’ve been too forward tonight—you can tell me so—but—”

“A night garden?”

He smiles.

          Thirty-one

C
HAUFFEUR
J
IMMY DROPS US OFF
in front of a majestic stone building on the lakeshore, at the edge of the most fabulous area of downtown, not far from the opera house. Otto leads me into a lobby that looks like a fancy hotel atrium, past a guard in a bright red uniform, and into a shiny silver cylindrical elevator. The doors squeak shut. Otto puts a key in the panel and up we go. The next thing I know, we’re walking out into the living room of Otto’s ornate top-floor penthouse. Bright, blocky, comfortable-looking furniture and rugs provide splashes of color, but the amazing thing is the woodwork. Nearly every wooden surface—walls, pillars, doors—is carved with elaborate patterns and scenes of leaves, creatures, even faces. The woodwork is so intricate, I can’t believe it was wrought by human hands. And then it occurs to me that it wasn’t. It was Otto doing his structural interface.

As soon as he leaves to get us sparkling waters, I examine the carving next to the bookshelves, run my fingers over a nature scene with deer and rabbits. Did Otto tell the wood to do this? Did these beautiful designs come from his mind? Then I’m drawn to his books. Lots of adventure and detective novels, and books with titles in an alphabet I don’t recognize.

And then he’s strolling across the colorful rug toward
me, jacket off, tie loosened, a magnificent beast in his magical habitat. He hands me one of the crystal glasses. Bubbly water with lemon slices.

“You like to read?” he asks.

“I love to.”

He regards his books in somber silence. “Sometimes I wish I could spend the entire day with my nose in a book. Just let the world drop away.” He sounds so sad, I don’t know what to say. Does he regret the evil path he’s chosen?

I follow him out a sliding door onto an expansive rooftop terrace that’s surrounded by big rectangular stone planters bursting with tangles of exotic plants, leaves big as bicycle wheels. A table and chairs are arranged under a canopy, and there is also a sauna hut and, beyond that, a sunken soaking pool. And all around, incredible views—the dark expanse of Lake Michigan on one side, downtown on the other. You can even see the tangle from here, like a sculpture of circling lights.

I draw near a planter to smell a cluster of purple blooms. “They’re lovely, Otto. These are all night flowers?”

“More or less.” Otto comes over and draws my attention to a pair of red bell-shaped flowers. “These are crepuscular more than nocturnal,” he says. “Dusk and dawn flowers. And this—” He indicates a large gray bloom, like a cosmic tulip. I lean in to smell it, but he pulls me back. “No. It might think you’re a mosquito. It eats mosquitoes and moths.”

“A carnivorous flower?”

“If you consider bugs to be meat, then yes.” He moves his hand along my shoulder. He’s discovered the fuzzy kitten softness of my sweater.

“If I was a flower,” I say, “I would think of bugs as meat.”

He looks at me strangely, and I get this awful feeling he suspects something. I have to move fast. I have to destabilize him thoroughly. I have to get that beret off.

He turns back to his flowers but he keeps his hand on my shoulder. It feels nice. “Gardening is a great solace. I have to confess, doing that elephant project with your uncle has been so deeply distressing to me, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come out here at the end of the day and care for these living things.”

I give in to the urge to tilt my head so that my cheek touches the back of his hand. It’s easy to fake an attraction to him. Mainly because there’s no faking involved.

“What happens to these plants in winter?”

“The roof is retractable.” He gestures toward where it comes out, then brings his hand down on my hair, touching it, smoothing it.

I close my eyes. Whereas my attraction to Packard is fiery excitement—unpredictable and even chaotic—my attraction to Otto is cool and lush, full of order and depth. And so luxurious. I drink in the cool feel of him.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispers, and I hear a soft clink. He’s set his glass on a ledge. He takes my glass from my hand, and when I look up and meet his earnest brown eyes, it’s like a shot down through me.

He smooths my hair some more, arranging it to splay around my shoulders, and then he kisses me, feathery light, lips soft and cool and lemony, and I explore the contours of his shoulders. He takes this as license to kiss me even more fervently, hand on my soft sweater, and then he kisses my cheekbone, my eyelid, even a handful of my hair, like it’s this precious substance. “Oh, Justine.” He draws back with an almost drugged look in his big brown eyes and pushes a long dark strand of his own hair away from his cheekbone. “I know you said you didn’t want to start something—”

I touch his sandpapery jaw. “Let me officially retract
that. But that doesn’t mean, you know—” He nods. “It does mean, though …” I stop here. I have no idea what I mean.

He kisses me again; he feels good—too good. It’s the way our lips fit, the press of my chest against his, the intoxicating scent of his neck. We pull closer, and I feel him with the tenderest part of my stomach. We move together warmly and smoothly, as if our bodies already know one another.

I’m trembling, I realize—not with fright, but with desire. I need to zing him before my will disintegrates. I need to zing him hard, or glory hour will be a major problem.

I pull myself together enough to ask, “Is that a soaking pool over there?” My thought here is that people don’t swim with their hats on. I need that hat off.

“It is,” he whispers.

“Got a suit for me?”

“Come on.” He leads me by the hand to the sauna, which includes a cedar-smelling dressing room with a number of men’s and women’s suits hanging on pegs.

As soon as I’m alone in there I work on reminding myself that Otto is a killer who robbed Packard of almost a decade of his life. I cannot fail here.

I select an orange bikini whose parts are connected by gold rings. Not the raciest thing there—that would be the thong bikini—but certainly not the dowdiest. As soon as I have it on, I close my eyes and call up the fear. My pulse speeds as it builds. I’m light, jittery, dangerously keyed-up.

The still-warm stone surface feels good on my bare feet as I stroll out, looking all around. And then I spot the Engineer, waiting in the pool.

With his hat on.

I stop. I needed that hat off! Okay, I tell myself, it’s okay. This only shows how important the hat is to his
well-being. Once it’s off, he’ll be more vulnerable than I ever imagined. It’ll take more than a dip in the soaking pool to get it off, that’s all. Possibly a lot more.

Blood
whooshes
in my ears as I continue toward him. Otto watches me approach, full of sensual gravity. And then he hoists himself up to sit on the side. I catch my breath, gazing at his olive skin, shining wet in the moonlight. Drips travel down his chest and stomach to dark swim trunks. The full deliciousness of him overwhelms me, and the notion that I can and will touch that wet, moonlit skin makes my stomach go springy.

Packard’s voice rings in my head:
Just walk away
. I proceed.