Black Swan (17 page)

    He used the British pronunciation of the word 'privacy'— a pretension so effortlessly delivered that it felt entirely sincere.

    "So you, too?" I asked. "Year-'rounder?"

    "Since retirement. Wharton, professor of economics. This was my parents' home. I don't go as far back as Desi, so as you can see, my privacy is of less concern."

    I got the feeling the professor was actually a little lonely, comfortable as he seemed standing there in the doorway being interrogated by a complete stranger. He had wavy, dark-grey hair that spread from a hairline starting about mid-scalp, and a weather-beaten face. It wasn't hard to see him bending to the pull of a long-handled tiller, or standing in front of a classroom full of über-capitalists.

    "Sam Acquillo," I said, sticking out my hand.

    "John Featherstone," he said, accepting the hand-shake. "If I see the young chap again, I'll let you know. You're a friend of the Feys?"

    "I'd like to think so."

    After leaving Featherstone, I drove down the road to the next house and knocked on the door. No answer. The same was true of the next three houses. At the fourth house, a young mother said through a crack in the door and over screeching children that she hadn't seen anyone go by her house that morning.

    I realized I hadn't thought to bring along a photograph of Axel Fey. Some cop I'd make. I thought about going back to the Swan to get one, but decided to press on. Despite my reverence for disciplined methodology, backtracking was something I was never any good at.

    The next two hours of door-to-door activity yielded nothing. Most of the houses were empty, and the people in the others were no help. As I reached various intersections, I chose a route that took me in the direction of Gwyneth

Jones' place. When I got there she was in the yard with her bulldog, looking up at the sky.

    "What's your prediction?" I asked.

    "Clear for a day or two, then there's another wingdinger headed this way."

    "Do you see the signs?"

    "No, I hear the marine forecast from those dunderheads at NOAA. But I think this time they're right."

    "How come?" I asked.

    "I see the signs."

    I asked her if she'd seen Axel Fey, describing him as best I could. She regretted telling me no.

    "Tell me more about him," she said. So I did, in detail, not sparing his family's privacy. She listened carefully, then shook her head.

    "I'm thinking runaway, and I'm thinking there're a few dozen houses within easy walking distance that're empty and at least somewhat stocked with things you can eat."

    "That's what I'm thinking," I said. "Axel's no survivalist, so forget the woods. He'd be one to find a comfortable location and hole up. Without a cop on the island, we can hardly search house-to-house."

    "What do you mean, no cop?"

    I told her about Trooper Poole and my efforts to secure a replacement. She looked very unhappy.

    "This doesn't happen here," she said. "No matter how ornery or mental we can get over the winter, the state cop is untouchable. I like that woman. Reminds me of my mother. No nonsense. What happened to your pretty girlfriend?"

    "She had to go. Took the boat over to New London and caught the big ferry home."

    She seemed to ponder that for a moment.

    "Lovely hands for a rough-water sailor," she said.

    "It's all in the gloves."

    I asked her to keep her eyes out for Axel and to tell her friends and neighbors to do the same. I was about to continue on when Hammon's Town Car pulled up behind me. He and 't Hooft both got out.

    "Fey just told us about Axel," said Hammon. "Any luck?"

    He looked genuinely concerned, though I didn't know him well enough to judge how genuine.

    "Not so far. All I know is he headed east after leaving the Swan at about six this morning."

    "Helluva thing. Kooky kid," said Hammon, more exasperated than angry. "We need to call the cops."

    "Cop," I said. "Can't do that now. She's indisposed."

    "Fine time for that," said Hammon. "So what do we do now?"

    "Drive around and look," I said. "I'll go east, you go west. The odds are just as good that he went that way after hitting the first intersection. I'm banging on doors and looking for witnesses, but that's a personal decision. You do what you want."

    Hammon nodded and looked around Gwyneth's front yard, trying to make sense of the buoyant eccentricity.

    "Interesting," he said.

    "Not to the enlightened," she said.

    "Of course," said Hammon, as he and 't Hooft climbed back into the big, black Ford and swooped off down the narrow, light-dappled street.

    "Hoodlums?" she asked.

    "Entrepreneurs," I said. "Close enough."

I
drove around, knocked on doors, refined my presentation till I was bored with it, and got nowhere. When I started hearing from people that two other strangers in a Town Car had already asked the same questions, I gained some confidence that Hammon meant what he portrayed—the legitimate concern of a family friend.

    I soldiered on until dusk, after which it seemed imprudent to further test the xenophobia of the island's residents. As I drove back to the Swan, I was cheered by the sight of lighted windows, however sparsely distributed. The Swan itself was lit up from stem to stern, as if celebrating the return to normalcy. I parked the Mercedes out front next to Hammon's Lincoln. The hood was hot to the touch, so he'd only beaten me home by a few minutes.

    Inside the hotel there was no one to be found until I checked the rear patio, where everyone had assembled. The evening was cool, but after the stormy mess of the last few days, I could understand the impulse to get outside. Strings of white Christmas lights hung above the tables helped the atmosphere, though the main work was done by the floods up under the eaves. A rolling tray had been filled with cold

snacks and another held beverages, among which I was delighted to count a bottle of Absolut.

    Expectant faces turned toward me as I walked between the tables, but I quickly shook my head.

    "No dice," I said. "How 'bout you guys?" I asked Hammon.

    "Nothing," he said. "A few people in town reported seeing a teenager or two, but they were likely locals. Tomorrow we need to pass out copies of his photograph."

    Two great minds, same thought.

    "Do you think he's still on the island?" asked Del Rey. "I mean, he could've grabbed a boat and gone ashore."

    "That's certainly true," said Hammon. "As I could have grabbed a rocket and flown to the moon."

    "Axel can't swim," said Fey. "He's afraid of the water.

    "Oh, yeah," said Del Rey. "I forgot that."

    I helped myself to the vodka and sat down next to Hammon. His slight, spidery frame looked ill at ease in repose, as if anything less than soaring flight was inherently unnatural. His long fingers rotated his cocktail glass in quarter turns. He looked over at me with a look both curious and bored.

    "Fey tells us you're an N-Spock aficionado," he said.

    "That's not exactly it," I said. "I used to run an R&D shop that used the application. Back when you were only at 2.5. We liked it."

    "That's nice to hear," he said, though not quite bowled over by the niceness of it all. "How many users in your operation?"

    "About a thousand. More if you count Lucerne and Dubai. I had a woman who kept track of it all. The point for me was what the computers did, not necessarily how they did it."

    "That big," he said. "What was the company?"

    "Con Globe. The late and great. I would have thought the Feys had told you."

    "Oh," he said, his cool poise slightly undone. "They were one of our largest customers. I sold it in myself."

    "I wouldn't know," I said, taking a casual sip of my drink. "I left that sort of thing to procurement."

    His fingers stopped spinning the drink and started tapping on the table.

    "The successor company has yet to sign up for 5.0," he said. "Know anyone there?"

    "Not anymore, but I know a few guys at East End Building Supply. I'll put in a good word."

    "Amusing."

    He went back to looking around the hotel grounds.

    "Any guesses on Axel?" I asked. "You knew the kid when he was growing up."

    "Not really. Del Rey and Sanderfreud took an interest, but I'd rather play golf. If I wanted a pet I'd get a goldfish."

    Del Rey's face tightened up and she got out of her chair and left.

    Charmed as I was by him, when I saw Anika enter the patio I thought I should join her. I excused myself and caught her at the drink trolley. I asked how she was doing.

    "I'm too shook-up to know," she said.

    "Any theories? About Axel?"

    "I'm too shook up for that, too. You might think all the scary excitement would have driven him away, but that's not Axel. The more anxiety he feels, the closer to home he wants to be. I was surprised he hadn't just locked himself up in his room, though with the power out, there wasn't much he could do in there."

    "No computer."

    "Sometimes I wonder if computers made him the way he is. It's all he's known for his whole life. The digital environment is his natural habitat, the only place he's utterly at home."

    A good case could be made for that, once I thought about it. A motherless child with a distant computer genius for a father, socially isolated, slightly agoraphobic, touched by savantism—who could know where cause and effect started and stopped.

    "I still don't own a PC," I said. "Though I've tried out a few. I can see the appeal. And the seduction for information junkies."

    "It's more than that," she said. "When you write the code, you don't just process information, you control it, and by extension, the people who use it. You rule over the thinking and behavior of anyone ensnared in your application. You own their minds."

    She said this so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that I almost missed it. She looked up at me, as if suddenly aware that I hadn't.

    "That sounded horrid. Sorry. I'm only trying to explain what it's like to be Axel. Lost in the delusions of computerland."

    The lights that lit the patio from above spread enough to render the docks beyond in a colorless outline of piers and walkways. I could see all the way to where the
Carpe
Mañana
had been docked. The empty space gave me a fearful little jolt. Once again, I excused myself, and walked back out to the street where I could radio Amanda without being overheard.

    This strategy wasn't fully realized, since Del Rey was out on the lawn smoking a cigarette. Her left arm held her midriff and supported her right, and one hip was slightly cocked, locking her in place.

    "Sorry about Derrick," she said when she saw me approach. "He can be a creep sometimes."

    "Sometimes?"

    "I can't think like that if I have to live with him," she said.

"You don't have to. The world's a big place."

    "I used to believe that. Now the world's shrunk down to peanut-sized. No big career. No youth. No kids, no family."

    She took a deep pull off the cigarette.

    "You made it sound like the Feys were family. It must have been tough when they moved away," I said.

    She brushed her hair with the back of her arm, the cigarette in her hand trailing smoke like a festive ribbon. I breathed it in through my nose.

    "The kids, yeah. Christian's no big treat. Got the sense of humor of a tree stump. And zero parenting skills, which worked out for me, since I got to have so much quality time with Anika and Axel. Like a maiden aunt, though that's okay. Better than nothing."

    "Sounds like you weren't the only one who chipped in."

    "Myron was always eager to look after them, even though he had a daughter of his own. Bought things for them, took them to the park, out to eat, that kind of thing. Grace didn't like it so much, so a lot of the looking-after happened at the office. Or on his boat. He kept a little day sailer on a lake nearby. Anika loved it, but Axel stayed with me on those days. Afraid of the water. Myron was such a good man. I can't understand why he'd want to kill himself."

    "You think that, too?" I asked. "I don't get it."

    She leaned in toward me so I'd hear her lowered voice.

    "Things aren't so peachy keen at Subversive these days. It weighed on him really bad. All he'd done was green light 5.0, but when things started going haywire, he took it all so personal. He kept it all bottled up inside and put on a good front. But I knew, because he talked to me."

    "Having the kids move away must have been hard on him, too."

    She shook her head, impatiently, then dropped the exhausted cigarette on the ground and toed it to extinction.

    "Right about the time Anika hit puberty she totally rejected poor Myron, and for some reason, got attached to me. You know how teenaged girls get. She went from talking to Myron every day to ignoring him completely. I don't think she even saw him again until he showed up here. Axel had to go along, too. I asked him, 'What's up with Anika and Myron?' But he didn't know."