Black Swan (22 page)

    Amanda came up the companionway.

    "I'd wag my tail, too, if I could," she said.

    "Don't sell yourself short."

    She fell into me and wrapped her long wiry arms around my neck.

    "Goddamn you, Sam Acquillo," she said.

    "Nice to see you, too."

    We dispensed with further discussion for the rest of the night, heading directly to the quarter berth, deferring all that unresolved dross to yet another day.

"

W
e have a decision to make," I said, my first words of the morning.

    Those words had been churning around my mind for at least two hours, having woken up with a head full of conflicting impulses, fears, internal arguments, cautions, and a few spectral images caused by slipping unawares into real sleep.

    "I should be flattered when you say 'we'—but it always annoys me," said Amanda.

    "It does?"

    "Because you don't really mean 'we'—you mean 'I.' I have no say in the decisions you make. You might even believe that you take my interests into consideration, but you never do. We're still together because I usually defer to whatever you want to do, in order to keep conflict out of the relationship, but that doesn't mean I always endorse what is about to happen."

    "Oh."

    With that as a starting point, it didn't seem like we were entering into a seamless decision-making process. I lay there in silence wondering if there were a half-dozen or a

few hundred occasions upon which Amanda had seemed to agree with a proposed course of action when in fact she would have approached it in a completely different way. I knew, at the same time, that one of my abiding failings as a human being was to be riddled with self-doubt, yet never appear as if I was. This led to the mistaken belief on the part of people close to me that I was driven by pure, unalterable conviction, when the opposite was usually the case.

    "Okay," I said, braced. "Then you decide. I'll just give you the alternatives, and you say yea or nay."

    "Does it matter if I know what you want to do anyway?"

    "You won't. I'll present the options in a purely unbiased fashion that will be impossible for you to divine beforehand."

    "Okay," she said, squirming more deeply into the tangled mess of sheets and unzipped sleeping bags that constituted the quarter berth's bed linens. "I'll play."

    I told her about the arrival of Ashton Kinuei and my spontaneous belief in his ability to master all the complicated elements of the case, physically and intellectually. With none of the biases that I had likely acquired as a result of my natural sympathies toward the Feys.

    "It's human nature to pick a side," I said. "No matter the doubts that might arise along the way."

    "I picked you. So there's your proof."

    "So now there's really no reason for us to stick around. It's now rightly out of our hands."

    "Okay, so what's the counter argument?" she asked.

    "I don't want to go yet."

    "So that's it? No reason?"

    "I'm worried about the Feys. I'm on their side."

    She laughed.

    "So your unbiased alternatives are the obvious, prudent and reasonable option versus what you actually want to

do, for no good reason whatsoever. And I'm supposed to arbitrate that?"

"Yeah. Go ahead. Your call. We'll do what you want to do."

    "You told me you've only had two intimate relationships in your life. With your divorced wife and me. And you're in your late fifties. Now I know why."

    I'd heard similar opinions expressed by my daughter on those few failed occasions when I tried to talk her out of her idiot boyfriends.

    "What's that got to do with this?"

    "I rest my case," she said.

    "So what're we going to do?" I asked.

    "I'm going to stay here as long as I can stand it. Then we're either going to sail this thing together to Southampton, or I'm going to motor over to New London with Eddie like we told everyone I've already done and take the ferry home."

    She squeezed me hard, then pulled herself out of the quarter berth and went to take a shower. I lay there for a while looking up through the forward hatch, then yelled out to her, "See, now we get to do what you want to do."

    Maybe sustaining successful relationships wasn't as hard as I thought it was.

T
he next trick was to get the dinghy back unnoticed, a step in the process I hadn't considered until that morning. Had I done so, the obvious thing would have been to leave the boat while it was still dark and come in the last hundred feet or so the way I left, by oar. It was now about 7:30, and the sun was well up, so that option was off the table.

    Before leaving, I swam to shore with Eddie and hung out while he did all the stuff he liked to do, including a close inspection of the man-made and naturally occurring crud

on the beach. Then I went back and took a shower off the transom, changed into fresh clothes, re-packed my backpack with additional essentials, and after a review of communications protocols with Amanda, took to the water.

    I went straight across from the lagoon, staying well north of the breakwater that protected the yacht club, the Black Swan and the marinas further down the channel. I hoped to find a place on shore to hide the dinghy that didn't mean cutting through private property to reach the coast road. What I found was a good hiding place in a wooded area clearly belonging to someone's summer home, but since the odds of them being there in October were pretty low, that was good enough.

    I clawed my way through the underbrush up to the road, then walked to the Swan where Anika was out in the yard, as usual fussing with the landscape.

    "Maybe if you just left everything alone it would do better," I said, crouching down next to where she was snipping twigs off an exhausted perennial.

    "That's the kind of thinking I associate with my father," she said, without looking up. "Maybe if your generation thought differently the world would be a more beautiful place."

    "So, no word from Axel."

    "No word. Where'd you sleep last night?"

    "You're not the only one who gets to have secrets."

    "I don't have any secrets," she said.

    "That's all you have."

    She stopped pruning for a moment, then went back at it.

    "I took a calculated risk with you," she said. "I'm still deciding if it was worth it."

    "That depends on what you were trying to achieve. What do you do with that computer in your room?"

    "Write emails to my friends, go on Facebook, Google stuff I want to know about. Same as anyone else."

"Same as Axel?"

    "All he does is virtual warfare with a bunch of pathetic digital shut-ins. What else would he do?"

    "Access the development servers at Subversive Technologies?"

    She stopped pruning again, sighed, then dropped from an awkward squat onto her butt.

    "There's an interesting accusation," she said.

    "No accusation, just supposition."

    I joined her on the ground.

    "You don't know much about computer security," she said.

    "I don't know much about bank vaults, but I can break into any one I want if I have the combination."

    She used her pruning shears to poke at the ground.

    "Servers aren't bank vaults. You might leave fingerprints in a vault. In the development servers at Subversive, you leave your name, address, the time you came to visit, how long you stayed and what you did while you were there."

    "Not if you know how to be invisible."

    She smiled indulgently.

    "Things in computerland have progressed a little since the late nineties. Kids no longer get to hack into the grownups' playground."

    "Unless the kids helped build the swing sets."

    She liked that, but tried not to let it show.

    "Even if he could hack Subversive, why would he?" she asked.

    "If he could, why wouldn't he?"

    "I like you better as a boat bum."

    "I'm trying to find your brother. Are you?"

    Before I was booted out of the corporate world, I'd occasionally be afflicted by management's desire to assess my assets and liabilities. They often did this to people in the middle ranks, the part of the company that did the most work in return for the least recognition, so I didn't take it

personally. One of these projects involved a psychological profiling that was supposed to help us better form and manage interpersonal relationships. You weren't supposed to be able to flunk this test, since the idea was to place you on an unbiased, non-judgmental personality spectrum. I think I managed to flunk it anyway, because they made me take the same test two or three more times, after which a woman from human resources asked to see me in her office.

    "I just wanted to put a face to the data," she said. "We've never seen such unusual scoring. My boss thinks you're doing it on purpose."

    "How would I do that?"

    "Theoretically, you couldn't, unless you were intimate with the test methodology," she said.

    She had that pale, exhausted and slightly shiny complexion that formed on people who worked in the company's over-worked, insecure professional sectors—like personnel and marketing—where it was generally understood that you were always a CFO's passing whim away from getting canned, no matter what the firm's financial prospects. Her mannish white blouse was too tight to button completely over her ample chest, and her blue skirt struggled to contain her lower half. I wanted to suggest a little more time in the gym, but even I knew that wasn't the kind of thing you said to women in human resources.

    "Your people like working for you and your supervisor calls you his best trouble-shooter. Everyone else is afraid of you, or just thinks you're an asshole. After looking at the results of your profile, I can see why."

    "I can't help that. If I do something I'm not supposed to do, you can call me back in here. Until then, you can tell the guy who came up with all this psycho mumbo-jumbo to cram it in a place I'm not allowed to specify."

    "The gal's psycho mumbo-jumbo. It's my test."

    "So let's make a deal. You stop pestering me and I'll stop screwing up your bell curve."

    If the HR lady was one of those patsies who said they were afraid of me, she didn't act like it. She smirked instead, a soft glow welling up from those weary eyes.

    "You don't always have to say what's on your mind," she said.

D
ecades later, Anika said to me, "You don't always have to say what's on your mind."

    "Yes I do. All I have is what's on my mind. If you don't want to hear it, don't talk to me," repeating what I'd told the HR lady.

    "You're a lot better at stuff like finding my brother than I am." she said. "I know because I've studied you."

    "Did he take a laptop with him?"

    She took a few beats to answer.

    "Yes."

    "Has he emailed you?"

    She waited even longer this time.

    "Yes. And no, he didn't tell me where he is. Just that he's safe."