Cold Snap (7 page)

"Nicely arranged," Ari nodded admiringly once
he and Rebecca were alone. She would have been a suitable candidate
for the SSO.

"I'm not a devious person," she
responded.

"Of course not," said Ari, thinking, Forget
Al-Amn al-Khas...what about the CIA?

"I was misinformed about the divorce," said
Ari as Diane flounced away. He would have scolded her with a frown
had he been given the opportunity.

"You have to be emphatic with children," said
Rebecca apologetically. "They don't understand gray."

Ari was a little bit of a novice on gray,
himself. In the Iraq of his upbringing there was either black or
white. You were either alive or dead. Perhaps that was what made
America great. It was spasmodically gray.

"Diane's father..."

Curious. Not 'my husband'. Ari wondered if
she was unconsciously announcing her availability. Not to him, but
as a test of what her future might hold. Perhaps clothing stores
should add a new section. Petite, Large, Divorcée....

"I'm not clear on this," said Ari. "Of what
advantage is it to tell Diane her father will not be back?"

"I tried the other way first, letting her
think he might come through the door any time. She became so wound
up that every noise she heard was Daddy trying to get back inside.
The day you came knocking at our door, she thought Ethan had
forgotten his key and she was racing to let him in."

"But you stopped her because you thought
there was a madman at the door...?" Ari cast his eyes over the tubs
of ice cream within the glass counter.

"I didn't know who was at the door."

"You didn't want her to open the door to a
stranger...?" Ari persisted.

"All right, I thought it might be Ethan."

"Which only added to your disappointment when
you saw...me."

"My reaction was less than gracious," she
said, deflecting Ari's smile with one of her own. He thought very
few people failed to improve their appearance when they smiled. The
Vice President might look like evil incarnate when he forced a
grin, but the President shined like a little boy.

"It was perfectly understandable." He sought
an explanation that would suit American ears, and came up with the
all-purpose, "I was under a lot of stress. It must have shown."

"No kidding. You took the beating of a
lifetime."

"Oh, it wasn't all that bad." No, just beaten
to within an inch of my life.

"I won't say 'if you say so', because I know
it isn't so. That was stress par excellence. But we weren't talking
about your behavior."

"Ah, but you were under much stress,
too."

Rebecca was in her late twenties, fresh and
attractive. She must have made a favorable impression on Bristol
when she appeared at office parties with her husband. There was a
juvenile element to the way men displayed their wives, like kids
showing off their toys. Ari had behaved similarly at one time,
until it became apparent how dangerous it was to show off one's
beautiful spouse in the Republican Palace...especially when a
sexual predator who wielded immense power was in the vicinity.
Someone like Uday Hussein, who on several occasions had approached
Rana, flashing his bucktooth grin and making his intentions clear.
But Uday no longer presented a problem. Ari had seen to that.

"At least I wasn't beaten," Rebecca
sighed.

"When one has lost contact with one's husband
or wife, it comes to the same thing," Ari said from experience.

"That finally brings us to the point of being
here," Rebecca nodded, staring at her empty cup. She glanced up.
"Aren't you going to have anything? I hate eating in front of you
like this."

"In the cafés of Paris, one can sit all day
with no more than a couple of espressos…"

"Paris?" She lifted a hand to point at the
liquor store next door and the strip mall across the street. "We
don't offer much competition. None, actually. Here, you have to
spend money or vamoose."

"'Vamoose?'" Ari inquired, liking the sound
of the word.

"Skedaddle."

Context was everything and Ari nodded, adding
these two new words for a hasty departure to his vocabulary. He was
preparing to rise for a better look at the ice cream tubs when
Diane sidled up, giving Ari a hard glance before telling her
mother, "My cone was real small."

"You think so?" Rebecca answered
skeptically.

Diane had treated Ari with brusque
assertiveness when she came to his house in search of Sphinx. With
her mother, however, she was more circumspect. Her reasoning was
softer, as though she was luring a mouse out of its hole, a tricky
procedure that failed more often than not. But the seeming courtesy
did not change Ari's mind about her, which was that she was a
wicked handful.

Seeing the answer to her dilemma, Rebecca
revoked her doctrine of moderation. She got up and paid for another
cone for her daughter, thereby remaining a paying customer. Diane
retreated with greedy pleasure to join her friend.

"We'd better rush things along or I'll have
to get her more. She'll gobble everything in sight until she
barfs."

"'Those who cannot control themselves must be
controlled by others'," said Ari, quoting 2,000 years' worth of
conservative commentators.

"Her father controlled her better than I ever
could." Rebecca took a deep breath. "I wanted to ask you about your
acquaintances on the police force. Could you ask them to
discretely..."

Ari, who had no intention of discrediting
himself by involving Officers Mangioni and Jackson in a search for
a runaway husband, nodded sagely. "I will have to give them some
details, you see. First of all, do you have a picture of him with
you?"

"I brought the most recent one." Removing a
small photograph from her purse, she looked briefly towards the
rear of the parlor and saw Diane had her back to them. She handed
the 4x6 to Ari.

"Does he always leer like this?"

"Hmmmm?" She leaned forward for a closer
inspection. "Oh. I never thought of it as leering. But now that you
mention it...it doesn't make him look very trustworthy, does
it?"

"Perhaps he was only pleased to have you with
him," Ari said, politely putting a good face on a face that
reminded him of...of...he looked at the far wall. Why,
Diane....

"Bristol took that picture last year, not
long before he fired Ethan. Maybe he saw the same thing you do."
She frowned, as though in pursuit of a judgment she was reluctant
to catch. "It was the annual Sayed picnic. We were three sheets in
the wind."

Ari wondered how the wind could have affected
the portrait. Besides, the wind must have died down the moment the
shutter button was pressed. Rebecca's long brown hair was lying
undisturbed on her shoulders, while Ethan was perfectly unmussed.
Ari's mental eye narrowed in suspicion. If Rebecca was going to lie
to him, why would it be over something so frivolous?

"Uh...I see you're a little confused. Diane
told me your English was a little rough. 'Three sheets in the wind'
means being drunk."

"I was just remarking that," said Ari with a
little cough and scrutinizing the picture again. And indeed, the
couple seemed a little bleary-eyed. He wanted to know where the
phrase came from. It was probably untranslatable. But there was no
time for etymology.

"What do you know about your husband's work
at Sayed?"

"What would that have to do with him running
off with another woman?" Her unplanned bluntness caused Rebecca to
blush. "Yes, it's that brutally simple. If you're fishing for a
character sketch, I think he proved what he was made of by running
off with a Chinese girl."

"I'm coming into this frigid," said Ari. "I
would like to take things in order."

"I think you mean you're coming into this
'cold'," Rebecca grinned. There was nothing of a leer in it. In
fact, it was rather forgiving. "All right, but I can't tell you
much. Diane already knows more about computers than I ever
will."

"Do you know anything about why he was fired?
Bristol was very vague."

"I know Ethan's version," Rebecca shrugged.
"I believed it at the time and 'poor-babied' him. He said that
Bruce—Ethan's direct supervisor—wanted to cancel his access to all
the corporate accounts they were working on. In other words, he
didn't trust him. He said he thought Ethan was using privileged
contact information to send bogus emails. Sayed was considered a
trusted source by all those customers, so if they opened an email
with an attachment...and the attachment had a virus..."

"Is this the 'phishing' Bristol was talking
about?"

"I guess."

"What do you think of Bristol Turnbridge and
Bruce Turner?"

"Other than that they share the same
initials?"

"That is a curiosity," Ari nodded.

"Bristol started a business from scratch,
which means he's probably an asshole. And Bruce does what Bristol
tells him, which makes him a mini-asshole."

"That seems harsh," Ari observed. "I have
been informed that America is based on the entrepreneurial
spirit."

"You've been watching Nightly Business
Report."

"I don't own a TV, if you're speaking of a
television broadcast."

"Diane told me your house was pretty empty,
but I didn't know it was that empty." She gave him a mildly
distrustful look, as though some of her doubts about him were on
the verge of being confirmed. "But maybe that's how we should all
live. The 'entrepreneurial spirit'? Sometimes I wonder if we'd be
better off living in caves."

"Caves are boring, Mrs. Wareness. Sicily is
full of caves. That was where many Greek prisoners were kept during
the tragic war with Athens. They all perished, many from
boredom."

"Believe it or not, I know what you're
talking about. I minored in European History."

"Ah," said Ari appreciatively.

"And maybe I'm being too hard on Bristol and
Bruce..."

"But the assholes fired your husband."

"Exactly."

"Do you believe your husband's version of
events…after having reflected upon them?"

"Sometimes your English is rough and
sometimes you're straight out of 10 Downing Street," said Rebecca
in an amused tone. "To tell you the truth, I don't know what to
believe. The Central Virginia Group believed in him enough to hire
him on the spot. And that's their in-house fraud department, which
investigates people they think are scamming the company. I don't
know what kind of resume he gave them, but it must have been
convincing. They must have vetted him. Do you want the name of his
boss and the address? I've written it out."

"Please."

She handed him a slip of paper. He glanced
down and read.

"This Elmore Lawson..."

"His boss, and a more perfect asshole you'll
never meet."

Ari seriously doubted this.

"You're including Bristol in this
assessment?"

"I tried phoning Lawson, but he wouldn't take
my calls. So I went in person and his secretary told me that Lawson
doesn't see anyone. Anyone! I ran past her and tried the office
door, but it was locked. I tried to explain to this bug-eyed
secretary that my husband was an employee, that he had
vanished."

"Ah, 'vanished'."

"Yes. And she threatens to call security on
me!"

"This sounds very unusual," said Ari.

"Well duh! I even tried to set up an
appointment. This twit said Lawson doesn't see anyone, ever! I
asked who his boss is, and she said they were a separate division,
like subcontractors, and that Lawson was his own boss!" She leaned
across the small table. "Well fuck!"

"Indeed," said Ari.

"My guess is that Ethan and this Lawson
dipwad are buddies, and that Lawson is covering his good buddy's
ass."

"How did you reach this conclusion?"

"Ethan slipped up big-time. I checked my
online Verizon account and I spotted a number I didn't recognize. I
called. And some Chinese bitch answered."

The pleasant, sociable Rebecca that Ari had
first met when entering the ice cream parlor had been transformed
into a malevolent virago. Betrayal had a way of making its victims
quite ugly. It was possibly the worst aspect of the crime.

"Would you happen to remember this phone
number?"

"It's on the paper I gave you."

Ari again looked down. Yes, there was a phone
number, just below Elmore Lawson's number. Rebecca had charitably
listed it as: Tramp's number.

"Isn't this what one would consider a broad
assumption?" he said.

"What?"

"That this woman is your husband's
mistress?"

"When I asked her if Ethan was there she gave
a squeal and hung up."

"That's rather telling," Ari admitted.

"Listen, Mr. Ciminon—and let's please keep
this formal. I know I'm asking you a favor, but it wouldn't do me
much good if people start suspecting that I'm behaving the same way
as my husband."

"You mean...indulging in a pastime with an
Oriental."

"Oriental?"

"Um, numerous Italians have Arabic blood,
and—"

"Yes, I see. That's not exactly what I meant.
But I guess, in a way, it is sort of what I meant. But that aside,
I just want you to find out if he's safe."

This surprised Ari. "Safe? I thought you
wanted to find out where he was."

"Would that matter, if he was with another
woman?" She stared down at her empty ice cream cup. "Are you
familiar with the phrase, 'There's something wrong with this
picture'?"

"It has crossed my chalkboard."

"There are creeps, and there are creeps. Just
look at that picture, with Ethan grabbing my tit for the camera, in
front of his boss...as if I was chattel or something."

"Yes," said Ari in polite acknowledgement.
The woman was wounded in a hundred ways.

"You might not get this, but Ethan is a good
creep. He might steal, he might even cheat, but he would never be
mean. Forget the picture, I mean really mean. But he was definitely
the kind of man to dive in over his head. It was a kind
of...creative cleverness? I don't know. And I think he's into
something now, way over his head."