Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (3 page)
Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
“What?” he asked. “I’m throwing it away. It’s all just bureaucratic nonsense.”
“That’s still an official notice. It belongs on
somebody’s
door—just not ours.”
“You’re right, it’s
my
house. Bought and paid for. I don’t even have a mortgage, so they can’t foreclose on it.”
That reminded Wells of something. “But
do
you own it, John?” she asked. “Think back a bit.”
Two years earlier, when money was tight and they needed to post a performance bond on the War Memorial Opera House—one of their first big projects—Praxis had put the house on Balboa Street up as collateral. As Wells remembered it, the appraised value had just about covered the ten percent in real money that the engineering firm needed to raise in order to get the five-million-dollar bond.
“Right, the opera house,” he said. “But we’re fine on that job. Ahead of schedule, in fact.”
“I’ll look into it in the morning,” she said. “Maybe it was the bank that made a mistake. Now that
can
happen.”
“But then … are we even allowed to stay here tonight?”
“No one around to stop us, is there?”
In the morning, it took three calls to the bank for Antigone Wells to discover that the performance bond had been quietly cancelled. With the opera house project more than ninety percent complete their client, the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, had not questioned the cancellation when they received notice of it some weeks earlier. The person who authorized the action had elected to withdraw the value of the bond in cash, in the form of a readily negotiable cashier’s check, and release title to the property held as collateral.
“Who signed the authorization?” Wells asked.
“Praxis Engineering’s vice president of marketing,” the bank official said. “I can’t quite make out the signature.”
“Mariene Kunstler?” she suggested.
“That could be it,” he agreed.
After she got off the phone, Wells went in to see Callie and explained what she had discovered. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is where Kunstler got the authority to do all this.”
“We gave her power of attorney,” Callie said.
“Why, for heaven sakes?” Wells asked.
“Mariene needed to be able to sign for the company—contracts, joint ventures … performance bonds. It simplified the bidding process and let her make deals on the spot.”
“A powerful tool to give someone who’s not even bright enough to know when she’s signing away the chairman’s house,” Wells observed.
“She might not have known about that. The bond was before her time.”
“She could have checked the address. It might have rung a bell.”
“I think the deed showed only city block and lot number.”
“Anyway, now we know where she got that half million.”
“Yeah, pretty clever. Sneaking it out from under our noses.”
“Except she got caught. Let’s call her in here so we can nail it.”
“She’s in Upstate New York this week. Scouting out a water project.” Callie checked her watch. “Lunchtime back there. I’ll try giving her a call.” She paused with her smartphone to her ear, then said, “Hello, Mariene. It’s Callie. Please call me when you get this. Thanks!” It was obviously a message to Kunstler’s voicemail. Callie clicked off.
Antigone Wells had listened carefully and could detect no hint of storm clouds in the message, none of the anger she knew the younger woman must be feeling now. “Keep it light all the way,” she advised. “Just bring her back, give her a reason to meet with you, and we’ll arrange to include those officials from Los Angeles.”
“Easy enough,” Callie agreed. “She’s overdue on justifying her expense reports.”
* * *
Mariene Kunstler looked at the message waiting on her smartphone’s display. She recognized Callie Praxis’s number, of course. She even punched in and listened to the woman’s innocent request for Mariene to call her back. She listened to it twice. No harm in that, because the voicemail service lived on Mariene’s side of the connection and so was untraceable.
She heard nothing suspicious in Callie’s voice or wording. She might even have called her back—except that
would
have been traceable. Come to think of it, the phone itself had been bought for Mariene by Praxis Engineering & Construction, which paid for the account. She knew from her police experience that they could initiate a trace of the phone’s location without even bothering to ring it. Almost by reflex, she switched off the device’s power button, located the nearest waste container, and threw it in.
Mariene was no longer registered at her hotel in Batavia, New York. She had flown out of Buffalo Niagara International Airport six hours earlier and was now in transit through JFK International. And the ticket she held was not in the name of Mariene Kunstler or anything like it. Instead, it matched a South African passport, credit cards, and pink-banded driver’s license she had cut from the lining of her second suitcase before heaving it—along with her PE&C business and credit cards, original travel documents, and the company-logoed fountain pen she carried—into a random dumpster near to where she made the taxi exchange between La Guardia and Kennedy. She had learned long ago to have nothing in her possession that was either personalized or monogrammed—no jewelry, no note cards or accessories, no underwear—so that any identity she needed would pass the closest inspection. And the photograph inside every passport clearly showed her Black Widow tattoo. She was a professional.
And because she was a pro, Mariene had arranged for ongoing contact, using coded words and fallback numbers, with every person in whom she had the slightest interest. That morning she had routinely called Bernardo Gorgoni, Melissa Willbrot, and the half dozen other people with whom she had conducted illicit dealings in her role as PE&C marketing head. All had checked in fine—code word “sunny day”—except for Willbrot, who hadn’t picked up her messages in two days on either her primary or secondary service.
Was that enough to cause someone like Mariene Kunstler to drop to the floor and roll, shred her current persona, and disappear sideways into the great, wide world?
Probably not for someone
like
her, which was why other people who tried to do what she was doing eventually got caught. But not her.
Now her only problem was figuring out how to get back in touch with Matteo di Rienzi, explain this mess, and not get herself killed over it.
* * *
After one whole day without hearing from Mariene Kunstler and leaving three more messages on her smartphone, Callie Praxis contacted the hotel in Batavia and learned that the woman had checked out some hours before getting her first call. Kunstler’s onward travel plans were not known to the concierge.
Callie then contacted the clients whom Mariene was supposed to be interviewing about the water project. They confirmed that, yes, she had been present for the initial briefing. She never came back for the follow-up session. She had left no contact information. They were mystified.
Two days later, Callie contacted both the Batavia and Buffalo police departments, asked if they had any female bodies turn up in the morgue, and gave them Mariene’s description, including the spider tattoo. Did she want to file a missing person’s report? they asked. Not yet, she told them.
Three days after Mariene Kunstler had gone missing, Callie called the bank that had issued her company credit cards, asking about recent activity. They reported nothing since she checked out of the hotel in Batavia. Callie told them to cancel all the cards and send the final statements to Praxis Engineering & Construction. She made the same call to the service that handled Mariene’s smartphone, which reported no activity either by cellular network or internet connection since Callie’s own calls. The device had disappeared from the network somewhere on the concourse at Kennedy International in New York City. Callie canceled the service and requested the final billing be sent to her company.
Then she called in Antigone and discussed how they should present their findings to the Los Angeles Police Department and District Attorney’s office. Wells suggested that both she and John should make depositions in the case. They could discuss their suspicions there. Their company had already formally withdrawn from the Long Beach Freeway project, so they could act as disinterested parties.
“Do you think we can get Dad’s house back?” she asked Antigone.
The older woman whistled. “You mean, extract the payment from this Willbrot person and buy back into the performance bond, as if nothing has happened?”
“Well … whatever …”
“Callie, the money’s gone—or tied up in court for a couple of years of trial and appeal, which is the same thing as gone. The house has been legally sold and the new buyer wants to occupy. We’ll have to go long just to square things with the opera association. Not to mention keeping you and John out of jail as Kunstler’s knowing accomplices.” Wells shook her head. “Count your blessings at this point.”
Still, the attorney looked troubled.
“What is it?” Callie asked sharply.
“Dealings this complicated don’t tend to happen just once. So I hired a confidential investigator we’ve used in the past for background checks and other business. I asked him to backtrack Mariene’s projects and her personal contacts, her old expense reports, her bank accounts—”
“Bank accounts? How could he get into—”
Wells looked at her levelly. “You don’t want to know. In any case, he’s come up with a number of peripheral contacts, unexplained trips and expenses, and large sums of money transmitted and received. He says he’s ready to put together the outline of a whole secondary business that Kunstler was apparently running—hints of blackmail, extortion, kickbacks—in and around the projects she was getting for us.”
Callie wondered what a search of her own bank records and private contacts would reveal of her dealings with Uncle Matteo. She was thankful she did not have Antigone Wells as an enemy.
“So,” Wells pressed, “do you want my investigator to document any of this?”
“What? Create more evidence Dad and I would have to testify about?”
“Something like that. If you want to have the big picture—”
“Let’s wait until we get through the Willbrot thing.”
“All right. Then I’ll tell him to hold off.”
On the fourth day after Mariene Kunstler disappeared, late in the evening and from her home phone, Callie Praxis contacted Uncle Matteo. As soon as the pleasantries about health and family could be dispensed with, she asked him directly, “Where is she?”
“Whom do you mean?” he asked blandly.
“The Kunstler woman—if that’s even her real name.”
“I don’t know. Where did
you
see her last? Isn’t she working for you?”
“Apparently not. She stole half a million dollars from us, bribed a public official, and has since disappeared. It will take six months for us to clean up the damage she’s caused.”
He sighed. “It is getting hard to find good help these days.”
Callie let herself get angry. “She was a cop, for God’s sake!”
“She was many things, Contessa. ‘Cop’ was the least of them.”
“She was working for you, too, Matteo.”
“But only in an advisory capacity.”
“And if that came out in court …”
“It would hurt you more than me.”
Callie realized that was the truth. She had no leverage against the man.
“Do you want me to send you another executive? One a bit more discreet?”
“Oh, no, Uncle. Please, no!”
“And if I should insist?”
Almost
no leverage. She thought of her nephew Brandon. “Then he or she might disappear after the first job interview,” she said quietly.
“I understand. Then you shall never see him—or her.” He hung up without the usual courtesy of
ciao, buona notte,
or
a domani.
That left Callie to ponder his last statement, which could be taken either of two ways.
3. Aches and Pains
The apartment that Callie Praxis and her daughter had moved into came with a food-grade three-dee printer in the kitchen. Callie had never tried it, or not for anything more complicated than cornflakes on the one morning they ran out. First, because she was never much of a cook and figured her skills wouldn’t improve by programming a machine. Second, because she didn’t have all the necessary cartridges. The ones labeled malt fiber, corn syrup, and fructose had already been loaded, and she guessed the previous tenant liked cornflakes, too.
Of course, she had used hardware printers—those fed by cartridges of polymers, metalized epoxies, colored dyes, and lacquer finishes—plenty of times before, both at work and at home. They were wonderful for making on the fly objects that tended to get lost at the bottom of drawers—a metric socket wrench when you needed it, pieces of the Lego set that had gone missing, and now and then a hair clip. The cartridges were always at hand, and the programmed patterns were easily available online.
By now Callie had decided that she and her daughter were eating way too much takeout. Since she had the machine, she might as well try it. But she didn’t want to jeopardize a complete meal by screwing up with something complicated and involuted, like a casserole or a steak. She felt adventurous enough to leave dessert to the machine, because it was the part of a meal she could field with ice cream from the freezer if something went disastrously wrong.
Callie decided on a lemon meringue pie, because it was made in simple layers and shouldn’t be too taxing. Pie was also really hard to make from scratch, with all those separate operations for the crust, filling, and topping. So she downloaded the program, listed out the necessary cartridges—gluten paste, starch, unsaturated lipids, gelatin, citrus oil, albumen, and more fructose—and brought them home with the rest of the meal to be cooked in the old-fashioned way. While she was boiling the pasta and heating packets of Bolognese sauce for their dinner, she loaded the cartridges and punched in the program.
When it came time for dessert, she brought out the finished pie. Rafaella cooed appreciatively. And, in fact, it looked good: the crust around the edges was properly flaky, and the puffs of meringue were brown on top shading to white lower down. It cut cleanly, and bits of crust even fell off the fork. But it was not a complete success. The crust and the lemon filling tasted okay, not too soggy, not too oily, if a bit bland. But the meringue—because of those convoluted swirls, or so Callie guessed—was crunchy all the way through instead of just crisp on the outside.
Rafaella ate her piece but she declined a second.
“You don’t like it, sweetheart?” Callie asked.
“It’s good, mama.” But she was making a face. “Just not like we got back home.” By which she meant back in Italy.
“Few things are,” Callie agreed.
* * *
John Praxis had learned that growing old—he was entering his late seventies, practically knocking on the door of his eightieth birthday—was not a simple or a straight-line process. Not like watching your hair go white or suddenly wanting to take naps in the afternoon. Aside from the big-ticket, life-threatening events—like a failing heart or kidney disease, which stem cell technology could now fix by growing new organs in a bottle and surgically implanting them—the body continued to suffer at first dozens and then hundreds of small hurts and insults on almost a daily basis.
Cartilage wore away at the joints until bone rubbed on bone.
Tendons thinned and strained, and muscles grew flaccid.
The endocrine system shut down; the sex drive failed.
Corneas clouded up while retinas became detached.
Nerve sheaths failed and palsy shook the hands.
Gums became inflamed and the teeth fell out.
The stomach and bowels grew constricted.
The immune system just went haywire.
The body loaded up with new toxins.
And every day brought more pain.
Although none of these age-related conditions was lethal by itself, collectively they made life not worth living. But he was also discovering that, while molecular biologists and genetic engineers had been building single organs from stem cells, the body’s own repair kit, other medical researchers had used these tools to address the more intrusive, systemic failures. In time almost any part of the body that might wear out, become inflamed and infected, go wrong through auto-immune disorders and degenerative diseases, or simply deteriorate under a lifetime load of unfiltered heavy metals and molecular litter—all of this damage could be repaired and replaced, while the underlying systems could be made stronger and supplemented to last longer.
Since the Treaty of Louisville, under which the Federated Republic officially defunded California’s socialized meddling in the health care market, Praxis had signed up for a half dozen of these procedures. He had his joints refinished, his gums abraded and resurfaced, three decayed and metal-filled teeth replaced with budding implants, his eyeballs totally regrown, his stomach and small intestine relined, and his large intestine replaced. He shied away from the purely cosmetic procedures, like hair regrowth and skin replacement, but those were available, too, for the vain and body conscious.
After two years of replacement therapies, John Praxis looked and felt younger than he had in a decade. He was even running again, now that his knees and ankles no longer hurt him.
Of course, the social pundits and medical ethicists moaned and sighed over the cost of all this medical care for the elderly. People on the leading edge of this new wave of the “wellderly” or “fountain of youthers” or “extended lifers”—as Praxis’s cohort were coming to be called—usually paid more for their procedures and occasionally suffered from imperfect techniques that had to be salvaged and redone. He might spend overnight for observation in the hospital after a procedure that could readily have been done on an outpatient basis. But as these techniques improved and became more widespread, they were offered by licensed medical technicians bearing associate degrees instead of board-certified doctors with nine years of college, med school, internship, and residency behind them. The established techniques were also supported by automated processes and assembly-line approaches. They were rapidly becoming common and cheap.
Youth, health, and beauty were now accepted as ordinary, in the same way that the cars and smartphones had been accepted in Praxis’s middle years. And he had to remind everyone who grumbled about the cost of his procedures that in their earliest incarnations the automobile, personal computer, and cellular telephone service had all been dismissed as “rich men’s toys.” Now they were the necessities of everyday life, available at vastly reduced cost.
Formerly, the mantra among his cohort—the men and women in their sixties and seventies who were rapidly approaching what had once been thought the end of life—was “You’re only as old as you feel.” Now the truism was “You’re only as old as you want to be.” Or, for those who were heedless and neglected to take care of their bodies, “as you allow yourself to be.”
But still, about every six months the morning would bring a new ache or infirmity as something else sputtered and offered warning signs of giving out. Chasing these maladies around his body was like chasing a mouse around the kitchen with a hammer. It was time consuming and demoralizing, and he wondered where it would all end.
It was only after his fourth trip to the bathroom each night for two months, and urging his urine to flow even then, that he took up the problem with his current doctor, Virginia Mills.
After a backdoor digital inspection that he did not at all appreciate and the return of blood work from the lab, she was ready with a diagnosis. “You have prostatic hyperplasia,” she said.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, meaning “cancer.”
“Probably not. The condition is usually benign. Your prostate gland is simply enlarged, and that obstructs the urethral canal, making it harder for you to urinate. I’m surprised you haven’t had this problem before.”
“Yeah,” Praxis said, thinking that he’d been getting up in the night for years. But only recently had he been unable to void his bladder, not even a dribble, or not without pain. “What can we do about it?” he asked.
“You can manage the condition,” Dr. Mills said. “Don’t drink water before bedtime, and avoid alcohol and caffeine entirely. Don’t take decongestants or—well, I can give you a list of medications to avoid.”
“What about treatment?”
“We can give you an alpha blocker, which relaxes the smooth muscle in there and lets the urine flow. Or you can take a hormone inhibitor, which treats the cause of the enlargement in the first place—but that can also damage your sex drive.”
“And what else can you do?”
“We can grow you a new gland, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, thinking of his old pal the Tin Woodman, whose body was slowly taken over by replacement parts.
“That’ll take a couple of weeks,” Mills said. “Maybe less, because we already have samples of your stem cells on ice and your genome programmed in the cooker.”
“I suppose the replacement surgery will hurt?”
“Oh, like a son of a bitch,” she agreed.
* * *
After her most recent late-evening call to Uncle Matteo, Callie Praxis sat up in bed for a couple of hours, cradling the now-disconnected phone handset, staring at the bedroom wall, and thinking bad thoughts. If she were still a smoker—a vice she gave up in her twenties when she was just out of college—she would have been halfway through a pack by now.
The old man was actually out when she called, off on some early morning errand, and she had to talk with his son Carlo. She then made the mistake of trying to do her business through him. But really, she reasoned after her third imaginary cigarette, it wouldn’t have gone any better with Matteo himself.
She had tried to be reasonable. “Given the amount of trouble your Ms. Kunstler has sown around here—” And when Carlo didn’t grasp the word
sown,
she had to interrupt herself and try again with
spread
and
scattered.
“—I think it’s best we cool our business relationship for a little while.”
“She was working for you, Contessa,” he insisted, repeating his father’s line. “Certainly, if you did not have adequate controls …”
“I thought she was honest. I thought your father and I had an honest relationship, an understanding. I was merely pointing out business opportunities—”
“For which you were collecting a finder’s fees, yes?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But that was—”
“Over and above the value in construction work that our investments enabled your company to obtain. Is this not one hand washing the other?”
“Well, technically, but you—”
“With us, it is no different. We cannot survive simply on the percentage returns from those investments. On the interest paid. There must also be incentives, gratuities—what do the English say? ‘Emoluments.’ Mariene was our agent to arrange and collect those emoluments.”
“But in the United States—excuse me, the Federated Republic—such incentives are called ‘graft.’ They make everyone nervous. They involve the police and the courts. The head of my Legal Department is now investigating, and she’s a straight-arrow type, squeaky clean—not at all Italian in her outlook. So I need you to back off on the entitlements. And I need to stop bird-dogging your investments. I can’t take any more finder’s fees, because—well, because it looks bad.”
The cell signal was quiet for a moment. The younger man’s face appeared frozen on her screen. “It is too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Contessa.”
“You must trust me on this. We have to cool it while Mariene’s little stunt at bid rigging goes to trial and gets resolved.”
“You don’t understand,” Carlo said. “Things are already in motion. We have hooks set all over the West Coast. You are merely the bait fish. You can’t swim away now. We own a piece of you.” With that, the carrier cut off and her earpiece went dead.
So Callie sat up brooding and stubbing out imaginary cigarette butts, wondering how she could extricate herself from her dealings with the di Rienzis, or at least shield her company from the toxic side effects.
* * *
Antigone Wells was following her morning makeup routine at the dressing table. After carefully dabbing on foundation and powder, smoothing in blusher, lining her eyelids, brushing in shadow, and applying mascara to her lashes, she leaned in toward the mirror, turned her lips out in a tiny pout, and dabbed on her favorite hot-pink lip gloss. On the third pass with the applicator stick, her face suddenly changed before her eyes.
The familiar, everyday face she knew and had been cleaning, moisturizing, and cherishing for years disappeared as if a mist had melted away. Her real face, the everyday face she wore to the public, the skin she was wearing now, became stunningly apparent. It started with the area around her mouth. Her lips radiated a network of tiny wrinkles. The corners of her mouth disappeared against two deep folds that started up around and along either side of her nose. Her eyes looked out of deep pockets whose underside failed of being lined and livid only because of the concealer and powder she used. Her cheeks sagged. Her jawline slumped into the beginnings of a double chin.
Age has finally caught up with me,
she thought sadly.
Wells had known for years—really, for a couple of decades—that she could no longer pass for a fresh-faced girl of twenty or even thirty. But still she had accounted herself a handsome woman, needing only a touch or two of color and gloss to bring back the image of the girl she once was. Now all that greasepaint and powder looked thick and garish, hiding nothing and instead calling attention to itself, like a mask, like a clown’s makeup.
It was true that John seemed to like her face well enough. When he looked into her eyes, she saw no hint of speculation, disappointment, or remorse. But would this present face be enough to hold him? She remembered that, at the beginning of their relationship, he would occasionally by mistake call her “Tippi”—confusing her with a film actress popular in the nineteen-sixties, during his own childhood. When Wells had looked up that woman online, she saw the resemblance immediately. She also noticed that the actress had perfect, flawless skin. One day John would wake up to her real face—an aging, sagging face, just as she was seeing it now. And what would he do then?