Diablerie (5 page)

"Hey, Cass," I said. "What's happening?"

"You, my brother," the dark-skinned security expert intoned.

Cassius's uniform was black trousers and a tight-fitting black turtleneck sweater-shirt that showed off his well-developed physique. He took a stack of red folders off my visitor's chair, threw them into a comer, and sat down.

There was no disrespect in these actions. Cass knew that I had a finely honed sense of my messy office, that I would be able to find any program folder whenever I needed to.

"Me?"

"Uh-huh." He held up a blue slip of paper.

"For me?" I asked, really surprised.

"Tina Logan says that you refused to sign in. She says she asked you but you just shined her on and walked by."

"She had her head on the desk," I said. "And she was talking to her girlfriend or somebody on the phone."

"You want me to write up a slip on her?" Cass offered.

"I don't know why she even works here," I said. "Why do we need a key card, a camera photo every day, and a sign-in sheet? You told me yourself that none of it makes any difference if somebody really wants to mount an attack."

Cassius Copeland smiled enigmatically. His dark features were more compelling than handsome. His eyes seemed like they held a trove of forbidden knowledge.

"Security," he said. "They asked me to set up a security system and that's just what I've done."

"But we're not any safer now than we were before nine-eleven and all these procedures."

"Not safer," Cass said, holding up a powerful, instructive finger, "but more secure."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Security, Ben, is a feeling. You got your security blanket, your good-luck charm, your friend on the phone saying you're all right when everything around you is goin' to hell. That's what they hired me for."

"They hired you so that no mad bomber comes in here and blows them all to hell."

"And I promise you, Ben, nobody is gonna blow up the main offices of Our Bank." Cass smiled and I laughed with him.

He tore up the blue slip and dropped it on my overflowing trash can.

From that day on, I signed in every morning at Tina's desk and never felt the slightest bit put out by the absurd security precautions implemented by Cassius Copeland for Our Bank.

That morning I was a little sluggish, but coming to work soothed my inflamed emotions from the night and day before. Seela would move into her roach-ridden apartment, Mona would heal from the sex she always asked for but never wanted, Barbara Knowland would move on to another banquet, shocking people with her tales of atrocity and recognizing people from her promiscuous past; people who didn't remember her. And I would sit in that tiny, doorless office copying numbers and making notes that were too boring for anyone else to consider.

When I first came to work at Our Bank, then named New Yorker Savings and Trust, there were sixteen people in my department. I was a lowly entry-level programmer working in COBOL and learning assembly language from an old Irish duffer named Junior. That was way back before PCs and the Internet. We still used information punched into cards and monitors that only had one color—green.

The systems I maintained were developed in the early sixties. There were hundreds of poorly thought-out, poorly executed, almost completely untested programs that broke down every other week. I learned from fixing logic flaws, bugs, in those programs. I wrote obscure subroutines to make up for the faulty logic rife throughout the data processing systems.

The work I did was cutting edge back then, twenty-three years ago, but today all my knowledge is archaic, troglodytic. Nowadays people have laptop computers and swap mountains of information across the fiber-optic Internet highway faster than anyone can monitor.

Over the years, my coworkers died, retired, moved on to different jobs, transferred and learned new systems that came into vogue and then faded away like rap stars and reality-TV celebrities. My department winnowed down and down until only I was left.

Every year a new systems manager comes in and tells me that he, or she, wants to "migrate the system" to a newer database that will allow more-modem computers and computer systems to take over. But banks are conservative places in spite of their new friendly names. My systems mull over hundreds of millions of dollars every night. My salary is in the very low six figures and I'm the only employee. A new computer system would cost millions. And the glitches and bugs in the transition would also be quite pricey. So all I have to do is have a well-documented job sheet so that if1 drop dead they can hire an expert just like me (for twice the salary) to keep the old programs running well into the twenty-first century.

I spent the day locating a bug in an old assembler program. It was a branch-and-load-register command that compensated with the wrong command length, found a valid op-code in the data field, and went on its merry way, ignoring all the carefully laid plans of my predecessors.

I fixed the problem and felt fine. It was a good day and I hadn't spoken a word to anyone. Most of the people on my floor didn't know who I was. The only person I answered to, Brad Richards, worked on the sixty-second floor and rarely bothered with me because I did my job, did not complain, and never asked for a raise.

When I got home, there was a note left for me on the butcher-block dining table off the kitchen.

Ben,

My mother called this morning and asked if I could come take care of her. She's got bronchitis and the doctor told her to stay in bed for two days. Call me there after six on my cell.

We should talk when I come home.

Love you,
Mona

I read the note through twice, three times, put it down on the sink, got some ice water from the refrigerator, drank that, and then read the short but pregnant message again.

Why hadn't she called me at work? That was the main question in my mind. She could have asked me what I was going to do for dinner, if I wanted to help her with her mother. And what was this "We should talk"? Was she mad about the night before? She never asked me to stop. I would have backed off if she had only said "no more."

I didn't mind that she wasn't home. I liked being left alone to stare out the window. Many nights Mona went to events with magazine clients. She was often sent out of town to do research or conduct interviews. But there had never been just a note on the table.

I didn't love Mona. But then again, I didn't love anyone: not my parents, who were like strangers after I came to New York; not Seela, though I was very fond of her; not Svetlana. I didn't feel bad about my lack of feeling for Mona because I wasn't secretly giving love somewhere else.

We weren't passionate but at least we were civilized. We took walks together and raised Seela well. We ate a sit-down dinner every night we were both in the house.

And now there was just a note on the dinette table.

It was five to six and so I called her cell phone.

"Hello?" she said in her clipped, I'm-in-a-hurry tone.

"Hey, honey? What's going on?"

"Oh . . . Ben."

"Yeah. How come you didn't call me?"

"Didn't you see my note?"

"You usually call."

"I was in a hurry."

"The phone is faster and better than a note," I said.

"I was upset," she confessed.

"About what?"

"Ben, I have to take care of my mother and I have a new assignment at work. I'm going to be busy all night and for the next few days. So can we put this on hold for a while?"

"Just tell me what's wrong. It's only a few words. A sentence. You're married to a man for over twenty years, have a daughter with him, and you can't spare a few words?"

She sighed as if greatly put upon and then said, "I can't do this. I have to go," and disconnected the call.

I pressed the redial button but the call went directly to her answering service.

You have reached Mona Valeria. I cannot take your call right now. Please leave a number or call back.

It was only after I threw the cordless unit down, shattering it on the kitchen tiles, that I realized how enraged I was. And there was something else: I wanted a drink.

This also was something new. I never wanted a drink. Never in all the years after I went off alcohol. I craved cigarettes aplenty, but it wasn't until after that phone splintered on the floor that I looked around, the way I used to do, for a bottle with a government seal on its neck.

"Hello," she answered sweetly.

"Hi, Lana," I said.

"Ben." In the silence after my name I thought I might have heard a hesitation. But I was so upset that I had no room to contemplate any new suspicions.

I was using Mona's home-office phone.

"I need to come over, baby," I said.

"Sure. Now?"

"If you don't mind."

"It's your house too. You could come here and live with me if you wanted."

The thing about Svetlana was that she was what I called "emotopathic." She could read the feelings rolling off almost anyone and say the things that they needed to hear.

She didn't want me to come live with her. She didn't pretend that there was anymore to our relationship than there was. She only knew that she heard loneliness in my tone and so she made up a happy little family for us-her and me together in a tiny studio on the West Side.

*  *  *

I made it to her place in a little under forty-five minutes. Rush hour traffic meant I had to ride the subway instead of getting a taxi, and the train always takes longer than it should.

I had a key, but I rang from downstairs. She was at her door waiting, looking worried.

"Are you all right?" she asked with that exquisite hint of a Russian accent.

She was wearing the short turquoise dress with the red flecks down the left side. That was my favorite. Her face was made up and I could smell coffee brewing.

Realizing that she had done all that in response to my mournful tone made me a little teary; this in turn disturbed me more—I was losing control and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn.

"Oh, darling," Svetlana said, and she put her arms around my neck, thrusting her small breasts against me.

I stood there, trying to find a way into that embrace, a place that would allow me to yield to an open heart.

"Lana," I said after coffee and sex.

"Yes, my darling."

"What did I say that night?"

She didn't ask me what night. She knew. Our moments together were more predictable than a timetable. There was only one night that stood out.

"I don't remember—not exactly. Why?"

"I don't remember anything," I said, "except that you were asking me something and then I was standing there and you were on the floor."

"I asked you about when you were a child in California."

"And what did I say?"

Svetlana sat up in the bed and hunched over, her large, pointed nipples just touching her slender thighs. As I watched her body, I began to feel nervous, uneasy.

"You said. . . let me see, you said, 'It was all a long time ago and there's nothing anyone can do about it,' and then you threw me." "I threw you?"

She nodded, the pain of the fall reflected in her face.

"I didn't just stand up and send you sprawling out?" I asked.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "You, how do you say, heav-ed me like a sack of wheat. You went down and came up pushing your arms out."

Svetlana hit me with the palms of her hands, pushing me over on my side in the bed. Then she crawled up on top of me and licked my face like a friendly cat.

"I liked it," she said in a deeper voice. "The next night I masturbated four times thinking about how strong you were."

I was simultaneously aroused and petrified. Svetlana's almost masculine admission, her leaning there on top of me, reminded me of something that, at the same time, I could not remember. It was naked desire with none of the little modesties and lies that I was used to.

"Fuck me, Ben. Do it right now."

In the morning Svetlana was already up and dressed in T-shirt and jeans when I roused sleepily.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Go back to sleep. It is early."

"No, no. I'll go."

"No," she said. "You don't have to. This is your house. I am your woman. You can stay in my bed. Why not?"

"You goin' swimming at the gym?" I asked, just to be saying something, trying to feel like I belonged.

"Yes. Then I go to class. Will you stay again tonight?''

There was something in her voice, or maybe it was in my mind, something that was asking more out of me. The expectation, hers or mine, exhausted me and I fell back into a troubled slumber.

In my dream Barbara "Star" Knowland was standing before a medieval room with a thousand tables. There were acrobats and clowns, jugglers and fire-eaters. One man was selling whole, full-feathered ducks; a dozen of them were hanging by their necks from a bloody cutting board that was somehow attached to the man's chest. He had a crazed look in his eye and an evil curved blade in his left hand.

"That's what you call a dead duck, huh, son?" my fither joked.