Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (20 page)

W
hen I got home, different-colored index cards were scattered all over the kitchen table. Index cards didn’t appear often, always meant my dad was having trouble with his book. I read a green one:
Max gets an old memory wrong.
And a blue one:
someone else’s dry cleaning gets delivered, which means???

Dad came into the room, a mug of coffee in his hand.

“Hi, Dad. Who’s Max?”

“That’s the question, all right.” He moved a few of the cards around with his fingertip. “It could almost be the title of the book.”

Who’s Max?
Didn’t do much for me. “Have you got a title yet?” I said. Titles were a total pain and very important at the same time, something I’d heard Dad and his writer friends talking about more than once.

“The working title is
Magic Spaces,
” he said. “Or
possibly
A Magic Space.
Or maybe
The Magic Space.
There’s also…” He got a faraway look in his eyes, then shook his head.

“Wait,” I said. “The book’s about magic?”

“In a broad sense.”

“Like, um?”

“Exalted states, I guess you’d say, their inevitable tendency to disappoint. The illusory triumph of the subjective and the relentlessness of the objective.”

I didn’t get any of that, but pressed on anyway. “What kind of powers do the characters have?”

“There’s really only one character, in the traditional sense of story.”

I nodded. I’d never read a story with only one character, but I knew, also from hearing my dad and his writer friends, that publishers were always on the lookout for new things, so maybe this was good. “Okay,” I said, “this character—what are his powers?”

“Powers?”

“Magic powers,” I said. “X-ray vision, for example.”

My dad laughed, leaned forward, mussed up my hair a little. “The story may have experimental aspects, but it’s still grounded in reality.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Magic powers of the kind you’re talking about don’t exist, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Dad said. “They’re just fantasy, child’s play, or, at best, wishful thinking.”

“Oh,” I said.

My dad gave me a smile. “You’re a great kid, you know that?”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He checked his watch. “How does dinner in Manhattan sound? There’s this new Indonesian place in Alphabet City, not even officially open yet, should be good.”

“Okay.”

He handed me some money. “I’m having a drink with Shep and his agent. Take a cab to Jane’s office, and I’ll meet the two of you at the restaurant.”

I took a cab to my mom’s office. The thing with cab drivers was you said the location you wanted and then added “that’s near X,” so they knew you weren’t some tourist they could take on a long meander. After that, you could sit back, relax, and enjoy the view. I saw a seagull perched on a high girder of the Brooklyn Bridge, its wings folded in tight, maybe on account of the cold.

The taxi dropped me off in front of my mom’s building in Lower Manhattan. I paid the driver, adding a tip. Dad said to tip fifteen percent, but that made the math hard, so I tipped twenty. I went inside to the security desk.

“Here to see Jane Forester at Jaggers and Tulkinghorn,” I said, handing over my Thatcher ID, which sported the most horrible picture taken since the invention
of photography. The guard turned the book so I could sign and printed a visitor’s pass. I clipped it to my jacket, crossed the inner lobby, deserted on a Saturday afternoon, and entered an open elevator. Everything gleamed in my mom’s building, including the insides of the elevators. I pressed seventy-eight and gazed at my reflection on the shiny walls. An idea hit me out of the blue: maybe I should try wearing my hair in a side part. I tried parting it on the right, the left, and the right again. The doors opened. Jaggers and Tulkinghorn had the whole seventy-eighth floor—and the seventy-ninth—so you were in the office the moment you left the elevator. No one was at the reception desk. I walked about halfway down a long hall to a closed door with my mom’s name on it, and knocked.

“Come in,” Mom called, in her office voice.

I went in.

“Hi, Mom.”

She looked up from her work. “Hi, Robbie. I won’t be long. Have fun with Ashanti?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Hung out.”

“Did you see Chas?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he doing?”

“The index cards.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yeah.”

Her gaze returned to the big stack of papers in front of her, almost like it was in the grip of some magnetic field. She frowned, scratched out a line or two, wrote in something else. “Some new magazines arrived,” she said, not looking up.

“Okeydoke.”

She looked up suddenly. “What have you done to your hair?”

“Just trying a side part.” I didn’t bother asking if she liked it, the answer already clear.

Mom’s office wasn’t huge, but it did have a little lounge-type setup in the corner—two-seater couch, comfy chair, coffee table—for having whatever kind of conversations with clients that you didn’t have at the desk. I sat in the comfy chair and leafed through some magazines. The models, celebrities, and actresses all seemed to have cool parts in their hair.

“Sorry if you’re bored,” my mom said, some time later.

“I’m not bored.” But I was, and Mom was good at sensing that kind of thing.

“There’s a TV in the upstairs boardroom,” she said. “It’ll be empty. I’ll come up when I’m done.”

“Okay.”

I took the elevator. Seventy-nine, where the partners had their offices, was fancier than seventy-eight, with Persian rugs scattered on the marble hallway and vases of flowers all over the place. The upstairs boardroom was at the end. It had a highly polished oval table made of some dark wood, with a couple of dozen leather chairs around it. A big flat screen hung on one wall. I found the remote and sat in one of the end chairs, maybe where the big boss partner—not Jaggers or Tulkinghorn, both long dead—sat when important decisions, like about the size of my mom’s bonus, were being made.

“How’s fifty mill sound?” I said. “No objections? Done!” And I was about to switch on the TV when I heard footsteps in the hall. I glanced down the table toward the open doorway, just in time to catch sight of a man going by. He was putting on a dark coat, switching his briefcase from one hand to another. But I hardly noticed those details. What grabbed my attention was the perfect profile, the silvery blue of the eye I could see, and the platinum hair. In other words: Egil Borg.

He kept going, without a look my way, and passed from view. But I fully expected him to wheel around the next second—how could anyone miss the sound of my pounding heart?

No wheeling around happened. I sat motionless in
the big boss partner chair. There was only one door to the upstairs boardroom, meaning only one way out. Time passed. I rose—every movement almost painfully careful—walked around the table, and halted just short of the doorway. Then I thought,
Whoa! Get a grip.
I had every right to be here, visitor’s pass lawfully in place. I took a deep breath and stepped into the hall.

Deserted. I walked a normal type walk to the elevators. The indicator light showed them all at L, except for one still on its way down. Four, three, two, L. It stayed there; they all stayed there, safe at L. I headed back along the hall, past the boardroom, reading the names on every door until I came to E. Borg. Door closed, almost certainly locked. But just to be thorough, I gave the knob an exploratory twist. And it turned. So what else could I do but give the door an exploratory push? It opened. I entered the office of Egil Borg, troubleshooter and fixer for Jaggers and Tulkinghorn.

Egil Borg’s office was smaller than my mom’s and had no little sitting area. The window was bigger than hers, but the blinds were down, admitting thin bands of light through the slats. Also my mom’s office had her college and law school diplomas on the walls, plus lots of pictures of me, my dad, and Pendleton, and some cool posters of Provence—her favorite place on earth and where we were going to spend a whole month at some future
period when she could get the time off. Borg’s walls were completely bare, except for a full-length mirror—I checked my side part again: really that bad?—and one small framed photo of an unsmiling old guy in a military helmet. I went closer and read his name—Patton—and was no wiser.

So mostly this office was about things not being there. The main thing in it was the huge desk, shaped like a rounded L and made of black metal. There was nothing on it except a phone, a big monitor, and a sleek little keyboard. The screen was blank. I touched the
x
key, just to see what would happen.

The screen lit up and a message appeared:
Password Please.
I had an amazing intuition: the password
was
please. So I typed it:
p-l-e-a-s-e.

Things happened fast after that, so fast and confusing I really can’t trust my memory to be accurate. But first a little square at the top of the monitor flashed. Camera! That little square was a camera, of course, and now it had just snapped my picture, capturing a record of what I was up to at that moment, which happened to be trespassing and breaking into someone’s computer. Proof beyond a shadow of a doubt. A whole bad chain of future events unreeled in my mind, events that included my mom getting fired and my dad pounding the pavement in search of real—I meant other—work, and me in cuffs. Then came the power, instantaneous and free of pain, shock,
or headache. The red-gold beam, brighter than I’d ever seen it, flared out and struck that little square at the top of the monitor. I heard a soft sizzling sound, saw a tiny puff of smoke. Meaning what? I didn’t know.

I backed away from the computer, sidestepping out of its range, pocketing my glasses. My first thought, an especially stupid one, was to sneak up on the computer from behind, kick it off the desk, and jump up and down on it, leaving nothing but digital innards. But then what? Leave the innards on the floor? Somewhere in those busted-up innards, I was pretty sure, would lie my picture, waiting for some nerd to find it. That—
nerd
—led me to a useful thought: Silas.

Silas would know what to do. I was reaching for my phone, foreseeing all sorts of problems, like what if I couldn’t reach him, or what if he couldn’t tell me on the phone but had to come in person, when a problem I wasn’t foreseeing suddenly presented itself.

Ding.
A soft, quiet ding, a familiar sound I couldn’t place for a second, and then did. It was the signal made by an elevator just coming to a stop. After that one ding: silence. Maybe this was one of those times when an elevator stops at a floor for no reason, opens and closes its door, and goes away. I listened my hardest, hoping for more silence. And yes! My hopes were answered. Silence and nothing but sweet, sweet—

But no. A footstep sounded—the hard-heeled footstep
of a businessman’s shoe—and then more:
clack clack clack.
After that, no sound. Had whoever he was gone into his office, somewhere down the hall?
Clack clack clack.
No, he’d merely passed over one of those Persian rugs. Another brief silence and then again
clack clack clack,
closer and closer. I glanced around wildly, looking for a place to hide—like behind a two-seater couch, say, which this Spartan office didn’t have.
Clack clack clack.
There was nowhere to hide but under the big desk shaped like a rounded L. I darted underneath, pushing the wastebasket aside.

And right away realized what a dumb hiding place it was: surprisingly well-lit and not very spacious, considering the size of the desk. Also—but there was no time to consider the alsos.
Clack clack clack.
From my angle down on the floor, I saw the shoes first. Businessman’s shoes: these were called wingtips, I thought, on account of the toe cap part having perforations shaped like two wings spreading along the sides. Then the cuffs of the dark gray woolen pants, and the lower leg parts, sharply creased. The briefcase was set down on the floor, just inches from me, a fine briefcase stamped with two small gold letters:
EB.
The hand setting it down was big and strong. I smelled coffee and tuna. Egil Borg hadn’t left for the day, but only nipped out for a snack.

He sat in his chair, stretched his legs. I squeezed back against the hard inner frame of the desk as far as I could,
his shoe tips an inch away. Any moment now he was going to—yes, I heard him tapping at the keyboard.

He went still. He drew his legs back, leaned forward, said, “Hmmm.” In the next second or two he’d be looking at the image of a girl who turned out to be a moron. More tapping and then: “What’s this?”

What’s this, meaning my goose was cooked? Or what’s this, meaning he was puzzled about something? It sounded more like that second kind of what’s this, but I couldn’t be sure, and before anything happened to clear things up, his phone rang.

He swiveled in the chair and reached for the phone. I caught a glimpse of his strong jaw and downturned mouth.

“Borg,” he said.

The voice on the other end sounded small and tinny, but I recognized the speaker: Sheldon Gunn. He asked a question, something about a secure phone.

“Of course,” said Borg.

Gunn spoke again. I could pick out a few words, like
situation
and
time
and
essence.

“Not sure I understand,” Borg said.

Gunn’s voice rose, and now I got every word. “Are you paid to understand?”

“Yes,” said Borg. And then backing down a little: “Within limits.”

Gunn was quiet for a few seconds. “That’s true,” he
said, “and is even part of what makes you useful. Useful within limits.”

One of Borg’s legs began doing a jittery little thing. He extended it suddenly, kicking me right on the kneecap, a hard spot that must have felt desklike to him. “Ow” came oh so close to popping out of my mouth, but it didn’t, and then Gunn was talking, his voice low and hard to hear again. I picked out a few phrases, like “the Saudis are getting impatient” and “financing deadline” and “speed, speed, speed.”