The Garden of Betrayal

7

I could tell there was something going on in the market as soon as I stepped out of my office elevator. The din of the trading floor rises and falls in pitch with the level of tension, like the sound of the wind in the rigging of a ship. There wasn’t enough urgency for whatever storm was looming to have hit yet, but the clipped expectancy in the voices suggested that everyone was fixed on the horizon. I turned toward the noise automatically and then reversed myself. The iPod was burning a hole in my jacket, and I had only an hour before lunch with Senator Simpson. Whatever was happening-or about to happen-in the market would have to wait.

Amy hung up the phone as I approached, looking harried.

“Did Alex call you?”

“No. Did you speak to him?”

“No. But he sent Lynn a text confirming that he’d be at lunch.”

I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and checked it, thinking maybe he’d contacted me directly. Another two dozen e-mails and a single text, but from Kate, not Alex: library freezing chaucer boring buy me sushi and hot green tea?

Kate had been spending a few hours a week at the main midtown library, on Forty-second and Fifth, working on her senior English project.

“Nothing yet,” I said, simultaneously thumb-typing sorry can’t today stay warm love xox to Kate. “Is there some kind of news out?”

“The French and the Russians issued a joint statement announcing that they’re going to work together to catch the terrorists. Your phone’s been ringing off the hook. Everybody wants to know what you think.”

It figured. The NATO allies, led by the United States, had issued a communique overnight, condemning the Nord Stream attack but urging Russia to exercise restraint. The Russians had responded predictably, suggesting that NATO piss up a rope and pointing out that the United States hadn’t exercised restraint when it invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, or when it mustered up a transparently flimsy “coalition of the willing” to take out Saddam. Confronted with an opportunity to knife the United States and suck up to Russia-where French companies were bidding on a number of enormous oil and gas construction projects-the Palais de l’Elysee had also responded predictably. The irritating thing was that Bush had so tainted us internationally that we’d ceded the moral high ground. It hurt not to feel superior to the French.

“All right. I’ll read through the news and then try to get something out ASAP. Do me a favor and get in touch with Rashid, please. Tell him I’d like to meet with him in person-tomorrow morning, if possible.” I turned toward my door and then spun on my heel. “You don’t know how to get data off an iPod, do you?”

“An iPod?” Amy asked, looking confused.

“Yeah.” I took it out of my pocket and showed it to her.

“No idea. You want me to call Frick and Frack?”

Frick and Frack were tech support for the floor, a pair of chubby, balding fifty-year-olds with identical ratty ponytails who’d worked for the National Security Agency before joining Cobra. Walter had been a demon on security ever since a guerrilla financial Web site hacked his positions and published them. He’d been short a bunch of illiquid biotechs, and his competitors had squeezed him mercilessly. Frick and Frack-actually Fred Ricker and Frank Ackerman-had been hired shortly after the debacle to implement new security protocols.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Theresa” had made me a little paranoid about security myself. I didn’t want anyone to see the data she’d given to me until I’d decided when-and whether-to release it. I thought for a moment, trying to figure out who else might be able to help.

“Do me a favor?” I said to Amy.

“What’s that?”

“Find a Japanese take-out menu and order in a bunch of tuna rolls and some green tea.”

• • •

I’d just finished an e-mail suggesting that my clients buy French oil services companies and short the German and English when Kate showed up. She was wearing blue jeans and a navy peacoat over an ivory Shetland sweater, and her nose was red with cold. I pressed the send key and got to my feet.

“Hey,” I said, leaning over my desk to give her a kiss. “You have the cable?”

She pulled a hard plastic clamshell container from her coat pocket and held it out of reach.

“You have my sushi?”

“Amy ordered. It should be here any minute.”

“Excellent.” She stripped off fleece gloves, lifted a pair of scissors from my desk, and set to work on the package. “This is a seriously high-rent district. I had to pay twenty-nine ninety-five for a stupid piece of wire. That’s almost thirty-three bucks with tax.”

I took three tens and three singles from my wallet and laid them in front of her.

“So, how do we do this?”

“Simple,” she said, setting down the scissors and deftly extracting the cable from the mutilated plastic. “Give me the iPod.”

I handed it to her, and she snorted derisively, flipping the unit over to study the microscopic printing on the back.

“Second- or third-generation,” she said, fitting one end of the cable to an attachment point on the bottom. “At least five years old. It’ll be a miracle if it still functions. The half-life of these things is only about six months, which-surprise, surprise-is about as long as it takes Apple to roll out a new model.”

I smiled mechanically as she attached the other end of the cable to a concealed port on the side of my monitor, thinking she seemed a little too bright and sarcastic. Whenever Kate got hyper and sharp-tongued, it meant something was bothering her. Maybe that was why she’d wanted to have lunch with me.

“Hmmm,” she said, touching the iPod’s face. “It powered up at least. That’s good.” Pocketing the cash I’d set out for her, she came around the desk and took hold of my mouse, clicking first on the Windows start button and then on the My Computer icon. “Even better,” she said, using the pointer to highlight a rectangular gray drive symbol on the screen. “For a second there, I was afraid that we might have to mount it on a Mac. Some early iPods weren’t natively compatible with Windows.” She double-clicked the drive symbol and an Explorer window opened, revealing dozens of folder icons with cartoon zippers running down their left side.

“So, what’ve we got?” I asked.

“About nine gig of compressed files,” she said, clicking on folders randomly. “Mainly Excel spreadsheets and a handful of PDFs. The best thing would be if I copied everything to your computer and then extracted it. That way you’d have a backup in case the iPod bricks.”

I hesitated. My computer was attached to Cobra’s network, which meant-what? I was in the business of publishing information, not concealing it. I’d never particularly had to worry about security before.

“Can I get it backed up on CDs instead?”

Kate shook her head.

“Not easily. The files are going to be, like, twelve to fifteen gig when they’re inflated, which would be twenty to twenty-five CDs. You could get it on two or three DVDs maybe, but I’m guessing you don’t have a dual-layer burner here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You want to move the information around with you, or you’re worried about somebody snooping?”

“More snooping,” I admitted.

“I could encrypt everything.”

“Is that effective?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s a lot of excellent military-grade encryption software out there. You’ll have to deal with a really long, random password, but I can write it down for you so you don’t have to remember it. Just don’t leave it taped to the underside of your keyboard.”

“Great,” I said, impressed, as always, by her tech know-how. “How long will it take you?”

“Forty-five minutes to an hour maybe, depending on how fast the iPod transfers data. Why? You going somewhere?”

Her voice caught as she asked the question. Something was definitely bothering her. If this Phil guy had hurt her, I was going to kick his skinny ass.

“A lunch I can’t get out of, but that’s not for half an hour yet. You want to talk?”

She fidgeted with my mouse, dragging files from the iPod to a new folder on my computer. I waited, giving her time.

“I got an e-mail from Sophie Reyes this morning.”

I struggled with the shift of context for a second. Sophie was the daughter of an old work acquaintance of Claire’s. She and Kate had gone to preschool together, before Sophie and her parents had moved to San Francisco. They still visited New York regularly, though, and the mothers and daughters had lunch together once or twice a year.

“Is everything okay?”

She shook her head, her lower lip quivering.

“What is it?” I asked gently. “What happened?”

Kate cleared her throat and touched a hand to her face. I got to my feet and gathered her into my arms just as the tears began flowing.

“Shh,” I whispered. I waited for Kate to calm down a bit and then guided her back to one of the chairs in front of my desk, handing her a box of tissues and sitting down next to her. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes.

“I spent the whole morning trying to decide how to tell you,” she choked. “I don’t want to make things worse.”

“Just say whatever you feel like saying. You’re not going to make anything worse by telling me. I promise.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, damp tissues bunched in her fist.

“Sophie’s mother got a new job, as the artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet. Sophie wrote to say how excited she was to learn that Mom was going to audition for the orchestra.”

“The ballet’s coming to New York on tour?” I asked, confused.

“No. I checked. But their resident pianist is retiring at the end of this season. They’re looking for someone new to start in September.”

An old joke came to mind for some reason, about a woman who won the lottery and rushed home to tell her husband to pack his bags. “What should I pack? Warm stuff or cold stuff?” he asked excitedly. “Who cares?” the woman replied. “Just get the hell out.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “You’re telling me that your mother’s planning to leave me.”

Kate shook her head forcefully, seeming more composed with her secret out.

“No. That’s why I was worried about telling you, because I knew you’d jump to the wrong conclusion. I’m betting Sophie’s mother asked Mom if she was interested, and Mom said yes without really giving it much thought. It’s a good thing, in a way. It means Mom’s interested in her career again. You always told me how important her career was to her, when you first met.”

Kate was trying to twist the facts, to make the blow less painful. A surge of anger gave way to a feeling of panic. I’d told Claire the truth the previous evening. I was scared, too. And the thing I was most scared of was another loss. Kate or Claire. They were all I had.

“She said yes to an audition for a job in San Francisco, and she hasn’t mentioned it to me. That has to mean something.”

“But not that she wants to leave you. I think she’s scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of spending so much time alone in our apartment next year, after I go to college.” Kate reached out for my hand. “Everything there reminds her of Kyle. She needs to let go. To really let go. To leave New York and put all the bad associations behind her.”

“She told you that?”

“Not in so many words. Sophie’s note was what pulled it together for me.” Kate squeezed my hand. “You need to talk to her, Dad.”

“And say what? That I have a sudden urge to move to San Francisco?”

“Maybe.” Kate ventured a smile. “There’s less snow.”

I disentangled myself gently and stood up, moving to the window.

“What was the line from that eighties flick we watched a few weekends ago? Buckaroo Banzai? ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Moving to San Francisco isn’t going to change anything.”

“It might if you let it.”

I stared down at the street below, my chest aching.

“I’m not the one stuck in the past, Kate.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad,” she shouted. “Are you fucking kidding me? You treat Mom like an invalid, you have this conspiracy with the doorman to hide Kyle’s mail, and every time we ride up or down the elevator, you moon about the dent in the paneling. It’s not just the apartment she needs to get away from.”

Turning, I saw Kate was leaning across my desk, her cheeks blazing.

“So, you think she should leave me?” I asked, overwhelmed at this onslaught.

“No. Don’t you get it? It’s not you she needs to get away from. It’s your never-ending obsession with what happened to Kyle.”

I felt like my chest was going to burst.

“How can I not be obsessed? I’m the one who flew off that night to give some stupid, goddamned speech. I should’ve been there…”

“That’s right. You should have been there. And if you were, you probably would have walked to the video store with Kyle, and nothing bad ever would have happened. But don’t forget that I was the one who wanted to watch the movie, and Yolanda was the one who taped over it, and Mom was the one who let Kyle go out by himself, and Kyle was the one who insisted on running the errand. It was everybody’s fault. We’re all guilty, and we all have to get over it.”

I turned back to the window, trying to calm myself.

“None of us are ever going to forget what happened,” Kate continued softly. “That’s a given. But if you can’t at least try to put the past behind you-to move beyond your guilt and help Mom move beyond hers-then I think you’re right. I think Mom’s going to leave you.”