by James Frey
“No, Ekaterina. There is no privacy here,” he reminds her.
She grunts, plainly annoyed. He enjoys her irritation—after all, it’s her fault he’s here.
“No matter,” she says. “We need to set up a meet. I need something of you.”
“When?” He won’t allow himself to sound eager. She hates that.
“I land in Zurich on Tuesday.”
Two days from now and, conveniently, visitation week. Wealthy, neglectful relatives will be flying in from all over the world, the rules relaxed in their honor.
“I’ll reserve us an eight p.m. table at Der Kunstkochen,” he says, before she can insist on some disgusting hole-in-the-wall with rancid beef. He knows her ways too well, and he understands that sometimes circumstances call for discretion. But sometimes—as when Maccabee has endured six months of dining hall cuisine—circumstances call for Zurich’s finest restaurant, for caviar, champagne, and a perfectly fried filet of wild sea bass paired with black olives and shallots.
“I don’t know,” she says, but he can hear the hesitation in her voice.
After all, Ekaterina is the one who taught him to appreciate the finer things in life. She’s the one who, before sending him to this godforsaken city, told him of the Kunstkochen and its caramel soufflé with the apple tatin heart.
“Eight p.m.,” she says, the temptation of impeccably prepared pastry too much for even her iron will to withstand. “Don’t be late.”
“I look forward to it,” he says, then hopes he hasn’t said too much.
“Indeed, my—” She stops herself abruptly. She always calls him “my Player,” but she can’t do so on an unsecured line. No one here can know Maccabee’s true role in the future of humanity, that he is the Nabataean champion, pledged to save his ancient race from extinction. And so she swallows the word, replaces it with one she never uses. “My son.”
She cuts the line.
“Love you too, Mom,” he says sarcastically, into the dead air. Love. It’s not a word he would ever dare say where she could hear him, or would ever want to. That kind of sorry playacting is for his inferiors. They cling to family, to their pathetic ideas about how mothers should care for their sons and how sons should cling to their mothers, because it’s all they have. Maccabee has Ekaterina, who’s taught him to be strong, to raise himself. She’s given him so much more than so-called motherly love. She’s given him a destiny, a place in history. Only ordinary people have ordinary mothers, Maccabee reminds himself. He slips the phone beneath his pillow and climbs back into bed.
His girlfriend’s eyes drift open. “Who was that?”
“Business,” he says.
She laughs unhappily. “You’re funny,” she says, but he knows what she’s thinking. That it was another girl on the phone. That the rumors about Maccabee, how he takes what he wants from a girl and casts her aside, are true. That this boy who claims to love her is taking secret four a.m. phone calls from someone else. Maccabee lets her think it. Having a girlfriend in this place is useful in more ways than one, but it doesn’t matter who the girl is. When this one gets too tiresome, there will always be another.
In the meantime . . .
“Since you’re awake,” he says, “I should point out we have two hours before you have to sneak back to your room.”
“However will we fill the time?” she says playfully, then tucks her long, blond hair over her shoulder and exposes a long stretch of neck.
He closes his eyes, thinking of Tuesday night, wondering at the need for the meeting and what will come of it, whether change is on the horizon, if Ekaterina will be proud of all he’s done here, and then he presses his lips to bare skin and wraps his arms around a narrow waist and, for the time being, thinks no more.
Sometimes this place has its advantages.
Maccabee arrives at the restaurant early. Ekaterina, of course, is earlier. She has never allowed him the upper hand, even for a second.
“Mother,” he says, unbuttoning his blazer, then sitting down across the table from her.
“Ekaterina,” she corrects him.
“Yes, of course. Ekaterina. I trust your flight over was smooth.”
“We aren’t here for small talk, my Player,” she snaps.
“Of course,” he says again. He has been wondering whether perhaps there is no important mission; perhaps it’s just been long enough that she wanted to see him, made an excuse.
But he should have known better.
A waiter silently materializes at their table, handing Maccabee a wine list. “Will you have something to drink, sir?”
Maccabee suppresses a smile and orders two glasses of their most expensive wine. Six feet five, more than 200 pounds of raw muscle, with a fine dusting of stubble across his tan chin, he looks at least a decade older than his age. It comes in handy. He catches the waiter glancing back and forth between him and his mother, brow subtly furrowed, and knows what the man assumes. That this is an intimate rendezvous, that this woman must be very wealthy to entice such a handsome younger man.
They make quite a mismatched pair, Maccabee and Ekaterina. Like the restaurant, with its fine china and antique chandeliers, its tuxedoed waiters moving in elegant sync, Maccabee oozes wealth and good breeding. He speaks fluent German with a perfect Swiss accent (one of 13 languages he can speak like a native). His nails are manicured and buffed, his bespoke suit worth thousands and his A. Lange & Söhne watch worth exponentially more. He makes himself the center of every room he steps into.
Ekaterina taught him how.
She taught him everything: how to dress like a gentleman, to speak like he owns the world, to infuse his chilly smile with warmth when required, to charm the most beautiful of women into giving him what he wants, to woo and entice and persuade, to carry himself like a man of power with enough conviction that it becomes the truth.
Not that anyone would guess it to look at her.
In her youth, Ekaterina possessed legendary beauty and knew how to use it. She wielded her appearance as a weapon—hardly the only one in her arsenal, but often the most dangerous. But Ekaterina has no vanity. Invisibility carries a power of its own, she taught Maccabee. Especially for a woman of her age: Men want to underestimate her, to ignore her. She helps them do so, wearing frumpy dresses two decades out of fashion and two sizes too big, spraying her hair into a tangled and graying nest, letting her caterpillar eyebrows creep across her face.
Tonight she is wearing a fanny pack.
She looks like nothing so much as a hapless tourist who stumbled upon this Michelin-starred restaurant while in search of a McDonald’s. And this, Maccabee knows, is exactly the way she likes it.
“You still share a room with Jason Porter?” his mother asks. Their shared native language is Polish, but she speaks in the ancient Nabataean dialect, a long-dead language closely related to Aramaic. They are the only two on the continent who speak it.
This place is not your home, she told him about Warsaw, as soon as he was old enough to understand.
This language is not your language.
These people are not your people.
He was three years old when she told him of their Nabataean heritage, four years old when she told him of Endgame and promised that she would make him the Player.
Nine years later, the promise came true.
Maccabee has spent years studying the Players of the other lines—his competition. He knows most of them have been chosen for the honor through prophecy or competition. Children pitted against children in demonstrations of brute force, children trusted with the fate of their people because some alignment of the stars or the tea leaves suggested it would be so.
It is, in Maccabee’s opinion, foolish. Worse than foolish: naïve. Moronic. Fatal. To leave such a crucial choice to fate or accident? To imagine that because an eight-year-old could win a wrestling competition or a baby happened to be born in the shadow of Mercury in retrograde, they were worthy of Playing the ultimate game? Anyone stupid enough
to believe that deserves to perish, as all those lines inevitably will.
The Nabataeans know better. The game is strategy; life is strategy. The honor of Endgame falls only to those savvy enough to accrue power, ruthless enough to use it. Ekaterina is both, and she has created her son in her own image.
Maccabee doesn’t know how many strings she had to pull, how many people she had to blackmail, how many millions she had to spend. What he knows is that he is the result of her life’s dream. He is the reason she sought out a Nabataean man with the body of an Olympian and the brain of an Einstein, bore his child, then disposed of him so he couldn’t interfere. Maccabee is what Ekaterina made him, and he cannot remember a time when he hasn’t shared her dream of the future. He Plays for her as much as he does for his line.
“You know I would have alerted you to a change in condition.”
She nods. “Good. The Porter boy’s mother arrived in Zurich this morning and is staying at the Schlosshotel im Altstadt. I need you to gain access to her room and retrieve a thumb drive. She carries it in a bottle of aspirin.”
“Might I ask why?”
“You know better than that,” she says.
He does.
His mother has no official job and never has. The line is, ostensibly, ruled by a council of three, elected every five years. But these are merely figureheads, puppets; those who know anything know that Ekaterina pulls the strings, even though she’s not officially a council member. No one begrudges her, or if they do, they don’t live long enough to act on it—she’s proved she wants only what’s best for the line. She accrues financial and political power for their people, in any way she can, and embedded Maccabee at the Akademie foreseeing exactly this kind of opportunity. Children, she has explained to Maccabee many times, make their parents significantly vulnerable. Most children, at least. Most parents.
“I’ll need you to do it in such a way as to guarantee she doesn’t raise a fuss when she discovers it’s missing,” Ekaterina adds. “That’s essential.”
“Do you have a suggestion?”
“Do what you do best,” she says. “What I raised you to do.”
They both know what that means.
He raises his glass. “Consider it done.”
Here is what everyone knows about Serena Porter, his roommate’s mother: She is the first female CEO of Intellex, the world’s third largest tech company. She’s famous for her efficient management style and ability to turn million-dollar acquisitions into billion-dollar stock surges; she’s infamous for her ability to juggle work and family, the leadership of a Fortune 500 company with the nurturing of a husband and two children. (Personally, Maccabee finds this rather less impressive and substantially less interesting than the billions of dollars in profit.) She’s written two books about her time-management strategies and parenting advice and is about to launch both a magazine and lifestyle reality show about working mothers.
Here is what Maccabee knows, from prowling through his roommate’s emails and from paying attention: Serena Porter shipped her two kids off to boarding school as soon as they were old enough to read. The daughter is in rehab and the son, Maccabee’s roommate, is a semi-illiterate, fully alcoholic meathead who’s been expelled from schools in four different countries. The husband is having ongoing affairs with both the former nanny and Serena’s current secretary; he and Serena live in separate wings of the Porter estate and see each other only for photo ops.
Here is what Maccabee can tell about Serena as soon as he spots her across the hotel bar, sipping halfheartedly at her single malt Scotch: She’s lonely.
This will be a piece of cake.
Maccabee and Jason are polite strangers. They rarely speak, never interfere in each other’s business. But Maccabee has a tap on Jason’s phone and knows exactly where and when the boy plans to meet his mother. He knows Jason’s schedule inside and out, and knows that after hockey practice and before dinner he will stop back in the room to slurp a shot of vodka. Maccabee dissolves a handful of valium in the bottle of Belvedere, and then waits.
Soon Jason is passed out and drooling on their floor—he’s woken up that way plenty of times before, and will think nothing of it.
Maccabee slips into his favorite charcoal-gray suit and slips a pale blue silk handkerchief into his pocket. He slicks back his thick, wavy hair and grins at himself in the mirror.
Irresistible.
He finds a place at the hotel bar, sipping ginger ale from a crystal tumbler—he can’t afford to cloud his head with alcohol, but the soda looks enough like whiskey to pass. He makes idle small talk with the bartender, admires the mahogany bar and its array of top-shelf liquors, pretends to be engaged by important business on his tablet. And all the while, he watches her.
Serena Porter sips her Scotch, checks her watch, checks her phone, stares into space for a few moments as if forcing herself to be still, sips her drink again, then gives in, checks her watch, and on and on. Her expression never changes, but Maccabee is an expert student of body language. He can see it in her tight grip on the glass, the tremble of her finger on the phone, the firm set of her lips: She knows her son isn’t coming.
She half expected it.
Maccabee bides his time, waiting for the perfect moment. After she’s accepted that the evening is a lost cause—before she gives up on the night and retreats to her room for more lonely hours in front of a computer screen. In between, there’s a sweet spot, when she will long for him without even knowing he exists.
He waits for it.
A sip of Scotch, she checks her watch, and then—she puts her phone away. This is defeat.
Maccabee makes his move.
“Send the lady at the end of the bar a glass of the 55-year-old Macallan, on me,” he tells the bartender. Priced at $600 a glass in Serena’s home currency, the drink will show he means business. First-class business. “Tell her it’s better than the swill she’s drinking.”
He watches as his command is carried out, sees Serena’s thoughts flicker across her face as clearly as if they were spelled out for him in cartoon bubbles. She should not engage; she should go back to the room, answer her emails, leave a stern voice mail for her son, go to sleep.
She picks up the glass of Scotch and slides into the seat beside him.
“What makes you so sure I’m drinking swill?” she says.
He smiles, though not too broadly. A woman like Serena will want a bit of a challenge. “Everything is swill, compared to this. Trust me.”
“You have me confused with another kind of woman,” she says.
“You don’t trust people?”
“Certainly not strangers.”
“Certainly not anyone, I’m guessing.”
That earns him a cool smile of reappraisal. She won’t want a pretty face with an empty head; that’s not her type. Even for an ill-conceived one-night rendezvous, she’s the kind to want an equal. He can lower himself just enough to make it appear he is one.
She sips the Macallan. And, though she tries to hold it in, a small sigh of pleasure escapes her lips.
“A gentleman never says I told you so,” he says.
She turns to face him, boldly meeting his gaze for the first time. She looks good for her age—good for any age. Her long, black hair falls in soft, refined waves. It reminds him of pictures he’s seen of his mother, before he was born and she let herself gray. “You, on the other hand . . .”
He laughs. “I did tell you so.”
She nods to the bartender, orders a second glass of the Macallan. “And put it on my tab. His too.”
“Ja, Frau Porter.”
“I can afford my own drinks,” Serena tells Maccabee.
“And mine too, apparently. So much the better. I like a woman who will keep me in the style to which I’ve grown accustomed.”
“Ah, I’m keeping you, am I?”
“Would you throw a poor stray like me back on the street?” He bats his eyelashes mockingly.
“Are you fli
rting with me, young man? You must be young enough to be my—”
“Son?” he suggests.
She snorts. “I was going to say younger brother. How old do you think I am, anyway?”
“I’m not as dumb as I look, and I’m certainly not going to answer that. How old do you think I am?”
She appraises him. “Old enough to have very good taste in watches, Scotch, and women. Too young for me.”
“And yet.” He smiles.
“And yet.”
They continue on in this vein, tension simmering between them, shallow cleverness pinging back and forth, until he sees the loosening of her expression, knows she’s ready to go deeper.
He asks what’s brought her to this part of the world, and how it is she’s sitting alone in a bar, drinking her sorrows away. “Surely no one would be so foolish as to stand you up.”
“What is it about a woman drinking alone that’s so difficult for people to believe in?” she says. “Do I need an excuse to be here? Do I need to be waiting for someone?”
“You don’t need anything, I suspect.”
“Exactly.” Then she sighs. “I’m waiting for my son.”
“He’s late?”
“He’s drunk,” she says flatly. “Probably passed out in some girl’s dorm room.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“Enough about me,” she says. “Too much about me. Tell me about you.”
In his 16 years, Maccabee has invented so many life stories, he’s nearly lost track of the real one. He tells her he’s an artist—he knows she cares little for art. He exploded onto the scene in his early twenties, just out of art school, he tells her, and is now in Europe to be feted at the upcoming Art Basel. His pieces, he implies, sell for millions and are housed in museums all over the world. He’s been on the road for several months and is looking forward to getting back to his studio in Jordan. He longs for his homeland when he’s away: the red rock desert, the sweeping open spaces, the scent of garlic and thyme wafting on the air, sizzling dishes of mansaf, kubbeh, and wara aynab spread on his mother’s woven tablecloth. He tells her of how his sculptures are inspired by the stone city of Petra, its ancient fortresses carved into rock, as if they grew from the mountains themselves.