“Jealousy,” she scoffed.
“He has his own idea. He resents the idea that I was able to accumulate the money to get ahead of him. He resents having to use the university computers, instead of his own.”
“He can go to ding dong bell,” she said. It was a bit of rhyming cockney slang she had picked up in London. It meant that he could go to hell. The children would not understand what she meant.
IV
Janelle was at home, having spent three weeks in Hong Kong. She sat in their living room, wearing the black garter belt, dark stockings, and shiny black shoes she knew Dave liked.
“Chen.”
She called Chen Peng by his patronymic, knowing the use of his given name would suggest a friendship having developed further than she wanted Dave to know right now. They had tried two more of the Glorious Postures. Their relationship had two components: business and erotic.
“Chen took me over into China. We went to Guangzhou. I ate something I never expected to eat in my life. A snake. They were in cages on the sidewalk, and Chen invited me to choose one. They were in three cages, according to size. He suggested I take a medium-size one.”
“Alive?” Dave asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Venomous?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. Anyway, it was carried to the kitchen, squirming on a waiter’s arm, and after a little while it was served as an appetizer. We shared it.”
“Ughh!”
“Actually, it was tasty. What they do is cut off both ends, slit it down the middle, rinse it out with rice wine, deep-fry it, and cut it in bite-sized pieces. It’s served with dipping sauce. The only difficulty I had was with picking up pieces with chopsticks.”
“It sounds like you had quite an adventure.”
“I did. What have you been doing?”
“I may have gotten your friend Tabatha Morgan off our backs.”
“I don’t think I want to know how. It must have taken courage.”
“She’s so damned grateful.”
“I suppose. Was it Samuel Johnson or Winston Churchill who said that about fat old women? Anyway, I meant not to ask if Chen came onto me. But—You said to use my own judgment. Can we leave it at that?”
He frowned, but he nodded. “Maybe you needed courage, too. Anyway, otherwise I’ve had an exciting time checking out Drake. It’s going to be a little complicated, but I think I know a way. In the first place, Drake Research Services stock is traded on NASDAQ. Have you ever heard of a professor of computer sciences at Stanford named Greenleaf?”
“No.”
“Well, Ben Haye is of course in San Francisco now, and I asked him to be confidential about it but to get me all the skinny he could on Drake. He came up with a lot of stuff we already knew. But he came up with something interesting. It seems that Professor Greenleaf hates Drake’s guts. He is also a respected systems designer on his own. He might—just might—be motivated to issue a report to the effect that Drake’s program is fatally flawed. The DRS stock took a little jump on Monday. It went from 23½ to 28 in one day. That seems to be because a professor at UCLA made a statement that his system is ‘marvelous.’ Now … if this fellow Greenleaf would issue a report, supported maybe by some others who despise Drake—and there seems to be quite a few of those—it might drive the stock down very substantially. At which point Hong Kong and Zurich jump in and buy a substantial minority interest. That will put somebody—Chen—in a position to apply pressure to Drake.”
“How do you know Greenleaf will cooperate?”
“I don’t. But the story is that he has an ego only a little smaller than Drake’s. Suppose somebody should endow a chair in computer science, maybe at Stanford, maybe somewhere else, and make it a condition that Professor Greenleaf will be the first occupant of that prestigious chair. I don’t know that it will work, but I think it’s one way of going after DRS.”
“Chen thinks Microsoft will also be after DRS.”
“I doubt that. Microsoft is under an intense investigation by the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department. If they are seen as trying to take control of still another technology, it could strengthen the case against them. We might be able to counter that, too. If Microsoft makes a move, maybe somebody could prompt Drake to complain. We’ll have to think about that one.”
V
SEPTEMBER, 1997
Cole and Emily rented a station wagon and drove Jenna to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan—a station wagon for her foot locker and other baggage. They moved her into her dorm room, and that evening they had dinner. In the morning they left for New Jersey. It was a wrenching experience for them to leave her.
It was more wrenching for Jenna than she had expected. But she was so busy with the processes of orientation and registration that she had little time to think about it. She was on campus a week before classes began. She found she had to take courses she had not expected: required courses. She learned that she could not declare a major in her freshman year but had to go through something the university called a core curriculum.
She found herself in a one-semester course devoted entirely to studying Plato: a Greek philosopher she had never heard of before. They studied The Republic. She learned that the question, What is justice? was not as simple as she might have imagined—if she had ever thought of it before. It was not so simple as, “Speak the truth and pay your debts.”
When her roommate saw that she had pierced nipples and wore rings in them, she was fascinated. Girls came to their room to see them. Not all her fellow students were midwesterners, but most of them were; and she discovered that they came from a very different cultural background from what she came from.
Mary Straughn, her roommate, was from a town on the Ohio River, called Marietta. She was not only fascinated but a little repulsed by the nipple rings. But she was not a virgin, as Jenna was.
Jenna was probably the only girl in the dorm wearing rings in her nipples, and the least sexually experienced on her dorm floor.
“Hey, Jenna, do you like to give head?” Mary asked one night when they were lying in the dark, Jenna on one of the two beds in the room, Mary in the other.
“I’ve never done it.”
“Never—You take ’em all in the twat?”
“I’ve never done that either.”
Mary rolled out of bed and switched on a desk lamp. “Hey! Are you serious? You want me to believe you’re a virgin?”
“Well … I guess I just never met the guy I wanted to do it with.”
Mary grinned. She was a pudgy, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl, eighteen years old. “You’re gonna have to, sooner or later.” She sat on the edge of her bed, naked, shaking her head.
“I suppose so.”
“Take it from me, Jennings, head is best, until you’re married and want to have kids. When you don’t want to get pregnant, suck him off. He’ll love it and get off your case. I’ve had four guys. The first one, I didn’t know about giving head and almost got knocked up. He used rubbers. You can’t rely on ’em. Of course, now I’m on The Pill, so I can go either way. The university health service will provide. I think you have to have a letter from a parent, authorizing. I don’t know. I have my prescription, and my mother will mail ’em to me each month.”
VI
OCTOBER, 1997
Professor John Greenleaf was as big an egomaniac as Willard Drake. It was probably inevitable that a rivalry between two such personalities would turn petty and bitter.
Greenleaf sat at breakfast with his companion Douglas Livermore. Greenleaf was fifty-five years old, a muscular, athletic man who played tennis and swam daily. Three evenings a week he worked out in a gym. He was a graduate of Harvard and a recognized authority on computer science. Livermore was twenty-four years old, a graduate student, who in his own right was becoming known for his ingenious systems designs. He was tall and slender, a blond with striking light blue eyes, which some people found disquieting, discerning a suggestion of determination,
even of cruelty, in them. He was the latest in a series of graduate students who had lived in Greenleaf’s apartment and shared his bed.
This morning he was naked, as he usually was in the apartment. Greenleaf liked that. So far as the younger man was concerned, this and the rest of the relationship he had with the famous man was a fair price to pay for his sponsorship.
Greenleaf stabbed a finger at the morning newspaper. “His goddamned stock has gone up! Those out-of-town idiots who came to look at his system went around and shot off their mouths about what a marvelous thing he’s got, and the silly market bought DRS without knowing a damned thing about it.”
Livermore went to the counter beside the sink to pour more orange juice into his glass. “Want some, Professor?” he asked.
“Thanks.”
The young man returned to the table with his glass and picked up Greenleaf’s. The professor looked up from the newspaper and watched him. The view of the young man’s taut, twitchy butt aroused him. When Douglas turned and came back toward the table, the professor stared at his body.
“All he’s got that we don’t have is goddamned money!” Greenleaf groused. “His inheritance seeded this thing of his, and he floated a fraudulent stock issue. Doug … if we can just somehow get it going, our idea is superior. It is more economical of resources and will be cheaper to operate. Drake’s system is going to look clunky beside ours, if we can just get it out.”
VII
Sitting on her cot, in lockup, Alexandra took notice that five years had passed since she arrived at Bedford Hills. She watched the evening news on her little television set. All she could get were the networks, and everything they broadcast was boring. She watched the local and national news, just the same, on the chance she would hear some reference to Dave. Once in a very long time, she did.
She had begun to take an interest in baseball, also in football, and watched every game that was broadcast. At eleven o’clock they switched off the electricity in the cells. The light went out, and the television set went dark, and she had no choice but to stretch out and try to sleep.
Which was not easy. Her thoughts were not pleasant.
Apart from the simple oppression of confinement, imprisonment was burdensomely boring. Hours and days crept.
Emily came once a month, faithfully. Emily said nothing about it, but Alexandra was aware that she had become fat and slovenly. What difference?
“I suppose Janelle is beautiful as ever.”
“I don’t see her. She spent some time in Hong Kong and China recently. They are establishing a Far East connection of some sort.”
“Let’s hope they make ten fortunes.”
Not confident that their conversation wasn’t recorded, they never mentioned Alexandra’s percentage.
“If we know Dave, we can be sure he will.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I
NOVEMBER, 1997
Ben Haye was still serving as CEO of Enterprise Bank. Dave told him to look at Professor Greenleaf and learn everything he could about him. It took Ben very little time to discover the relationship between the professor and his graduate student Douglas Livermore. It was well known around the campus, which was tolerant of it.
Graduate students were exploited in many ways, and this was only one of them. If Livermore had been a woman, the case would have been different. But this graduate student was a man—one building a record for brilliance and success—and it was obvious that the relationship was entirely consensual. In fact, some would have said that Doug Livermore was exploiting Professor Greenleaf as much as the professor was exploiting him.
On the basis of information obtained, Ben had a young lawyer for Enterprise Bank—Joseph Giannini, who was distantly related to A. P. Giannini, founder of Bank of America—contact a young woman named Sydney Toller, herself a graduate student working toward her doctorate in mathematics. He invited her to dinner at the Top of the Mark, which he hoped would impress her. Maybe it did, but she was no unsophisticated young woman; she ordered a double Glenfiddich straight.
“I suppose you have some reason for inviting me to dinner, Mr. Giannini.”
“I have. It’s a privilege, in any event.”
Sydney Toller was a pretty young woman, not delicately pretty but very attractive. She had glossy, dark brown hair, thick eyebrows, brown eyes, and a wide mouth with rather thin lips. Hers was a strong face. She had a well-toned body. She was wearing a black cardigan sweater over a white blouse, also a short black skirt.
“May I call you Joseph?”
“You may call me Joe.”
“I am Sydney. I prefer not to be called Sid.”
Joe was drinking a martini. It was said that the martinis made in the Top of the Mark were the best in the world. He was a tall, slender man, thirty years old, with black hair and an long, strong face, emphasized with penetrating blue eyes.
“I understand you are working on your Ph.D. in math,” he said.
“You seem to know a great deal about me. Why?”
“Nothing sinister. Enterprise Bank thinks you may have some information we could use.”
“Specifically?”
“Can we talk in confidence?”
“That depends on what we are going to talk about.”
“Well … as I said, it’s nothing sinister. I am sure you know that Professor John Greenleaf is working on a voice-recognition system to rival Willard Drake’s. His chief problem is lack of money. Enterprise Bank might be willing to lend him money. But we need to know a great deal more about him and about what he’s doing.”
“So what would I know about that?”
“Maybe very little about his system. But maybe a great deal about his character.”
She drew a deep breath. “I follow you. You really have been sneaking around.”
“Not I. I was handed the information. I don’t like the people who got it, and I don’t like the way they got it. None of them could possibly have been allowed to contact you.”
“Sleazeballs?” she asked, sipping from her Scotch.
He nodded. “The officers of Enterprise Bank thought maybe I could talk with you on terms of some mutual respect. At least, I wouldn’t offend you on sight.”
She chuckled.
“So you know what I’m interested in—that is, what Enterprise Bank is interested in.”
“Doug livermore,” she said. “Your sleazeballs really did check around. Private detectives, I suppose.”
“Professional sleazeballs,” he said.
“So why do you ask me? You already know.”
“Only the superficial facts.”
She sighed. “Let’s order dinner. Then I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Joe summoned a waiter, and they ordered.
“Okay,” she said. “Doug places ambition ahead of all else. Greenleaf is in a position to advance his career. Doug and I were living together. He moved out and moved in with the professor. Were we in love with each other? I don’t know. Were we thinking of marrying? We hadn’t talked about it. But he left me and went to live with Greenleaf. He’s bi. He’d had other relationships, both kinds. The professor isn’t. He’s strictly a fag.”
“What relationship do you have with Livermore now? I mean, is he still a friend?”
She smiled. “When the professor’s out of town … You follow me? I’m surprised you didn’t know. You know everything else. Of course, nothing serious could ever be established between us again. Doug is not to be trusted.”
“All right. Is it possibly true that Professor Greenleaf’s program is superior to Professor Drake’s?”
“I’ll tell you what Doug tells me. He says that when Drake conducts a demonstration of his system, it is always a canned demonstration. There is never a really open test.”
“Enterprise Bank is interested in Greenleaf. It’s interested in a voice-recognition system. If Greenleaf’s is better than Drake’s, there will be interested investors. We might think in terms of having him incorporate
and underwriting a stock issue.”
“So what do I have to do with all this?”
“If you can put us in contact with Doug and through him with Greenleaf, we would show our appreciation.”
“A bribe?”
“Not at all. Compensation for services rendered.”
“You want me to open talks between you and Doug Livermore.”
“If we approach him directly … Who knows? Maybe you could tell him you are dating a lawyer from Enterprise Bank, who has expressed an interest in what Doug and Livermore are doing. Maybe we could arrange for him to see us together somewhere.”
Sydney grinned. “Businessmen are as devious as academics,” she said.
II
Ben Haye spoke to Dave on the telephone.
“So far, so good,” he said. “The girl will put Giannini in touch with Livermore, and Livermore will put him in touch with Greenleaf.”
“Then it goes beyond Giannini,” said Dave. “Who’s going to make the proposition to Greenleaf?”
“You want me to do it?”
“I don’t think so. You are linked to me. I’d rather it be somebody independent of us.”
“Giannini is a good boy.”
“Yes, but he’s with Enterprise Bank.”
“True.”
“Uh … Suppose Enterprise Bank terminated him and sent him out to Hong Kong. I think you told me he’s not married. He’s free to move. I can have Janelle call Chen and see if he would be willing to establish a smart young American banker as a Far East banker. Then, if the shit hits the fan he’s out of sight and hard to find.”
“They could trace him.”
“Not if he’s carrying a Hong Kong passport, which Chen can arrange, I am certain. He won’t even have to get it forged. I’m sure he can arrange a Hong Kong passport for Giannini.”
“Maybe he won’t be willing to go.”
“I leave it to you to convince him.”
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