“All eyes were on Iona. The men couldn’t take their attention off her. As to the women, they couldn’t keep their eyes off her, either, fantasizing being her.”
“I don’t know what to say, detective,” Piper said. “Other than, if I were the genius sociopath you say I am, I would not have made it so easy on myself to slip my neck out of the noose. Hardly sporting, as you say.”
“Hardly,” Japhet had to admit, thinking about it. Piper formed a sphere of air trapped between his splayed fingers, as if he was admiring the world turning in his hands. It was just the kind of shit for which Augustin was famous. Japhet had studied the handheld camera footage on him, and camera-phone footage, all low-def, and amateurish enough to mask the identify of someone who looked a hell of a lot like him, just not so much the body language, his tics and mannerisms, all of which this guy had. It was one more nail in Japhet’s coffin come time to insist on holding Piper another forty-eight hours. He needed more time to get some traction on his investigation to keep Piper and Cliff from slipping away forever.
Thank God this was Italy and not America, or he’d have had to let them go already. According to Italian law, so long as they were “still gathering information that could be destroyed if they let the parties in question go” they could hold these three for weeks. But that gambit was a tough sell, considering they had all the evidence which could possibly be destroyed already in hand. But more than anything, not even the Italian legal system wanted to screw with the real Ainsley and Augustin. That much money and power carried influence and could slice through careers faster than a paper shredder through paper.
Time to switch tack yet again. Time for some reverse psychology all his own. “What gets me,” Japhet said, taking his seat opposite Piper, and squeezing the empty pack of cigarettes in his hand in a prototypically Augustin-like gesture “is this. What happens to a news reporter, his whole career ahead of him—responsible for some of the best journalism I’ve ever encountered, mind you—that makes him go psycho? Quite the lady’s man, too, from what I hear. I mean, the world at his fingertips…”
When Piper missed the next couple beats, Japhet’s sense of triumph soared.
“Maybe he was more average than you think. Even if he was exceptional, was he good enough to survive the final cut? As more and more newspapers go under, fewer and fewer people reading, or at least paying to read, with all the free stuff on the Internet…?”
Japhet was finally getting somewhere. Here was this guy baring his soul, at last. Maybe he’d finally had enough of feeling invulnerable, and he was helping the poor, stupid detective slip the noose around his neck, per his own irrepressible death wish. All these guys had a death wish. At least that’s what all the books said. “So maybe he settles for a smaller salary,” Japhet suggested. “Can’t imagine those ezines pay much. Maybe he doesn’t have to take a pay cut. After all, even small ezines are global. Just so long as it has a well-defined niche that serves a specific clientele better than anyone else. Seems to me, the new marketplace just forces you to identify what it is that’s so special about your writing that no one else can really duplicate. Not only does that help you lock in your niche audience, it helps you become all you can be.”
He let Piper stew on that, he could tell he was vacillating before the logic. Maybe he should have stopped there, but he continued laying it on thick. “Probably more chance today to make it as a journalist, even a mediocre one, than ever, hell, as anything, carpenter, plumber, police detective,” he chuckeled, “provided your niche is specific enough and you play to it well. Lawyers latched on to this coping mechanism long before anyone else when there were too much of them for comfort, and now they’re all doing well, even if they aren’t all getting rich quick.”
Piper shrugged his shoulders. Japhet could tell it was an argument Piper hadn’t considered, a bend in the road not taken that maybe he wished he had. If so, it meant Japhet could continue to soften him up with more blows to his ego.
“If I’m right,” Japhet said, “then maybe it’s not too late to rein in the psychokiller part of yourself. Hell, you could crank out one bestseller after another from jail. You sure wouldn’t be the first. Eventually, public opinion turns your way; I mean, who isn’t feeling pushed over the edge trying to survive this marketplace? You’re out, back to work in less time than it takes to get even two of those bestsellers published, maybe with a standard of living only the best criminals could even dream about.
“Maybe this path you’re on, it isn’t your best foot forward. Surely you had to think it was tapping a core competency a little better than journalism. That’s what they call it these days,” he said, laughing, “core competency, right? One more sign corporations really do rule the world, their corporate-speak is replacing everything. Even the hoodlums on the streets talk about core competencies.”
He laughed harder, in a more staged, calculated manner. “Maybe now that you’ve had a chance to reconsider where your core competencies lie, you can reconsider a confession.”
Piper stewed on his words.
Finally, out of the silence, Piper spilled. Only not in the way Japhet had imagined. He cried, tears and sobs erupting so violently, he had to rush his hands to his face, wipe his eyes with the middle joints of his fingers. He had definitely gotten Piper to regret the path taken versus the path abandoned. But then Piper segued into loud raucous laughter to cover the nerve Japhet had struck. “You’re fun, Japhet. A hell of a lot more fun than financial statements. I might have to take up a life as a psycho to live up to my expectations as much as yours now that you’ve raised the bar for me. Clearly, being rich isn’t everything when I can use the marketplace to help me discover who I was truly meant to be.”
“Fine, have it your way,” Japhet said, standing, changing tack yet again. “Why don’t I go check the math on your scribbles? We have one of Augustin’s peers on the other side of that window, one of the five men in the world qualified to tell the fake from the real thing.” He said it to see if he could make Piper flinch. He didn’t. “Maybe I was wrong about it being early enough to save your soul. A halfhearted, inexperienced psycho would have flinched just then. But not you. You’re committed. All your chips in. There’s no turning back for you, is there?” Japhet figured he’d leave him to think about that, one more jab to the ribs while he checked out his math with Taggart.
He exited without looking back at Piper to judge the reaction to his last words. He’d have the cameras for that later, which is what he was down to now that the in-the-flesh Piper had proven too smooth for him. The instant replay still held out promise for squeezing out more information his mind couldn’t capture in real time, not able to work fast enough—not as fast as Piper, anyway.
***
Japhet was right about one thing, Piper thought. It was a little scary just how well he took to play-acting, as if it was easy to dissociate from himself, from people in general; the stuff of sociopaths. He kept telling himself so long as he was hunting other predators, the good side of himself would continue to win out over the bad. It stood to reason, even if it didn’t exactly feel that way. Even Ainsley and Augustin were just a different kind of predator.
***
“Well, is he jerking my chain or not?” Japhet said, handing the notepad to Taggart, who grabbed it away from him before he could ease his fingers off it. The guy speed-read the charts like a savant, holding it up to his face as if he was just as willing to be unimpressed as Japhet was impressed. When no answer was forthcoming, Japhet glanced at Herron for an explanation.
Herron translated for him. “He needs time to commit it to memory so he can rush out of the room and hammer out the trades on his cell phone, self-serving bastard that he is.”
“Aren’t they all?” Japhet blasted. “Like I care how much richer he can make himself in the next five minutes. I just want an excuse, any excuse to hold that scumbag a minute longer.”
Taggart finally rubbed his eyes, and handed the pad back to Japhet. “It’s Au
gustin, all right. There are two, maybe three guys in the world who could have pulled that off in the timeframe he did. He did it off the top of his head, no less, and with no computer to back him up, dialed into real-time trades on the major exchanges. You can’t fake that kind of mathematical, acumen, gentlemen. You just can’t.”
Japhet shook his head. “I don’t know how the bastard did it.”
Taggart bowed to the two men. “Sorry, gentlemen, but I’ve lost more money in the last hour being jerked around by you two than I did in the crash of 2008. You’re on your own from here. That’s more Mr. Nice Guy than you would have gotten from Augustin or Ainsley.” And with that, he was gone. The mechanical arm closed the door behind him, sealing Herron and Japhet in with nothing but their worst fears for company.
“Maybe he placed a call to one of the big three before walking in here, bought the information,” Japhet suggested.
“Buy one of those guys? Not with the money he has in his account. Not with the money you have sitting around in a numbered account offshore no one else knows about,” Herron insisted.
“I guess I know when I’m reaching. Fill me in on the other two. Tell me you did better there,” Japhet said, sounding like a beaten man, he knew.
***
“You mind?” The detective gestured, holding out the pack of cigarettes.
She nodded.
“I don’t blame you. With a face and a body like that, I wouldn’t want anyone messing it up with cigarette smoke, either.” He stowed the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, then slid out the chair with the metal legs that had lost their plastic feet. They screeched against the cement like an alley cat getting its tail bit. When the scraping was done, she needed a cigarette. He was gauging her startle response the entire time.
“I think I read somewhere that they smoke in the movies to give them something to do with their hands.” He laughed nervously. “This is no film, is it?”
That was his offhanded way of indicating the seriousness of the situation, all the while sounding more needling than if he’d just threatened her outright.
After flopping down in the chair, he played with his lighter, one of those stainless steel models they came out with in the 1930s. He rotated it in his hand, flicked it open, spun the wheel to light the flame, then closed the lid to snuff the flame. Over and over again. It would have been a lot less annoying if she’d just let him smoke. Maybe that was the point he was making: give him what he wanted, and this whole interview was going to go a lot better for her.
He scrutinized her like an art appraiser who couldn’t afford to let an ace forger get past him. When he’d leered at her long enough to regain his composure, he said, “You know, ever since women’s lib, guys get hit on just as much as you, and treated as sex objects something terrible, too. I hate it.”
She answered with a short abbreviated laugh that was really more of a condescending sneer, a judgment, and a dismissal, all in one.
“There you go. That’s what I mean. It’s like going to an AA meeting and shouting from the rafters, ‘I’m addicted to sugar.’ They look at you and laugh. No sympathy. Now women, they get all the sympathy. Why’s that? And don’t tell me it’s because guys know they’re dogs. Women have their boy toys; they like their fun just as much as we do.”
She opened her bag and showed him the treasure trove of jelly beans. “Join me.”
He laughed. “Is this how you control your nerves?”
“I’m on a mission to get fat and ugly as quickly as possible. I’ve spent my last year getting hit on. The sooner I’m invisible, the better.”
He grabbed a handful of jelly beans and tossed a couple into his mouth. “Brilliant! I was thinking the cigarettes would turn me into a prune, eventually…”
“Shit, that’ll take thirty years. That’s no solution.”
He smiled. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“No, I always bring a bag of jelly beans to a police interrogation.”
“Maybe I’m serious, too. Got hit on three times this morning before I could get away from the street vender with my zepolle, and my day hadn’t even started yet.”
“You are a pretty fine piece of meat.”
He chuckled. “You done leering at me?”
“How did you know I was leering at you?”
“I’ve trained myself to leer with my peripheral vision too. That way I can pretend to be looking at anything. It’s great cover, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “You’re all right for a detective.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The job’s the perfect cover for someone with an antisocial personality,” she said.
“Shit, lady, we don’t need to tell all in here, just enough to get us through our day.”
She smiled at him. He really was growing on her. His olive skin, muscular build, Latin looks, even the fact he was a few inches shorter than her, and she liked her men tall, seemed at best, under the circumstances, a petty consideration. Or maybe like her own version of antisocial personality.
“Shareef Cartel,” he said, shaking her hand.
“What is that, Arabic?”
“Hell if I know. Never got a chance to interview my parents. They died soon after I was born. Short of exhuming the bodies and doing a DNA test, we’ll never know, not for sure, anyway. Maybe it was one of those trendy names going around at the time.”
“What about geneology trees? Public records?”
Shareef shrugged. “In Italy you can come by a social security number and an identity for less than the cost of a decent meal. For a guy who just doesn’t like living with the slightest doubt…”
She smiled. “Iona Pax.”
“Yeah, I know. The fact that so many other people know makes me feel small. Why is that?”
“Few men are strong enough to live in the shadow of a woman without growing all twisted from the lack of direct sunlight.”
“Got that right,” he said, playing with the lighter, and leering at her, as if he was contemplating a future living in her shadow. No, she realized, he was pausing to cue her she had finally said something significant, something psychologically revealing, something that slipped past the bullshit dialogue acting as so much smoke and mirrors. Something explaining her dynamic with Cliff and Piper. She took a second to upgrade her impression of him.
“Tell me, what’s with the two Wall Street wankers? Takes two to wind your clock?”
“Plan A,” she said sighing, “was to get enough free financial advice to go it alone, live the rest of my life as a shut-in, never having to go out.” She grabbed a couple more jelly beans and chewed them. “But the bastards keep stringing me along, sensing as soon as I find out what I want, I’ll dump them.”
“You really that traumatized by your own beauty?”
“Traumatized? Maybe. The word I would have used is ‘limited.’ I want to see what it’s like to live life no longer hemmed in by others’ fantasies about me. After a while, you find yourself either acting them out, or doing just the opposite to drive them away. Either way, they’ve won; they’ve shaped your behavior and your every response better than a fire burning your house down.”
“Most beautiful women learn to do and say things to break the spell of their beauty, long enough for the guy to realize they’re treating them like a sex object, and to stop it. Just the price of doing business. If they were fat and ugly, they’d be using a different magic to break a different kind of spell, wooing with their wit, their intellect, their inheritance, whatever. Different strategy and tactics prevail, depending on which hand you’re dealt, but if you want to win the game, Iona, it’s all strategy and tactics.”
It was another needling remark regarding the undertow of their conversation taking one or both of them down.
“So you see why I’m not buying it, Iona?”
She hesitated, reading him. Then she grabbed the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, fished the lighter out of his hands, lit a stick, took a drag, and returne
d the pack to his pocket.
He lit a cigarette in turn. “Thank God. I hate playing a part that just isn’t me, don’t you? So easy to lose yourself in it, until you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.” He blew a smoke ring and let her shoot a torrent of smoke through it with the fire hose of her pursed lips. “So tell me – what really drives you, Iona?”
“Maybe I don’t need an excuse to hate. Maybe the excuses are just smokescreen, as you say. To hide the fact that if I didn’t feel hate for others, I’d feel hate for myself, which is just too damn draining.”
He toyed with his lighter. It was his main tell, although he had others, that indicated when he was buying what she was putting down, and when he wasn’t. If he needed a few more seconds to put the latest clue to good use, then he scratched the itch under his nose with the thumb of his left hand. Like he was doing now.
“So why not get therapy for the hate? I imagine there is a whole ladder of emotions you can climb rung by rung, holding on as long at each level as you need to catch your breath.”
She exhaled smoke in a sigh akin to dragon’s breath. The enveloping cloud wasn’t enough to erase the scorn on her face. “I’ve spent my entire life in therapy. Didn’t take. Something too horrific lurking in my past to ever get over.”
“Maybe you just didn’t try hard enough.”
She said, “Maybe some habits are so hard to shake, your only chance is to break yourself all over again. And each time you start getting set in your ways, if you don’t like the new you, you break yourself again. Better yet would be to live a life where the pressure never lets up.” Speaking Cliff and Piper’s philosophy aloud, made her realize how much she’d come to believe it.
“Like the phoenix standing in the fire. Though, I suppose that’s an overworked analogy.” He scratched under his nose as he thought about it. “Is that what’s really going on here with you and the boys? Crafting a life for yourselves from which there is no escape? Short of death, of course? Of actually getting caught?”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 97