Chapter 6:
Breaching the Peace
The next morning, I slid the ’Benz into the pickup indent of my boss’s apartment building. Almost before I had shifted to park, he was coming down, impeccably ironed and starched.
“Good morning,” I said, pretending I wasn’t scrutinizing him. He looked considerably better than last night—although by the time I’d dropped him off, he’d been well enough to walk into his apartment building on his own. He hadn’t had a key, of course, but someone had opened the door for him, and after that—I don’t know. His apartment building is nice enough that it might have a manager there twenty-four seven. Or he could have a keypad lock.
“Good morning,” he said, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the stale lavender burnt into the seats. I’d wiped them down and stuck a musky air freshener in the vent, but the smell remained. In the end, I’d decided that rolling down the windows to revel in rush-hour exhaust fumes would be considerably less toxic than breathing in lavender.
I handed my boss his newspaper, and we drove to work without another word. To be fair, that part was pretty ordinary.
I exercised patience through that drive and while parking in the CSS garage (the building’s labeled “Carinan Social Services,” to deceive the general public, my brothers, and other simpletons). I said not a word on the topic while greeting Tom and Marta and before making coffee. I kept my lips buttoned as my boss sipped and concentrated and got himself properly caffeinated. Then I made my one and only foray.
I cleared my throat and tapped on his desk until he focused on me with polite, pointed incomprehension.
“Look,” I said. “Your deal with the proprietress. It’s not going to be a problem, is it?”
His voice flat, his mouth likewise, he said, “That has nothing to do with you.”
I hadn’t expected gratitude, so I was surprised at how much his brusqueness hurt. I knew my boss well enough to know that his dignity was his shield, his intellectual acuity his greatest—perhaps his only—point of pride. To lose so thoroughly when I had (as far as he had seen) won, to be stripped of his good suit and even of his conscious mind, to have me witness this degradation, must be more than he could bear.
And the thing was, I knew he was grateful, deep down—or he knew he ought to be, and was ashamed that he wasn’t. Because otherwise, he would have liked nothing more than to fire me, so that he wouldn’t have to look at me and remember and know that I remembered.
More than once, my boss had honored my dignity by pretending not to see, not to know. It was only right that I return the favor. He was giving me a chance to withdraw.
I would withdraw, but I had to make sure of something, first. “You said you went there to talk to her—and, I presume, to ask for her assistance with the prefect situation.”
“That does not concern you.”
“Sr. Nordfeld,” I said, “I do not want that woman anywhere near the king.”
He restrained himself from answering immediately; that was another way I knew he was grateful. And when he spoke again, he actually softened his tone and gave me an answer. “My deal,” he said, “was personal and did not mention you or the prefects or the king. I appreciate your reinforcing it—but please do not ask me about it further.”
The sky must’ve wanted to cheer me up, because it wiped away its cloudy expression and smiled forth the sun. For a few days, summer had come again.
The grass steamed dry and brightened, filling the air with fresh green fragrance. Flowers poked their heads out of buds, spreading white and yellow petals to dress even the cracks of the sidewalk in their finest colors. Sundresses dotted the throngs of gray and black suits, and bare arms caught warmth. Wednesday was so fine that my boss consented to eat outside and hardly laughed at me when I, plantlike, turned my face to the sun.
I got Luc’s text during lunch, with instructions, and so I forced my boss to leave work on time for once. I dropped him off at home, tucked in the ’Benz for the night, and headed for my apartment complex.
Housing in Silvertip isn’t cheap, but outside the city center it isn’t atrocious either. My apartment complex lies along the border of where commercial meets residential: only a block from the nearest drugstore and half a mile from a grocery store. The apartment complex itself is a sprawling affair of three irregular loops of two-story apartment buildings, clover lobes surrounding a central park.
That park is one of the complex’s selling points, along with a pool and tennis court I’m always too busy or too tired to use. I often hear other people using the park, though, and I can see them from the balcony. Most days, it’s full of happily screaming children, and most evenings of teenagers who’ve come out to play crab ball. There are picnic tables, grills, a swing set, and a jungle gym. On fine evenings like this, the neighbors are out in force—and today Luc was among them.
He waved me over, and I skirted fifteen children, a basset hound, and two groups of picnickers to get to him.
“Fish or beef burger?” he asked.
“What happened to the chicken?”
“I’m out.”
“You’re—are you selling them?”
Luc flashed me a 150-watt smile. He’d better be selling them, I amended, taking in the number of meat hunks on the grill, or he and Francis were binging again. Francis can get away with binges, with the amount of exercise he gets hauling around giant piles of wood and whatever else it takes to build a mansion, but Luc’s a sedentary twig.
“It’s a good way to meet people,” he said. “And someone let Francis do the grocery shopping again.”
“You didn’t stop him?”
Twig or not, no one could mistake Luc for anyone but my brother. He’s a couple of years older than I am, a couple of inches taller, and my coloring exactly. He’s even near-sighted like I am, although he wears contacts, which I can’t tolerate. Women don’t flock to him like they do to Francis, whose muscles are out of control. But I’ve been gravely informed—by four of Francis’s girlfriends, no less—that Luc’s nerdy charm is irresistible. The Francises of the world are fun to date, but you marry a Luc.
I listened and nodded at these girlfriends and told them about some of the times Luc and Francis had locked me in the closet or put spiders in my bed or made me believe my parents had found me in a garbage heap or engaged in any of the other activities caring brothers perform to improve their baby sister’s character. Since one or the other of my brothers generally came in during my epic retelling, these stories were followed up by renditions of my amazingly clever and fully justified responses to the wrongs perpetrated against me.
Although admittedly, that’s not how my brothers described them.
The truth is, we Cartier siblings inherited excellent genes for personal beauty, although heaven only knows where Luc and I got our capacity for abstract thinking; I’ve yet to meet another relative with anything of the kind. My father still speaks with amazement that Luc went off to college instead of a trade school, and he actually fainted when I announced I’d gotten a scholarship to study history at the University of Avior. Why, asked our mother plaintively, couldn’t we stay in Batata and follow in the potato-farming trade? Or mimic Francis, who had had the decency to pursue good, honest construction work?
The newspaper recently ran an article about the shortage of skilled construction workers. There’s no shortage of people with history degrees. I’m sure I satisfied my parents’ ambitions for me when I became a glorified secretary. I never told them that I only took the job because it paid well, and I was saving up to get my eyes fixed for the military. Fainting was bad enough; I didn’t want to give my father a heart attack until absolutely necessary.
“Speaking of tasty dishes, by the way,” Luc said, “—I’m giving you fish, incidentally—Francis promised to bring his girlfriend by. They should be here any moment.”
I groaned. “If I have to listen to Number 44 again, I might shoot myself. Or her. Preferably her. Where are grenade launchers when you need them
?”
“Give me some credit,” said Luc. “You think I’d be out here, in plain view, if Number 44 were coming? I have some sense of self-preservation. It’s a new one. She’s—”
“Hot, dim, and insubstantial,” I filled in. “Like steam.”
“Strangely enough, no. Only one out of the three.”
“Dim?”
“Hot.”
“She has a brain and she’s dating Francis?”
Luc shrugged and served up a fish burger on a paper plate and handed it over. “I know, I know, but there’s no accounting for taste. Her name’s Theodora Banks. You might like her.”
Pigs might start wielding machetes while chanting in time to the national anthem.
“See for yourself.” Luc pointed his spatula, and I saw. I think I dropped my paper plate. I know I was suddenly on my feet, blood rushing in my ears.
Francis was at the opposite end of the park, coming our way, hand in hand with a woman his age or slightly older. She wore a floaty robin’s-egg blue dress and tall strappy sandals of exactly the same shade. Thick ginger curls cascaded loosely over her shoulders, which were level with my brother’s eyes. People gaped as she passed, staggered by her beauty. One man whistled. She was too far away for me to see her eyes, but I knew they’d be cold and silver as distant stars.
Francis said something, and she laughed and leaned against him. I couldn’t hear her laugh. I couldn’t hear anything but the blood thumping in my ears. The sun turned to ice, and the hairs on my arm and neck formed up in ranks and columns.
I like to think of myself as calm and collected. For the most part, I am calm and collected. But Francis is family.
They approached, too absorbed in each other to look at us. Then the proprietress broke off, met my eyes, smiled—and I lost it. I think I roared. I know I launched myself at her, because by the time Francis dragged me off, blood dripped from long scratches down her cheeks.
I thrashed and kicked, but Francis simply yelled at me to shut up as he looped his arms under my shoulders and hooked them behind my neck.
There was a gap there, a moment of red and black where I’m not quite sure what happened. But then I heard Francis saying to the proprietress, “I’m so sorry. She’s not usually like this—I don’t know what—Mercedes, cut it out—are you all right? Luc, take her to the apartment, put something on that—I’m so sorry. Mercedes, STOP.”
The proprietress picked herself up from the grass. She didn’t put a hand to her cheek or otherwise acknowledge the scratches, but she had stopped smiling. “I’m glad to see you again too, Mercedes,” she said.
My response was brief and to the point.
“Mercedes!” Luc exclaimed. He had moved beside the proprietress, ready to take her up to our apartment and tend to her out of our jointly purchased medical supplies, but the proprietress didn’t even look at him.
“Get off, Francis!” I snarled. “Let me go!”
“Will you control yourself?”
“Get off!”
“So . . .” Luc said. “You two have met before?”
“Leave,” I choked at the proprietress, unable to scream at her with my neck all bent over. “Go away! You have no right to be here, you—” I devolved into the sort of language that shocked Luc, though I don’t know why it should, the amount of time he spends online. Forming a coherent and compelling argument while your brain is swathed in red mist is harder than it looks.
The proprietress—Theodora—standing there with blood running down her face and dripping on her expensive dress, said, “She’s mad because of Jon.”
That name meant nothing to my brothers, though I stopped struggling under it, listening tensely.
“Don’t you know?” she asked, amazed. “Your sister’s employer—Jon Erlend Nordfeld. I’d have thought . . .”
“We know about him,” Luc said curiously, and it struck me how ridiculous and surreal the situation was. That we should be standing here, in a crowded park, with no one paying attention to us. That no one seemed to particularly care that I’d just publicly assaulted the woman they’d all been drooling over a moment earlier. That I should be mad with protective terror, and my brothers were treating my reaction as irrelevant. That my brothers seemed more interested in hearing gossip about my boss than anything else.
She’s doing something, I thought, and didn’t know what or how to stop it.
“It’s true,” Francis said, holding me almost casually now. “Mercedes has never told us his name for some reason. Jon, huh? I expected something more exotic.”
“Have you met him, then?” Luc asked, awed. “What’s he like?”
“Luc, Francis,” I said, “listen to me. Please.”
“He was a client of mine,” Theodora explained. She came up to us and laid a hand on Francis’s shoulder, out of my biting range. “Your sister came in after him, to spy on him. I’m sure she’s a fine woman, Francis, but she has a bad jealous streak.”
I think she said this to drive me crazy again, but it had the opposite effect. She didn’t know I’d spent years building emotional walls around my boss. Very little can get through on me there; it’s one of my strongest fronts. The rest of the red mist dissipated, and I let my muscles relax. “You are breaking our contract,” I said, reverting to the detached impersonality of our earlier interview. “You agreed not to seek revenge upon me.”
The proprietress said: “Your memory is faulty. I agreed not to seek any form of retribution, directly or indirectly, for anything you or Jon Nordfeld said or did during or prior to our deal.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m starting to get a pretty poor view of how you uphold your contracts. First, you set a monster on me—”
“On the contrary,” she replied. “I provided you with the key to safe passage out of my home, and you not only willfully contravened my instructions, you attacked my night guard and refused to leave.”
“You were holding my boss prisoner!”
The smile was back. “He could have left at any time. No one was stopping him. It’s not my fault he preferred my bed to yours.”
That was a mistake on her part, which is the problem with not playing fair: other people notice, and they don’t like it.
It also showed how little she knew Francis. His head shot up and his voice roughened. “Take that back,” he ordered.
Theodora seemed astonished he’d interfered. “What?”
“I will not have you slandering my sister in order to win an argument,” he growled, “or yourself by falling into false accusation. Take it back.”
I could see Theodora knew he meant it, but that she was confused. “I don’t live at my auction house,” she clarified. “I keep beds there because I serve alcohol, and sometimes guests overindulge and have to sleep it off. I’m not in a relationship with anyone—except you.”
Francis remained unmoved. “Take back what you implied about my sister,” he said, “or we’re over.”
That gave me a second of hope. Unfortunately, Theodora saw it and calculated the correct response. Her expression and voice instantly morphed into an apologetic version of the vulnerability that I so often use. She shouldn’t have been able to pull it off, tall as she is, but she shouldn’t have been able to pull off four-inch heels either. “I’m sorry,” she said to him. She repeated it to me: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sucks when you say something that makes you look bad.”
“Be gracious, Mercedes,” Francis told me. “She’s apologized. If I let you go, will you control yourself?”
“Yes.” I would, too. Now that my reasoning capacity had returned full force, I wasn’t about to let it go. I knew attacking her like I had had been stupid—going after a powerful enemy with unknown abilities is dumb at the best of times. It’s only when you have the element of surprise that overwhelming violence is effective against an opponent who outclasses and outguns you.
That sort of tactic wouldn’t work against the proprietr
ess right now; her level of unfazed told me I was hardly the first prospective victim who’d tried fighting back. I needed more information.
In the meantime, let her think I was making a concession by not immediately attacking her again. The more she deluded herself, the better.
Francis unwound his arms and stepped in between Theodora and me. I rolled my shoulders and cranked my neck from side to side. There was blood under my fingernails.
“That was fun,” Luc said. “But you distracted me, and the burgers burned.”
“Listen to me, Francis,” I said. “You know my character. You know I don’t randomly go around attacking people. That woman is a dangerous psychopath. You need to stay away from her.”
Francis sighed wearily and rubbed the heels of his hands up his forehead. “I know you don’t like her, Mercedes,” he said. “You never like my girlfriends. But try not to crow.”
I could have screamed. “This isn’t about her being your girlfriend! I have a very good reason for saying that that woman belongs in a hospital for the criminally insane, and if I had any proof, she would be.” I grabbed his wrists and pulled them down so I could look him in the eye. “Reach past whatever illusion she’s foisting on you, Francis! It’s not real. With strength of will—”
“This is no longer funny, Mercedes. It never was.”
“Listen to me! Has she gotten her claws into you? Have you made any deals with her? Francis, have you? This is important!”
“Stop it, Mercedes. Being my sister doesn’t give you a free pass for false accusations.”
Sun played merrily over green grass and picnic tables. Children laughed and shrieked. Burgers charred black. I told my brothers of streets, of rooms full of addicts and slavery, of a deal in an attic, of the monster in the lobby and the scratches in the basement and the contents of the kitchen.
The proprietress listened calmly, eyebrows bent in incredulity, voice making no attempt to stop or correct me. She was the first to speak when I finished, but she didn’t say what I expected. She said, “Isn’t there an Edgar Allan Poe story like that?”
Bargaining Power Page 9