“What?” I said.
Luc snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s what I was trying to think of. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’! Palace full of rooms of progressive colors, oblivious and debauched partiers, a grisly end. I knew I’d read it somewhere!”
“Give her credit,” Theodora said; “the story’s not exactly universally known. I’d have been insulted if she’d used a blockbuster.”
“And Francis isn’t much of a reader. No way would he get the reference.”
“She’s missed some pretty big plot points, though,” Theodora mused. “For one thing, my auction house doesn’t have a basement. Didn’t have one, I should say, since it mysteriously caught fire as Mercedes was leaving. There’s practically nothing left of it, but I’m sure a construction expert could take one look at it and verify that it doesn’t and never did have a basement.” She stroked Francis’s bicep. “We could go there now, if you wanted to see.”
I had no doubt that Francis would see whatever she wanted him to. “What do you want?” I asked drearily. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” Theodora shot back. “Dating your brother? Because I like him. How was I to know his sister was the crazy who’d attacked my night guard and burned down my place of business? Try to get past your rampant jealousy, Mercedes. Yes, I do business with your boss. Yes, I date your brother. Deal with it!”
“Leave my family alone.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mercedes,” Francis said, drawing Theodora closer. She flowed into his arms and clung to him, lay her head on his shoulder.
I stepped back. She was trying to provoke me again. I knew what she wanted, but I wasn’t going to make another deal with her. I mustn’t. I’d seen the results of that game, and I had no desire to join her garden of golden statues.
Theodora met my gaze over Francis’s head. She rubbed strands of black hair between her fingers, but no expression save calculation shone from her silver eyes. Maybe she had made a deal with Francis, maybe she hadn’t, but it was clear there was nothing I could say that she would not twist against me.
I backed up further, picked up my handbag, and walked away.
Chapter 7:
Perverting the Course of Justice
I didn’t go far. I wasn’t walking for my health, only to get away enough that they couldn’t see or hear me. Then I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts.
My boss has never explicitly forbidden me to call him outside of work hours, but it was understood all the same. I could text him if I was going to be particularly late picking him up, but otherwise I had his number only in case of minor emergencies, such as if the bakery had neglected to make its usual selection of muffins or if he needed to take a call to get out of a meeting. Not even in our plans regarding the prefects had there been any question of my calling him.
Boundaries and barriers: my boss’s preference and my self-defense. Break down enough of them, and I’d no longer have a job.
I didn’t hesitate for a second.
Ring. Ring. Click. My boss’s voice, displeased: “Mercedes—”
“Theodora Banks,” I said.
There was a pause on the line. When he spoke again, his tone was one of caution. “How do you know that name?”
“She’s my eldest brother’s new girlfriend.”
The pause was longer this time, long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped. I had to bite my lip to keep from explaining more. He had plenty of information to go on; he just needed to process it, and my interrupting wouldn’t help.
His tone was different again when he spoke, grim and hard. “Number three-fifteen,” he said. “I’ll buzz you in.”
He hung up before I could answer. I was too busy staring at the phone to say anything anyway. Three . . . fifteen?
I didn’t know what I’d expected. Advice over the phone, maybe. For him to tell me to pick him up and drive him—somewhere. Or to wait until tomorrow morning. Or—or anything, really, other than his apartment number.
Oh, Francis.
My boss’s apartment is far enough from downtown to be affordable but not far enough to be inconvenient. It’s in a distinctly upper-middle-class area, suitable for someone living on a higher government pay grade than mine. My brothers and I had looked at places like it when apartment hunting. They’d struck me as comfortable and quiet, if sterile. Between the three of us, we’d have been able to afford one, but Luc had put his foot down. “I work from home,” he’d said. “You couldn’t pay me to spend my days staring at those walls. Besides, you know the kind of people who live there?”
“Professionals,” I’d replied. “Which we are.”
“I want to live somewhere with a park in the middle. Somewhere I can hear children playing and see actual women, ones who’ll look me in the eye instead of down their noses. And I want a balcony.”
“To lounge on or to watch women lounge on?”
“Both,” Luc and Francis had chorused.
I’d rolled my eyes. “Pigs. I’m related to a couple of pigs.” But Luc had won, and I’d eventually become glad of it. Although I’d never admit it to them, those apartments weren’t for the likes of us—and they were dull and colorless besides.
I found parking half a block from my destination. My boss’s apartment complex had a parking garage of its own not much further on, but I didn’t have a pass. I didn’t have a pass to get into the apartment building either, but I rang 315, and my boss buzzed me in without comment.
Though I’d never before seen the entrance hall of this particular apartment building, it was designed almost identically to others I’d scoped out: slate carpet, ivory walls, and all the personality of a dishwasher. I saw no one on my way in, heard nothing but a distant vacuum cleaner. The elevator was sterile, modern, and smelled faintly of pine.
My boss met me at his door. He swept his eyes over me but didn’t share his findings. “Come in,” he said, and took my coat. I was clumsy letting him have it, I was so surprised. He’d never done that sort of thing before. But then, I’d always been his employee before, not his guest.
My boss’s apartment was a model of glossy modernity, its personality a twin to the building at large. The main room contained a partially segregated sitting room, dining room, and kitchen, and it carried almost no imprint from its owner. The only splash of color came from the spines of books covering the right wall between two doors.
The place didn’t suit him. He was a man who valued old things. I couldn’t believe he’d been the one to decorate it.
My boss hung up my coat and ushered me further in, indicating one of the stools on the dining-room side of the kitchen’s wrap-around counter. I tucked my heels over the stool rung and propped my elbows on the counter, chin in hands to stop me from rubbernecking too much.
In silence, my boss began the preparations for tea. I guessed it made sense he knew how to make tea, though I’d never seen him do it any more than I’d ever seen him drive. His hands moved with his habitual decision and precision: kettle (stainless steel) on stove (black); teapot and matching cup and saucers (white) on counter (black); milk poured; sugar readied.
Tea cozy (pink). It fit the teapot like they had been designed for each other, and had clearly been knitted by an amateur, judging by the lumps and uneven stitches. The panels alternated between baby and hot pink yarns of different weights and textures. Atop this monstrous creation bobbled a pom-pom, two inches in diameter, alternating the two pinks until near the top, where the maker had apparently run out of pink yarn and substituted in cherry red.
At their best, tea cozies are informal and not the sort of decoration I would have expected him to pull out for a guest. But he wasn’t acting like it was anything to excuse or be ashamed of. I wondered who had made it.
Once the hot water was poured, we migrated to the dining table. I could see my boss was readying himself, and I waited patiently. Again, here my mental barriers helped me, and I stayed calm. I knew it was no
good being frantic or rushing him. That he had invited me here was proof that he was ready to talk to me; trying to force him would do nothing but make him clam up.
After he had let both the tea and his thoughts steep for several minutes, he poured one and spoke the other. “Have you worked it out yet?”
Had I—?
Clearly, my brain had been somewhere very different than his. “About . . . Theodora?”
He spooned sugar into his tea, not displeased. “Mercedes,” he said, “what do you think I am?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question or an offended exclamation. He waited for me to respond, genuinely interested in what I had to say.
Which didn’t help me in the least. “Would you please be more specific?”
He inclined his head. “You must think it strange that I knew about the auction house and its owner. You saw the sorts of people who made deals there—and what their deals did to them. Why do you think I went?”
“You said it was personal,” I said slowly, as if I hadn’t been mad with curiosity for days. “You wouldn’t have gone without good reason.”
“The proprietress did not tell you?”
I shook my head. “She’d have made me pay for the information—and the deal I made was bad enough.”
“I . . . see.” Words stuck on his tongue, and he wriggled them loose. “I admit, I . . . miscalculated. I am not in the habit of explaining myself, but you deserve . . . especially since . . .”
He trailed off. Maybe he wanted me to jump in and say the deal I made wasn’t so bad, that he didn’t have to worry about it.
I kept my mouth shut. If this leverage was the only thing I had to make him explain what was going on, to protect Francis, then I wasn’t about to alleviate it.
“What am I, Mercedes?” he asked. “What do you think I am?”
Back to this. I didn’t object; he usually told me things round-about. Like I’d understand them better if I worked them out for myself. Very Socratic, if only I had a clue where to begin. “You’re Jon Nordfeld,” I said. “Jon Erlend Nordfeld, if the proprietress—if Theodora—knew what she was talking about.” A subtle nod confirmed that she had, and encouraged me to continue. “You’re my employer,” I said. “A cryptanalyst and occasional cryptographer. A Carinan. A civil servant. A doctor in—various academic disciplines. Do I need to name them?”
“No. What else? Human?”
Something about the way he said it stoppered my response. Before I’d met the proprietress, I’d have laughed—or I’d have said no and expected him to laugh. Now, I took an opportunity to study him.
The first thing I noticed, which I always forget, was that he was not handsome. His features were too uneven for the aesthetic ideal and had the softness of one who spends his life eating muffins behind a desk. His hands were blunt and large and looked too clumsy to trace his flawless penmanship.
He was dressed, as always, conservatively and suitably. His taste was not so much excellent as discrete—the latter determining the former. Not urbane, merely neat: neat fingernails, neat suit, neat hair. He hadn’t dressed down in the comfort of his own home or even exchanged his work shoes for house slippers.
What these observations added up to, objectively, was that my boss looked ordinary but not suspiciously forgettable. Neither fair nor foul.
The proprietress’s most alien feature had been her eyes. But though his were stormy-sea blue and effulgent with brilliance, they had none of her inhuman gleam.
“Yes?” I hazarded.
Those eyes gazed steadily at me.
“No?”
Same.
“Maybe? Partially? Metaphorically?”
“All but metaphorically.”
“I need a hint, here.”
My boss tilted his head, his fingers tapping a tattoo on the table: one-two, four-three, five-four, two-three, one. I didn’t recognize it. He said, “Cipher.”
“You are a cipher or you want me to find a cipher?”
“I am Cipher.”
“And I’m confused.”
One-five, four-five, three-four, two-three, one. A piano exercise? Ciphers usually go for randomization, not pattern.
I tried again. “Are you a cipher puzzle, cipher solution, cipher number, or cipher computation?”
“The first two,” my boss said. “I am puzzle and solution—or puzzler and solver. I am human, but I bear the mantle of Cipher. You might say that I am the personification of ciphers, puzzles, and mazes. Have you figured it out?”
“Figured what out?”
“Why you’ve never been in my apartment before.”
Apparently, not for the reason I’d always assumed. Wondering what else I’d taken for granted and was completely wrong about, and feeling like an unprepared pupil being quizzed by a particularly intimidating teacher, I sipped my tea and looked around.
I’m not a cryptanalyst. The extent of my expertise is significantly beyond the daily newspaper, which only has a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. I can understand the theory of how to solve a certain type of cipher, once it’s explained to me, and follow the necessary steps to a solution. But I can’t crack ciphers if I don’t know the type, and I can’t untangle misenciphered messages without direction or invent new ciphers. It’s not that I haven’t tried; it’s that my brain simply doesn’t work that way.
But my boss knew that.
Depending on the expert you ask, ciphers exist in two or three general categories: transposition, substitution, and (debatably) concealment. The first two require a ciphertext, and I’d seen nothing of the sort since entering the apartment. That left concealment: a cipher that didn’t look like a cipher. Strictly speaking, concealment is a branch of stenography, not cryptography, but it fit under the heading ciphers, puzzles, and mazes. Invisible ink, text hidden in a hat band, a null cipher—a block of text in which one read every fifth (or second or ninth) word and discarded the rest. One voice speaking in a chorus . . .
A cipher that didn’t look like a cipher. Something hiding in plain sight. The simplest things are often the easiest to overlook, and the most humiliating to admit you’ve missed. But what did he think I’d seen? What could I have seen? What—
Spikes of headache formed. I closed my eyes, willed my forehead to relax, and released the tension. I was making this too difficult. This was something my boss had expected me to notice immediately, had so feared I’d notice that he’d always kept me out. That he presumed I’d have seen automatically when I so deliberately hadn’t snooped around.
I examined the room again, this time in full snoop mode.
The apartment was a study in grayscale. The carpet was steely, the walls pearly, the furniture inky. Most of the designs, when there were any, were geometric—overlapping circles, mainly. Even the books had the impersonal feel of a bookstore. Everything was spotlessly clean and looked unused.
He had lived here for as long as I’d known him and likely longer, and yet nothing struck me as to his taste—or having any taste beyond a generic template.
My boss refilled my teacup. He hadn’t removed the leaves from the pot, and this cup was strong, dark, and aromatic. The milk swirled through, sending out pale tendrils that mingled beneath the surface and turned the liquid golden brown.
Concealment cipher: a cipher designed not to look like a cipher.
“Do you actually live here?” I asked.
He beamed at me. “You might say that my living area has been transposed. Come.” He rose in one smooth movement, and I scurried after him.
“I hope you don’t think this means I understand,” I said. “Are you the concealment cipher or the concealed cipher or is the apartment the cipher or the concealer or—or something else?”
“All of the above.” He pushed open the door furthest from the entrance and stepped into his bedroom.
“Um,” I said.
It was as modern and bland as the main room. A gray duvet covered the double bed, along with a matching throw and pillow shams
. Side tables and dresser were black. The lamps were spiraled black pillars with white shades—very Modern Art. Everything looked clean, tidy, and unused.
My boss didn’t pause, tramping directly through to the opposite door—the bathroom.
It was nicer than my bathroom—but then, my apartment actually had two bathrooms: one for me, and one that Luc and Francis shared and that I avoided like the plague, which it likely contained.
Again, my boss kept going: straight through and out the opposite door.
Basic spatial awareness informed me that this door led back into the main room, and it did. We arrived a couple of feet down from my boss’s bedroom door, which was closed again. Had I closed it? Something felt different. Disassociating.
Back we went to the table, where our tea waited. I moved to sit at my cup and stopped, confused. Which was mine? I’d thought my back was to the front door, but I’d also thought I’d been on his left.
My boss took the right-hand seat.
Of course, he was correct. He didn’t take milk in his tea, so this one had to be mine. I sat, swiveled my teacup, and drank. Prince of Wales tea, getting tepid, no discernible variance in flavor.
My boss had an expression on, one he usually reserved for ciphers—like his attention was a magnifying glass for his brain. He was waiting for me to get it, and I hadn’t gotten it yet.
Holding my teacup to my lips, a barrier of china and infused water against that expression, I took in the room once more.
It was different. Backward. The light switch was on the door’s left, but most people are right handed. I’d had to swivel my teacup to grip the handle. This couldn’t be the same room as before . . . but then, what about the tea?
I downed the last gulps and flipped my cup over. The words were small, smudged, and printed in mirror image:
Since my boss seemed content to watch and wait, I got up and crossed to the bookcases. The titles on the covers were all backward, but when I opened the books, their contents read forward. Closer inspection showed that someone had painstakingly removed and replaced each cover.
Bargaining Power Page 10