A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  Crowson’s office was in one of those elegant converted houses between the university and downtown – you know, the kind with little round windows in front and a white gingerbread frieze hanging off the porch roof. He was actually in his office when Ingrid and Ben got there, slightly unhappy – not to mention sweaty - after driving around several blocks in search of a parking space and then hiking back to the address Lensky had forked over. It was close to noon by then and the Austin sun was just hitting its stride.

  Ingrid went inside to pretend she was looking for the (nonexistent) Past Life Therapy Group in the (also nonexistent) office 21F. Crowson Financial Services was in 21B, and while “looking” for 21F Ingrid verified that 21B was on the second floor, by the east wall.

  “He came out of his office to ask what the hell I thought I was doing in the building,” she told Ben when she got back outside, “so no, I don’t think we can lurk by the stairs while you riffle through his virtual files. It’ll have to be the east wall.”

  That was where the oleanders were planted, so it seemed – briefly – that at least some luck was with them. It was also where the building was shaded by live oaks, which they thought – erroneously – was another piece of luck.

  Ben had taught Ingrid the basis of Camouflage while they were driving to the office address. Now they both ducked behind the oleanders and she started visualizing while he concentrated on getting a remote look at the computer.

  He knew when her visualization got shaky because they were, abruptly, standing in the sunlight instead of under a dark blue virtual cloud. “You dropped it,” he whispered.

  “It’s the damned grackles. I can’t concentrate when I’m trying to dodge grackle feces.”

  She would say ‘feces.’

  “Okay, trade places.”

  They shuffled around each other and Ingrid yelped. “You didn’t mention the pyracantha!”

  “I thought you were bright enough to look where you were shuffling. Now concentrate, dammit!”

  “Maybe the, uh, ‘lady’ could concentrate better if she came out of those bushes,” said a third, and distinctly unsympathetic, voice. “You too, sir.”

  “Shit.” Ben reserved ‘feces’ for biology classes.

  “Now would you like to tell me what you were up to?”

  That was when Ben had what he considered his inspiration. “Ah, isn’t it obvious, officer?” He snaked an arm round Ingrid’s waist. “My girl and I were just looking for a little privacy.”

  The cop looked less than fully convinced. “Behind two oleanders and a pyracantha? You’re lucky you didn’t get any farther with her, I’d have had to run you both in for public indecency.”

  “It was an emergency,” Ben said. “Honey-babe here just agreed to marry me, and I wanted to kiss her.”

  “Riiight. Do you always propose to your girlfriend in a very public place? And without a ring?”

  “Sorry, I don’t have a settled technique for proposing. Next time I’ll be sure to ask you for lessons.”

  The cop made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere until they did, so they retreated down the sidewalk towards Ben’s car.

  “Honey-babe?” Ingrid muttered as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “Hey. I was improvising, all right?”

  “You’re lucky your precious Annelise wasn’t there!”

  “Actually I wish she had been. That girl is a genius at making up plausible stories. She’d probably have persuaded the cop to give me a boost up so I could work standing on the ledge outside Crowson’s window.”

  “Well, next time bring your little girlfriend and let me know how that works out for you!”

  “What really ticked Ingrid off,” Ben insisted when he was telling me this bit, “is that one of the grackles pooped in her hair and another got her down the neck of her blouse.”

  That explained why she’d disappeared into the bathroom as soon as they got back to Allandale House. She didn’t come out for forty-five minutes, but when she did, she was fully combed and groomed and wearing a clean, if damp, blouse. The only other sign of her unfortunate experience was that the blond braids wrapped around her head were still wet.

  By that time the rest of us were gathered in the break room. Observe the benefits of forethought; Jimmy had started by trying to take over my office to announce his discovery, but the absence of chairs inspired him to move elsewhere. He didn’t actually have anything worth forty-five minutes of discussion, but Ben was tired and I was on a mild aspirin high and Ingrid, of course, was de-grackling, though I didn’t know the specifics until later. So we let Jimmy have all the time he wanted to talk about Zillow and AirOffice and real estate rental listings before he got to the big reveal: 21A in Crowson’s building was vacant right now.

  “We could rent it!”

  “Takes too long,” Ben said. “Boris wants results now, not two weeks and a questionnaire and a rental history from now. And we want to get rid of Boris. No, we’ll just go in tomorrow. Jimmy, you’d better come with us in case I need to know more computer architecture.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ingrid said before she was quite in the room. “I’ve had quite enough of this clandestine business. Why don’t you take the wonderful Annelise, Ben?”

  Not having heard the full story by then, I was mildly curious as to why Ingrid was snubbing Ben. Not desperately curious; she was usually more likely to put me down, and I was okay with having Ben become the designated snub-ee for a change.

  “Believe me,” Ben said, “I would much, much rather have Annelise’s company than yours. But she does have class tomorrow morning.”

  He’d memorized her schedule?

  On second thought – why was I surprised? He was at least as interested in this girl as he was in Caspica caspica, and he’d already given me an earful on the box turtles of Mesopotamia.

  “How do you think you’re going to get in?” Jimmy wanted to know.

  “Fiddle the locks. Mathematically. Now that’s an application of topology with lots of uses. Move a small object a short distance for a big reward.”

  Ingrid rolled her eyes. “It’s also just slightly illegal.”

  “How can it be?” Ben demanded. “Everybody knows it’s impossible to open locks without a key or a lock picking kit. Since I won’t have any tools on me, clearly the lock was carelessly left open and I was just taking a look inside to make sure nothing was damaged.”

  “You might have used a credit card,” put in Jimmy.

  Ben gave him a tired look. “That doesn’t actually work nearly as well as the movies would make you think.”

  “When did you become an expert on picking locks?”

  “When it occurred to me that moving a latch or deadbolt back was sort of the reverse of how Ingrid moves objects towards her, except I stay in metric spaces.”

  The guy did have a talent for coming up with slightly twisted applications of very standard topology. He’d probably be the next Director if Dr. Verrick ever stepped down.

  “Might be a good idea to practice,” Jimmy suggested. Ben nodded and took his arm, and the two of them turned sideways and disappeared, presumably to practice fiddling all the locks in the Research Division.

  Ingrid and I sat back for a moment and just enjoyed the silence. Ben and Jimmy were presumably busy with their locks, and Lensky had gone out somewhere.

  “I hope,” Ingrid said eventually, “Ben never starts thinking about moving small bits of high explosives around.”

  “Mmm, could be useful, don’t you think? If these people Lensky’s after are planning a bombing?”

  “I just have this feeling that if you let a guy mess with explosives, his intuition is likely to come up with ways of creating a big bang rather than ways of stopping it.”

  That did seem too likely to be comfortable. We’d just have to stop the terrorists before they built a bomb.

  “So how was Scholz’s? Last night?”

  “Same as always. People. Tables. Uncomfortable chairs. Be
er. Grackles.”

  She winced at the word “grackles.”

  “I really meant, what was it like going out with Boris? Is he actually human?”

  “We weren’t ‘going out.’ Just, well, just having a beer together. And yes, he’s human, and he doesn’t like being called Boris.”

  “Tough. He’s not my type.” She thought that over. “Actually, I don’t see how he could be anybody’s type.”

  “Too crude?”

  “Too short.”

  “Isn’t that a function of where you start measuring from? If HK denotes my height and HT denotes yours, then given that HK < HT, in the set of real numbers there exist infinitely many values of x such that HK < x < HT .”

  “Do you girls ever stop talking about mathematics?” Lensky walked in with a white paper bag from Upper Crust. He dropped it on the coffee cabinet and began unloading the contents onto the tray beneath THESE ARE DOUGHNUTS. I could just reach it if I leaned back carefully.

  “Technically,” Ingrid said, “Lia was speaking mathematics. We were talking about men.” She looked at me. “And it’s a weak argument, you know. I don’t care how cute you think he is, he’s still a spook.”

  “A spook bearing gifts,” I pointed out, my mouth half full of chocolate croissant.

  Lensky raised an eyebrow. “If I go out and pretend I didn’t come in yet, can I hear the part about how cute I am?”

  “Ingrid’s just teasing you,” I explained. “That part didn’t actually happen.”

  “I’m crushed.”

  Fat chance.

  In any case, he was sufficiently uncrushed to invite me out for dinner. “I have to make sure you eat something to soak up the beer. El Patio?”

  One of my favorites. He must be compiling that dossier after all; I can’t resist their guacamole cheese enchiladas. Also, they have the best chips in Austin, paired with an authoritative salsa.

  They also have frozen margaritas.

  “I’ve been thinking about your family issues,” he said after we ordered.

  “Let’s not. I want to enjoy my food.”

  “And mine. Issues, I mean, not food.”

  “Probably not quite the same.”

  “No… You reminded me, though, that I’m not the only person in the world with family problems.”

  “I wasn’t exactly clear what yours were. Apart from financial issues, I mean. Want to tell me more?” I’d rather talk about his stuff than my stuff, which would never have come up if he hadn’t plied me with beer the previous evening. Tonight I was being prudent and sticking to frozen margaritas. They went well with chips and salsa. I loaded another chip and crunched away, waiting.

  He sighed and moved the basket of tortilla chips out of my reach. “You’re going to spoil your appetite, gobbling chips like that.”

  Bossy. Another major flaw.

  “I need something to balance the margaritas.”

  He moved my glass out of reach as well.

  Extremely bossy. But after inhaling half my drink on an empty stomach, I was feeling just a tad light-headed. Might be as well to wait until the enchiladas arrived.

  “Money issues… get mixed up with other issues. My brother.”

  He appeared to have come to a full stop.

  “Your brother?” I prodded gently.

  “Ten years older. No sense of responsibility. Also, as far as anyone could tell, no ethics. He made his living playing poker. He always insisted he was just good at counting cards and reading faces, but eventually he made the mistake of winning far too much from somebody who didn’t take losing well at all.” He frowned and tossed back the remainder of my frozen margarita, but I didn’t complain. This was my chance to get the dirt on the spook.

  Or, maybe, to find out what made the man tick.

  “People who upset the Latin Kings tend to disappear, or - well. Aleksi turned up floating in the Delaware.”

  “A family tragedy.”

  “For my mother, maybe. Something of a relief for the rest of us.” He raised my empty glass and caught a waiter’s eye. “Can we get another of these?”

  “Make that two,” I added.

  “What? You shouldn’t be drinking that much.”

  “I’ve hardly had a chance to drink at all. If you remember, that was my glass you just emptied. A relief?” While he was thinking that over, I leaned over the table and snagged the tortilla chips.

  “In a number of ways. Not least to his wife. He had a kid, too… Linda was too young to remember him. And Pamela was more relieved than anything else. She felt that working would be a lot easier than trying to get Aleksi to pay child support.” I noticed that he did not mention his own feelings about the loss of his brother. Clearly he found it easier to talk about his sister-in-law.

  “They were divorced?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing so straightforward. She would throw him out for a while, then he’d make a killing at some poker game and show up throwing money around and claiming he wanted to reconcile – get a steady job – whatever he thought she wanted to hear. And she’d take him back! I will never understand women.”

  “So what happened after Aleksi died?”

  “Oh, Pamela went to cosmetician school or some junk like that. Cost – well, it seemed like a small fortune to me at the time. But I finally got that paid off too, and she wasn’t doing badly until she took it into her head to move some place that doesn’t have snow. Here, to be precise.”

  “And is she still doing okay?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.” He moved the chips out of my reach again. That was okay; we were down to the crumbs in the bottom of the basket. “Apart from investigating terrorists, that is. She’s not exactly the world’s greatest communicator… or the most stable mother. I want to look at her living situation. See how my niece is doing.”

  Pedro brought our margaritas and a second basket of chips, which – the chips, not the drinks – Lensky waved away.

  “Bossy” might have been too mild a word. I mentally substituted, “dictatorial,” and wondered how his sister-in-law felt about his showing up like a representative of Child Protective Services. Not that it was any of my business.

  The food came then, and we both dedicated ourselves to it: me because I wanted to think about this hitherto undisclosed side of Lensky, and him, I think, because he was wondering whether he’d said too much to someone he barely knew.

  Or possibly he was thinking about getting to know me better. A lot better. I have to admit that I was more open to this possibility than I had been since he started throwing his weight around in the Center. But there was no point in thinking about that right now. Before we finished our meal he would probably find some new way to be offensive that would put me right off him again.

  He actually managed to stay civilized until the very end, when I was enjoying the quarter-cup of sorbet that El Patio calls a dessert. I like to take it slowly, trying to convince my mouth that it’s actually had dessert, and… well, he just had to comment on my ability to swirl sorbet around on my tongue indefinitely, didn’t he? And if the words were conceivably innocent, the smoldering look that accompanied them was not.

  Chapter 7

  It was still dark outside when I was awakened by what the Geneva Convention ought to define as torture. The aroma of actual good coffee wafted through my room. That in itself would have made for a big improvement in my dream. The way it kept insinuating itself into my nostrils and then receding: that was the torture part.

  First I had to pry my eyes open, then persuade them to focus on a most improbable sight: Ingrid, fully dressed and waving what looked like a very large paper cup from Quack’s.

  “Gimme!”

  “I told Ben that would get you up faster than pinching or shaking,” she said smugly, “and without any danger of violence.”

  That was only partly correct. If she didn’t hand over the coffee before I got my nervous system in gear, there was definitely going to be some violence in here. I may be small, bu
t I was in the Jersey City Girl Scouts before we moved to Texas and I was totally eligible for a badge in Fifteen Ways to Hurt Bigger Girls Without Leaving a Mark. Too bad National never approved that one.

  “Gimme. Now.”

  It was a medium dark roast, so rich with flavor it would’ve been a crime to mess it over with creamer. Large size. By the time I’d worked through half the cup I was close to forgiving Ingrid. I was also able to articulate more than two syllables at a time.

  “What’s the idea of waking me up at this hour? Whatever that may be.” The darkness outside didn’t give much of a clue, except that it was a lot earlier than any normal human being would get up. “Is it just an experiment? Because…”

  She interrupted me before I could get into detailed threats. “Ben’s idea. We’re going in really early, to make sure we can get into position before there’s any risk of an audience. Get up and get dressed.”

  I did so, not because I’m in the habit of taking orders from Ingrid, but because I felt more able to deal with life after I changed from the oversize tee I sleep in to my favorite cutoffs and a well-worn vintage Clash T-shirt. “You couldn’t have mentioned this last night?” I gulped down the last of my coffee and looked for my sandals. One was under the bed.

  “We could have,” Ingrid said, “if you hadn’t been lollygagging around with the spook, and if we didn’t want to do this without him breathing down our necks.”

  “He bought me food,” I said. “Guacamole cheese enchiladas. At El Patio.”

  “Really, Lia. I never thought you’d sell yourself for guacamole on your enchiladas.”

  I’d done no such thing. It was dinner, not an orgy. He had even laid off the double-entendres… for a while.

  The other sandal was behind my alarm clock.

  “Five o’clock? Are you insane?”

  When I dragged myself downstairs, Ben and Jimmy were waiting in his car. He had another medium roast black grande for me. The boy wasn’t bad at planning. Just in case he thought I would sell a decent morning’s sleep for two cups of Quack’s coffee, though, I grumbled all the way to Crowson’s office that five in the morning was something human beings were not meant to see, much less function in, and that if I’d wanted a life of secret missions that started at oh-dark-thirty I’d have become a Navy SEAL, not a research fellow in topology.