by Dani Lamia
“They said they would call us if they need anything from us,” says Angelo Marino. “They haven’t called.”
“I don’t think they’re very good at their jobs,” I say.
“Civil servants,” says Angelo Marino. “You don’t get to pick them.”
I take out my game phone and put it on my desk. Alistair does the same and we stare at each other, searching each other’s eyes.
Both phones ring in unison, and even though we’re expecting it, Alistair and I both jump. I assume that wherever Bernard and Gabriella are, their phones are ringing as well. The Nylo Corporation jingle blares throughout my office in stereo.
We pick up the game phones, and I pull out my regular phone and start recording the game phone for evidence.
At first, all we see is the character-creation menu, but then static fills the screen. When it clears, the background is highly pixelated lapping waves, blood red. In front of the waves, the Game Master appears, this time wearing a hockey mask like Jason from the Friday the 13th movies.
“Welcome back!” says the figure. “We are down to four players and now we are entering day two. Your clue for today is: ‘All the sea farmers know it was her favorite place to stand.’”
I panic because I don’t instantly know the answer to this riddle. I look at Alistair, furrowing my brow.
“Hey, wait a second,” someone says. It’s Gabriella. I can hear her through the phone. We must be able to talk back. The figure in the hockey mask cocks his head to the side.
“We don’t want to play anymore,” says Gabriella. “We want to forfeit.”
“You are certainly welcome to forfeit, which means you will lose all of your lives,” says the figure. “You have two lives left. Do you want to quit playing?”
“No,” says Gabriella. “I mean—”
“You killed our brother, you asshole,” I interrupt. “We know you did it.”
“Your brother lost all of his lives and is out of the game,” says the Game Master. “I had nothing to do with your brother losing his lives. So is that it? Are you all not playing anymore?”
Bernard chimes in. “I’m still going to play and I know this clue. I know the answer. I still want to play.”
“Bernard, you slime,” I say. “This guy killed our brother. I’m recording this conversation so I can send it to the police.”
“Nobody else has to play if they don’t want to play,” he says. “But I know this one.”
“I know it too,” says Gabriella. “If you’re playing, I’m playing.”
“None of us should play,” I say. “It doesn’t matter if you figure out the clue or not.”
“The last person to find the box will lose a life,” says the figure in the hockey mask. “Good luck to you all!”
The screen returns to static.
“Of course Bernard wants to keep playing,” says Alistair. “He has a damn helicopter.”
“We should make sure the cops know about his helicopter so they can question the pilot,” I say.
“I put it in his statement,” says Angelo Marino. “It’s all in the statement.”
“So now what?” asks Alistair.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Hold on, I’m calling Bernard.”
The phone rings but he doesn’t pick up. Exasperated, I dial Gabriella’s number.
“So are we still playing?” she asks me. “What if we all work together?”
“We have to stop,” I say. “I have a huge meeting this afternoon.”
“I think I know the answer, though,” she says. “All these questions are about Mom, right?”
“It seems that way so far,” I agree.
“Listen,” she says. “You get a train pass, but I have to walk everywhere. If this box is where I think it is, it’s going to take me forever to get there. I have to leave now. But I could tell you the answer if you want.”
“We have to stop,” I say. She hangs up on me.
I am a little bit annoyed that both Bernard and Gabriella seem to know the answer already while I don’t have the foggiest idea. I send Angelo Marino the recording of the game phone call.
“Send that to the cops,” I say. “Maybe they’ll believe us when they see it for real.”
Our game phones now show the clue and nothing else: “All the sea farmers know it was her favorite place to stand.” We can safely assume that “she” refers to our mother. I am also getting the sense that all of these clues will refer to places inside NYC. But this black box could be anywhere. I don’t have time for this.
19
“Do you know the answer to this one?” I ask Alistair point-blank. He shakes his head.
“Well, I have a ton of shit to do today,” I tell him. “I have a big meeting and I have to plan Henley’s funeral and deal with the press and I am still exhausted from yesterday. Let me know if you figure it out and we can go together.”
“I’m worried about you,” says Alistair. “You seem like you aren’t taking this very well. Not that you should be.”
That’s when I start sobbing. It is never tragedy that breaks me up. It is sympathy. I can’t handle it. I can’t handle a nice person sticking up for me.
I put my head down on my desk and gush fucking tears. All of my memories with Henley come rushing back. I wish I could call him and tell him what an asshole he is. I make a vow that I will use all the resources of the Nylo Corporation to get revenge for his death, no matter what.
Alistair knows me too well to try and comfort me. He lets me cry. He is still there when I am done. I feel a little nauseous. I’m bleary and dehydrated. Hungover. Crying is making it worse. I crack open a bottled water and drink almost the whole thing in one draft. The cold water hits my sour stomach and churns it, causing gouts of pain from all the stress acid, but I manage to keep my bile down.
“I can’t believe Gabriella and Bernard are going to keep playing,” Alistair says.
“We should hire security for them, for all of us. What was that private firm we contracted after 9/11?”
“Ellsworth Marshall,” says Alistair. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Private security is such a pain in the ass.”
“We don’t really have a choice. We would be utterly negligent if we didn’t at least try to protect ourselves.”
“I’ll handle it,” says Angelo Marino. “I’ll get full security details from Ellsworth Marshall for all four of you by this afternoon.”
“I’ve got to prepare for this meeting,” I say. “I’m not going to be swerved from buying Playqueen by some punk in a mask. The execs will be here soon.”
“You don’t think Playqueen has anything to do with all of this?” asks Alistair thoughtfully. “That’s crazy, right?”
I frown, thinking about it. Would a little company like Playqueen resort to murdering all of us to avoid getting acquired? It seems outlandish, but Playqueen actually has a motive, unlike anybody else I can think of.
“Maybe,” I say, after a long pause. “I wouldn’t blame them. But they won’t win. This is all just a temporary blip on our epic family quest to conquer the whole world of games and amusements, becoming the undisputed leader in every category of fun.”
“I’ll keep working on trying to figure out how to follow these phones back to some kind of source,” says Alistair. “They must have been made somewhere. And there aren’t a lot of places in the world that could make something like this. Surely I know them all.”
Alistair and Angelo Marino leave. I call Pez. He answers immediately.
“I’m coming in this afternoon,” says Pez. “I have news for you. It’s not much, but it’s interesting.”
“And I’ve got something else for you to investigate,” I tell him. “We’re trying to acquire a company called Playqueen. We think it’s possible they might somehow be involved in Henley’s murder. Dad was warning
me about them, but I’ve been stubborn. I was chalking up his hesitation to general sexism about games specifically targeted to women, but maybe he knew something that I don’t know.”
“I’ll look into them,” says Pez. “Anything else?”
“Alistair is trying to trace the source of the game phones, which might be an interesting angle. Also, there is a new clue for today: ‘All the sea farmers know it was her favorite place to stand.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
He thinks about it for a while.
“Something about the sea,” he says. “And your mother, presumably. The beach, maybe?”
“Our mother hated the beach,” I say. “She was too pale and she hated all the sand in her clothes and all the dumb, poor unfortunates arrayed on beach towels and reeking of sunscreen.”
Even as I talk, I get an inkling in the back of my brain: some old memory, some wry joke that our mother used to make. But I can’t hold on to it. Even as it starts to shimmer into focus, the memory fades into an aggravating phantasm.
I spend the next couple hours dealing with the heads of various departments. People seem nervous around me, given what’s happened the past few days, and I guess they should be. I tell Peter to refer all the press to Angelo Marino, and I avoid the internet, which is blowing up with news about the elevator crash that killed Henley. I’m amused to find that we are being painted in the same light as the Kennedys: a noble, aristocratic East Coast family dealing with unimaginable tragedy. And I’m relieved to discover they are using flattering pictures of me instead of paparazzi trash. America is a visual country.
I have a dark, cynical thought that all of this might even help the Nylo brand. We provide family entertainment and our family is breaking apart.
I call the marketing department. Chloe Taney picks up.
“Would you mind doing some analytics about how we should best spin the fact that we have lost Prescott and Henley?” I ask her. “Should we try and minimize the tragedy or should we lean into it for maximum brand awareness? I can’t think of any similar incidents with similar companies, but I have a feeling we can leverage this to our advantage, or at least minimize some of the bad publicity that could give our brand the taint of tragedy.”
Chloe sputters her agreement, bowled over by my coldness.
“Of course, of course,” she says.
She won’t be able to keep my request a secret. Soon everyone at Nylo will hear about how I’m capitalizing on death. Some people will be shocked and horrified, but mostly this will remind people why I am in charge. How I never crumble in the face of a crisis. How I never stop putting the company first.
And secretly they’ll be relieved. They’ll keep backing me, no matter what happens. You want a monster at the top, to crush all the other potential monsters who mistakenly think they can match the depth of the top monster’s creative malice in the service of the corporation.
I work through the afternoon, periodically racking my brain for memories of our mother, of our mother playing Sea Farmers, of our mother and the sea. I try to come up with a reason why Bernard and Gabriella might remember something about her that Alistair and I don’t. They were so much younger than we were when she died. It doesn’t make any sense.
At four o’clock, the department heads roll into my office. Peter lets me know the Playqueen team has arrived, too, and are waiting upstairs. “Keep them sweating,” I say.
My call to Chloe Taney has done its work. The department heads are all terrified of me, terrified of the tragedy itself, terrified of my response to it so far. They are terrified of the fact that I am insisting that we still hold the meeting with Playqueen in my dead father’s conference room, where we always hold high-level meetings.
After we go over the internal reports and briefs and charts (everything is ostensibly in order), we ride the elevator up one flight together in silence.
Playqueen has come in force. They’ve brought a team of ten, many of whom are lawyers and tax people, but it looks like they have way more execs from the company than they need. I wonder if that means they’re going to make this difficult for me. Which I actually find to be a relief. If they were literally trying to murder us all, I assume they would be more low-key here in this meeting.
“Listen,” I say, as soon as we are all sitting down and everyone has chosen from the cake, pie, pineapple empanadas, and coffee that we often serve at afternoon meetings. “I know you guys don’t want Nylo Corporation to buy you, strip you for parts, and remove everything that makes you unique. You think you want control. But I am offering immortality. There is no apotheosis in this business beyond greater distribution and a bigger marketing profile. Our offer represents a commitment to your mission. We see what you are trying to do, we get it, and we want to make your dreams come true, not just for America, but for the whole world. Right?”
The CEO of Playqueen is a giant bearded man named Salmon Chase Capaldi. He measures my words, looking as often at Angelo Marino as at me. I try to stay open-minded.
“We are going to do the deal, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it,” he finally says. “I am frankly surprised you still wanted to meet with us today. Frankly, and I hope you don’t mind my bluntness, how can anybody here be sure that you are thinking clearly? I remember when my mother died. I almost joined the Marines. Can you believe that? I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Do you know what the fuck you are doing?”
He has overplayed his hand. I look around at everyone in the room. I look at my vice presidents, I look at my COO and my CFO. I think about Grant’s rules for winning at war: find out where your enemy is, hit them with everything you’ve got, and then keep moving.
“Thank you so much for coming all this way,” I say. “You will find that all of our paperwork is in order and that our lawyers have done their due diligence. We know what we are getting and we are pleased that you have been so transparent with respect to some of the catastrophic mistakes you have made along the way that have put your business in the place that it is right now. Welcome to Nylo. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t stick around for the gory details of the evisceration?”
I excuse myself from the meeting, countering his belligerence with imperiousness. I have sized him up, taken his measure, and defeated him.
I take the stairs back down to my office and am pleasantly surprised to find Pez there waiting for me. He is holding his hat in his hand while talking on the phone to someone in soothing tones. I know the sound of Pez trying to cajole information out of one of his sources. He holds up a finger as I enter and he steps into the corner to finish his conversation in symbolic privacy.
I find myself weeping gently, thinking about Henley, thinking about my father. I wonder when I will ever have the time to process all of this. Part of me hopes that time never comes.
20
“I have news about Henley in China,” Pez says, finishing his phone call. “It comes too late, I am aware. But it might explain what we are dealing with. I’m not sure. I don’t know much about Playqueen yet, but it may come as no surprise to you that Playqueen is only accidentally successful. It was created as a laundromat for some New Orleans Sicilians, as a present to the daughter of someone quite family oriented. She turned out to be unexpectedly good at designing games. Some say that Playqueen has been intentionally tanking itself for years, despite quality product.”
“That does come as a bit of a surprise,” I say, glancing up, where on the floor above the acquisition is being finalized. Perhaps it will be possible to get this young Southern-Sicilian games girl genius to work for me after I take over her company.
“Anyway, the big news is about Henley and China,” says Pez.
He stops, tentative.
“How are you doing, by the way? You don’t look so good. I don’t expect you to look good, but you look terrible. Are you eating?”
“No less than usual,” I say.
“I want to see you eat something,” says Pez. “It will do my heart good.”
I call Peter and ask him to go upstairs to get us salmon, bagels, and cream cheese.
“So listen, I was able to get in touch with Henley’s latest ex-girlfriend, Sheila,” he says. “I was correct that he has been seeing her while he has been back in town. She was devastated when I told her that he was dead and she wouldn’t even believe me until she saw the Post online. I promised her that she would be compensated for her trouble if she told me what she knows. She needs some cash. Henley has been paying her rent and now she doesn’t know where she will go and what she will do.”
“I’ll make sure that she is taken care of,” I say. Just then my phone rings. “Excuse me for a moment.”
I take an emergency call about Playqueen. Our bagels and cream cheese arrive while I’m handling a decision about assets. After it’s settled, I hang up and stare at my bagel, while Pez stares at me staring at my bagel. Dutifully, I take a big bite, squirting some cream cheese down my chin. I wipe it off, lick my finger, and chew, actually enjoying it. My stomach grumbles and I realize that Pez is right: I do need to eat. Also, my hangover is fading, which means it’s probably time to get drunk again. I walk over to the sideboard and pour myself a bourbon on ice.
“None for me, thanks,” says Pez.
“So what did she tell you?” I ask. “Is the Chinese government murdering my family because of something Henley did?”
“Henley definitely got in trouble in China, but it wasn’t with the Chinese,” says Pez. “It was with plain old, boring, basic Americans. Midwesterners, actually, the most brutal and resentful people. He fell in with a bunch of small-time importer/exporters from Michigan who became his drinking and carousing buddies. I guess he was lonely on account of not being able to speak the language. According to his ex, he rarely even left the hotel where he was staying.”
“And what went wrong with these importer/exporters?”
“According to his ex, it wasn’t Henley’s fault. But I only have his side of the story filtered through her. I’m attempting to get some corroboration, but that will take time. Anyway, according to her, they got in way over their heads while gambling and they started moving from the importing/exporting business into the straight-up smuggling business, which in the new militant version of modern China is extremely forbidden and not at all as fun and easy as it used to be before Xi Jinping started cracking down on corruption. Once upon a time, you could bribe a Party official rather easily to help you transship anything contraband through Russia. Not anymore. However, making smuggling harder has made it way more profitable, as these things go.”