Mother Maybelle said, “Are we talking about the secret messages, again?”
“Yes, it’s the secret messages,” Sasha said. Months ago she’d discovered that Eduard was not delivering messages to Grandpop, even though they were explicitly addressed to Edo Anderssen Vik. They were text messages, emails, phone messages—scores and scores of them. Grandpop’s account, by contrast, received only messages from Eduard. Sasha had called a Deck Council to decide what to do. The council had advised to table the issue until more data could be collected. Sasha had set to work. In this house, there was no room and no account she couldn’t get into. And it had become clear that Eduard was continuing to keep others from contacting his father.
Bucko had the same opinion as last time: “Eduard’s a grog-sucking weasel.”
“Young man! That’s Sasha’s father you’re talking about,” Mother Maybelle said.
“Adoptive father,” Bucko said. “Junior’s trying to steal Grandpop’s money and take over the business. I say we expose the rat and let the bodies fall where they may.”
Mother Maybelle said, “We still do not know if this is something sons regularly do for their fathers.”
“Then I hope to never have sons,” Zebo said. “However, let us not lose sight of the possibility that Edo told Eduard not to give him the messages. A firewall, if you will, protecting him from the tawdry world of business.”
“Well,” Mother Maybelle said, puffing the syllable full of air. “When it comes to the world of business and the world of adults in general there is too much that we do not understand.”
“If Grandpop is okay with this, then he won’t mind when we tell him,” Sasha said.
“But Eduard will,” Zebo said. “If you demonstrate that you’ve been snooping through his personals, he will come down on you like a mighty rain. There will be no more access to electronics. You will be a prisoner.”
“Then you got to make it count,” Bucko said. “Eddie Junior’s been away for weeks. Get the latest messages off his pen and show ’em to Grandpop. Leave no room for Eddie to bitch out of this.”
Sasha frowned. Even with a roomful of IFs, deciding was so hard. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get the latest messages tonight. If Eduard’s still hiding things, then I’ll tell Grandpop tomorrow morning. Did you get all that, Tinker?”
The robot boy dinged twice. Of course he’d gotten it; Tinker forgot nothing.
“All right then,” Sasha said. “Back in the deck.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Somehow, impossibly, Rovil got up and went to work the next morning. I ate a rock star breakfast: dry toast at noon.
Ollie watched me eat. She said, “You want to tell me what that was about?” “That” meaning several things: the freak-out after seeing Eduard, the night with Rovil, my decision to flood my bloodstream with toxins.
“Not really,” I said.
“You’re not solving anything by not talking to her,” Gloria said. She sat in the living room, and if I didn’t know better I would have thought she was nursing her own hangover.
“I know about Sasha,” Ollie said.
“You know?”
“That day in the Marriott. I looked at your face, and I looked at hers. She has your cheekbones. Your eyes.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“I should have put it together earlier, but I wasn’t on my game. I knew you’d had a child. And four years ago, Eduard and his wife Suzette became foster parents for a mentally handicapped girl from a group home in Lockport, Illinois. They adopted her a few months later. She was mixed-race, and six years old. The same age as your biological daughter.”
“Is this what you’ve been doing? Digging through my life? Can you even help yourself?”
“You know I can’t.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Obviously Edo was behind the adoption,” she said. “I have a theory on why he’d do it.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
“It’s a legal maneuver,” Ollie said. “Vik can’t make Numinous legally because he doesn’t own the intellectual property outright. You could sue him. He owns only forty percent of the company and its IP. Gil owns ten, and you and Mikala split the rest, with two percent for Rovil.”
“How the hell do you know all this?”
She blinked. “I read the corporate filings.”
“Ollie, people don’t … nobody does that.”
“They should.”
“Rovil’s percentage came out of Mikala’s share,” I said. “He wasn’t a founder, and we hadn’t promised him anything, but she said he ought to get something when we were bought out.”
“That was generous of her.”
“She was probably already on Numinous when she decided that.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Out.”
“Out? Where?”
“Just—” I raised a hand. “Give me some fucking space, okay?”
She followed me to the front closet, where Rovil had put my coat. “Mikala’s shares went to you when she died, but you officially transferred them to a trust. For your daughter?”
“Get to the point,” I said.
“When she comes of age, that trust can only be hers if she’s mentally competent. Otherwise the guardian gets control.”
I opened the front door. “I can’t believe you knew about her.”
“I was waiting for you to tell me,” she said.
* * *
An addict off the wagon is a fundamentally boring creature, an animal with one dietary requirement, one habitat, and one schedule. It’s a fucking koala bear, minus all cuteness.
For the next four days I clung to my barstool as if it were a eucalyptus tree. When the bars closed I made my way home down spotless streets to Rovil’s apartment, slept hard, and got out of there before he returned from work. Ollie of course knew what I was doing; there was no fooling her brain. My strategy for dealing with this was to see as little of Rovil and Ollie as possible. I wanted to ditch Dr. Gloria as well, but I wasn’t able to do that until the second night.
We were in a faux-Czech bar that served tall pilsners and short vodkas. “This is just cowardice,” the angel said. She sat on the empty stool to my left, sipping water as if she were the designated flyer for the evening.
I said to the guy to my right, “A horse walks into a bar—”
“Good one,” he said. He was in his mid-fifties, and he’d been trying to look down my top for the past two hours.
“Wait for it, damn it!”
“If you want your daughter back, go see her,” Dr. Gloria said.
“So the bartender says, ‘Hey buddy, why the long face?’ And the horse says, ‘My wife just died.’”
He smiled uncertainly.
“Fuck you,” I said. “That is an excellent joke.”
“Sitting here self-medicating is not going to accomplish anything,” Dr. G said.
“Physician, heal thyself,” I said.
The man next to me said, “Pardon?”
“It’s funny,” I said, “because the horse is clinically depressed.”
“Ollie knows where he lives,” the doctor said. “Rovil can drive us.”
I wheeled on her. “You think we can just roll in to Little Edo’s estate? Did you see those fucking bodyguards? He’ll have us fucking arrested!”
The bartender appeared in front of me. “Okay, I warned you once. Get out.”
Shit. I’d been talking out loud again. “It was a joke,” I said. “These two guys with multiple personality disorder walk into a bar, and the fourth one says—”
“Let’s go, or I’m calling the cops,” the bartender said.
“Do as he says,” Dr. G said.
“Goddamn it!” I yanked the stool out from under her, but she recovered gracefully. “You think this is making anything better? Do you? You think you can nag me into doing what you want? Get the fuck away from me.”
Dr. Gloria’s expression had turned stony.