“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I would absolutely fucking love it if this were totally your fault. That would make me feel a little better. But, taking Suze’s call? Being worried about me? I can’t really blame you for that.”
“Thank you, Rachel.”
“What I do blame you for is—” She hesitated and bit her lip as if debating how to proceed.
“Go ahead. Say it.”
“I don’t know exactly how to say it, but … I’m here, and Suze is in foster care, and I can’t help thinking, none of this would have happened if I was a Tau. If I was a Tau, you wouldn`t have called 911, would you? You would have called some other Tau. Or a bunch of other Taus. Some nice little Tau couple would be looking after Suze, and after I got attention from a Tau clinic, and with a whole tranche to make sure I kept on my meds, I’d have her back right away quick. What do you think, Adam? Is that about right?”
I didn’t have to answer. It was absolutely true.
* * *
I stayed a few minutes more. A nurse came by with three pills and a paper cup, and Rachel dutifully swallowed the pills and chased them with a gulp of water. She opened her mouth to show the nurse she’d swallowed the meds. I think Rachel wanted me to see this small humiliation. The fate to which I had delivered her.
As I turned to leave she said, “Are you okay? No offense, Adam, but you look like shit.”
“I haven’t slept much.”
“Yeah, well.” Her gaze went a little quavery. “Welcome to the club. Oh, I remembered something. Something I meant to tell you. About the guys who came to visit me? The ones you drew a picture of at the beach?”
It seemed like a long time ago. “What about them?”
“The guy who did most of the talking—you asked about his face, and that’s what I was trying to remember. But he had another, uh, distinguishing feature. Not his face. His hand. There was a mark on it.”
“A mark?”
“A tattoo. A little one. Actually not his hand but just above the wrist? I saw it when his shirt cuff rode up.”
“What did it look like?”
The medication was beginning to kick in. She smiled dreamily. “A window.”
“I’m sorry—a window?”
“A box. A rectangle. A tall box. With a line across it. Like an old-fashioned window, the kind where you lift the lower pane. Know what I mean? Like a letter H, but with three cross lines, top bottom and middle. Does that mean anything?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
* * *
We rolled up our Vancouver operation in November of that year. Which was good, because by then I was desperately homesick. I missed Lisa and Loretta. I missed their big, warm house in Toronto. I wanted to be there when they put up the Christmas tree—usually a huge spruce, decked out with Victorian ball ornaments and spun-glass angels and silver menorahs and any other ecumenical or secular decoration any tranche member felt like attaching to it. I wanted to be home for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Dognzhi, Pancha Ganapati, Shabe Yaldā, Saturnalia, and what-have-you. That was what I wanted.
Damian needed to be back in Toronto for another reason. Toronto was where his law offices were, and the war between Tau and InterAlia was being fought with writs and court appointments. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: InterAlia was in a severely weakened condition, which gave us some leverage. The company’s stock had declined to record lows and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy.
Damian and I went out for an early dinner on our last day in the city. A couple of blocks down Robson there was a restaurant that served good and reasonably affordable schnitzel. The staff had come to recognize us as regulars, and I assumed they also recognized the two Tau security guys who habitually followed us in and kept watch over us from a table of their own. The evening crowd hadn’t arrived yet, and we had enough space and privacy to speak freely.
For years Damian and his law firm had been conducting pitched battles with InterAlia over the autonomy of Tau. The corporation was jealous of its intellectual property, and the last thing they wanted was any kind of legal judgment that might recognize the Affinities as quasi-ethnicities, even invented ones. But what had lately crippled InterAlia were the legal challenges from unaffiliated sources: class action suits, discrimination cases. Most of the Affinities—Tau on the vanguard—had created institutions that served their members exclusively. We had established, for example, a network of Tau rehab clinics, staffed by Taus and catering to Taus with substance-abuse problems. The success rate of our clinics was spectacular, with a recidivism rate half that of standard treatment. But we routinely turned away non-Taus. Did that mean our clinics (or our financial services, another area Damian had pioneered) were discriminatory? InterAlia didn’t officially sanction these Affinity-specific businesses, which meant Tau had been forced to fend off similar legal attacks; in all of these cases our lawyers had attempted to subpoena InterAlia’s sorting protocols; and in every case InterAlia had resisted, which meant costly out-of-court settlements or lengthy legal challenges, several of which were currently wending their way toward Supreme Court decisions.
But that was old news. As of yesterday, Damian told me, InterAlia had folded its cards and pushed away from the table. “Partly because they found out Klein had arranged for their proprietary algorithms to be posted all over the Internet. Between that and the ongoing litigation, the writing was already on the wall.”
“I guess I understand. But then, why go to the trouble of murdering Klein?”
“Simple. They didn’t.”
I blinked. That had been our theory from the day we first heard about Klein’s death: InterAlia was behind it. Who else could it be?
Damian sat a moment, watching customers come and go through the revolving glass door. Our waiter poured fresh rounds of coffee but knew better than to hover. “Remember what Rachel Ragland told you about the tattoo on that guy’s hand?”
The Phoenician letter Het. The guy who interrogated her had belonged to the Het Affinity. Which was disturbing in itself. There was nothing about the Affinities that precluded criminal behavior. All the Affinities were, in effect, low-crime districts, but that was because our collaborative potential made crime less inviting. Within the Affinities jealousy was blunted, greed was marginalized, and basic human needs were usually met. Statistically, Tau was the most law-abiding of all the Affinities, if only by a hair. We liked to think of ourselves as good people, and that was statistically true. But we were free moral agents like everybody else, perfectly capable of committing crimes under the right circumstances. So were the Hets.
“I saw the same kind of tattoo the night Amanda was shot,” Damian said. “On the guy who fired the rifle.”
“What do you mean—it was the same guy?” In which case my career as a forensic sketch artist was over before it had begun. The Pender Island shooter had looked nothing like either of my drawings.
Damian shook his head. “Not the same guy, a similar tattoo. The shooter had it on the back of his neck, just under the collar of his shirt. So we’ve had our experts take a deeper look at Klein’s models of Affinity interactions and how that might play out when the Affinities are autonomous and self-governing. The results are surprising. Some of the smaller Affinities, like Mem and Rosh, eventually wither up and vanish. Some get bigger. Some get big enough and rich enough to exert real political and economic influence.”
“Which is why Klein gave us the information, right? He saw Tau as a potentially powerful influence. A good one.”
“Others might be powerful but maybe not so good. And that raises a huge red flag, especially concerning Het.”
“Does it? I mean, why would the Hets want to kill Klein in the first place? Why would they be stalking our people?”