And if you go through there and never come out? Billy asks himself. He contemplates the prospect for a minute, tries to figure whether anyone would really even miss him. His dad, maybe. Everyone else? Denver? Anil and the Ghoul? Maybe he’s just depressed, but he can’t see them still thinking of him at all after a few weeks, a month or two at best. Springtime will return to the city, and as the snow recedes and drains away so will their memories of him; years from now maybe they’ll have a dim remembrance of a funny guy who maybe showed some signs of talent on occasion but never really pulled it together, who hung out with them for a while and got them to crack a smile every now and then, but not really the type of person who you miss, once he’s gone.
Okay, Billy thinks. You can do this. Something rises inside him. Maybe it’s that animal part of him, the part that likes being bigger and stronger, that likes being powerful. Maybe he’s ready, at long last, for a fight. He takes a final step, into the vestibule. And then he crosses it, without hesitation, opens the metal door, and enters.
CHAPTER NINE. THE LOOSENING
WELCOME TO STARBUCKS CAHOOTS • THE PROBLEM WITH HARD-ASSES • WHEN NOT TO TIP • NOT OKAY • SOOTHING VOICE: ON • GROWING UP FASTER • HUMAN CUISINE IN TOTAL • NO MORE ORGASMS • PANDAS ARE BORING • CONNOISSEUR OF PAIN
He’s in a Starbucks.
Billy frowns. He double-checks, just for the sake of his sanity, looking back through the metal door he’s just passed through: he can see the dirty vestibule, and then the red door that leads back out to Chelsea. It’s still open a crack; he can still see a little sliver of street. And he looks back at the Starbucks. It looks exactly like every other Starbucks he’s ever seen: a counter with an aproned staff working behind it, busying themselves at various beverage-producing apparatuses. It has the same impulse items flanking the register: mints, CDs, individually wrapped madeleines that Billy has always been pretty sure are only there because someone in Starbucks’s upper echelons thinks that the Proust reference is clever. Soul music sung by a white British person comes out through unobtrusive speakers.
He turns and looks at the tables, to check out whether there’s a clientele in here or what. And sitting there in one of the big overstuffed leather chairs, dressed in a tawny corduroy suit, holding what appears to be a Caramel Macchiato, staring right into Billy, is Timothy Ollard. Billy jumps.
Ollard smiles slightly, places the macchiato on the table, wipes one palm with the other, then rises. He does not advance, a fact for which Billy is incredibly grateful.
“Billy Ridgeway,” Ollard says, rocking back on his heels. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“How is that possible?” Billy blurts, dismayed that he doesn’t even have whatever questionable advantage might be conferred by the element of surprise. “Have you been reading my mind? ’Cause at this point I’d kind of prefer for people to just stay out of there, thank you very much.”
Ollard surveys Billy’s perturbed demeanor. “Billy,” he says. “One thing you should have learned by now. You don’t need to reach for a complicated answer when a simple one will do.” He reaches into the breast pocket of the suit and pulls out a phone, activates it with a finger-swipe. “I got a text,” he says. “FYI,” he reads from the screen, “Ridgeway is here.”
Billy remembers Anton Cirrus, outside, fiddling with his phone while they argued.
“So,” Billy says, trying to add it all up in his mind. “Cirrus.”
“Yes,” Ollard says.
“You and Cirrus.”
“Yes.”
“You’re … in cahoots?”
“Cahoots?” Ollard says, amusement ringing faintly in his voice. Billy feels fury swell within him; language is supposed to be the thing he’s good at. He almost pulls out the spray to give Ollard a good blast of it just on principle. “Not cahoots,” Ollard says, finally. “Think of him as an independent contractor. You could say a gun for hire if you wanted something with a little more pizzazz. With the Right-Hand Path setting up their little literary production it’s useful to know someone like Anton, who can knock it right back down again.”
“Why would he help you?”
“I sought him out. I showed him that partnering with me would provide him with certain advantages. Men like Cirrus enjoy advantages. Maybe to a fault.”
“Does he know,” Billy says, “that you’re planning to burn up the world?”
“He knows that I have the Neko,” Ollard says, showing no surprise that Billy is familiar with his plan. “He knows that it is a source of plentiful energy. He knows it’s unique and valuable and that important people are interested in it, and I think that represents a line beyond which Cirrus cannot see very clearly. The crest of the hill, in a way. See, that’s the thing about men like Cirrus—”
“Look,” Billy says, “I don’t really care about men like Cirrus.” He says this, although if he were being totally honest he would have to admit that something in him seizes greedily at the prospect that Cirrus’s takedown of him on Bladed Hyacinth was maybe less about the merits of his writing, or lack thereof, and more about some kind of chess move against the Right-Hand Path. “I’m here for the Neko. Where is it?”
Ollard looks flatly at Billy for a long moment. “Why don’t you get yourself a drink?” he asks.
“I don’t want a drink.”
“Billy,” says Ollard. “I’ve only just met you, but I can tell that this hard-ass routine doesn’t suit you. It’s fake.”
Billy feels a bit stung by this, and Ollard must notice, because he holds up a finger in a wait-one-moment-before-you-react gesture. “Hard-asses,” he says, “are boring. They see one route toward what they want, and barrel straight at it. It’s embarrassing. They’re easy to sidestep, easy to trip up. They don’t make satisfying opponents. If you’re not a hard-ass it means that there’s some small hope that you’ll be intelligent. And an intelligent opponent gives me at least something to savor.”
“Maybe the most intelligent thing an opponent could do, though,” Billy says, “is to pretend that they’re a hard-ass, to … lull you … into … a false sense of security.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of pretending, if that’s your strategy.”
“Maybe my strategy … is to pretend to be doing a bad job of pretending, so that you’ll think I’m pretending, when in reality I’m actually … smarter than that.”
“Well,” Ollard says, a little wearily, “yes, that would be one strategy. But if you’re such a master strategist, you can sit with me, and drink some coffee, and we can talk. Intelligently.”
Billy considers this. He takes a step backward toward the counter and waits a second to see if Ollard takes this opportunity to spring across the space separating them. He sort of half expects Ollard to sprout giant razored talons or something. But all Ollard does is wave Billy toward the counter with his fingertips, settle back into the armchair, and sip from his macchiato.
Well, Billy thinks, okay. If there’s been one good thing that’s come out of this week it’s been all the coffee. He approaches the counter.