He conducted Georgian into a room that contained several small printing presses and a larger one. The hand presses sat on hard wooden tables at one side of the room; the large press was against the far wall. The floor was protected by heavy tarpaulin. At center, a large-format camera was suspended from heavy exposed beams where the ceiling had been removed. Beneath the camera stood an enormous table with a broad, smooth surface covered in clean white paper. Everything was immaculate. Georgian thought this was the cleanest print shop she had ever seen.
“Shall we do a sample print?” asked Kawabata. He pushed a button on the camera mounting; the camera lowered with a whir. “If you wish to do excellent engravings, you must use a large-format camera in order to secure a very high resolution print. The larger the negative, the more detail you will be able to achieve—just as in photographic printing. Such order of detail requires great patience and great perception. Take this photographic loup, and look at your dollar bill again.”
Georgian took the small glass cube he handed her, and looked through it at the dollar bill. In magnification, it seemed to leap to life. What had appeared a sea of sage-green embellishments now appeared as a myriad array of complicated dots, swirls, dashes, and carefully textured blackish-green shadows.
“When you observe the left half of the Great Seal, the one with the pyramid of Egypt,” Kawabata was saying, “you will notice that the Masonic mystic eye suspended above it is surrounded by age lines! It is that kind of precision we must aim for.”
Georgian looked up from the loup. “What shall we print?” she asked.
“Why not your dollar bill?” asked Kawabata, smiling and picking it up from beneath the loup. “But let’s make it interesting. As this is merely an exercise, let’s pretend the dollar comes in many colors, as other countries’ currencies do.”
With a felt-tipped pen, Kawabata carefully colored in the mystic eye in red, so that it looked as if it had spent a rough night over the pyramid.
“This way, I can show you some more sophisticated engraving techniques. Young people nowadays are often in a great hurry to get somewhere, without really knowing where they are going. But engraving cannot be rushed. Engraving is like the tea ceremony; it must be done one step at a time, and each in its turn. Then it unfolds its secrets to you, like a flower.”
Kawabata took her to the darkroom beside his studio and there showed her the painstaking, step-by-step processes required to mask the photo plates, coat the engraving plates with photosensitive emulsion, prepare the acid baths, and carefully time each part of the operation. It was similar to the film development and printing process, but Kawabata stressed the importance of taking extreme care in each precise detail—well beyond the level of cleanliness and care required to produce an excellent photograph.
“To mix a color,” said Kawabata when they’d rinsed the last plate and carefully dried it, “even if the color is only black, it must be the right black. You must feel it in your soul. Now we must go to my study to meditate.”
“Meditate?” said Georgian, confused.
“A master engraver must always meditate before he prepares the color,” said Kawabata, “in order that he may bring his soul’s vibrations into harmony with the universe.”
Georgian did not realize how late it was when they’d finished the printing. She and Kawabata were seated in the large living room where they’d had tea earlier. She sipped her warm plum sake and held the perfect red-and-green dollar bill between her fingers. She felt as if she’d just graduated from a ten-year course as a master engraver.
“Mr. Kawabata,” she said, dreamy from the exhaustion of the work and the effects of the hot sake, “I can’t tell you what this afternoon has meant to me. I’m going to go right home and start practicing everything you’ve taught me.”
“Do you have a press to work on?”
“No—but I imagine I can buy one. There must be presses listed for sale in the papers?”
“These new presses all have automatic color mixers on them. They are quite sophisticated, if you wish to do assembly-line printing. But for an artist such as yourself, I think it would be preferable to use an older style of press, where everything can still be controlled by hand. Then you can mix your color to perfection. You will not destroy the delicate nuances of your engraving.”
“Where would I find a press like that?” asked Georgian.
“I have one here, which I can lend or sell to you, Miss Heyer. It is quite old, but in extremely good order. How will you be going home? It’s possible that we could squeeze it into a very large taxi. And I believe two people could carry it down the steps to the walk. If you do not have to go up five flights at the other end …”
The phone was ringing, and Lelia was turning over piles of cushions on the sofa trying to find it. At last, she dug it out and answered breathlessly.
“Allo? Allo?” she cried into the receiver. Then, after a moment, she said, “Oh no! Oh merde! Oui—he is here. Yes, I will make him to come at once. But you are complètement fou, my chéri.”
“What I can’t figure out,” said Tor, coming in from the kitchen with floury dough all over his hands, “is how you always get the raisins to puff up in the strudel if you’re putting them between two layers of dough—What’s wrong?”
Lelia was standing there, regarding him with stricken face.
“It is Zhorzhione,” she said, replacing the phone in its cradle with a sigh. “You must to go and fetch her.”
“Where the hell is she?” he said, wiping his hands on the cloth tied around his waist. “It’s nearly five o’clock—she was due back at noon. Has something gone wrong?”
“Oui. She is waiting at the Staten Island ferry for you to fetch her.”
“Why doesn’t she take the subway uptown?” he asked.
“She is at the ferry landing on Staten Island,” said Lelia.
“Then why doesn’t she take the ferry and then take the subway?”
“Because, mon cher ami, there was no one to help her on and off of the ferry with her printing press.”
MERGERS
Money in itself cannot grow.
—Aristotle
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4
I didn’t see Georgian or Tor for the rest of the week. They’d been so mysterious and secretive about their plot—but they assured me they would reveal all at dinner on Friday night, before I returned to San Francisco. Meanwhile, I had work of my own to do.
New York was full of banks, and my secretary, Pavel—who loved making long-distance calls—had apparently phoned every one of them to put on my itinerary. Though my visits to these security divisions had been set up to camouflage my jaunt to see Tor, now that he was my competitor in a wager—no longer my adviser—the rules had changed as well as the stakes. Since I was here in New York anyway, a bit of boning up on security might not hurt at all.
Mr. Peacock at United Trust was near the end of my list, but he had nothing new to tell me, so I managed to weasel out of my luncheon date with him. I needed some time alone to think. But when I went to my last planned appointment, I was in for a big surprise.
There must be a hundred thousand people in New York named Harris, so I was taken by surprise when I found that the Harris in charge of Citibank security was one of my old pals—the Bobbsey Twins!
Ten years earlier—the last time I’d seen him—he’d been slightly overweight, with unkempt hair, loose shirttails, and cigarette ashes sprinkled over his belly. Time and money had clearly worked in his behalf.
As he rose from behind his elegant rosewood desk to greet me, I noted his well-trimmed silver sideburns, his cashmere blazer and rep tie, and the rack of expensive foreign pipes gracing his bureau.
“Harris!” I cried as he came around to embrace me warmly. “What on earth are you doing working here? When I spoke with Charles last week, you were at the data center uptown—”
Harris put a finger to his lips and glanced through the window in his office door.
“Rather
bad show, if they got wind of it,” he told me. “I’m regarded as something of the high official. I say—have you any luncheon plans? Perhaps we could get away and have a chat.”
So Harris grabbed his camel overcoat and a fringed silk scarf and we headed off to the Four Seasons—a slight upgrade from the bocci court where we’d dined in days of yore.
The building that housed the Scientific Data Center hadn’t changed much in the past ten years, as I learned when we taxied up there after lunch. It was charred as if it had been gutted by fire. The copper wires in Charles’s core banks must be green by now, I thought, if they were still keeping the windows ajar to “cool him down” with Queens factory fumes.
Brits like the Bobbsey Twins always addressed one another by surname; a bit confusing, since their names were the same. As teckies, they’d resolved this problem by calling each other by subscripts: Harris Sub One and Harris Sub Two. And so I still thought of them.
When we entered the data center, Harris1 was standing, his back to us, embroiled with a machine that had many moving parts and seemed to be folding and stuffing envelopes. The noise was deafening.
The room itself seemed slightly cleaner than in the past. Charles Babbage sat at center, squat and happy as a pasha surveying his harem. He’d been painted a cheerful sky blue, and was sporting an old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, perched atop his console. Even in this disguise, he was easy to recognize.
“Blimey, if it isn’t Verity Banks!” Harris1 cried, when he turned to catch sight of me. “Charles, look up, lad—your mother’s here!”
“Turn off that infernal racket!” yelled Harris2. “I can’t hear myself think.”
Harrisi1 switched off the envelope stuffer and came over to us, beaming. He, too, looked remarkably well, in his tweedy jacket with leather elbow patches and a heathery turtleneck sweater. He’d grown a salt-and-pepper beard, and seemed every inch the country gent.
“You’ve both done well, I see,” I told them. “You’re looking fine, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s even more hardware here than ten years ago!”
“Actually, we’ve gone into the mail-order business,” Harris2 explained. “Charles Babbage is the president of our corporation, and we’re the vice-presidents. There was plenty of machine time unused here, and going to waste for many years. We were endlessly bored, sitting about each night—that’s why Harris2 took that daytime job at the bank. We found we could manage this place, even with one of us working outside. Then we got a bit more creative and opened a business. We’ve made quite a bundle—the three of us—these past few years.”
“Sounds wonderful, if slightly illegal,” I told them. “After all, you don’t own this data center.”
“You’ve been using Charles Babbage yourself, for the past ten years,” Harris1 pointed out. “We do read the logs, you know! But we’ve said, many times, that if you hadn’t saved his life as you did, we’d never have amounted to much ourselves. Charles has somehow given us the inspiration we needed to become entrepreneurs.”
I was flipping through some of the listings in Charles’s print basket as we spoke.
“What is this stuff?” I asked them.
“That’s an inventory of a mailing we do for our largest client,” Harris2 explained, “a consortium of East Coast universities. They’ve combined their alumni mailing lists so they can cull the cream of the crop—the really wealthy alums—and solicit special types of joint endowments.”
“We’ve refined the data,” chimed in Harris1, “by adding information from Dun and Bradstreet, the Social Register, and even real estate holdings, along posher sections of the seaboard. If we chose to sell this mailing list, it alone might go for half a million.”
As I listened I studied the list more closely. Not only did it include name, rank, and serial number—but family statistics, political affiliations, business connections, club memberships, property holdings, and tax-free donations made to various institutions. It was gold, and I knew it. That list might be worth half a mill to the Bobbseys, but it was worth far more to me.
I smiled. Once again, Charles Babbage had come to my aid, without even knowing it. I had to set up thousands of dummy accounts when I got back to San Francisco, didn’t I? Accounts where I could put all that dough while I invested it, without anyone getting suspicious over the size of the deposits passing through. I could hardly think of better names than those on the list before me. And now I wouldn’t even have to invent social security numbers or credit status; it was all spelled out right here.
But the clincher, of course—from my point of view—was that many of the muckete-mucks on that list were also members of the Vagabond Club! Maybe there was some justice in this world.
I whistled all the way back to my hotel. Fifth Avenue was strung with lights like a Christmas tree. The scent of winter was in the air, and the crowds moved at a brisk pace up the glittering thoroughfare. It was nearly dark when I swept through the glass revolving doors of the Sherry.
When I got to my room to change for dinner, I saw the red phone light flashing, so I rang up the desk to collect the messages. There’d been two calls—one from Pearl, one from Tavish, in San Francisco. I glanced at my watch: seven-thirty here meant four-thirty in California, not yet quitting time at the bank.
I decided I had time for a shower first. I phoned room service for a bottle of sherry and went off to make my ablutions. When I came out of the steamy bathroom fifteen minutes later, my hair wrapped in a towel, the tray with glasses was set up in the living room. I poured myself a drink and picked up the phone.
“Miss Lorraine isn’t at this number any longer,” the bank secretary told me. “She works for Mr. Karp now. Please hold, and I’ll transfer you.”
After a minute, Pearl came on the line.
“Hello, sweetheart,” said Pearl. “I’m glad you called back. I thought I should let you know that a few things are going on here. Our pal Karp and your boss Kiwi have been plotting something dire in your absence. I have the office next to Karp’s—if you can call this dump an office—and I can hear everything they say through the walls. I foresee a long ocean voyage in your future.”
“What do you mean? They’re trying to get me fired?”
“Worse than that, sugarplum,” she said glumly. “They’ve somehow learned that your little quality team is looking with maximum scrutiny at their systems. The latest plan is to get you transferred to Frankfurt for the winter—a charming place this time of year. With no one here to stop them, they could make your project vanish, get rid of me with impunity, and Karp could do with Tavish as he wished. By the way, it’s Frankfurt, Germany—not Kentucky—and it’s not considered a promotion!”
“A lateral arabesque,” I agreed. “Well, I’ll be home tomorrow—we’ll discuss it when you pick me up. If you can bring Tavish to the airport with you, do. It’s time I shared some other news, as well.”
“Since we’re alone, I’d better ask now—seen any action in Manhattan?”
“I’ve hardly spent my time dashing around trying to ‘get laid’—if that’s what you mean,” I told her curtly.
“Use it or lose it,” Pearl said with a sigh.
“Thanks for the sage advice,” I replied, and hung up.
Tavish wasn’t at his desk, I assumed, when I heard the phone roll over to another location. Someone picked up at last, and while I waited I could hear the squeak of disk drives in the background, and the open whir of the climate control systems, before Tavish came on the line.
“Where are you—the machine room?” I said. “Can you talk?”
“Not just at present,” he told me in hushed voice. “But you-know-who is taking a very active interest in our work. He’s asking for status day by day—hour by hour.”
“You mean Kiwi,” I said. “What have you told him?”
“I don’t work for him; I work for you,” Tavish said. “But he’s curried favor with the others on the team, each and every one. I’m pleased to report they’re not traitors—not
yet. But it’s only a question of time before he completely loses control—whatever small measure he possessed to begin with. When will you be back?”
“Tomorrow. Pearl Lorraine’s giving me a ride; can she pick you up on her way to the airport in the morning?”
“Delighted. I hadn’t realized you knew her so well. By the way, she and I have done a bit of politicking in your absence, to try to protect what we could—”
“I’ve just spoken with Pearl,” I told him. “Tell me—have you cracked any files yet?”
“Afraid not, but we’re working on it,” said Tavish. “Perhaps by tomorrow there’ll be better news.”
I was disappointed that Tavish had not been able to decipher the test keys or get into the customer accounts file. Without entry to the latter, I couldn’t even establish accounts for those prestigious names I’d garnered from the Bobbsey Twins’ list.
On the other hand, this might be fortunate. If the quality circle had cracked any files or codes, Kiwi might have learned of it somehow and reported it to management. So he could get the kudos. And take charge of “fixing the problem”—me.
I knew by now it had been a mistake to start up the quality team in my absence, and an even larger error in judgment to let Tavish operate in the dark. He needed to know my real plans, if I wanted to count on him for help. It’s dangerous to have a cog in your wheel that doesn’t know what its job is supposed to be.
But the biggest of all my mistakes had been to turn my back on Kiwi—even for a week. If he succeeded in shipping me off to Germany, my plans were wrecked and my wager lost, before either got off the ground. It was lucky I’d be back tomorrow. Perhaps there was still time for a quick fix.
I splashed myself with powder, brushed my hair, threw on my evening clothes, and headed out to Fifth Avenue for a cab to Lelia’s—to find out how the other half of our wager had progressed.
In honor of Christmas, the lobby of Lelia’s building had been decorated with a giant pink foil tree, and garish red lights obscured the plaster fruit basket and chandeliers. It looked like a design scheme dreamed up by Mary Magdalene, prior to her conversion.