“What happened?”
“Two months went by. I met this car thief named Lido. We were seein’ each other kinda and I was thinkin’ about goin’ back to school for a PhD in literature. Then one night, after Lido had gone, there was a knock on my door. Lido had given me a pistol and usually I would’a grabbed it, but for some reason I wasn’t worried and opened up. Alfie was standin’ there in a jean jacket and jeans. He’d given a private detective Bernice’s name and finally found me.
“We talked for six hours. I told him that I will not suffer fools, that his people didn’t understand a damn word of what they were sayin’, that not one’a the people I heard onstage could’a passed his suffrage test. He knew it was true. He knew. When I told him that I wouldn’t come back he said that if I would he’d change. Then he said that he’d change anyway and I wrote a good-bye note to Lido and went back with him.”
“How long was that before he fled the country?”
“Six months, maybe seven. By then his friends had started to turn on him. They wanted to use his blackmail file and he said no, that some people didn’t need their lives destroyed by a knife in the back.”
“I thought they said that he ran because the government was on him about secrets he shared with the Russians?”
“Oh yeah, right. Uh. Can you imagine my Alfie givin’ secrets to the Russians? But he didn’t have any friends left. Bein’ with me didn’t cut the cord — it hacked it off.”
“Speaking of birth, what about your son, Claxton Akim?”
“What about him?”
“Where is he?”
For the first time I felt suspicion coming from her. She had to swallow her maternal instincts before saying, “There’s a woman I met in school who lives in Wyoming. Claxton is with her until he can be safe with me.”
“Will that be soon?” I asked.
“With Alfie gone,” she admitted sadly.
“And now you control everything that was his?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I have something to ask you for.”
“What?”
“Could I get the specs on the space cannon?”
“For what?”
I explained, in brief, about Antrobus, adding, “It’s purely business and I’m quite sure that he won’t give the secrets away.”
“I trust you, King. But you’ll have to do something for me.”
“Of course.”
“Alfie left me three things of value: a fortune in a Swiss bank account, our son, and a fat suitcase.”
“What’s in the suitcase?”
“A special-built computer attached to a ten-thousand-gigabyte memory drive.”
“The blackmail file?”
“The password is Ten Thousand Things.”
“Oh... kay.”
“I want you to take the suitcase.”
“And do what with it?”
“Destroy it, sell it, read about the people in it, condemning those you think deserve damnation.”
“I thought I heard that Alfred had a guy that was going to release all the information to the world if something happened to him.”
“There was a man,” Mathilda said, nodding. “But he was from the way Alfie was before he met me. We were both pretty sure that he’d attack the Left and left-leaning people on the Right. At the end there we didn’t even know what to do with the files.”
“So does this guy expect you to turn over this database?”
“Years ago Alfie told him that there was an automatic code that would send him the files seventy-two hours after he was unable to cancel the delivery system.”
“He was in jail more’n three days,” I speculated.
“Yeah. But I’m pretty sure he had one of the guards making the call for him.”
“But,” I said, “I mean, wouldn’t whoever had him in there have figured out what the guard was doing and either pay him off or monitor him or something?”
That was the one and only time that Mathilda had what I’d call a haughty look on her face.
“Alfie was a genius,” she said. “He had the answer terminal send out a thousand random phone calls with the same abort message. Nobody would be able to find the guy that should get the message.”
“So what happens now?”
“Doesn’t matter. Alfie’s man no longer has a connection to the real files. I’m the only one that has it.”
It was a head scratcher, to say the least. But it really brought up only one important question.
“Who was it that had your husband captured and imprisoned here?”
Looking at me, Mathilda smiled.
“A while before things got crazy, Minta told me that she’d gotten a message from Alfie that he wanted me to meet someone. She drove me to a building on Seventh Avenue and brought me to an office. There Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite was waiting.”
“Whoa.”
“You know her?”
“Yes, I do. What did she want?”
“She offered me one percent of MDLT stock if I would grant her access to Alfie’s files.”
“Eight billion dollars,” I equated.
“I told her that my husband did not share that information with me. I said he had a man that was in charge of distributing that data.”
“Did she believe you?”
“After that was when Alfie was hunted down and brought here. But I’ve had that suitcase over a year now. And when Alfie had you reach out to me, he was saying that you were the man that could handle it.”
“How many files are on it?” I asked my temporary lover.
“I don’t know exactly. Thousands. Tens of thousands.”
“Where’d they all come from?”
“Official files from all around the world. You know Alfie never slept and his mind was always sharp, no matter how hard he was thinking. He broke computer codes in every nation, for dozens of police departments, government agencies, and databases of the rich. Then he’d hire individual agents to research the things he found.”
“Knowledge is power,” I said, more to myself than to her.
“When he told me about it I asked him how he would feel if somebody exposed him like that.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t ask that question himself.”
“We had a special connection. It was like if we looked into each other we saw ourselves. I mean, just because I was with you last night don’t mean I didn’t love him. I did. I do.”
It was what one might call an impossible moment. With the potential information on the giga-drive I could have built myself an empire — for good or evil. I could have become a modern-day Talleyrand. A puppet master.
“What do you say, Joe?”
“You wanna go upstairs and lie down for a while?”
We spent hours together in my tiny room. There was a good deal of temporary romance and erotic derring-do. But much of the time we spent talking and sharing little pieces of our lives that wouldn’t matter to anyone, not even our solitary selves, unless they were there — with us.
By the time I fell asleep I couldn’t have imagined anything, anywhere else in the world.
When I awoke again, at around 3:00 a.m., Mathilda was gone.
On the floor next to the bed was a fat brown suitcase. It didn’t have a lock. What good would that have done? I set up the contrivance on the cheap desk and sat, naked, on the red plastic chair.
When I turned on the computer, the first screen asked for the password. I entered Ten Thousand Things. The second screen asked for search parameters.
In the morning I packed up my car and drove to the Blue Grass Airport. There I made a deal with the manager of the car rental service to buy the Volkswagen.
It was a sixteen-hour drive. I stopped twice for gas and food, and once to make a call to Melquarth.
“Hello?”