“Tomorrow,” Tauber said.
Kate’s eyebrows went up like exclamation points.
“You know that? For a fact?”
She kept looking back and forth from one to the next of us. You could feel the air leaking out of the car. She stared out the window, tapping her knuckles against it like a drummer.
“I have an apartment,” she said finally, “in Philadelphia. Dad never visited me, so they couldn’t have gotten the address from him. You should be safe there overnight.” She made a disgruntled count of the company. “Someone’s going to have to sleep in the bathtub,” she announced.
Her apartment was in what looked like a very dignified old garage. “It’s a mews,” her voice echoed as she opened the huge door-someone had built it some time ago to fit the ornate archway on the street. “We’re tracing back the documents-I know it’s at least two centuries old but that’s as far as we’ve gotten.” The neighborhood was one of those arty places where everything looks a little rundown but one neighbor stacks huge paintings in his window while the sound of a jazz band drifts out of the next.
The TV was on when she opened the front door. The two spooks, Tauber and Max, immediately went stiff and cautious, moving through the place door to door, throwing open and checking each room thoroughly before relaxing. Kate walked calmly past them into the kitchen to make coffee.
“Steve leaves the TV on all the time-when he’s here, when he’s gone. It’s his imaginary friend.”
“Steve?” I asked.
“My boyfriend.”
“You live together?” Max demanded. The tone of voice said he wasn’t convinced there was no threat. “He stays here even when you’re gone?”
“Well-he and Morgan were here. They’re away this weekend.” She hesitated for a moment. “She’s my roommate-Steve’s with her too,” she said with a little hesitation.
“So he’s the apartment boyfriend,” I remarked and Tauber shot me a look. Kate just nodded and went back to her coffee. “Do you have tea?” Max asked and she nodded and ran water into a kettle.
“They won’t barge in on us?” Max asked. “The roommate and…your boyfriend?”
“They’re gone till Monday,” Kate answered wistfully, kindling a questioning look on Max’s face.
There was an artist’s easel propped against a corner, holding a book of drawing paper. Max tore off a page.
“We’re going to spread out on the table,” he announced, setting Kate scrambling to move a pile of academic journals onto the floor before he could upend them. Max spread the paper across the surface. Kate pulled out a speckled journal out of the side pocket of her suitcase and opened it to a page marked by a yellow stickie.
“These are my father’s notes from his talks with Dave, my notes from our conversations and my research. I can’t promise they’re word for word but the gist should be right.”
The pot started to whistle. Kate turned but Tauber held up his hand. “You stay, sweetie,” he said. “I can make tea-and coffee.”
“My hero,” she answered. She opened her book and started reading out loud. Each major point she made, Max jotted on the sheet, lines drawn between known connections and dotted lines between suspected or hypothetical ones. It was a familiar list-L Corp, using mindbenders to bolster candidates and business clients, an army of low-level mindbenders to send out mental suggestions and the Big Scheme coming soon.
“There’s not much new here,” Tauber said when she’d finished. The table was a nice mess of papers and coffee mugs, doodles on art paper and lots of names with arrows pointing at other names pointing at question marks, mostly because we didn’t really know a whole lot more than we did before.
“What did you do to the shooters at the cemetery?” Max asked again. When she didn’t answer immediately, he explained, “You made their guns fly away. They got naked without a peep.”
“Can’t you do that?”
“I want to know how you did it. Their goggles were supposed to hold down outside influences like us.”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You usually make guns fly around without knowing what you’re doing?”
“I don’t usually deal with people with guns!” she answered, again as though fighting to get the words out. Or fighting to control herself.
“So you took their guns-and cell phones,” Max said. “And goggles. And clothes. And you broke the killer’s bones.” Having seen her temper, I wouldn’t have kept pushing this point but that didn’t stop him.
“I–I didn’t,” Kate protested again. A long moment passed, the two staring each other down across the table. Then she added, “Not on purpose. He really did kill my father! It was in his head. He drove the car himself, so no one would botch the job. He ran over him twice to make sure he couldn’t survive and then just drove off.” The tears were brimming but she fought them off stubbornly, heroically. A long moment passed in silence.
“But not on purpose isn’t the same as I didn’t do it, is it?” Max said finally. “What did you know when you marched down that hill into the face of six people with serious guns and bad intent?”
“I knew I was sick of guns,” she answered fiercely. “I knew you were coming from Dave.”
“How did you know that?”
“He told my father that, if anything happened to him, you’d be coming.” This was a shock to me but Max just smiled, as though it confirmed something he’d already been thinking.
“And what else did you know?” he said, voice softening.
“Why is it so important?”
“If you’re really fooling yourself that you didn’t make those things happen, I need to know it.”
“You don’t need to know anything about me.”
“And if you broke his bones at ten feet without meaning to, I would think you’d better know it. People like us can’t afford illusions about ourselves.”
“Why? The psychiatrists are all booked up?” She was building up a slow boil again; I started looking for a soft place to land.
Max eyes flared. They seemed to draw up into his skull. I felt his voice coming at me through the floorboards.
“Our illusions have consequences. They have a way of becoming real.”
Kate’s face went paler, if such a thing were possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where is this boyfriend of yours? Where’s your roommate?”
“I–I told you. They-they went camping. They made plans… a long time ago.”
“You just buried your father.”
“You can’t expect them to feel the way I do.”
“I could expect them to go to the funeral for your sake.” Kate’s jaw was set but her eyes were nowhere near as confident. “Does Morgan share Steve with you when she’s around? Or are you the only one sharing?”
Max was inches from her now. His voice was so soft, I couldn’t believe I really heard it. I saw his lips moving but the words seemed to come from inside my head.
“Your feelings run very deep; they frighten you. Millions of people with the depth of a coat of varnish are frightened by their feelings. And you carry oceans-so I understand your caution.” He stared into Kate’s eyes like he was pulling her inside-out through them. “But instead of learning to deal with the power of them, you’ve gone into hiding. You’ve taken partners who don’t touch anything in you and given them free reign. It’s safe-you know they’re only using you for sex and company-you’re in no danger of feeling anything that could get out of hand. Your career keeps you at an academic distance from all of human history. You’ve got the illusion of a life but no nourishment. The longer you bottle those feelings up, the more powerfully they’ll spill out in the end.”
His eyes were hard on her and for a moment she looked stung, almost shamed. But then her face turned defiant. She took him on and stared him down.