She’d managed to get away from that. It hadn’t even cost her a zipless fuck—only a zipless blowjob to a National Guardsman whose name she never found out. You couldn’t get much more zipless than that, could you? Erica Jong would have been proud… or appalled, depending.
After that, Bronislav. She’d been sure Bronislav was the real thing. Well, she’d been sure with Hagop, too (or as sure as she could make herself with him), and with Bryce, and even with Peter way back when. Being sure was part of what made her tick. She’d dumped Bronislav’s forerunners. Getting dumped herself—and getting ripped off in the process—was a new, and nasty, variation on the theme.
So, while you couldn’t live without them, you also couldn’t live with them. Every so often, one of the guys at Nick Gorczany’s widget works would try his luck with her. With monotonous regularity, she turned them down and shot them down. She’d always got as much mileage as she could out of being pretty. Now she wondered if it wasn’t more trouble than it was worth.
Some of the engineers and programmers must have decided that, because they kept striking out with Vanessa, she had to be a lesbian. They must have gossiped about it, too, because a short-haired female programmer came on to her. She wasn’t as blatant as the guys were, but she also struck out. Vanessa was straight. Choosing the right guy was the problem. So was wondering whether she could find him, and wondering where to look. Aside from not at the widget works, she didn’t know.
Oh, she had an electronic profile or two out there. Who didn’t, as long as the power stayed on? But, after meeting a couple of men that way, she decided those profiles weren’t worth the paper they weren’t printed on. The fellow who said he was five-eleven turned out to be five-five. Since he hadn’t lied about his weight, he was also a good deal wider than advertised. The one who gave his age as forty had to be fifty-five. The pale band on the first joint of his ring finger said he was probably married, too. She made an excuse about needing to road-test her hamster and left as soon as she could.
She discovered that her high-school achievement-test scores qualified her for membership in Mensa. She sent in her forms, paid a year’s dues, and got a membership card. She went to one, count it, one, meeting. The people there were smart. Very few had anything else going for them. They talked about how they’d be on Easy Street if only this, that, or the other thing hadn’t happened to them.
Vanessa had plenty of complaints of her own along those lines. She didn’t feel like listening to anyone else’s. She wanted a winner. Winners plainly didn’t go to Mensa meetings. After that first one, neither did she.
She was eating a dinner that made her long for MREs (and they said it couldn’t be done!) when her phone rang. The displayed number and name seemed vaguely familiar, so she said, “Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Ferguson. This is Agent Gideon Sneed, from the FBI,” the man said. That was why she knew the name. He’d told her he wasn’t interested in going after Bronislav.
“Yes?” she said. Her opinion of the FBI hadn’t been high even before they didn’t want to throw her thief of an ex in the slammer. In that, she took after her father. He respected the Feds’ courage and diligence, but didn’t think they were long on brains. Because they had jurisdiction over a relatively small range of crimes, they didn’t need to be—not if you listened to him, anyhow. Vanessa had, for years, at the dinner table and in the car and while she was watching TV. His attitude sank in, and became hers without her ever noticing.
“I wanted to tell you that we may possibly be opening an investigation of Mr., uh, Bronislav, uh, Nedic”—Sneed made a horrible hash of both names, the way most people would reading them cold off a sheet of paper—“over issues that are unrelated to yours. If we do, we may append your charges as well, to increase our chances of winning a conviction on one count or another.”
“Well, all right!” Vanessa said. “That’s the best news I’ve had in I don’t know how long. What’s the asshole gone and done now?”
“You understand, at the moment these are only unsubstantiated allegations,” Sneed told her. And only somebody like an FBI man could say unsubstantiated allegations often enough to bring it out as if it belonged to the English language.
For once, Vanessa had no trouble stifling the urge to copyedit. “Yeah, yeah, fine,” she said. “Cut to the chase. What’s he unsubstantiatedly alleged to have done?” If you couldn’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Sneed didn’t think her repetition was funny—he sure didn’t laugh, anyhow. For all she could tell over the phone, he didn’t even notice. Cops got so used to cop jargon, they took it for granted. “There is a certain level of tension between the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile,” the FBI man said carefully. “It is possible that Mr. Nedic has participated in activities which would escalate that level of tension.”
From what Vanessa knew of Bronislav, he didn’t participate in activities. He shot people or blew them up. If those people were Croats, he got drunk on slivovitz and sang songs and danced afterwards, too. “That sounds like him, all right,” she said. “But how big are the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile goddamn Alabama? Seventeen Serbs and nineteen Croats?”
“Larger than that,” Sneed said. “Large enough that an incident between them could be a significant incident. If Mr. Nedic is trying to create such an incident, we need to prevent him from being successful.”
“And stop him, too,” Vanessa murmured. She couldn’t help herself, or stop herself.
“I beg your pardon?” Sneed said.
“Never mind,” Vanessa said. “So if you bust him on the terrorism rap, you’ll toss in stealing my bank account and taking it across state lines like a cherry on top of the sundae?” God, when was the last time I had a sundae? Much too long ago—probably before the eruption. Have to do something about that.
“Yes, that’s about right,” Sneed said. “You have an interesting way of talking, you know?”
“I’ve heard people say so,” Vanessa replied, which was true. Sometimes they meant it for a compliment. The FBI man seemed to.
“You do,” he said now. “I noticed it when we met in person. I was very sorry that our prioritization process prevented me from implementing proceedings against Mr. Nedic at that point in time.”
“So was I,” Vanessa said: growled, really.
“That makes me especially glad to be able to bring you this information now,” Sneed said.
“Okay,” Vanessa said.
“In fact,” the FBI man went on, “I wondered if it might be possible for the two of us to meet some time in a social setting.”
“You mean, like, a date?”
“Yes.”
She almost hung up on him right there. She wondered if the whole call was a setup. FBI guy finds a bulge in his pants, comes out with some bullshit about dropping on Bronislav so he’ll look cool to the woman who can’t stand the dude, then tries to get into her knickers. He hadn’t said they were actually doing anything about the damn Serb, just that they were looking at it. If they didn’t, he had all kinds of built-in excuses: Bronislav got cold feet, or there wasn’t enough evidence, or some judge wouldn’t issue a warrant, or yaddayaddayadda.