“I asked her about that. Pretty bluntly. She says she already told the police I was driving and that she hadn’t been hurt, and that was the end of it. Or would have been. Except yesterday two guys showed up at her door.”
“What do you mean—cops?”
“They said they were insurance investigators. They wanted to hear about the accident. She says she stuck to her story.”
“But?”
“But the ID they showed her looked dodgy, and she thinks there was something off about them.”
“Something off?”
“I think she meant they seemed threatening. They scared her. And since she lied to them on my behalf, she feels like I owe her an explanation.”
“Which is the one thing you can’t give her.”
“I agreed to meet her for lunch.”
Amanda said, “You couldn’t just tell her to fuck off? Because Damian’s right, it’s probably some kind of shakedown. She’ll ask for money, bet on it.”
“I didn’t tell her to fuck off.” For some reason I thought of Rachel’s daughter Suze, owl-eyed and rain-drenched in the backseat of her car. “But if she asks for money, I will.”
So I drove to the restaurant Rachel had suggested, a chain steakhouse in a Burnaby strip mall, and a bored waiter steered me to her table. Which was good, because I might not have recognized her. Her hair, which had looked black in the rain, was actually a deep coppery red. It framed her round face, brown eyes, small nose, and a pursed mouth that showed her upper front teeth when she smiled. “Adam Fisk,” she said.
“Just Adam.”
“And I’m Rachel.”
“I remember. Where’s Suze?”
“In school, but thank you for asking. I hope I didn’t drag you away from anything important?”
I had been more or less confined to a room with six other Taus—IT types and electronics engineers—for days now. But I couldn’t complain. “Just work,” I said.
“Mm. Well, I work three days a week at the food bank on Hastings Street. But today’s not one of those days.”
So we stared at our menus and discussed the comparative virtues of the salad plate and the club sandwich and wondered what else we ought to say. After we ordered I said, “You had some people come visit you?”
“Yeah. Like I said, two guys with IDs I didn’t trust. Kind of pretending to be nice—at least at first—but you could tell they were only pretending.”
“What did they look like?”
She shrugged. “Hard to describe. White guys in suits. Short hair. Maybe Russian or Eastern European–looking, if that means anything. Something about the cheekbones. But no accent, so I don’t know. One was a little chunky, the other was taller and looked like he worked out.”
“And they asked about your accident?”
“They seemed to know the details already, which is why I thought they were legitimate. I told them about the transmission. Actually the car’s still in the garage. Until I can bail it out. Expensive repairs.” I wondered if this was the point at which she would ask for money. “I got suspicious when they kept asking about what they called ‘the other vehicle.’ Your car.”
“What about it?”
“Well, they asked who was driving. Wanted a description.”
“And you told them—?”
“I said I there were three people in the car, two guys and a woman, and the younger guy was driving. Same as I told the cops. But these guys kept asking the same questions over and over. Was I hurt? No. Was I sure? Yes. Was I frightened? No. And so on. Like they thought I was being uncooperative. Which admittedly I kind of was. They weren’t very good at hiding their pissed-offness.” The waiter put down glasses of ice water and Rachel took a long gulp. “So I asked them to leave.”
“Which they did?”
“More or less peacefully. They didn’t make any threats. But I still felt threatened. So I called you.” Her expression hardened. “Since I stuck to the story about you driving, I feel like you owe me something.”
“Owe you what exactly?” I refrained from saying, How much?
“Well, for starters, an explanation! Who were those guys? What did they want? Am I in some kind of danger? I mean, I’ve got Suze to worry about. For that matter, who are you?”
“To be honest, I don’t know how much of that I can answer. I have no idea who those guys were.”
“Okay. I guess I believe that. But you don’t seem real surprised by any of this.”
And suddenly I wasn’t sure what to say. I was coming out of a long Tau immersion. Had she been a Tau, I would have just explained. But she wasn’t. I could neither trust her nor be sure she would understand anything I told her. Still, it was true she had done me a favor, and not just me; she had helped protect Damian, and by implication our entire Affinity. I said, “I’m a Tau—”
She rolled her eyes. “And I’m a Pisces. So what?”
“All the people in the car were Taus.”
“You’re saying this is some kind of Affinity thing? I knew the convention was in town, but—”
“My friend is involved in a legal wrangle with a major corporation. Their lawyers probably have investigators in the field looking for something they can use as leverage. Now, I’m not saying that’s who came to your house. I honestly don’t know who came to your house.”
“But it’s a possibility?”
“It’s a possibility. Did they ask anything that struck you as particularly odd?”
“They asked if I knew where you were coming from, the day of the accident.”
We had been coming from Meir Klein’s country house. InterAlia knew where Klein lived. Maybe someone had connected the dots.
We talked through lunch. Rachel asked a few questions about the Affinities, I asked a few questions about Rachel. She was fairly voluble now that she had relaxed, and I liked the way she stroked the air with her right hand as she talked, index finger and middle finger pressed together as if she were holding an invisible cigarette. The waiter cleared our dessert dishes. We ordered coffee. Another twenty minutes and we were still talking. And enjoying it.
So I went home with her. Though I knew it was probably a bad idea.
Affinity members tend to be endogamous: they’re more likely to form sexual relationships within their Affinity than outside of it. When it comes to long-term commitments, that’s true of all the Affinities. But some Affinities—Delts and Kafs, most notoriously—have a penchant for short-term liaisons outside the group. Taus fall somewhere in the middle of that range. Trevor Holst, for instance, hadn’t lived with anyone but another Tau since he joined our tranche, but he treated the annual convention as an all-you-can-eat sexual buffet, pun not entirely unintended. Wherever some Kaf was organizing a hotel-room orgy, there you would find Trev.
I told myself I wasn’t like that. Since I joined my tranche my single long-term partner had been Amanda, and all my dalliances had been Taus. If for no other reason than that it made life easier. No mixed signals, fewer hurt feelings.
But Rachel had attracted my attention, suddenly and deeply and in a way I didn’t entirely understand. And by the time we left the restaurant, both of us knew it. She had come by bus, and I asked her if she wanted a ride home. She said she did.
I wasn’t sure what was beginning, only that I was willing to let it begin.
“So you have somebody?” she asked. “Back in Tau-land?”
She had invited me into her basement apartment in New Westminster. Rachel was a single mother on a shoestring income and had furnished the place accordingly. Cotton throw rugs over scuffed linoleum, a thrift-shop sofa, three overflowing laundry baskets occupying the space between a video panel and a bookcase stocked with secondhand paperback bestsellers. The tablet computer on the coffee table was a couple of years out of date and there was a burn mark on the plastic frame.