Lord of All Things Page 22

  Cleaning his room would be easy now.

  Around noon, when everything was in place and tidied up and the house looked almost livable, Brenda conjured up a pot of something she had prepared earlier. As it heated up on the stove, the kitchen began to smell appetizingly of mulligatawny soup. Bowls were hastily unpacked, washed, and put on the table. Spoons clattered. Gwen called out, “Mmm, what’s in this?” and Juanita said, “Not bad.” Brenda and Dr. Wickersham, it turned out, had stopped for fresh bread on the way over. Charlotte’s mouth was watering as well. She hadn’t eaten mulligatawny for ages. The soup was thick and yellow, full of vegetables, chicken, rough-chopped cashews, and rice, and it tasted delicious.

  Inevitably, conversation turned to their childhood days in Delhi. Wickersham was astonished to learn they had both lived in India when they were young. Charlotte was a diplomat’s daughter, of course, so that made sense, but Brenda? Brenda launched into a series of anecdotes, such as the one about the old man who watched the entrance to her parents’ compound. He spent his days sitting in a tiny wooden guard hut, like a cage, and at night he would light a fire in there, building it in a rusty old hubcap. Brenda had worried for years that the house would burn down.

  Charlotte told the story about the monkey that had come into her bedroom to steal the math book. “I watched him climb back up into the tree to have a closer look at what he’d gotten. The other monkeys found out, though, and did all they could to get the book off him. In the end there was nothing left but confetti.” She laughed as she remembered. “I went out to the garden to gather up the scraps so that I could show them to my teacher the next day. I was worried she wouldn’t believe me otherwise.”

  She could see the big villa again in her mind’s eye, with its enormous garden.…Oh yes, and the dozens of servants always scurrying around. Not that any of them had worked very hard. She remembered groups of women who spent their days sweeping the paths, bent over with simple brooms made of bundles of twigs. All it did was stir up the dust; the flagstones were never actually any cleaner.

  “What did you do all day?” Wickersham asked curiously.

  Brenda glanced at Charlotte. “Once we’d finished our homework, we were usually over at your place at the pool, weren’t we?”

  Charlotte no longer remembered. “Didn’t we spend all our time in the courtyard? The one with the broken stone wall?”

  “Oh yes! That was where your peacock sometimes attacked us. He was an evil-tempered bird.”

  “He was indeed. What was his name again? Gerôme. Oh yes, he was one to steer clear of.”

  She felt lighthearted just thinking of Delhi, telling the old stories. How simple life had been back then.

  After lunch it was time for phase two: emptying Brenda’s room in Warren Towers. They had let the Office of Parking Services know about the move and had special permission to use the parking garage that took up the first two floors of the enormous dorm complex. The janitor came and freed up an elevator for them so they could go back and forth between Brenda’s floor and the truck. It could have been an easy job. Should have been. If Juanita had been able to simply take the books off the shelves and pack them in boxes without stopping to look at every single one. If she didn’t know a book, she read its jacket text from start to finish, and if she did, she would give a little lecture on it.

  “Ju!” Brenda finally yelled. “The girl who’s taking over the room is due next week, already! We have to hurry things along a little.”

  Juanita was deep in contemplation of a paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Did you know that Africans hate this book?” she asked.

  There was a constant bustle in the hall as neighbors came by to bid Brenda a tearful farewell. They acted as though she were about to emigrate, although in fact they would all see one another on campus on Monday. Charlotte was glad Brenda was finally moving out of Towers. The concrete hallways had all the charm of a subway station, and it always smelled nasty. Today the omnipresent odor of unwashed socks predominated.

  “It’s pretty lively here,” Wickersham commented to Brenda. “Don’t you like that?”

  “Oh I do,” Brenda replied, piling a cushion on top of the box of books he already held in his arms. “But I have these funny old-fashioned notions of privacy. Up here you can come home beat dead from the day and find there’s a party happening in your room and someone’s reading aloud from your diary. Not my idea of fun.”

  Unpacking back at Brenda’s new house was much calmer. Charlotte took her time putting towels on the shelves in the bathroom, enjoying the peace and quiet after the chaos of Warren Towers. She had the feeling that peace and quiet was allowed here.

  “Charley?” Brenda stuck her head round the door. “Here you are. Hey.” She came in and shut the door behind her. “You seem a little down today. Is everything all right with you and James? Did you two have an argument?”

  Charlotte took a deep breath. “No,” she said and shook her head. “No, we didn’t argue.”

  James hadn’t been able to get over that bout of impotence. On Friday he had turned up unexpectedly and thrown himself at her. This time the sex worked. It had been a little quick—too quick for her—but at least it had happened.

  “But?” Brenda looked at her in concern.

  “Everything’s all right with me and James,” Charlotte declared with the strangest feeling she was an oyster just starting to cover some inner hurt with mother-of-pearl. “Really, it couldn’t be better. I’m happy. Yes. We’ve been talking about setting dates, you know? We’ll announce the engagement in the fall and then get married the following summer.” She had to take a deep breath; there was a tightness in her chest. “Then I’ll be Mrs. James Bennett. That bothers me a little. I’ll get used to it, but…it’s a lot to take in.”

  Right at that moment she even believed what she was saying.

  Rasmussen wasn’t in the least like how Hiroshi expected an investor to look. The word suggested a guy like Gordon Gecko from Wall Street—somebody in an expensive suit smelling of expensive cologne. Gelled hair and an arrogant attitude. Rasmussen, however, was wearing linen pants, a polo shirt, and a summer-weight jacket. He had brought along chocolate doughnuts and coffee.

  “Just in case,” he announced. “I happen to really like doughnuts in the afternoon.” Then he looked around and added, “Wow. This is the neatest student room I’ve ever seen. It’s practically Zen. I’m impressed.”

  Hiroshi offered him a seat, which was much easier to do now with all his stuff gone, and said, “I have some cold drinks, too, if you’d like.”

  Rasmussen declined. “Let’s get to work on these doughnuts, then we’ll see.”

  As they ate, he began to talk. He told Hiroshi how he had watched Sollo Electronics try to take over its rival Cook & Holland, a company at least ten times its size. “They used the old trick—take out a bank loan to buy the shares and then pay off the loan afterward with Cook & Holland assets. Unfortunately, there was some competition, and the share price shot up. The sensible thing would have been to forget the whole thing, unload the shares they had, and cash in the profit, but no, the management at Sollo just said ‘full steam ahead.’ They took out loans all over the place and bought up more and more Cook & Holland shares, ran up these crazy debts—and then it all blew up in their faces. First, they couldn’t pay their suppliers—that’s when my alarm bells really started ringing, since two of my companies happen to be among the suppliers—then they couldn’t make payroll. After that the cat was out of the bag, and Sollo’s share price nose-dived.”

  Hiroshi had listened attentively, albeit without really understanding what the man was talking about. It was hard to say how old Rasmussen was. He had a weather-beaten look, as though he spent most of his time outside, and his hair was cut so short there was no telling what color it was. Probably gray. He had ice-blue eyes and a steady gaze.

  “So
what does all that mean?” Hiroshi asked. “Won’t there be any more Wizard’s Wands?” The idea that his invention might go off the market even before he got his degree depressed him.

  Rasmussen raised his hands. “Slow down. That’s just the point in the story where I took a closer look at the company. I made a guess at its true value, not the market value; stock prices have nothing to do with reality. I saw a company with amazing prospects but completely incompetent management. Megalomaniac idiots. So I bought Sollo Electronics—for a bargain price, if you disregard their outstanding debts—and I fired the lot of them. Now that I’ve paid off the debt, I have to turn those prospects I saw into reality.” He pointed at Hiroshi. “You, Mr. Kato, are one of those prospects.”

  Hiroshi shrugged. “I just invented one little gizmo.”

  “I have a nose for these things,” Rasmussen said. “It tells me you’ll invent more.”

  Hiroshi hesitated. “I don’t know. Could be.”

  “I’ve been talking to tradesmen. Lots of them. I haven’t met one who owns a Wizard’s Wand and doesn’t think it’s the bee’s knees.”

  “Well, that’s nice.” But what good did it do him?

  Rasmussen wiped a few crumbs of chocolate from his fingers with a napkin. “I looked at the numbers. Am I right that you weren’t particularly pleased with the money you earned from your invention?”

  Hiroshi shrugged again. “Well, pleased…it covered my tuition, so that was okay. I really just did it because I wanted to learn how that whole thing works. Patents, licensing, all of that.”

  “Did you know the Wizard’s Wand is on sale practically worldwide?”

  “I heard something of the kind.”

  “And weren’t you bothered that so little of that money was reaching you?”

  “Thirty, forty thousand dollars a year—is that really so little?” Hiroshi asked, though even as he uttered the words, he thought for a man like Rasmussen it probably was.

  The investor leaned forward and folded his hands. “Listen, this brings us back to the matter I mentioned on the phone: it has to be an exchange. A tree can’t just pump out oxygen; it has to take in its own nutrients. There has to be a proper balance of give and take if these things are to work. You never paid attention to this. You just put your invention out there in the world and let it look after itself. Pardon me for saying so, but that was irresponsible. It harmed you, and I believe that it harmed everyone else.”

  “But what should I have—”

  “What actually happened,” Rasmussen went on, with a curious gleam in his eye, “was the bosses at Sollo ripped off their patent holders first when they needed money for the takeover bid. The forty thousand dollars they paid you in the first year was all well and good, but please remember the Wizard’s Wand only came on the market in September, that the customers had to get to know it, and so forth. Your take should have been greater the following year. Instead, it was less. At least, in the balance sheet they showed you.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a piece of paper, which he handed to Hiroshi. “This is the amount you are actually due. Including the interest for late payment.”

  Hiroshi stared at the sheet of paper in his hands and felt his heart suddenly start hammering. It was a check for more than three million dollars.

  “I did wonder,” he heard a voice say, at first not even realizing it was his own, “whether we could integrate a laser pointer into the Wand to shoot out a coded light pulse. The cameras would pick it up and calculate the coordinates, then you could draw in partition walls or whatever directly in real space. Then, if we added a set of data goggles, the operator could see the new additions in the room right then and there in a virtual image. He could even move new elements around in 3-D.”

  “You see?” Rasmussen beamed. “No sooner do we get the balance right than your ideas begin to flow. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

  Hiroshi raised the check in his hand. “Three million? That’s really something.”

  He felt dizzy. He had been expecting almost anything, but not this. Three million. That meant he was rich. Not filthy rich, not stinking rich, but rich all the same.

  But despite that…he felt there was more at stake now than just money. His future was at stake, what he wanted from life, where he wished to go.

  “I’m pretty confused,” he confessed. “I…I mean, thanks for what you’ve done for me, of course—”

  “You’ve earned it,” Rasmussen said. “In fact, I figure you’ve earned the right to sue the former managers at Sollo Electronics for fraud.”

  Hiroshi looked at him in astonishment. “Uh, right.” He thought about it. “But what would that get me?” He had the money now.

  “It would punish a breach of contract and an abuse of your trust. Again, it’s a question of fair exchange. My favorite topic, as you will no doubt have noticed. Which is why I’ve already filed several suits. You’re welcome to be listed as a coplaintiff if you care to be.” Rasmussen waved his hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter right now. Think it over.”

  Hiroshi looked at the astonishing piece of paper in his hands: the Bank of America crest, Rasmussen’s looping signature. “Most of all I’d like to know why you wanted to meet me. What you expect. I sort of assumed that you would…I don’t know, ask me to sign a contract or something.”

  “Where would that get us?” Rasmussen shook his head. “Contracts serve as a written record of obligations. I don’t see that we need take on any new mutual obligations right now. I wanted to meet you because I believe in getting to know people face-to-face, in the personal touch—there’s nothing else like it. I wanted you to understand that I’m genuinely interested in you, in what you might do next, and I expect you to have a lot more ideas. Even more trailblazing projects. I also want you to know I’m ready to lend an ear for whatever you might be thinking of. Whether you need help getting an idea off the ground, or marketing a product.” He took a business card from his jacket pocket and jotted down a cell phone number on the back. “Only a very select few get this number, so please treat it as confidential. Here. You can reach me anytime.”

  Hiroshi took the card. “Thank you,” he said.

  “And what I just said will be as true ten years from now as it is next week,” Rasmussen continued. “Please don’t feel any pressure.”

  “Okay,” said Hiroshi.

  And then the investor was gone. Hiroshi could hardly believe someone like Jens Rasmussen had just been there—someone who flew in a private jet, owned a yacht, and donated five million dollars to a forestry campaign every year. But there was the check as proof it hadn’t all been a dream. He looked up. A sea mist was rolling in off the water, which was unusual for this time of year. But then it had been an unusual day. Hiroshi put the check inside his old Masters of the Universe notebook. Then he sat there and felt something he hadn’t felt for a very long time. He didn’t know what to do next. He opened his computer, but even as the screen started to glow he realized he couldn’t possibly check his e-mail or do anything so mundane. He switched the computer off and put it away. The mist outside was thickening into fog as he watched. The tower of MacGregor House was merely a silhouette. And Hiroshi’s room, so neat and tidy now, suddenly seemed small and empty.

  Had he forgotten some appointment he’d made? All of a sudden he felt that must be it. Something was nagging at him, but when he looked at his appointment book, there was nothing there. All the same, he had to get out of there. He threw on a jacket—the only jacket he had now—slipped his shoes on, and left. He met nobody in the corridors. The dorm was emptier than he had ever seen it on a Saturday night. The door squealed shut behind him as he left. The fog was everywhere now. There wasn’t much traffic on Memorial Drive, just a few dim headlights glowing through the gray fog. The trees on the center strip were like the looming shadows of ogres, and he couldn’t see the river at all.


  Hiroshi crossed the street. He knew he could walk along the bicycle path on the banks of the Charles River for hours if he had to. Walk until he was tired out. Maybe that would stop his thoughts from going round and round. He wasn’t the only one who was out and about. Someone was standing by one of the trees along the path, a familiar figure. He came slowly closer.

  “You?” he said in astonishment.

  Eventually everything Brenda would entrust to other hands had been unpacked and put away, and then the pizza arrived, a huge pizza with salad, and Italian red wine. The mood around the table was cheerful as could be, and even Juanita laughed occasionally and talked about something other than books.

  In fact, the mood was so cheerful that Charlotte made her excuses early, not wanting to spoil everyone else’s fun. “I have somewhere I should be,” she claimed. “Don’t mind me.”

  Brenda accompanied her to the door. “Thank you for coming,” she said and hugged her.

  Charlotte smiled wistfully. “You enjoy your first night in your very own home.”

  The fog was rolling in as she set out. It thickened astonishingly quickly, and Charlotte missed a turn. Before she knew where she was, she was downtown, driving past Cloud Eight, and for some strange reason her eyes were stinging. Whatever was wrong with her? When she finally got home, she shoved her sweaty clothes into the laundry basket and climbed into the shower to rinse off all the grime, the dust, the sweat. And that nagging sense of unease. Just as she was coming out of the bathroom, toweling her hair dry, the phone rang. She bent over and looked at the display. James. She put out her hand but then stopped before she picked up. She waited. It rang five times and then stopped. At the sixth ring her voice mail would have taken the call.

  So James had just wanted to know whether she was there.

  All at once the unease she thought she had washed away in the shower was back. As she got dressed, she realized she didn’t want to spend the whole evening sitting around wondering whether James would come. She could call back, she told herself as she blow-dried her hair. But she didn’t; instead, she put on a jacket and went out into the fog, which by now hung thick in the air. It was no weather for driving. No weather for sightseeing either. All the same, she wasn’t staying home, not tonight, not now. Just drive. She could drive slowly; she was in no hurry. How could she be in a hurry if she didn’t know where she was going? But didn’t she? At every intersection she knew without thinking whether to turn or keep on going. There was something telling her exactly where to go. This must be how the birds felt as they migrate, following their instincts.