Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (21 page)

“Got that,” said Borg, “but we’ll have to change tactics.”

Gunn’s voice rose. “Why?”

“Otherwise we’ll arouse suspicions.”

“Didn’t you take care of that blogger?”

Slight pause. “The blog is down.”

“Then no one will connect the dots,” Gunn said. “There have been pyromaniacs before, there will be pyromaniacs again.”

“All right,” said Borg, “but we’ll need more cash.”

Gunn, his voice low again, said something about short sales and hung up. Short sales were something about the stock market. My dad had tried it once, with bad results.

Silence. After a few moments, Borg burst out with a string of bad language, then punched a key on his phone.
“Henkel?” he said, his tone changed now, much more commanding. “New schedule. Twelve thirty tonight. The Goat.”
Click.

Twelve thirty tonight? The Goat? Something real bad was in the near future. My only chance now was to stay unnoticed until Borg left the office.
Leave, split, up and at ’em,
I thought, willing him my hardest to go. But he didn’t go, instead leaned forward and tapped again at his keyboard.

“Something happened here,” he muttered. He sniffed the air. “But what?”

Had he already seen my picture? What was going on?

More tapping. Then the sound of him sipping his coffee. “Yech,” he said, and compared the taste of the coffee to dog pee, although pee was not the word he used. Then he lowered the coffee cup—a paper cup with
KWIK KOFFEE
written on the side—down into my field of vision. He moved it first in one direction, then another, like he was searching for something like—oh, no!—the wastebasket. But the wastebasket wasn’t in its usual place, on account of me having moved it.

I got hold of the wastebasket—gently, gently—and began to slide it toward a spot underneath that coffee cup. Suddenly Borg made a sweeping movement and his hand brushed against mine and then bumped the rim of the wastebasket. He dropped the coffee cup inside. His
hand lingered there for a moment, feeling the wastebasket rim, then patting at the air around it. I shrank back, just out of reach, not even breathing. I could smell his breath: coffee, tuna, breath mint. He patted the air some more, his strong fingers—tiny tufts of platinum hair grew between the knuckles—coming an inch from my nose. His hand paused there, and then after what seemed like centuries, moved to the wastebasket. He adjusted its position back to exactly where it had been originally, straightened in his seat, and turned to the computer.

Tap-tap-tap.

E
gil Borg, fixer and troubleshooter, worked away on his computer. I stayed where I was, motionless under his desk, smelling coffee and tuna, and sensing his bad mood pressing against me like a material thing.

“Blank?” he said after a while. “How can it be blank? What’s been going on here?” He kicked out again with one of his feet, nailing my knee once more, exact same spot, with his fancy wingtip. This time it hurt even worse than before.

I rubbed my knee. This—staying under the desk and getting kicked from time to time—couldn’t go on. I was starting to get the picture, which was all about the lack of a picture, specifically mine. That was what was annoying Borg so much. He must have been thinking that his camera, or his programming, or some other thing that Silas would understand had screwed up. So soon
he’d be giving up, right? Calling it a day and going home. I was starting to get a cramp in my leg, but there was no way to straighten it without bumping into one of those wingtips.

Meanwhile Borg was back to tapping at the keys. A fixer and troubleshooter, yes, but also a lawyer, and I knew lawyers could stay at their desks for long, long sessions. Was it possible to somehow crawl out from under the desk, across the room, and out the door? I moved ever so slightly, not even crawling, more like the wriggling of a very slow worm, just enough to peek out from behind the corner of the desk and check the position of the door: a football field away, and closed.

At that very moment, someone knocked on it.

“Who is it?” said Borg, sounding impatient and unfriendly.

“I.T.,” said a man on the other side of the door.

“Come in.”

A man in jeans and a T-shirt came in, carrying a tool kit.

“What took you so long?” Borg said.

“Uh, sorry,” said the I.T. guy. “What can I do you for?”

“I hate that expression,” Borg said. The I.T. guy’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything. “Someone entered a wrong password,” Borg told him. “The camera
is programmed to take a picture of anyone doing that, but I can’t find it. I need that photo, and I need it pronto.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said the I.T. guy.

“Just do it,” Borg told him.

“Yes, sir.”

The I.T. man approached the desk. I ducked out of sight. He came around the back. I was just noticing that he wore big heavy boots when one of them came right down on the back of my hand.

It hurt! And the cramp in my leg was hurting, too. Those twin hurts teamed up to try and make me utter some cry, but I kept it inside.

The I.T. guy, one booted foot still on my hand, put his tool kit on the desk, leaned forward, and got to work.

“Well, well,” he said after a while.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Borg.

“Fried,” said the I.T. guy.

“What are you talking about?”

“Lens, circuitry, the whole photo library,” the I.T. guy said. “All wiped out.”

“You’re saying you can’t retrieve the photo?”

“No way.”

“How could that happen?” Borg said.

“Must’ve been a power surge,” said the I.T. guy, not sounding very sure.

“Haven’t we got surge protection?”

“Best there is, but there’s no guarantee that—”

“And if there was a power surge how come the rest of the computer’s fine?”

“That’s a head-scratcher, actually,” said the I.T. guy. “Kind of unprecedented, in my experience. I could take it down to the shop, maybe run a couple of—”

“You’re dismissed,” Borg said.

The I.T. guy packed up, stepped off my hand, and left the room. The pattern of his boot heel lingered on my skin. I was gazing at it and flexing my hand a bit, when I realized I was still seeing very clearly without my glasses; the power was in no hurry to leave me.

“What a moron,” Borg said; I’m leaving out an adjective he put before moron. He smacked the desk, then rose and started pacing around, out of my line of sight. “Memo to self,” he said. “Have I.T. moron fired.” He paused. I could feel him thinking. Then he was on the move again. I heard the door open, heard him walking onto the hard floor of the hall; the door slammed shut.

I made myself count to sixty. But why? I thought, when I got to fifty-nine. What if Borg had just been in need of more pacing territory and was on his way back? I squeezed out from under the desk, rose, straightened out my cramped leg with both hands, and limped across Borg’s office.

Very slow, very careful, I turned the knob, opened
the door an inch or two, and peered out. No one in the hall. I hurried to the elevator bank. One elevator stood open. I jumped inside, hit seventy-eight. The doors closed. The elevator started moving. I took a deep breath, one of those sighs of relief, and at that moment saw myself in the shiny elevator walls. Hey! I looked kind of the way I did in Tut-Tut’s drawing. And one other thing: my side part was gone. I felt around on my head: no part. Had I taken the part out sometime after leaving my mom’s office and going up to seventy-nine? No. And therefore? The power didn’t like the part either? I searched for some other explanation.

I went into my mom’s office.

“All set?” she said. “I was just coming up to get you.”

“All set,” I said.

“Where are your glasses?”

“In my pocket.”

“Well, put them on—you don’t want to strain your eyes.”

I put on my glasses, straining my eyes. The power wanted to stay a little longer.

“Mom?” I said. We were in a taxi, on the way to meet my dad at the Indonesian place. “What’s financing?”

She glanced at me. “Financing is about providing funds for business or investing.”

“Funds means money?”

“Basically.”

“What do the Saudis have to do with it?”

“The Saudis?”

“I heard the Saudis do financing.”

“Who told you that?”

“I just heard people talking about it.”

“Well,” said my mom, “the Saudis—meaning the royal family and the ruling class—have lots and lots of money from all these years of selling their oil. You can’t just let money sit there—”

“Why not?”

“Because almost always it will be worth less the next day.”

Not sure I got that—in fact, I knew I hadn’t—but Mom was already going on.

“So you have to put the money to work—backing some tech start-up, for example, or buying up an already existing company, or lending to a developer.”

“Like a real estate developer?”

“Exactly.”

“The poor kind of real estate developer,” I said.

“The poor kind?” said Mom.

“Because the rich kind—like Sheldon Gunn—wouldn’t need financing. He’d use his own money.”

My mom smiled. “Sheldon Gunn seems to have made quite an impression on you.”

I shrugged. “Just using him as an example,” I said. “Could be any big developer.”

“Such as?” Mom said.

I tried to think of a name, got nowhere.

My mom laughed. “Even the Sheldon Gunns of the world need financing. Being a billionaire doesn’t mean you have quick access to the huge amounts of cash that the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project will need. Just using that as an example.” Mom has this look my dad calls her checkmate face. She gave it to me now.

I laughed. So did she. We sat a little closer together in the back of the taxi.

“And using other people’s money often makes sense for a lot of reasons,” Mom said, “such as tax avoidance or estate pla— Driver! You missed the turn.”

Back home after dinner at the Indonesian restaurant—my vision returning to its terrible normal self with the arrival of the menus—texts zoomed around between Ashanti, Silas, and me, but not Tut-Tut since he had no cell phone. I kept the whole Borg adventure out of it, stuck to the fact that something was going down at the Red Goat that night at twelve thirty and we just had to be there. But how? We were kids, and it was night. I couldn’t just say, “Hey, I’m going out for a stroll, be back whenever.”

Downstairs, I could hear Mom and Dad talking about
Shep and the agent. The drinks thing had gone well—the agent liked having a title with
Magic
in it, and he’d asked to see the first fifty pages, so Dad had his work cut out for him, since there weren’t any pages yet. Dad said something, and Mom laughed. It was nice to hear them having fun like that, but weren’t they tired? Wasn’t it sleepy time? I went to my window and gazed down at our garden—a small space with a brick patio and a dirt patch where Mitch tried to grow tomatoes. On the far side stood a building much like ours, and on each side grew cherry trees that never produced cherries. Past the cherry tree on the left was a narrow alley that led to the street on the block behind us. Right outside my window was the fire escape. I’ve climbed out there once or twice in summer to catch a few rays—my little secret.

I raised the window. Cold air blew into my room. I stepped out onto the fire escape. It was like a narrow, railed-in balcony with a square hole in the middle of the floor. You stepped through that hole to the ladder that slanted down to a similar balcony on the next floor, which happened to be outside the downstairs bathroom window. That balcony didn’t have a hole; instead you walked to the end and lowered the ladder, left in the up position to keep the burglars at bay. My parents had explained the whole setup when we’d moved in. I’d never tried it, of course. It was all theory.

I climbed back inside and closed the window. There was a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” I said.

“I feel a draft,” my mom said. Mom was a champion feeler of drafts. The door opened and she popped her head in. “No wonder,” she said. “It’s so cold in here.” She glanced at the window, saw it was closed, and felt the radiator. “Nice and warm,” she said, looking puzzled. She was moving toward the window when Dad looked in.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Mom feels a draft.”

Dad laughed, said, “What’s new?” and moved off down the hall to their bedroom. Mom smiled and shook her head in a what-can-I-do way. They were both in a pretty good mood; we’d have to hit that Indonesian place more often.

“Night, Robbie. Don’t stay up too late.”

“Night, Mom.”

She closed the door and left. Soon there were running-water sounds and moving-around sounds and then things got quiet.

I called Ashanti, spoke very low. “I can get out,” I said.

“Me too,” said Ashanti, “but only after my mother takes her sleeping pill.”

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know. She’s pretty lively tonight.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Listening to music.”

“Oh.”

“Opera,” Ashanti says. “She loves opera, especially Maria Callas.”

“Who’s that?”