'Sorry,' he said hurriedly. 'I'll get off the soapbox.'
She shrugged. 'Maybe I'm a little too touchy on the subject. I've always been curious about something I heard. Did they really clean your tank back when you were starting out? Is that true?'
'Oh, yeah,' he said, 'they whipped my ass good. The Chamber of Commerce sold everyone down the river, the newspaper lied to them, the bigshots bought off the judges, they brought in the heaviest, ball-busting lawyers they could find from the big town, and they turned a paradise into a killing ground. All I got out of it was a good lesson.'
'What was that?'
'It's dangerous to be blinded by idealism. The minute the hyenas find out you have integrity, they bring on their assassins in silk suits.'
'You haven't done badly. Blowing off one of the most respected banks in the city for money laundering, shutting down two chemical companies, busting half the city council for being on the sleeve. I call that getting even.'
'It's a start,' he said, and changed the subject, focusing the conversation back on them. 'What I miss are our old skirmishes, even after ten years.'
'There's something to be said for good, old-fashioned cutthroat competition.'
'You ought to know.'
'Look who's talking.'
She raised her glass and offered a toast to cutthroat competition. Their eyes locked again and this time she didn't break the stare.
'Janie,' he said, 'just how hungry are you?'
She slouched back in the booth and looked at the ceiling and closed her eyes and shook her head ever so slightly, sighed, and peered down her long nose at him.
'Cocktail parties always did ruin my appetite,' she said.
She was seeing a side of Vail he had never revealed to her before, a vulnerability, a romantic flair. He had brought home the bottle of chilled Taittinger after informing Guido that they had changed their mind about dinner. She had always been attracted to Vail, even in the old days, but had never admitted it to herself, dispelling her feelings as a combination of admiration and fear of his talent. Now, standing in his living room, watching him light the fire, she realized how much she wanted him and began to wonder if she had made a mistake. Was she rushing into something? A one-night stand? Would it turn into one of those awkward mistakes where she would awaken in the morning with a sexual hangover? But when he stood up and faced her, her fears vanished, washed away in another rush of desire. He took off her coat and tossed it over the sofa and went into the kitchen to get wineglasses.
She looked around the apartment. It was a large two-bedroom, high enough to have a nice view of the city but not ostentatious. One of the bedrooms had been converted into an office, a cluttered room of books filled with paper place markers, files stacked in the corners, magazines piled up, most of them with their wrappers still on them, scraps of notes, and newspaper clippings. A blue light glowed from the bathroom and she peered in.
It had been converted into a minigreenhouse. A six-foot-long zinc-lined sink ran along one wall, with taps and tubes running from the bathroom sink. Pots of flowers crowded the bathtub. A row of grow lights plugged into an automatic timer created the illusion of daylight twelve hours a day. Beneath the lights were bunches of small, delicate blue flowers surrounded by fernlike leaves. On the other side of the narrow room was a small plastic-covered cubicle, its sides misty with manmade dew. Through its opaque sides, she could see splashes of colour from other flowers.
She looked around the small room. 'What do you know, a closet horticulturist,' she said, half aloud.
'They're called bluebells,' he said from behind her.
She whirled around, startled, and caught her breath. 'I'm sorry. I was snooping.'
He handed her a tulip glass bubbling with champagne. 'Belles as in beautiful young ladies. They're winter flowers. Grew wild along the banks of the river where I grew up. I used to pick them and take them home to my mom and she'd put them on the piano and sometimes I'd hear her talking to them. 'This is Chopin,' she'd say and then play for them.'
'She sounds lovely.'
'She was. She died when I was in the eighth grade.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Long time ago.'
Her anxiety was slowly transforming back to desire. Her mouth got a little drier and she took another sip of champagne. Oddly, there was only one photograph in the bedroom, a grim, dark, foreboding picture of a murky colony of industrial plants, partially obscured by a man-made fog of steam and dirty smoke. They appeared as one long, grey mass with
