He jots the new unlisted number on the back of a business card and hands it to me.
“Good to meet you,” he says. “Dana tells me you are a good friend. She will need us all in the weeks and months ahead.”
I smile but say nothing.
Then before I can ask why she wants to see me, he is gone, around the back of the limo. He disappears into the open door on the other side, it closes, and the procession pulls away.
“What’s that all about?” says Harry.
“I don’t know.” I look at the business card in my hand, expensive velum with a watermark no less. I turn it over to the printed side. It reads:
FITTIPALDI ART and ANTIQUITIES
Nathan Fittipaldi, Owner
Agents for Acquisition by the Discreet Collector
London, New York, Beverly Hills, San Diego
There is no phone number, only a fax and a web address, “Discretion. com”.
Home at night with Sarah is not always a quiet time. She does her homework, one leg folded under the other in one of the sofa-style armchairs in our living room, with the television going full bore, watching Star Trek. With this she gets straight As. How she does it, I don’t know.
Her hair, thick as a pony’s tail, brunette with flashes of auburn like spun copper whenever sunlight hits it, is put up in cornrows tonight, something new. She says it makes it easier to handle in the morning.
She is becoming a young woman, not only in the way she dresses and cares for her appearance, but in matters of judgment as well. Sarah is her own person. When peer group pressures seem to slay other kids, my daughter has demonstrated a maturity that at times embarrasses me in my more exuberant and rash moments. We have played board games of conquest in which she has demonstrated a kind of strategic thinking I would never have credited to someone her age, with an element of compassion for those lesser competitors, protecting them from my native male aggressions, until she crushed me. This, at fifteen. I shudder to consider the heights to which this may take her, but feel more confidence in that generation knowing there are people like her in it.
Tonight we are left to our own thoughts. Sarah to her science and history, and me to the little Palm device that belonged to Nick. So far I’ve figured out the screen and the little green button at the bottom that turns it on. But I’ve been afraid to do much beyond this without instructions, afraid that given my ten thumbs for all things computer, I will lose the data stored inside. It is one thing to walk off with possible evidence in a capital case. It’s another to lose it.
At the top of the screen, each time I turn it on, is an image of a battery. It appears to be draining slowly. The black shaded area of energy sliding a little more to the left each day. When it disappears, I suspect I will lose whatever information is stored inside.
I lift the tiny battery cover in the back. Two AAAs are housed inside. I study these for a moment.
“Sarah?”
“Emm?” She doesn’t look up from her schoolwork, her focus riveted on the book cradled in her lap.
“Do we have any batteries, triple As?”
“The small ones?”
“Yes.”
“I think so.” She goes to the refrigerator where she keeps these, mostly for the walkman she listens to constantly in the car.
“Like this?” She holds one up.
“That’s it.”
“How many do you need?”
“Two.”
She brings them over to me. “What’s that?”
“I think they call it a handheld device.”
“Shuur. I know that. But what’s the little thing on top?”
“It’s a cell phone.”
“Cool. Where’d you get it?”
“It belonged to a friend.”
“He let you borrow it?”
“Sort of,” I tell her. “Do you know anything about them?”
“Some of the kids at school have them. Theirs aren’t that nice.” Sarah’s looking over my shoulder, big brown eyes checking out the device. “What do you want to know?”
“How to change the batteries.”
“Oh, Dad. Here, give it to me.” She reaches for it, but I hold it away.
“I can’t take a chance on losing the information stored inside.”
“Maybe it has a bubble memory,” she says.
I’ve heard of bubble gum and bubblehead. But bubble memory is a new one.
“If it does, then everything’s stored inside, on a chip or something. We learned about it in technology. Even if you disconnect the power it stays there.”
“How do I find out if it has one of these memories?”
“You could look online. Something that cool must have a site. How much does it cost?”
“I don’t know.”
“My birthday’s coming up,” she says.
“I’m buying you batteries,” I tell her.
She gives me that look of mock exasperation, something of her mother’s to remember her by.
“Can I see it? I won’t break it. I promise,” she says. Reluctantly I hand it over.
“Hey, this little button on top. It’s the cell phone.”
“I know. Don’t touch it.”
“Relax,” she says. The same thing Nick told me before they shot him. “Why can’t we just turn it on? See if it works.”
“Because it may drain the batteries.” I don’t tell her that the cops have probably landed on Nick’s cell phone account by now. If so, the service provider will have a trap on the line so they can isolate the cell by location if any signals go out from the phone, even if it’s just looking to go online.
“If there’s a site on the Internet, do you think you could find it?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I could look.”
It takes her less than five minutes. Sarah works her nimble fingers over the keyboard and rolls the mouse, using Yahoo! to check sites. On the fourth one she hits pay dirt, a logo that matches the one on the device, two curved crossed slashes with a dot between them at the bottom, Handspring. com.
We scan the page for half a minute or so.
“I don’t see anything that looks like directions. Do you?” she says.
“No. So what do we do?”
“Gimme a second.” She punches the button on the page for customer support. An e-mail message screen pops up.
Sarah types out a message, telling them that we’ve lost the directions and need to know how to change the batteries. And asks whether we’ll lose any stored data.
Ten minutes later there’s a reply. Attached are a set of instructions for operation. The e-mail message itself advises us to sync the device to a desktop computer and then change the batteries. It tells us that if we can’t do this, we have only one minute once we start removing the old batteries to replace them with new ones. After that the device will crash and we will lose any data inside.
“Looks like there’s no memory inside,” she says, “unless there’s batteries.”
Without the hot-sync cradle to attach to the computer and the software to run it, we can’t back up the device by syncing it to the desktop.
“You want to do it or do you want me to?” Sarah’s talking about changing the batteries.
“I’ll do it.”
