“Maybe it’s because my dad did beat up on me.”
Milo stared at him, wondering if it was a joke. There was no way to tell. “You find anything on the drive?”
“I’m not here about that. I need you to give me that camera you took.”
“Is it yours?”
“Everything’s mine.” In answer to Milo’s look, he softened and said, “No, man. I just want our technicians to take a look at it. See if we can find out who was spying on your friend.”
“You want to tell me how you knew it was there?”
“No,” said Chaudhury. “How about two o’clock? Give you time to eat your pizza. I’ll drop by your place to pick it up.”
“You don’t come near my place,” said Milo. “We’ll meet here. And in the future, if you want me, call me. Don’t ever show up when I’m out with my family.”
Chaudhury opened his hands, patting the air. “Calm down, tiger.”
“Are you going to tell me about the drive?”
He rubbed the side of his nose-one of those awkward, obvious signals that amateurs think looks natural-and Milo noticed Chaudhury’s denim friend crossing the street to their side. “There’s nothing to tell. It was wiped clean. Zeroed out.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
Chaudhury shrugged. “I’ll see what my man in London can find.”
“You’re done with me?”
“Yeah, Milo. I’m done with you. But if you come across some hot tip, I’d appreciate hearing about it.”
“See you at two,” Milo said.
As he returned to his seat, he saw that Chaudhury and his friend had left, and that Stephanie was sucking through a straw, stealing his Coke. “Give that back, kid.”
Smiling, she puffed her cheeks and blew noisy bubbles into his glass.
“Ah, forget it,” he said.
“Was that the Homelander?” Tina asked.
“I’m not sure.”
She stared at him.
“Now he says he’s Company.”
She nodded at that but frowned. “So? Anything new?”
“About who?” asked Stephanie.
“Nothing,” Milo said to Tina. To Stephanie, he said, “Alan.”
“What about Alan?”
Tina gave him a look, and he realized that they hadn’t discussed what they were and were not going to tell her. Procrastination was evidently Tina’s only plan. That, or absolute secrecy. “The fact that someone keeps stealing his Coca-Cola,” he said. “It’s a big mystery. They’re going to have to bring in the army soon, shut down the city, and search each house until they find the person who did it.”
Wide-eyed, Stephanie blinked at him and, very seriously, said, “It wasn’t me.”
When he met Chaudhury on the sidewalk at two, there was no sign of his denim-clad friend. Milo handed over the camera in a paper bag. Chaudhury seemed to want to talk, but Milo didn’t. “Take this,” Chaudhury said, reaching into a back pocket. He produced a blank, white business card with a D.C. 202 phone number and the name “Director Stephen Rollins” handwritten on it. “It’s the office number. I strongly suggest that you leave it alone, but if you find you can’t put down your paranoia and you absolutely must verify that I work for who I say I work for, call that number.”
“Who’s Director Rollins?”
“My Lord and Master.” Chaudhury grinned. “Though I prefer to call him by his proper name. God.”
“Will you get in trouble if I call?”
“Me? I’m a survivor, Milo, I’ve no worries. I just think you’d probably like to stay off my boss’s radar,” he said, then raised a hand in farewell.
At home, Milo found Tina cleaning up the living room. “Looks like we’re getting a permanent guest,” she said.
“What?”
“Penelope. Someone ripped up her apartment.”
“I put everything back,” he said quickly.
“The bedroom?”
“What?”
“Did you slice open her mattress and tear out the springs?”
“Oh.”
“I told her to pack a bag and come back.”
Penelope arrived two hours later, and Milo carried her large, heavy suitcase up their narrow stairs. She seemed more put out than scared, and while Milo grilled chicken breast for a Caesar salad, the two women drank wine in the kitchen doorway and berated the Central Intelligence Agency. “It was them, wasn’t it?” she asked Milo.
“I think so.”
“They could have just asked me. Knock on the door, say, Mrs. Drummond, may we please look around? I would’ve said yes.”
“They don’t always think so directly.”
“What does that mean?” Tina asked.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he had meant. Then he knew. He turned to face them. “The Company spends as much time anticipating disaster as it does collecting intelligence. If someone says, Let’s go ask Mrs. Drummond if we can look around, someone else at the table certainly says, She’s upset. What if she says no? Then they all have a think-okay, if she won’t let us in, what happens next? Because operational planning is about staying five steps ahead. If you aren’t, then things go wrong. If Mrs. Drummond is upset, and says no, maybe she’ll be sure not to leave the apartment so that no one can come in to look around. Or maybe she’ll hire someone to keep the place secure.”
“But I wouldn’t do that. Christ, Alan worked for the Company. He loved the bastards.”
“You would do that if you had something to hide. You would do that if you thought Alan had something he was hiding from them. That’s what they’re thinking. So, logically, the only thing they can do is break in when you’re not there, then get out as fast as they can. Which means leaving a mess.”
There was no point telling either of them that a man named Dennis Chaudhury had worked all night ripping the place apart. She knew what she needed to know-that the Company had done this, and that she should not pretend to herself that the Company was her friend.
“I should write a letter,” she said finally.
“By all means,” he said, turning back to the hissing chicken. “Just don’t expect an elegant apology. Not on paper, at least.”
7
Some families thrive by being open to the world, absorbing visitors into their daily routines, while others hold themselves always at a distance, in voluntary exile, as if bringing in some third party might blemish their particular joy. The Weavers were part of this latter group. When friends and family visited, they used their too-small apartment as an excuse and put them up at the nearby Park Slope Inn-it kept the intrusions within a predictable, manageable bracket of time.
Penelope, though, crashed like a boulder in the middle of their living room, taking their couch for her bed. It was awkward for everyone except Stephanie, who seemed energized by the disruption. On Friday, Tina went to work, leaving Milo and Stephanie to deal with their guest. Penelope, perhaps to get out of their hair, left at noon for
