Out on the wet street, still drunk, her loneliness is near to burning a hole in her. The lights from Fantôme glow on the pavement, then vanish, like she’d stayed on a stage after the show was over, but she still doesn’t want to go back to a hotel room. The bistro across the street is locking its doors but there are still the bars, though in them she knows she’ll find nothing worth having unless she wants to spend the night drinking hard, and of course she could see if she still has the long-disused, entirely academic art of getting men to buy her drinks. The hook-up sites come to mind, promising the fear and the exhilaration of some stranger’s eager hands, but that’s not it, is never really it, and then she remembers that Cromwell wants to see her.
She checks mail on her phone—there are a few coaxing messages from Maya—So have you got any time tonight? Anytime tonight? reads the subject header of the most recent, and in the body is the address of Maison Dernière, apparently in an office tower downtown. She hesitates, wondering if it’s a setup, but there’s a clear-cut paper trail so it has to be benign. What better time to take a meeting, she thinks, so she emails Maya, who checks her phone compulsively, and Cromwell’s secretary—she assumes his apparat is unsleeping—that she’s on her way.
* * *
As the elevator rises she runs a search on Maison Dernière and finds that it doesn’t exist. She stares blankly at her phone, then tries the search but again there are no websites, no reviews, in fact no references at all, and her fear rises as the floors flicker by and she wonders if this is how a call girl feels when a trick starts going bad. There’s no emergency stop button so she jabs at the buttons for the other floors but they won’t illuminate, which makes the elevator car a prison, and she wishes she’d made a habit of carrying a gun, or stayed sober. It occurs to her to call Maya, who has private security firms on speed dial, or just call Parthenon directly, but what’s going to happen will have happened before they could arrive.
It might be a misunderstanding, and it might be perfectly benign, but one thing that’s certain is that Cromwell hasn’t been forthright, so she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the constellations of the thousands of nearby machines. She scans through them and finds the elevator and sees that its software hasn’t been updated in years—infrastructure, she’s noticed, is often lost in the shuffle. She tells it lies like bad patterns whispered in its ear, and it’s soon persuaded that she’s a long overdue maintenance program sent by the manufacturer and by the time the elevator starts to slow it’s entirely hers and she’s never been happier about committing a felony.
She sees the elevator’s internal state and that it’s one second from stopping and opening its doors—she could keep them closed, or drop the car into free fall, but now that she has an exit she wants to see what’s going to happen and even more than that she wants to push back. There’s an SFPD weapons platform drifting high over downtown, and it’s bad heat if she gets caught but it would sure give her the whip hand, so she tries for it anyway. She’s briefly lost in the labyrinth of its security and it’s too complicated for the time she has, but there, better, is an electrical transformer down in the building’s basements, installed thirty years ago and its software not updated since. She brushes past its quaint, almost amusing defenses and sees how she could overload it in moments, which would blow the grid, blacking out the building, and possibly the block, and maybe start a fire, a card she’ll hold in reserve.
She tenses as the doors open to reveal a girl radiant with youth and even in her tension Irina is moved by her beauty. The girl is dressed as though for a first date that matters but her smile fades as she sees Irina’s face and in a blurry accent asks, “Is everything all right?” with such simplicity and evident concern that Irina thaws a little and realizes that she looks like she’s ready for murder.
“Is this the Maison Dernière?” Irina asks but the girl only peers at her, in fact at her lips, eyebrows slightly raised, because she’s deaf, of course, and then the girl smiles hesitantly and turns away, beckoning for her to follow.
The cramped corridor seems to have been carved out of what once was office space, though the unmarred hardwood floors and white plastered walls are so new she can smell the paint and the varnish, and then they round a corner and there’s track lighting focused on landscape paintings in alcoves that she recognizes as Hockneys, and it’s hardly worth the trouble of leaning in to confirm that they’re originals, and it’s all starting to read as a secret aerie dedicated to quiet happiness, which makes Cromwell start to seem like a sensible sort of person.
They come to a small foyer floored in black stone; there are cooking smells and a distant clattering of pots and pans. The girl guides her to an inset silver basin into which water sluices from a faucet that must have been harvested from a rustic French estate of the most estimable provenance and authenticity. The girl takes her hands and tries to wash and massage them, as though it were a spa day, but Irina pulls away, kindly, and does it herself.
The girl takes her out onto a wide balcony that looks down on most of city and there’s Cromwell, alone at the one table, absorbed in his phone.
The girl pulls out the other chair for her and slips away as Cromwell looks up and says, “My director of security says the SFPD have reported an attempt to hack one of their weapons drones. The attack lasted less than a second, but nearly succeeded. They think it was a team of professional thieves, possibly cartel, certainly highly prepared. Strangely, they think the attack came from somewhere in this building, though the evidence is inconclusive, which is … just as well.” He looks up at her, deadpan, his archness all but imperceptible, and in the candlelight he looks unearthly, as though he’s made of fire, and she realizes she can barely hear the noises of the city.
There’s a bottle of wine in an ice bucket and as Cromwell lifts it she sees the faded, spidery handwriting on the label. As she lifts her wineglass to receive the pour her hand jerks too high because the glass is lighter than she’d expected, in fact it weighs almost nothing at all, as though it were crystallized air—it must be one of the wildly expensive, very fragile glasses that are only a few molecules thick, which she’s heard of but never before touched, and she imagines a future in which that jerk is the mark of the parvenu handling good stemware for the very first time. Cromwell says, “It’s surprising, isn’t it? My first time I practically put a brandy snifter through the ceiling.” There’s a pause that seems more awkward than she’d have expected in a man of his years and experience and then with an air of forced bonhomie he says, “This wine was laid down on Francois Mitterrand’s estate in the year of his death. He’s said to have enjoyed playing vintner, so this bottle may have been handled by the great man himself. To be honest, I can’t tell one wine from another but it’s a kind of way of consuming history.”
She sips the cold pale fluid and wonders how much her little swallow cost. “What interests you about Mitterand?” she says, who is, for her, one dead French president among many.
“The manner of his death,” he says, his poise snapping back. “When he knew his life was ending he went to Egypt to visit the tombs of the pharaohs, with whom he identified. His last meal was ortolans, a royal meal, a songbird one eats with a napkin draped over head and plate, lest God see. He lived for another three days but ate nothing more.”
“What’s so great about that?”
“It suggests a composed resistance to the brute facts of mortality.”
“I thought this was a restaurant, when I came here,” she says, her anger cooling. “But I looked it up and it didn’t exist.”
“Ah. Of course. I’m so sorry—I should have clarified. The Dernière is actually more like a private club with a membership of one. Only a very few people know about it, and none are the kind to put it on a blog. To call it a restaurant is a kind of inside joke. There is a menu, of course, but the chefs will make you whatever you want. I had hoped that you’d be pleased—for what little it’s worth, heads of state have hinted that they wished to dine here, and been shunted off to Chez Panisse.” His urbanity is fully restored now, but his apparent warmth feels like a performance intended to conceal a watchfulness and a deep interior chill. She wonders what drives him, and what, if anything, he loves—she’s seen nothing to suggest a family, and he lacks the hard dullness that marks men who live for money. Maybe Magda is his center, she thinks, remembering how his posture changed when she was near him.
She says, “At first I thought that the name meant ‘latest house,’ like a house that was chic.”
He studies her for a moment, then says, “A natural misreading, but not the worst one. In the wrong context, the name could be read as a cruel joke, the last house as in the last house one would ever see, an invitation into charnel. I’m told there are such places. But, no, it’s not like that at all. The name just means that this is, in some thematic way, the last place in the West the sun touches, or where the Western world ends. In fact, I very much hope you’ll enjoy yourself here, and won’t find it necessary to bring out the big guns, so to speak.”
She realizes she’s staring and that it’s unsettling him. He picks up his glass and puts it down again, then says, “And I don’t know just how to put this, but I meant to say … I recognize that all of this is shit. I mean, it’s nice, and I’m grateful, and so on, but I know it has no real value. Well, except for the Hockneys. It’s just that there are people who take care of this for me, and it’s just as easy to allow it to happen. I don’t want you to think I’m some hedge-fund philistine who preens himself on having just the right wineglasses.”
“So what can I do for you?” she says. “It must be important, as you’re paying quadruple-time. But maybe one of your people will take care of that for you?”
She’s pleased to see him wince. He says, “I’d hoped that we could talk, and perhaps become more than strangers,” and refills her glass though she’d scarcely been aware she’d been drinking.
She considers this, and though she’s fairly sure he’s slept with the beautiful deaf girl it doesn’t feel like he wants that from her. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she says, “but why bother?”
“Because you’re interesting,” he says carefully, “and we might both be around for some time. I’m looking for potential points of continuity.”
“As for longevity, you do realize that, financially speaking, I’m not even remotely in your league? Wouldn’t you be better off bonding with the capitalist elite over, I don’t know, skeet shooting?”
He leans in across the table as the deaf girl returns with little plates of olives and bacon and another bottle of white wine. “Hardly. The capitalist elite are mostly heirs, who are dull, and founders-who-got-lucky, who are even duller. At least the heirs have manners. But they’re not interesting, and, more to the point, none of them will last as long as me.”
“Why not? Money is money.”
“The why is a secret,” he says, smiling. “A great secret. Lately it’s all secrets with me.”
I’m sure it is, she thinks. Your AIs aren’t what you think they are. You have some kind of new computer on your desk but you don’t know how it works. You’re more interested in me than seems warranted, and you’re spending money like it’s the end of the world. Someone is stalking me, and someone stole my friend’s memories, and mine along with them. You’re very old but still speak of the long-long term. There has to be a greater shape here but it’s one she can’t quite see.
“I want to make a deal,” he says, and though he’s trying to hide it she can tell that he’s nervous, even behind three glasses of wine, and her thought is that he’s rushing it, that this is the crux, though he’d planned to wait longer, and she notices at some point the moon set, leaving the balcony lit only by candles and the stray light of the city. “First, I’ll tell you what I’m offering. I’ll pay for the Mayo Clinic.”
“I can pay for the Mayo Clinic.”
“You can barely pay for the Mayo Clinic. There’s also the degeneration around your implant. I’ll pay for that, and for the Mayo, for the next fifty years.”
“That’s a lot of money, even for you,” she says, keeping her voice neutral as his words ring in her ears, and this, at last, could be an end to fear and struggling, and she tries to imagine what he could want for it. She could appear at his cocktail parties and perform prodigious feats of memory for his guests, or she could follow him home and slide into his bed, or she could wear a corporate badge on a lanyard and sit through boring meetings drinking muddy coffee and it would still be worth it, unless it won’t, for as quickly as it formed her abjection has dissolved, and she wonders if she’ll have to destroy him for humiliating her. Have to see how that goes. She watches him, waits, remembers to breathe.
“My net worth is higher than the press imagines,” he says, and now the benign mask is gone and he’s perfectly cold, a chess player driving through the steps of an intricate combination. “In any case. My security service prepared a précis of the circumstances of your life, as they do for everyone allowed within fifty feet of me. You have a rented apartment in Boston, and you recently allowed your lease to expire on another in Santa Monica, though both are all but unfurnished, and chosen in large part for their proximity to the airports. In the past year you’ve spent about sixteen nights in both combined. So on top of the Mayo I’ll throw in a home. There’s a house I own in Noe Valley where I sometimes put visiting dignitaries—it’s quite beautiful, very private and very secure, built around a central garden, rather like the Gardner Museum in Boston. I think the architect won a prize. I’ll sign it over to you, and take care of the taxes. It’s not far from your friend Philip, who would consider himself my rival.”
A silence, and finally she says, “And in exchange?”
“First,” he says, “no questions.”
He sits up very straight and drains his glass and it occurs to her that whatever he wants he wants it entirely, that this moment is the crisis of his life, and then he says, “I want your memories.”
As her rage rises like a black wave she’s aware that there’s something she’s been missing and looking into his eyes while he waits for her answer she sees his terror.
She kills the power to the building.