It looks like a telegram. On the front, it has Alice’s name but no address. “It was hand-delivered today,” she says. It reads:
Dear Friend, You are hereby directed to appear this Friday at nine A.M. at the Half Moon Bay Airport. You will be met by our representative and provided further instructions at that time. It is not necessary to bring clothes or sundry items. Please do not bring any valuables, personal effects, or electronics. This is a directive, not a request. Failure to comply with a directive, as you are aware, is addressed at length in Section 8.9.12–14. We look forward to seeing you. Vty, a Friend.
Everything inside me sinks, dread welling up.
“I finally started to think that I’d been wrong about Dave. I almost decided it was all nothing, that I took what was really a pretty ordinary conversation and transformed it in my mind to something sinister.”
“It’s not nothing,” I say. I tell her about the meeting with Vivian.
Her eyes fill with tears.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” I pull her into my arms. “I should have never let us get involved with this.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m the one who invited Finnegan to our stupid wedding.”
“You can’t go to Half Moon Bay. What can they do?”
“A lot. If they push me out at the firm, if they…” I can see her mind fast-forwarding, panic setting in. “We have all those loans, there will be no glowing references, no new job, the mortgage…Vivian is right. Finnegan’s influence reaches far and wide. And not just Finnegan, all the other Pact members we don’t know.”
A thought occurs to me. “How much does that matter? You looked so happy just now, playing your music. What would happen if you just took your bonus and left?”
“They haven’t given the bonuses out yet. There’s no check. We really need that money.”
“We can do without it,” I insist, although the truth is we’re stretched thin with the new investments in my practice, with the mortgage on the Victorian, the mortgage on this house, just the expense of life in one of the most overpriced cities in the world.
“I don’t want to be poor again; that’s no way to live.”
“Are you saying you should go to Half Moon Bay?”
“I think I have to. But there’s a problem. This Friday I have a court appearance. We’re set to argue my motion for summary judgment. I worked months on it. This is where we can win the entire thing. If we lose on Friday, it’s all downhill—thousands of hours of work, pointless work, no chance of winning. I can’t believe it. I wrote the damn motion, no one else can do it for me.”
“The telegram mentions consequences. What are they?”
Alice gets up and pulls her copy of The Manual from the bookshelf. She turns to Section 8.9.12–14. “Punishments are meted out according to the severity of the crime and calculated, similar to the CCCP, on a point system outlined below,” she reads. “Recidivism, as noted, is calculated at 2x. Cooperation and voluntary confessions are afforded appropriate concessions.”
“Well, that’s helpful,” I say.
“We could run away,” Alice offers. “We could move to Budapest, change our names. Get jobs in that great market by the bridge, eat goulash, grow fat.”
“I do love goulash.” We’re trying to keep it normal, but there is no levity in the air. It seems that we are truly and royally fucked. “There’s always the police.”
“And what, exactly, do we tell them? That a woman with a really nice handbag gave me a bracelet? That I’m worried I might lose my job? They’d laugh us out of the station.”
“Dave threatened you,” I remind her.
“Imagine telling this story to a cop. There’s no way they would take us seriously. ‘No one leaves The Pact’? Come on. And if they talked to Dave, which obviously they wouldn’t, he’d tell them it had been a joke. And then he’d offer them a tour of Pin Sur Mer.”
It’s quiet for a while as Alice and I struggle to come up with a solution. I feel as if we’re two little rats trapped in a cage, both still convinced there must be some way out.
“Fucking Finnegan,” she finally says. She picks up her keyboard and plays another song, a moody tune from her band’s final album, the one she and the boyfriend wrote together while they were in the process of breaking up.
“Budapest isn’t a bad idea,” I say, when the song comes to an end.
Alice seems to be considering the proposal. I meant it as a joke, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. It occurs to me that I’m good with whatever she decides. I love Alice. I want her to be happy. I don’t want her to be afraid.
My heart sinks when she whispers, “They would find us, wouldn’t they?”
31
Although I follow my usual pattern today—waking up, walking to work, meeting patients—my brain isn’t really in it. If Alice is supposed to report to the airport on Friday, we need to come up with a plan.
Last night, Alice wanted to clear her head, so we watched Sloganeering. It was a funny episode about the Minister of Slogans and his efforts to buy a smelly car from Italy. It was nice to curl up, think about something else. After turning off the TV, we went to bed and slept deeply. This morning, the usual mess of papers and printouts and legal books littered the kitchen table. The Manual sat on the arm of the big blue chair. Alice had placed a bookmark at the start of Section 9: Procedures, Directives, and Recommendations.
Between patients, I keep trying to come up with a way around this thing. While some people get increasingly paranoid when they ruminate too much on a problem, I usually go the other way. By three in the afternoon, I’ve almost convinced myself that the situation isn’t as dire as it seemed yesterday. I’m thinking about this when Evelyn steps into my office and drops a white envelope on my desk. No stamp. Gold writing on the outside, just my name, no address. I stare at it, sweating.
“A bike messenger just dropped it off,” she says.
Inside, there is a white card with a handwritten message, also in gold ink:
We appreciate the honor of your presence at the quarterly meeting of the Friends at 6 P.M. on March 10. The address is 980 Bear Gulch Road in Woodside. The security code for the gate is 665544. Do not under any circumstances share the address or the code with anyone.
There’s no signature or return address.
32
On Thursday morning, I sit on the bed in my T-shirt and boxer briefs, watching Alice dress for work. “What are we going to do?” I ask.
“I’m going to go do my job,” she answers. “You’re going to do yours. Whatever the consequences are, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Vivian’s threat was about Finnegan and the firm, but if I’m a no-show for the court appearance, I’ll be on seriously thin ice at the firm anyway.”