And then, there he was. It was probably around 1:00 p.m., and she hadn’t been sure where they would catch him—out for a martini lunch at Lupo’s, or maybe in Patrick’s filthy office over the flagship garage location. At Jane’s. But he was at his home office, the one attached to their bedroom, tie knotted, hands folded across his desktop. As if he had known she would call. Where was his shock, his confusion? How could it be that he seemed, as ever, unsurprised, even in control?
“Thank God, Marta. I’ve been worried sick. I hoped I would hear from you.”
He didn’t look sick. Or even ruffled. But she accepted the concern with a nod. “Thanks. Thanks for answering.” She chanced a glance toward Andy but couldn’t make out his form in the darkness beyond the bright left wing of the display. “Why have you been worried? Why did you think you’d hear from me?”
There was a shuffling behind her. Something hard pressed against her side, and she stiffened, though she’d expected as much.
David’s mouth tilted almost imperceptibly—a flash of mirth across his mask of solemnity. “Well, I don’t know what you know. What you’re supposed to know. But you can tell your captors that I got the message they left at the Lenoir substation.”
“What message?” Marta dared to ask, and the screen suddenly darkened, and the hard pressure against her side became a painful jab.
“Get on script,” Joe hissed. “You get one warning here. This is it. This is the one.”
“What message is he talking about?” Marta asked again. She wasn’t sure why she pressed Joe, except that there was a petty pleasure for her in it. The pettiest. Four people were dead, after all. If she hadn’t been able to wholly believe it before, she couldn’t deny it now.
“Do as Joe says,” June said from behind her. There was a dangerous flatness to her tone. Marta, afraid to say anything at all, simply bobbed her head.
After a moment, the screen relit, David’s face coming back into sharp focus.
“Ah,” he said. “There you are. Are you OK?”
“I’m OK,” she said. “I’m not hurt. I’ve been treated . . .” She searched for a word. “Fairly.”
“Am I allowed to ask who has you?”
She read from the script: “I’ve been the guest of one of your valued business partners. Due to recent events, your partners wanted to reach out to you and reassure you of their commitment to supplying you with a quality product. They would like you to know that they’re ready to have a conversation with you about your offer of a onetime buyout of Salt.”
David leaned back in his chair. “Oh. How thoughtful of them.” He fiddled with something out of range of the camera, then pulled a cigar to his mouth. He struck the flint on a silver-plated lighter fixed with a single small ruby in the cap. Marta had given the lighter to him early in their marriage, a significant expense to her then though nothing of great value now, and she’d never imagined he still possessed it or used it. She found herself unexpectedly touched.
He brought the flame to the end of the cigar, took a puff, exhaled. “Though, I must say: this is a strange way to accept my offer. I could have come up with some nicer ones. They have Feingold, too, I have to assume. Unless they killed him.” He seemed to be thinking about this. “That would probably have been the smartest play, actually.”
Marta consulted the script, wishing she could know what was happening behind her. “Wes Feingold is also a guest. He is getting to know the operations at your partners’ camp, and he’s excited about shifting his Pocketz business from SecondSkins to Salt, if such a deal goes through.”
“What makes them think I’m still interested in buying them out?”
Marta scanned the script for an appropriate response. There was a rustling to her right, and new text expanded on the screen, dominating her field of vision, almost too large to read without moving her head left and right. The language was first person now, the pretense of dinner-party cool stripped away, and Marta read it awkwardly, stumbling over the typos and the missing words. “They” had become “we.” As if Marta were one of them.
“What we’re pro-proposing would be only good for you. All we ask is be—to be—left alone. Feingold returns to zone with seeds, some plants, and our formulations. Both rec-recreational Salt and medical. Medicinal. We can continue to run production for you, we have the . . .” She took a breath and backed up, reading the comma as a period. “We have the infrastructure. Nobody could do it cheaper.”
“I could have had that deal years ago if I wanted it,” David said.
A new sentence materialized on screen, and this one sent a chill along Marta’s spine: “We didn’t have Feingold years ago, or your wife.”
“Feingold was still shitting his britches then,” David said. “As for my wife”—this was strange, as if Marta herself had become an automaton, or the speaker at a fast-food drive-through—“are you planning to keep her there forever? What do you think will happen if you send her back? Or kill her?”
Even after all this time—after all she’d learned about her husband—his casual tone wounded her.
More furious typing.
“We are asking so little. You’ll lose nothing by letting us be.”
“I don’t gain anything, either,” David said.
No typing now. Marta waited, darting her eyes over the existing script, wondering what was expected of her. She risked a look to her right and could make out in the dimness beyond the screen Andy, his hands poised over the keyboard, back hunched.
“I wonder,” David said, drawing Marta’s gaze back to the display. “I wonder if Feingold knows about the drug’s side effect.”
“What side effect?” Marta risked asking. No one bothered to nudge her with a gun this time.
“Infertility,” David said. “That, and a bunch of other problems. Birth defects. Ovarian cancer. What my mother would have called ‘female troubles.’ Yes, I know all about it. I’ve known for a long time. If I thought I could get the drug past the FDA and on the market, I’d have done it already. But there’s no way. Not even for me. Not for what I’m willing to invest. I’ve set my sights elsewhere. I don’t need your drug.”
Another endless pause. Marta looked around, scanning the faces—Andy’s, Joe’s, June’s, even Randall’s—for some clue about how to proceed. Finally, June whispered in Andy’s ear, and he started typing again. Marta read: “That’s not certain. Drug still—is still valuable. Can be tested and refined. Rec-recreational Salt is still lucrative business.”
David shrugged. “It’s OK business. But there are lots of ways to get high. Lots of ways to make money off people getting high. You haven’t cornered the market.”
More typing.
“Hope of a cure could be good for your political prospects.”