Out on the wet street, still drunk, her loneliness is near to burning a hole in her. The lights from Fant?me 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.”