Secrets of the Apple (34 page)

He dropped heavily into a wingback chair. Charles Dickens and his stupid story. As if grit and murder could compensate for fatal sentimentality, and hanging an entire plot on divine coincidence as though lost angelic thieves continually stumbled upon their own equally angelic families. The book must remain in print purely out of habit. No touching of curls. Assume the boy’s a threat and reason from there.

Here was the itchy bit. After talking to Kate that afternoon, he’d gotten on the internet and learned a few things:

There were seven million homeless children in Brazil and resources to help them were limited. If he turned the boy in to the authorities, it was highly likely he would be back on the streets again.

No child under eighteen could be held legally responsible for any crime, even murder, thus prompting enterprising criminals to gather expendable armies of children to shield themselves from the law.

Some businessmen had allegedly resorted to hiring murderous “cleanup squads,” paying by the piece, so to speak.

Most street children didn’t make it to eighteen.

Ryoki hoped none of this was true, only wild internet rumor. He’d made some calls but hadn’t gotten a straight answer. He checked in with his personal head of security and learned his house phones now all had access codes and they’d closed the loophole that allowed the boy onto the grounds. No one else would be able to breach the perimeter unseen.

Was the sleeping boy a victim or a viper?

He looked so small and frail under the white sheet.

A child on a mattress.

His heroic vision of himself, coat flying back, money in one hand, phone in the other, the gallant savior of children—an impatient driver, a speeding black car, superman shattering against the hood.

Would he risk himself for an anonymous urchin?

He touched one finger to the boy’s curls. Lucas had come to him, delivered by Kate through a broken window, blood trickling, heedless.

He returned to the library to discuss his thoughts with Kate and found her whisper shouting into her phone, a strained quality to her voice that told him she was beyond frustrated and trying not to lose it. “He’s only a little boy. Why are you so mad?” she said. Before he could flee she looked up and caught him. He mouthed a silent “sorry” and escaped to his room to face his fears alone.

T
he next morning Kate came in to breakfast looking as though she hadn’t slept much.

“Good morning,” Ryoki said.

“Morning.” She scooped a spoonful of scrambled egg from a small chafing dish and picked up a triangle of toast, painstakingly slathering it with butter and blackberry jam. “I love blackberry jam,” she said as she salted her eggs. But once she had prepared her plate, she seemed to run out of steam, pushing her food around with her fork for a full five minutes before asking if he was ready to go.

“It’s early yet,” Ryoki said, pouring her some mango juice, a substance just one step below chocolate on her temptation meter. “I wanted to talk to you about Lucas.” He hesitated, feeling as though they were playing at mommy and daddy. “Have you found a place for him?”

She focused on her juice, tapping the glass. “I just got an email from Tanaka Charities. It may take some time to set up the channels in a new country, and the place I hoped for in Rio is officially full. But today Cecelia said she’d take him to play with her grandsons, so he’ll be out of the house all day, and I promise to have him somewhere else tonight.” She looked deflated and miserable, juggling balls that weren’t allowed to touch.

“Take your time, Kate, find a good place. We can take him on until you do, maybe give him odd jobs to keep him out of mischief.”

She looked up, classic deer caught in the headlights. “What do you mean?” she stammered.

“If it takes more than a week, we could get him a tutor, somebody who could watch him and help him catch up until we hand him off. Didn’t you tell me Cecelia’s niece is a teacher? She might know someone.”

“She’s looking for private students herself,” Kate said, dropping her eyes to the table.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.

“I’ve been worrying about this all night. It’s really a complicated commitment,” she said slowly. “If things go badly, they could go
very
badly. I have to be fair.” She picked up her juice, looking as if she might actually sip it, but she set it down again. “Matt’s dead-set against it.”

Ryoki had already guessed Montgomery’s opinion, but he said nothing as he watched her spear a bite of egg and mash it to yellow molecules.

“He’s mad, wants me to get rid of Lucas right away, like taking a dog to the pound. He says I never got over playing with dolls. I told him I never played with dolls.”

“Montgomery thinks your eyes are brown,” Ryoki said, but she didn’t appear to hear him.

“He says to quit pretending I’m Mother Teresa, that I’m stretched too thin as it is.” She picked the napkin from her lap and dabbed the corners of her mouth as though she had actually eaten something. “I’m not good, I probably brought a criminal into your house.”

“He might be afraid you’ll lose focus on him,” Ryoki said.

“No, he says he’s worried about my career. We talked about marriage once, but we broke up because he wants to put off having kids for at least ten years so I can establish myself first. He says he’s thinking of me, that if I’m not careful I’ll find myself ground down to nothing but a housewife. Those were his words, ‘ground down’.”

She made a low, throaty sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “My mother was ‘nothing but a housewife,’ and when she died she left a big hole that nobody else could fill. How many irreplaceable people do you know?—that’s what I asked him, but he didn’t say anything.”

She looked up, seemed to remember who she was talking to. “I mean, I’m committed to my career.”

Ryoki wanted to ask her what she thought made a homemaker inferior to a career woman, but she didn’t give him the chance.

“He wants me to be like him, like I can’t be his equal if I’m not making a name for myself. I told him I took a daytrip to the top of the heap and there’s nothing there, but he doesn’t believe me, nobody believes me.”

It was the most revealing thing Kate had ever said about herself. Ryoki wanted to take her hand, but held back.

“I’m sorry you’re upset, Kate.” And he honestly was, though he sensed a tinge of ignoble glee peeking out from under his finer feelings.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “We’ll cool off and work it out. He’s actually a nice guy and he really gets me in a lot of ways. If we can just figure out this one thing.”

Ryoki thought the “one thing” constituted several things that constituted a great chasm, but he was saved from answering by Cecelia who entered, trailed by a familiar private messenger contracted with Tanaka, Inc. He carried a sealed document box marked
URGENT
on both sides in English and Portuguese. “He says he must put it directly in your hands, sir,” Cecelia said.

It took Ryoki a moment to place the sender’s name: Rosana Alves dos Santos. The mole he’d placed in Jackson Browning’s organization. Opening the box with his pocket knife, he pulled a cover letter and summary report from the top of the stack.

The letter began blandly enough, but after the first paragraph, he glanced at Kate who was preparing to leave the table. “Wait,” he said.

She turned to face him. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t answer, but held up a finger to wait while he read the letter and the report, then riffled through the rest of the documents. She sipped her juice and waited patiently. When he had looked through everything he pulled out his wallet and put some money on the table, roughly the equivalent of one U.S. dollar.

“‘Bet you a dollar.’ That’s what you said, right?”

Kate looked puzzled for a long moment before her face fell. “Jackson Browning? Are you sure, no mistake?”

“Supporting evidence,” he said tapping the document box. “After our discussion I decided to send a special forensic accountant, someone he wouldn’t suspect.” He handed her the report. When she had finished reading, they sat looking at each other.

The great Jackson Browning, thief.

He’d been very clever about it, adjusting large construction accounts with what the auditors would classify as “immaterial amounts” which collectively amounted to the understatement of constructions costs and the overstatement of assets. The entries had been routine enough not to arouse suspicion, but the clever mole had gained the confidence of one of Browning’s jilted secretaries who had once gotten a whiff of impropriety when he received an inopportune phone call, and had since furtively acquired two records that didn’t seem to jive, shyly showing them to her new friend Rosana,
it’s probably nothing, but…

Banking on his reputation, Browning had negotiated a huge performance-based bonus tied to the project’s cost and time constraints. Once he had wrestled the numbers, the project expenses would certainly come in under budget, but the actual fixed assets would be significantly overstated, a criminal offense. Browning did not yet know he’d been ratted out, an advantage, but not much.

Ryoki sat considering the irony of last night’s valiant decision to take in a risky boy, when all the time he’d been sheltering a hardened criminal in Armani who would have cost him enough to feed, clothe and house an army of Lucases, major theft included.

“Backroom gambling habit concealed behind social betting, never raised a red flag,” he said, pulling some stapled pages from the top of the box. “Ramped up in the last couple of years, expensive divorces, in over his head, desperate. Apparently he started looking for loopholes before he accepted this job, which explains his willingness to trade a slightly lower salary for a larger performance bonus.” He laid several reports on the table and sat back, rubbing his eyes. “As we got closer to the end of the contract term and his responsibilities rolled over into the Brazilian management group, the budget and related assets would be scrutinized less, not more, effectively masking his actions.” Ryoki looked at Kate. “I owe you an apology.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t trust him, but I never foresaw
jail
.”

“Swiss cheese ethics. Those were your words,” he said, stacking the papers. “I have to call my father and gather the board. We need to keep this quiet. It could be a major embarrassment if word got out before we were ready.”

Kate touched his hand with her fingertip. “This isn’t as bad as it could be.”

“Because of you,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. She drew her hand away.

“Don’t ever say that in public. People wouldn’t understand, and if a rumor started that you were taking advice from someone like me with zero credentials, it would look like you’d consulted a fortune teller. That would be bad for the whole company—worse than if I wore my red suit,” she added from the corner of her mouth, pushing back her chair and rising from the table.

As Ryoki walked to his den, he remembered how often his father had taken his wife with him when he traveled for business, and wondered for the first time if his mother had provided something more complex than ordinary creature comfort. But the question evaporated from his mind as he punched in his father’s number and began scanning in the most pressing supporting documents. On the phone his father sounded very tired.

Two days later, Ryoki paid a surprise call at the grand and impressive building in Porto Alegre, tracking bits of thunderstorm and rumor seed in a neat trail from the elevator to Browning’s office, where he entered unannounced and stayed to talk behind thick closed doors. For nearly an hour managers fidgeted as secretaries nudged each other in eerie silence:
What’s going on? Do you know? I don’t know.

At last their leader appeared, standing alone in front of his office door, smoldering cigar pinched carelessly between two fingers, a big game hunter relaxing as the beaters dragged his latest kill from the field, and the office exhaled a long satisfying stream of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Only Miss Blatislav noticed the grayish cast to Browning’s tan and the single trickle of sweat glistening at his left temple. “Get the air conditioning fixed, will you. It’s hotter than—” the elevator dinged on the other side of the office, distracting him. “I’m on my way to lunch,” he finished gruffly. “See you in an hour.” He took the stairs. A battalion of accountants poured from the elevators, invading the office, indiscriminately displacing employees and booting up laptops. Browning accepted Ryoki’s offer and fled the country, leaving his bonus and his treasures behind. Ryoki had the glass eyes shipped to Browning’s wife with a note of thanks, mentioning in a postscript that he would happily restore the weapons at any time her husband returned to claim them.

The day after Browning’s disappearance, Tanaka, Inc. announced that the position would be assumed by Izumi Nakamura who would not be available for some weeks yet. Ryoki gathered his top executives in the conference room to inform them that in the interim he would be taking over Browning’s responsibilities, in addition to his own.

Executives who had not worked with Tanaka-san in London shook their heads. They knew their young boss worked very hard, but to pile on the factory project would bury him completely. Those who had served with him before had more faith, but there were still only twenty-four hours in a day, and even he had to sleep sometimes. Although in London they’d often joked that he did not.

Ryoki wished he could clone himself. Since he would be out of the office most of the time, he knew he needed a liaison who understood his daily responsibilities better than anyone. Someone who could keep him updated, who could work with Arima to appropriately redistribute any task that couldn’t be handled by remote. Reluctantly he decided his Portuguese had progressed far enough to leave Kate in São Paulo while he made do with Browning’s former assistant, Miss Blatislav. Behind closed doors Kate argued against the idea, said she’d learned a few things about Japanese offices, that she would look fast and pushy, possibly make enemies, but they could come up with no better solution. On the day he presented his plan to his executives, Arima flanked his right as usual, but the chair to his left remained empty, though the space was visually filled by Kate who sat to the left and just behind him. As his assistant she could not sit directly at the conference table, but the message was clear: If they were to support him, they would have to cooperate with her. He explained his plans as clearly as he could and no one batted an eye at his controversial choice. He couldn’t tell whether they were showing respect to her or to him, but he hoped it would last the duration.