Code 6, p.9
Code 6, page 9
“People who accidentally fall off a balcony don’t leave suicide notes.”
“Not everyone who writes a suicide note intends to go through with it. Sometimes they want to be saved, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“And sometimes they get drunk and take it too far, don’t they?”
“Do you really believe that’s what happened here?”
“I’m just trying to understand. Maybe she wanted Kate to walk into the apartment and see her leaning over the rail. Maybe she wanted to be saved. Maybe she wanted her daughter to save her.”
“Mr. Gamble, this is a sad case, but the law requires us to put a label on it. I sympathize that it may be easier for a family to cope with an accident, but this was no accident. That whittles down the choices to suicide or homicide. I’m leaning suicide—unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”
The detective’s question had put him on the defensive. “Do you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s something you’re just not ready to admit to yourself. Either way, now’s your chance to tell me.”
The voice of Abigail Sloane was suddenly in the CEO’s head, and while her delivery was more colorful—“Shut the fuck up”—it was the same advice he would have received from any good lawyer.
“There’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing I can think of.”
The detective’s response was slow in coming, and even though they were on the phone, Gamble could almost feel his stare, the penetrating gaze of an inquisitive detective who could discern the truth better than any polygraph machine.
“All right, Mr. Gamble. We’ll leave it at that. Have a good day, sir.”
“You as well,” he said, and the call ended.
Kate walked from the athletic facility to Building C, where Patrick worked.
Kate had texted him after dinner with her father and said she knew “Project Naïveté” was fake, that she could take a joke, and that all was cool between them. But he hadn’t answered. She chose not to text him again. Creepy old babysitter texting the precocious little boy who’d grown up to be a twenty-two-year-old blond and blue-eyed Adonis was not cool. But she was curious to know why he hadn’t answered her.
Kate went inside, and there was yet another security checkpoint in the lobby. The guard recognized her as the CEO’s daughter and apologized for having to put her through the same routine they followed for all visitors.
“Rules are rules,” he said.
Building C was a more modern design than the law department. The multitiered workspace was accessible by ramps instead of stairs, with shiny chrome railings, wide-planked floors of white oak, and perfect ambient lighting that made Kate feel as though she were entering MoMA. All interior offices had glass walls so that you could see all the way through from one exterior wall to the other. Patrick’s office had his nameplate on the glass door, but Kate would have guessed it was his even without the nameplate. The assortment of junk food on the desk was classic Patrick. In all her years of babysitting, Kate had never seen him eat anything but McDonald’s fries, pizza, the occasional pizza pocket for variety’s sake, full-sugar sodas, and giant Icees. He’d obviously not outgrown his eating habits.
A coworker emerged from the neighboring glass box. He was wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, which seemed to be the unofficial uniform among Buck engineers. “Patrick’s not here,” he said.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Not sure.”
“Okay. I’ll leave him a note.”
“Well, he won’t be back anytime soon,” he said. “They sent him away.”
“What do you mean, ‘sent him away’?”
“It’s like an outward-bound program. He’s camping in the wild on some kind of survival exercise.”
“Who sent him?”
“HR. It’s a new program they just started for engineers. No cellphones, no technology of any kind. It’s supposed to prevent burnout.”
“How long will he be gone?”
“No idea.”
Kate glanced toward his desk. It seemed odd that he’d leave food out if he was leaving for an extended period of time, though there were probably enough preservatives in that junk to last a millennium. “I just saw him last week. Weird he didn’t mention he was leaving.”
“I didn’t know, either. Nobody did. Like I said, it’s a brand-new program.”
“Is Patrick the first?”
“Yep. Patrick’s the guinea pig. Hopefully, he’ll get bitten by a snake or something and they’ll nix the whole program before I have to go. Life without tech. What’s the point? Know what I mean?”
“Not yet,” she said, glancing one more time at the empty desk chair. “But I’m learning.”
Chapter 14
On Saturday morning, Kate received a text message from Bass’s assistant. Meet me for tea, it read.
Kate texted back: Where?
Moments later, Sean’s response: At the Reichstag.
Kate knew what was coming next, and she laughed as the bubble popped up on her screen: With Adolf Hitler.
Ordinarily, there was nothing funny about Hitler, unless you were a producer named Mel Brooks and it happened to be springtime in Germany. But Sean’s text warmed her heart.
Kate had delivered more than the first ten pages by the Friday deadline. She’d fleshed out the entire first act with new material on the life and career of IBM’s founder and CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. In June 1937, Watson became president of the International Chamber of Commerce, urging “world peace through world trade.” His inauguration was at the annual ICC banquet, held at Friedrich Wilhelm III’s romantic eighteenth-century castle outside Berlin, organized by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in what would go down as the most elaborate party in the history of the Third Reich. That same evening, Watson became the first American to receive the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, the highest honor the Reich had, up until that point, ever bestowed on a non-German, surpassed only by Hitler’s subsequent decoration of Henry Ford, a known anti-Semite. At a separate, more intimate meeting, Watson took tea with Hitler at the Reichstag. No one knows for sure what they said to one another. They may have talked about the weather. Or, Watson might have mentioned his plan to double the output of his German subsidiary, increasing Hollerith card production to 74 million per month by the end of 1937, enough to accommodate the Führer’s need to process an emerging mountain of census data and other personal information that would soon expand to include the populations of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Memelland.
Kate had worried how her dramatization of tea at the Reichstag might be received. Sean’s text was the reaction she’d hoped for.
Coffee at 11? she texted back, adding a link to her favorite spot. Sean quickly accepted.
When John Adams, second president of the United States and first resident of the White House, denounced tea as “impatriotic,” it may not have been his intention, but he nonetheless established the nation’s capital as a city of coffee lovers. Kate’s go-to coffee bar was just a few blocks from the White House, Swing’s Coffee Roasters, which had been serving Washingtonians for over a century. The mosaic-tiled floors were so beautiful that, on her first visit, Kate had almost felt guilty stepping on them. Her usual seat at the black quartz counter offered prime people watching, as the aroma of freshly ground coffee wafted from a pair of shiny, dependable espresso machines on the other side. That morning, however, Kate didn’t go inside. The unexpected sight of the silver-haired gentleman seated at an outside table stopped her in her tracks.
“Irving? I thought I was meeting Sean here.”
“He’s doing what he does best. Fetching coffee.”
Kate settled into the empty chair, not wanting to sound impertinent, but she had to ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be in rehab?”
“Eh. Rehab, schmeehab.”
Sean joined them with three coffees and put one in front of Kate. “Mesco Blend, one Splenda, a little cream,” he said.
“How’d you know?”
“The barista told me. Apparently, you’re quite the creature of habit.”
Bass pulled a hard copy of Kate’s script from his leather satchel. “Sean sent me your pages. I was up all night with them.”
She glanced at Sean, who had promised not to show them to anyone, unless . . .
“You passed the first-ten-pages test,” Sean explained.
“You work fast,” said Bass. “I like that.”
“But do you like what I’ve written?” she asked, sounding a tad needier than intended.
“First of all, it doesn’t matter if I like it. It matters only if I love it. And if I love it, I’ll tell you. But if you must know, as of now, your script is in the category of fixable.”
“That’s a compliment,” Sean volunteered.
“I’m open to changes, of course,” said Kate. She drank through the lid of her go-cup and braced herself for the director’s feedback. An awkward minute of silence passed, then Bass seemed to digress.
“Do you know what I really hate?” he said. “I hate it when a waiter comes to my table, tries to memorize the order, and puts it in to the kitchen without ever writing it down. I just know it’s going to come back wrong.”
Kate took the hint, dug into her purse, and found a pen but no paper. Bass gave her the title page to write on.
“Now then,” he continued. “You’ve made the right decision to tell this story through the CEO. The audience won’t like Watson, but they’re not supposed to like him.”
“He’s so complex. I think there’s a lot to like about him.”
“We’ll get rid of all that.”
“Oh,” said Kate, making a note of major surgery number one.
“The key line is when Watson rationalizes his decision to ramp up production of his German subsidiary in 1937. Keep in mind that by the time he accepts the Merit Cross, the Nuremberg Laws have already been passed. Jews were no longer German citizens. They couldn’t marry an Aryan or even fly the German flag. Jewish doctors couldn’t practice in German hospitals. The same month Watson took tea with Hitler, another camp for political prisoners opened in Weimar. Buchenwald. And we know what became of that.”
Kate was writing furiously, getting it all down. The guide at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, if she recalled correctly, had lost her family at Buchenwald.
“With all this going on,” said Bass, “Watson lands in Berlin touting world peace through world trade. ‘Ford sells a car,’ he says, ‘and someone might drive drunk. Smith and Wesson makes a gun, and someone might use if for something other than self-defense.’ That’s a great line.”
Kate didn’t tell him that it was a direct quote from her father. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I love it. But you need to expound on it to develop the real theme of the play: the evils of capitalism.”
Kate stopped writing, her ballpoint frozen to the page. “I didn’t see this as a play about capitalism. It’s the story of the world’s first personal information catastrophe.”
“Caused by capitalist greed,” said Irving. “Are those words a direct quote from Watson?”
“‘World peace through world trade,’ yes. The rest, no.”
“That’s fine. This isn’t a documentary. Watson could have said them. And any man who would say them is the worst kind of capitalist. He’s Fagin.”
“Oliver Twist’s Fagin?”
“Yes. ‘In this life, one thing counts / in the bank, large amounts.’ That’s what Watson is about.”
Kate paused. The words were her father’s, not Watson’s, and she’d never viewed her father as Fagin. She’d always thought of him as one of those lucky guys whose creative passion and intellectual pursuit proved financially rewarding. Like Patrick.
“Point two,” said Bass. “Too much humor. I want this play to be dense.”
Kate bristled. “I’ve never thought of ‘dense’ as a literary aspiration.”
“I mean dense in a good way. Dense like Oslo. Have you seen Oslo?”
“No.”
“You need to.”
“Where’s it playing?”
“Nowhere,” said Sean, jumping in. “It’s too dense.”
Bass shot him a look of disapproval, which suddenly devolved into an almost gruesome expression. His eyes closed. He placed his palms flat on the table and drew a deep breath.
“Irving, are you okay?” asked Kate.
He breathed out slowly. “Just a little indigestion.”
It looked much worse than indigestion to Kate.
“Sean, can you share the rest of my notes with Kate and walk her back to the Metro? I’d like to sit alone for a minute.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Kate.
“I’m fine. Just go.”
Kate gathered her purse and her coffee cup. Bass didn’t rise to shake hands. She thanked him, which he ignored, still focused on breathing. Sean started down the sidewalk, and Kate walked with him.
“I’m worried about him,” she said.
“Don’t be,” said Sean. “He gets overly dramatic every time he tries to stop drinking. It’s as if he wants someone to tell him, ‘Irv, stop suffering and pour yourself a drink—please.’”
Kate was suddenly thinking of her mother. “The problem is that he doesn’t want a drink. He wants ten drinks.”
They stopped at the Metro entrance. Sean buried his hands in his pockets, as if unsure of his next words. “I don’t think I can find an active production of Oslo,” he said. “But The Little Foxes is playing at Arena Stage. I was wondering if you’d like to see it.”
“Love Lillian Hellman. I’ll definitely check it out.”
“I meant . . . see it with me.”
“I know you did,” she said, smiling. “Yes, that would be fun.”
He smiled back. “Great. I’ll check on tickets and shoot you a text.”
“Perfect.” Kate turned and started inside.
“Hey,” said Sean, stopping her. “Your play still doesn’t have a title. What are you going to call it?”
“Don’t know yet. Hope to figure that out before the end of the next act.”
“Looking forward to it,” he said. “The next act, I mean.”
“Me, too,” she said, taking his double meaning, and then she continued into the station.
Kate went home to an apartment full of boxes. The movers were scheduled to arrive on Monday, and then she would be moving south of the National Mall, to the apartment her father had found in the Wharf District. Her decision had pleased him.
“You’re going to love it there,” he’d told her. “And you’ll be very safe.”
Kate had felt perfectly safe in DuPont Circle. She wished he would stop talking as though the family were suddenly under attack.
Packing had been a veritable walk down memory lane. Kate was not a hoarder, but it was amazing how much stuff a single person could accumulate in three years, even in a small one-bedroom apartment. In the middle of the living room were several overflowing boxes of things marked “undecided” on the keep-or-throw-away tick list. Her running shoes were as yet unpacked. She laced them up and headed out the door to clear her mind.
Kate’s usual route was through Montrose Park, near Georgetown, an immediate escape from the city to life among chipmunks, squirrels, and an occasional white-tailed deer. When feeling strong, she’d continue through Whitehaven and Glover-Archbold parks on up to American University. Memories abounded here, too. The way to even lovelier Dumbarton Oaks Park was downhill along Lover’s Lane, the place where Noah—corny as ever—had stopped in the middle of their run to say, “I love you.” They’d known each other for about three weeks. Kate had thought he was joking and laughed. He’d said of course he was kidding and joined in the laughter. Only later did she learn how much her reaction had hurt him.
“Kate?”
She stopped and looked back. It was the runner she’d just passed on the trail. He, too, had stopped, and the two of them were standing in the shade of a chestnut tree.
It was Noah.
Each expressed the same sentiment—how weird it was to run into each other—though in truth it didn’t shock Kate. Noah also lived in DuPont Circle, and technically this was his route, the one they used to follow. She’d found a new one after they’d stopped dating, but she’d decided to follow the old one, one last time for nostalgia’s sake, before moving. She hadn’t expected to see him. But maybe a part of her had hoped that she would. They talked with hands on hips, catching their breath, as they walked along the trail.
“How’s the play?” asked Noah.
“I was up till three a.m. every night this week rewriting it.”
“You always worked best that way. You happy with it?”
“I will be. If I can keep Irving Bass from turning it into a polemic against capitalism.”
“Since when did you become such a capitalist?”
“I don’t want my play to be a polemic against anything.”
Kate left it at that, as running was her way of escaping from her worries, not dwelling on them. She changed the subject and told him she was moving, managing to steer clear of Buck Technologies and the DOJ audit, until Noah brought it up.
“I hope you don’t mind me talking a little shop.”
“I’d rather we didn’t. But truthfully, I’m totally walled off from your audit. I’d have nothing to say about it, even if I wanted to.”
“I was going to ask you about Patrick Battle. I understand he’s a friend of your family.”
“I used to babysit him when he was a boy. What do you want to know?”
A jogger passed with her chocolate Lab on a leash. Noah waited, then continued. “I gave the company a list of the first ten employees I wanted to interview. His name was on it.”
Kate forced herself not to react. “Wow. Baby Patrick, on your A list. That’s so amazing to me.”
Noah brought their walk to a halt, his expression serious. “When I sent the list, he was coming and going to work every day like normal. Then my list of names landed on somebody’s desk, and suddenly he’s gone, out of the country, supposedly on some kind of corporate bonding adventure.”
