He was hunched up, like a dog expecting a kick. I felt sorry for him. “I’m sure. And I don’t think she does want to hurt people. She doesn’t think about that. What she’s thinking about is the family. The business. Control. The patents, the intellectual property, the profits. It’s her life. The way she’s found to not think about being small and held down by her sweating, crying mother. . .” I was the one who was crying. Greta, who had got me a lock. My mother, lost. . .
He stared at me. His eyes were bright with city lights. “How do you know all this?”
“Oh, Papa, you are the one who should have known!”
He reached out and touched my tears, found a handkerchief. “We can’t be everywhere, and know everything at once,” he said sadly.
But you didn’t even try! He had removed himself from the responsibilities of ownership. He had been happy to leave it all to his wife and her family. He had delegated himself right out of the command chain, and gone off in his boat to count endangered fish.
“The business carries your name. You’re responsible.”
I didn’t know how to make him understand. I met a man called Paolo, I wanted to say, whose life is ruined because you didn’t care enough to oversee the business. The money comes in, and you take it, you don’t care how it’s made, you don’t care that we still rake in tithes on every patent use, that we preside over a monopoly that we don’t need anymore. We already have so much money we don’t know what to do with it.
But even when I was seven years old I had known he preferred to leave the real work to others. He wasn’t a termite on the forest floor, organizing the building; he was a brightly colored bird soaring up, up above the canopy, unconcerned with what went on below, as long as the sun still shone and there was nectar in the orchids.
There was too much for me to explain, and I didn’t have time.
“I have something to do tonight,” I said. “Something that won’t wait. I’ve made a tape. I’ll give it to you. You must make Greta give back Lucas Chen.” I hesitated, then decided not to threaten him with taking it to the police, making the whole sordid business public. “And I want your help. I want you to speed up the formal reclaiming of my identity. I want a copy of my PIDA.”He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, but he merely nodded. “I have it.” They had probably sent it to the family as proof that they had me. “I’ll get it messengered over first thing tomorrow. Will I see you then?”
He looked old and frail. “Oh, Papa, yes.”
We walked farther. We had been walking awhile.
“I have to go.”
We held each other again. Longer this time, and harder. I had my father back. “Tomorrow,” he whispered. I hurried down the towpath.
Spanner was in the Polar Bear, drinking alone. She saw me in the mirror and watched me thread my way to the bar, the way a well-fed snake will watch a young pig: trying to decide whether it should kill now, or wait for its prey to grow a little and make the attraction, the mesmerizing gaze, the final strike worthwhile.
I didn’t bother to sit down. “Why did you do it?”
She shrugged, looking down at her drink. “Why not? You always said I would do anything for money.”
“And will a quarter of a million make you feel good about yourself?”
“Money always helps.”
“That’s what you’ve been waiting for all along, isn’t it? A reward. For your prey to finally get big enough, worth the risk. Worth lunging for, pumping full of poison.”
Her eyes seemed dry and blank. No reflections there. No clues about how she felt, or if she did feel anything anymore. I doubted she understood a word I was saying.
“Did you hate me right from the beginning?” She said nothing. “Why did you hate me? Because I had what you didn’t, self-respect?”
She stirred. “You didn’t have any self-respect when I found you naked and bleeding and nameless. No, what I hated was that you had choices. You chose to not go back to your family. I had no choices. I’ve never had choices.”
“That’s not true. There is always a choice.”
“Easy to say when you’re a van de Oest.”
Perhaps she was right. I would never know. I was not