isn’t yours. And then I thought: Why didn’t she just give it to Tim’s people to deal with? That’s when I thought, Ah. As in Ah, maybe it’s actually Tim’s, and she wants to see what’s on it without him knowing.” He smiles again.
You can’t be bothered to explain that the iPad has nothing to do with Tim. “What are you suggesting, exactly?” you ask, although you suspect you already know.
“A trade. I’ll give you the contents of the iPad as I unscramble them. In return, you let me peek at your coding.”
You shake your head. “That isn’t going to happen.”
He holds up an Ethernet cable. “You won’t even notice I’m in there.”
The idea is faintly gross. “No,” you repeat firmly.
He tosses the cable onto a shelf. “Your choice. Too bad.”
You hold out your hand. “Give me the iPad. I’ll take it somewhere else.”
He folds his arms. “Uh-uh. No deal, no iPad. In case you hadn’t noticed, nothing gets nothing in this world.”
“You’re pathetic, you know that?” you snap.
“I just want to see how you work,” he says plaintively. “It’s no different from a gearhead looking at an engine.”
“Excuse me,” you say sarcastically. “From my perspective, it’s really not very similar at all.”
He shrugs. “Come back when you’re ready to make a deal.”
“That iPad isn’t yours. I’ll go to the police.”
“Yeah, right. Be my guest.”
“Prick.”
“See you soon,” he says as you march furiously to the shop door. “I’m Nathan, by the way.”
ELEVEN
A couple of days after the mouse pad appeared, Tim asked Abbie to join him in his office. Naturally, we all kept an eye on what was going on in there.
On one wall there was a big flat-screen computer monitor—if you wanted to show Tim something, you’d hook your laptop up to it and present that way. It looked as if he was showing Abbie a presentation on it now.
Someone who had an excuse to walk past told us Tim was taking Abbie through a PowerPoint titled, Why Homeopathy Is Dumb.
The presentation, we learned later, dealt with many of the key elements of designing good scientific trials, from selection bias through to the placebo effect.
Perhaps remarkably, Abbie seemed fascinated.
“But if I take a homeopathic pill, all I know is, I feel better,” she was overheard to say. And Tim was heard to reply—not arrogantly or dismissively, but as if he was genuinely interested in explaining it to her—that this was indeed perfectly possible, and might well be due to the statistical effect known as regression to the mean.
Now, it’s fair to say that some of us were surprised by the romance between Abbie and Tim. A few people even made disparaging remarks about Abbie’s possible motives.
Those who took that position felt vindicated when, a week or so later, Abbie didn’t turn up one day until way after noon. Someone spotted her striding across the parking lot, backpack dangling from one shoulder.
“Hey,” Tim said, when he saw her at her desk.
“Hey,” she replied.
“Thought you and I were going to have breakfast.”
“I know. I’m really sorry, my car broke down at the beach.”
“It broke?”
She nodded. “It’s the head gasket, apparently. I had to leave it and catch a bus. And then I had to organize the tow and the garage and it just took forever.”
Tim went into his office. A moment later he came back with something in his hand.
“Here,” he said, dropping a bunch of car keys on her desk. “For you. Now you needn’t ever be late again.”
We waited for Abbie to throw the keys back at him; or at the very least to say she didn’t want to be placed in his debt like that.
But she didn’t. She picked up the keys. She said, “Wow. Thanks.”
33
Bouillabaisse is not the simplest dish to make, although the results can be spectacular. Your previous effort used Elizabeth David’s recipe, but the most authentic one, the one favored by restaurateurs in Marseille, is from Jean-Baptiste Reboul’s 1897 La Cuisinière Provençale, which stipulates half a dozen different rock fish, including grouper and striped bass. Since some of them are unavailable in North America, you decide to amalgamate that recipe with one from Chez Panisse.
Step one: Make a fumet, or broth, of chopped vegetables, fish bones, fennel seeds, and thyme.
Step two: Add two cups of white wine, twelve mussels, the peel of an orange, two tablespoons of a French liqueur called Pernod, and an ounce of Spanish saffron. Simmer for two hours, then strain and set aside. The saffron alone cost over