Chapter 8
Trick
He towed us four hundred miles and would not take money.
Nadia asked him once what he wanted.
"To be in the room," he said. "Same as everybody."
"You called Pepper Vance," I said.
"I did."
"Why."
"Because a story needs somebody in it who's right," he said, taking the on-ramp at a sedate fifty-five.
"You two were getting very comfortable being the interesting ones.
There's nothing more tiresome than two charming criminals being charming at each other for four hundred pages.
So I found the woman with the legitimate grievance and I told her where you'd be. "
"You used her."
"I invited her." He looked genuinely offended, which he does about once an hour.
"She could have stayed home. She chose to stand in a hallway and say a true thing to a woman who owed her nineteen months, and then she chose to put the gun down, and none of that was me.
That's the whole art of it, Silas. I don't move anybody who wasn't already leaning. "
"You moved Weber's stack."
"That's paper," he said. "Paper doesn't have a soul. Paper's just furniture."
Nadia, from the middle seat: "Does it bother you at all that you killed Fitch?"
The truck went about a quarter mile.
"I didn't," he said.
"Somebody did."
"Yes," said the good suit, and did not say anything else for sixty miles, and that was the only time in the entire eight hours that he stopped talking, and I have thought about it every week since.
He let us out at the top of the drive in Havregard at nine at night, honked twice, and drove off down the county road, and Deke came out of the clubhouse and said, "Who was that?" and neither of us had a good answer.
Wolf called church for eleven and moved it to the forge room, which he does not do.
The forge room is the old smithy behind the clubhouse, brick and iron and a coal bed that's been banked since 1948. Every patch this charter has ever worn got struck on that anvil. Wren got married in there, more or less. It's the one room in Havregard where nobody's ever told a joke.
Eleven men, one folklorist, one grifter, one tote of paper on the anvil.
Ozzy had to be told to leave the raccoon outside and took it personally.
"He's patched—"
"Ozzy."
"You keep saying that like it settles it and it doesn't settle it—"
"Ozzy, buddy," Deke said gently, "there's a coal bed."
That did it. Ozzy went and put the raccoon in the truck and came back looking like a man who'd been forced to choose between two loves, which, in fairness.
And the good suit, standing near the coals with his hands behind his back, looking around at the brickwork like a man at an open house.
"You brought him here," Gunnar said.
"He brought himself," I said. "He drove."
"He drove—"
"He towed us. He wouldn't take money. Gunnar, I've had a night."
Wolf hadn't sat down. He was looking at the suit with the pale eye and the pale eye was doing nothing at all, and everybody in that room who knew what that meant — which was Wolf, Wren, and me — had gone very quiet.
"Say your business," Wolf said.
"It's not my business, it's hers." The suit gestured graciously at Nadia. "I'm a guest. I've been invited by circumstance, which is my favorite kind of invitation, because it can't be revoked."
"Somebody explain," Deke said.
So Nadia explained.
All of it, standing on the packed dirt floor of the forge room in front of eleven men who'd known her three weeks — the transfer, the sixty percent, the four consents, the arithmetic of what happens to me on the far side of it.
She didn't soften it and she didn't perform it.
She laid it out like a ledger, which is what she is.
When she finished, nobody said anything for about ten seconds.
Then Ozzy said, "Wait, so Trick's been cheating?"
"Ozzy."
"No, because I lost an argument to him about a raccoon—"
"Ozzy," said eleven people.
"I'm just saying I've got a follow-up question about the raccoon."
"So refuse it," Gunnar said to Nadia. "That's the answer. You refuse and it stalls and he stays broken and we handle the rest. That's what a club is for."
"That kills them both inside a year," Wren said, from the wall.
"Then she takes it," Gunnar said, "and Trick—"
He stopped.
To Gunnar Sloat's eternal credit, and I mean this, he stopped, and he looked at me, and he did not finish the sentence, and his jaw worked.
"I'm not saying that," he said.
"You could've," I said. "It's the better play."
"I'm not saying it."
"Thanks, Gunnar."
"I still think we should have traded her to Ash."
"There he is."
The suit was watching all of this with his head slightly tilted, and he looked — I'd never seen it before and I've seen it twice since — bored. Just for a second. He'd built a beautiful trap with two doors and everybody in the room was walking toward one of them.
"Nadia," Wolf said. "It's your call. It's been your call since the dock. Say it."
And my wife walked over to the anvil and put both hands on it.
"There's a third thing," she said.
The suit's chin came up.
"There's not a third thing," he said.
"There's always a third thing. You told me yourself — it has to be accepted. It's not weather, you said. It's not a faucet. It only works if somebody takes it on purpose." She looked up at him. "You never said it had to be one somebody."
The room did not follow. I did, about a half-second before anybody, because I'd spent three weeks watching her arrive in rooms.
"Oh," I said. "Oh, you didn't."
"I'm selling it," Nadia said.
"Selling it," Wolf repeated.
"To the club. All of you. Split." She straightened. "Eleven men, twelve with Wren, and the empty chair gets a share too because I've been told it counts. Everybody accepts a piece. Everybody says yes out loud, on purpose, in this room."
"That's not—" Gunnar started.
"Think about what it is," she said. "It's not a muscle, it's not a power, it's a — it's a pressure. It's the reason a room believes one man. And a pressure that big needs a single vessel or it isn't worth anything. You take a god's gift and you split it twenty ways and what do you get?"
"Charm," Wren said quietly.
"Charm," Nadia said. "Ordinary charm. Everybody in here gets a little bit better at talking to a cop and none of you gets to bend a room. It's unfeedable. There's nothing in it to watch."
"Hold on." Sunny, from the end of the table, in the voice she uses for line items. "Explain the mechanism. Not the poetry. The mechanism."
"It's a pressure," Nadia said.
"That's poetry."
"Fine." Nadia turned to face her. "Here's the mechanism.
It's not a thing inside Silas that makes him convincing.
It's a thing around him that makes a room agree.
That's why it works on people who've never met him and why it doesn't work in writing.
It needs proximity and it needs a decision being made. "
"Okay."
"So the size of the effect depends on how much of it is concentrated in one place.
All of it in one man, you get a god's mouthpiece.
Half of it in one man, you get what he's had for three weeks, which is a lot of near misses and one string snapping in Cheyenne.
" She spread her hands. "A twelfth of it in twelve people, spread across a county, none of them in the same room half the time? "
"You get nothing," Sunny said.
"You get a club full of guys who are slightly easier to talk to."
"That's not nothing," said Deke, hurt.
"Deke, you were already the easiest man alive to talk to."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment, it's a security concern—"
"I'll take it," said Deke.
Sunny wrote something in her book, which is how you know a thing has actually been decided at that table.
"And Silas?" the suit said.
"Silas gets a share," she said. "Same as everybody. Same as the raccoon, if the raccoon's patched."
"He's a prospect," Ozzy said.
"Ozzy, I swear—"
"I'm just clarifying the org chart!"
I stood in the middle of a forge room and watched a woman take fifteen years of my life and hand it out like cake.
"Wait," Gunnar said. "Wait. If we all take a piece—"
"Yes," said Wolf, and his voice had gone flat and old.
"— then the whole charter's marked."
"Yes."
"Every man in this room is on the ledger of a god who's already got one arrangement running with us from 1948—"
"Gunnar," Wolf said.
"— and we don't know what the second price on that one is yet!"
The word landed in the room and sat there.
The arrangement. Second time I'd ever heard it said out loud, and the first time was Bram, and Bram is dead.
"That's enough," Wolf said.
"Wolf—"
"That's enough." He put his hand flat on the anvil. "You're right, Gunnar. Write it down somewhere and put a date on it, because you're going to want to be right about it later. And I'm doing it anyway."
He looked around the room.
"He's ours," Wolf said. "That's the whole argument. I don't have a better one and I'm not looking for one."
He turned to the suit.
"Twelve shares. Does it work?"
And the good suit stood there by the coals with the firelight on that perfect charcoal wool.
He didn't rage. I'd braced for rage. Everybody in the room had braced for rage, and Deke had put himself between the suit and Wren without appearing to move, which is a thing Deke does.
The suit smiled.
Slowly. All the way. With his whole face, with what looked absolutely like joy.
"That's wonderful," he said.
"Is that a yes?" Nadia said.
"That's a yes. It's a terrible outcome and it's a wonderful solution and I want you to know I did not see it, which happens to me about once a century." He put his hand over his heart. "Mrs. Loveless. Genuinely. You've made a bad night into something I'll be telling people about."
"I don't want you telling people about it."
"I know," he said, delighted, and that's when I understood we were all going to see him again. Not because we'd beaten him. Because we'd been interesting. Rage would have been survivable. Rage ends. Admiration is a subscription.