Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

I opened the leather booklet and looked through it quickly. “I like the Grand-Puy-Ducasse Pauillac quite a bit,” I said.

Truslow smiled and took the wine list back. “What was on the top of page three?”

I thought for a second, brought the picture to memory. “A Stag’s Leap Merlot, ’82.”

Truslow nodded.

“But I’m not much into performing like a circus animal,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I apologize. That’s a very rare gift. How I envy you.”

“It allowed me to coast through any class at Harvard in which memorization was crucial — which included English, history, the history of art...”

“Well, you see, Ben, your... eidetic memory is a real advantage in work like this, an assignment that might well involve sequences of codes and the like. If , that is, you’re still willing to accept. Incidentally, I’m completely amenable to the terms you and Bill worked out.”

The terms I extorted, he meant, but was too polite to say. “Uh, Alex, when Bill and I discussed those terms, I had no idea what you wanted me for.”

“That’s quite all right—”

“No, let me finish. If I understand you correctly — that what this comes down to is clearing Hal Sinclair’s name — then I certainly have no intention to be mercenary.”

Truslow frowned, his expression stern. “ Mercenary ? For God’s sake, Ben, I know about your financial plight. At the very least, this assignment will give me the excuse to help you out. If you’d like, I can even put you on our payroll as well.”

“Thanks, but not necessary.”

“Well, then,” he said. “I’m glad you’re on board.”

We shook hands, as if ritually consummating the deal. “Listen, Ben, my wife, Margaret, and I are going to our place in New Hampshire tonight. Opening it up for the spring. We’d love it if you and Molly could have supper with us — nothing fancy, barbecue or whatever. Meet the grandkids.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“Tomorrow possible?”

Tomorrow was hectic, but I could clear some time. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

For the rest of the afternoon I could barely concentrate. Could Molly’s father seriously have been involved in some sort of conspiracy with the former head of the KGB? Was it possible that he had actually embezzled money — “a fortune,” as Truslow put it? It made no sense.

Yet as an explanation for his murder... it did make a certain sense, did it not?

A knot of tension had formed in my stomach and evidently had no plans to untie itself.

The phone buzzed; Darlene announced that Molly was on the phone.

“What time are we meeting Ike and Linda?” She was calling from some noisy corridor in the hospital.

“Eight, but I’ll cancel if you like. Under the circumstances.”

“No. I... I want to.”

“They’ll understand, Mol.”

“Don’t cancel. It’d be good to go out.”

There was, thankfully, no time to brood that afternoon. My four o’clock arrived punctually: Mel Kornstein was a rotund man in his early fifties, who wore too-stylish, expensive Italian clothes and his tinted aviator-style glasses always slightly askew. He had the distracted, unfocused look of a genius, which I believe he was. Kornstein had made a tidy fortune from inventing a computer game called SpaceTron, which you’ve no doubt heard of. If you haven’t, basically it’s a chase game, in which you, the pilot of a small spacecraft, are supposed to elude the evil spacecraft intent on destroying you and then planet Earth. This may sound silly, but the game is a marvel of computer technology. It’s all done in 3-D so lifelike you’re really convinced you’re there — you really feel as if the comets and meteors and enemy spaceships and all that are coming right at you. This is accomplished by means of an ingenious software driver device Kornstein patented, a real breakthrough. Add that to his patented voice simulator that barks commands at you — “Too far to the left!” or “You’re getting too close!” — and you have an explosion of color and sound, all on your home computer. And Kornstein’s company had revenues of something like a hundred million dollars a year.

But now another software company had released a product so similar to SpaceTron that Mel Kornstein’s revenues had plummeted. Needless to say, he wanted to do something about it.

He sank into the leather chair at the side of my desk, radiating darkest despair. We chatted for a few moments, but he was not in an expansive mood. He handed over to me a box containing the rival game, which was called SpaceTime. I popped it into my desktop computer, booted it up, and was astonished to see how close a copy it was.

“These guys didn’t even try to be original, did they?” I said.

Kornstein removed his eyeglasses and polished them on a shirttail. “I want to shut the fucking bastards down,” he said.

“Let’s slow down a minute here,” I said. “I’m going to have to make an independent determination as to how close the patent infringement is.”

“I want to screw the bastards,” he said.

“All in good time. Let’s go through each of the claims in the patent, one at a time.”

“It’s identical,” Kornstein said, putting his eyeglasses back on, still askew. “Am I going to have a case here, or what?”

“Well, computer games are patentable on the same principles that govern, let’s say, board games. You’re really patenting the relationship between the physical elements and the concepts behind them, the way they interact.”

“I just want to screw ’em.”

I nodded. “We’ll do our best,” I said.

Focaccia was one of those fabulously hip, vaguely offensive, yuppie northern Italian restaurants in the Back Bay that serve a lot of arugula and radicchio, where all the patrons are young and beautiful and wear black and work in advertising. Between the clamor of voices and the thundering white man’s rap music, the place is deafeningly loud, too, which seems to be another requirement of pretentious northern Italian restaurants located in urban American settings.

Molly was late, but my closest friend, Ike, and his wife, Linda, were already shouting at each other across the table in what looked like a vicious marital argument but was just an attempt to communicate. Isaac Cowan and I had gone to law school together, where he specialized in defeating me at tennis. He’s now got some corporate law job that’s so unspeakably dull, even he can’t bring himself to talk about it, but I know it has something to do with reinsurance. Linda, who was seven months pregnant at the time, is a shrink who mostly treats children. Both of them are tall, freckled, and redheaded — unnervingly similar in physical type — and I find them both easy to be with.

They were saying something about his mother coming for a visit. Then Ike turned to me and mentioned a Celtics game we had gone to last week. We talked a bit about work, about Linda’s pregnancy (she wanted to ask Molly something about a test her ob-gyn was forcing upon her), about my backhand (virtually nonexistent), and eventually about Molly’s father.

Ike and Linda had always seemed a little uncomfortable talking about Molly’s famous father, never sure when they were prying, not wanting to seem too curious about him. Ike knew a little about my work for CIA, though I had made it clear I preferred not to say much. He knew, too, that I had been married before, that my first wife had been killed in an accident, and not much else. Naturally, that limited our conversation at times. They expressed their condolences, asked how Molly was doing. I knew I couldn’t say anything about what had preoccupied me of late, certainly nothing about Hal Sinclair’s murder.