Nicola Griffith - Always

I considered. “What else is missing?”

“How did you—”

“What else is missing?”

“A lot.”

“How specific is the loss?”

“I don’t understand.”

"Particular files, files that are connected in some way, or random chunks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out. Do you want cream or sugar?”

He was still riffling through files when I brought back the coffee. I settled comfortably behind the desk and sipped, content to wait now that he’d begun.

“I’m going to have to cross-check the computer records file by file against the paper files to know for sure what’s gone, but I can tell you one thing I’ve noticed. She’d had me make calls about three lots in the last couple of months that are connected. More or less. I mean, literally. They’re next door to each other. Contiguous.”

“Is one of those lots mine?”

He nodded.

“You said more or less.”

“That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s one lot between the others that isn’t for sale. It’s the Federal Center. You can’t buy that. Also, I don’t remember any calls to other investors about these other three lots.”

“You think she wanted it for herself?”

“I don’t know. And it’s pretty useless land, anyhow. Warehouses. Who wants those?”

“Close the file cabinet and come sit. Talk to me about real estate here in Seattle.”

I TOOK THE Seattle Times with me and read the story carefully in the car. I tried to imagine I was Corning. I highlighted the names of those admitted to Harborview Medical Center. I asked the MMI for a map.

At Harborview, I found that they had all been released, except for one man, Steven Jursen, who had been transferred that morning to the University of Washington Medical Center.

According to the MMI, the UW Medical Center was less than a mile from Kick’s house. I drove down her street, even though it wasn’t strictly on my route. Her van wasn’t in the driveway. I wondered if she had got the flowers. Of course she had. Benjamin was an efficient concierge.

The lobby of the medical center was stuffed with art. The floors were clean enough to eat from, if I’d wanted to eat. Nothing was white. The elevator took an age.

Jursen was in a private room. The door was partly open. I stepped close, lifting my hand to knock, and the smell hit me: that hospital scent of disinfectant and fear and floor polish, of bleached linens and sugary drinks, of sleek equipment with its contacts recently wiped down with alcohol and ready to lie cold and stinging against warm skin. I knocked. No response. There again, if he was on a ventilator, there wouldn’t be. I pushed the door open.

He was asleep. Sunshine poured through the large window, gilding the brushed steel and putty white of the equipment standing ready around the room. He was breathing on his own. On the set, I remembered a man in his late fifties with hard hands and grey hair who wore overalls and walked with slightly bowed legs. A manual worker all his life, whose parents or grandparents had come from Sweden and had expected a hard life of hard work. No great ambition for success, just a steady job with one company, maybe in construction, who paid him on time and took care of everything. A mid-twentieth-century man trying to live in the twenty-first.

Asleep, he looked quite different, not younger but purer, untouched by the experience and compromises of age. A preacher from the eighteenth century, say, who knew he was doing God’s work. I looked at his chart. He’d been off the ventilator since midnight. There were EKG records and an order for an echocardiogram and something called a MUGA test. Under marital status a woman had written in blue ink: divorced. I adjusted the slant of the blinds so that the sun wasn’t in his face, and watched his chest rise and fall, then went to find a doctor.

I DROVE Acircuitous route—no one followed me—to a café on Boat Street that I’d read about. I pulled into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I didn’t get out of the car; I doubted my hunger would stand in the face of food that tasted of sulfur and burnt rubber.

Jursen had congestive heart failure. The overdose had nearly killed him—an overdose he’d been fed because he was connected to me. His near-death was a consequence an order of magnitude greater than spoiling a few rolls of film, and very public. Corning was running scared, scared enough to try to erase her tracks, starting with pulling the tail on me. Good. I would let her stew in her own juices another day or so. Fear would do my work for me.

KICK’S VANwas parked outside the warehouse, but it was her assistant at the craft-services table. Rusen stood by one of the soundstages, talking to Peg and Joel.

“—can’t,” Joel was saying. “It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way with these time constraints.”

“You’re always saying what you can’t do,” Peg said. “Why don’t you try looking at what you can, just for once in your miserable, whining life. We’ve—” She saw me and broke off. They all turned.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

“No, no,” Rusen said. “Are you looking for your friend?”

“Dornan? He’s here?”

“He was. Or maybe that was yesterday…” He pushed his glasses up his nose, realized that it was him I’d come to talk to, and turned to the other two. “Sorry, guys. Later.”

“But—”

“Later, Joel, okay?”

As we walked through the set to his trailer, someone dropped a microphone boom, someone else started shouting. Rusen’s stride was small and tight.

His trailer was painfully neat. He took his customary seat behind his keyboard and began organizing paper clips into rows.

“Things seem a little tense,” I said.

"Sîan Branwell has to be in Spain in four days to shoot a feature. We’re having to reorder the production sequence to get all her scenes in the can. It’s causing… complications. Disagreements with the director and stunt coordinator. And money is, well, you know how the money is. And Finkel isn’t coming back tomorrow, after all.”

“His son is worse?”

“He’s dying.” Silence. “Boy howdy, it does seem wrong to be worrying about money and production schedules and bickering crew when a boy is dying.”

“Letting your dream go won’t keep him alive.”

“That’s right,” he said. Then, more strongly, “That’s right. And, anyhow, our people need these jobs. The industry’s in a bad place with Vancouver siphoning off business. We can’t… But, hoo boy, you didn’t come here to listen to me. What can I do for you?”

“We should start planning our strategy for OSHA and EPA. Let’s begin with payroll and benefits. How’s health insurance?”

It turned out that his people had major medical but both co-pay and deductible were very high, and the company’s secondary insurer was making a fuss about covering the difference.

We talked about that for a while. He began to look a little less harried.

“I took a long look at your payroll and I don’t see any information on the young person I noticed the other day. Even if he’s an unofficial intern, we need some paperwork.”

“Bri’s not an intern. He’s Finkel’s son. Bri Junior.”

“I thought his son was dying.”

“His other son.”

I mulled that. “How old is he?”

“Bri? Fifteen—no sixteen now.”

“Unless he sits around reading comics all day, get some paperwork going and formalize some kind of payment. Figure out what would make OSHA happy. And how old’s his friend?”

“Mackie? Oh, he’s twenty at least.”

We talked for another hour. When I stood to leave, his tension was no less but it was focused. He had a plan. “We can keep it together,” he said. “It’ll work.”