Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

A FEW FEMALE customers looked up, tracking Venn toward the purple sofa, off which he plucked a crushed newspaper. The furniture in the café was elementary-school chic: primary colors, hard plastic, initials scratched into wood. Tooly stood before the counter, perusing a jar of oversized cookies. “Plain coffee?” she called to him, her question unintentionally broadcast to the hushed room, consisting largely of lone customers flipping through ring binders. As the barman fiddled with a faulty multidisc CD player, Tooly opened one of the ubiquitous binders herself, expecting a drinks list but finding dating profiles. This Upper West Side hangout, which she and Venn had entered at random, seemed to be a matchmaking café.

To demonstrate that her relations with Venn were not of this nature, she sat on an armchair opposite him rather than sharing the sofa — although calculated distance probably resembled a first date even more. As he scanned the newspaper, she leaned forward to read the back page, a story about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, on a visit to Texas, talking up the inexperience of his opponent for the White House, Governor George W. Bush.

She informed Venn that Wildfire had come to nothing.

“Ah, well,” he responded, folding the newspaper. He appeared amused, as if he’d wagered on this outcome and, although it was unfavorable, enjoyed having been right.

“Does this put you in a bad position now?” she asked.

“How would it?”

“Well, I told you to reserve space at the Brain Trust. That guy you’re overseeing it for, is he going to expect rent and joining fees now?”

“Which guy?”

“The guy who owns the place. I forget his name. That venture-capital guy.”

“You mean my friend Mawky Di Scugliano? Who got shot as a kid when gunmen tried to rob his folks’ Italian restaurant?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Dear Tooly, I’ve never met such a person.” He had no idea who owned the property where the Brain Trust was based. That school bus in the center of the office space, he’d heard, had been left there by a dim-witted fashionista who’d set up an atelier there two years earlier and ended up in rehab. The floor had been empty since. Until, without permission, Venn sent in cleaners, had technicians hook into existing phone and power cables in the building, moved in desks, hired a bum off the Bowery to operate the freight elevator, and started renting out those cheap cubicles. “I never spent much time there in case someone turned up who actually did own the place!” he said. “I suspect it belongs to the Buddhist temple downstairs, but the monks never complained. Vow of silence: priceless.” He laughed. “Thing about the Brain Trust is that it sort of worked. Those kids were having a great time coming up with stuff. Ridiculous ideas, of course, but one might hit the jackpot. There’s nothing to say that ideas must be good to succeed. Somebody could make a fortune yet because of the Brain Trust.”

“So, wait — there is no cooperative?”

“I hardly even know what a cooperative is. And if there was a cooperative it’d be ridiculous. It’d mean the most inventive kids would have to split their proceeds with the duds. How is that fair? This way, it’s all spoils to the victor.”

“So those guys there were essentially paying you thousands of bucks to turn up each day in an abandoned office space?”

“And paying in cash, Tooly. In cash.”

“Can’t be safe for you to keep that place open.”

“I agree.”

“Could we go somewhere else now, Venn? I want to leave this city. Not telling Sarah this time. Maybe not telling anybody,” she said, too cowardly to specify Humphrey.

“I agree,” he said. “I think it’s time.”

“Yes!” She leaped from her seat with excitement. “Yes!” She sat, beaming. “I want to plan a whole project together, start to finish. We could pull off something amazing. Don’t you think?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“You pretend that it’s everyone for themselves,” she said, “but I owe you tons. I know all that you’ve done for me. I know you better than anyone.”

“You do,” he said. “We’re the same, me and you.” He took out a cellphone and rose from the sofa, then knelt before her and tied the laces of her Converse sneakers, one shoe to the other.

“What are you doing?” she asked, smiling.

He cupped his hand against the side of her face. “You’re the softest person on the planet, Tooly. You couldn’t kill a wasp if it stung you on the nose. Even then, I see you shooing it out the window.”

“I can be horrible and dishonest if I put my mind to it.”

“If only!” he said. “Don’t let anyone take my newspaper. There’s something I need to show you in it. I’ve got a surprise for you. I’m tempted to say a great surprise, but I’ll call it an interesting one.” Venn raised his finger, indicating that she must remain quiet, and he stepped from the café onto Amsterdam Avenue. He opened his flip phone, dialed a number, and sauntered down the sidewalk, passing from view.

All sounds were louder suddenly: a rock CD playing, the smack of the snare, the repetitions of the singer. The café was filling up now, and not just with lonely hearts.

“Some guy was in our lab today. Don’t know what he was, a resident or something. And the professor was, like, ‘You don’t knock, you don’t stay.’ ”

“He’s like that.”

“I’m really surprised at the level of detail in this class.”

“The teaching quality this year is so superior to the first year.”

“I know!”

At another table:

“He interviews a lot of people for the school.”

“He’s such a dad.”

“He is a dad.”

“The funny thing? The woman who wrote that book is a friend of the Heckers.”

“Hey, when are you going to the shower Saturday?”

“I think I’m going to go on Saturday.”

And another:

“Finally, after months of anxiety I called her, bless her heart. She’s in Detroit. So I call her last night to see what happened. She said she’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Wasn’t she up for a job?”

“Lots of jobs.”

Tooly could never have conversations like these. The only place in the world where she fit was beside Venn. She watched the window, sitting upright each time a man entered her field of vision. She smirked, looking at her laced-up shoes, realizing how much like those nervous daters she must have seemed, glancing up whenever the door opened. He never did come back.

MAKEUP APPLICATION WAS NOT Tooly’s strength. Summoning her art-class skills, she underscored each eye “gesturally,” as her instructor might have said, then blinked at the blurred image of herself reflected in the rearview mirror, peering through two black smudges. “Oh, this is ridiculous,” she said, and dangled a bead of spittle into a tissue to dab both eyes clean. A certain muss of the hair seemed stylish, while another was vaguely like a teenage boy. Did she look “severe”? Who had said that about her?

She drove from Cork Airport in her rental car, across South Tipperary, east past Clonmel, following signs for Waterford, toward the destination, Beenblossom Lodge, which she’d pinpointed on an online map. In the middle of a two-lane country road, she stopped the Nissan Micra, left clicker blinking. She was jittery to think that “Xavier Karamage” could be minutes away. She’d made this trip to Ireland without invitation or announcement. Would he be there? She turned down a private driveway.

Expecting the house to appear, she drove at walking pace. But the driveway continued for more than half a mile through woodland, offering strobe views between tree trunks of an emerald field containing a pond with a small island. Finally, she arrived at a gravel clearing bordered by rhododendrons. Beenblossom Lodge was a Georgian manor, ivy over the sash windows, pert chimneys at each end of the slate roof, a four-columned portico flanked by Regency urns overflowing with pansies. She pulled in beside a black Range Rover and a pink Mini, and turned off the engine. She sat a moment, looking at the front door.