THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Chapter 5: THE STAINED GLASS

The elevator rose so smoothly that Zale only knew they were moving because his stomach said so.

Forty-one floors. A hum under his shoes, a faint pressure in his ears, and his own reflection in the brushed-steel doors: a pale young man in a charcoal suit that had cost more than a car and fit like it had been cut for someone else. The shoulders hung half an inch too wide. The sleeves covered his knuckles, which suited him. He had asked the tailor for exactly that.

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand until they went red, then let his mouth hang slightly open. Hungover. Late. Sorry about it.

The doors parted on the top floor and the light hit him.

The whole level was glass. Floor-to-ceiling panes ran the length of the building, and the late morning sun came through them like something thrown. It lit the white marble, the pale leather chairs, the long reception desk where a young woman in a gray dress sat very straight and did not smile. The air smelled of new leather and dry espresso, and underneath that of cold, filtered air, with nothing in it that had ever been alive.

His father's name had once been carved over the front doors of this building. Zale had passed under the replacement on his way in. Steel letters, clean and modern, spelling out a word that meant nothing.

"Mr. Alden." The receptionist stood. Her eyes went to his tie, which was crooked, then away. "Your uncle is expecting you. The board is already in session."

"Oh, man. Is it ten?" He squinted at his phone, fumbled it, and caught it against his chest on the second try. "I thought ten-thirty. Sorry. Sorry. I had a, uh. A late night."

"Of course."

Her face gave nothing back. Her fingers, though, were pressed white against the edge of the desk.

He noted it and let it go and shuffled toward the double doors at the end of the hall.

Someone had put a tray of coffee on a side table. He took a cup without asking, and the cup was hot, and he let it slosh. A brown splash hit his cuff. He swore, softly, cheerfully, and dabbed at it with his thumb, and the whole time his eyes stayed on the frosted doors ahead. Behind them, voices. Low ones. A murmur with no rhythm to it, the sound of people talking over each other without raising their voices.

He pushed the door open with his shoulder.

The boardroom ran the length of the building's corner, and the sun filled it. A long table of black glass. Eighteen chairs. Fourteen of them were occupied, and every head turned toward him at once, and every head turned back.

That was the first thing.

Nobody had looked at him for longer than a second. At the gala they had greeted him with champagne and white teeth. Today he was a minor interruption, a draft under a door.

The second thing was the air. It was hot. Somebody had turned the climate control down, or up, or it had failed under the glare of that enormous window, and the room held a thick, close warmth that smelled of old coffee and skin. A man near the foot of the table had unbuttoned his collar. A dark ring of sweat showed under the arm of his pale blue shirt. Beside him a woman in a gray suit tapped a silver pen against a legal pad, quick and hard, tap-tap-tap, a tiny hammer working at the quiet. She did not seem to know she was doing it. The man beside her pressed two fingers against her wrist, and she stopped. Then she started again.

Whispers ran along one side of the table in a low continuous hiss. A bald man leaned toward his neighbor and spoke from the corner of his mouth. The neighbor shook his head. Another man, young, with a thin mustache, looked at his phone and turned it face down on the glass. He had done that three times since Zale walked in. Zale counted.

One chair at the table stood empty and pushed back from the glass. Black leather. A name card sat in front of it in neat steel type.

T. CRANE.

A glass of water stood beside the card. Nobody had touched it. A thin film of dust floated on the surface.

Zale's face went on smiling.

"Zale." Gerald's voice came from the head of the table. "Sit. Anywhere."

"Hey, Uncle G." Zale lifted the coffee in a clumsy toast and dropped into the nearest chair, which squeaked. He crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and slid down a little, a young man who had never once been told a meeting could matter. "What'd I miss?"

"Nothing." Gerald did not look at him. "We're nearly done."

Zale looked at Gerald.

Gerald Hale sat at the head of the table with his hands flat on the glass, and for a man who had greeted him two nights before with a boat tan and a patronizing slap on the shoulder, he looked as though someone had let the air out of him. The tan had gone sallow. A shaving cut ran along his jaw, small and fresh, where the razor had slipped. His collar sat a little crooked. He had not changed his shirt, Zale thought. The same navy suit from the weekend, the lapel creased, and a faint dark patch beneath the arm.

His hands were the thing. They lay on the table perfectly still, which was wrong. A man who is calm lets his hands move. A man holding himself together pins them down. The knuckles had gone pale against the black glass, and when Zale let his gaze drop to the thick neck above the open collar, he could see the pulse there. A hard, quick flutter under the skin, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty. Gerald's signet ring turned slowly on his finger, round and round, one revolution at a time, with a faint click against the glass every time it caught.

"As I was saying." Gerald cleared his throat. It came out wet. "Until we have further information, no one speaks to the press. Not a word. Nobody confirms, nobody denies. Our statement is that Mr. Crane is on a personal leave."

"Gerald." The woman with the silver pen leaned forward. "His housekeeper told my assistant that an ambulance came to the villa on Sunday morning."

"An ambulance." Gerald's mouth twisted. "Yes. That's what I've heard."

"Is he alive?"

"I don't have that information."

"Then who does?"

The table rustled. Someone coughed. The man with the sweat-dark collar wiped his upper lip with a folded handkerchief and tucked it away, and then took it out again.

"His family has been unreachable since Sunday," Gerald said. He said it slowly, each word set down like a stone. "His phones go to a message. The clinic in the hills says they have no patient by that name. I have had security calling since seven this morning. Nobody knows anything. Nobody." His ring clicked. Clicked. "That is the situation. We will maintain discipline."

Zale sipped his coffee, scalded his lip, and winced.

*The clinic has no patient by that name.* So no one had claimed the body, or someone had claimed it and was keeping it quiet. The broad man at the piano had found him at dawn, as planned, a tired man asleep over his papers. Somebody had decided what story to tell and who to tell it to. That someone was either Crane's family or the man at the head of the table, and the way Gerald's collar had gone dark at the throat said it was not Gerald's idea.

Somebody above Gerald, then. Somebody else was holding the leash.

The thought sat cool and quiet in the back of his mind while the rest of him hunted for a napkin.

"Sorry. I'm just." He dabbed at his sleeve, grinned at nobody, and let his knee bounce under the table. "Is this, like, a bad time? Because I can come back. I just wanted to see the, you know. Family business."

No one answered him.

The pen tapped. The whispers hissed. Out beyond the glass, forty-one floors down, the city ran in bright gray lines, and the sun flared off a thousand windows at once until the whole room seemed to be burning white around its edges. Zale squinted against it. In the window's reflection, he could see the long table, the hunched backs, the empty chair with its steel nameplate.

He could also see Gerald's head turning.

It turned slowly, the way a man's head turns when he has been holding something back for a very long time and has just run out of strength. The bloodshot eyes found Zale at the end of the table, and the room, one chair at a time, went still. Even the pen stopped.

Gerald's ring made one last click.

"Zale," he said. His voice was soft and very careful. "You spoke with Tobias at the party. Alone, I believe, for some time."

"Uh." Zale blinked. "Yeah?"

"What did he say to you?"

Zale," Gerald said again, lower. "What did he say to you?"

Every head at the table had turned. Fourteen faces, fourteen sets of eyes, and the sun sat behind them all like a spotlight with the heat on. Zale felt the room lean toward him. He let his mouth fall open a little further.

"Tobias? Oh, man." He pressed two fingers to his temple and winced. "Okay. So. He said I should drink more water."

Nobody moved.

"No, wait, that was the bartender." He laughed, a cracked, embarrassed little sound, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. "Sorry. Honestly, that whole night is, like, a fog? I think Tobias said something about my dad. Ambition, maybe? And I said Dad thought I didn't have any, and he laughed, and then I think he told me I looked like a pear."

"A pear," Gerald said.

"Or I said the champagne tasted like pears. One of those." Zale squinted at the ceiling, trying to haul the memory down by the collar. "Then Aunt Viv put me in a car and I think I went to a club? Or a lounge. There was a guy with a very tall hat. I lost my phone. I found my phone. I lost it again. I woke up on a couch at, I don't know, someone named Brecken's? And I'd lost one shoe." He lifted his foot to the edge of the table and gestured at a gleaming Italian loafer. "Found it in the elevator, actually. At the hotel. Which is weird, because I wasn't staying at the hotel."

He grinned around the table. A thin film of sweat had broken out above his lip, and he didn't wipe it, because a man who has been awake for two days should sweat.

Gerald stared at him.

Zale held the stare for a count of three with his eyes soft and slightly unfocused, the look of a puppy that has been shouted at and doesn't know why. He let his lower lip pull in. He let his fingers fidget with the lid of his coffee until it popped off and a little hot brown spilled over his knuckles. He yelped, shook his hand, and said "Sorry, sorry, ow," and the sound of it rang into the quiet like a plate dropped in church.

Somewhere down the table, someone let out a breath.

Gerald's shoulders came down an inch. A muscle in his jaw unclenched. The bloodshot eyes dropped from Zale's face to the splash on his cuff, then to the crooked tie, then to the loafer on the table's edge, and Zale watched the numbers add themselves up again in the red-rimmed gray. *Pear. Hat. One shoe.* It was exactly the story a fool would tell.

"Take your foot off the table," Gerald said, tiredly.

"Right. Yes. Sorry."

"Tobias is on personal leave." Gerald rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. His voice had gone flat. "If anyone, anyone, asks you about him, that is what you say. You don't know anything. Which should be easy."

"Totally. Yeah. I don't know anything." Zale beamed. "Great. I'm great at that."

Somebody choked on a laugh and turned it into a cough. Gerald closed his eyes.

"We're adjourned."

Chairs scraped. The room let go all at once, a long exhale of leather and cloth, and the whole board rose in a single jostling mass and went for the doors. They did not look at each other. Zale watched them go the way a man watches a field of mice when a shadow crosses it. The woman with the silver pen shoved her legal pad into a briefcase so hard the clasp snapped. The bald man ran a handkerchief down the back of his neck. The young one with the mustache grabbed his phone off the glass and thumbed it awake before he'd even stood.

Zale bent over his shoe as if the lace had come loose.

His eyes were on the doors. His ears were on everything else.

"...Voss on line two," someone hissed, near the exit. A woman's voice, tight and low. "He's called three times since breakfast."

"Tell him tomorrow."

"He won't take tomorrow. He says the Kotor shipment can't sit, and if Crane's not signing off, then somebody's got to."

"Not here."

"Then where?"

"*Not here.*"

Zale tugged his laces apart and tied them again, slowly, with the clumsy double knot of a man who had never done it himself. Kotor. A port town on the Adriatic, a few hours down the coast from the stone buildings where he had spent his teens. He knew the harbor. He had run the gorge road above it at dawn with a sandbag on his back, and had watched cargo cranes the color of rust swing over the water, and had never once thought about what was inside the containers.

The two voices moved off down the hall. A third, male, murmured something that ended in "...Merrow Freight."

Then they were gone.

He straightened. At the head of the table, Gerald had not moved. He sat with his chin on his chest and his hands flat, and the room had emptied around him until only the empty chair and the untouched glass remained. A phone buzzed against the glass, a short insect whir. Gerald flinched. He looked at the screen for a long second, and the color left his face.

He answered with his back to the room.

"Yes." A pause. "Yes, sir. No, sir. I have it under control." Gerald turned toward the window, one hand lifting to grip the back of his neck. Sunlight ran along the edge of his cheek, wet and white. "He was never part of the arrangement. That was Crane's own folly. No. Yes. I understand. It won't happen again."

His voice cracked on the last word, a small thin sound like a plate hairline-splitting.

Zale stood very still with a coffee cup in his hand and listened to a grown man answer a question with *sir*.

Then he picked up the cup, spilled the last of it on the table, and said brightly to the empty room, "Okay! Great chat!"

Gerald did not turn around. He lifted one hand and waved it, a dismissal, the gesture of a man swatting a fly.

Zale walked out through the glass hallway with his shoulders slumped and his tie crooked, whistling softly through his teeth. The receptionist looked up and then down. A cleaner with a cart parked beside the elevators ignored him. Nobody spoke. Nobody watched him with any interest at all, and he drank that in like cold water, a whole building agreeing that he was nothing.

At the end of the hall stood a single pair of brushed-steel doors with no button, only a small black glass panel. His uncle's private elevator. He had been given a keycard on his way in with a wink and a wad of nothing-to-worry-about. He touched it to the panel.

The doors parted. He stepped through. They closed behind him.

Quiet.

The smile dropped.

It did not fade. His whole face emptied at once, the loose mouth and wet shine of the eyes and the dopey tilt of the head, until the skin lay over the bones as flat and cool as paper. His spine rolled straight, vertebra by vertebra. The knees locked. The shoulders came back, and the oversized jacket, which had hung off him like a coat on a hanger, pulled taut across a frame that was all wire. His hands, loose a second ago, closed once at his sides and went still.

In the polished steel of the doors, a stranger watched him.

The face was gaunt, the eyes dark and level, the jaw a hard line under the stubble. A man in a suit that didn't fit looked back at him out of the metal, and for a moment the suit stopped mattering. It was a sheath. It could hang however it liked.

The car dropped. Floors ticked past in pale numerals. His ears popped. He watched his own reflection and did not look away.

*Sir.*

Somebody above Gerald held the leash. Somebody who called him at midday, and made his voice break, and had never been part of the arrangement Crane apparently botched. A name on the wire. Voss. A freight company called Merrow. A shipment at Kotor that could not sit, in a port where the cranes had always been red with rust and the containers had never opened.

He took the folded paper from his breast pocket and did not unfold it. He didn't need to. The second name was already there, in his own small, even hand, a hair beneath the first.

Dominic Voss.

The elevator slowed. The doors slid open on the lobby, and a rush of cold marble light broke across his face, and the smile came back up over him like a hood, slow and soft and stupid.

Zale stepped out into the noise and the sun, and began to look for a way to Kotor.