Slow River

Market share. Hepple. A tent, wind singing along the dunes outside. Marley, saying something about…

“-divided up among several rival plants, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”

Silence.

“Are you there?”

“Um? Yes. Sorry.” The wisp of memory faded.

“Well, what should we do? Apart from beat the bastard to pulp.”

“Watch and wait.” A dissatisfied, incredulous silence. “We need more information.” There was something missing. Something important. Hepple. A truck. Tok. Marley. I shook my head. “We don’t know for sure that he’s responsible.”

“True.” Grudging. “He might not even know we know it’s sabotage.”

“If it is him, he’ll know what the plant managers know.” Her sigh was loud and long. “Meet me outside the plant at half five?”

“Yes.”

I picked up the hammer and a mouthful of nails and went back to building my planter—one of five. I was going to make an orchard. Me, the sky, some trees. Maybe bees would come up here after all.

The wood was new, still sappy and white against the silvery glint of the nails. Difficult to saw, but less expensive.

On a water worker’s pay, I couldn’t afford any better.

But there’s that thirty thousand tucked away. I tried not to think about that. If I didn’t spend the money I could pretend I hadn’t been in that bunker with Spa

I could ignore that awful dead-bone smile she had given me, the things I had said. The things I knew because of what I had done.

I thought about Magyar’s words: managers’ profits. Hepple wouldn’t be getting any this quarter. His own fault. His greedy attempts to shave expenses could have cost people their lives. Market share.

The hammer slipped and caught the edge of my thumb. I spat the nails out of my mouth and swore. Carpentry wasn’t my forte. Tok, now, he could have taken these bits of wood and banged them together in a second. Very practical and workmanlike. He was the kind of person who could take two twigs and a piece of string and make something interesting and sturdy. He had done beautiful things made of found objects dotted the grounds at Ratnapida. He had never been able to just sit, empty-handed. And then he had gone to study music. So hidden, after all. Close-minded. I suppose it ran in the family.

We had shared things, though. And he had helped me. Like that time by the pond when he had told me to find something to do, something to use as a shield against our parents’ interest. I hammered the nail home, set another in place with a tap. That afternoon had been su

It came out of nowhere, a metaphysical hammer blow between the rise and fall of the real tool: Hepple. Market share. Jerome’s Boys. And it all fell into place.

Magyar was waiting for me in the locker room. The shift would not change for half an hour and everything was quiet. We sat next to each other on the wooden bench, not too close. “Jerome’s Boys,” I told her. “They were a dirty-work team run directly by the van de Oest COO, forty years ago.

They enforced the company monopolies, before the courts got around to it. Any means necessary. Which is why they were supposed to have been disbanded. Maybe they were, but someone’s had the same idea.” Magyar was staring at me as though I was crazy. “Look at when Meisener joined. Just a few days after Hepple started cost-cutting.”

“Hepple? This bunch of enforcers tried to wreck my plant because of that useless idiot?”

“No. Or, rather, yes: because of what Hepple did. In a way you were right. It’s about market share.”

“I’m trying very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what Hepple’s got to do with it.”

I started again. “My… the van de Oests originally made their money by genetically tailoring bacteria and then patenting them. Every time their bugs were used, they got a cut. Then they retailored the bugs so that they don’t work unless they’re supplied with special proprietary bug food—which is where they make their real profit these days. Treatment plants need the bugs, the bugs need the food. The van de Oests license people to supply both and earn a lot of money for doing nothing. They have a monopoly. When Hepple canceled the food order in favor of generics, he was breaking that monopoly. Someone stepped in to protect it.”

“They would risk all this, thousands of lives, to protect a monopoly?”

“They didn’t intend anyone to get hurt. Except in the pocket.” They wouldn’t risk another Caracas. “And even if people died, the van de Oests would have come out of it smelling of roses. It’s happened before. After all, they would say, if their instructions had been carried out and the proper food used, nothing would have gone wrong. The finger will point at Hepple, and the people who were stupid enough to hire him.”

“Which is what’s happened.”

“Yes.”

“So,” Magyar said slowly, “this group, Jerome’s Boys or whatever they’re called now, is responsible. But they’re illegal. They’re not supposed to exist. So where do they get their money?”

The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money, Oster had said. No funds, no operation.

Ridiculously, I felt too ashamed to tell her. It’s not your fault, I told myself, but they were my family. I shared the same genes, the same upbringing. I might have had the same values. “It… They…” I looked down at the floor, then back up again. “Kidnap is a great source of income.”

“Kidnap is…?” She stared at me. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Someone assembles a group to protect the company. But they don’t have access to legitimate corporate funds. So they kidnap the heir, you, and get—how much, ten million?”

“Tax free.”

“-ten million tax free, to fund them. Their purpose is to insure corporate market share by doing things like illegal information gathering and plant sabotage. The point of insuring market share is to keep up van de Oest family income…” She shook her head.

“I know, it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make any kind of sense! Whoever’s in charge of these people has to have a mind like a corkscrew.”

“And access to everything that goes on.” Corporate records and strategy. Marketing. Research and development. Personal family records.

“They had to know I was going to be in Uruguay. They had to know I was allergic to spray hypos. They had to have an organization. Just like the organization that sabotaged the plant. And look at who’s been kidnapped now: Lucas Chen, heir to another bioremediation family. The kind of person the dirty-work group would be collecting information on. Don’t you see? It makes perfect sense.” Someone in my family had had me kidnapped. Had put me through all that humiliation and fear and guilt. Had put me in a place where I might have killed somebody. Someone in my family. “Have you heard any more from your friend in county records?”

“More of the same: nothing, nothing, and nothing. She’ll keep checking, but either you didn’t kill him, or someone doesn’t want anyone to know that you did.”

She didn’t say: which is the same thing. It wasn’t.

She stood up, looked at her watch. It was almost time for the shift change. I had a sudden picture of Magyar in my kitchen, making coffee, talking about nothing in particular. I wondered if it would ever happen.

“So, what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Help you watch Meisener.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Don’t you think you should tell someone what you know? You should take it to the police. You haven’t done anything wrong. Or at least call your father. The poor man thinks you’re dead.”

“I want it to stay that way for a while.”

“You’re punishing him for something you once thought he did. But he hasn’t done anything wrong, either.”