The Greed by Scott Bergstrom

Author:Scott Bergstrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Twenty-Three

After leaving Naz’s office, I go promptly to the address she’d given me, a stately old building off the Paradeplatz just a few doors down from Hindemith & Cie. The plaque on the front of the building says Feldman Capital Services.

Inside, it looks every bit like a bank—and is, in fact, a bank. But a division for, as Naz put it, specialized services, is segregated from the rest, and this is why I’m here. The specific specialized service for which Lila Kereti has come is the leasing of a specialized kind of safe-deposit box.

Virtually every question on the application form has next to it the word optional in parentheses, even those asking for passport number and name. The only two that do not are the boxes where one checks consent to a retinal scan and the method of payment, which will be taken in advance, five years minimum. This, Naz told me, is the niche FCS has carved out for itself, the class of wealthy clients for whom passport numbers and names might, on occasion, become inconvenient.

A pretty blond woman with clever green eyes shows me into a mahogany-paneled booth the size of a small bathroom and hefts a narrow steel box about eighteen inches long onto the counter.

“Let me know when you’re finished,” she says, and closes the door behind her.

I press my fingerprint against a panel on the front of the box and an LED goes from red to green. The inside is lined with a black rubber mat.

One by one, the things I’m leaving behind go into the box. Three hundred thousand in cash. Lila Kereti’s passport and identity documents. A small plastic bag with a dozen SD cards containing copies of my father’s video testimony. The original hard copies of the doomsday device scrawled on children’s notebooks.

* * *

The sun is setting, and the air is filled with a magnificent yellow-orange that surrounds everything, casts it in gold, touches everyone’s skin and makes it glow. Terrance is waiting in the Paradeplatz, right on time.

“All finished?” he says.

“All finished,” I say.

A tram rumbles into the square and sets a flock of pigeons into the air, turning them into dark darts on a hundred bending trajectories. I duck and laugh, then see Terrance has bird shit on his shoulder and laugh again.

“It’s good luck,” I say, fumbling for a tissue and not finding one. “Really. It’s a thing in, like, a dozen cultures.”

But he’s aghast, scowling at his sweater.

I fish a newspaper from a recycling bin and do the best I can. “You needed a new one anyway,” I say, adding spit to the mix in the hope that it will help. “Let’s go; I’ll get you one, my treat. Look, there’s a shop.”

Still-laughing me and shit-shouldered he cross the street and enter Lorber’s Haberdashery. Nothing new here for the elegantly suited clerks; the pigeons in Paradeplatz have simply claimed another victim. Terrance is given a stack of shirts to sort through, and I entertain myself with a wooden box filled with swatches of elegant wool.

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