Quotients

  Copyright © 2020 by Tracy O’Neill

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  My President (My President Is Black (Remix)) Words and Music by Justin Henderson, Christopher Whitacre, Jay Jenkins and Nasir Jones Copyright © 2008 Songs of Universal, Inc., Nappypub Music, Henderworks Publishing Co., Universal Music Corp., Nappy Boy Publishing, West Coast Livin’ Publishing, Universal Music - Z Songs, Sun Shining, Inc., Emi Blackwood Music Inc. and Young Jeezy Music Inc. All rights for Nappypub Music and Henderworks Publishing Co. Administered by Songs of Universal, Inc. All rights for Nappy Boy Publishing and West Coast Livin’ Publishing administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights for Sun Shining, Inc, administered by Universal Music - Z Songs. All rights for EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and Young Jeezy Music Inc. administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved used by permission reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Neill, Tracy, author.

  Quotients / Tracy O’Neill.

  New York, NY : Soho, [2020]

  ISBN 978-1-64129-111-8

  eISBN 978-1-64129-112-5

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction.

  3. Man-woman relationship—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction.

  PS3615.N465 Q68 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For those who enlarge closeness

  Prologue

  He’d found a small way to resolve the future. The year he believed that, though in fact the belief would not last the year, was 2005. It was a various year, one he trusted those who euphemistically might be called his cohort and then didn’t, where he quit assuming a fake résumé and an ardor for details could occlude misfortune’s gaze. He decided to keep stories to the rooms where they’d happened, but he also aspired to sensible collations of evidence, although—or in particular because—it was a time of perfect aberration. It was when he met Alexandra Chen.

  In his mind, there was a procedure to calm successions. It began with the call center. There, you could rely on emergencies. And so, the night before the year torqued, Jeremy Jordan turned on his headset. A red light in a grid lit. He asked how could he help, not in the manner of hopelessness.

  My life’s action is gravity, callers said their own ways. Help me catch what’s falling; what’s falling is me.

  His training was follow the slope of a suffering mind before it inflicts itself on the body, but listen too for what fills the air one cannot see. A source quivers energy off it, persuades the air around it to shake. Sound huddles waves into intimacy. That is the way of a voice or explosion, telephones. He could hear that somewhere in London a woman lay silverware in drawers, knives slapping knives, matching.

  Signals: they were everywhere if you knew how to heed them.

  There was some static, a rustle, the woman there and yet closer, in his ear at the center and her house, kilometers reduced as she recalled her husband slamming a door hard enough a mirror shattered. He slammed it so hard, she said, the image of his departure rained down in shards. From the caller’s unseen room, he heard reflections, noise returning. The word—it’s thrown and it strikes off the surface, arrives in homecoming a little different. Sometimes the waves ripple out. Other times, they die. It is water where the word travels clear. No-man’s-land.

  Sometimes, she said, she wished it were too late for her.

  He dispatched a mobile crisis unit. He aspired to totem comfort. He told her, “You are not alone,” meaning only any more than anyone else.

  Jeremy’s head was heavy with the hour of night, and still to come was his putative real job at the fund, but he would remain on the line until the team arrived for her. And though his voice was reasonable, though his collar was crisp, this was talisman in action, superstitious math: offer safety so what life exacted from him would not be Alexandra.

  He listened to the stranger survive. He said, “Stay with me.”

  PART ONE: DIVIDEND

  It is dark one inch ahead of you.—Japanese proverb

  Chapter 1

  Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn’t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.

  She had on a flat gray suit and spoke in her client voice, contained and reassuring. The front of a room did not come naturally to her, but she’d practiced how to land her eyes on a small audience and let her voice settle. She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country.

  She’d done it in Uganda and Sweden, had successes enunciating small former Soviet states still in spinout from the Cold War. Her clients wanted investors from abroad or tourists, to unravage images, firm up legitimacy. Proper trade deals. That’s where they’d arrived in history. There’s the Lisbon Strategy on one hand, and then globalization means chunks of cartography are left behind. They did not want to be left behind.

  The board room had no windows. There was the woman at the head of the table who had called the firm first. There was a man with pink hands like overstuffed sandwiches. These were individuals with government posts, commercial interests, ties to the embassy. They had clean-cropped haircuts and trim shirts, professionally empty faces. But her brother had taught her poker, had taught her, “In bets, you find out who the dreamers are at the table.” And she was in the business of dreamers. She was in the business of casting bets on national narratives, then waiting for them to gain ballast.

  “And can it all happen by the game?” someone leaning over the oblong of the conference table said.

  She was at the whim of FIFA.

  When she’d practiced her pitch with Jeremy, he’d said he’d trust her with a country. He’d trust her with anything. But her firm, Orbet, had been called late to Germany. There was only a year until the World Cup, a blip of a lead-up. Already the business security firm Orbet often worked with, Tyle, had dug up evidence of meetings between Blair’s and Schröder’s people beyond the public-private partnerships.

  “Germany does not have the problem of an Estonia,” she said. “Vast demographics couldn’t picture Estonia. They couldn’t point to it on the map. Germany has an image, and German culture can be globally competitive. Yet, there is delicacy to it. What is a German brand of soft power, one that travels, invites? Rather than a German nationalism.”

  “You’re referring to the Anschluss and the Sudetenland,” the man said bitterly.

  “Or emotion.”

  She was a student of the image. The way at a certain angle a nation caught light. She believed in second chances, third, and so on. You pieced together the tropes, then turned them. Yet she did not yet know how to tell Jeremy that the account would mean a year away.

  “In public opinion polling, what we see is the intellectual history, the art is submerged beneath an identity of engineering and Volkswagen, beer gardens, efficiency. It’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s an issue of foregrounding. This is the country of Goethe and Einstein. Herzog.”

  “Miss
Chen,” someone making a show of his watch said. “We know whose country this is.”

  They were untucking their phones from the insides of their jackets. Typing. Slapping them shut. Someone’s whisper cut into her riff. The woman at the head of the table cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Miss Chen,” she said, already standing. “But we’ll need to end this meeting. There is a matter at the Foreign Ministry.”

  Alexandra collected her things. She folded the computer and turned off the projector. She’d never persisted with a man, and still, if the Germans offered a contract, she thought she and Jeremy could once a month have weekends together in the aura of Alsatian Riesling and something like holiday, that perhaps it would defend them from the ordinary rhythm of fracture. She shook the hand of the woman from the Foreign Ministry.

  “Please,” the woman said, extending an arm toward the door, walking her to the exit faster.

  Alexandra moved into the hallway, and out the window there was a weather that could be described as early. It wasn’t rain or shine, just a sense of open time beating down.

  By the elevator, she looked at her phone.

  As fast as news, she forgot how to walk. Her legs could only stand in the manner of sprinting. There was a door registered only after the rush through, stairs above and behind and below and ahead. Something cold untied in her stomach. Bombs were exploding across London.

  Chapter 2

  Jeremy could not move, speak. Happenings were happening too fast, and his mind switched from simple sentences. There was no subject, object, predicate, meaning predicated on simple words one after the other. He was stuck on four syllables: Alexandra.

  Alexandra held hostage, Alexandra beneath a crush of rubble. Four syllables with life pulled out from under her. He thought of how he’d never told her he wanted them to die very old, him first, of course, and holding her hand. He had not even told Alexandra he wanted to choose paper towels with her.

  Assimilate to the moment: in the offices of Strategic Hedge International, the volume of the television normally tuned to Bloomberg was turned high. Coffers stood erect before the men. It was tragic, the explosion, explosions, he told them, and the lesson from oh-one was it was time to execute the list. They must, he said, offload. Sell before the fall. Banks and hotels, British Airways. Buy up pharma. It is the responsibility owed their investors.

  Gavin Thomas’s hands already maneuvered over his desk.

  Try again: once, twice. Fingers clumsy on his mobile. At his ear: this is the sound of not reaching Alexandra.

  Soon the internet servers failed, and at some point after it had been confirmed phone lines had gone down, Jeremy heard talking torsos declare normal programming had ceded to breaking news. One dead. King’s Cross and Russell Square. Old Street. Moorgate. One turned to twenty. Twenty dead.

  “More information is worse news now,” someone said.

  And it was true, Jeremy knew. Jeremy knew breaking news became broken history, knew news early in an emergency was a broadcast of provisional facts. Later, they’d shed authority, permute, redetermine. Information would redouble. He listened for names. Hers. From the flatscreen, the police commissioner announced it wasn’t coincidence on the Underground; it was terror. Jeremy did not need to be told.

  Around the room, the men of Strategic turned to each other. Speculation shaped their lips. Proximity to the US Embassy at Grosvenor and a dense shopping strip meant that another attack could take them too, or else, maybe that was optimistic. Maybe everywhere meant open to the end.

  “In a city of eight million people,” Thomas was saying, “consider stat’s twenty in eight million. Fact is, good fraction. Good odds.”

  But Jeremy could not weigh probabilities. He could only think of the impossible. He once had had the other phone, the one his people had given him, not these numbers to nowhere, buttons that wouldn’t reach. He could only think of the impossible, though even if he did have the old phone, even if she were alive to call, she’d be on the regular service, the felled one. Alexandra couldn’t answer on the secure line. She, after all, had never been a spy.

  Chapter 3

  In the nights after the Underground bombings, they clutched, and they were alive, fortunately, wonderfully alive. Alexandra told him he was too far when they were next to each other.

  In the mornings, because she’d admitted what she was too impatient to enjoy, Jeremy removed pomegranate seeds from the husk, and because she did not want him to first think to discard the imperfect thing, she fussed a small screwdriver to repair his watch, though always it was breaking. When they watched a movie, he asked after if the gladiator would live, and no matter the quality, she declared the warrior’s future thrive. She began to pay attention to men’s shirts in shop windows, cuff links.

  They had met in May and now it was July, and as days ticked off, the calendar grew suggestive. “I’ve seen you more than the inside of my own refrigerator this week, you know that?” Alexandra said.

  “A dry goods woman, are you?”

  “Just north,” Alexandra said. “Freezer.”

  “That’s the one shaped like a boot.”

  “It’s an intemperate country, but you’d be surprised at the idyll,” she said. “Food never spoils, and there is no fever, war, or taxation.”

  Her foot was in his hand. “I will levy no impost,” he said. “But I cannot speak for the food.”

  That afternoon, he noticed that she paperclipped magazine pages to keep her place. He remarked on it. Later, when she removed an issue from her overnight bag, she found a note clasped where she’d left off reading. Have a drink with me. Or have a museum with me. Have tea.

  Am I allowed only one? she wrote on the blank side of a receipt. And when after a week he did not find her small letter, she did not tell him its contents, but she did invite him to meet her best friend.

  At the bar, over glasses of whiskey and ice furnished with regular fleet, Jeremy removed and layered clothing, muttering too warm, too cold. He reiterated what she’d told him of Genevieve Bailey in the form of questions. Did Genevieve still prefer for different foods not to touch, and was it true that she preferred to write in pencil?

  “It is true,” Genevieve told him.

  “I like him,” Genevieve told her.

  Once, Alexandra would have on the occasion of bringing him flowers said she was bringing his house flowers. Less to lose then. Less frightening. Now, she asked, “Can we be trusted to raise a houseplant?”

  He brought home two kittens.

  The Abyssinian they named Jill. The all black, So-So. The shell-pink felt of the pads on their paws shocked the sequester of her where careful language stacked, modular, ready-made. They lay on the carpet, jouncing shoelaces, and she made fool noises.

  Chapter 4

  Jeremy was in the habit of walking. Sometimes, he would wake up on a weekend and just walk from Islington, passing the Columbia Road Flower Market with its stalls of tight bouquets clumped by the dozen, get lost in the tessellations of petals gathered in crystalline cellophane and white paper, continuing all the way down to Canary Wharf. These were not errands. It was only the quiet power of observing the world stayed where you left it, accommodating your passage, homes and trees and automobiles made tractable in a sense. In the panic of too much, you could lose your surroundings. This was legacy wisdom. His mother had never believed in psychotherapy, but she believed in walking.

  Just walk it off, she said.

  It had not always worked, the walking cure. It had not worked of late. It was why he was going to Wright’s.

  Because now, Alexandra’s very presence incurred a sense of deprivation, what it would be for her to be disappeared. It happened quickly. Someone familiar could do it. Someone decided and then never again. Never again when lying in the dark would they whisper for no reason other than the way it sanctified information, passed sentences. Never again would she say, �
�Put the geniuses on for bed?” The violins would not rise. Cellos would not come in through a song that lived across borders, proseless and mysterious in meaning. Never again would the appearance of her hair, thick as a paintbrush on the pillow, disrupt his vascular system.

  The day of the bombings, July seventh, Seven-Seven, a day of doubles, Gavin Thomas, the fund researcher, had been unharried. Gavin Thomas, Jeremy supposed, would have known that they would profit marvelously because it was Gavin Thomas who had advised that they purchase credit default protection against transport just a week before. Gavin Thomas would have known that the value of the CDP would gallop uphill as quickly as trust in the Tube shot down; to the detriment of civilized society, Strategic would take in a load. The question was how he had known the value would swing, how Thomas had predicted catastrophe.

  Thomas was too connected. Jeremy was sure of it. Charisma was multiplying in secret cells around the globe, men offering ideas to organize lives. Men offering ideas to organize deaths. To orchestrate terror was to tell young men what to do with tomorrow, an irresistible charm. You are part of a recipe for disaster. I can give your rage an occupation. He did not know how the system worked or what it meant. He did not know where the sides cut, who Thomas’s people were. Yet it was enough to suspect that Thomas had people at all, that someone had known when to bet against the safety of the city. It was enough to thicken the distance.

  London had grown warmer in recent days. Jeremy could feel the heat on his neck as he walked. He looked at the horizon, something longer than truncated autobiographies. Wide blue. He had a way of gentling the air around him, fading into it. Outside Wright’s, a two-floor flat that he kept to only half of, Jeremy made the call. He was not conspicuous on the stoop. The door opened without a word. A slip inside from view.

  Toward the back of a dark, dusty room, Jeremy sat on the couch by an end table topped with a typewriter. Wright poured a glass of something and nudged it over. He crossed his legs, and Jeremy sipped, then waited for the ice to go soundless in the glass again, settle. For Wright to.