They paused, the word “suicide” seeming to have an awkward place in their conversation.

  “What are you telling me?” asked Kate.

  “The relationship between your father and me was not sexual. I was, in effect, your father’s psychiatrist. He told me everything. Is that intimacy? I suppose. Is that a betrayal? Your mother thought so.”

  “I don’t think you can presume to know what my mother thought based solely on what my father told you.”

  “It’s based more on what your mother told me.”

  Kate came to a hard stop. “When did you speak to my mother?”

  “A few weeks before she died.”

  “She came to see you here?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No,” said Kate, and then another thought came to her. “Has my father been here?”

  Sandra shook her head, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of the question. “Your father’s not stupid. We’ve had zero communication since my arrest.”

  Kate leveled her gaze and saw nothing that made her think Sandra was lying.

  “Maybe that should tell you something,” Sandra added.

  “Like what?”

  “It’s probably best for everyone that this conversation end,” said Sandra, rising. “But before I go, I want to clear up one thing. When I said your father told me ‘everything,’ I don’t mean company secrets. I mean his personal secrets.”

  Kate reminded herself that this visit was at Noah’s request, and she phrased her next question accordingly. “Are you denying you accessed company secrets?”

  “I admit I broke the law when I lied to the FBI,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “That doesn’t really answer my question.”

  “That’s the best answer you’re going to get,” said Sandra. She started away from the table and then stopped. “Strange. You never asked why I did it.”

  “Lied to the FBI?”

  “Whatever it is you think we’re talking about.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask: Why?”

  Her expression turned very serious. “I did it for Megan.”

  “Who’s Megan?”

  “My daughter.”

  Kate felt chills. She did “it” for her daughter.

  I did it for Kate.

  Kate watched her walk away. Sandra never looked back as she crossed the room, passing one table after another on her way to the exit. The corrections officer opened the door, and the inmate was gone.

  Kate was back where she’d started, alone at the table, her mind awhirl with questions.

  Chapter 31

  Kate skipped the weekly law-school happy hour. She had a date with Sean.

  It was their first date—possibly their second, if helping her move into a new apartment was “a date,” or maybe even their third, if you counted “tea at the Reichstag.” A third date, of course, would have implied certain rules, but Kate had just one for the evening:

  “The rule is we can’t talk about Irving or my play,” said Kate.

  Sean agreed, and for the first half of the date, it was easy to stick to the rule. They were in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall enjoying the National Symphony Orchestra perform Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. At intermission they got a glass of wine, red for Kate and white for Sean. They waited in the grand foyer, near the thirteen-foot-high, three-thousand-pound bronze bust of John F. Kennedy that almost seemed to be eavesdropping on their conversation.

  “Just one thing about your play,” he said.

  “Breaking the rule already?”

  “Sorry. We have to cut the scene where Watson’s wife jumps down his throat for writing that letter to Adolf Hitler.”

  “That letter is real.”

  Sean drank his wine. “But it sounds made-up.”

  “I’ve seen a copy of the letter. It’s real. November 1938. Right after Kristallnacht. Over seven thousand Jewish homes and businesses were vandalized. They burned synagogues to the ground. Dozens of people were killed. And what does Watson do? He fires off what he thinks is a strongly worded letter to Hitler saying, ‘I respectfully appeal to you to give consideration to applying the Golden Rule in dealing with these minorities.’”

  “Do they even have the Golden Rule in Germany?”

  “Yes,” said Kate, resisting the urge to add, you moron.

  “Maybe you should double-check.”

  “Trust me, they had the Golden Rule. What they didn’t have was IBM’s latest technology. Unless Watson was willing to sell it to them. That’s why this scene has to stay.”

  “Claude says it has to go.”

  “Who’s Claude?”

  Sean hemmed and hawed, then answered, “A screenwriter. He’s in Hollywood.”

  Kate froze. “Irving Bass is shopping my play to Hollywood without telling me?”

  “Actually, Irving knows nothing about this.”

  “So you’re shopping it behind Irving’s back and mine?”

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘shopping.’”

  “But you admit you went behind our backs.”

  “Look, Kate. Irving is delusional about this play. It was his idea, so he’s trying to shoehorn it onto the stage. But it’s too big for live theater. This story is screaming to be a five-part series.”

  “But I’m not writing a TV series.”

  “That’s why I connected with Claude.”

  “You have no right to show Clyde my script.”

  “Claude, not Clyde.”

  “Whatever the fuck his name is.”

  An elderly woman within earshot gave Kate a reproving look. Sean moved closer and said, “Calm down, Kate.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down. This is my story.”

  “Technically, it’s a true story.”

  “As imagined by me, which you are feeding to Claude, through my script.”

  “No. This story is based on actual historical figures and events, which Claude is reimagining through his script.”

  Technically, he was right—the law doesn’t prevent multiple dramatic interpretations of the Kennedy assassination—but that didn’t make it okay for another writer to use her script as a blueprint, and it didn’t lessen Kate’s feeling of betrayal.

  The chime sounded, calling all patrons to return to the concert hall. The crowd migration began, but Kate didn’t move.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Come on, Kate. Don’t be like this.”

  “You are a fucking snake.”

  Kate placed her wineglass on the table, but Sean stopped her before she could step away.

  “Kate, I’m sure they did have the Golden Rule in Germany. But in this business, we live by the Crypto Rule. The sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Ask your old man. He’ll know.”

  Sean returned to the concert hall. Kate headed for the exit.

  A stiff autumn breeze met her outside the door, and by the time she reached the taxi stand, her hair was a hopeless mess. She climbed into the backseat, gave the driver the address to her father’s house in Georgetown, and did her best to brush out the windblown look on the ride there.

  The point of her visit had nothing to do with Sean. Kate had been avoiding her father’s calls, worried about how he might react to her having visited Sandra Levy without telling him. His relationship with Sandra was still confusing to her, and Kate wasn’t convinced that sharing secrets, if not a bed, wasn’t some form of infidelity. Maybe all that was none of a daughter’s business. But she had every right to understand her own mother’s suicide note. A straight talk with her father was overdue.

  The taxi dropped her at the curb, the guard let her inside, and Kate found her father in his study. Work was what he did every Friday night for as long as Kate could remember. He took one night off a week, Saturday, if he had a free night at all.

  “Wow, don’t you look pretty,” he said. “Date night?”

  “Disaster night.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s not what I came to talk about. This is important.”

  “Okay,” he said, leading her to the club chairs, where they each took a seat. “What’s up?”

  “Did you know Mom went to see Sandra Levy in prison?”

  The question seemed to catch him off guard, but he didn’t dodge it. “Yes. Did your mother tell you about it?”

  “No. Sandra did. I went to see her yesterday.”

  His face went ashen. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  For Patrick, she reminded herself. But all that, coupled with her conversation with Noah, was way too much to explain.

  “Let’s put a pin in the ‘why’ question for now. I want to talk about the things she told me.”

  He seemed curious, perhaps in the way that anyone would be curious to know what his de facto psychiatrist had to say about him. Perhaps it was more than that.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m not at all happy you did this without telling me, but let’s hear what Sandra had to say for herself.”

  Kate skimmed over most of it and went straight to her final exchange with Sandra—the words that had been playing over and over in her head.

  “Her daughter’s name is Megan,” Kate said.

  “I know. She’s in high school,” Christian replied.

  “She said she did it for Megan.”

  Her father was silent. Kate pressed him.

  “It’s like Mom’s note. ‘I did it for Kate.’ Sandra told me she did it—”

  “I get it,” he said abruptly.

  Kate couldn’t understand his reaction. “Don’t you think that’s important? They both did ‘it’ for their daughters. It raises the same question I asked the day you helped me move into my apartment. What does ‘it’ mean?”

  Her father rose, walked to the bar, and poured himself a brandy. “I would frame the question differently. Brandy?” he asked.

  “No, thanks. What do you mean? How would you frame the question?”

  He swirled the brandy in his snifter and returned to the club chair. “To me, it’s an ‘either/or’ question. And I’ll let you answer it for yourself.

  “Either Sandra Levy is your new best friend, and she’s trying to tell you something important.”

  “Or?”

  “Or she found out what your mother’s suicide note said, and she’s messing with your head—to get back at me.”

  That would have been an incredibly mean-spirited thing for Sandra to do, and it almost made Kate afraid to ask what kind of anger and resentment could possibly have prompted it.

  “To get back at you for what, exactly?” she asked.

  Kate watched her father swallow his brandy.

  “Sandra’s a very complex person,” he said.

  Kate waited, but it was clear he’d said all that he cared to say on the subject. He rose and grabbed the television remote from the coffee table.

  “Since your date is over, want to sit and watch a movie with me?” he asked, clearly wanting to turn the proverbial page.

  She wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily, but she could bide her time and circle back to Sandra’s “complexity” later. “Sure,” she said.

  He switched on the TV and started scrolling through the menu, which reminded her of her talk with Sean.

  “Dad, have you ever heard of the Crypto Rule?”

  He was focused on the menu, not really listening. “Crypto is short for cryptography, which is all about codes, which is the world I live in.”

  “I know what the word ‘crypto’ means. I asked what’s the Crypto Rule, as distinguished from the Golden Rule. Do you know?”

  “I’ve heard people use the expression before, mostly Silicon Valley types.”

  “What is it?”

  He took a seat and handed her the remote. “Do unto others . . . before they do unto you.”

  It made Kate wonder if she’d been too kind in calling Sean a snake. “How nice,” she said.

  “Pick a movie, kiddo. What are you in the mood for?”

  “Anything but a film stolen from a playwright,” Kate said.

  Chapter 32

  They found his whatchamacallit.

  Patrick was in the slow, disorienting transition from unconsciousness to the dark reality of life behind a blindfold. He remembered the guard shoving him against the wall, knocking loose the tool he’d found in the trunk of the car. It had slipped down the inside of his pant leg and fallen to the concrete floor with a clang. The guard had started yelling in Spanish, and the last thing Patrick remembered was the crushing blow of the whatchamacallit against the side of his head.

  “Damn,” he said, feeling the lump behind his ear. He smelled something strange, and for a moment he thought it was his own blood. But his wound was dry to the touch. He breathed in through his nose, sniffing out the odor. It was rum. Patrick wasn’t much of drinker, having seen what it had done to Mrs. Gamble, but one semester of college was more than enough “education” to make the distinctive smell of a Cuba libre immediately recognizable.

  A screech pierced the darkness, the sharp scraping of a chair pulling away from a table on a concrete floor. He heard footsteps, and it finally registered that he was no longer in the janitor’s closet. He had no memory of being moved to another room—or was it an entirely different building? He wondered how long he’d been out cold from the blow to his head.

  As the footsteps drew closer, Patrick instinctively raised his hands for protection. Chains rattled. The slack quickly disappeared, and metal handcuffs pinched his wrists. His hands were in front of his body, rather than the more restrictive behind-the-back method. Still, he had little range of motion with such a short chain tethering him to a pipe of some sort that protruded from the wall, perhaps a radiator.

  “Buenos días.” The slurred Spanish was like bad Castilian—Buenoth diath—which oddly reminded Patrick of his own mother, who’d learned to speak Spanish while living in Spain. He wondered if he would ever see her again.

  Patrick felt a swift kick to the belly, followed by more slurred Spanish, something to the effect that Patrick was a rude Americano who couldn’t even say “good morning.” The voice was definitely the guy who’d brought him to the Hostage Hotel, but the inescapable breath was Bacardí.

  “Buenoth diath,” said Patrick, and another swift kick followed for having mocked his captor. It took a minute, but finally Patrick had enough wind to speak.

  “Did you move me someplace new?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “A while.”

  “How long do I have to wear this blindfold?”

  “As long as I say.”

  As stupid as he was, this guy could handle questions with the skill of a Washington politician. “Just take it off,” said Patrick. “I saw your face in the jungle. It’s not like I forgot what you look like.”

  “That’s not good for you.”

  “Dang. And I was on such a lucky streak.” He’d said the last sentence in English, and the fact that he didn’t get another kick to the stomach told him that the sarcasm was lost on his captor.

  A pair of thick fingers fiddled with the knot behind Patrick’s ears, and the blindfold slipped away. His eyelids fluttered in the sudden burst of light. The room was dimly lit, and the adjustment from total darkness came slowly. He wasn’t chained to a radiator, as had been his guess. He was on the floor, tethered to a metal bed frame. The small room had no other furniture and no window. The walls were filthy, paint peeling away, graffiti everywhere. The concrete floor was a patchwork of stains, several the color of dried blood. The only source of light was a yellow bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling. His gaze drifted toward his captor and settled on the hideous gang-style tattoo that crept from his shoulder, up his neck, and covered the entire left side of his face. It did a fair job of camouflaging a ghastly scar that started at the corner of his mouth, curled back across the cheek, and then up and over the ear. It looked as though someone had tried to remove the skin from his skull with dull scissors. The name Scarface came to mind, the old Al Pacino film, but that moniker was too cool for this talking turd. Patrick named him “Inkface.”

  “What are you looking at, El Rubio?”

  Patrick averted his eyes, unaware that his staring had been so obvious. “Nothing. Takes a little getting used to the light, that’s all.”

  A noisy commotion came from the hallway right outside the door. It was two men arguing, which made Patrick nervous, as he was certain that Inkface wasn’t the only drunk piece of shit in the building who was packing a loaded pistol and a knife big enough to behead a rhinoceros. The tip of the blade was suddenly an inch from Patrick’s nose.

  “Make a peep, and you die—slowly. Understand?”

  Patrick nodded. Inkface withdrew the knife and, as he crossed the room, yanked the string dangling from the ceiling to kill the light. The door opened, and Patrick caught a glimpse of one of the men arguing in the hallway.

  It was Javier.

  The door closed, but the argument continued—so loud that Patrick could overhear. Javier was looking for Olga. Patrick hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d surprised him in the bathroom of the Hostage Hotel and vowed to get him out.

  “I know she’s here!” Javier shouted.

  “No, no,” said Inkface. “Not here.”

  “You’ve seen her. Don’t deny it!”

  “No. Nobody seen Olga.”

  Inkface was lying, and Patrick didn’t know why, and it only escalated the conflict. Someone tried the doorknob, which made Patrick start, but thankfully the door was locked.

  “Who are you hiding in there?” Javier shouted.

  “A hostage,” said Inkface.

  “Show me.”

  “Blow me.”

  “You’re protecting Olga!”

  The shouting came to an abrupt halt, but the tension was palpable even on the other side of the door. In his mind’s eye, Patrick could see the staredown between the two drunk and overheated men. Finally, Javier spoke, saying something that Patrick couldn’t quite hear, but he presumed it was on the order of “This is far from over.”