A Familiar Rival

Create up to 20 seconds from 0:00. Available for free opening episodes. Preparing a clip downloads this episode on your device.

Gideon Rusk stood when Arthur entered, which was the first thing that made Victor afraid.

Gideon did not stand for people he considered harmless unless he wanted something from them. He had used the same warm courtesy on the evening Victor remembered dying. Now he offered a hand across a small table at the Gannet Club and said he was glad Arthur was recovering.

Victor took it. The pressure was familiar. The hand receiving it was not.

The invitation had come after Wednesday's dinner. Rusk's firm had an interest in the proposed purchase route, and a conversation with Arthur had become useful once the family could no longer say his cooperation was merely a matter of arranging a pen. No supernatural insight was required to put him on Gideon's calendar. A creditor and a buyer had ordinary reasons to compare notes.

Arthur had agreed to a short conversation about the stated business proposal. Nora knew where he was going. He would not sign anything, claim authority over the company's sale or take a private settlement as a substitute for the unanswered documents.

Those were sensible boundaries. They had not prevented Victor from spending the journey imagining Gideon recognizing him before he sat down.

The club smelled the same. Polished wood, coffee and the particular clean scent used to keep old carpets from admitting their age. Victor had once liked the way every room made business look like a private agreement between civilized people. This morning he noticed how little of the work keeping it civilized appeared where the guests could see it.

He did not know which private room he had been in on the final night. The angle of the tablecloth returned, not a reliable map. He would not improve the memory by deciding a familiar door must be the right one.

"Your sister says you're taking an interest in the detail," Gideon said.

"It has my name on it."

"Quite. A useful incentive."

The tone invited Arthur to enjoy a joke about himself. Victor had provided such invitations all his adult life. He could feel the old reflex to accept the host's description of him and earn permission to say something afterward.

He let the invitation pass.

Gideon described a purchase that could simplify the family's position. A buyer with experience could bring discipline to a struggling subsidiary. Arthur's personal exposure could be addressed within a broader arrangement, subject to the actual terms. There was no reason to let an argument over a fee obscure the larger opportunity.

"Does the fee disappear if the purchase happens?" Victor asked.

"We would look at the whole position."

"That wasn't the question."

Gideon folded his hands. He had expected a grateful young man or an angry one. A person keeping the question where he put it required a little more attention.

He said the credit and purchase arrangements had separate responsible parties. Victor said that was a good reason to keep their claims separate until they were explained. If the printworks carried value the buyer wanted, it could be examined as value rather than used as a polite name for Arthur's embarrassment.

"You think there's value nobody's noticed?"

Victor did not yet know. He had not visited the business. He could see the trap in promising a hidden fortune merely because he recognized the technique being used to buy it cheaply.

"I think I should look before I agree there isn't."

Gideon smiled. "Someone has been giving you advice."

"Yes."

The answer denied him the pleasure of discovering a secret. Victor was beginning to see how useful an ordinary fact could be when he stopped treating it as something to conceal.

A server brought coffee. Gideon accepted his. Victor had opened his mouth to request the black coffee he always drank, but the smell turned his stomach with an abruptness that did not feel like a decision.

"Tea," he said. "With lemon."

"Your usual?" the server asked.

The question landed harder than Gideon's hand had. Arthur had been here often enough for someone to know a preference Victor did not possess.

"Yes. Thank you."

The server left, and Gideon began describing how risk would be absorbed by an experienced purchaser. Victor listened until the description converted the workers' uncertainty into evidence that the buyer deserved a discount.

"Risk doesn't die," he said. "You move its name."

The words arrived before he could stop them.

Gideon's expression changed by almost nothing. The smile remained. His attention moved from Arthur's face to the left hand that had squared the papers without meaning to.

Victor had used that sentence privately after an acquisition Gideon preferred to describe in different terms. He could not remember ever putting it in a public speech. That did not prove nobody else had heard it. It did explain the silence that followed.

"Where did you hear that?" Gideon asked.

"Is it wrong?"

"It's familiar."

"Then perhaps you can answer it."

Gideon reached for his cup and did not drink. He said responsibility would be defined in the appropriate contracts. Victor asked for those actual definitions to be supplied to the company's advisers, rather than a reassurance that experienced people would work them out after Arthur supplied his cooperation.

It was not a victory. He had exposed a habit he meant to hide and obtained no document that solved the debt. Gideon now knew that Arthur was less predictable than the family's summaries had suggested.

Lydia Cross arrived near the end of their agreed time. Victor recognized her voice before he turned. For a moment he was back in the other room, trying to tell whether she was holding the door closed or simply standing where he could not get past.

He had not seen everything. The limit mattered. His certainty about being betrayed did not supply a view through walls or an answer to every gap in the last minutes.

Lydia introduced herself as though they had met only in passing. To Arthur, perhaps they had. She offered condolences for the firm's recent loss before realizing the phrase belonged to the wrong part of the conversation.

"Victor Sloane," she said. "You may have seen the news."

"I did."

"A difficult week."

He could not decide whether her expression was grief, calculation or the effort of keeping both in the same face. In his former life he would have called that uncertainty weakness in someone else. Now it was the only honest information he had.

She said the firm was continuing its work. Existing proposals would be handled through their proper people. If Arthur wanted an explanation of the purchase route, she could arrange a further meeting with the relevant papers.

"Send them first," he said. "Then we'll know what the meeting is for."

She looked at Gideon. He looked at Arthur's untouched tea. Neither supplied a revelation Victor could take home as proof.

He stood when the agreed time ended. Gideon offered a final reassurance that there were ways to prevent a difficult personal position becoming a public humiliation. Victor thanked him for the conversation, not the reassurance.

At the cloakroom, an attendant asked whether he wanted the paper he had left on his previous visit. It had been kept with the ordinary lost items, not discovered in an envelope addressed to a new consciousness.

Victor accepted a folded print proof carrying the Pendelton Printworks mark. On the back, someone had written: Ask Miriam what the stock really costs. The handwriting resembled the reminder about Nora's number. He did not recognize the intended design or know whether Arthur had ever asked the question.

He asked when it had been left. The attendant checked the note attached to it: the Friday before his collapse. Victor thanked him and kept the note with the proof rather than converting the man's approximate recollection into an exact private itinerary.

Arthur had been carrying a question into this room before Victor borrowed his face. The realization did not establish competence, innocence or a hidden business plan. It made the camouflage feel a little less like an empty suit waiting for someone qualified to put it on.

In the corridor he stopped beside a mirror and saw the younger face reflected against the club's old wood. It was almost absurdly good camouflage. The problem was the man behind it, still reaching for the same phrases, the same coffee, the same expectation that a room should understand who had just entered.

Outside, he called Nora to report what had actually been offered. He did not tell her he had frightened a murderer. He described the proposal, the promised papers and the fact that none had yet arrived.

Then he made a note of the sentence he must stop saying. Under it, without knowing why, he wrote the server's question.

Your usual?

Arthur had already been living in places Victor thought belonged only to him.