Generation V (16 page)

“I’m glad,” Atsuko said. She gave Suzume a sharp look, then asked, “And did you also call Keiko? Your sister has been looking for you today, and has been most insistent that it is simply personal, and has nothing to do with the business.”

Suzume grinned. “Oh, you’re very clever, Grandmother. Yes, I called her, and yes, Keiko screwed up. But look at it this way—if she called me to take care of it, and I will, then does it really matter if you aren’t supposed to know about it? And won’t you probably be happier in the long run if you didn’t?”

Atsuko frowned. “When I was a girl, a fox like you would’ve been beaten and left out for demons to eat.”

Suzume’s smile widened. “But I’m too useful to serve as demon chum. Also, too pretty.”

Atsuko muttered something in Japanese, then focused on me again.

“What will I owe you for the information?” I asked her. I was hoping that she would settle for free coffee at Busy Beans.

Atsuko was thoughtful; then a look crossed her face that was very sly, very foxy, and not very nice at all.

“A favor,” she said. “A big one, to be owed to me and mine from you, to be redeemed at a time and place of our choosing.”

Oh, that sounded bad. But when I considered Jessica and Amy Grann, who were depending on me, it sounded worth it.

I agreed; then Suzume and I hit the road, driving back to Providence.

“Can’t this errand of
yours wait until after we track down Luca?” I asked. We were back in Providence, after a brief fast food pit stop to make sure that neither of us passed out from low blood sugar, and Suzume was driving. Apparently she’d never been to this destination before, so I’d been crouched over the map trying to give her directions as we slowly prowled through a series of extremely affluent residential neighborhoods. I made a mental note that if I ever got money out of Larry, the first thing I would buy was a GPS.

“Nope. Business trumps philanthropy. I’m pretty sure Andrew Carnegie said that.”

“No, I think Scrooge McDuck said that. And what kind of business is this anyway? Real estate? Ponzi schemes?”

“You can say that we’re in the service industry.”

“The what? Like waiters?” A woman with one of those insane triple-long baby carriages was crossing the street in front of us, and Suzume was able to turn completely away from the street and give both me a suggestive eyebrow waggle and a very salacious leer.

“No,” I said in horror. “No,
no
.
Not
—”

“Oh yes.” Suzume was thrilled by my reaction, and pulled a business card out of her pocket to hand to me. It was a Rolls-Royce of business cards—the glossy cardstock was the kind usually reserved for wedding invitations, it was engraved, not printed, and in beautiful scrolling font, so restrained and elegant that it screamed old money, it read
Green Willow Escorts
. A phone number was listed at the bottom. And that was it.

“I thought your family got out of the geisha thing,” I said, feeling a little stunned. I didn’t doubt that Suzume could con men out of their pants, but somehow I just hadn’t pictured that she would be doing it so literally.

She laughed. “You look so appalled. I wish I could take a photo of this and make it your new profile picture. And why should we have gotten out of the business? Grandmother already knew how much money and power you could accrue. What kind of free hour do you think I traded to the police commissioner for the information you needed?”

“But you…” I struggled to find the words, and failed.

Suzume executed the kind of perfect parallel parking job that I could only dream about (parallel parking tended to be a forty-point sweaty endeavor for me), and then leaned into me, invading my personal space and sending my core body temperature skyrocketing.

“What?” she asked, and my head began to spin as I inhaled the smell of her skin. She traced my jaw with one long finger, leaving a trail of fire. “Don’t you think I’d be good at it?”

I took a deep breath and tried to marshal my thoughts, refusing to acknowledge the frantic signals being sent from my lower body, all along the lines of “now, dude,
now!
” I saw that glitter in her eyes that only seemed to appear when she was particularly fucking with my head, and I was beginning to catch on that this didn’t have anything to do with sex.

“You’re not a hooker, are you?” I said.

“What makes you think that I’m not?” That sassy grin, that beautiful face, the body that right now seemed to be making a million promises. I felt even more certain.

“Because,” I said, forcing myself to relax instead of tensing up. Okay, that wasn’t even close to happening in my pants, but I could try to lie with my upper body. “You’d be a terrible hooker.” Her eyebrows shot up, and I continued. “You always have to let me know that I’ve been had. You have to see me actually realize and acknowledge how awesome you are. You would never get a single repeat customer, unless he was a masochist.”

Suzume slid back into her seat in a sinuous maneuver that made her look like her bones were made of jelly, dropping all the seduction. She gnawed her lower lip and tilted her head thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t discount the masochists. They’re willing to pay pretty well for discretion. And our employees are a bit more refined than your average streetwalker, so we like to call them escorts instead. But you are right, my temperament wouldn’t exactly be a good fit. Besides.” She shrugged. “Even high-level escort work here in America is a pretty far cry to what the geisha were in Japan. Atsuko moved from labor to management, and the nice thing about a family-owned business is that no one expects you to work your way up from the bottom.” She gave a little Beevis and Butthead–style snicker, and I couldn’t help
smiling a little. Humor that immature was hard not to delight in.

“Yeah, about that.” I held up the business card. “Shouldn’t this be a little more, you know…explicit? I mean, aren’t you trying to entice people into buying sex?”

Suzume gave me a look that was equal parts pity and condescension. Apparently I’d just wiped out all the respect I’d just gained. “Fort, anything that advertises itself as either VIP or exclusive just isn’t. If all you want is a blow job, you can get that for the cost of dinner and a movie. The people who can afford our services are buying a lot more than that.”

“They’re buying sex, right? Because I’m with Bill Clinton—sex is more than a blow job.”

“Okay, let’s try a new example. There’s a restaurant in New York City where dessert costs a hundred dollars.”

“What, really?” I tried to imagine spending a hundred dollars on dessert, but couldn’t. “Is it like that eight-person bucket of ice cream that you can get at some ice cream parlors, where if you can actually finish it it’s free?”

“No. This is a two-scoop sundae.”

“Is it made out of gold?”

“Okay, kind of. It has gold leaf in it.”

“Then after you finish it you can go panning for gold in your stool and recoup some of the cost.”

Suzume slanted a suspicious look at me, but I kept my face as innocent as possible. Of course, as a product of a liberal arts college, I’d spent whole classes discussing the idea of perceived value, but I wanted to see when Suzume would lose patience with me.

We made it through sunglasses, purses, jeans, and
high school cheerleaders before I finally realized that we’d been sitting in the car for almost thirty minutes.

“You did this deliberately,” I accused Suzume.

“Or we were having a pleasant conversation about market economics,” she said.

I glared at her.

“Okay, I did this deliberately,” she admitted. “But if I hadn’t, then you would’ve spent the entire thirty minutes bitching about how much time we were wasting. Instead now you only have to wait another ten minutes.”

“What?”

She pointed across the street at a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and one of those perfectly angled jaws that are rarely seen outside DC comics or network news anchors. His suit could’ve paid my rent for two months. He’d just gotten out of a chauffeured black Lincoln and was walking up to one of the restored brownstones that lined the streets. When the door closed behind him, the idling car started up and left.

“Okay, so some guy we’ve apparently been waiting for has gone into his house. Why do we have to wait ten minutes?”

“If we knock on his door now, then he definitely knows that we’ve been watching for him to come home and he’ll get suspicious. If we wait more than ten minutes, we run the risk that he might’ve just been getting ready to go out again, and we might miss our window. Ten minutes is just enough time for him to pee and get out another set of clothes.”

Suzume leaned into the backseat and began riffling through her duffel bag, which she’d thrown into the car before we drove down to Newport. Dragging my eyes
away from the curve of her rear, which was a medal-worthy achievement in itself, I considered what she’d told me.

“Okay, better question,” I said when she wiggled back into her seat, holding a black women’s suit jacket. “Why are we stalking this man?”

“We’re not stalking,” she replied, pulling on the suit jacket and smoothing out a few wrinkles. Then she flipped down the sunshade and began to use the vanity mirror to arrange her hair in one of those smooth uptwists that professional women on television always seemed to be wearing, and that I’d rarely seen in person outside of my senior prom. “We’re providing customer service.”

“Green Willow Escorts does door-to-door customer service?”

“Green Willow Escorts charges five thousand dollars as the flat nightly fee, and this particular client is the CEO of a Fortune Five Hundred company. That means boatloads of personal income, and even a little more if he likes to cook the books at work. So not only do we do door-to-door customer service, but we also send our clients birthday presents.”

“Like a stripper-gram?”

“Like monogrammed ties, Fort. Ashtrays if they’re smokers.” A quick application of eyeliner and she gave me an urgent gesture. “Come on, time to go.”

“Fine,” I grumbled, getting out of the car. “But can you at least make this quick?”

“I’ll do my best, but artistry can’t be rushed,” she responded.

As we walked across the street I realized how different
Suzume looked. It wasn’t just the jacket and the hair, though they did make an impact. But she wasn’t walking with the long, almost strutting steps that I’d become used to. She’d shortened her steps almost to a mince, and her posture became completely straight rather than casually slouched. Her head dipped a little, and her eyelids seemed heavier. There was something weirdly…submissive about her suddenly.

“Suze,” I asked, feeling very disturbed by the change. “What’s going on?”

She looked over at me beneath those heavy lids, and gave me a quick wink. “Just roll with this, Fort. It’ll be fun.” She rang the bell, and I had to swallow what I would’ve said, which was an observation that every time she said that, what followed was never fun.

“Will he have a butler?” I whispered as I heard footsteps approaching. “If he spends that much money on hookers, he’s got to be loaded.”

“No,” Suzume said, her lips barely moving. “This guy likes privacy.”

Sure enough, it was the man we’d seen on the street who opened the door. He didn’t look happy at all to see us, but before he could say anything Suzume gave a formal head dip that almost looked like an abbreviated bow, and held out one of the Green Willow business cards she’d shown me earlier.

“Mr. Delaney,” she said, and I almost jumped out of my skin at the change in her voice. It was as soft as if she were whispering in my ear again, but something about the tone was wrong. It was higher, almost girlish. “It has come to my employer’s attention that there was a difficulty in your appointment last night, and that it was possible
that we had failed to meet all of your needs. If you have a few minutes to spare, I would like to discuss this with you.”

A lot of emotions had gone across Delaney’s face while Suzume talked. At first he seemed a little worried, but as she kept talking, he relaxed a lot. By the end, there was that look of smug superiority that I tended to associate with people who worked in high finance and didn’t like waiting in lines to order their coffee.

“I was planning on going out, so I don’t have much time,” he said.

“I understand that you are an extremely busy man,” Suzume said, almost seeming to shrink within herself while somehow remaining perfectly poised. “But the topic is a”—her voice became hushed—“
delicate
one, and if my driver and I could just step inside…?”

Delaney looked over at me for the first time, and I tried to follow Suzume’s lead and look submissively nonthreatening. It probably wasn’t too much of a stretch. Delaney looked me up and down, sneered, and dismissed me as useless. Even though it was what I’d been aiming for, it pissed me off.

“Fine, come in, but this will have to be quick.” Delaney stepped back, and we both entered the house. It was decorated like a photo shoot from
Esquire
magazine—all dark leather sofas, parquet hardwood, oil paintings of English hunting dogs. All it lacked was the pop star pinup model in the middle of the room.

Delaney started up as soon as he had the front door shut. “Your service was highly recommended to me, but I have to say that I was extremely disappointed by the quality of what I received last night. I
might
consider using you
again, but only if I receive a personal apology, a full refund, and a steep discount on any future transactions—”

He was interrupted when Suzume slammed her fist into his throat. One minute she was nodding, and the next she was moving. I stared. She was slower than a vampire, but that still left her a lot faster than a human. Delaney gave a strangled sound and started turning purple, instinctively clasping both hands to his neck. That left him wide open for what she did next, which was to slam a booted kick into his left kneecap. There was a very audible crunching sound, and if Delany had had enough breath he would’ve been screaming. As it was he gave a low croak as he collapsed onto the floor. She approached him fast, and he swatted out with his right hand, trying to ward her away. One quick move of her hands, a sharp snapping sound, and his wrist was hanging at a wholly unnatural angle. She repeated the action on his other wrist, and Delaney was able to let out one loud howl of pain before she’d slammed him onto his back and crouched beside him like a demented gargoyle, one knee wedged up and pressing on his abused throat.