The Weirdness(52)

He turns and looks at the tables, to check out whether there’s a clientele in here or what. And sitting there in one of the big overstuffed leather chairs, dressed in a tawny corduroy suit, holding what appears to be a Caramel Macchiato, staring right into Billy, is Timothy Ollard. Billy jumps.

Ollard smiles slightly, places the macchiato on the table, wipes one palm with the other, then rises. He does not advance, a fact for which Billy is incredibly grateful.

“Billy Ridgeway,” Ollard says, rocking back on his heels. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“How is that possible?” Billy blurts, dismayed that he doesn’t even have whatever questionable advantage might be conferred by the element of surprise. “Have you been reading my mind? ’Cause at this point I’d kind of prefer for people to just stay out of there, thank you very much.”

Ollard surveys Billy’s perturbed demeanor. “Billy,” he says. “One thing you should have learned by now. You don’t need to reach for a complicated answer when a simple one will do.” He reaches into the breast pocket of the suit and pulls out a phone, activates it with a finger-swipe. “I got a text,” he says. “FYI,” he reads from the screen, “Ridgeway is here.”

Billy remembers Anton Cirrus, outside, fiddling with his phone while they argued.

“So,” Billy says, trying to add it all up in his mind. “Cirrus.”

“Yes,” Ollard says.

“You and Cirrus.”

“Yes.”

“You’re … in cahoots?”

“Cahoots?” Ollard says, amusement ringing faintly in his voice. Billy feels fury swell within him; language is supposed to be the thing he’s good at. He almost pulls out the spray to give Ollard a good blast of it just on principle. “Not cahoots,” Ollard says, finally. “Think of him as an independent contractor. You could say a gun for hire if you wanted something with a little more pizzazz. With the Right-Hand Path setting up their little literary production it’s useful to know someone like Anton, who can knock it right back down again.”

“Why would he help you?”

“I sought him out. I showed him that partnering with me would provide him with certain advantages. Men like Cirrus enjoy advantages. Maybe to a fault.”

“Does he know,” Billy says, “that you’re planning to burn up the world?”

“He knows that I have the Neko,” Ollard says, showing no surprise that Billy is familiar with his plan. “He knows that it is a source of plentiful energy. He knows it’s unique and valuable and that important people are interested in it, and I think that represents a line beyond which Cirrus cannot see very clearly. The crest of the hill, in a way. See, that’s the thing about men like Cirrus—”

“Look,” Billy says, “I don’t really care about men like Cirrus.” He says this, although if he were being totally honest he would have to admit that something in him seizes greedily at the prospect that Cirrus’s takedown of him on Bladed Hyacinth was maybe less about the merits of his writing, or lack thereof, and more about some kind of chess move against the Right-Hand Path. “I’m here for the Neko. Where is it?”

Ollard looks flatly at Billy for a long moment. “Why don’t you get yourself a drink?” he asks.

“I don’t want a drink.”

“Billy,” says Ollard. “I’ve only just met you, but I can tell that this hard-ass routine doesn’t suit you. It’s fake.”

Billy feels a bit stung by this, and Ollard must notice, because he holds up a finger in a wait-one-moment-before-you-react gesture. “Hard-asses,” he says, “are boring. They see one route toward what they want, and barrel straight at it. It’s embarrassing. They’re easy to sidestep, easy to trip up. They don’t make satisfying opponents. If you’re not a hard-ass it means that there’s some small hope that you’ll be intelligent. And an intelligent opponent gives me at least something to savor.”

“Maybe the most intelligent thing an opponent could do, though,” Billy says, “is to pretend that they’re a hard-ass, to … lull you … into … a false sense of security.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of pretending, if that’s your strategy.”

“Maybe my strategy … is to pretend to be doing a bad job of pretending, so that you’ll think I’m pretending, when in reality I’m actually … smarter than that.”

“Well,” Ollard says, a little wearily, “yes, that would be one strategy. But if you’re such a master strategist, you can sit with me, and drink some coffee, and we can talk. Intelligently.”