The Entropy of Bones Read online

  But the low-level disgust was still there. The repulsive nature of something, the money, the lifestyle, maybe Poppy just made the offer hard to stomach. It was the way Peren looked at me when he thought he had me, like all was right with the world because I was under his thumb. It was the way Poppy simultaneously ignored and encouraged Shotgun as though he were her pet. It was the way I felt Rice constantly tugging on me for my attention.

  I could feel when he was closer to me. I could almost smell his breath sometimes, and I wanted it. I wanted him, sexually, mentally. I wanted to beat him up then I wanted to molest him. I wanted him to admit that he liked it and somewhere, hidden under years of confusion and shame, I wanted him to do the same to me.

  I went to Mom. She was the only person I knew that had a full-time legit job. In fact, she’d moved up in the world from night receptionist to full-time manager at the hotel she worked at. She wanted nothing but my happiness. But when I tried to explain my misgivings, I sounded foolish.

  “So wait. He wants to give you one hundred thousand dollars a year just to be his personal security?” She was sunning herself as we sat on the dock drinking iced tea. “Hmm, well, either security means something different than what I thought it did, or he has some serious enemies.”

  Maybe it’s a little of both? I asked.

  “I’m not used to you sounding this unsure of yourself,” she said. I couldn’t see her eyes because of her face-sized sunglasses. “I thought I’d like a little humility in your voice.”

  It’s just that . . . I started. I’m not worried about his enemies. I can take on whomever . . .

  “There’s my cocky daughter.” She smiled in earnest.

  It’s just that I’ve got an instinctive thing against this guy. Him and all his pretty friends. But someone else I know, he said that I was happy being miserable. Made it sound like I was messed up for not wanting to party like an idiot with this guy and his crew, you know?

  “And you’re afraid he might be right.” She said it and I knew it was true.

  Look, Ma, let’s be honest. I’m not the best judge of character. We hadn’t talked about Narayana since I emerged from my room those few years ago. It was too painful for me and Mom didn’t like to gloat about being right. Maybe that’s why I don’t like these guys, this job, I confessed. Maybe I see happiness and I get suspicious.

  “Little girl Chabi,” she called to me like I was a kid again. “Now I don’t ask what you do to take care of yourself but let me ask you something, in your various schemes and machinations do you make anywhere near a hundred thousand a year?”

  No, but what do I need that kind of money for?

  “To take care of your old mother when she can’t work anymore.” She laughed, sipping on her iced tea. “This is the world of adults, Chabi. And it runs on money. If you’ve found someone willing to pay you good money for what you love to do, count yourself lucky that you get to call it work and get it done. Believe me, there are a lot of others willing to take your place.”

  I showed up at the Naga Suites the next day. I actually took BART in, rather than running the thirty miles. A near clone of the first woman who greeted Shotgun and me was at the front desk. Before I even announced myself she gave me a keycard to a room. It was the penthouse. When I walked in, Rice was on a huge projection screen in the main room. Behind him Babylon was in full swing. It looked like someone was shooting bad drug-fueled porn in the background. The music was consistent and horrible.

  How do you always know when I’m coming to see you? I’d gotten smart and written down the question before I saw him. Whenever I was in his presence, I couldn’t think straight and I had questions.

  “Is this a question from my new chief of security?” He sat in a club surrounded by models and those that dress like them.

  Yeah. How do you know?

  “Hey, I’m the boss. I’ll ask the questions!” He smiled with a fake serious tone. “Seriously, though. You like the penthouse? It’s yours. I’ll keep it reserved for you unless family comes through. Family always comes first, snake heel fucks that they are.”

  Where are you? I asked, trying to find the speakers to turn the volume down. The techno crap club music was killing me.

  “Prague. I’ll be back in a week. In the meantime, I need you to check the Suites for anything weird. Head to toe. You’ve got total autonomy. Leave no stone unturned and all that shit. I don’t want you going home. Stay in the penthouse. Everything is comped. Anything weird goes on, you phone me right away, ok?”

  What am I looking for? I asked, totally confused.

  “Anything suspicious.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh yeah, saw a guy who kind of fought like you.” A lump came up in my throat.

  Yeah? Would Narayana be in Prague?

  “He told me who he trained with but I forgot. What’s the name of your style again?”

  I found my legs just before I said, It’s not a style, it’s the way I breathe, the way I think, it is me. Instead I realized his trickery.

  It’s called the style of minding your fucking business. I got a black belt in it.

  “I swear I’m going to marry you one day.” Rice smiled a big grin of defeat then closed the laptop he was on.

  It was the first time I’d ever stayed away from the boat for an extended period of time. Even at the Green brothers’ I’d get home fairly regularly. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t believe the temperature was so consistent. I realized I didn’t eat anything when people were constantly ordering food around me. There were three different restaurants in the Naga Suites. And not buffet “all you can eat” type restaurants, but destination locations with chefs whose names were known throughout the world. Just past the main lobby was a bar that was open twenty-four hours a day. Everything was muddled, handcrafted, and small batch brewed. Narayana would have hated it. Half the people in the Suites at any given moment weren’t residents or staff. They came for meals, to have meetings, or sometimes just to be seen. It was a cross between the suit and tie crowd and their hipster younger brothers and sisters who’d just found a cool patch of elite status. A significant cross-section of them were shifty eyed, not used to being in close proximity to other people. I could tell by the way they moved in the space, avoiding eye contact but taking everything in. Something about them was predatory. I ignored them all.

  I focused instead on the staff. More correctly, they focused on me. I woke up after my first night to a timid knocking at my door. A young Filipino woman, no older than twenty-five, smiled but wouldn’t look at me. She wore the typical housecleaning uniform.

  “The Mr. Montague junior says I take you to shopping floor, when you have the time. I wait here.” I tried to get her to come in but she wouldn’t hear of it. So I got dressed quickly and took the elevator with her down to the second subbasement. On the way we ran into Poppy. She wore pajama bottoms with a light cream button-up nightshirt.

  Don’t you ever get dressed? I asked. The Filipino woman giggled then stifled herself hard.

  “Fashion tips from you, Chabi?” I was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants so I didn’t have much to say. “Tell you what? Let’s bury the hatchet and have some fun. We’ll let Rosa-Maria go and you and I can do some shopping together. What do you think?”

  “Mr. Montague Junior . . .” the Filipina started to speak.

  “It’s clothes shopping, my dear, not securing a nuclear weapon. I think we’ll be fine. Don’t you, Chabi?”

  “No!” Rosa-Maria shouted. “Mr. Montague Junior he asked me personally. He said I was to take her. That’s what I do. Mr. Montague lets you stay here. You don’t own hotel. Please see him if you have problem with my conduct.” And in a mix of Spanish and Tagalog Rosa-Maria mumbled as she grabbed my hand and stomped off the elevator, two floors before the final stop.

  Want to be my friend, Rosa-Maria? I asked her as soon as the doors closed.

  “I no trouble maker. I work good for Mr. Montague Junior. You tell him, yes?”

 
; Rice? Yeah, I’ll tell him you’re real stand-up, I said catching a whiff of the strangeness.

  “You promise? Oh, you tell him, please? Tell him I do good work for him all the time. I get good people work for him as well. My nephew, he work in club downstairs. My son, he park valet. They all love working for Mr. Montague.”

  Cool. I nodded.

  It might not have meant anything to anyone else, but my mom worked in the hotel industry her entire life. I remember people coming over bitching about their jobs, running into co-workers in the street with her as they went over the horrors of rockstar residents and overly demanding crew. But I’d never heard a member of housecleaning staff not only proclaim how much she loved it, but also how much she wanted her children to be involved with the same hotel. As shitty as my life had gotten, my mother never recommended I get a job with her. Something was up.

  I let the ladies in the fashion boutique try their best to get me into something that didn’t make me look like a street urchin begging for change. When that didn’t work, they gave me richer versions of what I already owned. Instead of sweats they handed me a pair of light harem pants and a thin and velvety soft James Perse tee.

  One woman almost got a Rooster’s Lament to the side of her head when she brought in training bras for me to try on. I thought my shouting ended the issue until the head boutique operator asked me into her office before I left. The woman was in her late fifties, though her hair, makeup, and frame would have you believe early forties. She looked like she had been attractive once, before age and gravity collected their tolls. Now she perched in her final shop of glamour trying to do for others what she’d done for herself. It was a quiet little room set back from the rest of the shop. The walls were peach-colored and the furniture familiar steel and ebony.

  “Just wanting to make sure your experience shopping with us was all you could ask for.” The woman smiled, pouring a cup of tea as though I’d asked for one.

  It was fine.

  “Good. Good. On a scale of one to five, five being the best, how would you say . . .”

  Are you serious? I laughed.

  “Oh, quite serious, young lady. We understand you to be the new chief of personal security for our Mr. Montague Junior. We want you to not only look good but to also feel comfortable coming to us with any of your fashion needs.”

  You got it. Next time I need some gear gratis, I’m coming your way.

  “Excellent. Excellent. You know, you’re quite a lucky young girl to have Mr. Montague Junior . . .”

  Anybody ever call him Monty? Or Junior? How about Rice? Anybody ever just call him by his first name? The color drained from the not-forty-year-old woman’s face.

  “You can rest assured, ma’am, that neither myself nor any of my staff would ever address Mr. Montague Junior in such an informal manner without express consent from him.” I let her have her moment, understanding it to be genuine and not some performance for an invisible audience. “I have been in the employ of the Montague clan for over three decades and there have never been any doubts about my loyalty or my commitment.”

  Long time to work for one family, I noticed. She nodded. Any of your family members work here?

  “My daughter and my son’s fiancée both served you outside. My aunt is a head sous chef for the roof restaurant. My late husband had the honor of being Mr. Montague Senior’s driver for twenty years before he died.”

  I’m sorry.

  “About what, dear?”

  I left. Was this what Rice had been talking about? This unnerving loyalty to the point of servitude? It wasn’t to all customers, though they did have a high level of customer service. It wasn’t even to all pretty folks. Rosa-Maria had no compunction about telling Poppy to fuck off. The loyalty was directed at Rice. No one I talked to in the subsequent day and a half had anything bad to say about him: from the towel boy at the pool to the piano player in the bar at night. The maintenance guys, the operators, the head desk, all reported the Naga Suites as the best place they’d ever worked. More than that, they all had something good to say about Rice. He’d helped them out of a rough place in their lives, he’d lent them money, and by far, the most popular praise of Rice, he’d gotten a member of their family a job. Usually at the Suites.

  My third day at the hotel I started getting more proactive. I went to the head of room service and demanded a laptop. A Mac. Big screen. Still in the box. The small Asian man typed for seven minutes straight into his computer then said, “Twenty minutes ma’am. It’ll be delivered.”

  I pulled the phone Shotgun gave me weeks earlier and texted one of the three numbers I knew by heart. Luckily, he was in town. The Little Kid got to my door half an hour after the computer came.

  “You want me to do what now?” he asked, after I’d already explained it three times. I couldn’t tell if it was because he never imagined seeing me in a penthouse or because of what I was asking. I went to the why of it instead.

  Look, something is fishy about this whole set-up and I can’t figure it out. I need to know where the fish is. Is it in the hotel or is it in the dude? I want you to check that computer for bugs first and foremost.

  “But to leave them in if I find them?”

  Exactly. Then do a search for Rice Montague Junior. Do another one for his dad, and then do another one for the Naga Suites International.

  “Like just a plain Google search?”

  Whatever, man. But then I want you to do a search on your own computer but not here. I don’t want you to use the same router or cell tower or anything. I want . . .

  “To see if the results are the same,” he said, finally getting it. “Ok, first off, this sounds incredibly paranoid of you but whatever. I owe you so this is going to get done. The real issue is that what you’re asking for won’t get you what you want.”

  Why not? I asked, curling up on a couch across the room from him.

  “If anyone really wanted to give you false information, why would they spend time bugging a new computer with hardware? More likely, he’d identify the IP address and then trace/clone any website you checked out online.”

  Other options, Little Kid? I said, defeated. I hadn’t understood any of the tech talk, but he sounded convincing.

  “You know we are the same age, right? Of course there are other options.” He smiled and pulled out his own computer. “I’ll tether my laptop to my phone and open a VPN to an onion router I have access to. It also has a bare-bones search engine on it so . . .”

  And no one here will know it was me? I asked.

  “It wasn’t you.” He smiled again.

  Little Kid showed me how to turn off the wireless modem on the computer then gave me a thumb drive with all the info he could grab about the Montagues and the hotel. None of it was illegal though some of it was buried. Like the net worth of the Naga Empire, 7.9 billion dollars. The Suites have been around since the mid 1800s and had never gone out of the family line. Kinda. It seemed that it was a family of foster children. From Rice’s great grandfather to Rice himself, each generation had only one child, a son. And that son had been adopted.

  About Rice there was next to nothing that he hadn’t told me. He’d attended the prestigious Miskatonic University as his father had and his father before him. When he graduated he went to Turkmenistan to learn some ancient smithing practice. I had no idea what that meant or where Turkmenistan was. He returned and took the art world by storm with his sculptures, usually of some form of twisted serpent. After selling one to a collector for 1.2 million dollars, his next commission was from his father to design the sculptures for each of his twelve luxury suites. Then the video game, and then nothing else. He seemed like a usual rich kid with too much time on his hands trying to make up for the guilt he felt for being rich. His father, Kothar, was an entirely different matter.

  This man ate countries for breakfast. The hotel business was his retirement money. He’d pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from what Kothar referred to as the “shit piles of Liv
erpool” in an interview forty years earlier. Rice Senior was more interested in building the hotels than running them. He went from domestic construction to military construction in three years. From there it was a quick jump to supplier of weapons and aircraft, first to the friends of Great Britain, and then to anyone who could afford it. He was still a young man then. By the ’80s he’d gone deep into commodities, grains, arable lands, water. I didn’t know someone could own water rights, but Kothar Montague did for half of South America. In the ’90s he moved to pharmaceuticals. He bought up ten smaller companies, consolidated all of them and made an irresistible meal for Big Pharma. His take? An even 550 million dollars and a seat on the board of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies ever. Two years earlier, he’d retired his seat and taken a profitable lobbying/consulting gig. Oh yeah, and he still owned twelve hotels, five of which he’d literally help built by hand. With three ex-wives dead, all rivals defeated, and a “Come fuck with me” glare that even made me nervous on the screen, Kothar was an obvious owner of the world.

  But nothing in either man’s past explained the loyalty of the staff. It hit me again the next night. I went down to the final basement to catch the show. I’d been so tense the past three days all I wanted to do was dance. One of the Samoan bouncers immediately left his position to serve as my personal protector. I was going to laugh at him until a leggy blonde literally flung herself on him to try to get at me.

  “I have to talk to you! You know Rice, right? Please, I have to talk to you.” She was screaming over the music. I let the bouncer know it was cool and pulled her into the bathroom.

  Talk away, girl, I told her after she gathered herself together. She was barely legal, wearing enough wispy silks and light cotton material to guarantee hypothermia on the cold streets of San Francisco. She had Betty Boop pupils, and Daisy Dukes that looked like they were shrunk in the laundry.