Page 2 of Angel’s Doll

When I first saw the name on my uncle’s calendar, I smiled. My dad loved a singer called almost like that. He used to play his songs in the car, both of us shouting the choruses wrong. One letter off. Close enough to make me eight years old again, windows down, world safe.

The man waiting in the foyer doesn’t smile. He’s somewhere past fifty, gone soft in the middle, built like a man who used to do his own collecting before other men started doing it for him. He wears a fancy suit that still can’t make him look like a businessman. He has mob written all over him, and he scares the hell out of me.

“Miss Hale.” He stands when the elevator doors close behind the senior partner. “I assume he’s available now. I’ll see myself up. I know the way.”

“I’ll take you,” I say, because my uncle would have my head if I let him roam around the offices alone.

In the corridor he stays half a step behind me, a draft on the nape of my neck the whole way.

Voss is gone when we’re back in the conference room. Whatever gets said in here now, my uncle doesn’t want it said in front of anyone who’s an officer of the court.

He doesn’t mind if it’s said in front of me, though. Or he doesn’t care. I’ve never worked out which is worse.

“Ian.” Victor comes around the table with his hand out and his voice dialed to the register he uses for investors. “I take it by now, you’ve heard.”

“I’ve heard.” Durey ignores the hand. He takes a chair instead, unbuttons his jacket, and looks around the room like a man pricing the furniture. “Tell me anyway. I like to hear it from the man who owes me.”

I move to the sideboard and pour two glasses. My hands know the routine even when the rest of me wants to be anywhere else. Neither of them tells me to leave. To Victor, I’m furniture. Apparently to Durey too.

Victor tells it straight, which is how I know how frightened he is. Two plots of land in the middle of the project are now completely protected. The project is dead.

“So,” Durey says when it’s finished. “My money.”

“It’s in the land.” Victor spreads his hands. “All of it. That was the structure. You knew the structure. We bought well, below market for most of it. As soon as I sell the parcels, you’ll be made whole, maybe better than whole. But it’s going to take a minute. Land like this doesn’t move in a week. Two months. Maybe six for …”

“Six months.” Durey repeats it the way he’d repeat a joke he didn’t find funny. “This is not acceptable. Not for me and not for my cousins.” He picks up the glass now, turns it, sets it down without drinking. “You want six months of my patience. Patience is expensive. Mine especially.”

“Six months is a worst-case scenario,” Victor says. “The first parcels could close in ninety days if …”

“One week.”

Nobody speaks.

“You’ll show me progress in one week,” Durey says. “A signed sale. A wire. Blood from a stone, I don’t care which. And in the meantime, I hold collateral. This is how it’s done between serious people. You hand over what you can’t afford to lose.”

Victor’s eyes go to the renderings on the wall, then to the head of the table, then to me.

I watch it happen. I watch my uncle look at me. Durey follows the look. He smiles.

“Your darling niece,” he says.

Say no. The words are so loud in my head I’m certain both of them can hear. Say it’s absurd. Say she’s family. Say anything at all.

My uncle looks at the printouts on the table. He straightens one so its edge lines up with the glass.

“She’ll be treated well,” Durey says, to him, not to me. Nobody in this room has said one word to me. “She’ll have her own room. Better view than the one over your garage, I’d imagine. And in a week, when you’ve shown me what you need to show me, she comes home and none of us mentions it again.”

“A week,” Victor says.

That’s it. That’s the whole negotiation for me. Two words, and he still hasn’t met my eyes.

“Get your coat, Miss Hale,” Durey says, rising, buttoning the jacket. “My car’s downstairs.”

And here is the part I’ll hate myself for later. I obey. The week I moved into my uncle’s house, I was a stupid teenager throwing tantrums to deal with my grief and I refused to wear the dress he’d picked for my parents’ funeral. My winter coat disappeared for a month. I learned.

I walk to the closet by the assistants’ station and take my coat off the hook, quick and quiet. My phone stays on my desk. Company phone. My bag stays in my drawer. Company card in it, company keys. Nothing in my entire life belongs to me.

I follow the mobster to the elevator with the one thing in the building I can call mine, my driver license in my back pocket.