Symphony of Secrets, page 5
He hoped he’d roll a seven. He pressed Send.
One ring and she picked up. “There’s a new place in the East Village,” she said. No “hello.” No “Bern, it’s good to hear from you after all this time.” Instead she said, “Insane crust. Crispy and chewy. Good fresh sauce. They do something with it that makes it slightly sweet, but in a good way.”
“Is that Baldino’s?” he asked.
“Good guess,” Eboni said. “It’s actually a cousin or a stepmother or something. They split from Baldino’s and opened their own shop. Brick-oven. Seriously worth trying.”
He’d rolled a seven, he thought. Winner. “Let’s go. I’m back in New York.”
“Wait, you’re here? I thought you got a job down in Virginia? You get fired from there already?” Her voice was the same as always: crisp, with unapologetic intonations of her native Bronx. Thwaught. Fi-yaad.
“No, not quite. Almost a promotion. But I’m on a leave of absence.”
“You can’t take a leave of absence yet. You just started there, right? Must be something big to get you back here.”
“It is,” he said. “And I could use your help.”
“It’s gonna cost you,” she told him. “You’ll have to buy the next couple slices. Maybe four.” He could picture her, phone tucked against her ear, hair in tight braids battering her back. He wondered what color the braids were. Green, maybe. Or yellow.
“It’s a deal,” he said, “but if things go right with this, you’ll be able to buy your own pizza shop.”
“Brick or coal?”
“Brick and coal,” he said. “And electric, just in case.”
“I’m in,” she said. “Should I start looking for restaurant space?”
For years, at Columbia, they’d gone to pizza shops together, on a quest to find the Best Pizza in New York City. They debated Neapolitan versus Sicilian versus classic crust, canned versus fresh sauce, wet versus dry mozzarella. And toppings: Were mushrooms too wet? Were potatoes too Roman? Let’s discuss pineapple, even. Eboni had worked in a Bronx pizza shop during high school—as a delivery person and then sometimes making pizza—at the same shop where her aunt worked. Bern and Eboni used to joke about starting a pizza restaurant together, if Eboni’s plans on computer security went south, and if Bern couldn’t make it as a musicologist.
“I’m actually in the Delaney building. Again.”
“What? Delaney? You serious? They’re going to take out a restraining order on you,” she told him.
“No, nothing like that. I’m at the Delaney Foundation, working on this major project.”
“Every project is a major project to you. The operas again?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Kind of.”
Eboni Washington had been the Quintet’s computer analyst: she’d written code specifically for Jacques Simon’s team, analyzed the musical structures, knew those operas almost as intimately as they did. Eboni, a doctoral student with one more year before completing her PhD, had immediately bonded with Bern when Simon had brought him onto the team. They were both very driven and recognized this in each other—they both came from poor Black households and were uncomfortable in Columbia’s rarefied world.
“Do you know I couldn’t get that one song out of my head for a month? ‘The Bamboo Reed Dance.’ I almost turned it into my ringtone.”
“Jay-Z did a rap version of it,” Bern said. “You ever hear it? You must have. And McDonald’s used it in a commercial. Allstate did, too.”
“Yeah, only a million times in the past few years. What’s the project?”
He took a breath. “Same kind of thing as before. Musical analysis and score comparison.”
“Analysis of what? Comparison of what? We did all the Rings.”
“I know this sounds crazy, but I can’t tell you over the phone,” Bern said. “They’re asking for NDAs for anybody involved with this.”
“NDAs? You serious?”
“As a heart attack,” he said.
“You want me to sign an NDA to do some computer code on some music,” Eboni repeated.
“Um, yeah. Pretty much.”
“I didn’t have to sign anything with the Rings,” she said.
“Well, this is different.”
“It’s that important?”
He didn’t respond, and after a moment she went on. “Okay then. You can send a car over to pick my ass up.”
“What?” He turned to stare at the phone’s screen like it could explain her better than her voice could. “I can’t send a car over to you. I don’t have any authority. Aren’t you still in the Bronx?”
“You’re talking about me opening a pizza shop and signing NDAs and you can’t send a car for me? And yeah, I’m still in the Boogie Down. If you’re working for Delaney, you can get a car over here. I’ll text you the address, same place. I’m booked until four, though. If the car ain’t here by then, I’ll be sitting in Midtown traffic all night and nothing’s getting signed or done.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”
“Great,” she said.
“I’m really glad to be back in touch,” he said.
“Me too. Just tell me one thing. Did you iron your shirt?”
“What?”
“Your shirt. Did you iron it?” She always teased him about his penchant for well-ironed shirts.
“Well, yeah. It is the Delaney Foundation,” he said.
“A crease in both sleeves?”
“Is there any other way?”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll see you soon. I guess you’re buying the slices tonight.”
Moments later they hung up, and he picked up his office phone, dialed six. Within a few moments, Stephanie poked her head in. “Dr. Hendricks? Is everything okay? Can I help with something?”
“As a matter of fact, you can,” he said, and then, cautiously, “I need to hire someone. A computer person.” He waited for Stephanie to shake her head. To say, Anybody who doesn’t have the self-respect to dress appropriately at the Delaney Foundation certainly doesn’t have the authority to hire someone. Instead she said, “Of course,” with that smile of hers—almost a wince, but not quite. “If you’ll open the file marked C-16, you’ll see a list of Delaney Foundation employees who should—”
“No,” Bern said, “I’d like a specific person. I worked with her before, with Jacques Simon. She did all the computer backend for the Rings Quintet, and having her involved will really speed up the process. She’s in New York and is available at four today. Can we send a car to get her? I’ll give you the address.” He couldn’t believe he was even saying this.
She nodded, already tapping on her tablet and speaking into her headset. In a moment she’d ordered the car service.
Damn. That was easy. He threw himself back into the work.
The afternoon flew by. He’d gotten the first page done and was starting on the second, the overture’s sixty-fifth measure, when his desk phone buzzed and the lobby’s security guard said, “Professor Hendricks, your guest is here. Miss Washington.”
It was just before five p.m. He hit the Talk button. “Okay, great,” he said. “Please send her down.”
He turned off the computer monitors, stashed the printout of the original RED in his desk drawer, locked it, and headed out to meet her at the security guard’s desk right in front of subbasement two’s elevators. Before he left his office, he checked to make sure his shirt was still pressed. He sure wished he weren’t wearing jeans, but that couldn’t be helped.
He met her just after she’d gone through the security screeners: she gave him a hug, and he hugged her back. It had been a long time, but he would have recognized her anywhere. Her hair was meticulously cornrowed close to her scalp, with tight, beautifully maintained braids swept up in an elaborate style that framed her face and then hung halfway down her back.
“Thanks for coming over,” he said.
“Okay, Mr. Big-Time Delaney Employee, what’s the top-secret project?”
“I can’t wait to tell you,” he said. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Before she could follow him back, though, she had to relinquish her phone. No phones on the floor at all. Bern had to show her where his was stashed before she consented to parting with it.
Finally she made it down the hall and into his office. He closed the door, and she maneuvered over to the plush chair next to the couch. “Well, damn. This place is nice,” she said. “You sure got yourself in good with these white folks. No windows, though. How come you’re in a basement with no windows?”
He sat on the couch. Held her eye. “First, you can’t say anything to anyone,” he told her.
“I ain’t gonna give out your secrets,” she said.
“I’m serious. This is a life-changing, very important project. The real deal.”
“You’re really geeking out over this,” she said. “What is it?”
“I need you to sign an NDA,” he said, pushing across the papers that Stephanie had delivered to him earlier that afternoon.
“I need to know what I’m getting into before I sign anything,” she said.
“Well, I can’t tell you if you won’t sign it. That’s the point of an NDA.”
“I’m not signing. If I care enough, we can get started. But you have to tell me first.”
“They want you to sign it,” he said, a little more desperately than he wanted to sound.
“What the ef do I care what they want? And who is this ‘they’ anyway?”
“ ‘They’ are the executive board of the Delaney Foundation. Mallory Delaney Roberts. Frederic Delaney’s niece. You met her at the ceremony.” Now that Eboni knew it was Mallory herself, surely she would sign.
Instead, Eboni rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah. I remember her. She still wear those Golden Girls outfits?”
He decided to take the high road and ignore her. She’d never revered the Foundation the way he did. “They found something and they’re keeping it under wraps. They want me to work on it and I’d like you to work on it with me. It’s a pretty big deal.” He thought for a moment. “You want me to sign it on your behalf?”
She just looked at him, her cornrows catching the light.
“You really can’t tell anybody about this,” he warned her.
She rolled her eyes.
That was the best he was going to get, he knew. And he also knew that a piece of paper was only as good as the person who signed it. The bottom line was that he trusted Eboni Michelle Washington. And—let’s face it—he owed her for all the times she’d saved his ass, when Jacques Simon was chewing him out for forgetting to log in proper information or keep track of a musical source. Eboni always had a backup. She should have been a Girl Scout—she was always prepared.
So now Bern would sign her name to the NDA and hope nobody noticed.
Most people would look at her and jump to conclusions, and the conclusions were almost always wrong. If you saw her on the street you’d think she was a hood rat working on her next hustle. If you talked to her for ten minutes, you’d realize that she possessed one of the fastest minds you’d ever encounter. But if you got to know her, she might—might—let down her guard and reveal the warm, compassionate woman who hid beneath the tough-talking South Bronx persona.
He explained what he wanted from her: to start with a comparison of the reconstructed RED and the scan of the original RED, and then, in a week or two, when he had enough of his own transcription done, to continue to double-check his work.
She patted her pockets, exaggeratedly, for her phone. “Where’s my phone? Oh, right, it was confiscated. How can I keep track of anything without my phone?” She thought a moment. “It’s Tuesday,” she said. “I can probably have a copy back to you by Thursday. Friday, at the latest.”
“They’re not going to want a copy of the original RED on your server,” he said.
“Have your people call my people. My server’s more secure than theirs, anyway. I guarantee it. I do this for a living, remember?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll have them call you tomorrow, first thing.”
“Hold up, slick.” She blinked at him. “Before you get all hot and bothered, we need to get one thing straight.”
Bern knew it had to be too good to be true.
“My fee is nonnegotiable. Make sure you tell that to your Delaney friends. Don’t let them think that because we go way back, they can take advantage of me. That shit ain’t gonna fly.”
“I don’t think it’s about money for them,” he said.
“It better not be, that’s what I’m saying. I know the Delaney Foundation. They only hire the best and, yes, I know because I turned down a position with them, thank you very much.”
Bern had almost forgotten that Delaney’s tech division had tried relentlessly to recruit Eboni during the Rings Quintet research. She couldn’t stop going on about it. Eventually she’d turned down a serious six-figure salary to start her own company. She wanted to keep her business in her own neighborhood to help revitalize the area.
Eboni was brilliant—and at Columbia he’d encountered many very smart people. She told him once that she’d tested off the charts for spatial intelligence, which, in its simplest form, meant she was able to visualize shapes in three dimensions. She never got lost and could read a map at a glance. More important, she was able to detect patterns quickly and deftly, in ways that left him stuttering with amazement: once they’d gone to Central Park and she’d ambled across Sheep Meadow with him, stopping every few feet to pluck a piece of grass and then continuing on. She’d kept up with him the whole time—he hadn’t been walking quickly, but he’d definitely been moving forward. After maybe the fifth or sixth instance, he’d asked what she was doing. She’d opened her palm and showed six perfect four-leaf clovers. She’d found eight more before they reached the other end of the field, and she hadn’t even paused to search for them. That was Eboni in a nutshell: casually brilliant, able to detect configurations that mere mortals could not.
And yet he’d heard that her work designing cutting-edge computer security systems had not been going as well as people had predicted—meaning she hadn’t yet sold her company for billions of dollars to a megacorporation. She’d hired a team of people, but everyone had thought she would have sold her company to Amazon or Google by now. She did many things brilliantly, but assimilating, giving in, or compromising was not in her playbook. He didn’t doubt that she’d ruffled many feathers.
If she didn’t alienate people, she often flew under their radars. Most underestimated her or wrote her off entirely. “That Eboni?” Bern had heard Columbia students say. “She’s a lightweight. Total poser. Can’t believe she’s still here.” They usually said this right before she obliterated them on an exam or a presentation. She was five steps ahead, or almost at the finish line, before her opponents even put on their shoes.
Now, he said, “I’ll tell them that they should pay you what you want. You’re the best at what you do, and I don’t have time to train someone new. We can see what they say.”
“Just talk to whatever stuffed shirt is in charge and tell them to authorize it. That’s the only way you’re getting me.”
“Okay,” he said, extending his hand to shake hers.
Instead she hugged him. “Boom. Now where is it?” she said, meaning the original RED.
“I have the scanned files here.” He moved over to his desk, switched on the monitors.
“You seen the original?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Mmm-hmmm. Where did they find it?”
“They haven’t told me specifically,” he said. “It was behind a panel or something.”
She blinked at him again, elbowed him out of the way, and sat down in his desk chair. Typed a few keys. “It’s encrypted pretty good,” she said. “And the security is top-of-the-line. You go talk to your bosses and have the IT guys contact me first thing tomorrow so I can get a copy of the file.”
“Any chance I can have them contact you now? Everybody’s still working here, and I was kind of hoping—”
“It’s after five,” she told him. “There ain’t no way I’m starting on this tonight. Like I said, I’ll have it for you by Friday. And yes, I’ll be available for you during normal business hours if you need something redone.” She stood, grabbed a couple of Delaney Foundation pens from the cup on his desk. “Where are you taking me tonight? You want to hit that East Village place I told you about?”
“Nope, work comes first,” he said. “When you get me the files on Friday, you’ll get whatever slices you want. Even if they are Sicilian.” He wasn’t a fan of the thick-crusted Sicilian pizza.
“You got yourself a deal,” she told him.
6
Jar versus Pot
Bern
Bern had to tap-dance with Mallory and the Delaney Foundation crew, but eventually Eboni managed to demonstrate that her server was more secure than the Foundation’s, and that she’d put protocols into place to restrict additional copying of or access to RED. Reluctantly they sent over the file, encrypted and security protected, with a deadline of Friday for her to return the new files to them and purge her servers of all traces of it.
In the intervening days, he smoothed things over with his dean at the University of Virginia, who was surprisingly accepting of Bern’s absence and coordinated with another associate professor and a few grad students to take over Bern’s classes. Bern suspected that a call from Mallory and, no doubt, a thoughtful “donation” from the Foundation hadn’t hurt matters. In any case, once word of RED got out, UVA would be fighting to keep him.
