Chapter 44

It took eight weeks for Hugo’s ID to show. Irving apologized for the delay, but I think he was more antsy for himself than for us. He wanted Hugo now.

And it was a busy eight weeks for us. As I promised Hugo I would before we drove back to the cabin, I shifted immediately to trying to give him the basics of dollar transactions, of what’s worth what and what isn’t, the nuts and bolts. But we hadn’t been at it more than a couple of hours before he stopped me.

“Linda, I cannot learn well in this way,” he told me. “I have only small pieces that do not go together. Let us go back to where we were before. Show me more of how money system work, let me go on myself from there.”

So we did. He was right for his way of learning; give him the grounding, let him tie it together for himself. I went back to basics, and we started moving forward again. I have absolutely no idea how he does it, and he can’t tell me, but if I teach him the underlying principles he can extrapolate tremendously from there to the implied specifics. He was particularly interested in the rarity/value correlation, and we got pretty far down the road that way.

As soon as we’d got home I’d called Danny with the news, thinking he’d be really excited for us. I suppose I should have expected it, but actually at first he was a little miffed.

“Damn, sis, you mean I did all that for nothing?” he said querulously. “I mean, I could have gone to jail over the Tremaine business!”

In fact it was pretty much for nothing; Hugo hasn’t had to show his ID once since he’s had it. But the sense of ease it’s given me has been huge, I would have had my heart in my mouth any time we’d gone anywhere. And maybe in an odd way it helped bring Irving into the fold. I focused on these things to calm Danny down, and after a while he did and said he was happy that it turned out so well.

The lie-detecting stuff floored him. “You mean he just listens and watches and hey, pres­to, ‘you’re a liar’ or ‘you’re telling the truth?’” he asked.

“That’s about it,” I said. “Sometimes he can even pick up more that you don’t mean to say. Remember what I told you about the fake cop and how Hugo knew?” I’d given him that story after I’d read the newspaper piece, and he was pretty relieved it had turned out so well. I also told him about Paulette and her expense account. I didn’t tell him about Irving, I promised and I won’t make exceptions even for Danny.

“Do you have any idea how he does it?” Danny asked. “I mean, is it something he could teach?”

“He says not,” I explained. “He says it’s the whole ball of wax, everything taken togeth­er, you can’t learn it rigorously. Maybe that’ll change and he’ll figure out how to teach it, but right now he’s unique. Which is what makes him worth—are you ready for this?—five hundred bucks an hour as a consultant for the firm.”

I could hear Danny suck in his breath. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He was even more impressed when I told him the rest. “Sissie, you found the mother lode.”

“Yeah, I did,” I agreed, a little smugly I have to admit.

“The rest of it still the same?”

I knew what he meant; we’ve been talking a couple of times a week and he never fails to ask me. “Oh, yes,” I told him. “You can stop asking, Dan, I love him more every day that goes by.”

He just laughed; he’ll ask again.

Irving has waited the whole eight weeks to go any further, but that was it. The same day Hugo’s ID showed up by express courier he was on the phone with properties to show us. Give him credit, he’d really worked at it—or, I’m sure, had his tame realtor working on it. But they had some wowzers.