Chapter 52

Monroe wasn’t surprised to find that Dietrich hadn’t locked the door of his borrowed apartment nor was she surprised to find Cricket in his kitchen wearing only one of his work shirts as she looked through the cabinets. Dietrich’s senses of privacy and sexual restraint had always been underdeveloped.

Before Cricket could notice her, she said. “I come in peace. I’m Dieter’s sister.”

Cricket turned to look at her. “I remember. We met last night.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d remember. Some women see my brother and forget everything else. I’ve learned that a little reminder I’m not a rival can save me from a potential catfight.” said Monroe. “What are you looking for?”

“Coffee. I was going to just get dressed and go back to my sister’s place, but Ainsley’s going to have questions and she’s been known to withhold caffeine until she gets answers.” Cricket pulled out a bag of coffee beans and kept searching, presumably for a grinder. “Does that work ... telling Dietrich’s women that you’re not a rival? You two kind of look like Lannisters.”

Monroe laughed. “We’re not, I promise. When we were six, I convinced Dieter to eat earthworms three days in a row. His charm hasn’t worked on me since. Besides, we don’t have to be Lannisters. We’re Stones. Stones do pretty much everything except close family incest.”

“Found it.” Cricket declared, extracting a white cylindrical coffee grinder from the cabinet. “I’m going to make coffee. You want any?”

“I could stand a cup or two.” acknowledged Monroe. “I’m still on Montana time.”

After Cricket had started coffee, she said. “I made enough for your brother to have some once he wakes up. You might have to wake him if you want that to be any time before noon. We were ... up pretty late. If you’re planning on waking him, I would ask you to let me finish my coffee and get out of here first, though.”

“You don’t want to be here when he wakes up?” Monroe smirked. “Are you sure? A lot of girls have asked me if he has a girlfriend or if he wants children and an April wedding by this point in the conversation.”

“Nothing against your brother. He was a lot of fun, but he clearly wasn’t looking for anything more than that.” Cricket got two coffee mugs down. “I’m actually pretty sure I know the next two women he’s planning on sleeping with after me and I did before I came home with him. That doesn’t exactly inspire pining.”

Monroe’s estimation of Cricket immediately went up. She hadn’t been exaggerating much when she said women tended to fixate on her twin brother. Some time around sixteen, Dietrich had started looking like a cowboy on the cover of a romance novel, but as of yet, he hadn’t learned the first thing about acting like one. He wasn’t cruel or heartless. He just always seemed confused when the women he brought home seemed to want to stick around. Running a ski resort where the average visitor stayed for a week or two had given him a steady supply of teenage girls and full-grown women willing to make fools out of themselves over him and then leave.

As they sat down to drink coffee together, Monroe said, “What’s your story again, Cricket? I know you told it last night, but I wasn’t entirely listening. Are you a ... lawyer?”

“Special assistant to the legal department of the Anna Coyle Colby Dickinson Fund. Taking a gap year before Yale, then probably on to law school. I’m basically a glorified intern except that I actually get paid. My sister Ainsley is head of the legal department.” Cricket sipped her coffee. “You’re from Green Mountainside, Montana. Your family owns the ski resort there. And you’re staying here until mid-September when you go on the Stone Family world tour.”

“Grand tour. The world tour is something they’ve been talking about organizing pretty much my whole life, but it hasn’t actually happened.” Monroe sipped her own coffee. “Full marks for listening better than I did, though. I’m used to women getting tunnel vision around Dieter.”

“Mostly, I’m taking what he told me and interpolating how the details would apply to you.” Cricket admitted. “What is the grand tour exactly? Your brother was a little vague on the topic unless it really is an opportunity to meet and bed all your foreign cousins. I didn’t want to interpolate that far.”

Monroe laughed. “I really do need to apologize for Dietrich. He can be a bit ... focused.”

Cricket waved off the apology. “At least he didn’t pretend to be anything he’s not. And I did hear the words coming out of his mouth. I could have walked away from him, but he and my libido ganged up on me and I decided to let them win.”

Monroe decided in that moment that she wanted Cricket to be her new best friend - at least for the duration of her stay in New York. Back in Green Mountainside, she’d become accustomed to being the apex cowgirl and she fully intended to trade on her “simple country girl” schtick once she got to Hollywood, but first she needed to acquire enough city smarts to ensure it was just a schtick. For that, she needed the right friends while she was here and traveling across Europe. She said, “To answer your question, the grand tour is something the Stone Family Trust sponsors every year. Young Stones from America gather in New York in September and we travel to Europe to visit all the centers of family power - London, Paris, Nice, Ferrari, Barcelona...” She waved her hand, “ ... plus a lot of less famous places - pretty much anywhere family money has accumulated and they’re willing to pay to put us up. We wind up in Rome for Christmas and head back to the States right after New Year’s and repeat the process here. Oh, and we pick up our European counterparts in Rome.”

“Sounds like fun. I take it it’s more than a big pickup scene?” Cricket asked.

“It can be. Six months on the road with a bunch of teenagers from a family not known for its monastic traditions?” Monroe smiled. “Whatever sort of alliances you’re looking for, it’s probably the best chance you’ll get to make them, particularly if you’re not rich. I’m going to be trying to make contacts in the entertainment business. A lot of people go looking for specific job offers or just any job offer. Some people just go to party. It’s like ... speed college.”

“And this is free?” Cricket asked.

“No, the Family Trust is generous, but they’re not that generous. The price tag is forty grand.” Monroe looked in Dietrich’s refrigerator, but there was no food. “But also like college, I don’t think anybody pays full price. There’s financial aid. Dieter and I even got some and we weren’t exactly rocking the free lunches at school. Beyond that, cousins who have beaucoup d’argent tend to sponsor more middle class ones as a form of patronage. Have you noticed that this apartment doesn’t have a stove? Is that a New York thing?”

The last bit just kind of slipped out and Monroe wished she hadn’t asked. She didn’t need to go out of her way to sound like a hick. But Cricket only shrugged. “I’ve only been in two New York apartments and my sister’s has a full kitchen. Maybe they microwave everything.”

Monroe opened the freezer, but it was as empty as the refrigerator. As she did, Cricket put her empty coffee mug in the sink. “I should really get dressed and head out. Work doesn’t start until eleven today, but I’m still expected to be there on time.”

Not wanting to lose the contact, Monroe said. “Sure. Hey, I’m going to be heading up to Saks Fifth Avenue later today.”

“Why, are you buying something for your mother?” Cricket didn’t even turn around to deliver the sick burn. Monroe was still trying to formulate a response when Cricket did finally turn around. There must have been some sign of distress on the young Stone’s face because the other woman looked confused then horrified, covering her mouth. “Oh, God. I totally didn’t mean it like that. I just ... we’re so close to Mercer Street here. I couldn’t figure out why you’d go all the way uptown for...” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Rather than put my other foot in my mouth, how about I start again and say, ‘Sounds like fun. Too bad I have to work?’”

Monroe gave a shaky little laugh. “Wow. Uh, yeah ... I ... sorry. I wasn’t actually going up there to buy anything. It’s just ... it is my mother. Whenever she talks about growing up here and then working in LA, she always comes back to Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. I wanted to go up there as kind of a pilgrimage to the holy land.”

“I really didn’t mean to be a bitch to you.” Cricket reassured her. “I’m sorry. I’m just out of my element here and...”

Monroe laughed harder at that. “Shit, you’re out of your element? I was thinking you’d make a good friend because I’m so out of my element and you seem so ... at ease.”

“Uh ... thanks?” Cricket said. “Listen ... you’re a Stone, right? And at some point in your life, you’ll probably need a lawyer? People in the entertainment business do need lawyers.”

“Uh, sure ... why?” Monroe asked.

“Ainsley’s been totally on about how I should be getting to know the Stones while I’m here.” said Cricket. “If you don’t mind the blind leading the blind, why don’t we both head up to Saks this afternoon and I can claim we’re networking?”

Part of Monroe rankled at the idea Cricket might think she was some sort of charity case who needed pity friendships, but a much larger part worried that here in New York, she might be some sort of charity case who needed to rely on pity friendships if she was ever going to gain the sophistication she needed. That larger part said, “Sure, I’d like that.”

As they toured Nick’s factory in Bangalore, Pilar thought her ability to read Nick’s hidden moods was keeping pace with his ability to hide them from everybody else. Gotam the factory manager had started out the tour jumpy and defensive, but as they made their way through workrooms, cafeterias, break rooms, and the factory’s central day care facility, talking to workers about conditions and their day-to-day lives, the gray-haired boss started to relax as Nick appeared satisfied with everything he saw. He didn’t seem to notice the way Nick set his jaw when he expected a certain result and wasn’t getting it.

Hiding his feelings around strangers by default was new but welcome behavior in Nick. So was not immediately seeking to put the factory manager at ease. When Gotam asked why they were here so soon after the last surprise inspection, Nick hadn’t mentioned his trust’s recent change to more active management, he’d only said, “That’s the nature of surprise inspections. They’re supposed to be a surprise.” Nick had also done a thorough job of making sure Gotam didn’t direct the tour, ignoring each suggestion they should follow a particular pattern until the manager gave up trying.

Pilar was pleased in general with Nick’s progress as a man gracefully managing the responsibility of a large fortune. If anything, she wished he might have progressed just a little more slowly. She could hardly miss the irony of this desire. Pilar had been Nick’s first real ally in the family and had the most invested in his success. She’d thrown in with him in no small part because she believed he could be brought up to speed on defending his own interests quickly with her guidance. Knowing the risk to her own family and its assets, she’d boldly aligned herself with him and worked hard to ensure Nick developed the mental muscles needed to resist the rest of the family’s efforts to guide his future in ways that were primarily meant to benefit themselves.

Pilar had worked hard to help Nick become as savvy as he was today, holding nothing back in her counsel. She’d imagined that she could hand her alliance with Nick to her father as a fait accompli and use that as leverage to get him to formalize her ownership of half of their company. Being outmaneuvered by her own father so badly had been a rude surprise. Everything she’d said to Nick about Jorge Rodriguez-Stone’s attitudes towards the way she’d grown Rodriguez & Daughter Contracting had been true, but it had glossed over a lot of nuance and completely ignored Pilar’s deep suspicion that her father’s dismissing the value of her particular form of business development was a pose adopted to strengthen his bargaining position.

Because she hadn’t held anything back in grooming Nick, Pilar was now in the unenviable position of having to negotiate with a man she’d worked very hard to teach not only her best negotiating tactics, but also how to counter them. As a result, her ace in the hole gamble had fallen flat and the balance of power with her father hung in the balance.

Nick had been circling around the idea of marriage for weeks and clearly held out some fantasy of their alliance being formalized and cemented with a wedding some day. She had similar fantasies, but that “some day” along with Nick’s indifference towards having children and the age gap between them made marriage to Nick a non-starter for Pilar. She might defer her own wedding until she was thirty if she could expect to start having children immediately.

She’d been willing to gamble all that to secure Nick’s assistance in growing R&DC. The next four years would determine whether she spent the rest of her life guiding and growing the company she’d built up from the brink of collapse or if she’d have to wait until her father retired or died to take the reins. For that, she’d been willing to put marriage to Nick on the table even though it would jeopardize the whole reason she wanted to build the company.

She’d done so with the idea that four years was plenty of time to find and groom a better wife for Nick than herself or, failing that, to convince Nick to give her the children she wanted. Even a week ago, it would probably have worked. Today, he’d immediately latched onto that last snag. Pilar had supreme faith in her ability change Nick’s mind on the question of children and Nick, unfortunately, had acquired enough self-knowledge to agree with her.

As a result, she now had a contract ready for her father to sign and the agreement with Nick to support her efforts in limbo. Nick had something he wanted from her other than marriage and he was using Pilar’s own urgency to make sure she wouldn’t have time to negotiate better terms for herself. Worse, he’d been clever enough to not let her know his terms up front. She couldn’t even plan her negotiations.

Stepping into the office Gotam had lent them for the day, Pilar braced herself to find out what Nick’s condition was and mentally prepared to agree to pretty much anything. On top of everything else, she had no idea what he could ask for in addition to what she’d offered aside from marriage that required the input of his in-house counsel. Literally the only thing she’d come up with that was even remotely plausible was that he might want to marry her firstborn daughter, but she really didn’t think Nick had internalized the idea of marrying someone much younger than himself yet.

As the office door closed, Tanvi asked Nick, “Is this all right for the candidate interviews? We still have the conference room downtown set up as an alternative site.”

Nick looked around the office. He’d declined Gotam’s offer of his own office suite for the day in favor of what looked like a middle manager’s office pretty much anywhere in the world - a desk, some chairs, red binders on a modular shelf. Only the artwork - a photograph taken at a local festival showing a man in a white suit bracing himself against a cloud of colored powder thrown at him - gave any indication of where they were. He said, “No, this will do nicely. One of the candidates ... Lol something ... she’s primarily focused on improving working conditions in third-world factories. I’m going to try to get her unvarnished opinion of this place.”

“Do you have some specific concerns?” Tanvi asked.

“No - and that concerns me. You saw the posters with the phone number to call and report unsafe, unhealthy, or unfair working conditions?” Nick said. “Is that something meaningful or is it just window dressing?”

“It’s a third-party service specifically for handling worker complaints anonymously. I looked them up. They have broad approval from NGOs including the one Ankita Lal works for and from the Indian government.” Tanvi brought up her pad, made a couple of quick gestures on the screen, and said. “It looks like the number and severity of complaints from this factory have declined each year since your trustees first contracted with them in 2006.”

“I just can’t shake the feeling I’m missing something. Obviously, I don’t want the factory I own to be mistreating workers, but I was kind of expecting to find something big and obvious that I could use to prove Black and Stringer was mismanaging my assets.” Nick sighed, sat back, and looked at his assistant. “Gotam kept looking at you like he thought he knew you.”

Pilar had noticed that, but dismissed it as a middle-aged man reacting to a beautiful woman in his workplace. Tanvi on the other hand held out her arms drawing attention to the gray and white suit she’d worn today. Unlike most of her work ensembles, it didn’t show even a hint of her Indian heritage. “My outfit deliberately confused him. It can sometimes be a fight for an Indian woman in India to wield her rightful, temporal power. I’m dressing more Western to suggest I’ve been raised abroad and have strange, foreign ideas that probably aren’t worth trying to correct. Also, I think Gotam wanted to be certain I wasn’t some poor girl you’d plucked off of a factory floor to have your way with. Did you notice how he tried to direct you away from the young women working here and tensed up every time you talked to one?”

“No.” Nick admitted. As he and Tanvi discussed their impressions of the factory and its manager, Pilar watched them interact. Because she’d been thinking about her own efforts to help Nick mature into his new role, she was more keenly aware of how Tanvi was doing the same thing - helping him look at the world more shrewdly, consider hidden motivations, and identify tactics being used to manipulate him. It was a reminder than she wasn’t the only one with a lot invested in Nick’s success and a worrying realization that she might not know all of Nick’s tricks just because she’d tried to teach him all of hers.

When Nick and Tanvi had finished discussing the factory, Pilar decided it was her best time to seal the deal for Nick’s assistance. She said quietly, “Tanvi, could you excuse us for a few minutes please?”

Tanvi rose and smiled. “Of course. Nick, should I go find us some lunch before your first meeting?”

“Please. The cafeterias looked like they had some interesting options.” said Nick. Once Tanvi had gone, he turned to Pilar, “What’s up?”

“The lawyer finished drawing up the contract I’m going to offer my father. I’d like to get him to sign it as soon as possible.” said Pilar.

“That sounds like a good idea.” Nick had brought out a legal pad from the desk and was writing down some notes.

When it became clear that Nick had said all he was going to without prompting, Pilar asked, “Have you considered my request for assistance in building R&DC?”

“Quite a bit.” Nick looked up. “I still need to talk to Ainsley back in New York before I can give you an answer.”

“Do you know when you’ll talk to her next?” Pilar persisted.

Nick frowned. “I talk to her pretty much every day, but I want to talk to her in New York about this - in-person and one-on-one. I need ... more than her legal advice on this.”

“I didn’t realize when you said you needed to talk to Ainsley back in New York, you meant you would actually have to be in New York.” Pilar said like it was a small matter of little import. “I guess I should go ahead and get the contract with my father signed then?”

Nick smiled at her. “You said it was a better deal than a flat twenty percent even without my help and it’s not like we won’t be allies if we can’t make a deal to trade all of my influence for four years in return for your immortal soul.”

His glib characterization of their pending deal struck a little closer to home than Pilar might have thought it would. She really was offering everything and it wasn’t much better than any ambitious cousin might put on the table. “Make me rich and I’ll use that wealth to help you for the rest of my life” was a beggar’s offer. The only thing that made Pilar’s offer unique was Pilar herself both as a savvy, well-connected player and as a beautiful, uninhibited woman. If she were playing the other side of the table and trying to scuttle this deal, she could name a dozen candidates as well or better suited to be Nick’s right-hand woman than herself. But she could hardly pull out of their existing alliance now without leaving at least one billionaire feeling betrayed by her and possibly two.

Still, she couldn’t let her distress show. Nick wasn’t likely to see her allegiance as more valuable if she let a little thing like the potential collapse of all her plans and destruction of her life’s work rattle her. She said, “All right. I’ll call him after our meetings if it’s not too late.”

“Actually, you can call him now if you like. These are just candidate interviews. Anybody who gets through this round will have to come to New York and spend some time with the whole council before we vote on them. Plenty of time for you to meet them then.” said Nick.

Pilar’s heart lurched. A seat on the Fund’s ruling council meant having a say in how Nick spent billions of dollars and she very much wanted to meet and evaluate any potential candidates so she could help steer Nick towards ones who would understand what that power meant and the value of wielding it properly. She said, “I don’t mind. I wouldn’t want to look too eager.”

“Even so,” Nick’s smile didn’t fade. “I think I’d like to maintain a bit of separate magisteria between the council and the family.”

He said it casually like he wasn’t taking a huge tool for expanding R&DC out of her hands. Pilar considered protesting or laying her cards on the table, but neither seemed like a clear path to success and either could imperil that larger deal between them. Mentally, she flipped through the strategies she’d laid out for dealing with Nick under different contingencies and asked casually, “Why isn’t Emily here then? If this is council business, she’s a seventh of the council.”

“She wanted to make use of the pool.” Nick frowned thoughtfully, considering what Pilar had said. “I should probably invite her to the rest of these interviews at least until we get back to New York.”

Glad she hadn’t lost all of her influence on Nick, Pilar rose. “I should head back to the house, then. Do you mind if I take the car?”

Nick smiled up at her. “I’m sure Tanvi will be able to find me another one when I’m ready to go. It’ll be nice to sleep in an actual bed tonight.”

Pilar didn’t miss the subtext of that statement. They’d only been in Kuala Lumpur for eight hours and Nick hadn’t used the suite they rented for much more than a chance to change his clothes before and after the candidate interviews there. Pilar had spent most of the time in the shopping district catching up with Emily. This was probably the longest Nick had gone without sex since they left for Montana together.

Thinking about that, Pilar decided which of her contingency strategies she wanted to focus on. “Nick, do you have any doubt I could bring Emily and Tanvi to our bed together today if that’s what we wanted?”

Nick had been paying attention to her, but the nature of his attention changed to something more primal. “I don’t doubt it at all. Honestly, it’s starting to feel less than sporting. I’m really not trying to humor you with targets who jump right into your net, you know?”

Pilar wasn’t sure what he meant. “You think they’d be easier than Rosangela was?”

“I don’t like the word ‘easy,’ but I think they both want to climb into bed with us for their own reasons.” said Nick. “You don’t have to push. I just have to stop pushing them away.”

“Really? I know Emily’s been wearing a lot less on the plane, but I thought she might just be gauging your interest.” Pilar suggested. It would be easy for Nick to confuse “willing” and “want.” Most men never got to see or appreciate the difference.

Nick sat back and made a thoughtful gesture. “When a beautiful woman comes to a sleeping man’s room dressed for bed herself and asks to stay there because she’s drunk and doesn’t remember where her room is, is that to gauge the man’s interest or is that because she wants to have sex with him?”

“Emily did that? You didn’t tell me.” Pilar said.

“I’m telling you now. Nothing happened. I wasn’t sure of the protocol for sex with a dead man’s drunk mistress on the night of his funeral the same week her not-boyfriend runs away. Zero google hits. Plus, she fell asleep within like ten minutes of lying down.” Nick shook his head. “I don’t want to take anything for granted, but it doesn’t feel like I missed my last chance.”

“And Tanvi?” Pilar needed to gather information now and analyze it later.

“I think she just figured out that I’ve wanted to sleep with her since she was just a voice on the other end of the phone. She recently started changing in the room with me and asking me to zip her into her clothes when previously she wouldn’t ask me to hand her a pen if she accidentally dropped it into my open hand. Her version of ‘I’m drunk and I don’t know where my room is’ was telling me that she had a poor sense of personal boundaries and a habit of sleeping with her bosses.”

“She’s an ISOC? When did she tell you that?” Pilar asked.

“Very early on - right before I gave her an apartment, but the acronym was on her CV when I interviewed her for the job. Where did you hear it?” Nick asked.

“It’s a slang term for someone who sleeps with her boss. You’ll see on the family forums sometimes. Pretty bold to put it on her resume, though.” said Pilar.

“Not her resume, her official CV from the Service. It stands for ‘insufficient separation of concerns.’” Nick looked pensive. “I was going to say I wondered if they knew it had fallen into use as slang, but they’d have to know. They’re SSCS. They know our family inside and out. And I doubt they’re still putting it on CVs because they haven’t gotten around to fixing it.”

Pilar watched Nick piece together part of their world she wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t spelled it out for her, but could say out loud first. “So, SSCS uses the term to deliberately signal that an agent is likely to sleep with her boss to her potential bosses?”

“The more I understand about SSCS, the less I approve of them.” Nick sighed. “But I’m going to keep using them and I’m going to sleep with Tanvi unless she tells me no. Thinking too hard about them is just an academic exercise.”

“I look forward to making her more intimate acquaintance ... if you still want me to.” Pilar wasn’t delighted with Nick’s new realism. To an idealist, each new understanding of how the world actually worked had to be painful.

“Of course I do. But let me see if I can bring her to you, please.” said Nick.

“All right.” Pilar again almost turned to go, but decided she should get more explicit buy-in for what she was about to do. “Can I ask what exactly you want from Emily?”

“Apart from the obvious?” Nick asked.

“More like how much of the obvious and at what intensity?” asked Pilar. “Do you want something like what you have with Ceilidh or more like what you have with me ... a maybe-friend you sleep with once and keep your options open on in the future, a full-on girlfriend you expect to see every night, or something in between?”

“Emily and I are already much better friends than I am with Ceilidh and she lives under my roof.” Nick pointed out. “I want as much of her as she’s willing to give me, but we’re running into a simple mathematical problem here. I’m really not looking to sleep with more than two women most nights. It’s ... less appealing. If you’re there every night and she’s there every night, I have to choose between sleeping well and sex with some women I’ve really been enjoying having sex with. So, let’s say somewhere in between.”

Getting Nick to ask for something very close to what she was already planning to give him made Pilar feel somewhat better about her value as a potential ally. “There’s something off about the way Emily’s been acting lately. I want to approach her with finesse - try to understand what’s going on in her head before I proceed too far. Do you mind?”

“No. Whatever the opposite of minding is, that’s what I’m doing.” said Nick. “I like that you’re a considerate seductress.”

Something in Pilar’s core tightened pleasantly when Nick called her a seductress with such obvious approval. They really were very well suited to each other. She leaned across the desk and kissed him. “I’ll get to it then.”

In the car on the way to their rented house, she reviewed what she knew about Emily King. Pilar had been partnered with Emily at IBJ for more than two years before either of them knew Nick. For all that, they’d barely known each other. Pilar had known Emily had a boyfriend named Clive and from bits and pieces of conversation knew he was older and not around much. Pilar had assumed it must be some sort of sugar daddy arrangement, but hadn’t inquired further about it. Emily had seemed like she might be embarrassed by the arrangement and had said so little about it that Pilar didn’t even know Clive was a Stone until shortly before he died. And even though Pilar hadn’t used the Stone part of her name professionally, Emily had certainly known she was one.