Who: Olivia Landon & Daniel Webster What: Paperworks! And deadly kitten assassins When: Prior to plot Warnings: None.
The taxicab that drew alongside Turnberry had likely ferried many of the residents of the building out, and back. The cab-driver was stoic; whether that was his habit with those who came to Turnberry or the explicit request of the woman in the back of the cab was up for debate, but her exit was neat, and it was elegant, reminiscent of old movies and their screen-stars. She swung out, long legs in dark pink heels, and the slither from the back of the cab, transfer of enough green bills to cover the journey and her adjustment once standing to smooth the taupe-colored suit was easy, effortless. Olivia Landon did not live in Turnberry, but she looked as though she might appreciate the elegance and luxury of the place a damn sight more than its odd collection of residents.
Perhaps that was why the concierge, confronted with a tall and handsome woman, hair knotted sleekly in the hollow of her neck and the sort of tight-lipped smile that said she had determination enough to get past him even if he didn’t care to admit her, did so with the resignation of looking at the name she supplied, and the history of visitors to that particular apartment. Olivia smiled; she moved past him with the clipped sound of heels on marble floors as though she were used to being an invading force, and she took the elevator with a couple that were so entangled with one another, last night’s black-tie clothing so disheveled it was likely they had absolutely no idea it was ten in the morning, and she rode up with an eye on her Blackberry and the soft, buttery leather bag on her shoulder tucked beneath her arm with all the assumed sanguine-froid of not being accompanied by two individuals who seemed utterly unaware of her presence.
It was entirely as expected for someone of Daniel Webster’s bank balance, she thought, as she stopped at the door corresponding with the address on the piece of paper. She had barely spoken to the man but Olivia assumed a vague, nebulous nastiness that came with money, closeted away in wealth and opulence, presumably with staff to clear up anything dropped or left or discarded. Turnberry was a neat line on a bank statement, along with many others; this time it was at the behest of the bank itself, after a long lecture on signatory forgeries that Olivia had smiled placidly through, her hands folded on the desk in front of her and the merest hint of boredom and of threat both in the very level of her gaze at being made to endure such an indignity. The package of papers under her arm, together with the report printed off from another particular outlier of Daniel’s bank account, remained wedged there, as she knocked.
Daniel ignored the knock. Daniel ignored most things. It was easy to do it because Danse Macabre was pounding along, screeching at full pitch, wild wails joining into a chorus and becoming whole. The notes vibrated the walls, which withstood the beating only because the best insulation money could buy supported the plaster and expert molding. Some more battering on the door produced at least some response, some stirring within. The music didn’t diminish but poured on, the flutes dancing like air on top of the shimmer of glass on tile.
Abruptly, the door swung open, and Daniel stood framed in it. Refrigerated air streamed low over their toes, and the scent of tomato spices cooking almost nauseating under the proliferation of whiskey coming off his skin. Daniel wrote loud and confident, but he was not a big man and never would be one. The paleness of his skin wasn’t the ruddy coming death of a long-time drunk, but it was still without health, his brown eyes without gleam. The dark curls were cherubic in their innocence, perhaps the only hint of youth in an otherwise tired man.
He stared at her, stared at the suit, the inches on those heels and the sleek phone in her hand. He examined her face. It was a strong face and he liked it, but he was careful not to show that. His mouth twisted in annoyance as Daniel chose which part of the woman’s appearance he disliked most: the existence of it on his doorstep. “What?” he asked, bluntly.
The door did not contain all sound, the thundering music had been much softened but not silenced entirely by the expensively thick walls and stone. Once the door was open, it was a tumult, a wall all its own accompanied by the slow, pervasive chill of conditioned air, a full-frontal offensive on the would be intruder. Olivia blinked; it was the music and the cool but also the ripe roil of whiskey that slid over on all that cool air. She neither flinched nor did she smile, the blinking looked natural. She was calm, the particular calm of those serving legal papers, ambulance chasers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
She had not yet been insulted which she had expected, but nor was Daniel precisely as she had expected him to be. There was a rude stature in his own plain text, the peculiar arrogance of the exceptionally rich, good looking and gifted who lack no reason at all for humility. Olivia did not resist her examination, she stood quite placid and still in her quietly expensive pale suit and obligingly tilted her head from one side to the other, with her own amusement invisible beneath bland politeness. She did not stare but she looked herself with the cool and obvious assessment entirely clear and if she thought this spindly man with the near-dead eyes and the lanquidity of ill-health looked entirely different from his pen and ink representation then not a bit of it was on display.
“Ah,” Olivia said. Her voice was cool and it was deeper than expected for a woman. It was rich, like red wine poured into a glass to warm. “Mr Webster. Now I recognize you.”
The hostility meter went up several notches as she said his formal name, revealed in a tightening around his eyes and nose. True, anyone who got past security likely already knew his name, but Daniel still thought of “Mr. Webster” as his father, and the association provoked him. His fingers tightened in a little ripple against the fine grain of the wood, and even in his irritation he leaned against it, as if her presence wasn’t enough to keep him standing. “From what? A wanted poster?”
While Olivia stood under Daniel’s withering assessment with collected calm, it was obvious that the man simply didn’t care what the woman thought of him. There was no shuffling, no lift of hand to his hair, no attempt to fix the shirt stretched out by wear and age into an oblong shape over the crease of his neck. Every once and a while he blinked, and that was the best that anybody could expect. In the intervening pause, the temperature stabilized, creating a zone of cool endlessness that resembled deep caves in dry forests. The scent of cooking eased into spices and rice, jambalaya perhaps, and whiskey sharpness retired under the musk of very old books.
The sliver of apartment visible over his left shoulder where the door was still open revealed little; the entryway had no light.
Rarely did clients care what Olivia thought of them, so rarely that she neither expected it nor looked for it. That Daniel (whilst ‘Mr Webster’ was the professional greeting, Daniel had at some stage or another become ‘Daniel’ when thought of) was both dishevelled and moderately unhealthy looking was not unimaginable but combined with the faintly unpleasant frigidity of the air circling her ankles and the strong scent of whiskey, she had paused temporarily to assess. He was not the Daniel of strong black ink and sharp letters but he was as acidly unpleasant as she had grown to expect. This pleased Olivia in a small, barely discernable way. She smiled.
“From your general good humor and manners,” she said. It was coolly pleasant. There was not a drop of sarcasm that could be pulled from the words, only the context itself. Olivia smiled more warmly; the context dissipated. It was possible - doubtful - but possible, given the smile, that she might have meant it. She peered behind his left shoulder, “You shouldn’t leave a stove too long unattended. May I come in?”
Daniel detected something that smelled to him of smugness in her expression. He scowled, but being a generally unpleasant person he didn’t entirely begrudge the satisfaction other people had when they managed to put one over on him. It didn’t happen all that often, and when it did it alleviated the monotony of his days. Not that he knew what day it was any given time. Or hour, either, come to think of it, as all the curtains were drawn and Daniel disliked the idea of keeping time.
“It’s on low,” he snapped back, not at all moving back or doing anything to suggest that she was welcome. (In fact, he was actively resisting that particular impression. Can’t have people dropping by to sell Girl Scout Cookies. In heels. Hmm.) “You’re not coming in until I know who the hell you are.” The sudden warmth of the smile scared the hell out of him, as he just couldn’t afford to have more sympathetic friends. Two was enough. Two was unheard of. His eyes widened slightly and he made a totally transparent decision to be meaner.
Daniel wasn’t aware just how obvious he was these days. The alcohol did a good job of killing brain cells and he didn’t bother counting them regularly.
Olivia wasn’t certain if he was drunk where he stood - the smell and the grip he had on the doorframe would suggest that he was, but the overlay of dust and paper and all other scents that indicated ‘books’ and the thick spice of the food managed if not to overpower it then to register as another note. She took a single step forward. It was not a large one; the skirt of her suit was not given toward striding but it was enough that it took her right to the edge of the doorframe and Daniel and the belligerent gleam that was his conviction to be if not mean then meaner. Olivia stood very tall in the pink heels and she smiled. It was a calm, cool smile that was both amused and patient and quiet all at once.
“Olivia,” she held out a hand with little expectation he would take it. Her hand was smooth and cool and the nails were neatly shaped and painted the kind of color that would be called ‘ballet slipper’ or something equally nonsensical and feminine. “Your financial advisor. Even on low, if you leave it in long enough you can burn it.” This sounded like it came from experience rather than the polish of the professional. It was rueful; Olivia only allowed it for a minute before she was business in heels once again.
Daniel was always drunk. It was just a question of how drunk; was it the usual lower level of something in his coffee, or was it the deep, mind-numbing sickness he consumed to completely disassociate from anything like self? His pupils worked to an extent and he seemed to process what she said fairly quickly. Without knowing what kind of man he was, many people would have no basis for comparison, but Daniel thought that Olivia might know him, know him the way an accountant know her accounts. Those crazies that thought there was something to be found in his books about him, well, they were wrong, of course. But his accounts... that was different. And Daniel had something to lose in this situation, though he would never admit it. Olivia was good.
He processed all of this in decent time, considering the amount of liquor in him. Slowly he put out a hand and shook hers. His palm was soft but very cold, refrigerated into sluggish response. His hand shaped against hers and tightened just enough. It was a professional handshake, something suited to ballrooms, fundraisers, and politicians. Through habit he dropped his eyes down and then flashed them up. Amber through dark fringe, a look that could have charmed if only he had smiled, if only he had stacked the curve of his spine in a pile upright. He pulled his hand away, easy, controlled, and he turned away.
“You come to advise me?” he asked, disappearing into the gloom. The door swung away and he let it, lurching away back into the apartment. The blank that he left behind indicated that she could follow... if she dared. Judging from the sudden increase in the spiral of spices, he was in the kitchen. All she had to do was navigate the standing piles of books, the frigid air, and the screaming soprano.
Of all of it, Olivia was most bothered by the screaming soprano. Whilst opera was very nice in its place - and she thought of it thus, ‘in its place’ as if opera could be tidied onto a shelf - it was as high and as loud as wandering onstage with the soprano herself. That the door swung wide onto an apartment as chilly as Daniel himself was half-expected; Olivia’s hand went to her throat where the suit dipped over a thin silk blouse, but that was all. She did not know him, not at all - she had thought him quite mad and then clever, a man who idled with words and with people (as much as could be seen on the screen of a small device when she glanced at it) and one overly generous but in secret, thinking on statements of accounts, expensive presents and a rehabilitation center both expensive and anonymous. She knew the contents of his accounts, where his money slid and paid little attention to the small proportion of the payments, the bank card purchases rather than the big ticket items.
Following the trail of warm-sour whiskey as it faded into a far more pleasant spice that curled in her stomach, she thought perhaps he had bought the stay in rehab for the wrong individual.
“Do you feel you need it particularly?” The stacks of books were a particular navigational hazard; Olivia’s heels were staccato on solid wood, the clipped pace of a woman with an elongated stride. The arm that carried the handbag reached out to correct one lurching pile awkwardly, before it came clattering down on top of her. He was, it seemed - Olivia thought wildly, even as the smile became very gracious and very correct, as suited to bankers and board rooms as the handshake had been at the door - a hoarder or quite irredeemably mad. Possibly deeply drunk. Possibly all three.
“Judging by the books, I would assume so. Do you have an aversion to shelves?”
The soprano’s song died down as somebody struck up a march, and a baritone paraded forward in his tongue twisting proclamations. One didn’t need to know the language to understand the tone. Strings bounced, but the apartment seemed, by comparison, morgue still.
The kitchen was probably the brightest place in the apartment. Daniel had thick canvas curtains in the same teal black that matched the furniture, shutting out the changing seasons with a Havisham intensity, but in the kitchen a small window too small to fit a man sat above the sink. No curtains could be hung there, even if Daniel was the Mr. Fix-it type, and so a cathedral in watery glass was made on chilled tile.
Daniel probably would have taken offense to the hoarder comment. There were newspapers, quite a few of them, but only because he subscribed to four different languages from as many different countries, plus three American copies: local, national, and financial. Present were only this week’s, as the cleaning company came through and tidied the rest. Other than the books, there was no sign of stacking or extensive belongings, just a very messy bachelor. “Go buy me some shelves and schedule somebody to come in and install them when I’m not here,” Daniel said, from a shadow by the stove.
He was looking into a covered pot simmering on the stove, a glass in his left hand. The kitchen table had newspapers all over it, but four tiny paws had recently been shredding it. The litter box was in the bathroom, but unless the woman was prepared to think he was the kind of person to shred the newsprint of his enemies, Daniel assumed she would make the appropriate assumption. Said feline was nowhere in sight, which, Daniel was starting to realize, was an ominous sign.
The light did not allow for definition of class of newspaper nor even the language in which it was written. Olivia recognized half a dozen, primarily because they were fanned across her desk each morning by someone quietly unobtrusive (as was the bank’s way in everything) but she noticed instead the threads of the stuff, that someone - or thing - had pulled the newspapers across the kitchen table into scarred shreds. It stopped her from saying something cutting and sharp, about personal assistants and the differences therein between financial and personal - although Daniel seemed to find the distinction difficult, given the affiliation and overlap between the two. The light here was better, and Olivia leaned, all taupe suit and the careful sway of her body against the table, the clipped sound of her heels stopping at its edge.
“Have you acquired mice or an animal?” Daniel did not seem - either the Daniel ghostly-pale and the queasily thin who stood beside the stove with a glass in hand as comfortably as if it were the only location such an item could be in, or the Daniel who wrote with sardonic verve and black ink - to be the pet-keeping type. He might, Olivia thought and for a minute she was alarmed, the type to kill it. Neglect or perhaps drowning it. She eyed the glass with some skepticism. “Are you ever not here for such an installment?” She had begun to doubt it. The place had a grand air of decay, of closed up places. The flow of chilled air over the backs of her legs made her flesh prickle.
“Leave every now and then to turn into a monster at the hotel. Takes my mind off things. That’s when the cleaning lady comes.” Daniel’s backhanded, unhurried attempts to irritate Olivia would fully sink into casual sexism without hesitation, and his tone was completely bland. He dropped the long spoon into the sink and watched the steam curl, sipping at the drink.
Daniel didn’t look up, apparently in no hurry. Where was he going to go? He knew she had some purpose in coming, and if it was a little too quiet in here, then maybe she might alleviate it just by being her irritating self and breathing his air. So he answered. “Somebody left a cat in here the other day. Probably thought it was funny.” Daniel stepped back away from his stove and looked around his feet, eying the table near her heels and the shadow of the doorway. “Not sure where it went.” He turned and flashed her a slow smile made of warm butter and cooling cinders. “Want to try some soup?” It wasn’t really funny, but he wasn’t really trying.
If Daniel had become the first client Olivia thought of when someone mentioned ‘difficult’ then it was also clear he was capable of charm. She eyed the slow-melting smile with a good deal of caution behind the clean mask of professionalism; the charm did not make him any less difficult, simply more inclined to manipulate. Charming people were rarely charming without an understanding of what charm obtained them. Olivia, who had been working with the very rich long enough to know that most wanted something - if not for nothing - then as close to nothing as they demanded, doubted charm. “The cleaning lady is on a schedule, I presume?”
She looked down around her own ankles when his gaze fell in that direction - it was the quick, darting look of someone almost alarmed. Olivia could not help it, despite the smooth and perfectly mild exterior of someone unshakeable, she eyed the ground as suspiciously as she’d eyed the smile; she liked cats - the sleek, disinclined-toward-swift-motion kind of cats. Something darting at her unexpectedly was entirely not to her taste at all. He was being distinctly less unpleasant than he could be - of this Olivia was certain. Whether it was to do with the glass he had in his hand or simply that coming across Daniel when he was cooking was a magical way of surmounting the unpleasantness, she did not know. If the soprano would stop shrieking, it would be near on pleasant.
“Perhaps,” Olivia said, tentatively. There were no rules against it but there were no rules against it presumably because it was rare one had to chase down a client in their apartment and convince them to sign paperwork in person. “Is it edible?” It was, she thought, given the skim-milk pallor of the light in the room, a fair question.
Daniel nodded when she asked about the cleaning lady, as nodding came easily to him after the first couple glasses--through gravity, not the will to acquiesce. He couldn’t imagine having a cleaning lady that was not on a schedule, as such a person would require some kind of input or maintenance on his part. He was, at least, pleased that Olivia wasn’t familiar with the schedule, as it implied she wasn’t keeping all that close an eye on his finances. Some aspect of his private life preserved, Daniel sipped again and then reached into a cupboard for a bowl. It took him considerably longer to find a second one.
She didn’t hear his implied joke about the cat in the soup, but he wasn’t concerned or offended. Daniel was better at cold, sly jokes, the kind that slid in like a blade. On print, the shadows were even longer, and his novels had hidden edges, spinning polygons of uncertain meanings. Daniel had never written for the lowest common denominator, but he very much recognized that right now, he wasn’t writing. He would need to buy a laptop soon. The thought of trying to understand the pros and cons made his head hurt. Maybe he’d send Lin money and tell him to buy one and... leave it on the doorstep.
Daniel answered her question about the soup by handing her a warm bowl that smelled of heirloom tomato and spices. Whole basil leaves drifted serenely away from a square of toasted wheat bread. The kitchen was now tinged with the faintly burnt, metallic scent of old bread crumbs at the bottom of a toaster. Daniel ignored the newspaper and sat down at the kitchen table, bare feet nearly silent. He treated her to a long silence just to see what she would do.
She had tried one of his books once. She had avoided them for much of the first week out of an odd sense of deference to the man on the phone who had been glacial at the use of his last name, who scorched barren any notion that he would be pleasantly authorial, aware of his own good fortune in making a name in a business that was difficult and thorny. She had avoided them afterward because Olivia preferred to shed work as she shed the pale assortment of suits, to unzip herself out of it as she did fine wool and tweed, leave the shell of it on the carpet to be picked up only when strictly necessary and to read curled in an armchair with wine so dark the tannin left stains. Daniel Webster intimated work in a place that was a haven to its lack; finally curiosity had got the better of her.
Daniel wielded words the way men of an alternate era might swords; there was nothing sparse nor utilitarian about it but a fine mesh designed to trap, hold the reader in place as the light was drawn in precisely to expose, to illuminate. It made for odd reading, brilliance, and she stood with her fingers folded over the edge of the chair’s back and studied him, as if attempting to fit the brilliance into the thin, white shadow that stood at the stove’s top.
She accepted the bowl and Olivia abandoned the soft, buttery-leather bag at the table’s edge with the carelessness of those that can afford to lose their possessions. She sat herself, and it was a prolonged series of motion, the skirt smoothed and the glide sideways onto the chair with bent knees, like a fifties movie star getting out a low-backed car. Silence settled, deliberately. Olivia smiled blandly above the soup at Daniel and waited. Silence was only uncomfortable if you allowed it to be, it could be used as well as any weapon. Olivia daintily ate soup and waited him out.
Daniel also ignored the (relative) silence. He surveyed her as he twisted his spoon in his hand, and though he was the chef of the moment, he wasn’t all that interested in eating. Daniel’s appetite came and went, but mostly it was gone before he noticed he was hungry. Henry was the one with the appetite. The spoon swirled around in the soup, but mostly he dipped in chunks of toast and thought about the dead woman who had taught him her recipe.
Unlike many bachelor cooks he wasn’t all that interested in whether or not his audience liked what she was eating, because he knew the recipe by heart and probably couldn’t have screwed it up even if he’d had four times what was sloshing in his glass at that moment. It was obvious that he was wondering why she was there, and yet so untroubled by the general state of his finances that he wasn’t in a great hurry to ask. The longer she sat there, the more interesting it became, until finally he was simply waiting to see what would happen rather than fighting the silence on some kind of childish principle.
He didn’t stare at her, just examined her further, and while one might expect the spoiled man on the journals to sit back with a smug smile, instead he sat forward and let his eyes move, inspecting the expensive seams of her bag, obviously painting a picture to match the emails he hadn’t been getting since Lin broke the computer.
The soup wasn’t bad. It was actually quite good, earthy tomato and herbs. Olivia made note of it with the faint surprise reserved for all things short of stock exchange collapses but she noted too that Daniel was not eating. It looked (to a practical eye acquainted with all the eccentricities and vices that money could buy) as though perhaps he had not eaten - properly - in some time. She was looking at him the way someone versed in property might assess a house, as though at any minute one might open a cupboard and the floorboards would fall out; it was a faint quirk of eyebrows. Olivia sat the spoon down, and she folded her hands on the edge of the table.
“You aren’t bankrupt,” she said tartly. He did not look as though he might expect it. Daniel did not appear to think her appearance heralded bad news which was only mildly surprising given his unpleasantness about her abilities. “Are you intending to eat? Or merely play with it?” She made a motion to his bowl, the spoon, the glass: it was both at once understated and dramatic, as though catching a glimpse of bright underlining in a staid suit. She would have said something about his appearance and the unlikelihood of his having regular meals - the extreme unlikelihood of his consuming much of anything beyond the glass’s contents. She would have said something about the emails lined up like pins in his inbox, each signed off in curt irritation at the lack of response. She did not.
Something small and intent and determined was stalking past the door with a tiny pipecleaner of a tail stuck straight up into the air. Most women faced with kittens might have melted. Olivia did not. She looked instead, as though she might have been thinking about her shoes. “You need to sign something. And there was an enquiry. About the bank statements from the publishers.” It curled up at the end, as though it ought to have been a question, rather than a statement. It was something rather more firm than a question ought be.
By the time he noticed it, Daniel’s spoon was starting to drift away into his soup, sinking slowly into the red surface like a ship going down with the tide. He blinked violently, obviously set askew from his thoughts, when her quick, businesslike series of motions signaled that she wasn’t really interested in eating. The blue eyes focused, the vivid blue without ripple or blemish, just faintly smoky with drink and fatigue. Daniel folded up the toast dangling from the two fingers of his right hand, scooped up some soup into the soggy surface, and ate it in two bites before sitting back. This, it seemed, counted as a meal.
“Not even this place,” Daniel made a quick gesture with his hand, sending a small scatter of crumbs down his front, “can make me bankrupt. I couldn’t drink through a royalty check even if I wanted to.” This was, technically, true, but he accompanied it with a nasty smile, as if he was thinking about trying it. The insidious amusement was not directed at her, inner turmoil that played deeper under the surface, but he let it show, just for a while. He leaned over and picked up his glass again.
The kitten made a better entrance than most practiced performers. Looking down at it, he said, “There’s no food here for you. Go find your bowl.” He seemed to expect the very young, very deaf, and completely feline animal would understand this directive immediately. The cat took no notice, staring at Olivia. And then Olivia’s bag. And then Olivia’s shoes.
Meanwhile, Daniel lifted an eyebrow and said, “Enquiry from whom?”
Olivia looked pointedly at the glass. It was both a silent remark, impeccably groomed eyebrows and the meaningful look in brown eyes but it was also about not looking at the kitten as it stared her down. Olivia liked dogs, they were biddable and largely unobtrusive. They could be banished to another room. Cats were, she thought, largely impossible. It made perfect sense that the man could keep a kitten alive whilst barely eating anything himself, seemingly sustained only by the pickling tendencies of vast quantities of alcohol. Olivia had seen many men try to rid themselves of the excess in their bank accounts, firstly through whatever they could entertain themselves with and secondly through whatever they could ingest that would make a world so solidly open to them that its pleasures paled, more interesting.
“Do you want to?” The question was calm; it could have been about interest rates. It was the sort of unfussed placid that Olivia had dragged in with her heels and her suit; she spun one of the nearest newspapers closer, skimmed a headline with a minimum of interest. “Or is that a statement designed to be provoking?” She watched the cat; it took a great deal to see below the laquered polish of banks and grooming and a disinterest in emotional responses to life that Olivia presented, but there was a certain nervousness aimed at the kitten.
“From upper management.” Olivia said ‘upper management’ the way some people might speak of God. There was very little adulation and a great deal of respect, even if it came with the kind of edge that said she had been dragged to church a little unwillingly. “The kind of money moving into your account looks like laundering. They question,” delicately, as though asking after undergarments, “My decision to permit you to sign remotely.” It sounded as though Olivia disapproved of the judgment, even if she did not especially disagree with the dislike of his enacting decisions remotely. It was in the long, slow look around the place, the dim haze of light through clouded glass.
Daniel’s gaze directed itself over Olivia’s glass, as if her eyes presented a rapier and he could cross it with a blade of his own. The glass remained where it was, innocuous in its crystalline beauty. The alcohol itself could not be blamed. Only Daniel, with all his brilliance, could so intently find a vice meant to disseminate and degrade. He chose it for its lack of speed, its absolute oblivion. He simply couldn’t bring himself to do better, and while his soul shriveled and darkened in the clutter and smoke, the rest of him was fucking bored with the whole process. Olivia could be a distraction.
The kitten strutted forward on stiff legs, and then crouched down in a slow hunter’s approach for the high, bright high heel under the table. Daniel all but ignored it, but a little glimmer in his blue eyes betrayed an occasional flick of his gaze down and to the side, the icy blue rocking as the Atlantic on a winter day. He ignored the question about his intention, only smiling again in an answer that could have meant anything at all. Safe to assume the goal of a provoking statement.
While Olivia treated upper management with some modicum of respect, Daniel only let his lip curl upward, as if he had begun to smell something rotten. “So you brought things for me to sign. So I can say that literature is only laundering boring old thoughts, and not money.” He picked up a piece of the dry toast and took a bite in what looked like the most difficult thing he’d managed so far. He made a face and literally washed it down with whiskey. “Get on with it then.”
The kitten pounced.
“Boring old thoughts?” Olivia was the upward flick of an impeccable eyebrow, the neat drawing together of the lines of her face into the faint echo of something alike to doubt. That the author - the Author, imbued with far too much romantic sensibilities as a moniker for Daniel who was, it was rapidly apparent, suited to the slow and chilly decay of his surroundings as if he were a younger, masculine and far more intent Miss Havisham surrounded by newspapers and an odd predisposition toward cooking. She had expected, however, the hubris of the man who sold paperbacks in stores and in airport terminals, who was celebrated in newsprint. She was looking at the glass, but her eyes flicked up to Daniel himself, quizzical behind the smooth patina of kabuki masks and clever self-control. She reached for the leather bag, for the spill of paperwork.
And then she yelped, sharp and high and utterly unalike self-control at all, eyes very wide and startled and the paper dropped to the floor. The kitten latched, tiny claws spread wide into the tassel on the very front of the high, bright-colored shoes (and through the tassel, pinioning Olivia herself). Olivia moved sharply, she jerked her foot back but the kitten (this game being one of extreme interest) clung on, small furry body sprawled across the width of the shoe.
“You have an attack cat?” She leaned sideways, the suit fabric creased as if it was not intended to be worn throughout feline attempted assassinations and she observed her ankle and her shoe the way someone might inspect an unexploded bomb. “Do you mind?”
Daniel looked down to watch the kitten swing around desperately. The little white animal refused to mew and attempted to bite at the tassel even as his little needle claws dug in even deeper. The little rat’s tail whipped around and around, and little teeth gnawed at the leather. Death to shoe, murder most deserved, curse the swaying tassel and its descendents. It pays. The kitten missed as it lunged for the tassel and almost fell off, its pink tongue stretched behind his fangs.
Daniel laughed... and put down his glass.
He slid down off of his chair, slowly, and eased down to his knees on the tile. He spoke to the cat in French, not cajoling, not at all in the tone of a man who sought to romance, but lightly. He spoke the way an amused man might speak to a child, flippant. He told the small cat that he was being a fool, because this woman didn’t run. The cat didn’t pay too much attention, but Daniel grasped him around the ribs and pulled gently, detaching the claws one by one with his free hand.
“He likes your shoes,” Daniel said in English, obviously amused. “Serves you right. No woman wears heels like that unless she wants them to be seen.” It was a compliment, though it might not have sounded like one. His tone was much more genial as he continued. “I’m not laundering money. People like my books. I imagine the number is going down, though. They’ll forget until I die, and then there will be a big surge in sales, then that will be that. Done inside a year.”
She was, initially, rather preoccupied with the shoe itself. It was, like many of Olivia’s shoes, impossibly high and incredibly expensive. It was made of soft, rich suede (utterly impractical in New York, but in the desert, far more use without ruining them) and even as the would-be assassin was coaxed to relieve his target, tiny determined teethmarks in the extremely unnecessary but whimsical tassel and the needle pinpricks of tiny claws were evident in their attempted gouging of the defenseless victim. They had in fact, slid into the foot beneath: once released, Olivia winced and she rubbed her foot with a look rather more rueful than Olivia permitted in business hours - a look in fact that constituted a whole expression rather than something slimmed down to respectable. It was rather more human than the business professional really wished to be.
Olivia spoke enough French for business and most of her vocabulary was limited to that of a transactional nature and leaned toward the Swiss but she understood entirely the tone. Daniel with the animal cupped in his hands (entirely too small, in Olivia’s estimation, for normal people to wish to possess) was a swathe of ice cracking on frigid lake; Olivia rather thought she would run from something as possessed of determination and dirty tactics but she kept silent, one hand curled around her ankle and her elbow on the table, chin in hand as she watched the byplay, more amused than perhaps she ought to be.
“One might think,” Olivia’s voice had warmed through: it was a momentary, forgetting kind of thing. “That if I wore them for people to see, I did not intend them to be mauled by small furry assailants who cannot recognize good craftsmanship.”
She smiled at him. Olivia had the kind of strong face that many people had told her was attractive in a doubtful way that presumed the comportment of features (all not unattractive) would draw themselves together at some point to convince them of her attractiveness but that until that point they were unresolved. The smile did it. “Why would you think that people will cease to like your books? They’re really quite good.” It was a compliment shaped like a statement of fact.
Daniel curled his hand around the fuzzy body despite a rather bloody struggle of white fur and ears, largely indifferent to the cat’s attempts to enact furry vengeance except for a casual curse or two in French--since he was in the mood. He returned to his chair, giving her a look from the floor that was a little self-conscious before doing so. Very few people knew that it was even possible for Daniel to feel self-conscious, but it suited his tired face shockingly well. It melted away before he was even properly settled into the chair once more. The kitten decided that maybe the stuff in the bowl was interesting, but Daniel wasn’t letting go.
Daniel sketched his brows upward. “People lose interest in whatever isn’t shining directly into their eyes. I’m not planning on going back out into the light any time soon.” He was perfectly serious, and it was only the cliche that made his eyes flicker with amusement. The cat wriggled free of his first three fingers, slipping around the blunt edges of ink-stained flesh, but he caught him before he pounced on the soup. “Save your shoes,” Daniel advised, dropping the cat once more on the ground, where it stood splay-legged for a few seconds before recovering enough to seek new prey.
Daniel took another half-hearted spoon of the soup, but he wasn’t really interested in eating and soon pushed it away. “So what am I signing?”
Olivia had not come to lunch with her client. Lunches were expensive, gold-leaf trimmed things and extremely dull and whilst the soup was good - and perhaps far better than she would have given him credit for - the bowl sat to her left, abandoned and congealing in the chilly air. The look she sent in his direction was almost entirely directed at the cat, the desperate peddle of four limbs and thread of a tail and the tiny, impotent fury of teeth and claws - it was amused, in a clarity that would not usually have been admitted, but looked rather as though her face was used to mirth rather than the clear, placid lines adopted far more frequently.
“Do you mean you don’t intend to publish again?” she said, of lights and stepping into them, with a resumption of composure that was as clean and as quick as the snap of a fan. There was a tone - out of place perhaps, of something alike disappointment, wiped away in the next minute. “I suppose with royalties so very high, you don’t need to.” Her eyes widened; deftly, Olivia flicked off both heels and scooped them up with two fingers into her lap, with a laugh that was a brief ripple of guilty vanity as her hand curled protectively over the suede.
“There,” a gesture, “Something that I’ve actually witnessed.” There was something of distinct displeasure, subtle as a note in a vintage that could perhaps be detected only when trying to, of Olivia’s dislike at being drawn up and chastised. “The terms of the services provided, a statement that you have read them.” Not a whit of doubt that he hadn’t.
“Nothing with my name on it is going out in ink ever again. Nothing that anybody is going to sell.” Daniel’s voice was final and adamant. He was absolutely sure, absolutely frank. “And you’ll find anything more interesting than a dictionary that’s leftover in this apartment is to be destroyed if I turn up dead one day.” As, inevitably, he would. He gave her the yellow smile once more, the one fraying slowly in the shadow. “But it’s always nice to meet a fan.” The frayed smile unraveled into threads until it was gone entirely. Not even the kitten’s distracted scrambling lightened it.
Daniel stretched out his left hand and picked up his glass. With his right, he lifted a few leaves of newspapers and dug out a gel ink pen. It clicked on one end and its clear barrel spiraled around heavy ink that never ran. A journalist’s pen, easily replaced, but obviously the one that matched Daniel W. on the paper they knew so well. “Give it to me, and then you can go home.” He sounded tired.
The smile was unpleasant enough to merit notice; it was as chilly as the room itself and regardless of the small creature’s gamboling, it made it very clear that despite the thin, hollowed look to Daniel that suggested a decaying refinement absolutely at match with the apartment itself, he was caustic and coarse in equal measure. Olivia edged one eyebrow upward, she drew the paperwork out of the leather bag and she splayed it out in a more orderly rainbow on the table.
“It’s a pity,” she remarked with the bland pleasantry of pulling something of the board-room back around her shoulders. Even with her shoes in her lap and a kitten inspecting her ankle with some disgust at the lack of shoe attached to it, Olivia managed inoffensive dignity. She regarded the glass and she smiled at him, calm and cool. “When this is the stuff of a novel itself. Albeit one that has already been written by Dickens. You need to sign there, and,” a tap of pale pink manicure on the page, “There.”
She leaned sideways, slid feet back into shoes. “And you,” she told the kitten with all the severity of chastising a rash stock trading decision, “May find something else to attack. Be gone. These were expensive.” She gathered the soft leather bag off the table and stood.
Daniel tipped his glass up once and then shifted on his seat to slide like a typewriter all the way over to view the first sheet farthest to his left. He didn’t blindly sign, not this time, idly relishing the temporary company despite its complexity. He initialed the first box, three letters rather than two, the loops winding together in a distinctive calligraphic pattern not present in any of his other signatures.
Daniel rearranged his fingers on the glass, propping his palm up against the rim and gripping with three joints and no hesitation. Another initial scrawled into a second box, deliberately. One blue eyes slid up to regard her, the dark curls chopped haphazardly away out of his face, likely by kitchen scissors when he was annoyed enough to notice their presence. “My life is not a fucking book for you to read. Focus on your job.”
The kitten ignored the both of them, finding a more profitable use of his time in the attempt to pull open a drawer for some nefarious purpose of his own. Daniel looked down again, initialed a third time, and then finally signed: strong, confident first letters, but a total absence of anything to indicate that he was the third Daniel Webster in a line of rich men that were good at golf. He sat back as if he’d just run a marathon, allowing her to gather the papers again.
Olivia smiled as easily as if there had been some banal remark about the kind of pen he was using rather than petulance; it was a bland, smooth thing and nothing of a would-be reader with novel in hand. With the kitten so occupied, she had no need to guard her shoes, nor bag but she watched the flick and dart of the pen and the liquid black so very recognizable from the pages. “Thank you,” she said, sweeping the requisite paperwork together with a competent flick of embossed bank address gleaming at the top of the consecutive printouts. They, and the signature - regardless of third or first, a witnessed ‘Daniel Webster’ set down in distinct inky and inimitable fashion - disappeared once again into the soft, soft leather bag.
“If you wish to be disinteresting,” Olivia said lightly, with a look at the glass, by way of parting, “You might very well begin with that. Rarely do people begin trying to drown themselves if they haven’t a reason to start.” The papers thus tucked away, Olivia’s heels were a clipped tattoo that faded very quickly into the gloom until a distant catch of the door signalled business - and Olivia - were finished here.