Page 64 of The Circle

Eliza pokes at the ice in her Negroni. She’s not really drinking it, just fiddling with it. The butler laaitie keeps stopping by to ask if we’re sure we don’t want anything to eat. I have to imagine that when you’re used to catering to an entire train full of what must be a demanding clientele, you grow used to the art of officiousness. And when there are only four people to whom one must needs attend, you have to find a place to put all that excess desire to serve.

I finally just told him to “fok off like a good laaitie,” and he did. It didn’t seem to faze him. He just smiled, said, “Very good, sir!” and fokked off straight away. And, now that he’s gone, I’m partially wishing I let him keep coming round. Because the filled air between me and Eliza has no place to settle but upon us. She breaks the silence.

“You have no idea who these people are?” she asks. “What they’re after?”

“The ones waiting for us in Vienna?” I ask. She nods. “I have theories.”

“What are they?”

I take a breath, considering how much telling her will help anything or how much it might make her feel worse. More worried.

Not my responsibility. My responsibility is to the truth—as much as I am capable of telling it—and so I embrace that.

“I suppose my dominant theory, the one that makes the most sense, more or less, is that it has to do with the diamond we stole.”

“Which one?” she asks.

“The one I took from my father,” I say. Her eyes focus and become hard and soft all at once. She’s heard the tale before. “The one that caused he and my mother to become my late father and mother.”

I breathe in the train’s perfumed air as Eliza swirls her drink inside the beveled tumbler, waiting for her to speak again before continuing on.

“I thought that was something like seven years ago.”

“Almost eight,” I clarify. “But, recently, or semi-recently—I’m still not sure how long I was at the estate…” At the mention of the estate where I was held, the same one where she and I hid out after my colossal failure to serve Christine and my love for her, Eliza stiffens, but I sally forth in spite of her visceral reaction. “In any case,” I continue, “not that long ago, I came to discover that the diamond still exists. Is still intact. Remains.” I’m not typically partial to redundancy, but it seems necessary in this instance, to drive home the point. “And I now have to wonder if I’m not the only one who has been once again made aware of its existence.”

She breathes in and out heavily through her nose. “Russians?”

“One must imagine.”

“How—?”

“I can’t know exactly, but I’m considering the disturbing possibility that someone has been watching me for much longer than I would like or have been previously aware.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean”—I take a sip of the water with ice I have in front of me. I want to remain alert and hydrated. Both seem important in their own ways—“that things were all going smoothly for a while. After… well, after you and I…” She closes her eyes. Opens them again. “After Christine and I reconciled—or so I thought—she and I went back to our ways, doing the things we do, and even though Danny wasn’t with us at the time, everything felt relatively… normal.”

“You’re asking relativity to stretch itself quite thin there,” she notes.

“Indeed,” I acquiesce. “But, in any case”—and a cold chill courses through me as I recount what I know and what I believe—“then, suddenly, Christine either fell or was thrown from a rooftop. We still don’t know precisely which. But it is highly unlikely that it is the prior. Christine making a mistake… slipping, falling… that is not who she is.”

“Are you sure?” Eliza asks. “In my experience, people do fall. Sometimes hard.”

I nod in an attempt to dignify the point while not becoming simultaneously derailed by the metaphor. “Yes,” I say, “but not in this case, I can’t believe.”

She nods too, sips her drink, says, “Go on.”

“My point is that subsequent to that, things became—and have remained—very strange. Even by the metrics we might normally use to gauge such things,” I say quickly before she can once again remind me of how categorically beyond the standard all of our lives are.

I continue, “Upon me sending Danny to fetch her and the three of us finding ourselves together again, we endured a monumental assault on Danny’s home. And we endured another monumental assault on a home in the middle of nowhere where we were hiding. And while I now know both of those events to have been orchestrated nominally by Lars, I believe they weren’t. Not fundamentally. Not ultimately.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a laaitie. A young Zulu oke called Solomon. He was with me for a brief moment. But I didn’t hire him. And when I asked Lars, he told me he didn’t hire him either. And Lars killed him before I had a chance to interrogate the matter further.”

“All right,” Eliza says, slowly.

“How did someone find their way into my organization without me or Lars knowing? Why did that person come into our world right as Christine was being thrown about? Someone from the outside has managed to find their way into a place of influence in my orbit. And it would seem that they have been watching me ever since. Because someone retrieved me and Lars from the base of the cliff from whence we were shot. Someone placed us in repose at the estate. The same someone who abducted Andra and Theo. The same someone who shot Brasil Lynch off that bridge yesterday. Or last week. Or last year. Or whenever the fok it was.”