The Candy House(56)

Chris rolled his eyes, but his grandmother rose quickly from her chair.

“Oooh, I’d put that out, Abuela,” Gabby said, for their grandmother had finished her tiny portion of stew and was enjoying one of the slender mentholated cigarettes she bought on a black market, now that the FDA had banned them. “We don’t want an explosion.”

Abuela went swiftly into the kitchen and doused her cigarette under the tap. “Let’s move this case outside,” she said.

“Let’s call the police,” Gabby suggested.

“No!” Chris and their grandmother said in unison. Abuela, he knew, was loath to jeopardize the anonymity she believed was protecting her treasure, and Chris had no wish to represent the suitcase’s unknown contents before the law.

“Look, I can take it back to the city,” he said with a sigh. “I can call an Uber right now.” This was pure bluff, an invitation for Abuela to insist that he stay and finish his stew. But he’d miscalculated.

“I think that would be for the best,” she said with reluctance. “We can wait for the taxi together, outside. With the suitcase.”

“I’ll just go finish my dinner,” Gabby said. “Nice to see you, Chris.” She was grinning, and why not? She’d managed to banish him from the house.



* * *



It was dark when Chris’s Uber pulled up outside SweetSpot Networks. He looked for Comstock, but there were no smokers out—in fact, he couldn’t recall ever having seen them at night. He’d fantasized during the ride about leaving the suitcase inside the Uber’s trunk, but now he shrank from this thought, as he did from taking it to his apartment in the Richmond District. Not that he’d be returning home tonight—he would need to work straight through to get his presentation done by morning. He kept a change of clothes in his cubicle for such occasions, along with Adderall.

He left the Uber without checking the fare—he didn’t want to know. As he dragged the suitcase toward SweetSpot’s sliding glass doors, he noticed sparks spraying up from where its wheels scraped the pavement. Holy shit! He hefted the suitcase into his arms, aware for the first time of its unnatural weight. It was large enough to hold a compact adult in the fetal position.

“Whoa,” said Dieter, one of the night guards, as Chris staggered through the sliding glass doors with his unruly load.

“Do you know Comstock?” Chris panted, the effort of setting down the suitcase causing sweat to leak from his forehead into his eyes. “Guy named Comstock? Drives a Harley? Smokes outside a lot?”

“We’ll have to open that,” said Frank, the Bad Cop.

“Can you just… run it through the machine?”

“Machine only picks up certain things,” said Dieter, the Good Cop. “And anyway, that’s too big to go through.”

“What’s inside?” asked Frank.

“It belongs to Comstock’s girlfriend,” Chris said. “She’s from another country, Russia, I think. I went with Comstock on his motorcycle to pick her up at the airport, but I came back separately in a cab with her luggage.”

The guards listened with blank attention, as if awaiting some hook of reason upon which to affix their comprehension.

“I don’t like to open someone else’s suitcase,” Chris said, but this was an understatement: The thought made him light-headed with dread. “Can I just… go on up? Leave this here for Comstock?”

“We don’t know any Comstock,” Frank said.

“Why don’t we check the company directory?” Chris said with impatience. “How many Comstocks can there be?”

“There is no directory,” Dieter said. “Company’s grown too fast. Can you text this Comstock? Or call him?”

“I don’t have his number.”

A pause opened and hardened. Chris felt the strangeness of his predicament settle over all three of them.

“I’m going to have to ask you to remove that suitcase from the building,” Frank said in a more formal tone.

“To the perimeter,” Dieter said with apology. “It’s the policy.”

Without another word, Chris dragged the suitcase back through the glass doors into the dark. Fog toppled in from the sea, swamping the streetlights. At the sound of the automatic doors whispering shut, he felt as if he’d been sealed off from not just Good Cop/Bad Cop but the storytelling universe they occupied. His caper had failed to find a comic resolution. Instead, there had been a genre switch, and the madcap adventure had turned serious. Or had this bleakness underlain the caper from the start?

Indifferent to sparks, Chris dragged the suitcase past the yellow perimeter line and stood there, waiting. Frank ambled to the window to check that he’d complied, then returned to Dieter. Chris could hear them laughing.

i < (a + b) = i?2



He felt a convulsion of self-loathing at what his dutifulness had cost him: This fucking suitcase was proof. He couldn’t bring himself to abandon it, or to open it, or take it home. He could only stand with it and wait for Comstock to return.

Now and then, groups of SweetSpotters approached the building. “You coming up?” asked the ones Chris knew.

“In a minute,” he said each time, and they went inside without looking back.