‘Oh, right,’ Ed mumbled, sounding vague and unconcerned as usual. ‘Well, you see, I had this idea and I just needed to thrash out some of the theoretical calculations before I could …’
Nick pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath.Ed is brilliant, he told himself.Ed is a genius and this project needs him. You cannot kill Ed with your bare hands.‘Just get the fuck up here, okay,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Well, you see, I’m at a bit of a tricky point in the old calculations and I –’
‘Ed, there are four huge Russians here, all of whom are rumoured to have links with the mob, all of whom are scary in the extreme. You do not keep these people waiting. Even apart from the fact that they could twist you into a human pretzel as soon as look at you, there is also the small detail that if these guys say no then there is no project, right?’ There was a long pause on the line; Nick rolled his eyes and clenched his jaw in frustration. ‘Right, Ed?’
‘The mob?’ Ed whispered.
Nick sighed. ‘Ed, we’ve been through this, the problem is that you don’t listen to me. Sometimes when the lowly mortals of average intelligence but who happen to be paying your exorbitant salary speak, you need to listen.’
‘I’m on my way.’
When Ed did finallydeign to arrive Nick was seated in the conference room after some awkward greetings had been exchanged with the four large Russians, all of whom looked as though they hadn’t cracked a smile their entire lives, and further that they could happily wrestle a bear to the death, bare-chested, in a Siberian wasteland and barely break a sweat. The fact that they were wearing suits contrarily made them seem even more menacing, their bulging necks barely contained within the straining shirt collars.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Ed shouted as he barrelled through the conference room door; then, catching sight of the Russians, he tripped over his feet and had to grab the edge of the table to steady himself, nearly ending up head-first in a less-than-impressed-looking Russian’s lap. Ed straightened up, his wide eyes taking in the wall of menace seated at the table, and he took a small step back, swallowing hard. ‘Uh … I … well …’ He nearly fell over again as he backed into the projector stand. Nick rolled his eyes. It wouldn’t be so bad if Ed was at least wearing a tailored suit like every other man in the room, but with his trademark disregard for any kind of convention he had chosen to wear an ancient ripped T-shirt with a faded poster for a lost Schrödinger’s cat on the front. His black hair was sticking up in all directions and his jeans looked like they were in danger of giving up the ghost and falling down his skinny hips at any moment.
‘Bertie, could you come in here for a minute,’ Nick said through the intercom whilst pulling on his shirt collar to loosen it. The Russian mumbles from the other side of the table were becoming more hostile by the second.
‘You called, Oh Great and Glorious Leader?’ Bertie said as he swept into the room, ignoring the atmosphere and smiling a broad, totally inappropriate smile at the Russians. ‘What ho, chaps!’
All four men turned towards a red-faced Bertie. Nick rolled his eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time that morning. Bertie, in a three-piece suit, could have almost passed for normal if it wasn’t for the fact that the suit was tweed, and not only tweed butpurpletweed. Who would buy a tweed suit? Leave alone a purple one? Bertie’s explanation had involved a ‘terribly attractive and jolly young lady who said it was just the thing.’ If ‘the thing’ was something to make Bertie look even more ridiculous than he already managed on his own, then Nick would have to agree. The Russians were staring at Bertie like his existence and his suit’s were not only confusing but highly offensive.
‘Where is the interpreter, Bertie?’ Nick said through clenched teeth, trying to retain his aura of calm as he felt a trickle of sweat fall down his back.
‘Ah … well, there might be a bit of a problem there, old boy,’ Bertie replied. ‘The poor bloke just rang, and from what I could make out, in amongst the vomiting, he –’
‘Find me another one,’ Nick cut in, giving in to the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration.
‘Chto yebat' zdes' proiskhodit?’ the most menacing of the group barked out, lifting up from his seat to tower over Bertie.
‘Sest,’ a clear voice sounded from the doorway. Looking up, Nick’s eyes met a pair of familiar blue ones before their owner focused on the four angry men at the table. Surprisingly the man who had stood up shifted in discomfort under her penetrating stare, then dropped back down into his chair. ‘Vy sobirayetes' slushat' etikh lyudey . Vy soglasny s nimi . Vy utverdit plany.’
‘Pochemu?’
‘Moye imya “Goodnight”. Vy ponimayete?’
For the first time that morning Nick saw a flicker of emotion in the Russians’ expressions before their faces became carefully blank. What was she saying to them?
‘What is going on?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I heard you boys struggling from out there and thought I’d come and help out,’ Lucy said happily, her stern expression fading as she addressed him, morphing into the more familiar chirpy but vacant one Nick knew well. He frowned. ‘You speak fluent Russian?’
‘Of course,’ she said slowly, as if explaining things to a slow child. ‘Thatiswhy I got the job, after all.’
Nick had had very little to do with recruiting Lucinda. She’d just appeared when he arrived back from New York after a month-long waste of time trying to negotiate contracts with the Americans (he was now resigned to them being the very last people on the planet to accept Ed’s breakthrough, and certainly the last to invest in it). When he’d asked who had recruited her, he had been offered some vague story about HR branching out.
Weird as this latest turn of events was, after the last uncomfortable fifteen minutes Nick was willing to do just about anything to cut through the tension and try to get the deal on the table. ‘Right, fine. Are you okay to translate? Can you keep up?’ he asked, and watched her cheerful expression slip. Her eyes became so cold that he actually had to suppress a shiver before she pasted a smile back on her face.
‘Of course – hit me.’ For a moment it sounded like she actually wanted him to physically strike her. Her head was tilted to the side and he thought he could see a challenge in her eyes; then he realized that she meant for him to start speaking.
He turned to the men opposite, who were now eyeing the new arrival warily. Bizarre.
‘Gentlemen, I understand you have concerns about the project; that there may be some conflicts of interest.’ Lucinda proceeded to translate and the Russians’ eyes narrowed. One of them leaned forward and spat out a tirade which Nick was quite sure featured a fair amount of swear words, and, if he wasn’t mistaken, an extremely derogatory reference to his mother. He glanced at Lucinda throughout this and noticed she was staring at the Russian, her head still tilted to the side and a bored expression on her face. After a couple of minutes of the Russian’s verbal attack she was clearly done.
‘Stop,’ she shot out (even Nick knew that ‘stop’ was the same in English or Russian). All eyes swung to her. With the sheer level of authority her voice carried, Nick was quite sure she could have cut off a world leader mid-tirade and the Russian man fell silent. She then leaned forward slightly and blanked her expression before she started speaking. Nick had no idea what she was saying, it was too quick to pick up anything. He even thought it might have been a subtly different dialect to the basic Russian he had attempted to learn last year. But what did strike him was her tone. She wasn’t ranting like the Russian man had been; there was no anger in her voice. If anything her speech was eerily devoid of emotion, but there was no mistaking the thread of menace it carried, and the temperature of the room felt like it had dropped a good ten degrees.
When it was clear she was done, one of the other Russian men started talking to her, spreading his hands in a gesture of frustration. She replied with the same tone, and, to Nick’s annoyance, they proceeded to all exchange words with each other for the next ten minutes.
