My brother has never blinked first.
That is not a figure of speech. When he was twelve, he won a staring contest against our uncle Walt that lasted until Walt's contact lens fell out. When he was twenty-six, he sat across from a shipping magnate for nine hours without asking for a glass of water.
The magnate asked for four. The magnate lost.
He had one rule, and he taught it to me at the kitchen table when I was six. Whoever speaks first loses.
At forty, Elliot Vance was a senior partner at Ashgrove Partners, a firm that negotiated on behalf of companies too proud to do it themselves. Mergers, buyouts, the occasional divorce between two breweries. People called him the Glacier.
They did not say it to his face. Nobody said anything to his face, because his face said nothing back.
I joined Ashgrove on a Monday in September. I was thirty-three. For the previous eight years, I had been a vice principal at Fernhill Middle School. It is the only job on earth harder than hostage negotiation.
Hostages, at least, do not have parents. A recruiter had called me in March, out of nowhere, about a job I didn't remember applying for. I assumed it was luck.
Ashgrove occupied the fourteenth floor of a building made almost entirely of reflective glass. From the outside, it looked like a giant mirror that had been told to stand up straight. Inside, it smelled of espresso and quiet fear.
Elliot met me at the elevator. He wore a charcoal suit and a tie the exact gray of a filing cabinet. He shook my hand.
"Ms. Vance," he said. "Welcome to Ashgrove."
"You're shaking my hand."
"It's customary."
"You taught me to ride a bike. You held my hair when I threw up a funnel cake at the county fair."
"Human Resources," he said, without moving his face, "will show you to your desk."
Then he walked away.
The woman from Human Resources watched him go. Then she looked at me with an expression I recognized from parent-teacher conferences. It was the face of someone deciding whether you were dangerous.
"You're his sister?" she said.
"For thirty-three years."
"Does he ever—" She paused, searching for the word. "Is he ever different?"
"At Thanksgiving," I said, "he carves the turkey with a ruler."
My desk was in the analyst pod, a cluster of six workstations near the copy room. The person at the desk beside mine was a twenty-nine-year-old named Desmond Achebe. Everyone called him Dez. He had a tiny leather notebook in his breast pocket and a mechanical pencil behind his ear.
"Odds were three to one you'd quit by Friday," he said, before I had even sat down.
"Who set the odds?"
"I did." He tapped the notebook. "I set all the odds. Nobody bet on Friday, though, because the smart money's on week three."
He pointed across the floor at a whiteboard mounted beside the kitchen. At the top, someone had written THE BOARD in blue marker. Below it ran a list of propositions, each followed by odds and a column of initials.
Elevator 2 fixed before Halloween: 6–1.
Grant mentions football in Monday meeting: 1–20.
Someone microwaves fish again: even.
At the very bottom, in letters smaller and somehow more reverent, was this:
E. Vance seen laughing, any cause, by year end: 40–1.
Only one bet had been placed on it. The initials column did not show initials. It showed a name, written in neat block capitals: MR. ANANAS.
"Who's Mr. Ananas?" I asked.
"Nobody knows," Dez said, lowering his voice. "Fifty dollars in an envelope under my keyboard in March. Typed note, no fingerprints."
"You checked for fingerprints?"
"No. But it felt like there were none."
"That's a weird name."
"It's a weird bet. Forty to one, so two thousand dollars if it hits." He looked toward the corner office, where my brother sat motionless behind a glass wall, reading.
"It won't hit," Dez said. "Six years I've been here, and not a chuckle. I once saw him watch a man fall off a rolling chair. Nothing."
"Was the man okay?"
"The man was Grant. He was fine. Grant bounces."
Grant Holloway was the other senior partner in our practice. He was forty-five and had played one season of college football, which he discussed the way other people discuss a war. He came by my desk at ten-thirty and clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough that my coffee rippled.
"New recruit!" he said. "Welcome to the squad. You're the Glacier's sister, right? Must be like growing up with a refrigerator."
"He was a very warm refrigerator," I said.
Grant laughed, a big laugh built for locker rooms. "Here's the playbook. You find his weakness, you tell me first. I'll make it worth your while."
"He doesn't have one."
"Everybody's got one." He pointed at me with two fingers, like a coach calling a play. "Fourth quarter. It always comes out in the fourth quarter."
He walked away. Dez, without looking up from his screen, wrote something in his notebook.
"What was that?" I asked.
"He said 'playbook' before eleven," Dez said. "I had that at two to one."
At noon, the managing partner sent an email to the entire practice. Her name was Ruth Castellano. She was fifty-eight and did the newspaper crossword in pen every morning. According to Dez, she had once ended a merger dispute by asking each CEO for a seven-letter word meaning "stubborn."
Subject: Summit Weekend — Camp Tamarack — Attendance Expected
All,
The negotiation practice will spend the weekend of October 10 at Camp Tamarack on Loon Lake. Two teams. Friendly competition. A Field Day on Saturday and a bonfire to close.
Captains: Elliot Vance and Grant Holloway.
Bring sensible shoes. Bring a sense of humor, if you have one. Some of you will need to borrow.
R.C.
Under the email, a meeting invitation appeared on my calendar for three o'clock. It was from Ruth. The subject line read: Coffee. Six letters, starts with S.
I worked it out on the way to her office. Sister.
Ruth's office had a view of the river and a bookshelf of dictionaries. She poured coffee from a steel carafe and slid one cup across to me.
"I'll be direct," she said. "Have you heard of Dunmore Orchards?"
"The canned fruit people?"
"The largest independent fruit canner in the country. The CEO is Bertrand Szabo, sixty-one, who came over from Budapest with eleven dollars and a jar of plum jam."
"And he wants to sell?"
"To the right buyer, which is our client." She sipped. "Your brother has been negotiating for eight months. They are stuck."
"Stuck on price?"
"Stuck on Elliot." Ruth set the cup down. "At a dinner in June, Mr. Szabo told me he does not sign with a man he has never seen laugh."
I waited.
"A man who cannot laugh is hiding something," Ruth said. "That's how he put it. He does not buy fruit from people who hide the bruises."
I thought about that. "And Elliot has never laughed in front of him."
"Not in nine years, not in front of anyone at this firm." She looked at me over her glasses. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm telling you why there's a bonfire."
My brother found me at six, in the stairwell between the fourteenth and thirteenth floors. Nobody used the stairwell. Elliot used it because nobody else did.
He stood two steps above me, which he knew made him look like a statue of himself. He did not say hello.
"Pineapple," he said.
I had not heard him say that word in twenty years. It still worked. My shoulders went up all on their own.
When I was seven and he was fourteen, we had an arrangement. Elliot was ticklish. Not a little ticklish.
Catastrophically ticklish, along his ribs, in a way that turned a calm boy into a squealing bundle of elbows. I discovered this at age five and used it ruthlessly for two years. Then our mother sat us both down at the kitchen table and made us negotiate.
The result was the Pineapple Accords. Tickling was permitted only by mutual agreement. Either party could say "pineapple" at any time, and all hostilities ended immediately.
Violators lost dessert for a week. Elliot wrote it out in pencil. Mom signed as witness.
It was, I realize now, his first contract.
"The Accords are still in effect," he said. "Nobody here knows. Nobody will know."
"I wasn't going to tell anyone."
"Grant asked you."
"Grant asks everybody everything. He asked the coffee machine if it played ball."
Elliot almost reacted. Almost. Something happened near the left corner of his mouth and was immediately arrested.
"This weekend," he said, "people will want things from you. They'll think you're a shortcut. Don't be one."
"El." I used the name nobody else used. "Are you okay with me being here?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at his watch.
"I have a call," he said, and went up the stairs.
When I got back to my desk, Dez was waiting. He had a manila envelope in one hand and his notebook in the other. Behind him, the Board had a new line at the top, freshly written in red.
THE GLACIER'S WEAKNESS. Sealed guesses. $20 each. Revealed at Tamarack. Winner takes the pot.
There were already eleven sets of initials beneath it.
Dez put the envelope on my keyboard.
"You're the only person in this building who'd actually know," he said quietly. "So I'm opening a side market. Just for you."
"What's the side market?"
He flipped the notebook open and turned it so I could read the figure he'd written.
"Name your price," he said.
Up next: Loon Lake
Continue to Part 2 →