E.Godz

Chapter Eighteen

White clouds billowed out in all directions from the open-air patio beneath the awnings of the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. Passers-by exchanged nervous glances and sniffed the air, convinced that where there was so much smoke there had to be a fire of Hollywood disaster-movie proportions.

Then they sniffed the air a second time and drooled. Nothing was burning. The only scents on the early morning breeze were of heaping platters of freshly puffed-up beignets and oceans of chicory-laced coffee. Those white clouds weren't smoke; they were sugar.

Under the awning, at a table with a clear view of the sidewalk (under less cloudy conditions) Dov Godz sat at the epicenter of the sugar blast, leaned over, and offered his sister the use of his handkerchief.

"If I'd known you were going to react like that, I'd have phoned you," he said. His face, his hands, his hair and the front of his clothes were all covered with a thorough dusting of powdered sugar. It had rolled over him like a tidal wave when he'd told Peez the truth about Edwina's condition and his sister had responded by shouting, "WHAT?!" right across the plate of beignets that their waitress was just setting down between them.

Unfortunately, at the time, the waitress was also balancing a tray laden with many more beignet platters, intended for other tables. Peez's unexpected outburst took the poor woman by surprise. She gave a little yelp of dismay and tossed her tray into the air. When it hit the floor, powdered sugar reared up like the stem of a mushroom cloud and spread everywhere. (Thus the appearance of a four-alarm fire at the Cafe du Monde when it was really only a multiple beignet pileup on the interstate.)

"How did you expect me to react?" Peez countered, wiping her face with Dov's handkerchief. She too wore a light dusting of powdered sugar, though nowhere near so much as her brother. "First you show up on my doorstep—"

"You don't have a doorstep."

"All right, on the threshold of my hotel room, then. My first thought was that Mom had died and you wanted to break the news to me gently, in person."

"Which would have been very kind of me to do," Dov remarked. "Even if it wouldn't be the sort of thing you'd expect from me."

"Why wouldn't I?" Peez was genuinely puzzled.

"Well, it's been years and years since we've seen each other. I assumed it was your choice because you, uh, weren't all that fond of my company. Most people don't tend to hold high opinions of the folks they avoid."

"Dov, we've been avoiding each other." Peez reached out to pat her brother's hand. "We've both been stubborn and we've both been stupid. I've finally come to realize that. I'm not very proud of the person I was. You want to know what I really think of you?"

Dov pulled back just a hair and asked, "Is this going to hurt?"

"I think you're someone who is more than capable of kindness." It wasn't a lot, as tributes go, but it was sincere.

Just as well, Dov thought. If she'd started gushing over me, I wouldn't have trusted her for a Miami minute.

"You do?" he said.

"Of course I do! You know, Dov, I remember a lot more about our childhood than I used to. I've chosen to remember it, and about time, too! While I've been on the road, I've picked up a few new ways of looking at things. I used to do my best to forget all your positive traits because that might mean I'd have to admit that the problems in my life weren't all your fault."

"Same here." Dov scratched his head sheepishly. A miniature white cloud detached itself from his scalp and rained sweetened dandruff onto his shoulders. "That's the good thing about having a rival: You've always got someone to saddle with the blame for just about everything."

Peez nodded. She ran one finger around the rim of her coffee mug, chasing away tiny drifts of fallen sugar, and said: "When Mom first set this whole charade in motion, I wanted to beat you out of the company leadership because I thought we were enemies. Later on, I wasn't certain if I wanted the job myself, but I didn't want you to have it because I thought you didn't appreciate what E. Godz, Inc. was really all about. I never once thought to find you, to see if my assumptions about you were right or wrong."

"Same here twice," Dov said. "Well? Were you as wrong about me as I was about you?"

"Very wrong," she said. "Very wrong and very ashamed. We're family, Dov. Not enemies, not rivals, not strangers: family. We've had our differences—all families do— but we've made the mistake of letting them get out of hand."

"We had help," Dov said bitterly, recalling his dream. "Edwina. Maybe things never would have gotten so bad between us if she hadn't been playing games with us all those years."

"She's still playing games, according to what you just told me," Peez said. "Nasty, cruel games: telling us she's going to die soon, setting us up against each other again, making us compete for a business empire that she never had any intentions of giving up!"

"Oh, she's going to give it up, all right." Dov smiled while he drank his coffee.

"When? Years from now? Decades? You told me the doctor's report pegged her for dying at ninety, if then."

"How does tomorrow suit you?" Dov asked.

"Dov! You can't mean it."

"Can't mean—? Oh, I don't mean kill her. That would be bad corporate PR. What I've got in mind is this: Since she sent us out individually to gather enough support from the E. Godz, Inc. client base for one of us to take over the company after she's gone, we combine that support and use it to take over the company right now."

"Mmm. Tempting, tempting." Peez drummed her fingertips on the powdery white tabletop. "We'll have to plan this out carefully. If she's not sick, she's more than a match for the two of us. She's been in the magic game a whole lot longer than we have, remember."

"Yeah, but she's got one big weakness: She thinks that we're still a pair of snot-nosed little kids who'd never dream of challenging Mommy. She may have more experience than us, but we've got surprise on our side."

"Surprise and power." Peez licked her lips, though it was impossible to tell whether she did so because she could almost taste their ultimate victory over Edwina or because she could actually taste more of that blasted, omnipresent confectioner's sugar. "You do know how to tap into the client reserves?"

"Ummm ... maybe?" Dov flashed a smile at his sister, one that did not belong to his professional repertoire. It was the smile he'd always worn back in their earliest days together, a helpless little puppy-dog of a smile that simply said how much he needed his big sister to look out for him when he wasn't sure he had what it took to look out for himself.

Peez smiled back. "You don't have a clue, do you?" she said without malice. "Every person or group with the ability to raise the earth-power is like a storage battery. The tapping spell is like a set of jumper cables. The only difference is you can't invoke it unless you have the implicit consent of the storage battery to divert its power to your purposes. It's an easy spell; you'll get it on the first try. And then I'll want you to teach me some of yours."

"My pleasure."

"So, who have you got?"

"Got?"

"For batteries. You've been out there in the field same as me, courting the company's most important clients, trying to get them to promise their collective support to you as the potential head of E. Godz, Inc. Anyone who's given you his word has fulfilled the condition of implicit consent that the tapping spell requires. I know you've got Mr. Bones on your side already because he told me so."

"Same way I know that you've got Ray Rah and the Chicago group behind you," Dov said. "Who else?"

"Uhhh." Peez mouth twitched just a tad. "No one," she said in a small voice.

"No one?"

"Some of the people I saw wouldn't give me their support, and the others, well, I wasn't so sure that I wanted theirs. I never imagined I'd need their power to fight Mom or I wouldn't have been so picky." She shrugged. "Too late for regrets. What about the other groups backing you? Besides Mr. Bones, I mean."

"Uhhh."

Peez clapped her hands over her eyes. "Oh, Dov," she groaned.

"Hey, it's not my fault that Sam Turkey Feather wouldn't give me an answer while Mom's still alive! Can you blame him? And that guy out in L.A., the Reverend Everything—"

"Say no more. I felt the same way you did about him, at first, but he's not just a big phony out to skin the suckers."

"He's not?" Dov was reluctant to believe her. "Well, I wish I'd known that while I was out there. I might've swallowed my scruples and given him the hard sell."

"You did what you thought was right," Peez said. "We both did. Isn't it nice to know that even when we weren't getting along, neither one of us hated the other enough to want the company no matter what?"

"I guess so. But that still doesn't leave us with a lot of firepower to use on Mom." Dov drained his coffee mug. "What about that guy in Seattle? The sculptor?"

Peez turned so radish-red that the waitress hurried up unbidden with a glass of ice water. Peez took a big gulp, regained her self-control, and said: "He— Martin— He wasn't ready to make a commitment. A business commitment. What about Fiorella in Salem? She blew me off, so did she throw her support behind you?"

"To tell you the truth, Sis, we never got around to discussing that. As soon as she made me see what Mom was really up to, I forgot about everything else."

"In other words, we've got bupkis, or a reasonable facsimile thereof." Peez sighed, blowing sugar into new patterns on the table and her brother.

"Does this mean we just quit?" Dov asked. "After all she's put us through, we do nothing?"

"What can we do? Tell her we're wise to her and we won't play her little games any more? She'll just laugh and put her mind to creating new games."

Dov shook his head. "No," he said. "I'm not going to give up so easily. Like I said before, we still have one thing on our side that she can't counter. We'll just have to lay plans that rely more on surprise than power."

"Dov, I don't know about this. There's only so much that surprise can do."

Dov clasped Peez's hands firmly. "Peez, what's the worst that can happen? We make our move on Edwina and we fail. What's she going to do to us then? Kill us? I don't think so. Punish us? How? By sending us to our rooms with no supper?"

"She could throw us out of the company."

"Right. And that's the answer to my first question. Throwing us out of the company is the absolutely worst thing she can do to us. Know what? That's not so bad."

"It's not?" A glimmer of hope showed in Peez's eyes.

"Sis, if I say it's not bad, you better listen," Dov said, radiating confidence. "This is your baby brother talking, remember? The kid voted most likely to end up cleaning windshields or running for Congress? Without the company, what kind of a career can I hope for? I could fudge my resume from here to next January and it still wouldn't get me a job bussing tables at McDonald's. If I can risk the wrath of Edwina, you certainly can."

"I don't know." Peez looked away. "I don't exactly have a whole lot of highly marketable job skills either."

"Are you kidding me? You're brilliant, you're beautiful, you were born to organize, and you've got an inborn talent for management that most people would kill for!"

His words made her stare at him as if he'd just been dropped out of the belly of an alien mothership. "That's what you think of me?" she asked.

"Every word, good as gold." He crossed his heart with two fingers and held them up in a Boy Scout salute, though the closest he'd ever come to the Scouts was an ill- considered summertime flirtation with khaki shorts. "I saw how you were running the New York office. Granted, I was watching you because I was hoping to catch you screwing up, but I never could. That's how good you are." He sounded proud of her.

Peez stood up, leaned across the table, and planted a kiss on Dov's forehead before sitting back down. "Dov, if you can come up with a plan that can surprise Edwina half as much as you just surprised me, I'll be right behind you all the way. Got any ideas?"

"You know I do. But let's go get cleaned up a little first. I think we're starting to attract bees." He pushed his chair away from the table and snapped his fingers to summon the waitress. "Check, please!"

She had just returned with his credit card when Peez's cell phone rang. "Ugh! I thought I had that thing turned off," she said as she answered it. "I hate people who turn a restaurant into the world's biggest phone booth. I'll make this quick. Hello?"

"Hewwo, oo' mean ol' Peezie-pie," a quavery little voice assailed her ear. "Why oo' goes away an' weaves um's Teddy Tumtum all by um's self? What has Peezie-pie's naughty brovver Dov been saying 'bout Teddy Tumtum? Oo' much too smart to beweev all the lies he gonna tell oo'. Lots an' lots an' lots of lies, lies, lies! Oo' comin' back soon, 'cause oo' doesn't wanna lose um's onwy fwend inna whole wide world, isn't dat wight? Teddy Tumtum misses his ickle Peezie-pie, yes he does!"

"How dare you call me like this?" Peez snapped. "You're a fine one to talk about lies! I told you, it's all over between us. You used me! You pretended to love me, you led me to love you, and then you betrayed me! Maybe you think you can sweet talk your way back into my heart, play me for a fool again. Ha! I'd like to see you try, if only so I could have the satisfaction of telling you to go to hell all over again! All those years together meant nothing to you. All that time I thought you were devoted to me when you were really hers. Well, no more; she can have you. Get off my phone and get out of my life because we are through!"

Like her brother before her, Peez regretted that you couldn't slam the receiver of a cell phone, so she did the next best thing, throwing it to the ground and stamping down on it so viciously that it shattered.

Throughout the Cafe du Monde, every woman and a fair number of the men present broke into spontaneous applause as she stormed out, with Dov hurrying after, trailing little puffs of sugar as they ran.