CHAPTER
6
HANCOCK HAD OFFERED TO DRIVE Devine home, probably just to see where he lived. Devine accepted and a few minutes later he climbed out of the car in front of the white two-story brick town house with a one-car detached garage that was part of a small community of like structures. It was not poor, it was not rich. And neither was it just right.
“Nice place,” said Hancock.
“It’s the only thing I could really afford this close in that had trees and some grass.”
“You think this is close in?”
“Where do you commute in from?”
Hancock smiled and said, “Trenton.”
“I rest my case, and I’m not even a lawyer.”
“If I need to follow up on stuff?”
“You know where I live and work. I’m easy to find. I’m not going anywhere unless Cowl and Comely decides to pull my plug. If so, you can catch me at the unemployment office.”
Hancock drove off in his ratty motor pool coffee-and-nicotine ride. Black smoke poured out of the tailpipe and coated the white brick, and Devine, with a nice, cozy blanket of carcinogens.
Coughing, he unlocked the door and walked in. The front room held one of his three roommates, the big-bellied Will Valentine. He worked from home and was employed as a white-hatter, a person hired by tech firms and banks and other industries to try to hack through their security systems. They had become friends, and Valentine had even taught Devine some ingenious ways to electronically sneak into various databases.
He was also Russian, but had changed his name to something very American. He had shown Devine his passport. His real name was long and unpronounceable, at least for Devine. Lots of consonants strung together had never been his thing.
“I get many more girls with American name,” Valentine had explained. “But I tell clients truth, that I am Russian. They know we are best at hacking. You wait and see; I will get rich. I fuckin’ lo-o-ove capitalism. And I love your women.”
Devine never could tell if the guy knew he was playing a Hollywood version of a Russian now free in America, or if he really was like that.
Valentine was now snoring softly on the sofa, mumbling in his native language. To Devine, spoken Russian always sounded menacing. As though the spoken words were uniformly And now, you will die horribly, comrade.
Valentine’s laptop was perched on his substantial gut and was being lifted into the air with each inhale and dipping with every exhale. The TV was on but muted. It looked to be one of those limited series that moved at the speed of light, just begging to be binged. An open and empty Domino’s pizza box was on the carpet next to the couch. Twin empty bottles of Michelob rested next to it. The Russian was definitely an American in diet now.
Devine went over and touched the open laptop. Its screen came to life, but didn’t reveal its treasure box of data. A large dragon came on instead and breathed a wall of fire at the attempted digital trespassing.
Cute, thought Devine. He peered into the dining room, which held not a stick of furniture but only a human being. Another roommate, a Black woman named Helen Speers, was on a mat in the middle of the green carpet doing yoga. She was barefoot and performing a downward dog pose in a tight-fitting Lycra one-piece. Speers had just graduated from law school at NYU and was almost never home before Devine was. She was petite and lithe and lovely. And one day she would be in court righteously carving people up with the law.
“Early night?” he said.
Speers had AirPods in. She nodded and said between deep yoga breaths, “Got stood up on a drink in SoHo, if you can believe that. I’m releasing endorphins in retaliation.”
“No, I can’t believe that,” he replied, but she had moved on to child’s pose and wasn’t listening.
He walked up the stairs to the second floor. His third and final roommate, Jill Tapshaw, was a truly brilliant person who had started her own online dating company, known as Hummingbird. He marveled at her guts and drive and brain operating on a different plane from the rest of the world. While Valentine and Speers had come to live here about the same time Devine had, Tapshaw had been here only a little over four months, but she was friendly and outgoing, and he had gotten to know her.
Her company was a true start-up because she ran it from her bedroom and also from a two-room office in a strip mall in downtown Mount Kisco, about a half mile from here. She had five full-time employees other than herself and about three dozen independent contractors working remotely, she’d told him. They specialized in bringing together people fearful of reaching out on their own, or of enduring the usual online dating experience. It was a need and she had filled it. Tapshaw had told Devine the site already had millions of users and over a hundred thousand paid subscribers from all over the world.
“And we’re now adding tens of thousands of new users a day. We raised half a million in our Round A and five million in our B a year later. I’m projecting a home run for a Round C, at five times that, at a great valuation. Next, we tack on some tasteful piggyback ads and banner bucks for peripheral revenue streams. With enough capital I can dominate my space. And then we execute different but compatible product silos under separate corporate entities, all under Hummingbird’s umbrella brand, to provide a sort of dating-to-grave experience. You want to invest? It’s still relatively cheap. Last chance. Friends and family and roommate discount.”
Cowl and Comely paid shit to the Burners. They just did their eighty- to ninety-hour grunt workweeks in the hopes of the payoff at the end. Most of Devine’s money went for rent and the ride in and out. And then there was that other thing called food.
But nevertheless, though he legally wasn’t a qualified investor under the securities laws, he’d bought a thousand bucks’ worth of stock in the little bird that flitted around flowers sucking up nectar and paying it forward. Which was where she had gotten the name, Tapshaw had told him. “You can spend a hundred grand on a branding firm to come up with horseshit and then focus-group the hell out of it for another hundred grand, or you can do it on your own for free.”
He tapped on her bedroom door and called out her name.
“Getting ready to Zoom with a Taiwanese venture capital group,” Tapshaw’s voice barked. “Their birth rate is plummeting. Is it urgent? Is the place on fire? Are you bleeding to death, Travis?”