“Like what?” Angel asked around a mouthful of champagne.
Poe exchanged careful looks with Lancelot. “Funding. Changes to the, um, bylaws.”
Lancelot shrugged. “We had to do some art restoration work last year, and we had to get permission to pay for that.”
One of the other knights cracked up. “Yeah. ‘Art restoration.’ You put a football through an oil painting, Lance.”
He blushed and ducked his head.
All of the early 19th century brothers were similarly well heeled, and the Tobias Trust grew in wealth. They invested in a chunk of prime campus real estate, built themselves a massive stone tomb, and filled it with a wealth of antiques, artwork, curiosities, and college knickknacks crooked from every other organization at Eli.
Aside from the property on High Street, the Tobias Trust (a tax-free non-profit, apparently) owned a lovely little set of suites at the Eli Club in midtown Manhattan and a private island down south, where the members went on retreats.
“How much is the trust worth?” Soze asked. I was quickly learning that Josh could always be counted on to get to the meat of any equation.
Poe quoted a number teetering on eight figures.
Personally? I was impressed, but a quick glance around the room showed a mixed bag of reactions. Angel looked like her last sip of champagne had gone to vinegar, and Soze appeared to be biting the inside of his cheek.
“Is that not…enough?” Lucky asked, speaking up for the first time. Small wonder. Her similarly large income had probably paid for a fleet of churches. But it most likely didn’t equal Angel’s trust fund.
Poe backpedaled. “Our actual operating budget’s pretty large, so the cash value of the trust itself is not indicative—”
“We’ve got plenty of money,” a patriarch interrupted, as if the discussion was closed.
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Are we still on a need-to-know basis?” I asked. “Even now that we’ve been initiated? Secrets within secrets?”
“Wrapped in riddles buried in enigmas, babe,” Lancelot added, lifting his champagne glass in an impromptu toast.
“Look, Ms. Haskel—” the patriarch said, then bit his lip suddenly, his reproach forgotten. He dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed two dollars to Poe.
“Barbarian names,” Poe explained as he stuffed the money into the pocket of his robe. “Penalties go into our personal till.”
“Two down, nine million to go,” Soze said.
The point of this whole barbarian business was to separate our society lives from everything else. Inside the tomb and during official society events outside the tomb (like our lessons in the mansion), we used society names for each other, and society terms for various objects and events. We swore by Persephone rather than our professed religious figures. Time even ran differently; the Digger clocks were set five minutes ahead of the outside world and Diggers counted years from the time of the society’s inception. Anything that happened in the normal world, even if it happened to society members, was referred to as “barbarian matters.”
The party broke up soon afterward (and without any further elucidation on our financial standing, much to the new taps’ chagrin), and we followed the seniors into the atrium, where there was an indoor swimming pool—a real one this time. I trailed along at a safe distance and watched them strip to their skivvies and splash around in the heated water. Mist rose from the surface and swirled toward the glass ceiling, and their shrieks and shouts echoed off the stone walls. My brothers, screaming their heads off in see-through BVDs and—oh, Lord, Clarissa!—lacy white thongs.
I collapsed on a cushioned lounge chair and poured myself another glass of champagne from the near-empty bottle of Veuve Cliquot I’d been toting around. My mind could not absorb the events of this evening. The crazy initiation, the new class of taps, the tour of the tomb, the history, the songs, the protocol—it was like cramming for a history exam and a lab practical all at once. There was no way I’d remember all the formulas, and they’d already outlawed crib sheets. There had been dozens of secret passwords and combinations and hiding places and handshakes—yes, we learned a secret handshake, too, can you believe it?
This is how it goes:
OFFICIAL ROSE & GRAVE SECRET HANDSHAKE
Step One: Giver extends hand as if giving a regular handshake, but before clutching, tucks index finger underneath and presses it against the other guy’s palm. That’s how you tell them you are in.
Step Two: Receiver taps thrice, once, and twice on the giver’s ring, middle, and index finger knuckles, respectively. That’s how you make sure you’ve separated a Rose & Grave member from some other organization that also uses the palm-tickle trick.
Apparently, it’s derived from the Templars, or the Masons, or someone, and so a lot of other secret societies do similar things.
“Everyone copies us,” Lancelot had said with his signature grin.
“Why don’t you just do the part that’s specifically Rose & Grave?” I had asked, and immediately regretted it, as I saw the other taps’ eyes raise heavenward. Every time I opened my mouth, it seemed, I got myself in trouble.
Only Lancelot seemed immune to the annoyance. “Because, Bugaboo, some of these guys are eighty, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“We’ve been using the shake for centuries,” another Digger explained. “And we aren’t about to change just because some idiots caught on and decided to copy.”
I leaned back in my chair and practiced the secret handshake on myself, doing my best to make it look as subtle and unobtrusive as possible, so that nosy onlookers wouldn’t notice all the fancy fingerwork. It was trickier than it looked, especially given the fact that one of my hands was upside down.
Maybe there was someone else around here to practice with. I looked up, and sure enough, Jenny Santos was sitting by herself again, watching the swimmers with a mixture of amusement and confusion on her face. She was the only one who hadn’t been drinking tonight. In fact, of all the taps, she’d been acting the most aloof. Maybe it was time to break the ice.
“Don’t you like swimming, either?” I asked, sitting down on the end of her chaise lounge.
She snapped out of her reverie. “I love it. But I’m not taking my clothes off.”
I checked out the various swimmers. And their underpants. Good point. “Want to try the secret handshake?”
I stuck out my hand and she proceeded to do the handshake with such ease and casual skill that my mouth dropped open. “Wow, how did you do that? Did you already know it?”
Jenny shrugged. “No.”
Maybe it was a computer dork thing. Like she was so skillful at manipulating the keyboard, flitting her way around the finger work of a secret handshake was no problem. I felt around for another conversation topic, because it didn’t seem like Jennifer here was going to introduce any. “So I hear you’re a big-time computer genius. What did you invent?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m a smart girl. Try me.” At least try with more than two words, honey.
She sighed, loudly, as if she was tired of explaining it. “I wrote the kernel for a desktop search program that avoids the repeating context search polling thread queries that invalidate the translation lookaside buffers and avoids the bogdown of CPU resources. It got picked up by a software company, and they integrated it into their new operating system.”
Okay, maybe I’m not that smart. But I’m sure I could understand the monetary part. “And they paid you a pile of money for it?”
“Not exactly. They didn’t know how much they would like it until they started using it, so they made the mistake of paying me by commission instead of buying the program outright.”
“That’s awesome! So now you get a commission for every copy of their new operating system?”