Chapter 379 — The Price Didn’t Matter I

Nine days into the break, James was standing in a Porsche showroom on the south side of Dublin, and nobody in it was pretending very well.

The salesman had known who he was before he got his hand out. He said "Mr Ganner" with the slight lift of somebody who had practised not making a thing of it, and then he made a thing of it anyway by walking them past three cars to the one James had come to see without being told which one that was.

Two staff at the far desk kept finding reasons to look up. A young lad by the coffee machine had his phone half raised until the woman with him put her hand on his wrist and pushed it down again, without looking at him, like she had done it before.

The floor was polished so hard that every car stood on its own reflection. There was music somewhere, low enough that James could not have said what it was. The whole place smelled of leather and new plastic and the kind of air that had been cleaned on purpose.

The last place he had spent this kind of money was Guild Zero's armoury. That had smelled of oil and sweat, and Ronan had been shouting about the straps.

"You've done your homework," said Maeve.

He had. He had done it for a week, in bed at night with the light off, and he had come in already knowing.

He stopped beside the Taycan Turbo S and pulled the specification up on his phone one more time. It was the Irish price, before options.

**€230,974.**

He waited for it to hit him somewhere physical. The stomach, maybe, or the back of the neck. Two years ago a number with that many digits would have been a joke you told somebody on the bus.

He had read the report in Maeve's car park, though. The number on the screen in front of him would not even make a dent in it.

Nothing happened. That bothered him more than the price.

Maeve was watching his face. She took the silence the wrong way.

"There's the base Taycan," she said, nodding at the next car down. "Or the 4S. It's a good bit less and you won't notice the difference unless you're trying to—"

"It's not the price."

She looked at him for about a second. Then she understood, and she smiled in a way he did not enjoy at all.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, James."

"Don't."

"You've just found out what money's for. In a car showroom. I want to remember where I was."

"You brought me here."

"Because you were going to scroll listings until you died."

"I don't need coaching on how to spend my own money."

"Clearly you do."

The salesman had developed a sudden interest in a brochure. James turned to him.

"Can I drive it?"

---

The demonstration car was outside under the canopy, dark grey and so clean the rain beaded on it and sat there.

James got in and pressed start, and nothing happened.

Then he saw the dash had lit up, and understood it had. There had been no turn of the engine and no shake through the seat, only a soft chime and a screen waking.

He pulled out onto the road like he was driving his own car, carefully, and then the salesman in the back said "Whenever you're ready, there's a clear stretch coming," and on the clear stretch James pushed his foot down.

The seat came into his back and kept coming.

There was no roar to tell him how fast he was going. The tyres got louder on the wet road, and that was all. The cabin stayed exactly as quiet as it had been at a standstill, while the numbers on the dash went past motorway speed before he had finished breathing in.

Maeve laughed out loud beside him.

James eased off. He did it on instinct, the way he would have pulled back from an edge. Years of ordinary cars had not taught his body what to do with that.

"You lifted," said Maeve.

"I did."

"You can kill a Steward but you lifted."

"The Steward made noise."

He drove for another twenty minutes. Somewhere in there he stopped treating the car like a ride at a fair and started paying attention to whether he liked being inside it. He liked the seat. He liked how quiet it was, and that he could hear Maeve without either of them raising their voice. He liked that it went exactly where he pointed it.

"Are you going to spend three days pretending to compare it with something else?" said Maeve.

He indicated, and turned back toward the dealership.

---

He did not finance it, and he did not haggle over a few thousand.

He sat at the salesman's desk and picked the colour and the wheels and the interior, and said no to two options and yes to one, and the salesman typed it all in. The exact car he had chosen was not sitting in a yard anywhere in Ireland, so collection would be the following week.

Then there was a payment to approve.

The figure on his banking app was bigger than any sum that had ever controlled his life, the kind of sums that had once decided what got paid that month and what waited. He looked at it for a second and pressed approve.

The app went back to his balance afterward. He looked at that too. It still looked absurd.

The salesman's face did something small when the confirmation came through, a professional slip that he corrected almost at once. Across the floor, the two staff at the far desk had stopped pretending to do anything else.

The lad by the coffee machine came over then, with the woman behind him looking mortified. He waited until James was standing up before he asked, which James gave him credit for.

"Sorry. Could I just—"

"Go on."

One photo. The lad said thanks three times, and the woman steered him out of the door.

Outside on the forecourt, Maeve buttoned her coat.

"You've just spent over two hundred thousand euro before lunch."

James checked his phone. "It's quarter past one."

"So?"

"So technically it's after lunch."

---

"What are you doing now?" said Maeve, in the car.

His old car. It smelled of the idea of pine.

James opened his mouth and found he did not have anything to put in it.

He knew how to train. He knew how to prepare, how to climb, how to sit in a dark room going through footage frame by frame, and how to run a guild. He did not know what you did with a Tuesday afternoon that nobody had booked.

"I'll go in to the guild for an hour."

"No you won't."

"Just to—"

"No."

She put her belt on. "Town. You're going to buy clothes, because that jacket's older than our guild."

---

It went the way Maeve had planned it, which was the way most things went.

She took him through three shops on Grafton Street and the lanes off it, sent him into changing rooms with armfuls of things he would not have picked up, and threw out anything she thought made him look like a substitute teacher. He stood under the warm lights of a mirror in a coat that actually fit across the shoulders, and did not hate it.

In the first shop he turned every tag over before he decided whether he liked the thing it was hanging off. He did it without thinking, the way his hand went for his weapon at a sound behind him.

By the third shop he had his hand on a jumper, and he caught it halfway to the label and stopped.

He left the label where it was. He liked the jumper, so he bought it.

He found his mother something on the way back to the car. It was a proper frying pan, heavy, with a lid. The one she had used for onions every evening of his life had lost its non-stick years ago, and she had refused to replace it, because it still technically fried things.

For Nyra, he bought the headphones she had been posting links to in the family chat for weeks. She had tagged him in them twice, with a sad face.

"And Alice?" said Maeve.

"I've no idea what you buy a Fallen Angel."

"That's cowardice."

"It's a fact."

"It's cowardice dressed as a fact."

"Then you solve it."

Maeve looked like she was going to, which worried him more.

---

They had a late lunch in a place off Merrion Square with white tablecloths and a waiter who poured the water. Five years ago James would have walked past it and assumed it was for somebody else.

When the bill came he saw the number and paid it. By the time he had put his card back in his wallet he had forgotten what it was, because Maeve was halfway through telling him about the guild.

"Team One cleared another one on Thursday. Clean. Ronan says the caller didn't even look at him once."

"Which floor did—"

"And Team Two pulled their attempt. Their healer went over on her ankle in training on Tuesday, and Cillian asked them what they wanted to do, and they decided themselves to wait a week."

"Did they rebook? Because if the healer's out, the slot—"

He stopped.

Maeve kept talking about something else.

James sat back with his coffee. Ronan and Cillian had sat ten people down, and those people were making decisions about their own lives that were correct. He had not been in the building for any of it. Nobody had rung him.

He had expected that to sting a little. It didn't. He felt lighter.

Maeve did not say anything about him stopping. She was already on to something about a supplier.