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blandly.
    “The Kunstler woman—if that’s even her real name.”
    “I don’t know. Where did you see her last? Isn’t she working for you?”
    “Apparently not. She stole half a million dollars from us, bribed a public official, and has since disappeared. It will take six months for us to clean up the damage she’s caused.”
    He sighed. “It is getting hard to find good help these days.”
    Callie let herself get angry. “She was a cop, for God’s sake!”
    “She was many things, Contessa. ‘Cop’ was the least of them.”
    “She was working for you, too, Matteo.”
    “But only in an advisory capacity.”
    “And if that came out in court …”
    “It would hurt you more than me.”
    Callie realized that was the truth. She had no leverage against the man.
    “Do you want me to send you another executive? One a bit more discreet?”
    “Oh, no, Uncle. Please, no!”
    “And if I should insist?”
    Almost no leverage. She thought of her nephew Brandon. “Then he or she might disappear after the first job interview,” she said quietly.
    “I understand. Then you shall never see him—or her.” He hung up without the usual courtesy of ciao, buona notte, or a domani. That left Callie to ponder his last statement, which could be taken either of two ways.

3. Aches and Pains
    The apartment that Callie Praxis and her daughter had moved into came with a food-grade three-dee printer in the kitchen. Callie had never tried it, or not for anything more complicated than cornflakes on the one morning they ran out. First, because she was never much of a cook and figured her skills wouldn’t improve by programming a machine. Second, because she didn’t have all the necessary cartridges. The ones labeled malt fiber, corn syrup, and fructose had already been loaded, and she guessed the previous tenant liked cornflakes, too.
    Of course, she had used hardware printers—those fed by cartridges of polymers, metalized epoxies, colored dyes, and lacquer finishes—plenty of times before, both at work and at home. They were wonderful for making on the fly objects that tended to get lost at the bottom of drawers—a metric socket wrench when you needed it, pieces of the Lego set that had gone missing, and now and then a hair clip. The cartridges were always at hand, and the programmed patterns were easily available online.
    By now Callie had decided that she and her daughter were eating way too much takeout. Since she had the machine, she might as well try it. But she didn’t want to jeopardize a complete meal by screwing up with something complicated and involuted, like a casserole or a steak. She felt adventurous enough to leave dessert to the machine, because it was the part of a meal she could field with ice cream from the freezer if something went disastrously wrong.
    Callie decided on a lemon meringue pie, because it was made in simple layers and shouldn’t be too taxing. Pie was also really hard to make from scratch, with all those separate operations for the crust, filling, and topping. So she downloaded the program, listed out the necessary cartridges—gluten paste, starch, unsaturated lipids, gelatin, citrus oil, albumen, and more fructose—and brought them home with the rest of the meal to be cooked in the old-fashioned way. While she was boiling the pasta and heating packets of Bolognese sauce for their dinner, she loaded the cartridges and punched in the program.
    When it came time for dessert, she brought out the finished pie. Rafaella cooed appreciatively. And, in fact, it looked good: the crust around the edges was properly flaky, and the puffs of meringue were brown on top shading to white lower down. It cut cleanly, and bits of crust even fell off the fork. But it was not a complete success. The crust and the lemon filling tasted okay, not too soggy, not too oily, if a bit bland. But the meringue—because of those convoluted swirls, or so Callie guessed—was crunchy all the way through instead of just