House on Fire

58

Sukie quickly went upstairs and packed a bag. I could hear scattered shouts of the protesters outside. A couple of organized chants: “Blood money! Blood money!”

She had a brief chat with her editor, who was staying there and working into the night. I grabbed her bag, and we went back out to the yard. I’d decided it was unsafe or at least unwise for her to leave via the front door. That was where the protesters were waiting for her. She said there was a way out through the back — probably the way the brick-throwing fat man had gotten in in the first place.

We crossed the community garden and went through a side gate on to Bleecker Street and flagged down a cab.

My friend’s pied-à-terre was a one-bedroom on Central Park South, a high floor in a tower building. It had an amazing view of Central Park, spread out before you like a diorama, like a perfect little toy model. A big dark rectangle bordered by the lights of Fifth Avenue on the right and Central Park West on the left. A breathtaking sight.

When I emerged from the bathroom, I found Sukie sitting on the couch by the view of the park, weeping. She looked small and vulnerable curled up that way.

I came near and said, “Everything okay?” even though everything clearly wasn’t okay.

After a beat she took a hand from her face.

“They don’t know... They don’t know that I’m fighting alongside them, that I’m fighting for them. They don’t know.”

“Not fair.”

“You want to protest someone, go to Kimball Hall. Go to Chappaqua.”

“Maybe they don’t know where Megan lives,” I said, sitting on the couch next to her.

“She’s had some protests in front of her house. We’ve all been targeted. Everyone but Cameron, because he just flits around so much, he doesn’t really have a fixed—” Sukie started shaking. “Oh, God, I think it’s just hitting me.”

“I know.”

“I could have been burned alive. I was totally within range.”

That was true, although I didn’t confirm it. If I hadn’t gotten to the fat man in time, he would have flung flaming gasoline at her.

She said, “I’m — Jesus, is no place safe for me?”

“You’re safe,” I said. Because she was safe, at the moment. I wanted to say, I’ll keep you safe, but I knew I couldn’t promise that.

She turned and put her arms around me, embracing me tightly. “Oh, God,” she said. I could feel her hot breath on my neck. “This whole time I’ve been feeling so alone in this. But now — I don’t know, I don’t feel so alone. It’s like... I guess I feel you’re in it with me.”

She moved her face in close and kissed me on the lips. I was surprised, but I responded. My heart began to thud. She kissed hungrily. I could smell her hair, something lavender and soapy.

There was something so exciting about how carnal she was — that she’d revealed herself to be. It was like she’d been unleashed.

When we were showering together afterward, she said — and I could tell she’d been waiting to say it — “Do you sleep with all your clients?”

I laughed. I thought of my last client, hangdog Mort Vallison.

“Seriously, do you?”

“It’s not billable time, don’t worry.”

She lightly slapped my chest, laughed, and said, “You bill in increments of an hour?”

Then she noticed the ugly scar on my right thigh that started just above the knee and twisted toward my groin. She traced it with a finger — “Can I?” — and said, “I’m guessing there’s a story.”

For a quick moment I thought of what Sean had once said to me. He had been smoking a joint. “We get wounded, and we heal,” he had said. “The wound repairs itself, right? But we’re not the same. We take our scars with us. They make us who we are. And if we can’t accept our scars, we haven’t really healed.”

But to Sukie, I said only, “A couple of bullet wounds and related damage. Happened a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

I quickly recounted the incident in Afghanistan, made it sound as uninteresting as possible. I’m not very enthusiastic about telling war stories. When we were toweling each other off, I said, “You want to get some dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Also, I want to talk to Hayden.”

“Why?”

I’d been thinking of the note that Maggie had scrawled— “HK—>$$$?” Something about Hayden and money, right, but what did it refer to? I said, “I want to rule her out.”

She got dressed in her jeans and a T-shirt and then grabbed her phone and looked at the time. “Knowing Hayden, she’s probably in a rehearsal. Let me text her.”

Her sister texted right back, and we had a date to see her in an hour.

The bar where we were meeting Hayden was located in a brownstone on West Forty-sixth Street, upstairs from a well-known theater watering hole. It had a name but no sign. No phone number. Tourists did not know about this place, and no New York theatergoer would ever find it. You had to know about it. As a result, it was full of famous Broadway types — stars, directors, producers, and so on. And the occasional tech billionaire.

At the top of the stairs the heavy blue curtains parted and I saw a dark bar with black-and-white photos on the wall, of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. But it was otherwise unadorned, undecorated, unchic, which of course made it chic.

Hayden was there, the center of a crowd. She was wearing black jeans and boots and a neatly pressed denim shirt, like she had been the last time I saw her. Branding, I figured. She was pressing cheeks with George Takei, Sandra Oh, B. D. Wong, and a couple of very good-looking actors from the movie Crazy Rich Asians. Maybe they were in her production of Suddenly Last Summer. Or maybe they were invited guests.

She saw us but kept chatting with people for another couple of minutes while we stood and waited. We sat at a table and ordered drinks — there was no cocktail menu. I got a vodka martini, and Sukie got a Negroni. Finally, Hayden came over, said, “Sorry, it’s first preview — wait, what happened to you?” She kissed her older sister. “What the hell happened?”

“I’ll tell you in a second. You remember Nick, right?”

She smiled perfunctorily at me and said, “You’re the one who’s in the dark arts, right? McKinsey?”

“That’s right. Nick Brown.”

Sukie told her about the brick-throwing and, worse, the guy with the Molotov cocktail. She cried as she relived it. Hayden looked terrified. I could see her realizing that the protests against her family just got real. I knew Hayden lived with her partner, a playwright who was semi-famous for having very long-term writer’s block, in a huge loft in the West Village that looked out over the Hudson River. “Taylor and I have decent security in our building at home,” she said, and then her voice got hushed. “But what if they — decide to target my theaters?”

“Not that I know anything about it, but if it were me, I’d be adding to my personal security detail,” I said.

“I don’t have a security detail.”

“You might want to think about getting one, for the time being. And you might want to change the name of your production company. But what do I know?”

Sukie excused herself, as we’d previously agreed on, and then Hayden said to me, marveling, “So you took down this Molotov cocktail guy?”

“He was a big target,” I said. “Big fat target. Didn’t require Superman.”

She smiled.

I said, “So let me ask you something. Why aren’t you Scott Rudin? Why aren’t you Jordan Roth? Why aren’t you Fred Zollo?” I named some big, successful Broadway producers whose names I knew from boning up in the last couple of days. People who did what she did but had a lot more success and visibility.

I couldn’t interrogate her, because as far as she was concerned, I was just Sukie’s boyfriend. Instead, I was a little aggressive. Right away, I saw that she wasn’t expecting that. She was expecting deference. But she didn’t wince or snap something back at me. She took a drink of her Scotch.

I thought of that scrawled note on Maggie’s yellow pad: HK—> $$$? Meaning something about Hayden and money, but what?

“I can’t finance all this myself,” she said. “You hit a bit of a tender spot there, Nick.”

“How so?”

“I mean, it’s kind of an unfair comparison. Look at Jordan — and I love the guy, he’s so talented — but we’re talking deep pockets. His father is just a lot more generous than mine is. I kind of feel — well, first-world problems, right? — I mean, the things I’ve identified and had to miss out on! I think of the projects I developed off-Broadway that got taken away from me.” She put her hand on my forearm. “You know, Nick, I would love to be in a position where I don’t have to say no when I want to say yes. To not be constrained. I’m not my brother Paul. I’m not writing imaginary books about imaginary subjects, you know?”

That was not a dig I’d expected. But maybe she was just the blunt sort. I nodded, smiled. Made a mental note that I should also find a way to talk to Paul, up in Cambridge, Mass., and soon.

“I mean, this is real,” she said. “It’s theater, but it’s real. It’s as real as it gets.” She took her hand off my forearm, took another big sip of her Scotch. “Sorry, just a tender spot. I’m not a complainer.”

“Why do you think your dad won’t open the floodgates a little?”

“Because of Big Sis. Megan.” She said it liltingly, sarcastically.

“How so?” I remembered Hayden and Megan had pointedly avoided each other at their father’s birthday dinner.

“Because she and Paul consider what I do a hobby, you got it? Let me give you an example — and I’m trusting you here, Nick, because you’re with Sukie, so you gotta be okay. Megan once came to see a staged version of Shoah that I produced at the Long Wharf in New Haven, okay? And you want to know what she said afterward? She said, ‘Kind of a bummer, no?’ This is the type of sensitive soul we’re talking about.”

I sort of got what she meant. Megan didn’t like the downbeat ending of a play about... the Holocaust. “So you would have received more support from Conrad if she hadn’t been pouring poison in his ear?”

“Exactly.”

“That makes sense,” I said, and then I pushed further. “But Cameron doesn’t do that, does he?”

She shook her head. “I mean, Cam’s a bit of a lost soul. Never found his way, like the rest of us have. It’s like there’s something broken inside him that never got fixed. I’ve always thought of him as, like, the extra, the understudy. Waiting for a turn that may never come.”

“I see. And as long as we’re speaking frankly, I wonder how closely you guys have looked into Natalya’s background.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “You’re asking a very pointed question. We’re concerned about it. I’m concerned about it.”

I nodded. “I work with a lot of venture capitalists,” I said, “and one of the most important things they do is due diligence. You’re going to invest your fund’s money, you want to get to know the people you’re investing in. You fly over, you kick the tires, you talk to people, you check things out. I’m sure you do the same thing in the talent business.”

“Sure.”

“If your eighty-year-old father’s not going to do it, one of you should. Hire someone to check her out. Get it done.”

“You want to know what I wonder about,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her over the din in the bar. “Not ‘Is she a gold digger?’ — that’s obvious. And common. No, I’m wondering if she’s connected to some Russian oligarch, you know?”

“It’s possible.”

“I’m not saying she is. She could just be a gold digger with a heart of gold, right?”

“Where is she these days?”

“Oh, my God, it’s the Westminster Dog Show, you didn’t know that? She does not miss it. Why do you ask?”

Someone approached — a slender woman in her sixties with dark circles under her eyes — and said, “Are you Hayden Kimball?”

Hayden turned. “Who wants to know?”

The woman said, “Someone told me you’re Hayden.”

“That’s right. And you are?”

The woman hissed, “Murderer!” She grabbed a glass of ice water from the table and dumped it on Hayden’s head. “You killed my son!”

Hayden yelped, her hair wet and scraggly, water streaming down her face and blotching her shirt, and the woman fast-walked away. Her expression evolved from terrified to furious, but when I spotted Sukie across the room, she appeared to be suppressing a laugh.