Need You Now

4

I emerged from the subway in TriBeca, a few blocks from my apartment. The northbound train would have taken me to the Midtown office, but word was probably out that I was officially the first FA to get slapped down by Joe Barber, and the last thing I needed was to return to work with the burn marks of muzzle blast on my neck, as if I’d spent the lunch hour trying to shoot myself-and missed. Talk about unbearable.

“Hey, it’s Patrick Paradeplatz, Super FA.”

“Really, dude, suicide hasn’t been the Wall Street way since 1929. Now we resign in disgrace and go buy a vineyard.”

I was making light of it, but I was pretty shaken. I stopped on the sidewalk to examine my neck and lower jaw in a plate glass window. Nothing serious, but it was plenty ugly-a red, black, and purple combination of a bruise, a burn, and a scrape. Somewhere in my closet was one of those black mock turtlenecks that Steve Jobs had made acceptable, if not exactly fashionable. That was just what the doctor ordered, at least until I decided what to do. It would have been easy to lose all perspective, and I reminded myself that people got assaulted at gunpoint every day in New York. Some of those victims were close friends of mine. It wasn’t fun, but it was important to keep your wits about you. The most troubling part was that I’d been warned not to contact the police, and this had the feel of something that was bound to get bigger. The trick was to figure out who was in the best position to help me.

It was chilly in the shadows of Tribeca’s iron-facade architecture of another century, and after a brush with death and a ride on the subway, the fresh air felt good on my face. The Irish immigrants who built the Romanesque Revival-style gem near the Franklin Street subway station could hardly have imagined that, someday, a four-bedroom apartment there would go for 12 million bucks-no extra charge for the quaint cobblestone street. Hell, it had even given my boss sticker shock. My much smaller condo was down the street. I passed a flower shop and a Jewish bakery on the way. Across the street was a coffeehouse with free Wifi for people who didn’t mind sharing personal information with every two-bit hacker in Manhattan. The familiar haunts of my old neighborhood were comforting. Singapore had never felt anything like home, and if my assault had happened there, I might have been too shaken to think straight.

“You probably should see a doctor.”

I said it aloud to see if the flesh wound on my neck made it painful to talk. Not bad. I’d felt much worse pain after flag football games in Central Park.

My iPhone rang. I let it go to voice mail, but the intrusion had me thinking about that funny noise again-the ping I’d heard moments before landing in the back of an SUV with a gun to my head. I stopped at the corner and tried to duplicate it. I couldn’t. My guess was spyware. Before the attack, it would have been paranoia to think so. But now the only question was who was tracking me. BOS Corporate Security? The gentle folks who had hired a professional hit man to come within a half inch of blowing my brains out?

Footsteps sounded behind me. As I looked up I caught a glimpse of a woman fast approaching.

“Stay cool,” she said.

On some level I recognized the voice, but before it could fully register, her arm locked with mine and she was pulling me along. It took only a step or two to feel the familiarity of her body against mine.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said, still moving. “Don’t react.”

I felt her hand slip into my pocket, and she removed my phone.

“It’s bugged,” she whispered, and she dropped it into a trash can on the sidewalk. “It picks up conversations even when you’re not on the phone.”

Lilly’s grip tightened around my forearm as she led me into the bar at the corner.

We found the darkest booth available, and I stared at her from across the table, trying to absorb both the surprise of her return and the change in her appearance. She’d cut her hair to a stylish length that barely covered her ears, and it was dyed much darker, more of a chestnut color. It suited her, but what a different look it was.

“What the hell is going on, Lilly?”

“Do you mean what am I doing here?”

“That’s only the beginning. Do you have any idea what just happened to me?”

“Yes, I do.” She turned her head slowly, offering her profile. In the dim glow of a neon beer sign on the wall, I noticed the swelling on her neck, just below the jawbone. Her makeup was hiding the remnants of a flesh wound just like mine. It was an upsetting sight, and given our personal status, I probably cared too much and in ways that I had no business caring.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She drew a breath, and on the exhale offered a weak response. “For a while, I suppose. Until they figure out that I decided not to hang around for the mock execution to turn into a real one. I cut my hair and got on a plane out of Singapore so fast that I barely had time to pack a bag.”

“Who are they ?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Well, so far today I’ve learned that you may have hidden God only knows how many billions in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme, that the bank fired you for trying to access information about numbered accounts, and that a professional hit man has promised to send both of us the way of Gerry Collins if you don’t tell him where the Cushman money is. How much worse can it get?”

She looked away, presumably in shame, but my sympathy had its limits. “That thug who threatened me said not to call the police,” I said, “but I’m in serious need of some answers, Lilly.”

Her eyes welled, and she was suddenly on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure why I was apologizing. I didn’t deal well with tears in general, and the fact was that, until our breakup, my previous record for staying mad at Lilly had been about eight seconds.

“I don’t blame you if you can’t stand the sight of me,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

“I wanted to call or text you, but there’s no such thing as a secure electronic communication. I was even going to send a handwritten letter by old-fashioned snail mail, figuring that was the only way to make sure they wouldn’t intercept it. But I was afraid you wouldn’t open it.”

My head was starting to spin. “Every time the conversation starts to sound slightly normal, you throw in another layer that sounds completely crazy. Why would anyone intercept your calls and texts to me?”

“Bad stuff is going on. Has been going on since… we talked on the beach.”

“Must be why that bird shit on my head.”

My sarcasm made her smile a little, and I almost regretted the fact that I’d elicited a glimpse of the old Lilly. Almost. Love that smile.

“No,” she said, turning serious again. “This is bad, Patrick. It started when we were together, and I knew it might come to the point where it would hurt you. I tried to tell you more on the beach, but… I couldn’t. I chickened out, I guess. I opted for the clean break.”

“So, you dumped me… to protect me?”

“I could lie to you and say that I’m the best person on earth and was just trying to insulate you from all this. But my thought process wasn’t that clear. I needed out. With everything that was going on, you were… it was too much to handle.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to seem too deflated. “Honesty is good. Not good for the ego, but overall-in a cosmic, utopian, Judeo-Christian, don’t-get-your-hopes-up kind of way-good.”

“Stop,” she said. “All I’m saying is that it was not black and white. Of course I was afraid something might happen to you. That’s why it almost killed me when I found out they had you.”

“But how did you find that out?”

“They called me and said, ‘We have your boyfriend.’ Then they tapped me into some kind of eavesdropping device they’d planted on your iPhone.”

That explained the strange ping I’d heard. “If you knew I was in danger, how about calling the cops?”

“Then they really would have killed you.”

Again I recalled the thug’s warning to me: Don’t even think about calling the cops. “How did you know they weren’t going to kill me anyway?”

“They told me.”

“They told you?”

“If I’m going to find the money, they know I need a helper inside the bank, now that I got fired. I’m sure you heard about that.”

“Yes, I just heard. But hold on a second. Is that why you’re here-to ask me to help you find the money?”

“No. I’m here because I’m sorry you had to become a part of this. But you need to understand the message they are sending me. What happened to you today… they want me to know that they can-and will-hurt people I care about if I don’t meet their demand.”

Part of me wanted to follow up on “people I care about,” but I stayed on task. “By ‘demand,’ do you mean handing over the money you put in Cushman’s hands?”

She nodded.

“How much are we talking about?”

“Two billion.”

“Whoa. I didn’t know it was that much .”

She leaned across the table, held my hand, and looked me in the eye. “Patrick, I had no idea Abe Cushman was running a Ponzi scheme. I wish I knew what happened to all that money, but anyone who thinks I do is flat wrong.”

Her hand felt nice in mine, but old feelings weren’t the way to the truth. I withdrew and said the same thing Joe Barber had said to me. “I’d like to believe you.”

“You have to believe me.”

“You’re going to have to explain an awful lot.”

“All right. Where do you want me to start?”

She was touching my hand again, and despite my effort not to get caught up in old memories, my mind pulled up a funny one. Lilly and I shared a passion for old movies, and we’d rented The Sound of Music after working late one night at our Swiss bank, only to laugh our way into bed upon realizing that the DVD was entirely in Chinese and that the original story was set in Austria, not Switzerland anyway. It was one of my favorite nights with Lilly-sort of the standard by which our future lovemaking would be measured.

“We could make like von Trapps and start at beginning,” I said in a lame Chinese accent.

The Do-Re-Mi allusion seemed to trigger the same pleasant memory for her, even if she did screw up her line:

“Not a bad place to start.”