Times Square
It was night, and the trading floor outside Michael Steinbach’s office was empty. The TV screens suspended from the ceiling, which had been playing CNN and CNBC nonstop throughout the day, were turned off. But around the perimeter of the floor, from behind closed doors, you could still hear the rapid patter of keyboards in use. Traders keep trading hours; hackers keep hacking hours.
Steinbach himself was a hacker, though he’d been known to put on the occasional position himself, just to show he still knew how. He’d written the original trading system the company used and devised the first of the company’s quantitative trading strategies, a pairs-trading algorithm that looked for mispricings across global equity markets. Arbitrage opportunities were few, small, and short-lived — but with a powerful enough set of computers hunting for them, you could make a business out of exploiting the handful you could find.
And a business is what Michael Steinbach made. Starting with a few million dollars from a single large investor, he parlayed his original pairs-trading strategy into a billion-dollar fund with a dozen different strategies and a staff of nearly one hundred. Each year, the company’s Human Resources team identified the top graduates in math and computer science from the country’s best universities with the same single-minded efficiency his computers used in locating trading opportunities on the world’s securities markets. Each year, the firm interviewed several hundred prospective employees; each year, the firm made zero, one, or two offers — no more — to join their quantitative research staff. A job as a quant at Quilibrium Investment Partners, L.L.C. was a prize not easily won, nor lightly cast aside.
Which made what Simon Kurnit had to do that much harder.
He stood with one hand poised to knock on Steinbach’s door, the other hovering inches away from the knob. It’s not that he had any doubt about the decision he’d made — he just dreaded having to break the news. But there was no way around it.
“Yes?” Steinbach shouted when Kurnit knocked.
Kurnit stuck his head into Steinbach’s office. “Is this a good time?”
Steinbach lifted his PDA from his desktop, glanced at it, and laid it down again. “For a few minutes.”
Kurnit came in. Steinbach’s desk was covered with papers, a mixture of computer printouts, pages torn from professional journals, and post-it notes filled with jagged scrawls. The man looked nearly as messy as his desk. His hair was nominally parted but flew away from his scalp in several directions. The whiteboard on his wall was covered with formulas and figures, and his fingers were smeared with its erasable ink. But the appearance of disorder stopped at the man’s eyes, which were penetrating and intense and felt as though they were systematically peeling you apart like a lab experiment on a dissection tray.
“What?” Steinbach said.
“Listen,” Kurnit began, “I’m sorry to do this — I wanted to tell you sooner — but...” He raised his hands, palms up, hoping for a sympathetic nod, a gesture, something — anything — that would make this easier. But he didn’t expect any help and didn’t get any. “I really appreciate what you’ve done for me—”
Steinbach’s eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving.”
“I don’t want to,” Kurnit said. “Honestly, I’m happy here, you pay me well, the work’s good. If it were just me, I’d stay forever—”
“But you’re leaving.”
“You know Maureen’s been looking for a teaching position, and it’s just... they’re hard to find in her field. NYU’s not hiring and Columbia, they just, they won’t hire you onto the faculty if you got your degree there, it’s their policy...”
“You make enough money,” Steinbach said. “She doesn’t need to work.”
“It’s not the money,” Kurnit replied, “it really isn’t. It’s just... she’s a teacher. That’s what she does, it’s what she’s always wanted to do. She put it on hold for me, for my sake; she spent the past five years here for me, but now... she got an offer from the University of Texas in Austin. It’s a good offer and... I’ve got to do this for her. You understand.”
If Steinbach did understand, he gave no indication of it. His face, generally affectless to begin with, was entirely blank. Except for those eyes, ticking away, trying to get under his skin.
“I’ve been offered a position at Blackshear. It’s not as good as the job here, but it’s... it’s fine. I’ll do fine. Obviously, I won’t take any of the algorithms I’ve developed here — I hope that goes without saying. I’ll start fresh there, do all new work. You’ve got my word.” Kurnit paused. “I’m sorry to leave this place, I’m sorry to leave you, but...” He didn’t have an end for the sentence, so he just stopped, looked up, and waited for Steinbach to say something. Anything.
Steinbach looked at his PDA again. “I’ve got a call in three minutes.”
Kurnit took an envelope out of his pocket. “I don’t know if you need a formal letter of resignation, but I wrote one, just in case. I’m giving thirty days notice, but if you need more — even, I don’t know, sixty days — I’m sure I could get Blackshear to agree.”
“Thirty is fine,” Steinbach said. And he reached out across the desk. At first Kurnit thought Steinbach was reaching for the letter, but after a second he realized the man was trying to shake his hand.
He stepped forward cautiously, reached out, shook.
“Simon,” Steinbach said, and something like warmth came into his voice, though it didn’t sound at all natural there. “You’ve done excellent work for us. Without you, we wouldn’t be trading warrants at all, and you know you’re responsible for most of the alpha in our foreign exchange strategy. It’ll be a real blow to lose you. The one thing I ask is that if anything changes, you remember you’ve always got a home here.”
A home? Quilibrium offered its employees many things: the possibility of making a fortune, the chance to work in an exciting, fast-paced environment, intellectual challenges... but no one would have used the word “home” to describe it, and certainly no one had ever heard Michael Steinbach talk about it in those terms.
Kurnit looked into Steinbach’s eyes and saw nothing there — nothing bad, nothing good. It was like looking into a computer screen after the plug has been pulled.
“I appreciate it,” Kurnit said. “You’ve always been good to me—”
Steinbach released his hand and turned back to his keyboard. Whatever warmth there had briefly been was gone. Kurnit waited for a moment before deciding that Steinbach had, with his customary grace, ended the conversation. Well, no matter. At least he’d gotten it over with. And it could have gone worse.
Kurnit stepped to the door. “Closed or open?” he asked.
“Closed,” Steinbach said.
When Kurnit had left the office and drawn the door shut behind him, Steinbach lifted his PDA again, screwed a foam-covered earpiece into his ear, and tapped a few times on the screen with a stylus. He had to let the phone ring seven times before it was finally picked up. It was only 9 o’clock, but the man sounded as though he’d been woken up.
“Perlow?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Michael Steinbach.”
“Oh, Mr. Steinbach, I’m sorry.” The voice woke up in a hurry. “What can I do for you?”
“Simon Kurnit just came into my office to quit. He says he’s following his wife to Austin, where she’s accepted a teaching job.”
“Aw, jeez.” Silence. “Did he say where he’s going?”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s not going anywhere. We need him here. And there’s no fucking way he’s taking what he knows to one of our competitors. Period.”
More silence. “What do you want me to do?”
“Kill the wife,” Steinbach said.
Alec Perlow had graduated from Amherst with a 4.0 GPA, but his degree was in English and Comparative Literature and he could no more have programmed a computer than he could have stepped off the ledge outside his window and flown. Nor did he have the mathematical skills to be a quant or the personality to be a trader. But he was smart — Quilibrium smart, as they liked to say in the office when evaluating a candidate (Yes, he’s smart... but is he Quilibrium smart?) — and Steinbach himself came out of the interview saying they had to hire the kid. So they hired the kid. But what to have him do?
At the time, the company was small, just a few dozen people, and Steinbach couldn’t launch half the strategies he wanted to, not without doubling or tripling in size. And good luck getting a quant or a trader to spend time on recruiting. So that’s the job they gave to Perlow. While they were at it, they dumped the rest of Human Resources on him, too: benefits and space planning and employee relocation and, well, who the hell knew what else, but there was plenty of it, plenty of work that wasn’t financial or technical but needed to get done in a firm this size. And Perlow got it done. Exceptionally well. If there had been grades in the world of business, he’d have maintained his stellar GPA.
He also excelled in another dimension, and that was loyalty. He was good at keeping his mouth shut. Everyone in the firm knew this, not least of all Steinbach. It’s why they could trust him with all personnel matters, even the delicate ones.
When a trader needed to be poached from a rival shop, it was Perlow they called, and only Perlow knew about it until the news broke over AP and Reuters. When an offshore investor was in town overnight and needed tickets to a sold-out Broadway show, it was Perlow’s extensive Rolodex they mined — he knew every scalper in town. And if this investor wanted a little in-room entertainment after the show, there were entries in his Rolodex for that, too.
What of the really sensitive matters, the rare cases that crossed the boundary between merely questionable and flat-out illegal? Well, Perlow was a prudent young man — no telltale entries in the Rolodex for men who would eliminate an employee’s wife, say. But that didn’t mean he didn’t know such men, or that he’d never had cause to retain them.
He kept a steel cashbox in the bottom drawer of his desk, out of which he now drew ten thousand dollars in non-consecutive hundreds. One of the benefits of being a billion-dollar financial firm was the close relationships you had with all the big banks in the city. Occasional favors were traded in confidence; nothing illegal, understand, but merely agreeing not to record the serial numbers of a de minimis cash withdrawal, where’s the harm in that?
This was the cash with which Perlow paid his scalpers and his procurers, and it was the cash that would wind up in the pocket of the man Perlow was e-mailing now, one anonymous Hotmail account talking to another across the Internet.
New job, the message ran. Ten men want to meet you this afternoon to discuss it, and ten more will want to talk with you next week after it’s done. F&J’s at 3 p.m.?
The reply came in half an hour later: OK. That was all.
Perlow grabbed his coat, rode the elevator down to the street, and walked out of Quilibrium’s offices into the heart of Times Square. The crowds were swarming beneath the giant computer-controlled video screens and animated signs. Fifty years ago, the signs would have been advertising singers and cigarettes and stage plays and such, but now in direction you saw the giant Nasdaq board pouring out its endless torrent of stock quotes and in the other you saw the Morgan Stanley ticker streaming its financial data the side of a building. Not to mention the Reuters screen and the Lehman Brothers ticker and... hell, even the sign in front of Toys “R” Us periodically flashed the stock prices of Disney and Mattel. This was the twenty-first century Times Square, and Alec Perlow couldn’t get enough of it. Wall Street wasn’t confined to Wall Street anymore, and it wasn’t confined to fat middle-aged guys in suits either, with their Harvard MBAs and their secret handshakes. Now there was room for a new type of company to shake things up, as long as it had the right technology and the right people and the right contacts — and even an English major from Amherst could be part of it, if he found way to carry his weight.
As he crossed the narrow concrete mall separating Seventh Avenue from Broadway, he saw Simon Kurnit coming the other way, a couple of folded-up cardboard packing boxes in his arms. Alec waved at him as he went past, got a smile and a nod in return. Poor bastard, Alec thought. But who the hell told him to quit?
Kurnit dragged the roll of packing tape across the top of the box, cut it off, and pressed it down. At this point, his office was basically packed — what was left were papers that belonged to the company and a few items too large to pack. He lugged the box to the corner of his office and lifted it onto the stack already there. He dialed his own phone number one-handed while uncapping a Sharpie with the other. The marker squeaked as he wrote his name and new Texas address on the side of the box.
Maureen answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Darling, it’s me. I’m finishing up here. I should be able to leave in, I don’t know, ten minutes.”
“Is that a real ten minutes,” she asked, “or one of those ten minutes that turn into an hour because Michael asks you to do something as you’re walking out the door?”
“Michael’s not here. He left early for some charity benefit. Put on a suit. Even combed his hair.”
“So it’s a real ten minutes.”
“Yep.”
“I can count on it.”
“Yep.”
“As in, I can order food now and you’ll be there to pick it up before it’s all cold and disgusting.”
“Yes,” he said. They had this conversation nightly, and neither of them actually meant the mock annoyance in their voices. Except when they did.
“I’m going to order Chinese, okay?”
“Sure.” He snapped the cap on the marker and dropped it on his desk. “Get me beef with broccoli — no, wait, if I got General Tso’s would you have a little?”
“I’ll get you beef with broccoli,” Maureen said, “not spicy, with brown rice. And I’ll get General Tso’s chicken for myself.”
“I’ll pick it up. In ten minutes.”
“Fifteen’s okay.”
“I love you.”
“But not twenty. I love you, too.”
“See you soon,” he said.
Kurnit left the office twenty-five minutes later — he hadn’t meant to be late, but there’d been e-mails to answer and an exit interview HR insisted on his filling out before he left. Fortunately, he lived close to the office, on West 44th Street near Ninth Avenue, and the restaurant was just down the block. He raced over to the place and caught his breath while the pregnant woman behind the counter sorted through a batch of bagged orders to find his.
“Beef with broccoli, General Tso?” She repeated this to herself while peering at the characters scrawled on the receipts stapled to each of the paper bags until finally she found the one she was hunting for. “Beef with broccoli, General Tso chicken. Twenty-one fifty.” He counted out three bills and pocketed the change she handed back to him.
It still felt warm, for whatever that was worth. Maureen had probably allowed an extra ten minutes before calling in the order. She usually did, even when he told her it wasn’t necessary, because, well, it usually was.
At the front door to his building, a squat fourteen-unit co-op with paired fire escapes zigzagging down the front, Kurnit had his keys half fished out of his pocket when a man in a black turtleneck swung the door open. He was carrying a bulging plastic garbage bag and held the door as they squeezed past each other in the tight vestibule.
“Good night,” Kurnit said. The other man didn’t say anything.
The building was pre-war but it had an elevator, a relatively recent addition that had added two thousand dollars to their monthly maintenance bill for a year. Kurnit stripped off his gloves and crammed them in his coat pocket as the elevator slowly carried him to the fifth floor. He still had his keys in his hand.
Normally Maureen would make it to the door before he had both locks open — the sound of the Medeco was enough to bring her running, especially when there was food and he was late. But not this time. Kurnit dropped the bag of Chinese food on the small table next to the door, hung up his coat in the closet, and locked the door.
“Darling?” he called.
He carried the food into the kitchen, popped the staples holding the bag shut, and took two large plates down from the china cabinet. Two forks, two serving spoons. He tore off two paper towels to use as napkins.
“Honey?”
He carried the plates to the table in the dining area, a corner of their L-shaped living room. He flipped on the ceiling light. “I’m sorry I’m late. But the food’s not cold. Yet.”
He returned to the kitchen to get the two aluminum trays containing their main dishes, the two cartons of rice, the paper-sheathed pairs of chopsticks, the cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies. He dropped it all on the table.
“Maureen? You okay?”
Finally, he went into the bedroom.
It was a week before Simon Kurnit returned to his apartment, and when he did he had to strip off the yellow police tape on the way in. The apartment was silent and dark, and he sat at the table in the dining area without turning on the light. Someone had thrown out the Chinese food and Windexed the tabletop. He could smell it.
His back ached. He had a headache, too, and he hadn’t shaved that morning or washed his hair when he showered. He’d just stood under the water, barely feeling it though it was turned as hot as it would go.
The company had put him up in a hotel room — a top-of-the-line suite at the Edison with windows facing out over Central Park — while the lawyer Perlow dug up (Find him the best in the city, Steinbach had said when he and Perlow had shown up at the holding cell. Not the second best, the very best) got him straightened out with the police. He’d had Maureen’s blood on him, all over his hands and shirt, and it was natural to take him into custody even though he’d been the one to phone 911, even though he was obviously distraught, even though the knife was nowhere to be found. Many husbands who kill their wives are distraught, and many of them find a way to dispose of their knives before 911 arrives.
But the lawyer, a man named Neville, Stephen J. Neville, was able to get him out, and they tucked him away in the Edison under a false name so the reporters from the Post and the Daily News couldn’t find him. They found him anyway, but since he didn’t come out of the building, didn’t answer the phone or the door, they eventually gave up and left him alone. There were other murders to write about, after all.
Perlow testified that he’d seen Kurnit in the office around the time the murder was estimated to have taken place, and the e-mail logs supported this. Picking up the takeout food added another few minutes; a cop who spoke Chinese got confirmation from the woman at the restaurant. Then, too, there was the fact that the bedroom had been thoroughly ransacked and some large items — a DVD recorder, Maureen’s laptop, her jewelry box — were missing. Kurnit told them about the man he’d passed in the vestibule, the stranger with the bulging black garbage bag, large enough to hold a DVD recorder and a laptop and a jewelry case. They either believed him or they didn’t, but they let him go. He hadn’t formally been charged, and Neville told him he wouldn’t be.
But what did it matter? He didn’t need the police to charge him or a jury to judge him guilty. He knew he was.
Twenty-five minutes.
So it’s a real ten minutes.
Yep.
I can count on it.
Yep.
He had touched the man, they had passed belly-to-belly; he’d been polite, said goodnight to him. While upstairs Maureen was bleeding to death. Or had she already been dead by then? If so, for how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
He’d thought he couldn’t cry anymore, he’d thought this repeatedly over the past week, but he’d been wrong every time and he was wrong now. The tears ran down his face like water. His chest heaved. He made no sound. Just sat in the dark sobbing and asking himself what had been so goddamn important that it couldn’t wait till tomorrow, what e-mail was worth Maureen’s life.
They’d sent him flowers, the company had, and the card that came with them was signed by everyone in the office. Steinbach had written, Take as much time as you need. You’ve always got a home here, and he remembered their conversation the day he told Steinbach he was leaving. A home. A home was the one thing he didn’t have, that he’d never have again.
Would ten minutes have made the difference? Would five? If he’d walked in on the man while he was filling his bag, could he have stopped him? Or would he be dead now, too, lying side by side with Maureen in that chilly basement morgue? It didn’t sound so terrible to him. Not nearly as terrible as sitting here in their dark apartment, alone, afraid to open the bedroom door.
He slid the closet door open instead, ran his hand along the coats, lifted the sleeve of one of hers, inhaled deeply. There was no smell of her, but it was her coat, it had held her once, and he pressed it to his cheek as though some residue of her might still be there. Outside, on the street five stories down, cars honked, some drunk shouted at them, life went on. In here, the radiator thumped and clanked as the heat came on, hissing. But it all sounded to him like whispers from a thousand miles away.
He counted the money in his pocket, thought about where, this time of night, he could get a quiet drink, some private spot where no one came and you could sit by yourself and if you cried a little no one would say anything. There was a bar two blocks away — he’d brought Maureen there once but she hadn’t liked it, hadn’t liked climbing two flights of stairs to get there and another flight if you had to use the bathroom; she said it felt like some old, decrepit, falling-apart relic from the ’40s, and she was right, that’s exactly what it was, it’s what he liked about the place, but he’d never made her go there again. Yet she’d been there once, on the stool next to his, and if that stool held no more of her ghost than this coat did, so what? So what?
Then, when he got back, he’d brave the bedroom.
When he got back.
He locked the door behind him and headed to Frankie and Johnnie’s.
It had been a speakeasy once, or anyway that’s the story they told. Perlow liked it because except at theater time it was generally pretty empty. Middle of the day, you just had a few lonely retirees keeping the bartender company, and coming up on midnight you’d have the place to yourself.
At the top of the stairs, the little coat check room was open but no one was manning the counter and the metal rod in the back had nothing on it but hangers. Perlow walked past and pushed the main door open. To the left was the bar, to the right a handful of tables where your more upscale customers could order some food with their drinks. When he’d given Mesh the assignment, they’d sat at a table so they could talk without the bartender hearing, but this time there was nothing to say, and Mesh was waiting for him at the bar.
Mesh was an older guy, well into his fifties. He still had the wooly sideburns he’d grown out when they were the hot new look around the time of the Bicentennial, only now they were white, like the rest of his hair. He had a paunch and his face was deeply grooved, and sitting at the bar in his wind-breaker and turtleneck, he could’ve been any guy in any bar, taking home $375 a week from some union job. But he was taking home lot more than that, and they hadn’t found a way yet to unionize what he did for a living.
Perlow dropped the Duane Reade bag he was carrying at the foot of the empty stool next to Mesh’s, stripped off his coat, draped it over a chair back. He wasn’t going to stay long, but one drink, maybe two, would give Mesh time to finish the one in front of him, settle his bill, quietly pick up the bag, and exit. They hadn’t arrived together and wouldn’t leave together.
The bag contained an envelope and the envelope contained the full 10k he’d promised, even though Mesh had been sloppy this time, had been seen. Perlow had wanted to dock him for that, give him maybe a ten percent haircut just to make a point, but when he suggested this to Steinbach, Steinbach had said no, that’s not the way you do business. A handshake is as good as a contract, that’s the way Wall Street works — billions of dollars change hands on a handshake, and if you say you’re going to pay someone ten thousand dollars you don’t show up with nine. You try that and pretty soon everyone knows and no one will do business with you.
Probably just as well. Guy like Mesh got unhappy with you, he might do worse than just stop doing business with you
“What’ll you have?” The bartender wiped down the spot in front of Perlow, though it was plenty clean. Just a way to keep his arm occupied, something to do while waiting for an
A beer, Perlow was about to say, make it a Heineken, but the door swung open then and Simon Kurnit walked through it
It didn’t register at first. Perlow, from the office — all right, everyone at Quilibrium worked late some nights, though this late was pretty extreme. And the guy next to him who glanced up and quickly turned away — just a guy, though there was something about him. Kurnit stood in the doorway, holding onto the door, thinking, I can’t just walk out, it would be rude, but also thinking that the last thing he wanted right now was company, was Perlow from the office, was—
Then it did register. The turtleneck. The sideburns. The face. Perlow, glancing over now at the other man, a look of panic flashing across his face. It was a moment of complete clarity. It felt to Kurnit as if he’d been walking on the surface of a frozen lake and, without warning, plunged through into the icy water beneath.
“You — You—” he said, but Perlow was facing the other way, raising his hands, saying something to the other man, who was reaching into his windbreaker with one hand, pulling out a black handgun, leveling it at Kurnit. Perlow was saying, No, you can’t shoot him, we need him, and wrestling for the gun, one hand on the man’s wrist, the other on the barrel itself, and the words “we need him” went echoing around in Kurnit’s head.
He didn’t move. He was rooted to the spot, watching the men fight over the gun, and it was only when the gun-shot exploded in the confined space, smashing a bottle and sending Perlow backward over his stool in a spray of blood, that Kurnit found his legs again. He stumbled back against the door and fell into the hall outside as a second bullet splintered the doorframe. Getting to his feet, he scrambled for the stairs, grabbed the narrow banister, and flew down, two steps at a time, slipping, almost falling, ducking his head as he heard the clatter of footsteps behind him. He reached the landing, used the banister to pull himself through a tight 180-degree turn, and started down the steep second flight to the street.
Halfway down he missed a step. He felt his heart catch, his breath stop. He swayed for a moment in midair, tipping forward, headlong. It was suddenly silent, it seemed to him — there were no more footfalls, no shouted voices behind him, just the world tilted precariously and swinging up at him. He put out a hand to catch himself, and his fingertips raked a row of framed black-and-white photos of forgotten Irish tenors off the wall as he fell.
He felt his leg snap under him, but when he came to rest against the street door at the foot of the stairs, he was only conscious of the pain in a distant way. He was facing up, and he watched as a pair of sneakers came into view on the highest step he could see, then the legs of a pair of brown corduroy pants, then a hand holding onto the banister, a plastic Duane Reade bag hanging from its wrist. The man kept coming, picking his steps now with care. The zipped-up bottom of the windbreaker descended into view, then the other hand with its gun, the barrel pointed down at him, and finally the man’s chest and face. Kurnit’s heart was racing, fluttering; maybe he was going into shock. He watched the gun barrel come up and the finger tighten on the trigger and then the second pair of feet at the top of the stairs, and the second pair of legs, and the second gun, this one a long-barreled shot-gun. And the man before him, the one who had murdered Maureen, the one his own company — my God — had paid to murder Maureen (No, you can’t shoot him, we need him), the man who was going to kill him, too, this man spun to face the threat behind him and lost his balance and may well have died from the fall, but the blast from the bartender’s shotgun didn’t give him the chance.
In the hospital, Kurnit refused visitors, refused newspapers. He only turned the television on to watch Jeopardy!, and even regretted doing that the one time a teaser for the evening news showed footage of Michael Steinbach leaving a courthouse, Stephen Neville at his elbow.
He hesitated at the door to Steinbach’s office. The cast had come off and he’d switched from crutches to a cane, but he still felt it each time he put weight on the leg, and he took a moment to arrange himself before he lifted the handle of the cane and used it to rap sharply against the wood.
“What?” Steinbach shouted.
Kurnit turned the knob and went in. He knew Steinbach was alone; his assistant had left at 5:30 and no one else had gone in during the half hour he’d been watching.
He limped across the office to Steinbach’s desk, where the man waited, his face showing no expression except perhaps a trace of impatience. There was a chair off to one side of the desk, and Kurnit lowered himself into it, extended his left leg so the knee wasn’t bent. It stiffened up less that way.
Steinbach stared at him, dissecting him. Kurnit stared back. He’d thought he wouldn’t have the patience for this, but suddenly he found himself extremely calm.
“We’re glad you’re back, Simon,” Steinbach finally said.
“I just want to know one thing,” Kurnit said, and his voice didn’t shake at all. “How could you do it? How could you possibly...?”
“I don’t know what got into Perlow’s head,” Steinbach said. “He must have—”
“No,” Kurnit shot back. “No. Not Perlow. You. Perlow did what you told him to do. That’s all he ever did.”
“I never told Perlow to hire anyone to kill Maureen. I would never—”
“Stop it. Stop it. I’m not an idiot. You always say you hire people because of how smart they are, so how about treating me like it? I’m not wearing a wire, we’re the only people here, and I want an answer. I think you owe me that.”
Steinbach’s eyes flicked back and forth across his. He was hunting for something. Trying to decide whether Kurnit was lying or not? He wasn’t, and Steinbach apparently satisfied himself that this was the case.
Steinbach turned back to his desk, hunted briefly through one of the stacks of papers, found a recent P&L report, and tossed it at him. “Strategies you developed or worked on generated $84 million over the first eleven months of this year. You’re a valuable employee.”
“So... you kill my wife?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Steinbach said. “But speaking hypothetically? For $84 million? Let’s analyze this rationally. Put some numbers to it.” He leaned back in his chair. “With her alive, we have a zero percent chance of keeping you. Remove her and your main incentive to leave has been eliminated. Now, there is some chance, call it twenty-five percent, that you decide to leave anyway, maybe quit working entirely, and there’s maybe another twenty percent chance that the whole thing blows up and you find out what happened, but that leaves a fifty-five percent chance of keeping you, and those are better odds than we’ve had on trades that ended up making us a lot money. You tell me, what would the fair price be of an option that improved the odds from zero to fifty-five percent of keeping a man capable of generating $84 million a year? Actually—” he tapped on the screen of his PDA a few times, dividing and multiplying, “$91.6 million if you annualize. I haven’t run Black-Scholes, but I can tell you it’s worth a hell of a lot more than the sum of what Randall Mesh, Stephen Neville, and the Edison Hotel charged. Now, you’ve got to factor in the risk-adjusted cost of fighting the charges if things do blow up — as they did — and that’s not cheap. And then you’ve got to assign some amount to the catastrophic risk, however small, of going to jail. But it still comes out an expected-value winner.”
Kurnit sat in silence.
“I don’t imagine you can look at it objectively right now,” Steinbach continued, “but if you do look at it objectively, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s like the distressed securities business — a company’s going bankrupt, the owners are behaving emotionally, you go in and price the trade accurately, and if the numbers come out positive you pull the trigger. Now, in this case it didn’t work — it failed to work pretty spectacularly, in fact. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad trade. It just means it was a trade that moved against us. So you count your losses and move on. I’m telling you this, Simon, for two reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The first is that you asked, and you’re right, you deserve a straight answer — whether you can handle it or not is up to you. The second is that I think you handle it. You’re angry, I understand that, but you’re a rational man and extremely intelligent and I think you can put that aside and come back and be just as strong a businessperson as before.”
“What odds would you give it?” Kurnit asked, and this time his voice did shake, but he didn’t care. “What odds that I can come back and be a strong businessman for you?”
Steinbach considered the question seriously. “Thirty per-cent. Which may not be great, but it’s not a trivial percentage.”
“No,” Kurnit said, “that’s not trivial.”
He got slowly to his feet. Leaning on his cane with one hand, he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. After getting out of the hospital, the first place he’d made his way on his crutches was back to Frankie and Johnnie’s. He couldn’t navigate the stairs, of course, but he’d called ahead and the bartender had come down to meet him. Kurnit wanted to thank him, he’d explained, and maybe the bartender would’ve come down for that reason alone, but he’d also told the man he was looking for someone who could hook him up; he didn’t need anything like the shotgun the bartender kept under the bar, just something he could keep in the night table at home, something to give him a little peace of mind. Not a problem, the bartender had said, I know a guy.
The handgun Kurnit took from his pocket now was smaller than the one Mesh had used, and older, too, but still powerful for all that, and it frightened him to look at it, to hold it, to point it at another human being. Strangely, Steinbach didn’t seem frightened at all. A little exasperated, maybe; a little angry.
“Come on,” Steinbach said. “Think about this rationally. There’s zero chance that you could shoot me and get away with it. Literally zero. And what do you stand to gain?”
“A little peace of mind,” Kurnit said quietly.
“Peace of mind?” Steinbach shouted. “You’ll be on trial, you’ll be in jail, you’ll be on the front page of the fucking New York Post — what do you think the odds are that you’ll have anything like peace of mind?”
Kurnit found himself crying again as he pulled the trigger.
“Thirty percent maybe,” he said, though Steinbach could no longer hear him.
257 W. 36th Street
Make me rich.” Russ Ickes, newspaper reporter, whispered the code words into his cell phone. His heart began to thump faster. The insider trading scheme had been going so well. But things had changed.
“And?” Trip Pennypacker’s cool drawl sounded in Russ’s ear with the tiniest hint of impatience. You wouldn’t detect it if you didn’t know Trip well.
Russ felt himself starting to sweat. “Make me rich,” he stammered again. He didn’t understand why Trip insisted he still use the identifying code. Surely after all these years, Trip knew his voice. Russ himself would know Trip’s voice from just one syllable.
“You’re repeating yourself. You’re calling me late, after the market close, and I’ll have to use after-hours trading. That’s more conspicuous. What’s up, champ?”
“We have to talk, Trip.” Russ could actually hear his heart. His eyes zipped around the busy newsroom. No one seemed to be noticing him.
“I’m a little tied up now.” Trip had been too busy for Russ ever since they were in college. “What do you have for me?”
A squall of perspiration had erupted on Russ’s forehead. He took a shaky breath and choked out the red-alert code. “Trip, there’s Barney Rubble.”
“Barney Rubble?” Very little ruffled Trip, the guest of honor at the unending party that was his life, but he was ruffled now. “Barney Rubble, you say, champ? What kind of Barney Rubble?”
Russ grimaced from the saltwater sluicing into his eyes and from a sudden, stinging memory. Right after college, and before he started on Wall Street, Trip and his friends had jetted over to London for a fling. During their whirlwind of intoxication and fornication, they had encountered cockney rhyming slang, where “going to the Jack Tar” meant “going to the bar,” and “having Oedipus Rex with a twist and twirl” meant “having sex with a girl,” and “brown bread” meant “dead.”
When Russ picked up Trip and his pals from their return flight — Russ hadn’t been invited to the London blowout — they were joking away in rhyming slang. The revelers, who hadn’t bothered to bid hello to Russ or thank him for the lift home from the airport, suddenly started calling their driver “jam roll.” Russ laughed along, as if he was in on the joke. He stopped laughing when Trip playfully told him it meant “arsehole.”
Years later, when they set up their deal, Trip decreed they use cockney rhyming slang as an addition to their code, although he didn’t remember many of the rhymes. Russ did. They were burned on his brainpan as if by sulfur. “Barney Rubble” meant “trouble.”
“Big trouble, Trip, federal trouble,” Russ whispered. His heart slammed in his chest like an industrial press about to overheat. Huge wet blobs from his forehead rained on his keyboard. He skidded his chair back from the desk. “The U.S. Attorney’s office called. They want me to come in.”
The flat-out uncoded statement hung spinning in the air. Trip stayed eerily silent for a full minute while Russ listened to his hyper heartbeat. Russ was about to ask if Trip was still there when Trip said, “Come see me right now.”
The familiar self-possession was back in Trip’s tone. He might have been telling one of his female admirers to pay him a late-night visit. No one refused Trip.
“I’ll be right over.”
“Didn’t you forget something?”
“What? Forget something?”
“What do you have for me?” Trip asked nonchalantly.
“A time like this, do you think that—?”
“What do you have for me?”
“I... Okay, Chimera Genetics. But if we’re accused of insider trading—”
Trip hung up on him — to arrange, Russ knew, for the purchase of shares of Chimera Genetics. Chimera was an under-appreciated stock that had been flatlining at ten dollars for the past year, but when investors read Russ’s bullish story in the next morning’s newspaper, extolling Chimera’s new wonder drug in final clinical testing with federal approval imminent, that would change fast. They would bid the stock price up much higher, and Trip would be there to sell his shares to them, and to skim a creamy and very illegal profit.
“Are you all right, Ickes?”
The words were like an electric shock, and Russ swung round in his chair. John Featherstone loomed above him, disdain contorting his face as though he’d bitten into bad meat. “Are you all right?” his editor asked again.
“Who, me?” Russ sputtered. “I’m fine. Fine, fine, fine.” He shook his head to banish a disorienting image.
On the fifteenth of every month, outside an exclusive and vaguely dangerous club called Inferno, Russ met Trip’s business partner, Mr. Abercrombie. Abercombie, a Gothic beast of a man, would emerge from the club with a fat envelope of cash for Russ. He scared Russ witless, and seemed to know it, as he always asked the same question before disappearing back into Inferno: “Are you all right, Ickes?”
Hearing those words from his editor was an unnerving jolt. Unlike his old editor, forced into retirement now, Featherstone didn’t appreciate Russ’s journalistic talents, and usually treated him the way a cop does a juvenile delinquent. Concern wasn’t part of the equation.
“Well, you don’t look fine. You’re sweating like a pig, Ickes.”
“Uh, I’m not feeling well,” Russ said, aware that vast wet blotches had spread from his armpits. “I better go home.”
“First you’re fine, then you’re not — what am I going to do with you, Ickes?” Featherstone examined his waterlogged underling with gimlet eyes.
“I–I better go then,” Russ said. He got up.
“Well, your column is in, and it was... adequate. So Chimera Genetics is about to skyrocket, huh?”
“That’s what they say.” Russ grabbed his Italian suit jacket from the hanger hooked to the cubicle partition. He slipped it on to hide the damp stains mottling his handcrafted shirt.
“Hmmmm.” Featherstone tilted his head skeptically and peered at the reporter with the intensity of an engineer searching for a fatal structural design flaw. “Nice threads. You’re certainly dressing better lately. How much did this suit cost?”
Bile rose into Russ’s throat. He swallowed back the burning acid. “Uh, it was a gift. My birthday was last week. The big three-oh.”
“You used to dress like you shopped at the Salvation Army.”
The khakis Russ once wore were innocent of pressing and dry cleaning. Now his tailored trousers had creases sharp enough to slice a finger. “Things change, I guess.”
Slumping through the newsroom, Russ passed a cluster of other business reporters near the Bloomberg machine. None of them liked him, and he suspected they were jealous of his having “Street Talk.” Someone muttered, “Brain Distrust,” and they laughed.
Eighteen months ago, when Russ was angling for the “Street Talk” stock tip column, he’d sought visibility by telling people he was the great-grandson of Harold Ickes, the FDR Brain Trust guy. For whatever reason — maybe for his pedigree — the paper’s top brass gave him the column. But the publication had its share of nasty people, and they all had long memories, and not long ago — just after Labor Day — Russ had learned why lying to journalists was unwise. Someone on staff dug up that Russ Ickes was no relation to Harold. It was late October now, and when Russ passed through the newsroom, he ignored the snickers and walked
There was a bustle around the Metro desk, and Russ paused there. Another young woman — another pretty blonde — had been pushed off a subway platform onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train. This made it five. The murders had happened randomly at stations throughout the city, always late at night and with few witnesses. The cops had no leads. Russ thought about the trains roaring out of the darkness and the helpless figures on the tracks. A shiver went up his spine.
The air outside was bracing. It was past 8 o’clock, and the evening rush had subsided. With the sodden shirt chilling his skin, Russ moved moodily along the pavement. He had to compose himself before he saw Trip, but he couldn’t slow his pounding heart.
He wandered in slow motion through Midtown, and wondered how to handle Trip. People pushed past him with purpose and places to go. So many of them were stylish and good-looking — so much like Trip.
Russ’s mouth was achingly dry, and he looked down the block. He was approaching Inferno — Trip’s favorite club — and he knew it wasn’t just by chance. He sighed. He could use some liquid courage before facing Trip.
The beefy guard at the velvet rope wore a red greatcoat with black leather lapels. He was as welcoming as Russ’s editor. “We’re full,” he said.
“Come on — this place doesn’t get going until midnight.” Russ produced a hundred-dollar bill. “Come on... please.”
The guard regarded the bill as he might used toilet paper. “We’re full.”
“I was here three weeks ago.” This had no impact on the guard, but Russ pressed on. “I was here with my friend, Trip Pennypacker.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You a buddy of Mr. Cool’s? He knows people here.” He unfastened the velvet rope and Russ pocketed the hundred and stepped forward. The guard’s face turned stormy. He stopped Russ and reached into his pocket to extract the bill.
The only other customers inside were three Japanese businessmen. The club’s craggy, cavelike walls were red, and paper flames flickered everywhere. By 3 a.m. the joint would be jammed with writhing dancers. Russ ordered a twenty-dollar Scotch from the scantily clad barmaid and remembered that Saturday night with Trip.
It was only because Russ had complained that he never got to see Trip that they had gotten together at all. Trip had grudgingly agreed to let Russ join his friends for dinner at Per Se — with the proviso that Russ not give his real name or say how they knew each other. Russ sat ignored by Trip’s trendy friends, and watched as a devastating blonde ran her hands through Trip’s hair and her lips over his neck.
The only thing Trip said to Russ the entire evening was that the two of them would split the check. Russ’s half was astronomical. Afterward, Russ tagged along to Inferno. He paid for a round of drinks — another enormous sum — and Trip and his friends vanished among the dancers, leaving Russ to get plastered by himself and at a huge price.
As he sat at the lonely bar now, Russ recognized the bartender from that night. Her little outfit was red leather. “Good to see you again,” he said to her as she put the glass in front of him. “I was in here Saturday, three weeks ago.”
“Great,” said the barmaid, who clearly saw nothing great in Russ.
Many men would be staring at her cleavage. Russ fastened onto her bored eyes. “I was here with Trip Pennypacker.”
Her blasé expression changed into something Russ couldn’t read. “Trip, huh? He’s your pal? You like him?’
“Trip? Sure — he’s the smoothest guy I know. Handsome, smart, charming, and the girls all think he’s pretty sexy.”
“Yeah?” she said. “And what about you? Do you think he’s sexy?”
“Me? Well, I, uh... Do you remember me from that night?”
“I remember — you were the little guy who bought drinks for Trip and his worshippers. Who was the bitch with him that night?”
“The blonde? Tiffany something. She’s a model. He has a million of them.”
The woman leaned over the bar, her breasts bulging against the red leather. “Listen,” she said, “Trip has run through too many girls in this place.” She made a fist and Russ guessed that included her. “And some of us are plenty pissed at him.”
Russ’s face burned, and his throat went tight. “Really?” he croaked.
“Really. And the thing we all learned about your pal is that Trip cares about just three things: Trip, Trip, and Trip. When the chips are down, you can count on that asswipe to be first out the door.” The barmaid unclenched her fist. “Why they keep letting him in here is beyond me.”
Russ swallowed hard and forced some air into his lungs. “Is it because he’s friends with Mr. Abercrombie?”
She pulled away from Russ. “Don’t know the guy. Never heard of him.”
He fished another hundred from his pocket. “Tell me who owns the club. Is it Abercrombie? Someone else?”
The barmaid eyed the bill, then held out a hungry hand. “Just a hundred?”
Russ brought out two more bills. “Deal?”
The barmaid took the money; it vanished in the pocket of her little skirt. She shimmied her bare torso. “Some people you never want to mess with own this club, baby. So there — I’ve given you a valuable piece of information.” The Japanese businessmen growled at her and she sashayed off. As she did, she turned back to Russ. “Better run along before I tell them you’re asking questions.”
If the barstool had turned into burning brimstone, Russ couldn’t have scrambled off it faster. He left the club at a near run, and didn’t slow until he reached the subway.
Russ looked up and down the nearly empty platform and remembered the chatter at the Metro desk. Just the kind of setup the city’s latest serial killer favored, he thought. Ten yards away, a heavily pierced, waiflike woman with spiky peroxide hair eyed Russ warily. Was she thinking about the killer, too? Was she wondering if it was him? Russ shook his head. No way, he thought, he didn’t fit the description.
All anyone knew about the killer was that he was white and big. No one had a clue about his motives, but several criminal psychologists opined in the media that he probably felt rejected by women and was striking back. Why pretty blondes was anyone’s guess. Russ didn’t know whether the guy went after peroxide blondes, too, but the pierced girl was taking no chances. She stayed well away from the platform edge — right up against the wall — as most women did these days. Pretty blondes, Russ thought, just the sort that Trip favored.
The Queens-bound train roared into the station with a hurricane rush of air. Russ stepped into the car and sat heavily on a plastic bench. The pierced girl got into another car.
As the subway rocketed into the tunnel, Russ thought about Trip and his ever-present women. He remembered the time, a year after college, when he let himself into Trip’s apartment and found his friend having sex with a girl on the living room floor. Russ had stood there mesmerized until she tarted screaming and Trip started shouting. Trip had never before lost that famous composure. After that, he took away Russ’s key. He told Russ that he didn’t want to see him again; that he was tired of him. This despite all Russ had done for him: the laundry, the errands, the rides to the airport. It counted for nothing, and Russ was cast out.
Until a year ago. Then, comfortably ensconced writing the “Street Talk” column, Russ had called Trip with a proposition. Finding him hadn’t been hard — Russ had followed Trip’s life avidly — but getting up the courage to call was a different matter. When he finally did, Trip treated Russ like a bill collector. “Is it something quick? I’m just on my way out.” It hadn’t been quick, but as Russ explained to Trip how “Street Talk” could bring them fortunes, Trip had found his patience. And that old charm. Now, Trip acted as if the idea was all his own.
The train slid into the station. Russ sighed raggedly and left the car. The platform was deserted. Long Island City cleared out by nightfall. The station’s old walls were as grimy as ancient evil. He trudged up the stairs. A dark forest of empty buildings greeted him. One sheet of newspaper spiraled spectrally down the deserted street. Despite the cool breeze off the dark river nearby, he was sweating again.
Russ stood before the slab of an office tower that housed Pennypacker Securities. At age thirty, Trip owned his own company. Office rents were cheap in Long Island City. Trip had leased two floors in a good building. Russ unclipped the cell from his Prada crocodile belt and, with shaking fingers, succeeded in stabbing out Trip’s number. He hadn’t loaded it into speed dial for safety reasons. “Make me rich,” he said when Trip answered. “I’m downstairs.”
“Come on up.”
Russ scrawled illegibly in the book, and the wizened security guard didn’t give it — or him — a glance. He took the elevator to the top floor. He had visited Pennypacker Securities only once before. Now, as then, an icily beautiful redhead met him at the elevator and escorted him back. Russ knew her name was Beatrice, and he followed her through a brightly lit area with circles of desks that resembled his newsroom. Young men barely out of their teens were working the phones with demonic energy. Russ recognized one of them from that night out on the town. He had Trip’s confident, preppy panache.
“Sir, this stock is about to pop,” he said. “And we can get you in on it.”
“The road to financial security, ma’am, is built on knowing which stocks are hot,” said another, nearly identical, young man
“Yes, I hear what you say, sir,” said yet another, a clone of the first two. “But understand I am going to build wealth for you. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Beatrice knocked on the open door to Trip’s office. Russ peered in. The office was swathed in darkness, but he could make out Trip’s silhouette. He was facing a broad window, looking out on the hypnotic Midtown skyline to the west. Russ looked too. There was the newspaper. There was Inferno. There was Russ’s new apartment. So many places Russ would rather be.
A Tizio lamp clicked on. Mr. Abercrombie sat on a long, sleek sofa. The lamp, a small furnace, lit the stony crags of his broad face. He turned to look at Russ, and gave what might have been a smile. The light caught his gold tooth and it glinted. He wore a black leather jacket and a crimson tie. Monster hands, matted with hair, rested lightly on his knees, as though poised to grab. “Are you all right, Ickes?” he asked. The almost-smile vanished. “You look like you swam here.”
Russ opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out. He heard Beatrice close the door behind him. He was alone with them.
Trip turned around. His sculpted hair was the color of champagne, and that amazing grin was, as ever, a treasury of enticing enamel. His shirt had exquisite blue striping — stitched in London, Russ knew. With a dancer’s grace, Trip took his seat at the steel-and-glass Boltz desk that held his laptop and phone.
“Take a load off, champ,” he drawled. Russ sat in the chair in front of Trip’s desk. Trip grinned at him. “Now, what’s all this I hear about trouble?”
Before Russ could speak, Mr. Abercrombie got to his feet. He loomed above the desk and straightened his leather lapels. “I’ll let you fellas have your talk,” he said, and he stabbed at Trip’s phone console with a thick finger. “Bea, baby,” he rumbled at the phone, “whip up one of those cappuccinos of yours for me, okay, hon?” And then he winked at Trip and was gone.
“So, tell me all about it, champ,” Trip said when the door had shut.
Russ licked his arid lips. “I told you, I got a call from the U.S. Attorney’s office. They want me downtown, tomorrow at 10.”
“Did they say what it was about?” Trip was supernaturally calm.
“Not a word. But what else could it be?”
How could Trip keep smiling? “Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that it is about... our arrangement. What are you going to tell them?”
A high-pitched hysteria invaded Russ’s speech. “I’m not going to admit that I’m involved in an insider trading scheme, if that’s what you mean,” he squeaked.
“And you’re not going to mention me either, right, champ?”
“Of course not. If it comes up, I’ll say that we went to college together but that I haven’t seen or heard from you for years. Unless...”
Trip’s smile blinked off. “Unless what, champ?”
“What if they have some evidence? What if they have your trading records, and see that you bought those stocks the day before the ‘Street Talk’ columns appeared in the paper? Then what do I do?”
Tapping a finger on the glass desktop, Trip nodded slowly to himself. “They’d still have to prove a link between you and me.”
“How hard is that? I write about a stock, you buy the stock right before. Sounds like a link to me.”
“They won’t have my trading records, champ. The stocks and the cash go through so many cutouts and offshore accounts — the feds don’t have enough accountants to even get to first base.”
“But they could know that there was unusual activity in those stocks just before my columns came out. They could know that was buying or selling, even if they don’t know who. They’ll figure benefited.”
“Sadly, champ, they will likely conclude that that someone is you. So I wish you the best of luck.”
Russ’s face grew slack. “What... what are you telling me, Trip?”
“I’m telling you, champ, that I don’t want to see you again. I have better ways of making a buck.” Trip favored him with another smile.
“You... you bastard. You ungrateful bastard!” Russ was yelling now. “Who do you think you are?”
Trip’s smile took a malevolent twist. “I think you’d better get out of my office before Mr. Abercrombie comes back.”
Russ glared at him. “Listen, you self-centered son of a bitch!” he shouted. “I’ll tell the feds every little last bit about you. I’ll destroy you!”
“You can prove nothing. Get out.”
“No? You don’t think I recorded our calls? I’ll give the tapes to the feds, and tell them what the code words mean. It’s your voice on the other end of those calls, Trip. And we have credit card charges for the same amount at the same time at Per Se. I bought you drinks at Inferno. People there saw us together. All that sounds like a link to me.”
Trip jumped to his feet. His eyes flared and his perfect lips drew back in a snarl. In all the years he’d known Trip, it was only the second time Russ had seen him lose that famous cool. A vision of the first time flashed in Russ’s brain — Trip’s bare back, the sweat in his blond hair. Trip smacked his hand on the desk, and the vision vanished. He was screaming now.
“You’re nothing! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”
Russ gathered his breath. “Or maybe,” Russ said, his voice shaking, “maybe I could gut it out and protect you. The feds can’t have proof that I bought and sold those stocks — because I didn’t. They can accuse all they like, but without proof... Maybe this is all just a fishing expedition.”
Trip spread his hands on the glass desktop and trapped his ire behind a set of white teeth. “You’d protect me?” he asked.
“I would, Trip. But we’d have to be much more careful about things. And I’d need more money.”
“More money,” Trip repeated. He nodded to himself and drummed his fingers on the desk. Then he looked at Russ with a sly light in his eye. “We’ll take it out of Abercrombie’s share. I’ll make an excuse about why the count is lighter. He’s not that smart.”
Russ’s eyes widened. “But what if he objects? What if he wants to see some proof — trading tickets or account statements?”
Trip laughed nastily. “The guy wouldn’t know a trading ticket if it jumped up and bit his ass, and he has no clue about how the market works. I could show him my cable bill and he wouldn’t know the difference. Look, if he complains, I’ll tell him we’re suspending operations until the heat is off. You and I will keep on with our arrangement, and I’ll pass you the cash directly.”
“And if, somehow, the feds link us? What then?”
Trip gave a graveyard laugh. “Then we give them Abercrombie. We tell them he forced us — threatened us at gunpoint. I mean, the guy has a criminal record like a phone book. Who are they going to believe — him or us? We just have to stick together, champ, just like we always have.”
Russ paused, gulping air. His vision was blurry and his voice was trembling when he spoke. “Trip, I... Don’t you know how I feel about you?”
Before Trip could do more than raise an eyebrow, there was a rap at the door. Beatrice looked in. “Your Los Angeles call,” she said.
Trip grinned and glanced at his watch. “No rest for the weary, champ. And anyway, you’d better get going. Don’t want to be seen loitering around here, after all. Unless there was something else...?”
Russ’s throat closed up. “Nothing else,” he said, then bolted through the door. There was no sign of Mr. Abercrombie, and Beatrice said nothing as he hurried by. In what seemed like no time he was in the empty subway station. He leaned back against the dirty tiles and tried to calm himself. Images of Trip reeled through his head.
He heard a low rumble and felt the building wind of an oncoming train. He smelled something acrid and opened his eyes. He wasn’t alone on the platform anymore. Mr. Abercrombie towered over him. And behind him, steaming with anger, stood Trip.
Abercrombie’s massive hand closed around Russ’s slender arm. “Get the other one, Trip,” he said.
Trip recoiled. “Are you crazy? I shouldn’t even be down here. You were supposed to take care of this yourself.”
“I said, get the other arm.” The fiery menace seethed out of Mr. Abercrombie, and Trip took tentative hold of Russ’s other arm. Russ felt the tremble in his hand.
“What are you doing?” Russ cried as they dragged him to the edge of the platform.
“You know the feds will crack you like a walnut, champ.” Trip’s voice was soft in his ear. “And I just can’t let that happen. I like the income stream from you, but the risk profile is up too much.”
The subway train sped into the station, a thirty-five-ton, stainless steel behemoth with harsh eyelike headlights. It rolled at them with inhuman force.
The train was almost upon them when Mr. Abercrombie dropped Russ’s arm and, with amazing agility for such a big man, took Trip by the throat. Trip let out a shriek and let go of Russ, who stumbled backward, away from the platform edge.
Trip’s hands flailed feebly at Mr. Abercrombie. His gorgeous teeth were bared in pain and panic. Mr. Abercrombie lifted Trip from his feet and tossed him to the tracks.
The subway motorman looked up in horror to see some-one stumbling off the platform. He hit the horn and then the brakes. The first car shuddered as it bumped over the body, and the cars kept rolling past amid the brakes’ banshee wail.
Mr. Abercrombie took Russ by the arm again and hauled him out the turnstile and up the stairs. Russ followed the massive form numbly, along the empty street and into a black car parked in an alleyway. Mr. Abercrombie got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Trip,” Russ whispered.
“I gotta hand it to you, Ickes,” he heard Mr. Abercrombie say through a fog, “you had him pegged — how fucking quick he’d be to sell me down the river if he thought the feds were coming through the door. No fucking loyalty at all. I hate that. You had him pegged, all right. And that crap about the U.S. Attorney calling — that was nice touch, just like the thing with the intercom. Bea kept the line open and I heard the whole thing. You did okay tonight, Ickes — a real brain trust.”
Mr. Abercrombie’s huge hands worked the wheel. Sirens broke the night, coming in their direction. Russ felt water coursing down his waxen cheeks, and it wasn’t sweat. Abercrombie’s rumble filled the car.
“Bigger cut for everybody without Trip, and I won’t have to listen to the girls at the club complain no more either. And truth is, I was getting tired of that attitude of his. Not that smart. Sheesh, what an asshole.”
“I wanted to tell him—”
Three cop cars zoomed past, a carnival of light and noise. The black car continued toward the Queensboro Bridge. Russ sighed and Mr. Abercrombie shook his head.
“Like you said, Ickes, he served his purpose. And the way he treated you — an old friend like you — it was long overdue. It’d been me, I’d’ve taken care of it long ago. He had it coming, so enough with the guilt already. You can’t blame yourself. Trip is brown bread. Dead.” Mr. Abercrombie glanced over at Russ. “Are you all right, Ickes? Are you crying?”
“I wanted to tell him...”
“Hey, cheer up, pal — everything’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna make mucho bucks together, you and me.” With something almost like affection, Mr. Abercrombie dropped a gorilla hand on Russ’s shoulder, near his windpipe. He turned and looked at Russ. “Come on, champ. Make me rich.”
200 Park Avenue
I should be sitting here trying to figure out how to say goodbye to my wife.
Instead, I’m sitting here thinking I should have known the wheels were fixing to come off this thing the instant I spit that cough drop onto the Contessa’s nipple in full view of the Hell Bitch.
That was all the omen a man could ask for.
I get to my feet and look down at Katy, all hooked up to her feeding tubes and what have you. Laid out like some old person. Instead of the vibrant and amazing young woman I married not all that long ago.
All I can think to say is, “I’m sorry, darling.”
She looks at me and her eyes are wet. “Don’t, Billy. Please don’t.”
She reaches for my hand and I let her take it and squeeze it and hold it to her sunken cheek, and I can feel her tears on my skin.
I bend down and kiss her forehead and whisper that I love her, and then I retrieve my hand and walk out of the hospital room and take the elevator down and go outside and hail a cab. I tell the driver to take me to the NYPD’s Midtown North Precinct house.
That’s when I see the guy walking toward me with his hand inside his coat.
I need to back up some. To the Day of the Cough Drop Incident. To what happened that afternoon.
And to what happened even before that, on the morning of the Incident.
And, come to think of it, to what happened the night before that...
It happened in the Hell Bitch’s office on the afternoon of the Day of the Cough Drop Incident. Half the floor could hear it and it was horrible.
It was the complete works. Screaming, invective, cussing. What a fuck-up I was. How I had embarrassed her and the firm in front of one of our most important clients, a woman with connections across the Continent. Who would no doubt tell the story of my faux pas to many extremely rich and important people, potential clients, who would make up their minds on the basis of that anecdote alone never to do business with us.
On and on it went.
I sat across the desk from her and played mental rope-a-dope. Covered my ego with a blank expression and watched the spit fly from the Hell Bitch’s mouth as she yelled at me and I wondered why I hadn’t had sense enough to pursue a career in dentistry. Wondered what made me think coming to Wall Street to practice law in-house at a secretive private bank was a good idea in the first place.
When she started to wind down I thought, Well, there’s no time like the present.
I said, “Okay. For at least the fifteenth time, I apologize.
I’ll write a letter of apology to the Contessa. I’ll offer to have her dress cleaned. But there’s one more thing you need to know. Something else happened this morning.”
I told her about my ride uptown with Stu Spagnoletti, and I watched the fear and paranoia rise up in her like a fever. When I was done, her eyes were wide and her hands were shaking and she looked like a clown in some carnival of the deranged.
She stood, pulled herself erect to her full five feet, and screamed, “GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT!”
I was only too happy to oblige.
On my way back to my office I stopped by Frank Biallo’s. I’m not even sure why. Maybe just to be in the presence of a fellow sufferer. As I got there, the guy who delivered the interoffice mail, a stooped old man who wore a blue smock and whom everybody called Sarge, was walking out and taking the helm of his mail cart.
I looked in just as Frank was fishing an inner-office envelope out of his inbox. It bulged oddly. Frank opened it and extracted a paper ball. He smoothed it out on his desk and examined it and looked up. “I guess Stecher didn’t like my memo,” he said.
“I have a suggestion.”
“What’s that, Tex?”
“Let me go to my office and call home. Then let’s you and me go get drunk.”
Frank hesitated. He looked at the crumpled paper on his desk. “I think maybe I’d better stay here and do some rewriting.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself, podna.” I turned to go.
“Hey, Tex?”
“What?”
“You okay?”
I grinned. “Fine as frog hair.”
When I got to my office I called Katy. “I’m not completely sure but I may have just gotten my ass fired.”
“Oh, Billy. I’m so sorry. Maybe it’s for the best.”
“Maybe.”
“Why don’t you come home?”
“In a while. I want to go for a walk. Maybe get a drink.”
“I’ve got good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Stu already found work for Hiram. And a place for him to live.”
I hesitated. “Great. What’s he doing?”
“Limo driver.”
“Katy? I need you to tell Carmen something and ask her to pass it along to Stu.”
“What, honey?”
“Stu asked me for a favor this morning. Tell her to tell him I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to deliver for him.”
“Okay.”
When I hung up I checked my e-mail. There was one from the Hell Bitch, sent after I’d left her office, telling me to be at a working group session on the Park Avenue deal the next morning at 10 o’clock. I thought, Great. Guess I still have a job after all.
But I knew there was no point in hanging around there the rest of the day — I was fried. I shrugged on my suit jacket and overcoat and headed out into the blizzard.
That’s the night the Hell Bitch disappeared.
But for that storm I doubt there would have been any Cough Drop Incident to begin with. So blame it on the execrable New York weather.
The morning of the Incident the snow had started at day-break and I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside my apartment building trying but failing to hail a cab, and by that time the streets were a mess. After I’d been at it ten minutes I looked at my watch and decided maybe I’d best just walk. I was of course utterly unaware that, before the day was out, I would perpetrate a cough drop assault on a client and then endure the cussing-out from the Hell Bitch that I have already described.
A black Town Car slid to the curb and out of my building came Stu Spagnoletti, accompanied by a guy who looked like he could bench press the Brady Bunch. They were both dressed in double-breasted overcoats and fedoras and they made straight for the Town Car, but when Stu saw me he stopped and said, “Billy!”
“Stu.”
“You tryin’ to catch a cab? A cab, you’re never gonna catch in this fuckin’ weather, okay? C’mon. We’re goin’ uptown. We’ll give ya a lift.”
Stu headed for the Town Car but I hesitated.
Stu looked back. “C’mon! Get in, before your balls freeze off out here!”
I followed him into the car.
Behind the wheel was another slab of beef who looked at me in the rearview mirror. If it wasn’t a hostile look then I would not particularly care to see a hostile look from this hombre. Stu leaned forward and said, “Jimmy. On the way uptown we want to stop at 200 Park.” Stu looked at me. “That’s where this fancy bank of yours is, right?”
I did not even want to know how Stu came by this information. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” Stu sat back. Adjusted his overcoat. “How’s Katy? She doin’ any better?”
“Thanks for asking. I’m afraid not.”
Stu folded his arms over his chest and looked at me ternly. “She wants that you should be around more often. This she says to my wife.”
“We’ve been real busy at work lately.”
“This she also says to Carmen. So. Tell me about this problem of yours.”
“You mean Hiram?”
Stu dropped his hands in his lap. “Who?”
“My brother-in-law.”
“Naw.” Stu slapped at the air with a paw that was covered in black leather. “Get to him in a minute. I’m talkin’ about this crazy woman at the bank. Your boss.”
I looked out the window. We were crawling up Park Avenue. If I had just trusted my instincts and walked I would have been there by now. And my throat was starting to feel scratchy. Need to stop off at the newsstand, get some lozenges before I go upstairs. I cleared my throat and looked at Stu. “She’s just a little high strung, is all.”
“High strung, huh? Show me a woman that’s not. They’re all outta their fuckin’ gourds, you ask me. And it’s made worse by this thing. This women’s liberation, so-called. Now they want to be lawyers and doctors and priests and shit. They even got their own professional basketball league. It’s bullshit, you ask me. I can promise you this, we ain’t never gonna have no women partners in my line of work.”
“What exactly is your line of work, Stu?”
“Oh, this and that, this and that. Which brings me to this other thing. Tell me about this brother-in-law of yours.”
I shrugged. “We’re not exactly what you’d call close.”
“My wife says your wife says he’s a good Joe.”
“I suppose. For an ex-con.”
“So the guy has done some time. Doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. Personally, I liked him. He and Katy, they came over for coffee yesterday.”
“I heard.”
“He’s from some place I never heard of before and he talks funny. Aside from that, nothin’ wrong with him that I can see. My wife comes to me, she says, ‘Stu. Maybe you can help him out.’ And I say, ‘Sure. Why not?’ My wife likes your wife, you know?”
“Glad to hear it.”
“We’re neighbors. At least we are until they’re done with the construction at our house in Great Neck, see. Then we’ll be movin’ out.”
“We’ll miss you,” I said, as convincingly as I could.
“Yeah. Same here. Been nice gettin’ to know you some, these last coupla months.”
I looked out the window and thought, Stu, you don’t know me at all and I intend to make sure it stays that way. But I said nothing.
“So, anyway, neighbors should help one another out. Do favors. Like that. So I say to myself, ‘Stu. You should help the man out, this Hiram from Nowhere with the funny manner of speech. Find him some gainful employment.’”
I looked back at him. “I’m sure Katy will be very grateful.”
“Probably just minimum wage starting out. But maybe some, you know, possibility for advancement along the way.”
I went back to studying the snowscape. We’d only gone as far as the lower 30s. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. I toyed with making some comment about Hiram being the first made guy ever from Arkansas but decided against it. “If he clears enough take-home pay to move out of my apartment, I’ll be grateful too.”
“Happy to do you a favor. Now I got to ask you about somethin’ else.”
I looked his way. He was studying me like a man might study the angles on a three-rail bank shot. “Okay.”
“This deal you’re workin’ on. The air rights thing up on Park.”
My ears were suddenly humming. “How’d you know about that?”
“Was in the papers.”
“The fact that I’m working on it wasn’t.”
“All right. Have it your way, then. The Gerstens and my family, we go way back, see. And Ray Gersten comes to my old man and tells him you and this woman boss of yours are breakin’ his balls with this thing. This right to back out after a year, they don’t get their development plan through the P and Z. My old man comes to me and says, ‘This young Texan. He’s your neighbor at that nice apartment you just moved into, right? Maybe you should speak to this young man. Ask him to show a little flex on this. Do a favor for us and our old friends Ray and Ed Gersten.’ ”
I tried to think what to say but the humming in my ears had matured into a roar and my head felt like it was full of pea gravel. “Stu, I—”
He leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “If you could give us a little help here, my family would never forget it. Meantime, I’ll talk to my people. Find something for this brother-in-law of yours to do. Get him out from under foot.” Stu took his hand off my arm, pointed out the window. “I think this is your building.”
I hadn’t realized the car had stopped. I looked out the window and back at Stu. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Don’t mention it. But get back to me on this air rights thing. One way or the other. So I’ll know what to tell my old man.”
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at my desk sucking on a cherry throat lozenge and staring into space. I don’t remember getting out of the car or going into the building or buying the package of lozenges or going up the elevator. Somehow I had done all those things without having to think about anything other than the fact that I’d just had the arm put on me by a member of a known organized crime family concerning a real estate transaction on which I was the second chair lawyer.
The Gerstens and the Spagnolettis. Shithouse mouse.
My clients in this air rights transaction were what we euphemistically referred to as a “high net-worth family.” This is Wall Street jargon for richer’n shit. You’d recognize the name if I were to mention it, but that I will not be doing. They’d made their money in tobacco and sold out long before the class-action lawyers came storming out of the sewer grates and sued that business back to the Stone Age. They’d invested a part of their fortune in Manhattan real estate, including a building on Park Avenue that had excess air rights. Rights that could, under the applicable zoning rules, support a building larger than what had been built there.
So my clients had done the smart thing and made a deal to sell these unused air rights to the Gersten Brothers, for hundreds of dollars per buildable foot, payable in part at closing and in part at substantial completion of the condo project the Gerstens aimed to construct. Condos in the East 60s, with views of Central Park West on one side and all the way to Long Island on the other. Condos with blue granite finishes and gold fixtures in the bathrooms. Condos they’d sell to rock stars and Saudi princes and captains of industry for three thousand dollars a foot if they sold them for a dime.
This was the deal that for the last three months had been my own personal galley ship, with the Hell Bitch cracking the whip.
It was Katy who gave her that name, by the way, inspired by Captain Woodrow Call’s horse in Lonesome Dove. But her real name was Diane Martin. She was the bank’s senior real estate lawyer, the woman I answered to. The woman who had taken it upon herself to ruin my life.
But back to the deal. The rescission right that Stu had mentioned was a part of the negotiations from Day One. If the Gerstens didn’t get their condo development plan approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission within a year of closing, our clients could rescind the transaction — in effect, take back their air rights and return the Gerstens’ purchase to them.
The Gerstens had howled about this at every opportunity. A year was a very short turnaround time at the P and Z, and their fear was that if they missed the deadline our clients would rescind the deal and sell the air rights to Trump or somebody for more money, because those rights would only increase in value with the passage of time.
But our clients had insisted on this term as a way of protecting their interest in the deferred portion of the purchase price.
I sat there, not believing the position I was in. Should I tell the Hell Bitch about this? If I did, it was sure to trigger a full-blown episode. She’d be bound and determined to go to the Gerstens’ lawyer and have it out with him. She’d raise unshirted hell about this attempt to get to her through me, which would only poison the atmosphere between the two sides even more than it already was and make it harder still to get the deal closed.
On top of that, I had started to wonder about the Spagnolettis’ motives. Was this simply a favor — however ham-handed — for their old pals the Gerstens? Or did they have an ownership position in the condo development? One that would make them an ass-pocket full of money if the project was successful?
I had asked the Gerstens’ lawyer at least half a dozen times for a structure chart showing the full beneficial ownership of the limited partnership that the Gerstens had formed to buy the rights. The guy had done nothing but give me the Heisman.
It was going to be very hard indeed to say no to the Spagnolettis if they were looking to make money in the deal.
The whole episode had left me with a world class case of the nervous high strikes, and it just figured that when my phone rang it was the Hell Bitch’s assistant calling. I lifted the handset. “Morning, Patsie.”
“She has the Contessa with her and she has a question or two. Can you come up here please? And bring the closing binder.”
“On my way.” I popped a cherry cough drop in my mouth and stood up and pulled the closing binder down from my bookshelves and headed for the door.
We had represented a French Contessa earlier in the year when she had sent one of her gophers across the pond to buy her an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Two months and eight million dollars later, the woman owned three thousand square feet of prime Manhattan real estate. I knew the Contessa was in town and had been expecting that at some point I would get a call summoning me to the Hell Bitch’s office to take her through the particulars of this transaction.
By the time I reached the Hell Bitch’s three hundred square feet with commanding views up the island, I was a touch out of breath and sweating some. Made me wonder if I was fixing to take sick.
Please, God, not until after the Park Avenue deal is done.
Patsie showed me in. The two of them were seated at a conference table. The Hell Bitch was looking her most professional, wearing a blue dress that thanks to some optical illusion made her look slightly less chubby. The Hell Bitch had an on-again/off-again relationship with her grooming accessories and her makeup drawer — but today it was on-again. Her brunette hair was blown dry and combed and she’d even applied some cosmetics, not that any amount of makeup could do much for her jowly, bulldoggish aspect.
The Contessa looked like an older version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Blond hair, peaches-and-cream complexion, diamonds in her ears and at her throat and on her fingers. She was wearing a snow-white angora sweater dress that showed off a figure that might or might not have had something to do with her being royalty. She sat very erect and looked at me as a well-heeled guest might look at a doorman on her way out of her hotel.
The Hell Bitch made the introductions and I took the Contessa’s hand and shook it carefully and allowed as how I was pleased to meet her. Then I held the closing binder up and said to the Hell Bitch, “What would you all like to see?”
The Hell Bitch said, “The Contessa is thinking of getting a pet and wants to see the relevant building policies.”
“Got it.” I flipped through the binder. “Okay. Here we are.”
I walked around the table so that I was standing behind the Contessa and leaned over her and opened the binder and laid my finger along a line of text and said, “Here’s what you can own without seeking permission—”
And just then the lozenge fell from my mouth. It made directly for the Contessa’s sweater dress and landed on the very end of her breast. No Olympic gymnast ever stuck a better landing. A perfect ten.
Time froze.
I plucked the lozenge from the dress, and even though it was lousy with angora hair, I popped it back into my mouth and said, “—from the co-op board.”
I looked at the Hell Bitch and she was staring at me with her eyes wide and a look of panic and disbelief on her face.
I said, “Maybe I should just leave you all with the binder.”
The Hell Bitch said, “I think that would probably be best.” Her voice was two octaves higher than normal.
I headed back to my office to wait for the inevitable Hell Bitch meltdown. Which, as I’ve already said, came after lunch that same day.
And which I had coming for once.
As I waited, I thought about how just yesterday, just YESTERDAY, I had for five minutes entertained notions that maybe life was going to get better around here after all.
By the time I’d left the Gulag the previous night it was almost 2 a.m., but I judged the day a good one on account of the Hell Bitch hadn’t boiled over hardly at all. So with gratitude that it had gone smoothly, I sent out an e-mail transmitting the latest draft of the Park Avenue air rights P and Z agreement to the working group, powered down my laptop, slipped it into my Tumi bag, and headed for the elevators.
The firm’s name is not really the Gulag, of course — that’s just what us juniors called it. As I’ve said before, it’s sort of a bank. But don’t think Bank of America or Wells Fargo — it’s not that kind of bank. And you wouldn’t recognize the name unless your family is in the Forbes 400. Think of it as the First National Bank of No Man Is a Hero to His Valet. Because we only deal with the super-rich, and we deal with them when they’re at their super-worst. Which is when they’re obsessing about their money.
Along with the usual complement of bankers and traders, the Gulag has a large legal department, as big as some law firms. So that we can function as a full-service provider of all necessary services to our richer’n shit and secrecy-obsessed clients.
Which is how I’d spent my five years before the mast. Representing people who’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.
I saw but one other lighted office on my walk through the dark halls of the Gulag, and I stopped and stuck my head in the door. Frank Biallo sat studying a law book, with his tie loose and shirt cuffs rolled up. He had suspenders on and he looked like a dealer in a back-room game of blackjack.
“Hey, Frank.”
He looked up. His wire-rimmed spectacles caught the lights from the overheads. “Well, if it’s not our token Texan and Diane’s very own cowboy Friday. So, what’s with this knockin’ off early shit, huh? You never leave before me.”
“I’m like the monkey that was fucking the skunk, podna. I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand. What’s got you burnin’ the 2 a.m. oil?”
“Memo on that transaction in Vail. Stecher wants it yesterday. So, how’s your deal coming?”
“It’s coming.”
“And Diane? She still treating you good?”
“She’s a paranoid schizophrenic with a hundred and eighty IQ who is in all likelihood demon-possessed.”
“That’s a bad fuckin’ combination, Tex.”
“But she can also get a man a managing directorship. If she doesn’t kill him first.”
“Or he doesn’t kill her.”
“Tell me about it. I sometimes think a hit would be a really good idea.”
“You slurrin’ my ethnicity, Tex?”
“Hell no. Last thing I need in my life is a bunch of watered-off paisans.”
“You got that right.”
“Good luck with your memo, podna.”
“’Night, Tex.”
“Hasta luego.”
I stopped in the reception area and looked north through the plate glass windows at Park Avenue. I could just see it, way up yonder — a little building on the west side of the street, and all those beautiful air rights.
I glanced toward the sky. Clouds were moving in. Supposed to snow tomorrow, according to the weather sadist.
I missed Texas all the time but it was during the winters that I missed it most. In wintertime in New York, you see the sun maybe six hours a day and everything is gray and lifeless and depressing and the streets run with slush and even an extra fifteen pounds of clothes are not enough to keep you warm when the wind goes pounding down those canyons made by man and money.
I was soon in the back of a cab careening through the mostly empty Manhattan streets, headed for my tiny one-bed-room apartment near Union Square. The cabbie was attired in the kind of cloth headgear that has its roots in certain nomadic cultures, and he maintained a quiet and continuous cell phone conversation in a foreign tongue as he steered the cab with one hand and outside the tall buildings went by in a blur. I hung on as best I could and wondered if what I’d heard was true, that the most common cause for emergency room admissions in this town is accidents involving taxicabs.
And for aught that it was the wee hours and there were but few souls on the sidewalks, there was the ceaseless and implacable noise of New York, the cabbie mumbling and the radio tuned to 1010 WINS in the background and the sirens in the distance and the squeal of the cab’s tires. New York isn’t so much the City That Never Sleeps as it is the City That Never Shuts Up. So very unlike my boyhood home in South Texas where by that time of night even the coyotes have ceased carrying on and bedded down.
I got out near the corner of Fourth and 14th and paid the fare and walked through the lobby of my building, nodding at the doorman behind the reception desk. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor and walked down a dimly lit hall lined by doors sporting multiple locks and let myself into 17B only to find my living room couch occupied by an ex-convict from Arkansas who also happened to be my brother-in-law.
Seeing Hiram Redding in New York City at all was almost more of a shock than my system could handle. But here? In my living room? Drinking beer and watching porn with his feet up on my coffee table?
Hiram glanced my way and went back to his pay-perview. He raised his can of Heineken in a mock toast. “What’s doin’, bro?”
I glanced toward the bedroom. Saw the door was closed.
“Hiram? What are you doing here?”
“She didn’t tell you I was comin’?”
“She hasn’t said a word.” I set my computer bag on the floor and shucked out of my coat and walked to the refrigerator. Opened it. I had one beer left. One beer out of the two six-packs that were there when I left the apartment that morning.
Great. I come home at 2:30 in the damn morning to find a convicted killer sitting in my damn apartment, drunker than a damn lord on my damn beer.
I took out the last beer and popped the top. Walked into the living room and dropped into a chair. “I didn’t think your PO would let you leave the state.”
Hiram sipped his beer. “I been a real good boy. Not so much as a parkin’ ticket. I tol’ her I needed to come up here, check on my little sister, since she’d took bad sick and her husband wasn’t lookin’ after her like he should. Even a PO is a sucker for a line like that. You always work this late?”
“If I have to.” I looked him over. Prison tattoos he picked up doing fifteen in Tucker for second-degree murder. Stubble on his chin, just going to gray. Hair long and greasy and combed back. Wearing jeans and a wife beater. Alligator boots that looked to be older than he was. “You planning to stay long?”
“I might.”
“We don’t have a guest room.”
Hiram patted the couch next to him. “Yeah you do.”
“They don’t know what’s wrong with her, Hiram.”
“She done tol’ me that.”
“Could be chronic fatigue syndrome. Lupus. Lou Gehrig’s disease. She can barely lift her arms anymore. Has to take her food through a tube. Her immune system is for shit. She could get carried off by a cold if it was severe enough.”
“She done tol’ me all that too.”
“Your PO has no clue where you are, does she?” Hiram said nothing.
“Hiram? Why are you here?”
Hiram pointed at the television set. “Look at that ol’ boy go. He’s really givin’ it to her, ain’t he?”
“I’d appreciate an answer to my question.”
“She said she thought I ought to meet your all’s next door neighbors. They seem real nice.”
“You’re telling me you’ve met Stu and Carmen?”
“Me and Katy had a cup of coffee over yonder this evenin’. That Stu is one funny sumbitch. He talks like some guy in a gangster flick.”
I took a drink and thought, Jesus H. Christ.
When I was done with my beer I slipped as quietly as I could into the bedroom. Undressed and got into bed. Listened to my wife’s breathing. I used to be able to tell by how she breathed whether she was asleep or not. Anymore, I had no clue.
She ended the guesswork by saying, “I was planning to tell you, Billy. It’s just that he showed up a week earlier than I thought he would.”
“You could’ve called me at the office.”
“You hate it when I call you at the office.”
“I like it better than I do walking into my apartment and finding Mr. Murder-Two drinking my next-to-last Heineken.”
“There’s nothing for Hiram in Arkansas. I’ve been talking to Carmen about him. She thinks her husband can help him out.”
I turned on my side, tried to see my wife’s wasted shell of a body by what little light there was from the clock radio. “Katy, I hate to be the one to tell you, babe, but that is a real bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because the Spagnolettis are mobbed up to high heaven, is why.”
“You don’t know this.”
“Katy. Sweetheart. Everyone knows this.”
“Carmen has talked to me some about their family businesses. They sound very legitimate to me.”
“What businesses would these be?”
“Importing. Or exporting. Or something. I don’t know the details. Carmen says Stu will try to get Hiram hired on, doing some kind of work, maybe over in Queens.”
“Christ.”
“You’re too cynical, Billy. You weren’t that way when we met. You were sweet and trusting. This city, the bank — that woman — they’ve changed you.”
I leaned over and kissed Katy on her sunken cheek. “Well. I reckon. Now you should get some sleep. We both need some sleep.”
“Okay.”
But it was awhile before sleep carried me off that night.
Only to awake the following morning to a day that would start with a ride with Stu Spagnoletti, be punctuated by the Cough Drop Incident and a museum-quality Hell Bitch melt-down, and end with the Hell Bitch herself disappearing from the face of the earth.
The morning after all that happened we met for our 10 a.m. working group session on the Park Avenue deal, and that’s when we noticed we were short one Hell Bitch. When she hadn’t shown by 10:30, I left the conference room and chased her assistant down by phone. “Patsie, have you heard from Diane?”
“No. I haven’t seen or heard from her since last night when I called a Town Car for her just before I left.”
“Can you try her at home and on her cell, please?”
After that I had no choice but to go back in the conference room and get the meeting started. They were all there but the Hell Bitch, and by that I mean the Gerstens, their lawyers, and my client’s representative, Manhattan celebrity broker Donnie Dominick.
The Gerstens’ lawyer started right in about the Hell Bitch not being there.
“Where is she, anyway?”
“I honestly couldn’t say. Her assistant is trying to track her down now.”
The lawyer laid his pencil down on his stack of deal documents and crossed his arms over his chest. “Without her, we really can’t get much done, can we? I mean, unless you’re prepared to assure us that you speak for both her and your client.”
We all knew what he meant by this. Any deal we make with you, she’s just gonna un-make at the next meeting, hotshot. Why should we waste our time?
I looked at Donnie. He shrugged. I could tell he agreed with the Gerstens’ lawyer.
“You want to reschedule?”
“Maybe we should.”
Nods all around, and we broke up with plans to meet the next day.
Only, the next day? Still no Hell Bitch.
And at that point, I really had no choice.
I crossed my fingers and took control of the deal and gave the Gerstens’ lawyer the assurances he was looking for. Then I worked around the clock on the damn thing to resolve all the open issues, including the rescission clause.
Four sleepless days later, three things happened: I closed the Park Avenue deal; the Hell Bitch turned up graveyard dead, stuffed into a refrigerator in a vacant lot in the Bronx; and Katy was rushed to the hospital with full-blown pneumonia, damn near dead herself.
A week after they found the Hell Bitch’s body, I was taking a break from my vigil in ICU at Presbyterian, headed down to the cafeteria in search of caffeine, when two NYPD Homicide detectives badged me by the elevators.
“Your office said we would find you here,” said the older one, a short guy with a face like a basset hound, whose name was French.
“We’re working the Diane Martin case. We wanna ask you a few questions,” said his partner, a tall guy in spectacles with a prominent nose whose name was Reston.
“Can we do it over coffee?”
“Sure.”
Five minutes later we were down in the cafeteria sipping coffee and French was talking to me while he consulted his notebook. “Ms. Martin’s assistant says she called her usual Town Car service to pick her up the night she went missing. We checked with them, and they say they got that call all right, but then they got a second call canceling the car. Ms. Martin’s assistant said she made just the one call, the first one, so we’re wondering if something hinky went down.
“Anyhow, Ms. Martin was seen by one of your colleagues getting into a Town Car at the west entrance to 200 Park at approximately 7:30 that night. George and me, we been all over this city talking to limo drivers who picked up at that spot that night. Yesterday we found a guy, says he remembers seeing Ms. Martin get into a car. He remembers her because he drove for her once and she lost her temper at him.”
I sipped my coffee. “She had a short fuse.”
“Our guy said he got a look at her driver when he got out from behind the wheel to open the door for her. The guy who was driving for her that night, he looked different.”
“Different how?”
“Different as in not clean cut like your typical chauffeur who drives rich lawyers around. Our witness sat with a sketch artist and this is what the two of them came up with.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and laid it on the table.
Looking back at me was a perfect likeness of my brother-in-law, Hiram Redding.
French said, “You ever seen this guy, Mr. Carson?”
I swallowed hard and looked the cop in the eye. “Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
He nodded and peered at his partner. “We understand from talking to some of your colleagues that you had a nick-name for the victim.”
“A nickname?”
“A way of referring to her. Could you tell us what that was, please?”
“The Hell Bitch.” My voice came out a little squeaky. I cleared my throat and said, “I called her the Hell Bitch.”
“Not a very nice way to refer to somebody, is it?”
“It was a joke. Like I said, she had a temper. And she wasn’t afraid to use it. It was just a joke.”
“We talked to a Mr. Biallo in your office this afternoon. He says you once said you thought maybe it would not be such a bad idea if someone was to kill Ms. Martin.”
“I was kidding. For chrissakes — Frank knew I was just kidding.”
“Doesn’t seem all that funny now, does it?”
“No.”
“Do you know how she died?”
“I heard she was shot.”
“Once. In the back of the head.” The cop made quotation marks with his fingers. “‘Execution style,’ like they say in the papers. You know a Mr. Stu Spagnoletti?”
“He’s a neighbor of mine.”
“You were seen getting in a car with him the morning the victim disappeared.”
“It was snowing. I needed a ride to the office. He offered. I accepted.”
The cop tapped the sketch with a forefinger. “You sure you don’t know this person?”
“Positive.”
“Okay.” The two cops stood to go. “Before we go—”
“I know. You don’t want me to leave town.”
The two cops looked at one another. Then French said, “I was gonna say, we just want you to know, we hope your wife gets better soon.”
With that they turned and walked away.
When I knocked on his apartment door, Stu answered it himself.
“How’s the little woman doin’?” he said.
“Better. She’s regained consciousness and the doctors say they think she’s gonna make it. Thanks for asking. Now I have a question for you.”
He shifted his stance and crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay.”
“Did you have Diane Martin whacked?”
“Who is Diane Martin?”
“My boss. She was murdered last week.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“She wasn’t showing the flex you and the Gerstens wanted to see in the air rights deal. Maybe you decided she was the problem and that she needed to be gotten rid of. Knowing that I would take the lead in negotiating the deal once she disappeared and that I would come up with a reasonable compromise — with something we Texans call ‘rough justice.’ A deal that works for both buyer and seller, even if it’s not perfect for either one. Which is just exactly what happened.”
“Good for you.”
“You’re telling me you had nothing to do with her death.”
“I’m tellin’ you I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Where’s my brother-in-law?”
A shrug. “Gone.”
“Gone?”
“He worked a couple days drivin’ people. Then called in. Said he missed Arkansas. Was goin’ home.”
“Stu?”
“Yeah?”
“New York is a city with apartments by the hundreds of thousands. What made you pick this particular one to relocate to while your place in Great Neck was being redone? How is it that you happened to pick this very apartment, just a couple weeks after I started working on the Park Avenue air rights deal?”
Stu looked at me for a long moment. Then he walked back in his apartment and closed the door.
“Shithouse mouse,” I said to the closed door.
I went to my apartment, got out Katy’s address book, and tried every phone number she had for Hiram. No answer at any of them.
By this time my head was seriously spinning. I sat in my living room and looked out the window at a lowering sky that promised yet another winter storm before the night was out. I sat there for a long time, thinking.
It was full dark when I grabbed my overcoat and headed downstairs again.
On my way through the lobby the doorman called to me, a little sheepish. “Oh, Mr. Carson?”
“Yeah?”
“Thought you’d want to know, sir. A couple of detectives were in here before, asking me to look at a sketch of a man. He looked just like the man who stayed with you and your wife a couple weeks ago.”
I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”
Katy is awake when I get back to her hospital room. I pull a chair next to her bed, and brush her hair off her forehead and kiss her. “Hey, babe. How you doing?”
I get back a weak smile. “I’m feeling okay.”
“Honey? I need to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Where’s Hiram?”
Her face grows serious. “Sweetheart, I have no idea. I haven’t seen or heard from him since he moved out.”
“I talked to Stu today. He said Hiram went back to Arkansas.”
“Oh.”
“The police say a man who looks like him picked up Diane Martin the night she disappeared.”
“She’s not the Hell Bitch anymore?”
“Katy. I need you to tell me what’s going on here.”
She looks away. When she turns back she has tears in her eyes. “Stu heard me talking with Carmen about her. How awful she is — how crazy and paranoid and how she keeps you down. How you’re really a better lawyer than she is. A more reasonable person to deal with.”
“God Almighty.”
“Carmen said it was a shame and Stu said not to worry — that so much worry would only make me sick and there was no point in it. He said that this is New York, and people come and go all the time — to new jobs or new careers, or sometimes they, you know, get hit by a bus. Something like that. I didn’t argue with him.”
“You didn’t argue with him?”
Now she’s crying in earnest. “I said that would make me happy. Oh, babe, I was half kidding, but, my God, she treated you so badly. I just wanted her out of our lives.”
“Christ, Katy. Where did Hiram fit in?”
“I’d told Carmen about him. She said I should invite him to come to town. She said Stu might be able to find something for him. Something that would let Hiram make a little money, so he wouldn’t have it so bad back home.”
“Stu found something for him to do all right.”
“Oh God, Billy. I had no idea what she was talking about. Really and truly.”
“I gotta go to the cops with this, Katy.”
“Do you have to?”
“Katy. The cops are gonna think I brought Hiram to town to cap Diane. And you know why they’re gonna think that? Because Stu set it up to look just that way.”
I sit listening to her cry, knowing I need to go.
Knowing I need to go now.
Knowing I need to say goodbye to my wife and go dime out one of the most dangerous men in New York along with my asshole brother-in-law.
I stand and say, “I’m sorry, darling.”
Two minutes later I’m walking out of my wife’s room, the back of my hand still wet from her tears. The sound of her voice as she pleaded with me still in my head. The taste of her skin still on my lips.
I speak to the cabbie but he makes no move to pull away from the curb. And as I watch the guy in the overcoat walk toward me, I think about my wife lying in her hospital bed and hope that Carmen will see to it that Stu does right by Katy, maybe with some of the money his family will make off the Gerstens’ condo deal.
And I suddenly realize that the City That Never Shuts Up is completely silent, that there is no sound to be heard at all, no chattering cabbie, no radio traffic report, no jackhammers in the street, no sirens, no blaring horns, no drunken laughter, and the guy keeps coming with his hand in his coat and now he pulls out his hand and there’s something in it that’s dark and heavy and he makes straight for the cab window and what I next hear in this first ever moment of total silence in this town is glass exploding and the quiet deadly cough of a silenced gunshot.
1313 Avenue of the Americas
As soon as she wedged her way off the crowded elevator on the forty-fifth floor, pregnant belly swathed in a navy Anne Klein duffel coat, with a sticker from the security desk on the lapel, she noticed the charge in the atmosphere. A mood of muffled tension and high-wire efficiency pervaded the reception area with its Oriental carpet, copies of Billboard and Variety arrayed on the coffee tables, and works of contemporary art hanging on the mahogany-paneled walls.
“Can I help you?” A receptionist with honey highlights in her hair and a small gold stud in her nose spoke to her from behind glass.
“I’m Nancy Arthur. I’m here to see Scott Locasio.”
“Have a seat, please.”
She went over and sank into a black leather sofa, her feet aching, her eyes drawn to a painting of a seated screaming man surrounded by a cage of lines. She studied it carefully, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be the original version of the Francis Bacon she’d written a paper on back when she was an art history major.
“He’ll see you now.” An assistant in stilettoes as thin as ice picks came striding up the hall, carrying herself with a kind of daunting confidence meant to convey a sense of both her own importance and the visitor’s provisional status.
Nancy struggled to her feet and followed her past a row of mounted platinum records and movie posters, feeling that familiar hummingbird flutter in her gut. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be such a girl. A great oak door opened onto a sweeping godlike view of northern Manhattan, a perspective that made the trees of Central Park look like the current occupant’s private garden and filled her with an uncomfortable mixture of envy and awe. Its majesty was only slightly undercut by the presence of a Styrofoam backboard in the corner and the brutal thump of hip-hop coming from a pair of four-foot-high Altec Lansing speakers.
“So you’re supposed to be the new coach, huh?” He spoke without taking his eyes off his computer monitor. A stocky, thick-necked young man in charcoal double-breasted pinstripes, with a pair of black suede Bruno Magli loafers insouciantly up on his desk. “No disrespect,” he said. “But if it was up to me, you wouldn’t even be here.”
“And why’s that?” She sat down before him without being asked, trying to stake a claim and accommodate herself to the deliberate thuggishness in his manner. A lot of them were like that these days. The new breed, who wore flashy jewelry to the office, listened to misogynist rap, and left copies of Maxim on their desks, in full view of their pregnant guests.
“I don’t think I need it,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I took over as head of worldwide media last year, this company’s stock was in the toilet. Now we’ve got three CDs in Billboard’s Top Ten, four of the top-rated shows on the networks, and the top-grossing game system in the country for the last three weeks running. Nothing wrong with the way I’m doing my job.”
“So why do you think the board hired me to work with you?”
He finally took his eyes off the monitor, to give her the
“I guess somebody thinks I need a little ‘seasoning.’” He made little quotation marks with his fingers. “They want me to work on my ‘sandbox skills.’ Apparently, Scottso might have hurt somebody’s little feelings when he took over. Like that has any relevance.”
“And you don’t think it does?”
“Revenues have been up every quarter since I came in. All these Ivy League bitches with their Harvard MBAs and their Yale degrees wouldn’t know a hit if it came up and bit them in the ass. Things needed to be shaken up. A couple of dishes got chipped along the way? So fucking what? I never knew this industry had so many pussies.”
She tried to cross her legs, knowing that she was being tested here. Pussies. Bitches The language of intimidation. If you protested, you were barred from the boys’ locker room. But if you put up with too much, you were a doormat for life.
“So you’re the only one with balls around here, I guess,” she said flatly, letting him know she could play if she really had to.
He snorted in contempt. “You’re the only one with balls,” he mimicked her. “Listen to you. Like you’re going to tell me about my business? And where’d you go to college, Princeton?”
“I did my graduate work in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan.” She started to stick her chin out and then caught herself. “Why is that important to you?”
“Organizational psychology.” He looked like he’d just licked a cat. “That’s like a tofu hamburger, isn’t it? What are you? You’re not in business and you’re not a real shrink. Who do you think you’re kidding?”
She felt the little form squirming and kicking inside her, not wanting to let on that she’d asked herself the same question at least once a week for the last twelve years. She wondered if he somehow knew this was the biggest account she’d ever landed. Twelve years of patiently handing out business cards, trying to spread her name around, billing for less than she was worth, trying to build on each of her little success stories. Twelve years of holding hands with brusque, socially underdeveloped executives who needed a coach to keep them from alienating colleagues and damaging their companies.
“Well, my understanding is that I have a mandate to work with you on your management skills,” she said, trying to sound firm. “And I usually don’t get called in if everything is hunky-dory.”
He fidgeted a little, his left loafer waggling on the edge of the desk.
“But how the hell can you understand my position? Have you ever even run a business?” He paused for effect, hoping to humiliate her. “I’ve got fifteen hundred people answering to me worldwide and I bet you can’t even balance your checkbook. And now you’re going to walk in here and tell me something I don’t already know?”
She had the sensation of finding herself pressed up against a cold wall. If she let him push her around now, she’d never gain his respect. Her eyes moved across the office, searching for something that would put them on more even footing. When everything else failed nowadays, she could usually make her pregnancy into a conversation piece, sometimes even a bond she could share with other women and family-minded men. But there were no photos of children here. Just shots of several different silicon-enhanced stripper-types accompanying him on Cancún vacations, fishing expeditions in the Florida Keys, and autographed photos taken with members of Bon Jovi and various sports luminaries she didn’t quite recognize.
Instead, with mounting unease, she found her gaze drawn to a life-sized cut-out in the corner, the figure of a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo with a picture of her client’s face imposed on the top.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Whadayya mean, what’s that? It’s the Don.”
“The Don?”
“Whaddaya, kidding? The Don. The Don!” He looked incredulous. “Don Corleone. From... The... Godfather Maybe you’ve heard of it...?”
He smiled as if he was addressing a child with special needs, and she nodded, mildly embarrassed, not daring to let on that somehow she had reached the ripe age of thirty-eight without ever seeing that particular film.
Oh, of course she’d heard of it. She even vaguely remembered her older sister and her middle school friends whispering and giggling about some tawdry bit of business on page twenty-seven of the novel it was based on. But the truth was, the story had never interested her enough to actually sit down and watch it, even though most of the men she worked with referred to it as some kind of sacred inviolate Ur text. All those dark muttering codes and oaths of masculinity, all those silly posturing threats from a bunch of frat boys. She could never take it seriously, even when her husband begged her to watch it with him.
“Ohhhh, so you’re the Don,” she said.
He looked pleased, perhaps hearing an undertone of admiration that she had not really intended.
“What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” he mumbled. “Had you come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.”
She froze in alarm, until she realized he must have been reciting lines from the film.
“You sound just like him,” she said.
Who was in this movie anyway? Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? She was more partial to films about women triumphing over adversity. A League of Their Own Pretty Woman.
“I better.” He laced his hands behind his head. “I must’ve watched it two, three hundred times with my old man.”
“Really?” She pretended to be impressed.
“Well, whaddaya want? You grow up in Bensonhurst, it’s like learning the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“Sure. A rite of passage.”
She watched the way his body language changed as he began to talk about it. How his feet finally came off the desk and he sat forward in his seat a little, looking her in the eye for the first time.
“You ever wonder...?”
He’d started to ask an earnest question but stopped himself, not sure if he was quite ready to show her any kind of deference yet.
“What?”
She saw him wrestle with an idea, his eyes narrowing as he tried to pin it down, a flush of boyish pinkness rising in his cheeks.
“Did you ever really wonder why Kay left Michael?” he asked.
She steepled her fingers, as if it was a question that had long troubled her as well.
“Well, why do you think Kay left Michael?”
She watched him for cues, seeing that she’d set off a circuit of associations. He looked down at a shrink-wrapped CD that had been lying on his desk and scratched at the edge of the cellophane with his fingernail.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning pensive. “She acts like she’s shocked when she finds out what he does for a living, but c’mon — like she didn’t know already from being at the wedding and seeing his father? What business did she think they were in, State Farm home insurance?”
“Maybe she just came to realize he wasn’t the man his father was,” she said glibly.
He looked as if he’d just been slapped. You could almost see the outline of a palm print on his cheek.
Why’d you say that?
She shrugged, not having really meant anything by it. But of course he was going to react. A therapist getting a rise out of a client by bringing up his parents was like a cook turning on a stove. If it didn’t occur to you, you were probably in the wrong business.
“So are you saying that if Michael could’ve learned to be strong like the Don, he wouldn’t have lost his family?” he said, again reading more into her words than she’d put in.
“Well, what do you think?”
In the course of just a few seconds, he seemed to have transformed from a truculent executive to a parochial school boy working up the nerve to raise his hand in class.
“Let me ask you something,” he said quietly. “And if you tell a soul I asked you this, I swear I’ll throw you out the window.”
“Okay.”
“If I hire you, can you teach me organization principles according to the Godfather?”
“Can I...?”
“Can you be a wartime consigliere? That’s what I’m asking.”
She weighed her answer as she looked around the room, calculating that there were at least six pieces of furniture present that would probably cover a year’s mortgage for their “classic six” co-op on the Upper West Side. The guy who took care of the plants in the office was probably making as much as she was. She tried to fight down her growing resentment, reminding herself that she was supposed to be here to help. Then she remembered a line from a spunky Meg Ryan comedy she’d loved a few years back, something Tom Hanks quoted from The Godfather
“I’m ready to go to the mattresses,” she said.
He grinned. “Bella.”
Two nights later, she lay sideways on the living room couch, watching Diane Keaton stand helplessly on the threshold as one of her husband’s henchmen closed the door in her face and the closing-credits theme swelled.
“Because he’s a beast,” she said.
“What?”
Her husband Mark, shaggy-haired, unemployed, and banished to the club chair at some point after the murders of Sollozzo and the police captain, looked up bleary-eyed.
“It’s because he’s a beast,” she explained. “That’s why she’ll end up leaving him. Plain and simple.”
“So you’re not going to take this job?”
“Of course I’m going to take this job. Are you kidding? Did you see what our mortgage rate went up to today? We need this job.”
He pulled a well-thumbed copy of Maximum PC out from under his buttocks, having just noticed he was sitting on it.
“I thought you couldn’t stand this guy, Scottso.”
“But now I get him.”
“I don’t know.” He yawned and scratched his stomach. “How can you help someone you don’t like?”
“Because unlike some people, I’m willing to do what it takes to...”
She stopped herself from saying more, sucking in her lip. No point in flaying him again for being out of work for two months. It wasn’t entirely his fault that his little software start-up collapsed so soon after she got pregnant. If she wanted to marry a master of the universe, an industry leader, a true tycoon, she could have gone for some Wall Street lifer or some Cro Mag alpha-male type, like Scottso, instead of settling for her college boyfriend.
“Well, just as long as it’s strictly business, I suppose it’ll be fine,” he said, holding the magazine in front of his face as if she hadn’t wounded him. “You’re a pro.”
Larry Longman, head of the TV division, was a nervous man who always needed to be doing something with his hands. If he wasn’t squeezing a ball or fingering a pen, he was shooting his cuffs and making a half-closed fist, like he was holding a pair of dice.
“I think I have a good relationship with Scott,” he said. “I only have good things to say about him.”
Nancy nodded, already hearing something in his voice the way a police officer would hear gunshots from two blocks away. “I understand, but I want to assure you that everything we say here in the evaluation process is anonymous. He’s not going to know where it came from.”
“Well, not that I would say anything negative, but how do I know that?”
He rearranged the pens and paperweights on his desk, touched his computer mouse, and tugged on the fat end of his tie.
“You can trust my discretion. I wouldn’t have much of a reputation in the consulting business if I couldn’t guarantee anonymity when I’m interviewing different people in a company to do a 360-degree evaluation of an executive.”
“True.” Larry rubbed his palms together. “True. But couldn’t he still guess who your source is when he reads your report? I mean, if somebody’s talking about how he treats people in the TV division, he’s going to know it’s me, isn’t he?”
“You have my word that I’ll protect you by disguising your comments.” She smiled. “I mean, we all have the same goal here, which is to improve overall performance for the company.”
“Right. Right.
He reshuffled his pens, fingered his cell phone, smoothed his tie, and shot his cuffs again. She made a note to herself, seeing how much of a disturbance Scottso could cause without even being present in a room.
“So why don’t you just start off by telling me a little about Scott’s management style?”
“Well... obviously, he’s very, very bright...” He made the half-fist again and began shaking it, as if he was getting ready to throw the dice. “And very, very energetic...”
But... “ She leaned forward, as if she was trying to see something smoking under the hood.
“But...” The fist tightened. “Some people sometimes feel a little shut out of the decision-making process...”
“He can be autocratic,” she ventured, making it a statement rather than a question.
Definitely.” He nodded, emboldened, beginning to trust her a little. “Some people might even call it arrogant. Rude. Bullying. Not that that’s always a bad thing...”
“It’s better to be feared than loved,” she said.
“That’s funny.” He fumbled for his rubber ball, looking startled. “Scott’s always saying the same thing.”
Michael Corleone was plotting again. On the screen, Al Pacino was playing it cool, all steady sunken eyes and coiled posture in a coat black as crow’s feathers, as he carefully explained to hot-headed Frank Five Angels what he wanted done to Hyman Roth for his treachery.
“There are many things my father taught me here in this room,” he was saying. “He taught me: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
“Amazing,” said Nancy, sitting up on the couch.
“What?” Mark looked up from studying the tech column in the Wall Street Journal.
“The way he takes power, by using people and turning them against each other.”
“You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to admire him.” Mark folded the paper over. “He had his brother-in-law killed at the end of the last movie.”
“I know, but he’s so... controlled. The way he takes care of his family.”
“Sounds like you’re falling in love,” he said, watching the movie again. “Maybe you’re spending too much time on your client. He’s starting to rub off on you.”
“Maybe you need to start working again.”
Ouch.”
“Well, it’s true. Did you see what the prime rate went up to today? I don’t think we’d be struggling with the mortgage if one of us was willing to be a little more ruthless sometimes.” She lay back again, immediately regretting her sharpness with him. Still, it true. Why couldn’t he be a little stronger, a little more deliberate, a little more cold-blooded like these contained and quietly decisive men on the screen? After all, he had a baby of his own coming, a family to take care of.
She was beginning to understand what men like Scottso and Mark saw in these films, but also how short they fell of the image. They all thought they could be the Don, but really they were Fredos and Sonnys, either too weak-willed or too impulsive to hold onto power. They lacked the necessary detachment, the patient willingness to stand in the shadows letting events play themselves out until the right opportunity presented itself.
“I want you to open an account,” she said.
What?”
“You heard me. I want you to set up an account, in your own name.”
“What’s this about?”
“Just do what I’m asking you for once. Okay? Is that too much for you?”
“You know, you’re getting kinda bossy all of a sudden, Mama.” He reached over and touched her stomach, seeing if the baby was moving. “Am I going to end up sleeping with the fishes before my son is born?”
“Don’t tempt me.” She pushed his hand away.
Scottso threw the evaluation report down on his desk, almost hitting a platter of tea and cookies his secretary had brought in, his face starting to redden.
“Fucking Larry Longman,” he said. “It took him about two seconds to try to stick a knife in my back.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” she answered in a carefully modulated voice. “You’re focusing on trying to guess who said what in the 360s, instead of concentrating on the more substantial analysis of your management style. Do you really think that’s helpful?”
“I know it was Larry, because he had his assistant call about the reservations for the Michael’s meeting the other day.” He fumed, staring out the window. “It’s just like the Don says — whoever comes to you with this meeting, he’s the traitor He’s trying to organize a coup with the other division heads. Those fucking Harvard MBAs can’t stand taking orders from a guy from Bath Avenue.”
She felt herself hang back a bit, like Robert DeNiro in the tenement hallway with his gun, waiting for the Black Hand to arrive.
“Don’t you think that sounds a little paranoid?”
Don’t tell me I’m paranoid,” he said. “Do you know how many of these fuckers are gunning for me? Do you know how bad they wanna see me fail? I worked my whole life to put myself in this chair by the sweat of my balls. And I’m not going to let some little chardonnay-pansy bean counter who can’t stop playing with his pens slip a wire around my throat.”
She tilted forward, clasping her hands before her, studying him closely. “And so what are you going to instead?”
He looked startled. Not so much by the question itself, but by the way she was asking it. Calm, without judgment, and not completely unsupportive. Clearly, he’d been expecting something else from her.
“Well,” he said quietly, “to tell you the truth, I was thinking of making a move on him.”
“You mean, you were thinking of getting rid of him.”
He slowly nodded, assessing the gravity of what he’d just told her and then watching for her reaction.
“You gonna tell the board about that?”
“That’s not my role here.” She held him in a level gaze, imagining that if she stayed this way long enough her cheek-bones would start to rise and her eyes would move back into her skull the way Al Pacino’s did.
“You know, I can’t figure you out.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I thought you’d try to talk me out of it.”
“It’s your business. I’m just the consultant. All I’m asking is if you’re prepared to deal with the fallout. It’s like Michael killing the police captain and Sollozo. You have to be prepared for all-out war afterwards.”
“Jesus.” He ran his tongue under his lip in admiration. “Is this what they teach you in organizational psychology?”
“You said you didn’t need a psychologist,” she reminded him, reaching for one of the cookies. “You needed a wartime consigliere.”
He slapped his desk, pleased with himself. “You know, somehow I knew we were going to be paisans the minute you walked into this office. Something about the way you handle yourself. We’re coming from the same place. You sure you’re not Sicilian?”
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
Mark unfurled the business section so loudly that Nancy almost missed the gleeful way Al Pacino, older but more feral, tore into the line.
“Will you keep it down?” She rolled over from doing her exercises in front of the set, the baby due in less than six weeks. “I can barely concentrate here.”
“I don’t know why you’re even bothering with the third one. I told you the thrill was gone after Godfather II.
“I still want to see how it ends.”
“You know how it ends. Gangster movies never have a happy ending.” He folded the paper in half and looked at it closely. “Whoa. Your guy’s stock is taking a major beating here. What’s going on?”
“Total bloodbath. I thought I told you.” She raised her head, attempting to catch a glimpse of her feet. “Scottso tried to fire the head of the TV division and put his own guy in, but it just united all the other factions against him and caused a mutiny. They had a meeting the other day that left entrails all over the conference room.”
“And where does that leave Scottso?”
“Hanging by a thread, if you ask me.” She gasped, trying to lift her legs, feeling the baby move down a little further.
“And that doesn’t reflect badly on you?”
“Not my fault if someone decides to self-destruct. Besides, nothing wrong with a little shake-up now and then. Like Clemenza says, it helps get rid of the bad blood.”
“I think you’re turning into the Godfather.”
“What a thing to say to the mother of your unborn child.” She raised up on her elbows, frowning. “If I was a man, you’d be high-fiving me and buying me a beer.”
“If you were a man, I wouldn’t have married you.”
She started practicing her breathing again, trying to decide if she should feel bad. A nice girl wouldn’t act this way. On the other hand, a nice girl might not be able to keep her family from going into debt a month and a half before her first child arrived.
“So, are you still shorting that stock?” she asked.
“Not every single day, but I did a few trades on Wednesday.” He pinched the roll of belly flab he’d been developing in sympathy lately. “I’m worried about playing it too close to the edge.”
“As long as you keep the trades small and use your own last name, there’s not going to be a problem.”
“It still makes me uncomfortable.” He reached back, trying to get at an itch between his shoulder blades. “Betting against the company where your wife’s supposed to be consulting.”
She gave him a long look, silently deciding that he would stay home after the baby was born and she’d go back to work right away. He’d find out about that later. Fredo didn’t make the big decisions in the family.
“Go get me an orange, will you?” she said. “This kid’s sucking the calcium right out of my bones.”
She was wearing a $2,500 shearling coat from Searle and a pair of fur-lined Coach boots when she came to see Scottso the next week. He was busy at his desk, having been given an hour to clear out, while a security officer stood at the door making sure he didn’t take any material belonging to the company.
“Scott, I’m so sorry. I came as soon as I heard. Are you going to be all right?”
He looked at her once, shook his head, and reached across his desk for a stack of CDs.
“Ah, sir, you’re going to have to leave those,” said the security officer, waiting to escort him out of the building. “Those are property of the company.”
“You believe this?” Scott’s lip curled. “I signed half the artists on this label — I was in the studio when they cut these — and now they won’t even let me walk out of the office with a disc it cost about three cents to make.”
“I know how hard this must be.” She nodded. “But I’m sure you’re going to land on your feet once this is all over.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you.”
He snatched a picture of himself with John McEnroe off the corner of his desk and put it in the cardboard box at his feet.
“Do you really think it’s that useful assigning blame at this point?” she asked.
“Who else am I supposed to blame — myself?”
“Well, some people would take this as a time for self-reflection...”
“Oh, you’re good.” His nostrils flared. “You’re really good, I’ll give you that. I just can’t figure what your angle was.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t. Like you didn’t wind me up and play me off against Larry Longman on purpose.”
“Oh Scott, come on...”
“Just tell me one thing: Were you working for Larry or was there someone on the board gunning for me?”
She turned away as he lumbered toward her, crossing her arms in front of her stomach.
“There was no one else,” she said. “You wanted a war, so you got a war. Wars are messy.”
He reached out and fingered the soft collar of her jacket, the knuckle of his thumb lightly brushing her cheek.
“I know it was you, Fredo,” he said almost tenderly. “You broke my heart.”
“Oh, come on, it’s not the fall of Havana.” She pulled away from him and started toward the door. “Act like a man, Johnny Fontaine. What’s the matter with you?”
“Jesus.” He made his eyes into slits. “What’d you do, memorize the dialogue?”
“And that’s not what you wanted?”
He gave her the wounded uncomprehending look of a lover betrayed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, following her. “Why’d you do this to me? Did I ever hurt you? Just tell me that. Why would you do this to someone you don’t even know?”
“It was never anything personal, Scott.” She stopped on the threshold. “It was strictly business.”