Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  Sitting up in bed, she opened the laptop resting atop her thighs and went to the Manhattan Today website.

  Readers who despised Mayor Richard Headley might give passing praise to the column, but mostly they wanted to hurl insults at the man himself. “Rat fucker,” wrote BoroughBob. Well, Barbara thought, that certainly seemed, for New York, more appropriate than “goat fucker,” and was, by current standards, relatively tame. SuzieQ saw the mayor as “a cum stain on the city’s reputashun.” Barbara wondered where SuzieQ had gone to school.

  Then there were the Headley supporters who took out their anger against Barbara. “When’s the last time you actually did anything for the city, you cunt Jew?” asked PatriotPaul. Was it worth replying to tell PatriotPaul that, while raised Presbyterian, she no longer belonged to any organized religion whatsoever? Perhaps not. The numerically named C67363 asked, “How’s anything ever going to get done in this city when people like you are always complaining?” It was downright charming when someone could express an opinion without being vulgar.

  Barbara scrolled through a few more. On very rare occasions, someone might actually have something useful to say, maybe even point Barbara in the direction of a future article, although she wasn’t seeing anything like that tonight.

  But then there was this:

  “Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

  Barbara blinked, read it again. It was a reference, of course, to the column’s postscript about Paula Chatsworth. How she’d worked briefly at Manhattan Today, how she’d shown so much promise, how her life had been cut short by tragedy when she clearly had so much still to offer.

  It was, for Barbara, an emotionally honest bit of writing, and her sadness at the young woman’s death was genuine. People came to the big city to pursue a dream, not get killed in some freakish accident.

  Barbara read the comment again.

  “Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  What “greater good” could the author possibly be referring to?

  The author went by the handle GoingDown.

  “Very fucking funny,” Barbara said aloud, shaking her head. But then she thought, maybe it wasn’t intended as an elevator joke. The writer could be an oral sex aficionado.

  She was about to close the laptop when it dinged. An incoming email.

  From Arla.

  Barbara could not remember the last time she’d heard from her daughter. A few weeks, at least. Could it have been as long as a month?

  Barbara clicked on the email.

  “Hey,” Arla wrote. No “Dear Mom.” That would be too much to expect, Barbara knew.

  It went on: “I have news. Want to meet for a coffee or something tomorrow?”

  News? What kind of news could Arla have? So far as Barbara knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone. Then again, Arla had never been big on sharing the details of her private life with her mother. It would have to be something big for Arla to actually propose getting together.

  Maybe Arla had been seeing someone. Maybe Arla was engaged.

  Would she be expecting her mother to foot the bill for a wedding? Christ, how much was Headley offering to ghost-write his bio again? Mid–six figures?

  No. No way. Arla would have to need life-saving surgery before Barbara would sink that low.

  Maybe Arla was pregnant.

  Wouldn’t that just be history repeating itself.

  Anything was possible.

  Barbara clicked on Reply and began tapping away.

  “Sure,” she wrote. “When and where?”

  Ten

  The boy gently pats the woman’s arm as she sits in the chair. He believed she was simply asleep, but he has to be sure. She does not look well. Her forehead is glistening with sweat.

  “Mom? Mom, are you okay?”

  She opens her eyes slowly, focuses on the boy. “I guess … I nodded off there.”

  “You’re sweating like crazy. For a second it looked like you weren’t even breathing.”

  Her gaze moves beyond the boy. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t even put the groceries away. The ice cream’ll be melted.”

  The boy gives her arm a squeeze. “I already put it away. You should have sent me to the store instead.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly capable. A little extra exercise never hurt anybody.” She finds enough energy to smile. “Why don’t you get us both a little ice cream? It’s chocolate. I’ll sit right here. My legs are killing me.”

  The boy gets out a couple of bowls, takes the ice cream from the freezer, and spoons out two small servings. He hands one bowl to his mother, then perches himself on the arm of her chair while he eats his. She eats hers very slowly, as if this simple task takes effort.

  Chocolate is his favorite. But he finds himself too worried to enjoy it. He doesn’t know how much longer things can go on this way.

  TUESDAY

  Eleven

  The four elevators at the Sycamores Residences, a thirty-story York Avenue apartment tower just below Sixty-Third, were in constant use. Kids heading off to school. Men and women leaving for work. Nannies arriving to look after toddlers. Building maintenance staff heading to the top floor to vacuum hallways, working their way back down to ground level.

  New Yorkers headed out from this residence to every corner of the city. Some worked at nearby Rockefeller University. Several units in the building were set aside for visiting professors and scientists who came to Rockefeller from all around the globe.

  Although an exact count was not known because residents came and went, some people had guests, and others had sublet their apartments without informing building management, it was generally believed that any given time about nine hundred people lived in the Sycamores Residences. The building, like so many others in the city, was a small town unto itself.

  Only three of those roughly nine hundred people were in Elevator Number Two when it happened.

  Fanya Petrov, forty-nine, a visiting scientist from Russia, was staying on the twenty-eighth floor; she had been waiting the better part of five minutes and the elevator still had not arrived. She followed, with increasing frustration, the digital display above the doors, telling her where the elevators were. She’d hear them traveling through the shaft, whizzing past her floor on the way to the top of the building. Often, inexplicably, the elevator car would sail right past on its descent, not stopping to let her on. Was someone from building maintenance overriding the functions?

  Since coming to New York three weeks earlier, she had learned that the magnificent view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge that had at first so impressed her was not worth the aggravation of the slow elevators in the building. She’d have been happy with a room on the first or second floor. Who needed a view? She had learned that if she was to be on time for her appointments at Rockefeller, she had to allow herself an extra ten minutes because of the elevators. She’d take the stairs, but really, was she going to go down twenty-seven floors? It wasn’t particularly exhausting—she had done it a few times—but it was time-consuming. And she just knew that the moment she entered that stairwell, the elevator doors would be parting.

  She blamed the children. And their parents.

  There were so many youngsters in the building, and they always forgot something. Only yesterday, after thinking she’d caught a break when the elevator showed up almost immediately, the doors opened at the twentieth floor to allow a young man and his ten-year-old son to board. As the doors were closing, the boy shouted, “I forgot my lunch!”

  “For Christ’s sake,” his father said, sticking out his arm to stop the doors. “Go!”

  The boy bolted from the elevator, ran down the hall to their apartment, fumbled about in his pocket, looked back, and said, “I don’t have my key!”

  Fanya had closed her eyes and said to herself, You have
got to be kidding me. Well, not exactly that, but the Russian equivalent. Fanya spoke English fluently, but she was not up to speed on American phrases of frustration.

  The father dug into his pocket and said, “Here!” He tossed the keys so the son could retrieve them halfway down the hall and, of course, he failed to catch them.

  Future scientist, Fanya thought.

  “Sorry,” the father mumbled in the woman’s direction.

  The polite thing to do, she felt, would have been for him to step off the elevator and let her continue on her way. But no.

  The kid got the apartment door open, ran inside, took a good two minutes to find his lunch, then came charging back down the hall to get onto the elevator.

  Today, as she stood waiting, Fanya Petrov tried to think about the prepared remarks she would be delivering within the hour. Her area of expertise was “missing heritability,” traits that are passed down through the generations that cannot be found in the genome. The world had come to believe that a person’s DNA revealed everything, but it could not predict certain diseases or behaviors or countless other things, even when evidence existed that these characteristics could be passed on.

  And while that was the subject of her talk for today, Fanya was an expert in other things, as well. Like bacterial pathogens, and how they could be spread among a population. Used, in effect, as weapons. Fanya knew a thing or two about what many in the world most feared: bioterrorism.

  It was something she had studied a great deal back in Russia.

  It was her expertise in missing heritability that had earned her an invitation to continue her studies in New York, but it was her vast knowledge about pathogens that might end up keeping her here.

  Fanya Petrov did not want to return to Russia.

  Fanya Petrov wanted to stay in America.

  This was not something she had mentioned to her superiors back home. But she had mentioned it, discreetly, to another professor at Rockefeller who had connections with the State Department. A few days later, a message was relayed to her that her situation was being looked at favorably. If she were to seek asylum in the United States, she would be accepted—provided, of course, she shared everything she knew about Russian research into pathogens.

  That was fine with her.

  But Fanya Petrov was now very, very anxious. What if her superiors were to learn of her treachery? Would they summon her home before her application for asylum had been approved? Would she be thrown into a car and put on a plane before anyone knew she was missing? And what would happen to her when she got back?

  Very, very bad things.

  She had become so consumed with worry that when the elevator’s arrival was announced with a resounding ding, it startled her. Fanya sighed with relief and stepped into the empty cab as the doors opened.

  She pressed G and watched as the doors closed.

  The descent began.

  “Please, no stops,” she said under her breath, in Russian. “No stops, no stops, no stops.”

  There was a stop.

  At the twentieth floor.

  No.

  Every time the elevator stopped, or there was a knock at the door, or someone dropped by to see her at her office at Rockefeller, Fanya feared it would be someone from the FSB, Putin’s modern version of the KGB.

  So when the door parted and there was no one standing there who looked like a Russian thug, Fanya felt momentarily relieved. But relief was soon supplanted by irritation when she saw that it was the same father and son who had delayed her on her last trip down this elevator. Her heart sank. Please let them have remembered everything, she thought.

  The father glanced to see that G had already been pressed. As the doors started to close, he looked down at his son and asked, “You got your homework?”

  The kid, suddenly panicked, said, “Shit.”

  American children, Fanya thought. So foul-mouthed.

  The doors only had four more inches to go to close. But the father’s arm went up with the speed of a lightning bolt, his hand angled vertically, sliding into the rapidly narrowing space. The rubber extenders bounced off both sides of his wrist and the door retracted.

  “Please,” Fanya said. “I am in a hurry.”

  He caught her eye and nodded. Fanya took that to mean that both father and son would get off, retrieve the forgotten homework, and catch another elevator.

  But that was not the father’s plan.

  He said to the boy, “You hold the elevator. I’ll go. It’s on the kitchen table, right?”

  The boy nodded and put his finger on the Hold button.

  Fanya sighed audibly, but the father didn’t hear it because he was already running down the hall, keys in hand.

  The boy looked sheepishly at the scientist. “Sorry.”

  Fanya said nothing. She crossed her arms and leaned up against the back wall of the car. Down the hall, she saw the man slip into the apartment.

  Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds.

  Fanya felt her anxiety growing. She did not like to be in any one place for a long period of time. She felt exposed, vulnerable.

  The apartments in this building were not huge. How long could it take for the man to run in, grab something off the kitchen table, and come back out?

  “Remembering homework is your responsibility,” Fanya said sternly. “If you forget, you forget. The teacher gives you a zero. Next time, you remember.”

  The boy just looked at her. But suddenly his eyes went wide. He said to Fanya, “Can you hold the button?”

  “What?”

  “Just hold it!”

  She stepped forward and replaced his finger with hers on the button. The boy slipped off his backpack, dropped it to the floor, and knelt down to undo the zipper. He rifled through some papers inside and said, “Here it is.”

  Yet another sigh from Fanya.

  The boy got up and stood in the open doorway. “Dad!” he shouted down the hall. “I found it!”

  No response.

  This time, he screamed, “Daaad!”

  The father’s head poked out the doorway. “What?”

  “I found it!”

  The dad stepped out into the hall.

  Fanya, somehow thinking they were finally all on their way, let her finger slide off the button.

  The doors began to close.

  “Hey!” the kid said.

  But he was less courageous than his father and did not insert his arm into the opening to stop the doors’ progress. And Fanya wasn’t about to do it.

  She’d had enough.

  The father shouted, “Hey! Hang on! Hold the—”

  The doors closed. The elevator began to move. The boy looked accusingly at Fanya and said, “You were supposed to hold it.”

  She shrugged. “My finger slipped. It is okay. You wait for your dad in the lobby.”

  The kid slipped his backpack onto his shoulder and retreated to the corner, which was as far away as he could get from the woman in the tight space.

  They traveled three or four floors when the elevator stopped.

  This was just not Fanya’s day.

  But the doors did not open. The elevator sat there. The readout said they were at the seventeenth floor.

  “What is happening?” Fanya asked. She looked accusingly at the boy. “Did your dad stop the elevator?”

  The kid shrugged. “How would he do that?”

  After fifteen seconds of not moving, Fanya began to pace in the confined area.

  It’s them. They know. I’m trapped.

  “I have to get to work,” she said. “I have to get out of here. I am giving a lecture. I cannot be late.”

  The boy dropped his backpack to the floor again, reached in and pulled out a cell phone and began to tap away.

  “What are you doing?” Fanya asked, stopping her pacing.

  “Texting my dad.”

  “Ask him if he stopped the ele—”

  “I’m telling him we’re stuck.” He looked at the phone
for several more seconds, then said, “He’s going for help.”

  “Oh,” Fanya said. She wanted to ask the boy to ask his father if there were any strange men around. Men who looked out of place. Men with Russian accents. But she decided against it. “Why do you think we are stuck?” she asked the boy.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Why won’t the doors open?”

  “We’re probably between floors,” the boy said.

  Fanya looked at him and, for the first time, felt some kinship. They were, after all, in this together. “What is your name?”

  “Colin,” he said.

  “Hello, Colin. My name is Fanya.”

  “Hi.”

  Keep talking to the boy, she told herself. It would help control her paranoia.

  “What was your homework on?”

  “Fractions,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “I liked taking fractions when I was a little girl.”

  “I hate them.”

  Fanya managed an anxious smile. “I think we need to do something to get out of here. We cannot stay in here. It is not good.”

  “My dad’ll get somebody.”

  “That could take a long time. We need to do something now. Don’t you have to get to school so you can see how well you did on your fractions homework?”

  Colin nodded.

  “And I have to get to work. So let’s figure this out.” Fanya studied where the doors met, worked a finger into the rubber lining. “I bet we could get these apart.”

  “Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

  “Maybe we are not between floors,” she said. “Maybe the hallway is right there and all we have to do is step off.”

  “Maybe,” Colin said uncertainly.

  She dug her fingers in and started to pull the door on the right side into the open position. The doors did not move.

  Fanya said, “You look like a strong boy, even though you are little. You pull from the other side.”

  Colin said nothing, but did as he was asked. He got his fingers into the now-larger gap and pulled hard on the left door. Even with both of them pulling, the doors parted only about half an inch.

  “Okay, okay, stop,” Fanya said. They both released their grips on the doors and took a step back. “I do not think this is going to work.”