“Shit,” Bess exclaimed. “I don’t know if there will actually be food at this dinner. Do you want to eat before we go?”
“I’ll eat when I’m dead,” Cat said dismissively. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Chapter Eighteen
Still at the precinct, Hutton was just finishing a late lunch of cold takeout from a Styrofoam package, blindly shoveling forkfuls into his mouth between opening file folders. His hard work was paying off: there was only one more box to go through. He cut it open with a penknife and tossed out the folders to the four junior FBI agents who had spent their entire morning in his office.
“Read carefully,” he said before picking up the pile of possibles. “I’m going to get started.”
He read through the deliberately vaguely named corporations, one by one.
CostCompany Limited. Version Holdings Inc. Spatula Fork Productions. Triangle Limited. Brown Jones Inc. Lilac Futures Limited. Creative Solution Company. IdeaPark. Twentieth Street Limited.
It went on and on; they all seemed the same. He pulled up the spreadsheet that cross-referenced the companies in his pile with those they’d already examined, a document he’d spent the last ten weeks compiling. It had been aggressively tedious, but gut instinct told him it would eventually pay off.
Sorting by column gave him three companies that owned the most shares in what would eventually be Bedford Organics, LLC. Suddenly, a name caught his eye.
Donal Windsor, Esquire, a partner at Cavendish Crane and Vittoria Cardoso’s attorney, had been the registered agent for the original formation of Lilac Futures: a New York State Limited Liability Company located at 1131 Broadway, apartment 2250. He punched the address into his computer and found the website for a large rental complex.
He picked up his cellphone and dialed.
“Detective Hutton,” Betty Cormorant yelled into the phone. “Whatcha got?”
“Fifth Avenue, two-bedroom. But I need another favor first,” he told her.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?”
He laughed. “I know.”
Hutton fell asleep on the precinct’s plastic sofa waiting for the records to appear, but he woke up in the middle of the night to find them in his in-box. When he finally found the name of the applicant, he almost threw the computer across the room: James Burton, Esquire. Employer: Cavendish Crane.
Hutton typed the man’s name into his computer and found, as expected, that he worked as a senior associate and had litigated alongside Donal Windsor. It was an ouroboros, an endless loop of scales and vertebrae made from corporations and lawyers and lawyers and corporations, processing their secrets into dust, until there was nothing left to find. Still: there was one legal route left in his playbook. He picked up the phone, dialed the IRS, and started the process of recalling every single form that had ever been filed in relation to the profits of Lilac Futures.
Two hours into the sit-down dinner, Cat was finally starting to feel good. The Adderall had kicked in, you could smoke cigarettes inside the tent, and there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Louis Roederer Brut in generous, bell-bottomed flutes. There still, however, wasn’t any food—not that she cared. Food was for the birds. She downed glass number four in a swallow, grabbed glass number five from a tray, and teetered mincingly toward the dance floor where a live band had started playing Louis Armstrong covers with lots of verve—then stopped, aghast. The band was in blackface, something she hadn’t realized from across the room. The whites of their crooked smiles gleamed unnaturally behind the heavy black paint coating their faces. She backed away quickly and prayed that they could get out of here before this got online.
She scanned the room for Bess and spotted her surrounded by a crowd of admirers in the corner. Cat tried very hard to remain upright as she made her way over.
“Bess,” she hissed. “The band has blackface makeup on. We have to go.”
“Oh, c’est génial, eh? Comme Josephine Baker!” said an idiotic woman who overheard her.
“No, it’s not génial,” Cat snapped. “We have to go right now.”
Bess turned around and stared at the band. “Wow,” she said simply. “I honestly never thought I would see that in my entire life.”
“Welcome to France,” Cat explained, swaying slightly. “The country where Galliano literally praised Hitler in the Jewish quarter and got a job running Margiela three years later.” She grabbed Bess for support. “Fuck. I think I had too much champagne.”
“This way,” Bess said, picking through the maze of raised cocktail tables toward a back entrance. “I keep seeing the waiters go out here.”
The two women brushed through a narrow hallway filled with plastic crates and made their way past a set of heavy polyester curtains before finding themselves ejected into a small dirt circle filled with cigarette butts and diesel generators.
“Shit,” Bess said, seeing no way out. “Let’s try cutting through the kitchen.”
She grabbed Cat’s hand and led her through another maze of crates into the party’s makeshift kitchen, where the cooking staff whooped and whistled at their arrival.
“Merci, au revoir,” Cat slurred.
“You’re really fucked up, Cat,” Bess said, yanking her through the kitchen. They finally found a side exit closed off by another set of heavy curtains. Cat nodded, her brown eyes closing without permission. Bess looked around quickly and pulled the curtains shut. She pointed to the nearest plastic crate.
“Catherine Celia Ono, I order you to barf your brains out into that box before anyone sees you.”
“Nooo,” Cat whined, almost crying. “I can’t. I hate throwing up so much.”
Bess spun her around, and before Cat knew what was happening, Bess had shoved her manicured fingers right down Cat’s throat. Cat gagged and vomited right into the plastic crate.
“See?” Bess said kindly. “That wasn’t so bad.” She searched for a clean section of curtain and wiped the tears off Cat’s face. “Okay. Ready?”
“I hate you,” Cat replied, her voice soft and not very mean at all.
“I know,” Bess answered, laughing. “But you’ll be thanking me in twenty minutes.” She checked Cat’s face, straightened their dresses, and flung the curtain open. The two women made a mad dash for the nearest hedge, but after ten seconds of walking as quickly as their heels would allow, they both came to a stop. There was no point in rushing. Not a single person was waiting on this side of the tent—all the hubbub was at the front of the party, where Cy Bianco had just arrived. Bess looked around for the park’s green metal chairs, and pulled two up behind a hedge to shield them from the rest of the garden, just in case.
Cat lit a cigarette. She was starting to feel a teensy bit better, though her right toe was numb from the pressure of the narrow stilettos Bibi had jammed her into. She stood up and started walking, slowly at first, then found her stride near the end of the hedge they’d been hiding behind, and turned back to look for Bess, who was still in the chair and hunched over her phone.
“I’m ready,” Cat pointed out, gesturing to her upright body. “You were correct on the barfing front. Let’s go back to the hotel.” She leaned against the prickly hedge, its sharp leaves pressing their pointy, waxy angles into her skin.
“Fuck that,” Bess said. “We need to have our picture taken somewhere before that disgusting blackface shows up on Mania.” She held up her phone to Cat; notifications lit the screen one after another. “We’ve been invited to a hundred parties. Pick one,” Bess insisted, her speech rushed, like she couldn’t quite get the words out quickly enough.
“Great idea,” Cat agreed slowly, tapping her cigarette’s inch-long ash dramatically onto the gravel. The little gray log fell to the ground perfectly intact, like the molted skin of a snake. Cat wanted to step it into nothingness but after staring at it for a few beats decided to let the wind erode it. They scrolled through the invites before they found one from a group of mimes begging Cat and Bess to co
me join them a few blocks away, in an afterparty for Jonathan Sprain’s runway show, held on the fifth floor of an empty office building.
“That’s the one,” Cat said happily, while Bess summoned a car. They snuck down the line of hedges and out of the gardens before tumbling into a waiting Mercedes.
Paula Booth sat in the lobby bar of Le Narcisse, nursing a glass of wine and working away on her laptop on the final layout of the November issue. She frowned as her finger hovered over the Return button, then let out a long breath.
A mousy-haired woman to her left who had been trying unsuccessfully to signal the bartender turned, mistaking Paula’s sigh for an expression of exasperated camaraderie.
“Am I doing something wrong?” she asked Paula plaintively in English.
Paula looked at the woman, who wore a huge bead necklace, a tweed blazer, and brown jersey trousers over a pair of orthopedic clogs. “It’s Fashion Week,” she explained. “They’re trying to take care of all the people who are here on corporate accounts.”
“My corporate card is as good as anyone else’s,” the woman scoffed. “Note to self: France is exactly as expected.”
“Is this your first time here?” Paula asked. Something about the woman—she was so plain, but she had eyes like a hawk—reminded Paula of what she must have looked like once upon a time, during her own first visit to Paris, and she felt sympathy, maybe even empathy for her: a pair of feelings that bubbled up into Paula Booth’s consciousness very, very rarely.
“Is it that obvious?” The woman sighed, her middle-aged hands, pale and soft, holding the beads on her necklace. “I’m chaperoning my daughters.”
“What do you normally do?” Paula asked, trying to engage her on a positive subject.
“I’m a college professor,” the woman said flatly. “Experimental chemistry.”
“Experimenting in what?”
“Fluid dynamics, propulsion, that kind of thing.”
“You’re…a rocket scientist.”
“Well,” the woman said, a smile appearing on her face, “we don’t say it exactly like that. But, yes. Among other things.”
“You must be horrified at this whole spectacle,” Paula said, gesturing to the scene around her.
The woman laughed. “It’s not what I wanted for my children. But they want what they want.”
“Let me help you,” Paula said, signaling to the bartender with a flick of her fingers. “Treat them like servants—the French worship hauteur. What are you drinking?”
“What are you drinking?”
“I was drinking wine, but I’d change to something stronger. Scotch?”
“Absolutely.”
Paula ordered two double Laphroaigs, neat, in her imperfect but forceful French. The bartender complied almost immediately, and moments later the two women held matching tumblers.
“Thank you,” the woman said, holding her glass up to Paula’s.
“To your children,” Paula said. They each downed an enormous swallow of scotch.
“You love them and all they do is disappoint you,” the woman said wryly. “Do you have any?”
Paula raised an eyebrow. “No. It didn’t work out that way.”
“I have four. Enough for both of us. Cheers.” The women clinked glasses again and another shot went down the hatch, their tumblers now nearly empty. Paula signaled for a refill.
“Are all of your children here this week?” Paula asked.
“No, no. Just the two oldest.”
“What agency are they with?”
“Agency?” the woman asked, confused. “They have a small business.”
And it suddenly dawned on Paula with whom she was speaking. “You’re Dr. Bishop.”
“Yes,” the woman said, looking frustrated by the recognition. “I don’t speak for them,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “I’m just their mother.”
“You’re more than that,” Paula replied. “You’re on the board.”
“Yes,” the woman said uncertainly. “What outlet are you with?”
“I’m not a reporter,” Paula explained. “I’m Paula Booth. I’m Margot Villiers’s deputy at RAGE.”
A very large silence descended between them as the name sank in. Paula let a beat pass before she extended a palm, her boardroom manners irrepressible in any situation. “It’s very nice to meet you,” she said genuinely. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how impressive Mania is.”
Dr. Bishop shook her hand with an enthusiasm that Paula hadn’t expected. “And I don’t need to tell you how influential RAGE has been,” she replied immediately. “It’s an honor to meet you. Of course I know your name. You’ve been the coauthor of what, forty-five white papers on the garment industry?” she gushed.
“A lot of that work is done by our lobbyists. I’ve only been the catalyst,” Paula said graciously. “But…it’s been my whole life.” She gestured to her own outfit, a simple knee-length black tunic and polished boots. “I’m not much of a fashionista.”
“You don’t need to downplay your work to me. I’m in the chemistry department,” Dr. Bishop explained, “but at UCLA I work with the Future Materials Institute. It’s basically rocket science meets survivalism. We’ve used a great deal of data from RAGE to support our studies.”
“I’m glad you’ve found value in it,” Paula said, throwing back her drink as the bartender approached her with the bottle. “It might not be around much longer.” He filled her glass back up to the top.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Bishop pointed to her own drink.
“I mean that your children are putting RAGE out of business.” Paula tried not to sound bitter, just matter-of-fact.
“My children aren’t doing that. The market is.” Dr. Bishop could be matter-of-fact, too.
“Only because this generation fundamentally doesn’t understand the distinction between editorial and advertorial,” Paula snapped.
“Maybe, but who can actually tell the difference?” Dr. Bishop asked. “I mean that sincerely. It all has the same breathless promotional quality—‘Buy this product; buy into this idea.’”
“The difference,” Paula insisted carefully, “is that we’ve always made sure our breathless editorial copy was truthful.”
“Truth and transparency are different things,” Dr. Bishop replied, surprising Paula with her candor. “Look, if I’ve learned anything from what my children are doing, it’s that this generation considers it an honor to be chosen by a brand—to them, a brand is a business that somebody built, put their blood, sweat, and tears into. Young people value entrepreneurs. They don’t need an editorial middleman to tell them what’s okay and what’s not. They want to choose, to be the curators themselves, actively and publicly building their own taste profile.”
“You’re saying that young people don’t want to just imagine themselves being rich people; they want to be rich people,” Paula said, thinking out loud.
“They want the same things your editors want, except by connecting brands directly to consumers, Mania is completely transparent where RAGE is not. My kids argue that transparency is the new medium of media. Print, digital, it doesn’t matter. Honesty is the future,” she insisted. “Companies like yours are in bed with every advertiser that’s ever cut you a check and you know it—the difference is that you’ve been able to layer it in so many yards of privilege that you thought nobody could tell.”
“I suppose we labored under the assumption that the audience valued our privilege and held us to a corresponding moral standard,” Paula replied thoughtfully. “Let me ask you a question: How will your audience ultimately ensure that the products Mania promotes really are, as you say, local, ethical, and radical—‘ethical’ being the key word here. Whose ethics?”
“The market has taken care of that. Ethical manufacturing is a requirement now. You saw to that,” Dr. Bishop said confidently.
Paula nearly spit out her drink. “The second that we go out of business and I personally stop visiting factor
ies and bullying retailers and manufacturers, that ends. Have you ever been to a garment factory? This isn’t academia—there are no moral actors in this business. There’s just me and there’s Margot, and we’ve had to behave like fascists to get things done our way. Pardon the comparison.”
“I’ve never been to any kind of factory,” Dr. Bishop admitted. “But how quickly can labor conditions possibly change? The workers wouldn’t allow it. This is the twenty-first century. That’s what transparency is all about.”
“Transparency is subjective. Let me show you.” The November issue would have to wait: this woman had a billion dollars in the pocket of her Chico’s jacket. Paula knocked back the remainder of her drink and summoned a car.
Cat leaned against a bookcase on the fifth floor of a desperately tacky eighties-era office building while the loud, sticky mob of the party swarmed around her. A tall mime, his face painted white and lips painted red, offered her a small bag of white powder.
“Turtally,” she murmured happily, assuming it was cocaine and hoping it would sober her up. She snorted some up her nose while Bess, sitting across from her in the laps of two other mimes, sipped from a plastic cup.
Someone passed Cat a drink; she drank it.
Someone grabbed her hand and brought her out onto the dance floor; she danced. An orange-bearded man wearing a Carolina Panthers Starter jacket was in the center of the room, playing two keyboards, and everyone was jumping and screaming in his direction. Cat closed her eyes, raised her arms, and let herself fall in with the crowd.
Somebody else’s sweat coated her arms.
Somebody else’s hair whipped into her mouth.
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