“What did she look like?” asked Peter.
“Very pretty. Tall. Blonde. Late forties. Nice shoes. Jimmy Choo, maybe.”
From tall blonde to bag lady in eight months? Peter wondered. And Jimmy Choo’s?
“She had worked twice with our Revolutionary War material. She had read the folder you’ve just read. Then she asked for the actual box left behind by Walker.”
“How had the box come to you?”
“We were in existence long before the Sons of the Revolution opened their museum at Fraunces. And one of our early benefactors was Abigail Woodward, wife of a loyalist who hanged himself. She found the mahogany box in Nancy’s things. She donated it when we opened. It contained the only finial known to have survived.”
“What about this Hooley woman?”
“The one who was mauled to death? She doesn’t leave a lot of footprints on the sands of time. Ditto the one called L. R.”
“How do you think the theft was accomplished?”
“We follow the security procedures of any rare book library, but Erica Callow had established a relationship with us, so our guard was down. I was in the stacks, and my assistant took a call from a gentleman asking a stupid question about the external architecture of the building, a question that my assistant could answer simply by getting up and looking out the window.”
“Do you think the caller was an accomplice?”
“Erica Callow disappeared in the few seconds we were distracted, so I’d say yes.”
“So . . . what’s your take?” asked Peter. “Why would the blond scholar in Jimmy Choo’s steal a finial and a few pieces of printed material in a box?”
“Maybe she liked the story it tells.”
“Of what?”
“A rebellion born in a burst of optimism. A freedom won by great exertion at great expense. An expense that put a government in great debt. A government that decided there was no recourse but to print money.”
“Sounds like us.”
“Either that,” said Ms. Richards, “or she just liked finials.”
AFTER PETER LEFT the Society, he crossed Central Park West, so he could walk along the wall of green and not have to wait at every corner for the lights. Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Evangeline.
She was working on a deadline for an article to run in the Times travel section: “Honeymoon in New England,” off the notes from their last adventure, which had been anything but a honeymoon.
Peter could hear the click-tick-click-tick-tick of her keyboard. He told her what he had learned, which wasn’t much, but it did prompt a question:
“Your bag lady, was she wearing Jimmy Choo’s?”
“Orange Chuck Taylor high-tops. Now I have to finish this piece. Can you entertain yourself until lunch?”
“I have a few other things planned. They don’t call it fun city for nothing.”
“Good. And Peter, I’m sorry for sticking my nose into this.”
“I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t.”
“Be careful.” Evangeline hung up and went back to work. She was writing about the Mount Washington: “. . . the most beautiful hotel in New England, where . . .”
She stopped writing, looked up, looked out the window. A few things? What things? A visit to Kathy Flynn, maybe, the red-headed correspondent for MarketSpin .com, once a graduate student at Southwestern Iowa State?
Peter had gone out there to begin a career as a history professor. Evangeline had gone with him. They had been in their twenties. They had lasted two years before they grew bored with the place and each other and Evangeline applied to Columbia School of Journalism. She had always given Peter the benefit of the doubt about Kathy. He insisted that Kathy had not slipped off her underpants during office hours in his carrel, at least not until after Evangeline said she was leaving. But she had slipped them off.
Still, as Peter said, it had been a long time ago.
So Evangeline got back to writing about the Mount Washington Hotel.
PETER WAS WALKING south, enjoying the day and doing business, too.
He called his office, and Antoine Scarborough answered. “Fallon Antiquaria.”
Antoine had begun a history Ph.D. program at Boston College, but he still worked two days a week for Fallon, while Peter’s Aunt Bernice, a family fixture for four decades, handled the desk the rest of the time.
“I like the way you answer my phone,” said Peter. “Bernice always sounds like . . . Bernice. You sound like—”
“Go ahead, say it. James Earl Jones. I don’t mind.”
“I was thinking Chris Rock.”
“My dad was right. I should’ve gone to law school and gained some real power. Then I wouldn’t have to take this abuse from the man.”
They talked like that, because the Fallons and the Scarboroughs went way back. Antoine’s father had worked for Fallon & Son Construction. And when Antoine and his father had the same argument that Peter had with his father—law school or a history Ph.D.—Peter had given Antoine a chance to see the practical side of the history business.
“Do you need something,” said Antoine, “or can I get back to reading for my three o’clock?”
Peter told Antoine about Gil Walker, Nancy Hooley, a love letter from “L. R.,” and a newspaper article about New Emission. “Check them out. And see what you can find about a place called Woodward Manor.”
“Where was that?”
Peter could hear him jotting notes. “It was on the old Bloomingdale Road, aka Broadway. Find out when it was torn down, who lived in it, stuff like that.”
“How soon do you need this?”
“Yesterday.”
“Like always. What are you on to?”
“Not sure yet. I’ll tell you more later.”
“Like always. Is it big?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Dangerous?”
“Unh . . .”
“Sounds like somebody already chasin’ your ass around the Big Apple.”
“Let’s just say that I had to put on a Yankees hat as a disguise.”
“That’s like me puttin’ on a sheet.”
“Just put on your computer and get to work.”
AT THE SIXTY-FIFTH Street transverse road, Peter stopped for a red light.
Cabs roared past on their way over from the East Side. A few people hurried along. A police cruiser rolled past, but the officers didn’t even look at him. That was a good sign. The Yankees hat and sunglasses must have done the trick.
The red Stop hand changed to a little walking white pedestrian. As Peter crossed, a voice came behind him. “You seen the papers?”
Peter kept walking. He knew the voice. Joey Berra.
“The Daily News got a nice sketch on the front page,” said Joey. “Guy in a Yankees hat and sunglasses. Japanese guy and some lady bird-watcher fingered him.”
“Was Boris chasing Delancey?” asked Peter.
“Don’t know.”
“Why did Delancey come to our apartment?”
“Don’t know.”
“Don’t you know anything?”
“I know Boris won’t be down for breakfast. But I did a few things that’ll make it play like a drug overdose, once they get the toxicology report. So we’ll both be in the clear.” Joey did not look at Peter. He simply walked ahead, eyes on the sidewalk.
“You killed him? Why? To protect Delancey?”
“I’d like Delancey alive, and it was time to pick off one of those motherfuckers.”
“What motherfuckers?” Peter stopped on the sidewalk. “And who’s we?”
“We, like I told you, is the American people. And keep walkin’, numb nuts. You don’t know who could be watchin’. Neither do I.”
Peter gave a look around, then he kept walking.
“Now, listen,” said Joey. “I’ll give you a chance to get out of this. Delancey led Boris right to your girlfriend’s door, but her address died with him. That stupid fuckin’ Russian hadn’t cal
led his handlers to tell them where he was. I checked the phone.”
“His handlers? Russians?”
Joey didn’t answer. They were coming up to the light for the eastbound transverse entrance off Leonard Bernstein Way.
“Have you met Arsenault, yet?” asked Joey.
“Lunch, today. At his place.”
“Don’t be impressed by the fancy-schmantzy.”
At the corner, the light was green for the eastbound traffic.
“I’m peelin’ off here,” said Joey. “Keep walkin’ south. If you follow me, I’ll stick you with the same needle I used on Boris. You’ll drop right in the middle of Central Park West and some fuckin’ Arab cabbie’ll turn you into Boston roadkill.”
Peter took that as fair warning and stopped.
From the middle of the street, Joey said, “Stay in or out. It’s up to you. But I can’t keep protectin’ you and your girlfriend. And don’t put on that Yankees hat again. Every time you do, I can hear Joe DiMaggio turnin’ over in his grave.”
“Yeah . . . Ted Williams turns over, too.”
“Nah. He don’t turn. He just melts a little.”
SO PETER HAD even more to think about as he came into Columbus Circle.
And he was going to have to make a decision. To avoid it, he stopped for a moment at the place where Broadway met Eighth Avenue.
The sun was high, the traffic was swirling, and the surfaces of the city sparkled like a windblown sea on a running tide.
To the west, the Time Warner Center formed the newest and biggest development in New York. But not for long, because the “City that Never Sleeps” was also the “City that Never Stops . . . Changing.” Every newest and biggest gave way to something newer and bigger, sometimes in a year, sometimes in a decade, almost always in a generation.
After the Revolution, New Yorkers rebuilt the ruined city. By 1800, they had extended the tangle of streets another mile north of the Common. And the city fathers decided to bring order to the growth, because twenty-four square miles of island remained between Houston Street and the Harlem River.
So, in 1811, a board of commissioners conceived of a grid, twelve avenues running north to south, a hundred and fifty-five streets running east to west. They prescribed lot sizes, block sizes, street widths. Some people thought the plan was a waste of time because they couldn’t imagine the city extending farther north. Some said the grid was about as imaginative as a plowed field. But most knew it was plain prophesy.
The lines were drawn with pen and ink on a map, and then the streets were cut with pick and shovel across the fields and outcroppings, through the grand estates and shanty farms. Only the diagonal of Broadway defied the plan, and each time it crossed an avenue, it forced an open space into the unrelenting density—Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, and the traffic circle with the statue of Columbus. Once the building began, it moved north at the rate of more than a mile a decade.
By 1910, the city had reached all the way to the top of the island, so they went back to the bottom to build again. But this time, they built up, which was easier in New York than in most cities, because Manhattan Island was really a sliver of granite, solid bedrock to support the biggest buildings that technology could invent or money could buy. And since the city by then had become the center of American commerce, finance, and culture, there was plenty of money to buy the technology, and plenty of competition to be the biggest—and the best—in everything.
So the skyscrapers rose: the New York World Building, eighteen stories in 1890; the Flatiron, twenty-one stories in 1902; the Metropolitan Life Building, with the lantern on the roof, fifty stories in 1909; the Woolworth Building, an amazing sixty stories in 1913; and on up the island, to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State.
And then, another generation went back to the bottom to start again with the World Trade Center in 1970. And then . . .
The offices of MarketSpin were in the Time Warner Center.
That’s why Peter Fallon was standing there ruminating about New York.
He had Googled Kathy Flynn the night before. He had debated whether he would send her an e-mail, but he knew it would annoy Evangeline, so he hadn’t.
Kathy had e-mailed him instead:
Peter: Long time, no see. Hope all is well. The ever-observant Austin Arsenault noticed that you and I were at Southwestern Iowa State together. He asked me about you. I told him you were very smart and very handsome. But I didn’t tell him everything. A girl should have a few secrets. Any time you want to know about him, contact me. Come by the office. We can talk. Kathy, www.marketspin.com.
So there it was. She was offering him the kind of knowledge that he should have before he ventured into a meeting with Arsenault, even if she was flirting with him.
And business was business. So he sent Kathy a text. “Do you have some time? I’m in Columbus Circle.”
He told himself he would wait five minutes for a response, then head downtown.
His phone buzzed as soon as he put it back in his pocket. “Come on up.”
HE STEPPED OFF the elevator on the fifteenth floor: MarketSpin.com.
He didn’t want to admit it, but he was nervous . . . meeting an old girlfriend . . . an image of his youth that still from time to time danced naked through his imagination.
He remembered one of the first things she ever said to him, about how pleased she was to have such a tall advisor. Pretty cheeky for a master’s candidate to be talking like that in her first graduate meeting, walking the fine line between forthright and forward. But her beauty had been enough to make him catch his breath. So he had said, “I’m not that tall.”
“You’re taller than I am,” she had answered, “which I like.”
She was waiting for him in the reception area.
He was still taller, though the heels she was wearing made her taller, too.
“Peter Fallon”—she offered her hand—“it’s been a long time.”
His eyes flicked to her left hand. No hardware. Still single.
“As beautiful as ever,” he said.
“As? More. Come on.” She turned and walked ahead of him with that loping stride that he remembered as soon as he saw it.
She was wearing a green silk blouse, black skirt, black stockings. And the black pumps looked pretty expensive. Manolo, maybe, or Jimmy Choo. Jimmy Choo? The green complemented her auburn hair and popping red lipstick. The skirt did the same for her ass. The shoes gave her legs all the shape they would ever need.
As she led him past the studio, he glanced onto the set where she had interviewed Arsenault. The control room door was open. Somebody was rewinding a tape of Kathy. Playing and rewinding, playing and rewinding, and each time she said, “Whether this is the beginning of another stock market crash or just a correction . . . Whether this is the beginning of another . . . Whether this is . . .”
“Pretty weird to be hearing your own voice like that,” she said.
“You always had good pipes.” He tried not to sound like he was flirting.
She turned and gave him that smile. “Do you mean my legs or my voice?”
“Both.” What else could he say? It was the truth.
“Peter, sometimes I wonder why we ever broke up.” She took a right into her office. The furnishings were sleek, modern, lots of glass, chrome, leather. And the windows overlooked Lincoln Center.
“You’ve done well,” he said.
“Our network has done well. I’m one of the stars. You could call me one of the Money Honeys, but that term is taken. So call me one of the Bucks Babes, one of the Stock Market Sweeties, one of the Cash Queens.”
“Just so long as no one calls you a cash cow.”
“That would be sexist, but I’m that, too.”
He was glad that she sat behind her desk and not beside him on the sofa.
She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands and fixed him with her gaze. It had been her favorite gesture when she wanted to interest hi
m. “What about you? No wedding band. Married? Divorced?”
“Divorced, soon to be married. To Evangeline.”
“Shucks.” She rocked in her chair and said, “Speaking of marriage, I hear you’re getting in to bed with Mr. Triple A.”
“Maybe. What’s it like?”
“I wouldn’t know. But you won’t be the first. What has he said to you?”
“He’s asked me to save America.”
She laughed. “He asks everyone that. He asked me when he pitched the interview for his Paul Revere Foundation.”
“So he’s the messiah type.”
“More like the narcissistic personality disorder type . . . pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, lack of empathy, all the usuals.”
“Does this mean I won’t be saving America?”
“Hard to say. Men like that can sometimes work miracles. Who ever thought he’d push this New Emission Bond business all the way to the Supreme Court?”
Peter didn’t say much to that. He didn’t know enough yet. So he tried a lame joke: “New Emission . . . do I have to change my pajamas afterward?”
“Ha-ha. Still the smart-ass. But what do you think? Pretty interesting.”
Peter didn’t know what to think, except that she wasn’t really offering much. Maybe she was just trying to find out what he knew. He shrugged and said, “Whatever . . . the Chinese crisis has him all upset.”
“It should,” she said. “They’re not going to buy at tomorrow’s T-bill auction, so the Dow was down three hundred yesterday. And it’s down”—she glanced at her computer—“another fifty today. It looks like it’s hitting some technical resistance, but—”
“Why the obsession with China?”
“They hold over a trillion dollars worth of our twelve-trillion-dollar debt.”
“Trillion? A thousand billion?”
“With a capital T. We buy everything from China, from baseball bats to computer parts. They take our dollars, then they buy our debt, so that we’ll have the cheap credit to buy more of their cheap goods, so they can take more of our dollars, so . . .”
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