By the time Peter got his change and gave a look around, Kathy was already parading into the restaurant. That was how she walked, long legs loping, ass swaying, always like she owned the place.
Peter liked 11 Madison Park for its high ceilings, its twenty-foot windows looking out onto the square, and its two-course prix-fixe lunch for twenty-eight bucks. A bargain by New York standards. Just so long as no one was tailing you, spying on you, shooting at you, or otherwise trying to keep you from enjoying your meal.
But as he went in, he asked himself again, why the hell was he here when he should have been uptown, poring over those Riley notebooks? Most of the time, when he went after something, the clues accumulated logically: a line of quotes from Paradise Lost led to a lost Paul Revere tea set. A single line, repeated through history, echoed across New England until it drew him to the hiding place of a lost U.S. Constitution. But where was the logic in this? He hoped that Evangeline was doing better.
Kathy was telling the hostess that they were meeting the Arsenault party.
The hostess glanced at her book, “So there’ll be five of you rather than three?”
Peter noticed the eyes turning, but they were turning toward Kathy. Some were recognizing her, brightening, following.
It was a good lesson. If you were trying not to be noticed in a half-full restaurant, walk in with a well-known woman who also looked fabulous.
Will Wedge had arrived first. He was sitting on the banquette in the corner, so that he could see the whole room. He must have been spooked from the night before in the Harvard Club. He was sipping something amber, neat.
A little early, thought Peter, but under the circumstances . . .
Wedge looked shocked to see them, then he put on his old hail-fellow face, stood, and offered a big handshake. “Well, the MarketSpin lady and the treasure hunter. What a surprise. I didn’t know that you were joining us.”
Kathy put a finger to her lips and gave him a little wink. She could play anything, from hard-nosed to coquettish, from moment to moment. “It’s a surprise.”
Wedge turned to Peter. “Did the police ever interview you?”
“Not yet.” Peter sat with his back to the room. He was brazening through at the moment. A man wanted for questioning by the police would never be strolling into a fancy restaurant as the lunch crowd arrived, so he couldn’t be the guy whose picture had been in the papers.
And no one paid particular attention, except for the waitstaff. They slid another table into place. They brought Perrier, breadsticks, menus.
Wedge recovered nicely. He even glanced at the wine list and told the waiter, “Bring us the Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier, Clos de la Maréchale, Premier Cru 2006.”
“Nice bottle,” said Peter,
“Nice pronunciation,” said Kathy.
“Nice price,” said Wedge. “But what the hell? Arsenault is paying.”
“Is he?” asked Kathy.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t Wedge, Fleming, and Royce a feeder for Avid?” asked Kathy.
Wedge sat back. “A long and positive relationship. You could call it stellar.”
“In the good years and in ’08, too?”
“Well, yes. And if they were good in ’08, you know that they are rock solid.”
“Have you ever had a problem withdrawing funds for your clients?” asked Kathy.
Wedge leaned forward. “What are you getting at?”
Peter asked, “Who else from Harvard has come for the meeting of the Paul Revere Foundation. Anybody I’d know?”
Wedge said, “A dozen or more, all committed to fighting the deficit.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Kathy.
The wine arrived. Wedge told Peter to taste it. Peter approved.
Wedge took the time to recover. “As Arsenault has told this country for years, unless we get control of our deficit, we will turn our economy into a big Ponzi scheme.”
“Interesting term,” said Kathy.
Wedge kept talking: “But the people at the top of the pyramid won’t be stealing from the ones at the bottom. They’ll be stealing from their grandchildren.”
“And all the other Harvard men on the board agree with you?” asked Peter.
“They’re not all Harvard men,” said Wedge.
“We can look at the 501(c)(3) filing,” said Peter. “I’ll bet that most of them are.”
Kathy gave Peter a playful punch on the shoulder, “Very good. I wish I’d thought of that. Looking at the 501(c)(3). You should be a reporter.”
Wedge looked from one face to the other. “What is this all about?”
“A lot of Harvard brokers pouring money into the operation of a bigger Harvard broker. Getting nice annualized profits, never looking at the books, never questioning,” said Kathy.
“Sounds familiar,” said Peter.
“Now wait a minute,” said Will Wedge. “There has never been a moment when we haven’t been able to withdraw as much money as we’ve needed from Avid. I don’t think that—” Will Wedge shut up, because Austin Arsenault and Owen T. Magee were striding across the room.
And neither of them looked happy to see two extra guests.
“Please tell me that you have good news for us,” said Owen T. Magee to Peter Fallon. “Otherwise, this is a private lunch.”
But as if he understood that it was never cool to make a scene, Austin Arsenault sat and said, “On the other hand, we can make it a friendly lunch, if the both of you promise not to talk about business.”
EVANGELINE AND HENRY were still working away in the Marshall Room on the fourth floor of the New York Society Library.
The four notebooks were a hundred leaves long, lined paper, bound in marble boards, like ledgers. Since they were written over about a year, there were no drastic changes in handwriting. Sometimes Tim Riley wrote in pencil, sometimes in ink with smudges and splotches.
And the notebooks told the story of a man and his city, from the day he first rode uptown in the Riley Wrecking wagon, to the meetings with G. W. Plunkitt, to the encounters with J. P. Morgan, including the night when Morgan locked the bankers in his library. Then there was the run on West Side Workingman’s Bank, stopped by bags of Morgan money.
Henry loved this line from Tim’s father, who looked out from the cupola of an old house, at the smoky, steaming air of the city, and called it, “the great cloud of commerce that rains money like water on the city of New York.”
Evangeline was touched by this: “In the turmoil of the ’07 panic, your mother and I both suffered great disappointments. All people do in life. But out of it grew an understanding of what is most important. And out of our understanding came a fine son.”
She gave that sentence a lot of thought and wrote it down and read on.
The final passage was dated September 15, 1920:
“I must write of my father’s death. But I cannot write much. I only heard it happen. His bravery saved my life. He stood up to thugs. I found him on the steps of the old house that, if we could go back, would sit at the corner of Broadway and Eightieth. He had drawn a white X on the steps. This meant we should take up the board and save to sell to Squints O’Day, the cooper who made water tanks. My father sometimes worked for Squints, who called him ‘the best tank-bottom man in New York.’ I have always puzzled about my father’s last word, ‘eyes.’ When he said it, he seemed to be peering into the future. We all peer ahead and hope for our children. We all have big dreams. But what matters is what my father gave to Uncle Eddie and me: ‘A roof over your head and food on your table and a family that loves you in a parish that cares.’”
Evangeline showed that to Henry.
“Man was a philosopher,” said Henry.
Then she read ahead: “Tonight, after you were in bed, I took my evening walk to the roof. I counted several new water tanks. When I was a boy, there were few, and now there are many. The sons of Squints O’Day still make the tanks. And as my father once said, they hold the water that
washes like life into the city.”
Evangeline puzzled over that, then turned the page and saw a final entry, in pencil, in a handwriting that was scrawling, almost impossible to read, “Rainwater O’Day. X marks the . . . spiffle.”
Henry read that and said, “What the hell is a spiffle?”
IT WAS NOT a pleasant lunch.
Will Wedge was silent for most of the first course.
Peter guessed that Austin and Owen were planning to pump him, maybe to urge him to raise his stake in Avid Investment Strategies. That was how Ponzi schemes worked. They had to get more in because others were taking out, or would be soon.
Once the main course was placed in front of everyone, Will looked at Arsenault and said, “These two are suggesting that you’re another Madoff.”
“Print that,” Owen T. Magee said to Kathy Flynn, “and I will sue you, your Web site, your network, and the people who make the computer you write on.”
But Owen T. was the bad cop.
Arsenault was the good cop. He swirled his wine and said, “Kathy, you can look at our fund performance over a decade and you’ll see solid results, well-managed portfolios. And you’ll see the years when we took a beating just like everyone else. Go back to 2001, for example. We can show you the books. It’s all public record.”
“So why is your accountant dead?” asked Kathy.
Owen T. Magee said, “You’d have to ask the people who killed him. But remember this, Carl Evers wasn’t some nonentity from Long Island, like Madoff’s rubber stamper. He audited all our financial reports before he signed off.”
“But something had him scared to death.” Kathy turned to Will Wedge. “Why was the accountant walking toward you when he was shot? And why would someone shoot him in the middle of the Harvard Club?”
Will Wedge shook his head. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
Peter asked. “What’s your annual fee to feed Avid, Will?”
Arsenault said to Peter, “I don’t like that line of questioning. Will Wedge is an important broker. So am I. We do not hide like Madoff. We are part of the community. We support charities. We have big ideas. And we will make a national statement tomorrow, whether the court supports us or not . . . whether you find anything or not.”
“Got it?” said Owen T. Magee, as if to put a punctuation on the speech.
“Got it,” said Peter.
EVANGELINE AND HENRY were finished.
Henry walked over to the window and looked down. Then he laughed. But something wasn’t funny. “How in the hell did they know we were here?”
“What are you talking about?” Evangeline came over.
“See the black car up at the corner? Two shadows sittin’ in the front seat? They weren’t there when we came in. But they been there a while.” Henry called to Miss Nolan. “Did you tell anyone we were here?”
“Why would I do that?”
Henry grinned. “If I go through the rare book catalogue, I won’t see any items that say, ‘Gift of Oscar Delancey,’ will I, Miss Casey Nolan?”
The young woman shook her head. But her face reddened like a Courtland apple.
“Is there a back way out of this place?” Henry asked.
PETER AND KATHY came out of the restaurant.
Peter looked around. No Russian redheads. No Putin look-alikes. No police. A man sitting in Madison Square Park, over by the dog run, taking pictures. But there were people taking pictures in New York all the time.
Arsenault and the others came out, too. Magee and Wedge got into the limo.
Arsenault stopped on the sidewalk beside Peter and Kathy. He was still in “big man” mode. No harshness, no threats, just lots of visionary conversation, grandiose schmooze:
“It’s an amazing city. So much endures, like the old Flatiron over there. Yet so much fades.” He gestured up to Twenty-sixth Street, the site of the first Madison Square Garden. The building at the corner replicated the archways that once led into the Garden, like a shadow of an echo.
“Think of all that has disappeared,” said Arsenault. “The old city hall where Washington took the oath, gone. The Croton Reservoir, gone. The mansions of Fifth Avenue, gone. Even the World Trade Center—”
“Things change,” said Peter.
“Do they ever,” said Arsenault. “Go to Boston or Philadelphia and see the past. Come to New York and watch time fly. The wonders of the age are not wonders until they are proclaimed here, Fallon, and I have been part of it for thirty years.”
Kathy shook her head. “What a fucking windbag.”
Arsenault just laughed and got into his limo, then rolled down the window. “I intend to be around a whole lot longer. There are still wonders to see. So long as we can control the deficit.” And he sped off.
Peter looked at Kathy, “Now what?”
She shrugged. “I guess I go look at his books. He offered to show them.”
Her cell phone rang. She answered. She knit her brow. Then her eyes widened. When she clicked off, she looked shocked.
“What is it?’ said Peter.
“An old friend.”
“And?”
“She’s been dead for almost ten years.”
SIXTEEN
September 2001
AT LEAST SHE HADN’T MARRIED HIM.
Jennifer Wilson finished her second cup of coffee and thought about her autobiography for the first time in years.
What would this chapter say?
She had not taken New York by storm, but she sure had taken it. She only hoped that she wouldn’t have to give it all back, because like every bubble before it, like every big thing that had driven the American economy for a day or a decade, from tobacco to trains to Florida swampland sold as top-shelf real estate, the dot-com bubble had burst.
So thank God she hadn’t married John Smith, because they might have had children, and who would raise them if both parents went to jail?
She stood on her balcony above Abingdon Square and took another sip of coffee.
God, but she loved that neighborhood. She loved New York, period. And she told herself that no matter what happened that day, coming to New York had been the best thing she ever could have done.
She had to admit that she liked the cleaner, brighter, safer city that New York had become. She thanked the booming economy and gave Rudy Giuliani his due. But she still missed the New York she had first seen on that day she dragged a suitcase from the Port Authority Terminal all the way down to the Village.
The rest of America had made that New York a symbol of all that was wrong with urban life—the crime, the drugs, the homeless bums, the graffiti, the rats, the roaches, the derelicts in the derelict buildings, the squalor in the alleys, the soaring deficits, and the astronomical prices of everything from apples to apartments.
But the rest of America missed the point. All those people sitting out there in mom-and-pop land saw only what they wanted to see in the big scary city. Jennifer had found real excitement in the New York of the eighties, a kind of dark magic, even in a black limousine a week before Christmas. Thinking about it now almost felt like nostalgia. Now she could go up to the Meatpacking District—where butchers in bloody aprons used to slice ribs by day and gays in black leather cruised by night—and order Chablis in a fern bar.
The air was late-summer warm, September clear. So she lingered outside to feel the sun on her face and enjoy the view a few minutes more. The Twin Towers no longer seemed like a symbol of the sad seventies, when they had been built to revive Lower Manhattan. Back then, people used to say that they looked like the boxes that the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings came in. No . . . on that September morning, they shimmered silver, like the new century that lay ahead.
Still, she hated going down there.
Since the March afternoon in 2000 when Lucent earnings missed Wall Street estimates, a shitstorm had been blowing through the high-tech world. And it had finally found her in that fancy office on the ninety-first floor of the South T
ower.
So . . . what to wear for a shitstorm? A raincoat?
She thought about putting on a skirt. A skirt with no stockings would be cool and keep her from sweating. She still had a summer tan. And even though she had passed the big 4-0, she still had nice legs. Nice everything else for that matter, because she worked out three times a week. She even went down to the World Trade Center on Saturdays, showed her ID, and ran the whole ninety-one flights to her office. And her legs were even nicer when she slipped on the Ferragamos that she kept in a drawer in her desk.
But why give the FBI anything to look at when they were coming to grill her?
So she put on slacks and a pair of black cross-trainers. She preferred slacks because she’d been purse-snatched back in those good old eighties, and now she liked to carry her wallet in her pocket, like a man.
She stuck her coffee cup in the dishwasher and patted Georgie, her little terrier. He wanted to play. He always wanted to play. He was less than a year old and still chewing things. So she put up the baby gate to keep him in the kitchen. He whimpered a bit, then he began to chew the gate.
In the bedroom, Joshua was still sleeping with the sheet half over him, one long leg and one muscled butt cheek exposed.
After Smitty, Jennifer had been with lovers who got up and made coffee for her and lovers who got up and left before she was awake.
But Joshua was an artist. So he slept late because he painted late . . . and loved later . . . but longer. However happy she was that she hadn’t married Smitty, she was even happier that she didn’t love Joshua, because once they were done in bed, there wasn’t much to say. But if having Joshua was what they meant by “unlucky in love,” she’d live with it. She gave that handsome ass a little pat and let him sleep.
She dabbed a bit of Chanel no. 5 behind the ears. Then she grabbed her purse and her laptop. Then she decided to grab one more thing. She went to the top drawer of her dresser, to the compartment where she kept her Hermès scarves, under which she had hidden the false ID she had used to open one of her safety deposit boxes.
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