City of Dreams

by Martin, William

  Then she heard a creak on the little landing, then—good Christ!—a knock.

  The dog growled and scratched across the linoleum to the door.

  She kicked off her shoes and tiptoed after the dog, picked him up, shushed him. Then she reached into the kitchen and grabbed the carving knife.

  If the redhead was out there, come to finish the job he started on 9/11—

  Then there was another knock and a low voice: “I mean you no harm.” Then a minute of silence, then the rustling of paper and a large manila envelope appeared under her door. The voice said, “Take a look.”

  Sally put down the dog and opened the envelope. And there was Jennifer Wilson in a series of surveillance photos: walking out of her apartment, talking with John Smith, swiping her security card at a World Trade Center turnstile. And there was Sally Lawrence: going in and out of Delancey’s. Finally, a side-by-side of Sally and Jennifer, with computer lines drawn, showing the similarities between the eyes, the noses, the chins.

  The voice whispered, “I know who you were.”

  But who was he? He didn’t sound Russian, at least.

  “I was with you that day. You read my story in the papers. I just want to talk.”

  “With me? Are you the FBI?”

  “Not anymore. Besides, the statute of limitations on insider trading is five years.”

  Sally looked at the dog. What do you think? The dog looked at the door.

  So she opened it but kept the chain in place. The dog growled and bared his teeth.

  The man in the Yankees hat was standing there. “I’m former federal agent Joseph Berranova.” He took off his hat, then he pulled out a dog biscuit and offered it through the space in the door.

  The dog looked at her, and she said, “Okay.” The dog snapped up the biscuit.

  “What do you want?” she said over the chain.

  “I think you know, but like I say, I mean you no harm.”

  “That’s good, because I’ve had plenty of that harm shit. I don’t need any more.” And she decided to let him in.

  That night, for the first time, another person sat with Sally and drank tea at her wobbly table.

  He said that after 9/11, he left the agency with a pension as his life unraveled.

  Then he had read the story of Arsenault and the bonds, and he remembered the woman named Jennifer Wilson, from the Intermetro case. She had tried to cash a similar set of bonds in 1987. And he started making connections. “So many of the same players as in 2001, back together, Arsenault, Magee, the ghost of Jennifer Wilson, the Antonov family.”

  “You knew about the Russians?”

  “We knew there was dirty money behind Intermetro in ’01. We were hoping to flip you and Smith, take down the Antonov syndicate.”

  “That explains a lot,” she said, and she described the murders on that awful morning.

  All Joey could say was, “As dangerous as we thought they were.”

  “But it wasn’t me you wanted to flip. It was Jennifer Wilson. I was born on September 11, 2001. Jennifer died that day.”

  Joey sipped his tea. “I know what you mean.”

  After a moment, she touched his arm. “No one has said that to me in a long time. No one could.”

  The wind splattered sleet against the windows.

  “You and I saw things. Terrible things.” Joey shook his head. “Anyway, I started spiralin’ back into how I ended up in that tower, and it led me to Arsenault—”

  “He told the SEC about Intermetro, didn’t he?”

  Joey nodded. “And his name led to the bonds, so I decided to stake out Delancey’s, just to see if any of the old principals from the ’01 case showed up.”

  “And along came Frivolous Sal.” She smiled her toothless smile and gave a hoot. “You’re not here to arrest me, are you?”

  “I’m here to see if we can work together.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know.” Joey shrugged. “I just feel a pull. Don’t you feel a pull?”

  “Every day.”

  “I remember all the brave people, even the ones who were scared . . . even in the Sky Lobby. Nobody panicked, everybody tried to be orderly, movin’ to the elevators, takin’ directions. . . . People helped people that day, even after the plane hit and we were all in hell. . . . I was blown twenty feet. When I woke up, I thought you’d been vaporized. But I saw Johnson . . . cut in half.”

  “I remember a guy named Gomez.” And she just shook her head. “He worked up there, a janitor or something. He saved me, then he went back.”

  Joey gave the dog another biscuit, watched him for a moment, then said, “Somebody helped me find stairwell A. And there were people in the lobby and on the concourse, showin’ us how to get out. Some of them didn’t make it, either.”

  Another splatter of sleet hit the windows.

  “And do you remember the spirit in the city for a while after that?”

  “Yeah. People were generous . . . friendly . . . the way people ought to be.”

  Joey poured more tea. “Then we just got right back to bein’ who we are . . . a bunch of what’s-in-it-for-me backstabbers. Like all the bankers and brokers and greedy bastards in ’08, makin’ their thirty and forty million, while the whole economy was goin’ up the chimney and the government was scramblin’ to stop a depression. Do you think any of them would have helped you in that tower? No way. And guys like Arsenault are the worst, hidin’ their greed—and maybe their failure—under an umbrella of patriotism. Make you sicker than a dog eatin’ rats, seein’ him cashin’ those two bonds. He’ll cash ’em, take the fourteen million, and say he’s doin’ it all for America.”

  “It’s not fourteen million,” she said. “There’s a box of bonds. Worth twenty grand in 1780. Compound the interest, it comes to one-point-four billion.”

  “Jesus.” Joey Berra sat back. “He’d bankrupt the country if he could.”

  “One-point-four wouldn’t bankrupt a county.”

  “No, but it would save a bankrupt company, and still look like good PR.” Joey cracked his big knuckles. “Arsenault talks about these bonds bein’ a symbol. But he’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong with us.”

  And that night, two people whose lives had been shattered on 9/11 joined forces.

  Sally slept very well, because at last, she had a friend who could talk back.

  iii.

  Joey told her to stay away from Delancey’s, because he had seen Ivankov the Redhead watching the store.

  Instead they agreed to meet a week later in Katz’s deli at three o’clock.

  Sally got there early. She ordered coffee. She didn’t have money for more.

  Ten minutes to three: no Joey. Three o’clock: no Joey. Ten past three: no Joey.

  She hated herself for getting nervous when it stretched to fourteen past. She hated herself for trusting someone. When the clock on the wall reached three fifteen, she took a last deep breath of all the aromas of the deli, gathered her things, prepared to leave.

  That was when Joey hurried in. “Sorry I’m late. I been tracking Avid’s accountant.”

  “Carl Evers?” She didn’t say how well she knew him.

  “He’s scared shitless. Did you order yet?”

  She pointed to her cup.

  “Coffee? You don’t come to Katz’s and just have coffee.” Then he got it. He put a hand on her arm and gave her a little pat. “It’s on me, Sal.”

  She grinned, revealing the missing teeth, then brought her hand to her mouth in embarrassment. She realized this was the first time she had covered her mouth like that since it happened. “In that case, I’ll have the biggest hot pastrami I can get.”

  He ordered, then leaned across the table. “So . . . this Carl Evers, like I say, he’s scared shitless. I came up behind him on the street.”

  “That would scare the shit out anyone.”

  He grinned. “I just come up behind him and said, ‘How come your bosses waited till the economic shit hit
the fan before they started moving on this bond business?’ He didn’t have an answer. Didn’t want to talk to me. Kept walking.”

  Joey’s eyes lit up when the sandwich plates landed on the table. “Look at that, will ya? As big as your head.”

  Sally slathered hers with mustard and bit with her canines. She ate as fast as Joey. Faster. And after she wiped the mustard from her mouth, he pointed to the corner of his, to let her know she’d missed a spot.

  Only a friend would do something like that, she thought.

  And after they ate, she told him about a trip to the Times archive. She didn’t tell him that Erica did the work. She hadn’t told anyone about Erica yet. She’d need to trust him more. But she told him about Tim’s father, murdered at Woodward Manor.

  Then she pulled out a tattered picture book she had bought for two dollars at Delancey’s: Lost New York, a series of images of the city that had grown, flourished, and given way over three centuries, including a photo of the ancient house, as it had looked just before its demolition. An old oak tree extended its branches over the roof.

  She said, “Tim Riley’s father was a demolition man. He tore out walls and floors. He kept what he found. So I’m trackin’ the name Woodward to see where it leads.”

  “Good. And I’ll keep hauntin’ that accountant.”

  BUT BEFORE ALL that, Erica insisted that they take a bus trip at Christmas. Sally didn’t tell Joey, but Erica never stayed in New York at Christmas. It depressed her. So she traveled to Washington, then on to Key West for New Year’s. But for the first time in almost a decade, she was thinking of someone in New York when the clock struck midnight at the southernmost point in America.

  And for the first time in that long, a Christmas present was waiting when she got home, a box of chocolates from Joey.

  Sally went down to the pay phone and called him to wish him happy New Year.

  “It will be if we take down Arsenault,” he said. “Or the Russians.”

  They agreed to have dinner on Saturday night in Little Italy.

  But Sally stayed home. Erica Callow went instead and walked into the restaurant ten minutes late.

  Joey glanced up from his Diet Coke, then he looked again when the blonde in the shiny red shoes came over and sat. “Excuse me, miss, but—”

  “Sally sent me.”

  And Joey Berra, former FBI agent, who had lived through hell in the sky and descended into hell on the ground and was now emerging, sat back as if she’d smacked him and said, “Jennifer?”

  She grinned like a movie star. “I’m Erica. Order me a glass of a nice Tuscan red.”

  It took Joey about ten minutes to get over his shock, while Erica explained that without her, Sally would go crazy. “Sally does the dirty work. I do the dress up.”

  Joey looked her over. “You dress up nice.”

  She waited until after they had enjoyed the first course of pasta carbonara, then she said, “I think I know where the bonds are.”

  Joey was lifting his glass to his lips. It stopped in midair.

  Then she told him about her trips to the New-York Historical Society. Her search for Woodward had led to Abigail Woodward, mistress of the manor, wife of a loyalist who hanged himself. That led to the mahogany box Mrs. Woodward had donated to the Society.

  Then Erica described its contents—the finial, some old clippings, a letter to a Gil Walker. She slipped out a notebook. “And get this, ‘Our good deeds will come back to us many times over in the blessings of freedom, stored safe and sound in a mahogany box. I await your return to show you our investment in the future. Love, L. R.’”

  He grinned. “You look beautiful.”

  She leaned across the table. “If Sally was here, she’d smack you in the chops.”

  “If Sally was here, I wouldn’t want to kiss her.”

  She liked hearing that, but not yet. “This is it, Joey. L. R. Loretta Rogers! The bonds are in the box. They have to be.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No. I think it has a false bottom. And it’s mahogany. We have to get it and open it.”

  He looked at her a long time and said, “Then we have to steal it.”

  She gave him her best dental school grin. “Right answer.”

  That night, Erica Callow stood in front of Joey Berra in the semidarkness of his little apartment in the East Village, and as Sinatra sang “Nice and Easy Does It,” she raised her skirt, revealing long legs, smooth nylons, garters, and . . . Joey gasped.

  THEY SPENT TWO months planning the theft of the box. Erica returned several times to the Historical Society, pretending she was a scholar writing about Fraunces Tavern. Meanwhile, Joey scoped out the security measures. Then he made a plan. And when the moment came, he made the phone call that distracted the librarian. It could not have gone more smoothly.

  They brought the box back to his apartment. It took them fifteen minutes before they figured out that a sliding piece of molding on the outside actually released the false bottom.

  “Here goes,” said Joey.

  They slid the bottom out. And—nothing. Empty.

  “Shit,” said Joey. “Back to the drawing board.”

  “At least we have a nice finial.” Erica held up the little brass crown.

  SPRING CAME, AND the world, or at least that part of it that cared, waited for the Supreme Court decision. Historical institutions filed amicus briefs. Scripophilists started making markets in the bonds again. Some bought on the bet that the court would uphold the Avid argument, some bet the other way and sold.

  And Sally, who usually met Joey at Katz’s to discuss strategy, told him that they had hit the wall. Erica, who usually appeared only when things were going well, never showed her face, her front teeth, or her blond wig. So there was no romance, because Erica handled that, too. Sally would never even go into Joey’s apartment. Still, thought Sally, Joey treated her with a gentleness and respect that she hadn’t known even when she was Jennifer. So she never stopped trusting him.

  Joey preferred seeing Erica, because when she appeared, he knew that romance might follow. And Erica had tracked the Timothy Riley story to a pile of notebooks in the New York Society Library. But when they could make no sense of what they found, there was less reason for Erica.

  By late April, Austin Arsenault began appearing more often on television and on MarketSpin.com, which gave Sally an idea.

  She gambled on revealing herself to someone she had known in her previous life. So she pushed her cart uptown to Columbus Circle, chained it to a lamppost, and carried little Georgie into the Time Warner Center, where she waited until Kathy Flynn stepped off the elevator.

  Kathy gave her the right-through-you look and kept walking.

  So Sally hefted the shopping bag holding Georgie and trundled after her and got behind her on the escalator.

  “I got a scoop for ya!” Sally yelled. “I got a big scoop.”

  Kathy Flynn made a cell phone call and started talking.

  When they got to the bottom, Sally came right up behind her and said, “Austin Arsenault is a fraud. What he says he’s doin’ for America he’s doin’ for no one but himself. Talk to him. Talk to his accountant.”

  Kathy looked at Sally as if she recognized something. The voice? The face? Sally and her little dog turned and disappeared into the crowd.

  A FEW NIGHTS later, Sally and Joey stopped Carl Evers on his way home.

  He lived on a quiet side street in the East Sixties. Trees, brownstones, wealth. Not bad for an accountant. He moved with a long-legged stride that seemed more frightened than confident, as if he were afraid that someone was following him.

  When Sally saw him, she started along the sidewalk with her shopping cart.

  Carl Evers gave her the sidelong glance, and she rammed the cart right into him.

  “Watch it, you old bag.”

  Joey came up behind him. “Don’t be callin’ her an old bag, Evers.”

  “And you!” Evers’s eyes widened. “Whoever y
ou are, it’s time I called the cops on you. This is harassment.”

  Sally said, “We hear that Kathy Flynn is investigatin’ you and your company. Gettin’ ready to do a big piece.”

  Evers looked from one face to the other. “Where did you hear that?”

  “And even worse,” said Joey, “there’s a member of the Paul Revere Foundation called Antonov, whose father was known as the Avenger.”

  Evers’s eyes widened even more. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “We’re thinking of telling him that we know a few things about the guy who’s been certifying that he audits Arsenault’s financial statements.”

  Evers started walking. “You know nothing. You’re two street bums. Beat it.”

  “Come on, Carl,” said Sally Lawrence.

  He stopped at the sound of the voice. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” said Joey. “But we know Arsenault was paying you twenty Gs a month. More than Madoff paid his know-nothing accountant. And the SEC might be slow, and understaffed, and they got burned when they missed Madoff. But if someone drops a dime on Avid, they’ll be all over you like fleas on a rat. And the FBI comes right behind them.”

  Evers started up the steps to his brownstone.

  “But the FBI would be better than Antonov’s boys,” said Sally.

  Evers hesitated at the door.

  “Cookin’ the books, aren’t you?” said Joey. “And Arsenault is bettin’ on those bonds to cover some kind of huge shortfall. If he finds them and wins his case, he makes one-point-four bil. Is that enough to cover his losses?”

  Evers walked down the stairs and over to Sally. “I know you.”

  And Sally Lawrence made a decision. She had trusted this man once. Maybe she should trust him now. So she said, “Yes, you do. And a friend of mine would like to thank you for seeing that her estate was distributed properly.”

  “A friend?” Evers knitted his brow.

  “What’s Arsenault doing, Evers?” said Joey. “Why does he want the bonds?”

  “He’s trying to save America. That’s what he told me.”

  “And two and two equals five,” said Joey.

  Evers looked from one face to the other. “What do you want from me?” ’