by Chris Pavone
Now it’s Isabel who’s standing in someone’s doorway, waiting for a superior to notice, to tear herself away from the device in her lap, to acknowledge her presence. Isabel waits a few seconds, then a half-minute. She clears her throat.
The president of the literary division of American Talent Management holds up one finger, give-me-a-sec, but doesn’t immediately look up to see who’s waiting. Then she does. “Oh hi Isabel thanks for stopping by come on in have a seat.”
Isabel mumbles thanks. She perches on the edge of a chair, not settling in, projecting that she is busy, no time for leisurely chitchat. She glances around the roomy inner sanctum, the walls adorned with ultra-shocking contemporary art, black-and-white nudes and garishly bright abstract paintings and a giant black canvas covered in scrawled obscenities.
Meg is an angry-looking, alarmingly skinny woman with a diligently earned reputation for tossing crazy bombs into meetings, for having absolutely no shame when it comes to the vulgarity of her language and the lack of boundaries to her privacy—Isabel once heard Meg boast in a conference room full of people about the responsiveness of her sexual organs—and for a wardrobe dripping in logos: the six-hundred-dollar eyeglasses and the two-thousand-dollar bag, the thoroughly expected tank watch and the unmistakable red soles of her unmanageably high heels. The same uniform shared by all the women of a certain type in Meg’s zip codes in Manhattan and Southampton, a Logo Woman, every brand the luxury cliché, the It: the big H and the interlocking Gs, the checkerboard pebbled leather and the plaid silk lining, the badge on the shiny sleeve of the puffer jacket.
“Sorry just let me finish this e-mail I’ll be right with you thanks for your patience.”
Half the town seems to be making people wait while they communicate with other people, on smart phone or tablet or landline, on anything, sending different communications in different directions, including the simple age-old communication of making someone wait, merely for the sake of making a person wait.
“Isabel, hi,” Meg finally says, plastering on a wide smile, placing her device on the desk in front of her. Attention, though certainly not undivided.
“Good morning.” Isabel attempts her own smile, but knows that hers too is phony, and phony-looking. She’s not trying to hide the phoniness.
“So, Isabel. Who’re you lunching with these days?” Perhaps the most insulting question in the book business, coming from your boss. “Or breakfasting?”
“No one in particular.”
Meg looks at Isabel, eyebrows raised, trying to intimidate her into saying more. Saying something. But Isabel won’t.
“Okayyyy,” dragging out the second syllable, an obnoxious forty-five-year-old teenager. “Anyway … How are you, Isabel?”
Isabel has heard this question before from Meg. It’s not a question, in the traditional sense of the asker wanting an answer. It’s a throat-clearing. A prelude to a criticism or an attack. It’s not that Meg doesn’t care at all. It’s just that the caring isn’t an important part of her.
“I’m fine. And how are you, Meg?”
Meg smiles, knowing that her disingenuousness has just been thrown back at her. “Not bad. Thanks for asking.”
“Mmm.”
The two women stare at each for a few beats.
“How long have we known one another, Isabel?”
“Each other,” Isabel whispers, to herself. Mostly to herself.
“Excuse me?”
“Twenty years. Roughly.”
Nearly every night of those two decades, Isabel has read. She has read experimental fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoirs, biographies, genre novels. She has read until she’s fallen asleep, then she has woken up and read some more. She lived paycheck to paycheck, and managed to remain idealistic for far longer than most of her contemporaries.
“What was that first big deal of yours?” Meg asks. “Belinda Coleman?”
“Brenda.” It had been Isabel’s first million-dollar deal, at auction.
“And I invited you to drinks,” Meg continues, ignoring Isabel’s correction of her error. As a rule, Meg surges right past her own mistakes without slowing down. It’s other people’s errors that stop her cold. “The Four Seasons, wasn’t it? I said that we could offer you a job tomorrow.” Meg shakes her head, after all these years still impressed by her own impressiveness. “Do you regret it? Coming to Atlantic?”
Meg never, ever refers to the agency as ATM. Legend has it that back in the mid-eighties, when automated teller machines were being installed everywhere, one of the young agents pleaded with the owner-founder-president that he simply had to change the name, or the agency would become a laughingstock. The president’s answer was a definitive no. “If it turns out like you say, everyone will just call us Atlantic!” Two decades and millions of cash machines later, there are only a handful of people who ever refer to the agency as Atlantic.
“No,” Isabel says, “I don’t regret it.” She’d been tired of being poor, tired of being obscure, tired of being idealistic. So she moved out of the mom-and-pop shop in the grungy downtown open-plan loft, into the multinational corporation in the fancy Midtown skyscraper. She took the fancy salary and the fancy expense account. She brought Brenda Coleman along with her to ATM.
Within a year Isabel found herself barely reading anymore, selling most of her projects based on one-page pitches backed by jargon-heavy marketing budgets, signing up new clients after smoothly orchestrated beauty-pageant meetings, connecting already rich celebrities with the international corporations that could make them richer. She herself earned a large salary and hefty year-end bonuses.
“Then what happened, Isabel?” Meg looks, and sounds, earnest.
It’s not a very complicated answer. First she got married, then pregnant. Her husband started making a lot of money, and they became another Manhattan couple lifted by the rising tide of irrational M&As and unsustainable real-estate appreciation. Then she was a new mother, well on her way to becoming one of those women with a casual but lucrative career, dabbling at a job with erratic hours and too much vacation, with questionable commitment and dwindling ambition, a drive that was increasingly keeping her from the things—the people—she increasingly wanted.
She was becoming a woman who was resented by nearly all other women, because her life was so very perfect. Until it wasn’t. Perfection is always impermanent.
And after, when she managed to come back to work, she made a purposeful decision to adjust her priorities. To give much more attention to a much smaller client list, holding their hands, being all things to all of them. To try to be a good mother to every one of her writers, to make up for the moment when she had been a bad mother to her flesh-and-blood child.
But Isabel’s new strategy didn’t fit in with the ethos of ATM, which was to sign as many clients and make as many deals as possible before the so-called brands became mature. The deadwood could then fall away, replaced by younger, hotter talent with their best years ahead of them, not behind. “Forecasted client attrition,” this was called.
There had been a long period when everyone respected Isabel, at first for her hard work, and then for her taste, and then for her profitability. Then there was the period when everyone pitied her; when she pitied herself. A period that has continued to this day.
Isabel knows she still carries the disconcerting scent of grief about her, the twinge of tragedy. Very few people know exactly what happened—Isabel doesn’t talk about the horrifying particulars, never did—but the general idea was more than sufficiently heartrending.
Enough already. She wants, needs, to gain back the respect. She hopes that starting her own shop will do that. But she shouldn’t simply march out the door. That would be failure, or at least look like failure. She needs to leave ATM triumphantly, with a big new client.
“You know exactly what happened to me, Meg.”
“I don’t mean what happened to you. I mean to your career.”
“They’re different?”
When Meg had been elevated to the president’s position a couple of years ago, they’d had a laugh, agreeing that it would probably become awkward, someday, for one old friend to be the boss of the other. But in such a small business, everyone finds themselves working for friends.
“So I just wanted you to be, um, aware, that … that your year-to-date numbers haven’t been …” They never imagined it’d be this awful, this soon. “Unless things change pretty dramatically in the next month or two …”
Isabel folds her arms across her chest. It has recently become clear to Isabel that she never really liked Meg.
“You know, Isabel, you’ll always have your job, right? I mean, as long as I have anything to say about it?”
This, Isabel suddenly realizes, is not true. Isabel has never had this type of conversation before, but she recognizes it: advance warning of being fired. A soft pre-dismissal.
“But I don’t think you should count on a bonus, this year. In fact, Isabel, I’m afraid we’re going to have to consider scaling back.”
“Scaling back?”
Meg responds with a thin-lipped smile, then leans away from her employee, from this conversation, this confrontation.
Isabel stands. “Is that all, Meg?”
“Sign up anything new recently?”
“Not really.”
“No? You sure?”
Isabel shrugs. She doesn’t want to overtly lie, but she’s certainly not going to tell the truth. What she wants is to get the hell out of this room. Out of this building. She’d sort of been expecting this, for a while now. There are outfits in the book business where well-respected middle-aged professionals can coast by for years, even decades, with sub-par production. Not many outfits, but more than zero. ATM has never been one of them. Here, you’re only as good as your last year. Isabel’s last year wasn’t good, and the current one is not going to be better.
“Nothing to Jeff Fielder, this morning?”
Of course: it was that Courtney, who was at the brasserie this morning, who reported to Meg, just before Isabel came into this room. That devious little bimbo of a fink.
“Nope.”
Meg knows Isabel is lying, and she knows why.
“Is there anything else, Meg?”
The Accident is her ticket out of here. And today is, apparently, the day she’ll be leaving.
“Don’t fuck with me, Isabel.” Meg glowers. “You’ll be sorry.”
Isabel’s heart is racing as she pops the thumb drive into her computer. She starts copying important files—her contacts, some recent contracts, a couple of manuscripts, all from a folder titled Most Important Docs that she created for this exact purpose.
Her hard copy of The Accident is already in her bag. She picks up the small silver frame with the picture of the little boy, and slips it into the bag, along with the slender digital storage device. She glances around quickly, then shrugs in her brain, and walks out of her office, forever.
She hurries down the hall. From around the corner, she can hear Meg, probably on her cell phone, laugh loudly—an ugly burst of nasal noise—and then say, “Of course, St. Barths is just not worth the hassle if you’re flying commercial.”
Isabel glances left and then right, frozen, wondering where to flee, but she runs out of time—
“Isabel.” Putting her finger over the mic of her phone. “Where are you going?”
“Lunch.”
“At eleven-thirty?”
“It’s an early lunch. Excuse me.” Isabel brushes past her boss. Ex-boss. Ten steps away, she can hear Meg say, “Call Security.”
Then Isabel is rushing down the stairs, hurrying through reception. Pushing, pushing, pushing the elevator call button. Just as the doors are closing, another elevator arrives, and two security guards hurry to the ATM doors.
Halfway down to the ground floor, Isabel reconsiders her destination, and presses B.
She steps into the eerie cinder-block basement. She walks past the security office, turns into a long corridor. She passes a maintenance man, pulling a dolly through a door. He eyes her warily. “Can I help you, Ma’am?”
“No thanks!” Trying to sound cheerful. Probably sounding panicked, or insane. She turns another corner. Now she can hear men talking behind her—“Where’d she go?”—“That way”—their voices bouncing off the hard, cold surfaces.
Hurried footsteps are now behind her, closing in.
She breaks into a run.
A red exit sign beckons at the end of the hall. She pushes through this fire door, out to a loading dock, an empty bay, a blast of hot air and a whiff of diesel. Down a few concrete steps with a broken banister that snags the sleeve of her suit jacket, jerking her to the side, ripping the fabric loudly.
“Shit!” She extracts her sleeve from the cut-off pole, and herself from the stairs, hustling across the shallow driveway. And then she’s on the sidewalk, a busy Midtown midday street, just another face in the crowd. She falls into step behind a trio of blue-besuited men, joining the stream of westward-walking pedestrians in the outside lane of the sidewalk, facing off against the east-bounders on the inside lane. Those are the enemy, walking east against her; these are her allies, walking west with her. It is anonymous, it is arbitrary. Just like any teams, any conflict. You were born there, I was born here; you believe in that god, I in this. You want to kill me, and I don’t want to die.
Isabel doesn’t know where to go. She wades through the thickening humanity of impending lunchtime on a sunny summer weekday, walking among hundreds—thousands, tens of thousands—of people.
She doesn’t know what to do.
She is unemployed for the first time since—when?—high school? Yes. It’s been more than a quarter-century since she was last totally jobless.
She is possibly, probably, in physical danger. She double-checks the security of her bag with the manuscript. Does someone else in New York—in the world?—have a more dangerous thing dangling from her shoulder? Only perhaps a person with a tactical nuclear weapon, a neat little one-megaton device in a hardened suitcase, standing in bustling King’s Cross Station, or sitting in the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, or perched on a hard bench on a subway that’s stalled between stations underneath Tokyo.
Or maybe loitering right here in the crush of Times Square, in the middle of New York City, the people and cars swirling above the rumbling of the subway and beneath the neon lights and television studios and skyscrapers and Jumbotrons.
She doesn’t know whom to turn to, if anyone. Can she trust Jeffrey?
Isabel takes out her phone, stares at the screen, preposterously tiny here amid these others, these electronic screens the size of billboards, of buses, broadcasting diluted approximations of genuine news.
She begins to type an e-mail with her thumbs, a short note, just three words. Another inquisitive to the anonymous author. She isn’t absolutely positive, but she’s pretty sure who the recipient is. Even though she’d been under the impression that this person was dead.
CHAPTER 17
After a series of hastily arranged succession meetings over the course of a few hectic, exhausting days, the author left the office for good, amid tears and hugs and the firm but reasonable handshakes of people who shake a lot of hands, professionally.
He retreated to his Georgetown house, to the upstairs bedroom he used as his home office, on the web and on the phone, sending e-mails, phoning doctors, collecting information, making the arrangements he’d been advised to make.
He and his ex-wife had never gotten around to writing wills until she was pregnant, and even then continued to put it off until the last minute. So it wasn’t until she was at thirty-six weeks that
they’d sat in that generic East Midtown conference room, cherry-tabled and windowless, discussing with the T&E lawyer every conceivable combination of deaths and incapacitations and their implications for the fiduciary and physical custody of their as-yet-unborn and -unnamed child. Preparing for every version of horror, except the one that actually occurred.
Now he called that same lawyer in New York, and had her change some particulars. He took the revised paperwork to a local office with a notary and his self-important little stamp.
There were a lot of arrangements to make. There were surgical options to consider, doctors to consult. There were the densely woven secrets he and Charlie Wolfe had been sharing for two decades, and the portion that he’d been keeping to himself. There was also the new possibility that Charlie actually wanted him dead. Would maybe even take steps to cause his death. So there was his security to consider.
When he was finished, he made efforts to conceal the work he’d been doing. He shredded documents. He destroyed files. He cleared the history from his web browser. But even though for a long time he’d been the day-to-day chief of what was something of a tech company, everyone knew that he was not particularly adept, technologically. He wasn’t the type of guy who’d be savvy about his digital footprint.
As he takes a turn onto a minor road high above Zurich, his mobile dings, an incoming e-mail, another message received to an account with extraordinarily convoluted ownership, and no practical way of tracing it. He won’t answer. The sender will get another of those auto-response bounce-back messages. Keeping her off-guard, making her think she can’t find him. A little unavailability is always good to help control the conversation. It’ll be driving her nuts.
He glances at the little screen: Is it you?
When all his arrangements—financial, logistical, psychological—had been finalized, he drove out to the airfield in the Maryland suburbs. He climbed into the small Piper that he’d bought secondhand as soon as he’d received his pilot’s license, back when he’d first started earning unmistakably disposable income, already looking forward to a time when those amounts of money would be indefensible, unspendable. It came on quickly, the hubris that accompanies wealth.