by Alan Glynn
He’s left three messages already.
Sitting at his desk, he tries him again.
“Hello?”
“Arnie?” A miracle. “Jimmy Vaughan.”
“Oh, Mr. Vaughan, good evening. I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, I—”
“You didn’t get back to me, Arnie. That’s the whole point. It’s what, ten o’clock on a Friday night, and I’m getting back to you?”
“Oh? Oh yes, of course. Sorry.”
“And you know why I’m calling, don’t you. I need you to get me some more of those pills.”
When he says it like that it sounds sort of pathetic. Not so much a kid looking to score a dime bag as a degenerate lowlife junkie pleading for his next fix.
Like his degenerate lowlife junkie son.
When was that? Jesus, 1981? Feels like a century ago. Feels like yesterday.
“The problem, Mr. Vaughan, is that—”
“No, no. There is no problem. This is a repeat prescription, my friend.” If this bastard wants to be difficult, Vaughan will instigate proceedings to buy Eiben-Chemcorp back. Which he could do. In a heartbeat. “Just see to it that what we did last time happens again, okay? You know the terms. They’re very generous. So I’ll expect to hear—”
“But, Mr. Vaughan—”
“I’ll expect to hear from you on Monday or Tuesday. Thank you.”
He hangs up.
That has agitated him a little, and he doesn’t like it.
This drug works, it’s as simple as that, and he wants more of it. He heard all the scare stories ten years ago about MDT-48, and he wouldn’t have gone near the stuff with a ten-foot pole. But now? Now he’s old and he doesn’t give a damn. Besides, this is clearly MDT-lite.
Very lite.
His doctors are amazed—and baffled—at his improved condition, so why would he back away from this? Why would he not take advantage of it? He’s been involved with companies developing innovative products and services all his life, in pharmaceuticals, electronics, communications, the agri and energy sectors, you name it, and when has he once benefited personally or exploited his position in any way?
He gets up from his desk and leaves the study.
He should go to bed.
Instead he goes in search of Meredith. He finds her down the hall, in the main living room, splayed out on a couch with a soda in one hand and the TV remote in the other.
He steps into the room and stands there, looking at her.
The way she’s positioned, all languorous … her skirt pulled up a bit, lots of stocking showing, one shoulder strap slipped off and—
He feels—
“What are you watching?” he says.
He’s got a hard-on.
She looks up, distracted, and presses PAUSE on the remote. He turns and glances at the screen.
Connie Carillo, frozen in sober gray, staring out over the courtroom.
“I DVR’d it,” she says. “It’s so depressing.”
“Then why are you watching it?”
She takes a sip from her drink. “I don’t know. It’s Connie.” She pauses. “I still can’t believe it. I mean, she stabbed him in the chest with a carving knife.”
Hard-on’s gone.
“If she did it,” he says, only for something to say. He’s grown bored with the trial and hasn’t followed it for days.
“Of course she did it.”
Attempting to sit up now, Meredith gets a splash of soda on her dress.
“Jesus.” She reaches down and puts the can on the floor. Then she inspects the stain. “Shit. They’ll never get this out.”
“Well,” Vaughan says, “I’ll leave you to it. Good night.”
He goes to bed and falls asleep pretty quickly, but after maybe an hour something wakes him, a passing siren maybe. He stares into the darkness. He was in the middle of a dream … Ray Whitestone cross-examining Connie Carillo in the kitchen of their house in Palm Beach, asking her how many ladles and soup spoons and pepper pots she had, and if she could describe them.
It was extremely vivid.
But also stupid and meaningless.
He turns over and tries to go back to sleep.
* * *
When he’s leaving the room, Frank puts the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. There’s a big fat crack on the plasma TV screen from the Stoli bottle, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with that today. He may be coming back here, he may not be, he doesn’t know. He’s paid through till Wednesday. It was the easiest thing to do.
He gets a cab outside the hotel and tells the driver to head downtown.
This is something he really doesn’t want to do, but what choice has he got?
They’re on Seventh Avenue, and when they get to Fourteenth Street, he tells the driver to go east. Then, when they get to Orchard, he gets him to crawl along, says they’re looking for a car—but that if they reach Delancey to turn left, and on no account to go straight on. It’s bad enough being down here, but he doesn’t think he could bear going right past the building. Looking around, what strikes him first is how ordinary everything is, how there’s no … there’s no trace of what happened. But why would there be? It was a week ago, which is the second thing that strikes him … the relentless, forward-moving, unidirectional, fuck-you nature of time itself. There was before, there was the event, and now there’s afterward. If you’ve got a problem with that, then … you’ve got a problem.
Car’s not here.
They turn left on Delancey.
“No car, sir?”
“No.”
Parking’s pretty crazy in New York, with times, alternate side regs, etc. Also, he can’t remember exactly where he parked, if it was at a hydrant or a loading zone.
“They boot your car, probably.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t see it. It’d still be there. Let’s spin around one more time.”
They loop back onto Grand and then onto Orchard again. It’s definitely not there.
“When you leave it, sir?”
Frank exhales. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious now, isn’t it?
“Week ago,” he says, knowing what’s next.
“Ah, even if they boot it, sir, after two days it gets towed. You want to go to the pound.”
Pier 76.
West Thirty-eighth and Twelfth.
“Okay.” He rolls his eyes. “Let’s go.”
On the way there he calls Deb. He doesn’t want any surprises at the pound, like alarm bells triggering when he hands over his credit card or anything. She’s left him multiple voice messages over the last few days, but he hasn’t actually spoken to her.
So this isn’t going to be easy.
“Jesus, Frank.”
He gets it out of her pretty quickly that he’s not being sought for further questioning, at least not yet. She says that Lloyd has been fielding all of that stuff, and that as she said in one of her messages the FBI is refusing to give them a release date.
Frank swallows.
He looks out at languid, sunny Twenty-third Street, quiet Saturday morning traffic cruising by.
A release date.
He asks how John is.
John went back to California two days ago. He has stuff to do at college. He’ll be back again, though.
He’ll be back when …
Yeah.
“But how are you, Frank? I’m worried about you.”
The reflex response here would be I’m fine, but he’s not fine, so he isn’t going to say it. He mumbles something and turns it around by asking her how she is.
“I guess I’m fine, but counseling helps. It really does, Frank. You should consider—”
“Are there still media people outside your building?”
“Erm … no. They’ve moved on. The damn world has moved on. I can’t even watch the news anymore.” She pauses. “Frank, where are you? Why don’t you come and see us? Let’s talk. Come for dinner. Come tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Well then, how about—”
He makes a vague commitment for early next week sometime and gets off the phone.
Pier 76.
Oh God.
The waiting room is more than half full. It’s hot and stuffy, and peopled by the hungover and the dispirited. It doesn’t take too long, though. He gets called to the window after about twenty minutes. He’s allowed to go and get his registration and other documents from the car, and then after another maybe ten minutes he’s paying with his credit card and being handed a retrieval slip.
Another ten minutes again and he’s heading north on the West Side Highway.
The drive back to West Mahopac passes in a dream-like rush, and it’s only when he gets near his apartment building that he starts feeling weird, and actually a bit sick. That’s when he realizes he hasn’t eaten in … how long? He can’t remember. Eating seems like a sort of weakness, a betrayal, a surrender to the future.
Anyway, once inside the apartment, he makes straight for the bathroom and throws up, or spends a couple of minutes trying to, at least—retching and groaning.
There’s nothing he’d eat in his fridge or in any of the cupboards, and he doesn’t want to go out again, not just yet. Eventually, he finds a couple of granola bars, which he tears open and eats standing at the sink. Then he makes some coffee.
He gets his laptop out, sits on the couch with it, and for the next several hours reads anything and everything he can find on Craig Howley and the Oberon Capital Group.
* * *
When Ellen sees Jimmy Gilroy coming through the door, she gets quite a shock. He’s put on a little weight and has a beard. The callow look is gone. He surveys the room, and when he spots her sitting at the bar his face lights up.
They embrace, double-take, reembrace, and then get settled, Jimmy doing a quick survey of the taps and bottles before ordering a Theakston XB.
Ellen is fine with her Leffe.
It’s early Saturday evening, so the place isn’t too crowded. She’d been going to suggest Flannery’s, but she knows too many people there and they’d never be left alone. This place—the Black Lamps, on East Sixteenth—is small, dark, and rickety, with a tiled floor and worn oak fixtures. It’s perfect for a quiet reunion like this.
They spend a few minutes doing catch-up, during which Ellen reacquaints herself with Jimmy’s Irish accent. She also sees definite flickers of his earlier self, but her main impression is of someone who is tired and a bit desperate, someone who has been backed into a corner and can’t see any way out. His pursuit of James Vaughan seemed logical at the outset, given that Vaughan owned most of the companies, most of the players, involved in the original affair—Paloma Electronics, Gideon Global, the Rundles—and given that he’d been around for, if not directly complicit in, the very event that kickstarted this whole thing in the first place, a helicopter crash at a conference in Ireland that resulted in the deaths of six people. But the very idea of pursuing Vaughan for a specific crime, for any wrongdoing at all, in fact, soon began to seem ridiculous, quixotic even. The corporate and legal firewalls surrounding a man like him were impenetrable. So Gilroy decided to focus instead on Vaughan’s business empire, in a general sort of way, and then on his family.
Which was fine, but there were two slight problems here. Three, really.
One, the subject matter was vast, octopus-like, and it expanded exponentially the more he researched it. And two, who gave a fuck? No one.
Which is still the case. Because the simple fact is, no one outside of business or political circles has ever really heard of James Vaughan. So who’s going to want to buy, let alone read, a book about him?
Which leads neatly on to the third slight problem.
In a scenario like this one, how do you pay the rent?
Well, it turns out that Gilroy did indeed sell his apartment in Dublin. He also has that bar work he mentioned. But how does any of this promote … the career?
“It doesn’t,” he says. “The career is in a sort of holding pattern at the moment.”
Ellen looks at him, brow furrowed. Though she knows what he means, because really, her own career as a journalist is in a holding pattern, too. At least he’s got something to focus on, something to be passionate about.
“The thing is,” he continues, “as long as Vaughan is alive, he, or people in his organization, will block this any way they can, and they’ve made things very difficult already, believe me.” He pauses and reaches for his XB. “When Vaughan dies, though? That’s it. Window closed. I mean, all the work I’ve done? It’ll be of historical interest, sure, at some point … but that’s not what I signed up for.”
She nods. “What about the stuff that’s going on at the moment? These shootings. The kids down on Orchard Street. The protest movements, the marches, Occupy. Bain. Isn’t there a renewed interest in the whole private equity thing arising out of all that?”
“Yeah, I suppose,” he says, “but there’s a hell of a lot more to James Vaughan than just private equity. He’s managed to fly under the radar for years, but the fact is he’s involved in virtually everything—finance, domestic and foreign policy, intelligence, the military. My basic problem is I’ve written a biography of someone fascinating who no one has really heard of. Don’t get me wrong, they should have heard of him, but they haven’t, and there isn’t much I can do about that. No one’s interested. It’s too long for Parallax or any other magazine, and publishers just shrug and say who’s James Vaughan?” He pauses. “I suppose I could self-publish, do it as an e-book, but I can’t make the leap. Psychologically. I want someone to make me an offer for it. I want to bloody well get paid for my work.”
“I know,” Ellen says, “I know.” But she’s surprised. “You’ve actually finished it?”
“Pretty much. A full draft, give or take. It’s not Robert Caro or anything, it’s fairly succinct. But I knew if I didn’t nail it, and soon, the damn thing would kill me.”
“House of Vaughan?”
“Yeah.” He smiles, sheepish. “You want to read it?”
“Nah.” She shakes her head. “Of course I do, you moron.”
He reaches into his pocket and takes out a flash drive. He puts it on the bar and slides it across to her.
“I’m paranoid about sending this kind of thing by e-mail. My account has been hacked too many times.”
“Tell me about it.”
She takes the drive and slips it into her pocket. “Thanks. I look forward to reading it.”
And she genuinely does. Because she hopes it amounts to a lot more than what she’s done in the last year and a half, which is a dead-end series of articles about failed presidential candidates, followed by this recent, seemingly never-ending attempt to break into a story that has just persisted in eluding her.
She doesn’t relish the prospect of talking about it, though, of telling him about her various interactions with Frank Bishop over the last week or so—but she will, because there’s actually a small part of her that suspects this story can’t go on eluding her forever.
“So,” Jimmy says, shifting on his stool. “Ellen Dorsey. What have you been up to?”
14
AFTER CHAIRING HIS THIRD CONSECUTIVE MONDAY MORNING SIT-DOWN OF THE SENIOR INVESTMENT DIRECTORS, Craig Howley is beginning to feel that he has some sort of a grip on things. The Bloomberg interview was a triumph, and he’s been getting texts and messages of congratulation ever since—even more, weirdly enough, than when the actual takeover announcement was made. It’s the power of media exposure, he supposes, something that Vaughan himself would have done well to learn about and try to harness years ago. Howley plans on doing more interviews and has scheduled a meeting for later with Beth Overmyer, Oberon’s VP of communications, to sketch out a new media strategy. As a direct result of tonight’s Kurtzmann benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria, photos of him and Jess will be appearing in multiple platforms across the mediasphere, and it seems sort of crazy not to already have a strategy in plac
e to take advantage of that.
It’s funny, but even a couple of weeks ago—at that cocktail party in the Hamptons, say—he couldn’t have foreseen how quickly, and how far, things would progress.
As he gazes out over the office now, mentally stripping away the mahogany panels and ripping up the pile carpets, Howley gets an alert from Angela that he has a call, and that it’s from Vaughan.
He reaches for the phone. What the fuck is this about? Vaughan is the last person he wants to talk to today.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah. I was thinking.” Good morning to you, too. “A bidding war? Is that really what we want to get into with Tiberius? Because the numbers don’t make a lot of sense to me, Craig. We’re at $23.45 a share, they go $24.15, we counter with $25 something or $26 something, then it’s a war of attrition, no one’s happy, and six months down the road we’re not talking to each other, when we need to be, and all over some crappy retail chain that’s overpriced to begin with?”
Howley can’t believe this. And they were only discussing it earlier, at the meeting. As it happens, Vaughan’s analysis is probably correct, but what does he think he’s doing?
“Jesus, Jimmy, I … I don’t understand, what happened to I’m going to play some golf? I thought you were supposed to be taking it easy.”
“I am taking it easy. But the old batteries are recharged, you know, and I … I can’t help it. I see stuff like this in the papers, what do you want me to do, sit around and watch?”
Yes.
Howley leans far back in his chair and glares up at the ceiling. His batteries are recharged? Holy shit, two weeks ago, less, the man was practically an invalid.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jimmy.”
“Tell me you agree. Then I’ll set up a lunch with Chris and get him to back off.”
Oh Jesus.
Chris Beaumont, chairman of Tiberius Capital Partners.
“That’s not a good idea, Jimmy. I mean, really.”
“Why not?”
He has to explain it?
“You know what, Jimmy,” he says, “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you, okay?” Then he blusters his way off the phone, saying he’s heading into a meeting.