by Alan Glynn
Howley is, too, as it happens, though it’s got nothing to do with the benefit. He feels he’s under siege. Vaughan has called him twice this afternoon, and both times Howley refused to take the call. He’s never done that before, not even once, and he somehow doubts that anyone else has either. But he can’t go on doing it.
Nor does he want to have the conversation—the one where he tells Vaughan, in whatever ingenious formulation of words he can summon at the time, that he’s effectively being an interfering pain in the ass and must stop. Howley’s only hope here is that Paul Blanford will come up trumps by cutting off the supply of this new medication, and thereby, he doesn’t know, slow Vaughan down, return him to the seemly and steady decline to which they had all … happily … become accustomed?
Whatever.
But the problem now is that Paul Blanford won’t return his calls. They said at the end of their conversation this morning that they’d talk at the benefit, but soon after he put the phone down Howley remembered what a control freak Jessica can be at these events and that a discreet, private confab with a colleague might actually be hard to arrange.
So he called him back, after lunch.
Twice.
It’s now nearly seven o’clock, they’re heading out in ten minutes, and Blanford hasn’t returned the call yet. Howley is irritated as a result, because this is really not the frame of mind he wants to be in this evening. The benefit, which is being held in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, will be his first major social engagement as the new head of the Oberon Capital Group, and he’s determined to make the most of it. It’s a culmination of months of work for Jessica, sure, but it’s more than that—it’s also a culmination for them, as a couple. This is a pinnacle, of sorts, an arrival.
Looking stunning, Jessica eventually emerges from her lair—leaving behind, he’s in no doubt, a deeply frazzled team of stylists and cosmeticians. She’s in a ravishing Tom Ford dress and nude leather Christian Louboutin pumps. Her strawberry blond mane is embellished with a beautiful floral headband. She’s clearly nervous, but not letting it get the better of her. Holding hands, they take the elevator down, then float—pumps notwithstanding—out through the marble echo chamber of their lobby to the waiting car on Sixty-eighth, assistants hovering, security on point, every detail in place.
It’s still earlyish, Manhattan’s electric background thrum carrying everything, carrying them all, into a warm, familiar, crepuscular embrace. They settle loose-limbed into the back of their spacious limo and then break out their devices.
The driver hums forward and quickly angles right onto Park.
They have eighteen or so blocks to go. The driver—his name is Pawel—knows what he’s doing, he’s wired in to the system, hyper-aware that the timing of arrivals is choreographed to within an inch of, if not his, then someone’s life, and consequently he’s working the traffic—the flow, the pacing, the lights—like a smacked-out bebopper on a serious roll.
Howley is sending a text to Angela when he gets a call alert. He answers it.
“Mr. Howley, it’s Vivienne Randle, from Mr. Blanford’s office.”
Howley sits forward. Jess looks up from her iPad, but only for a second.
“Put me through to Mr. Blanford.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Blanford is indisposed.”
“What?”
“He was taken ill this morning, at the office.”
Howley rolls his eyes and then turns to look out the window, all too aware that they’re probably gliding past Vaughan’s building right about now. “Is it serious? Is he in the hospital?”
“No, Mr. Blanford is at home. He’s receiving medical attention there.”
“What was it, his heart? No, not his heart, he wouldn’t be at home if it was his heart.”
“I believe it was some stomach problem, or intestinal issue.”
Yeah, right. A fucking ulcer. We all have those, sweetheart.
“Okay, thanks.”
Jess glances up at him again. “Who was that?”
“No one. Paul Blanford. Don’t worry about it. Just one name off the list.”
She returns to her screen.
They stop at lights.
Howley is seething now, furious. He feels like jumping out of the car, storming over to Vaughan’s building, grabbing the old bastard by the throat and throttling him to death.
That’d cure any stress-induced ulcer right there.
The lights change, and they whoosh forward.
* * *
As Frank walks east along Forty-ninth Street, he feels his heart thumping in his chest. He feels other things, too, elsewhere in his body—minor sensations, twinges, darts of pain or discomfort. These are mild and intermittent. But he does wonder if he’s having some form of coronary, or pre-coronary. He doesn’t eat well and doesn’t get enough exercise, and even though he’s lucky to have the kind of metabolism that means he generally doesn’t pack on the pounds (and looks fairly okay as a result), the reality is, he’s almost fifty years old and could well be in the grip of various conditions and diseases already.
Without knowing it.
He’s a prime candidate. Plus, the stress he’s under at the moment is of a level and intensity he has never experienced before—the kind he imagines you ignore at your peril.
Perfect storm, sounds like.
Nevertheless, he wonders if it’s possible, by sheer force of will, to delay something like this, a heart attack—if that’s what he’s actually having—to hold it off, to keep pushing, until you get over some … line.
Real or imaginary.
At Sixth, he waits for the lights to change.
In this case, the line is very real, and very close, three blocks away.
People gather on either side of him, in front, behind, waiting. The lights change. He pushes forward, across the avenue, and then on toward Fifth.
He catches his reflection in a store window.
Anonymous man in a suit.
Denizen of the city.
Architect.
For so much of his life that’s how Frank defined himself, which meant that he never had to struggle with his identity. It was simple—the world, and his place in it, consisted of angles and forms, of light and space. It was the ordering of the infinite into the quotidian, the perfect marriage of art and science. For a quarter of a century, as a student and then as a professional, but also as a husband and as a father, he needed no other terms or rules to live and breathe by—that is, until one Friday afternoon two years ago, in the Belmont, McCann conference room, when he got laid off and had to surrender his identity … simply give it back, then somehow carry on without it, making do with whatever ramshackle alternative he could piece together from the Help Wanted section in the paper and the weird looks he got from, among others, his precious daughter, Lizzie …
But—
But.
Crossing Fifth.
He was going to say.
It was always this part of town that made him feel most like an architect, midtown—with its soaring towers and vertiginous canyons, its expanses of glass and steel, its mullions and spandrels … the mongrel skyline rising from an ordered grid, this great aggregate of the revolutionary and the dandified, the conservative and the radical …
Skyscrapers.
Like that one up ahead there, with its granite base, its limestone facade, its bronze-clad cupolas. He comes to the foot of the squat Colgate-Palmolive Building on the corner of Park and Forty-ninth and stops. It’s just over there, on the other side of the avenue, the one with the anchored canopy, and the cars lining up outside, and the flashing lights, and the barriers, and the security, and the photographers, and the crowds …
He crosses to the grassy median and waits, gazing over at this iconic art deco masterpiece.
One of his favorites.
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
* * *
Something is bugging her, and by early evening Ellen needs to get out of the apartment,
she needs a drink, or a couple of hits of a joint, anything that will lead to an altered state of consciousness. Because the one she’s currently in is tired, used up, polluted with the contorted syntax of all the e-mails she had to write this afternoon turning down offers to talk or blog about Ratt Atkinson and his bogus Twitter accounts.
She can’t believe that’s still going on.
A call to Michelle would normally be a reliable route out of the mental ash cloud, but recently Michelle has been too news-focused in her chat, too eager to engage with the stories Ellen needs a little respite from.
But still, that’s not what’s bugging her.
This thrum of anxiety has been with her since she left Frank Bishop earlier—left him standing outside his room in the Bromley Hotel on Seventh Avenue, left him in that wide, desolate corridor, on that ugly multicolored carpet, with its vertigo-inducing geometric patterns.
Frank Bishop is what’s bugging her.
His demeanor, his suit, the things he said, and maybe didn’t say … his hotel room, the books and magazines, the cracked TV screen and the empty vodka bottle.
How would she have reacted, and behaved, in his position? There’s no saying.
Not that it’s any of her concern anymore.
If it ever was.
She heads down to Flannery’s, which is pretty much empty. This is because it’s early, and it’s a Monday, which suits her just fine. She orders—and it’s almost perverse, because it’s not what she normally drinks, or ever drinks, in fact—a Stoli on the rocks. The barman gives her a look. She shrugs. What? She has to explain?
I’m looking to break a code, to enter someone’s mindset.
Right.
Not that it works, of course. The Stoli. As a drink it does, sure, but that’s all.
She’d probably be better off if she had someone to talk to. Charlie’s not here, which is a pity, because she watched some of the Carillo trial earlier and feels that she’s maybe ready to reengage. After more than a week, Mrs. Sanchez is still on the stand, and Ray Whitestone is getting her to deconstruct the household, its comings and goings, its rhythms and routines, and in quite staggering detail.
She’d like to get Charlie’s take on it.
But he’s not here.
The gorgeous Nestor is, though. She sees him emerge from the kitchen, obviously finished with his shift and heading off. He spots her at the bar, makes a discreet toking gesture, and flicks his head in the direction of the alleyway up the street.
She’s all over it.
A few minutes later they’re passing his joint back and forth and discussing why teleportation as seen in Star Trek is technically impossible.
Looking into Nestor’s eyes, and not entirely without irony, Ellen says, “Beam me aboard, Scotty.”
“Never going to happen, because … think about it—”
“Yeah, I am.”
“You’ve got to obliterate the human body, which is ten to the power of forty-five bits of information, and then reassemble all that shit somewhere else without so much as putting a single itty-bitty molecule out of place. I don’t think so.”
Ellen is wondering how Nestor would react to being hit on by a forty-one-year-old woman when something occurs to her.
Reassembled bits of data.
She passes the joint back, exhaling thick smoke, and looks away. Various corollaries of the thought that has just struck her seem to be forming now in clusters around her brain.
The bottle of Stoli and the cracked TV screen … when did he throw one against the other? And why? Isn’t it suddenly obvious? It was just before they spoke on Friday, when he was drunk and watching Craig Howley being interviewed on Bloomberg. And the solution? He said he was no longer interested in the problem, only in the solution, but when she asked him what that was, he told her to ask Lizzie.
Ask my daughter.
The last thing he said was that maybe he and Ellen had one more shot at this.
What did that mean?
She leans back against the alley wall.
Then there was the suit and tie, and the clean-shaven look, which she took to mean …
But—
Maybe she misread that one completely.
“You cool?”
Ellen turns back to Nestor. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She takes out her phone. “I’m sorry … to do this, but…”
Without finishing her sentence, she turns away again and wanders out of the alley.
Standing on Amsterdam, she stares down at her phone, trying to work out what to do.
A fire truck rushes past, siren screaming.
It’s Craig Howley, isn’t it? Private equity, Paloma …
But what?
She Googles him. Goes to News.
The first few stories are about him taking over the Oberon Capital Group, his appearance on Bloomberg, his press conference. Then there’s a story about something called the Kurtzmann Foundation. She clicks on it.
Ellen hates using her phone for looking stuff up on the Internet. The screen is too small, the keys too fiddly. But she enlarges the text and reads.
Gala benefit … Jessica Bowen-Howley … Monday evening … 7:30 … the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel …
She looks up and gazes out at the passing traffic.
Stoned, but not stoned.
Unconvinced, disbelieving, tired of all this.
She looks back down at her phone. What time is it? Just after seven.
Shit.
She turns around. “Sorry, man.” This to Nestor. “I have to go.”
Nestor shrugs and rolls an index finger.
Next time.
Ellen walks to the corner and flags down a cab going east.
* * *
They cross Park at Fifty-seventh Street.
Still seething, Howley is hunched forward, neck and shoulders all tense, switching his phone from one hand to the other. He’s desperately anxious to move this situation forward.
Fifty-fifth.
In just a few blocks Pawel will be swinging to the left, around the median, and they’ll be pulling up at the Waldorf.
He can’t hit the red carpet like this, can he? Looking distracted, angry, a scowl on his face? It wouldn’t be fair to Jessica. There will be A-list celebrities here, Hollywood actors, sports stars, senators and congressmen, people who know how to smile in public, schmooze, work the big room.
Professionals.
He needs to get with the program.
He looks over at Jessica and smiles, or at least tries to.
She’s about to say something when her phone rings. She rolls her eyes and answers it.
As she’s talking, he decides to try Blanford’s cell one last time.
It goes to message.
Damn.
They’re at Fifty-second.
“Paul?” He looks over at Jessica. She’s still talking. He turns to the right, facing the window. “Paul, it’s Craig,” he whispers. “What the fuck is going on? Are you really sick or has he gotten to you? It’s Jimmy Vaughan I’m talking about. But you had to have known that, right? Well, let me tell you this.” Rapid flick of the head toward Jess, then back. “If Jimmy goes on being allowed to take this stuff, he will fucking eat you alive, do you hear me? He’ll end up destroying your company, or worse, buying it back. And believe me, Paul, you do not want Jimmy Vaughan in your life, running things. Find this leak, find it now, and plug it.”
He presses END CALL.
Shit.
He overplayed his hand there, didn’t he? But the pressure of all this is getting to him.
He puts his phone on silent and slips it into his jacket pocket. He reaches a foot over and nudges Jessica in the leg. She looks at him and nods.
“Gotta go, sweetie,” she says into the phone. “See you in a bit.” She puts the phone away and looks out the window.
They’re swinging around the median.
“That’s quite a crowd,” she says, beaming.
Howley looks out the window, too, at the
flashing lights and the photographers, at the security guys and the onlookers.
“Damn right,” he says, the red carpet just sliding into view now.
He reaches a hand out to Jessica.
“You ready?”
* * *
On the periphery there is mild curiosity. A few people in a passing MTA bus crane to see. A man in a car, stopped at lights, beeps his horn. Pedestrians on Forty-ninth and Fiftieth glance, then glance away.
Closer in, under the canopy, it’s a different story. On either side of the red carpet, which leads from the curb through the central entrance and right up into the lobby, there are security barriers. These are draped in white. Thickset guys in black, with earpieces, parade up and down, scanning the area for trouble, never smiling, exuding a kind of dumb, steroidal menace. Behind the barriers, on either side, there are photographers and onlookers. The real action for the photographers—as far as Frank can make out—is probably inside, in the main lobby. That’s where the posing and the interviews will take place, the serious media work. The photographers out here, he’s guessing, are bottom-feeders, only a notch or two above the onlookers.
People like him.
As each car pulls up—all either SUVs, town cars, or limos—there is a directed flurry of attention. The assembled photographers and onlookers wait to see who gets out, then react accordingly. If it’s some middle-aged couple, tanned and moneyed-looking, as most of them have been so far, the reaction is muted. If it’s anyone with the remotest whiff of celebrity to them, the reaction tends to be pretty wild.
“This way! Over here!”
“Look at me!”
In the ten minutes he’s been standing at the barrier—having slowly wormed his way in, the nudge of an elbow here, an excuse me there—he has barely recognized anyone.
Which is a cause for concern.
He thinks he saw Ray Sullivan, secretary of the treasury, and he’s fairly sure he saw one of the lesser Bush brothers, Marvin or Neil. He saw the actress Brandi Klugman, who caused quite a stir, and a Fox News guy whose name he can’t remember. There were one or two others he half recognized, as well as several he didn’t.