Paul reached into the pocket of his pants and withdrew a small black velvet box. Inside was a large yellow diamond ring surrounded by pink stones. It was beautiful and gaudy, exactly the sort of thing Connie Brewer would love. Annalisa slipped it onto her right middle finger. “Do you like it?” Paul asked. “Sandy said Connie has one just like it. I thought you might want one, too.”
“Oh, Paul.” She put her hand on the side of his head and stroked his hair. “I love it. It’s stunning.”
Back in the Gooches’ apartment, Sam rifled through his mother’s underwear drawer and, finding a pair of old leather gloves, tucked them into the waistband of his jeans. From the toolbox in the cramped coat closet, he extracted a small screwdriver, a pair of pliers, an X-Acto knife, wire clippers, and a small spool of electrical tape. He stuck these items in the back pockets of his jeans, making sure the bulges were covered by his shirt. Then he rode the elevator up to Enid and Philip’s floor and, slipping through the hallway, took the stairwell up to the first floor of the penthouse apartment.
The stairwell led to a small foyer outside a service entrance, and there, as Sam had known, was a metal plate. He put on his mother’s gloves, took out the screwdriver, and unscrewed the plate from the wall. Inside was a compartment filled with cables. Every floor had a cable box, and the cables ran from one floor to another. Most boxes contained one or two cables, but on the Rices’ floor, due to all of Paul’s equipment, there were six. Sam tugged the cables out of a hole in the back and, using the X-Acto knife, cut away the white plastic casing. Then he clipped the wires and, mixing them up, spliced the wrong wires together using the pliers. Finally, he wrapped the newly configured wires in the electrical tape. Then he pushed the cables back into the wall. He wasn’t sure what would happen, but it was guaranteed to be big.
16
Under regular circumstances, Paul Rice, the early riser, would have been the first to discover The Internet Debacle, as it would be later referred to by the residents of One Fifth. But on the following morning, James Gooch happened to be up first. Following his triumphant book reading the night before (“Four hundred twenty books sold, it’s practically a record,” Redmond had boasted), James was booked on the first flight from La Guardia to Boston at six A.M.; from Boston, he would go on to Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleve-land, and then Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
He would be away for two weeks. As a consequence, he had to get up at three A.M. to pack. James was a noisy, nervous packer, so Mindy was up as well. Mindy normally would have been testy about this disturbance to her sleep — considering sleep the most precious of all modern-day commodities — but on this day, she was forgiving. The evening before, James had made her proud. All the years of supporting him were paying off when they easily might not have, and Mindy found herself imagining enormous sums of money coming their way. If the book made a million dollars, they could send Sam to any university — Harvard, or perhaps Cambridge in England, which was even more prestigious — without feeling a pinch. Two million dollars would mean university for Sam, and maybe the luxury of owning a car and housing it in a garage and paying off their mortgage. Three million dollars would get them all that plus a tiny getaway home in Montauk or Amagansett or Litchfield County in Connecticut. Beyond this, Mindy’s imagination could go no further. She was so accustomed to living a life of relative deprivation, she couldn’t picture herself needing or wanting more.
“Do you have toothpaste?” she asked, following James into his bathroom. “Don’t forget your comb. And dental floss.”
“I’m sure they have drugstores in Boston,” James remarked.
Mindy closed the toilet seat and sat down, watching him go through his medicine cabinet. “I don’t want you to have to worry about details,”
she said. “You’re going to need all your concentration to handle the readings and interviews.”
“Mindy,” James said, putting a bottle of aspirin into a Ziploc bag.
“You’re making me nervous. Don’t you have something to do?”
“At three in the morning?”
“I could use a cup of coffee.”
“Sure,” Mindy said. She went into the kitchen. She was feeling sentimental about James. In fourteen years of marriage, they’d never spent more than three nights apart, and now James would be away for two weeks. Would she miss him? What if she couldn’t manage without him?
But that, she reminded herself, was silly. She was a grown woman. She did practically everything herself anyway. Well, maybe not everything.
James spent a lot of time looking after Sam. As much as she liked to complain about him, James wasn’t all bad. Especially now, when he was finally making money.
“I’ll get your socks,” Mindy said, handing James his cup of coffee.
“Do you think you’ll miss me?” she asked, placing several pairs of worn socks into his suitcase and wondering how many pairs he would need for two weeks.
“I can do that,” James said, annoyed by all the attention. Mindy came across a hole in the toe of one of his socks and stuck her finger through.
“A lot of your socks have holes,” she pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter. No one is going to see my socks,” James said.
“So will you miss me?” Mindy asked.
“I don’t know,” James said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I might be too busy.”
In a last-minute panic, James left the apartment at four-fifteen A.M.
Mindy considered going back to sleep but was too keyed up. She decided to check James’s Amazon rating instead. Her computer came on, but there was no Internet service. This was strange. She checked the cables and turned the box on and off. Nothing. She tried the browser on her BlackBerry. Also nothing.
Paul Rice was now up as well. At five A.M. on the dot, he was to launch his algorithm in the Chinese stock market. At four-thirty A.M., he was seated behind his desk in his home office, a cup of café con leche sitting neatly on a coaster nearby, ready to begin. Out of habit, he plucked a pencil out of the silver holder and examined the tip for sharpness. Then he turned on his computer.
The screen flashed its familiar and comforting green — the color of money, Paul thought with satisfaction — and then ... nothing. Paul jerked his head in surprise. Powering the computer should have kicked on the satellite system and Internet backup. He clicked on the Internet icon. The screen went blank. Finding a key, he unlocked the cabinet doors behind him and looked inside at the stacked metal hard drives. The power was on, but the array of lights indicating the exchange of signals was black. He hesitated for half a second and then ran downstairs to Annalisa’s office. He tried her computer, which he’d always joked was like a Stone Age tool, but the Internet was out there as well.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed.
In the master bedroom next door, Annalisa stirred in her sleep. At the celebration dinner the night before, the Rices and Brewers had consumed over five thousand dollars’ worth of rare wines before helicoptering back to the city at two A.M. She turned over, her head heavy, hoping Paul’s voice had come from a dream. But there it was again: “Holy fuck!”
Now Paul was in the room, pulling on his pants from the night before. Annalisa sat up. “Paul?”
“There’s no fucking Internet service.”
“But I thought ...” Annalisa mumbled, gesturing uselessly.
“Where’s the car? I need the fucking car.”
She leaned over the bed, picking up the handset on the landline. “It’s in the garage. But the garage is probably closed.”
In a frenzy, Paul buttoned his shirt while trying to hop into his shoes.
“This is exactly why I wanted that parking spot in the Mews,” he snapped.
“For just this kind of emergency.”
“What emergency?” Annalisa said, getting out of bed.
“There’s no fucking Internet service. Which means I am fucked. The whole fucking China deal is fucked.” He ran out
of the room.
“Paul?” she said, following him and leaning over the banister. “Paul?
What can I do?” But he was already in the hallway, punching the button for the elevator. It was all the way down in the lobby. Glancing at his watch, Paul decided he didn’t have time to wait and began clatter-ing down the steps. He burst into the lobby, waking the night doorman, who was dozing in a chair. “I need a taxi,” Paul shouted breathlessly. “A fucking taxi!” He ran into the empty street, waving his arms.
When no taxis appeared, he started jogging up Fifth Avenue. At Twelfth Street, he finally saw a cab and fell into the backseat. “Park Avenue and Fifty-third Street,” he screamed. Pounding on the divider, he shouted, “Go, go. Go! ”
“I cannot run a red light, sir,” the driver said, turning around.
“Shut up and drive,” Paul screamed.
The journey to midtown was agony. Who would have thought there would be traffic before five A.M.? Paul rolled down his window and stuck his head out, waving and shouting at the other drivers. By the time the taxi pulled up in front of his office building, it was four-fifty-three A.M.
The building was locked, so it took another minute of kicking and screaming to arouse the night watchman. It was another couple of minutes to get upstairs and use his pass to unlock the glass doors of Brewer Securities, and a few more seconds to run down the hall to his office.
When he got to his computer, it was five-oh-one and forty-three seconds.
His fingers flew over the keyboard. When he was finished, it was five-oh-one and fifty-six seconds. He collapsed on his chair and leaned back, putting his hands over his face. In the two-minute delay, he had lost twenty-six million dollars.
Back at One Fifth, Mindy Gooch poked her head out the door.
“Roberto,” she said to the doorman, “there’s no Internet service.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Ask your son, Sam.”
At six-thirty, she woke Sam up. “There’s no Internet service.”
Sam smiled and yawned. “It’s probably Paul Rice’s fault. He’s got all that equipment up there. It probably knocked out the service in the entire building.”
“I hate that man,” Mindy said.
“Me, too,” Sam agreed.
Several floors above, Enid Merle was also trying to get online. She needed to read the column composed by her staff writer in the wee hours of the morning, to which she would add her trademark flourishes.
But there was something wrong with her computer, and desperate to approve the column before eight A.M., when it would be syndicated online and then appear in the afternoon edition of the paper, she called Sam. In a few minutes, Sam and Mindy appeared at her door. Mindy had pulled on a pair of jeans below her flannel pajama top. “No one’s computer is working,” she informed Enid. “Sam says it has something to do with Paul Rice.”
“Why would he be involved?” Enid asked.
“Apparently,” Mindy said, glancing at Sam, “he’s got all kinds of powerful and probably illegal computer equipment up there. In Mrs.
Houghton’s old ballroom.”
When Enid looked doubtful, Mindy said, “Sam has seen it. When he went up to help Annalisa Rice with her computer.”
Annalisa herself was nervously pacing the living room with her cell phone in hand when Maria came in. “Some people are here,” Maria said.
“The police?”
“No. Some people from downstairs,” Maria said.
Annalisa opened the front door a few inches. “Yes?” she asked impatiently.
Mindy Gooch, who still had smudges of mascara under her eyes from the night before, tried to push her way in. “The Internet service is out.
We think the problem is coming from your apartment.”
“We don’t have Internet service, either,” Annalisa snapped.
“May we come in?” Enid asked.
“Absolutely not,” Annalisa said. “The police are on their way. No one is to touch anything.”
“The police?” Mindy shrieked.
“That’s right,” Annalisa said. “We’ve been sabotaged. Go back to your apartments to wait.” She closed the door.
Enid turned to Sam. “Sam?” she asked. Sam then looked at his mother, who put her arm around his head protectively. “Sam doesn’t know anything about this,” Mindy said firmly. “Everyone knows the Rices are paranoid.”
“What is happening in this building?” Enid asked.
Then everyone went back to their respective apartments.
Back in the living room, Annalisa folded her arms, shook her head, and continued to pace. If no one in the building had Internet service, then perhaps Paul was wrong. He’d called her at five-thirty A.M., screaming about how he’d lost an enormous amount of money and claiming that someone had found out about the China deal and deliberately sabotaged his home computers. He insisted she call the police, which she had, but they only laughed and told her to call Time Warner. After ten minutes of begging, the representative agreed to send a repairman in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Paul was insisting that no one be allowed in the apartment until the police had dusted it for fingerprints and performed other forensic duties.
Downstairs at the Gooches’, Mindy took a box of frozen waffles out of the freezer. “Sam?” she called out. “Do you want breakfast?”
Sam appeared in the doorway with his backpack. “I’m not hungry,” he said.
Mindy put a waffle in the toaster. “Well, that’s interesting,” she said.
“What?” Sam asked nervously.
“The Rices. Calling the police. Over a little interruption of Internet service.” The waffle popped out of the toaster, and she put it on a small plate, smeared it with butter, and handed it to Sam. “That’s the way it is with out-of-towners. They just don’t realize that in New York, these things happen.”
Sam nodded. His mouth was dry.
“When are you getting home from school?” Mindy asked.
“The usual time, I guess,” Sam said, looking down at the waffle.
Mindy picked up Sam’s knife and fork and cut off a piece of his waffle, put it in her mouth, and chewed. She wiped the butter off her lips with the back of her hand. “Whenever you get home, I’ll be here,” she said. “I’m going to take the day off. As the head of the board, I need to deal with this situation.”
Three blocks away, Billy Litchfield wasn’t having any trouble with his Internet service. After a sleepless night of worry, he was up, checking the art blogs, The New York Times, and every other newspaper he could think of to see if there was any mention of the Cross of Bloody Mary. There wasn’t, but Sandy Brewer was all over the financial pages with the announcement of his deal with the Chinese government to own a piece of their stock market, and already the outrage had begun. There were two editorials about the moral implications of such a deal, and how it might be a sign that high-earning individuals in the financial world could bond together to form their own kind of uber-government, with influence over the policies of other countries. It should be illegal, but at the moment, there were no laws in place to guard against such a possibility.
Sandy Brewer wasn’t the only person in the blogs. James Gooch was as well. Someone had taken a cell-phone video of James during his reading at Barnes & Noble and posted it on Snarker and YouTube. And now the hoi polloi were attacking James for his hair, his glasses, and his style of speaking. They were calling him a talking vegetable, a cucumber with specs. Poor James, Billy thought. He was so meek and mild-mannered, it was hard to understand why he could possibly be worth the negative attention. But he was successful now, and success was its own kind of crime, Billy supposed.
A few minutes later in midtown, Sandy Brewer, bloated and in a foul mood from the amount of alcohol he’d consumed the night before, strode into Brewer Securities, grabbed the soft basketball from the chair in his office, went into Paul Rice’s office, and threw the basketball at Paul’s head. Paul ducked. “What the fuck, Rice? What the fuc
k?” Sandy screamed. “Twenty-six million dollars?” The blood rushed to his face as he leaned across Paul’s desk. “You’d better make that money back, or you’re out of here.”
With Philip away in Los Angeles, Thayer Core was having a grand old time hanging out in Philip’s apartment, drinking his coffee and red wine and occasionally having sex with his girlfriend. Thayer was far too self-centered to be particularly good at sex, but every now and then, when she let him, he would go through the motions with Lola. She made him wear a condom and sometimes two because she didn’t trust him, which made it much less exciting but was made up for by the thrill of doing it in Philip’s bed. “You know you don’t love Philip,” Thayer would say afterward. “Of course I do,” she’d counter. “You lie,” Thayer would say. “What kind of in-love woman has sex with another man in that man’s bed?” “It’s not really sex with you and me,” Lola replied. “It’s more something to do when I’m bored.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You don’t expect me to fall in love with you, do you?” Lola would ask, screwing up her face in distaste, as if she’d just eaten something unpleasant.
“Who’s that young man I always see coming into the apartment?”
Enid asked Lola one afternoon. She’d popped in to borrow a cartridge for her printer. She was always “borrowing” Philip’s office supplies, and Lola couldn’t understand why Enid didn’t go to Staples, like everyone else. “You know, you can order supplies online,” Lola said, crossing her arms.
“I know, dear. But this is much more fun,” Enid said, pawing through Philip’s stuff. “And you didn’t answer my question. About the young man.”
“Could be anyone,” Lola said nonchalantly. “What does he look like?”
“Tall? Very attractive? Reddish-blond hair and a disdainful expression?”
“Ah.” Lola nodded. “Thayer Core. He’s a friend of mine.”
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