“Okay, then, white sailcloth slipcovers. When they get soiled you just pop them in the washer.”
“I can’t wait.”
“And I better get off. She’s been wingeing about the phone. Next thing the old bitch’ll be on my case about using the loo too much.”
“Just keep your eyes on the prize, Caroline. And I’ll keep my eyes on your luscious ass.”
“That’s enough from you.”
“I’m sitting here imagining your lovely ass—or should I say arse—billowing in the breeze.”
“Right, I’m hanging up.”
Peggy waited until the line went dead before clicking off. The overheard conversation had raised many intriguing questions, and inflamed her in numerous ways, but at the moment she felt an overwhelming need to survey Nanny’s behind—or should she say arse? She found her in the living room, daintily flicking the feather duster at the bookshelves like Rembrandt applying the finishing touches to a portrait.
“Did you want something?” Nanny inquired, turning around.
“Oh, I…”
She was at a loss for words, surprised and inexplicably unsettled to realize that Nanny did, in fact, have a perfectly formed heart-shaped derriere. Luscious might be an overstatement, but how had she missed the fact that Nanny was rather well put together?
“Are you all right, Mrs. Gimmel?”
“Don’t forget to dust the windowsills,” she said through fixed lips, achieving the desired lady-of-the-manor lockjaw, and fled the room.
“Do you ever feel…” Lily shook her head and ran an X-acto knife along the sheet of paper.
“Do I ever feel guilty?” Mohammed was making faint pencil marks on another sheet to guide her blade, working with a diamond cutter’s close concentration. “I feel guilty that I ever allowed you to become involved with me. I feel guilty that my income is now half what it was.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You should talk to my wife in Guyana. She was planning to bring the children to New York next year. Now she’s not so sure.”
“So I’m supposed to feel guilty?”
“There is fortunately an easy cure for your guilt. Get out of my life.”
Lily felt a curious letdown. She’d come to enjoy the hours spent in the garage with Mohammed, making money. It hadn’t occurred to her, though clearly it should have, that he resented her presence.
“I happen to know you’ve upped production since I came on board,” she said.
“There’s a limit to how much I can safely print. I do not want to get greedy and flood the market with these bills. That might attract attention.”
“Yes, well, a counterfeiter wouldn’t want to get greedy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Anyway, you admitted last week that it was immigration issues, not money, that was keeping your family from joining you.”
“If they were Arab terrorists, the government would let them right in, no questions asked,” Mohammed said. “Unfortunately, we are middle-class Guyanese, of Indian descent.” He spoke very fast, words butting up against one another, at least to her ears, with a lilting accent that ended each sentence, even complaints about her presence, on an optimistic upbeat.
“They could come over for a visit and just stay. That’s how…” That’s how Consuela had come from the Dominican Republic.
“Good grief, do you think I would allow my children to enter this country illegally?” he said as he took a sheaf of papers from the printer tray, each printed on one side with the front of four twenty-dollar bills. He inserted the paper back into the printer to print the reverse side and sat in front of the computer to type in instructions. “I will not have my children living illegally. Anyway, I want a bigger house. This place is unacceptable.”
Lily had been inside only to use the bathroom, and it hardly struck her as unacceptable compared to what she imaged his wife and sons were accustomed to in Guyana.
“I don’t know what kind of place your family is living in now,” she said, “but this wouldn’t be so bad for them.”
“You wouldn’t bring your children here.”
“I’m living on a pullout sofa in my parents’ home.”
“Even so.”
He waited for her to draw the X-acto knife lengthwise across a sheet of twenties.
“I am putting most of my income”—he looked at her and smiled—“into the stock market. By the time next year comes, I will have more than enough to buy a proper home and then I will send for my family. I would like them to live in Manhattan. When they think about New York, they think about Times Square and the Empire State Building. Not”—he nodded toward the small garage window and the vast sprawl of Queens beyond—“this.”
“You can’t count on the stock market, Mohammed. Not anymore.”
“I study it closely. This is not gambling for me, it is science.”
“That’s what my husband used to say before he fled the country. Do you just bring piles of twenties to your broker?”
“Don’t be absurd. You see, I drive a taxi, a cash business. Who can tell how much cash I bring in each day, a temporary bachelor who works 24/7? Every Friday morning I bring my cash earnings to the bank and make a deposit. I pay taxes, too. Everything legitimate. Hand me that pile of fresh twenties, please.”
“But doesn’t the bank check the money?”
“Perhaps, but as you know, I make a lot of change in my cab, at the local stores. By the time Friday rolls around, most of my cash is legitimate.”
“You must miss your family very much,” she said a while later.
“We talk often during the week, and we chat all the time online. I fool myself into thinking I am a part of their lives, even after being away for five years. Then I receive a photograph and I don’t recognize my boys, they are like strangers to me. The oldest has a shadow of dark hair over his lip. Soon he will be a man. I wonder if they will know me when they finally get here.”
“I think not recognizing your own children is part of being a parent. Mine can walk in a room after being at school all day and I think, Who is this person?”
“Sometimes I think they resent me for being here. They think I am living like Jerry Seinfeld and drinking at the Cheers bar every night while they squeeze into three rooms with bad plumbing and no air-conditioning.”
“Take it from me, parents who live with their kids aren’t always so wonderful.”
He looked at her sympathetically and she was almost encouraged to continue along this line. But she wasn’t quite ready to review her shortcomings as a parent with Mohammed Satywatti.
“You should get the bath ready for these,” she said, waving a sheaf of new twenties. Soaking the newly minted bills in a milky liquid, the exact formula for which Mohammed refused to divulge, made the bills feel stiff and coarse, more like the genuine article. She suspected the bath was nothing more than starch and water, but Mohammed made her leave the garage while he concocted it. The alchemic mixture prepared, he allowed her to dip the bills, stir them around a bit, then hang each one with a paper clip on a wire to dry. Making money was quite labor intensive. Who knew? as her mother might say.
Later, walking toward the subway stop, stacks of fresh twenties lending a satisfying heft to her Prada tote bag, Lily was sure she spotted a familiar face duck into a corner bodega. A tall, sandy-haired, Nordic-looking man in an area inhabited almost exclusively by Guyanese. As she swiped her MetroCard, noting with pleasure the $220 balance, she decided he was the same man who’d tried to take the envelope from her on William Street on the night she’d broken into Barnett’s old office and first met Mohammed.
Rosemary hired a sitter for two hours and spent Thursday afternoon in the library on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum, just off the Medieval Courtyard. The Met’s nineteenth-century decorative arts collection wasn’t extensive—the Victoria and Albert’s was far better—but she couldn’t very well fly over to London, as appealing as that might be, to research th
e provenance of a vase that her boss was resolutely convinced was genuine. Rosemary had misgivings, which she would not share with Lloyd until she had proof. She hadn’t been to the Met since the twins were born and hadn’t realized, until she stepped inside the grand hallway, how much she’d missed it.
The library in particular was a favorite spot, a quiet sanctuary where people pored over books on African tribal masks and Qing Dynasty porcelain with the hushed seriousness of wartime cryptographers. She had gathered a small pile of books on decorative glass, which lay before her on a table.
She’d seen the vase only once since the dinner with Lloyd and Esme, when her suspicions had taken root. Trying to fall asleep that night, she focused on the vase, but pleasurable thoughts of a successful winter auction quickly gave way to wakeful anxiety. At first it was the signature, on the bottom of the vase rather than the side, as was customary for Gallé. Her philosophy had always been to let the object authenticate the signature, rather than the other way around, so she’d tried to overlook the fact that Emile Gallé, unlike contemporaries Louis Tiffany, René Lalique, and the Daum brothers, almost always acid-etched his signature on the side of objects. What about the piece itself?
She opened the first book, a Gallé catalogue raisonné, and began flipping through it. She found much that looked familiar. Glass designers seldom subscribed to the “less is more” theory, adding spirals, beads, and molten bits of glass while the object was still hot, always trying to stretch the bounds of what could be done with glass, with results that were sometimes of dubious aesthetic value. Gallé in particular liked to lay it on thick, literally and figuratively. He was a master of cameo glass, layering different hues of glass one on top of another, then carving a design through the layers. It was a tortuous process, but when done well could result in dazzling sculptural works that appeared to have been carved from luminous marble. Esme’s vase was a prime example of cameo glass—or was it? In the nineteenth century, some glass designers, particularly in Bohemia, coated objects with molten colored glass and cut through the transparent surface to the clear metal beneath. Although she hadn’t caught it over dinner at Hoyle’s, Rosemary sensed later that Esme’s vase might have been produced using the Bohemian method, which would destroy the Gallé attribution.
The peony pattern of Esme’s vase appeared frequently in the Gallé catalog, which meant nothing, really. A counterfeiter would hardly choose a unique motif. But on Esme’s piece, the peonies seemed a bit overused; Gallé, for all his showmanship, was careful to balance gaudy blooms with restrained foliage, all achieved by etching through different colors and textures of applied glass. Esme’s vase was a riotous tangle of peony blossoms with very little foliage—it seemed designed to attract attention, and perhaps a high price, rather than earn aesthetic merit.
And then there was the provenance. Or, rather, the lack of one. A quick late-morning call to Esme had yielded no new information. “Alden never shared his passion for art glass with me,” she’d said. “He never…” Esme fell silent, doubtless contemplating other unshared passions. “He’d bring these lamps and vases and…what do you call those perfume bottles? He never called them perfume bottles.”
“Flacons.”
“Yes, he’d bring…bring those home, too, and he never said where he got them. I had no idea that information would be important. Now I feel just terrible.” She sounded quite despairing.
“We’ll figure it out,” Rosemary had assured her. But now, flipping through the catalog, she wasn’t so sure. Perhaps if she could examine one or two other Gallé pieces in Esme’s collection, and authenticate those, she’d feel more comfortable. She retrieved her cell phone from her bag and headed outside to call.
Guy reviewed the software license for Studseekers.com. Normally he’d have someone in legal take care of this—well, there was only one person in legal now, down from three. But the fewer people who knew that Positano’s FastResponse would be facilitating an online community of horny gay men, the better. He also wasn’t eager to have anyone else know that he was providing the software at cost. Bad enough to be in the porn business. But to be losing money in the one reliably profitable niche of the Internet was truly mortifying.
His eyes wandered over to his computer screen. Positano’s stock price continued to sink; at the current price, one share would just cover a vente cappuccino at Starbucks or two minutes of X-rated downloads at Studseekers.com. If only he could resist checking Positano’s price, but it was a bit like taking your temperature when sick: There was an irresistible fascination in watching your fever rise, even if there wasn’t much you could do about it.
“Hey, bro.” Sumner Freedman charged into Guy’s office and slouched into a chair in front of his desk.
“I’m not your brother.”
“No, it’s an expression!” When Guy failed to acknowledge this, he added, “Whatcha up to?” Sumner had a distressing habit of ambling into Guy’s office and asking what he was up to.
“Giving away our software,” Guy said as he slid the Studseekers.com contract under other paperwork. Sumner laughed with inappropriate gusto. “You’re too funny, Guy.”
“I have a meeting uptown in twenty minutes,” Guy said. The meeting was with Victor Ozeri, at the new apartment, to discuss the mis-positioning of the built-in cabinets.
“Who with?”
Guy took a long, slow breath. “What can I do for you, Sumner?”
“Well, here’s the thing.” Sumner cleared his throat. “The board has requested a monthly management update. You know, new contracts, prospects, follow-on engagements. I wanted your help in putting it together.”
“Aren’t I giving the presentation?”
“Not exactly.” Sumner stood up and walked over to the tank. “They’ve asked me to present. The feeling is that I’ll be more objective.” He tapped the tank with an index finger, and when this failed to elicit a response from its occupants, he rapped his knuckles on the glass.
“Don’t do that.” Sumner turned around. “It’s not good for the fish.” Sumner’s brows furrowed contemplatively, as if the fate of Guy’s tropical fish might be another thing he’d want to brief the board on. He shrugged and retook his seat, immediately assuming his customary slouch.
“I’ll handle the PowerPoint, but I’d like your input. I’ll be rehearsing on Wednesday, and I’d appreciate your feedback at that point.”
“We’ll present together,” Guy said.
“The board wanted me—”
“Fuck the board. This is my company.”
“It’s not your company, Guy. The board represents sixty-five percent of shares outstanding. Shares that are worth about eighty percent less than a year ago.”
“Our comparables are down ninety-three percent.”
“We’re aware that Positano has marginally outperformed its peer group.”
“We?”
Sumner waited a few moments before responding.
“No one can sell Positano’s software better than you, Guy. We…the board wants to free you up to spend more time in front of the customer.”
“Why not make me director of sales, then?” And chop off my balls while you’re at it.
Sumner stood up and headed for the door. “Our only interest—”
“Our?”
“—is the success of this company. No one stands to benefit more when the stock turns around than you.”
“Go to hell,” Guy muttered.
He couldn’t tell if Sumner heard him, and didn’t much care. His hand moved instinctively to his mouse. He clicked on Refresh and saw that Positano had moved up an eighth, meaning that in the ten minutes of Sumner’s visit, his net worth on paper (on screen) had increased by $360,000. It seemed like a trade-off of sorts: ten minutes with a pasty-skinned, Wharton-educated, jargon-spewing, fish-torturing asshole in return for $360,000. In fact, he felt cheated.
Twenty-four
Lily easily recalled the address of Forsling, Creighton & Samuels from the invoice-bearin
g envelopes that arrived regularly from the firm, which she tossed, unopened, into the trash. She hadn’t called ahead for an appointment with Morton Samuels, fearing that he’d insist on payment before agreeing to see her.
“You should have called for an appointment,” he greeted her in his office after she’d waited for twenty minutes.
“Would you have seen me?”
He squeezed out a pained smile and gestured for her to sit on the sofa. She noted the framed photographs of Samuels with his celebrity clients, all acquitted of white-collar crimes of which they were universally believed to have been guilty. After closing the door he sat in an armchair.
“Tell me what’s happening,” she said.
“With your husband’s situation?”
“No, in Glocamora.”
Another pained smile. “Nothing, I’m afraid. You can’t do much for a client who doesn’t communicate with you.” Samuels had a lean, vulpine face and slender legs, but his stomach was inappropriately large. He was in his late fifties, divorced, and shortly before Barnett’s arrest had begun showing up on the charity circuit with an assortment of much younger and quite beautiful women who were attracted to a man with the gaunt face of a prisoner of war, the belly of a late-term-pregnant woman, and the bank account of a Colombian drug lord.
“You haven’t spoken to Barnett?”
“I’m not even sure I’d take his call.”
“Did you know he had a girlfriend?”
“I…yes, I knew.”
“How…”
“I can’t recall. It was just something one knew.”
“Just something one knew’? Like, only order oysters in months with r’s in their names? Never wear white before Memorial Day? Barnett Grantham is fucking Francine Sparkler?”
“I’m not sure anyone knew her name.”
What must everyone had thought of her, the proverbial, the literal, last to know? Was it time to recast her memories of the past two years, replacing Lily Grantham, stylish wit, indomitable raiser of funds for worthy causes, with Lily Grantham, laughingstock?
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