by Amy Gray
“So, can we make it more official this time? Can I have your e-mail or something?”
“Sure,” I said, smiling as I recited the letters like my well-versed commands to the Starbucks counter guy.
Society for Ersatz Intellectuals
I walked into the conference room at lunch, with a roast-beef-on-rye sandwich and a Twinkie for Sol and a copy of the Post.
Vinny lit into me immediately for my choice of reading material. “Amy Gway.” He always called me Amy Gway His accent fell in some lonely place in the voice-continuum where Rain Man meets Elmer Fudd.
“Whadayadoin’ weeding da Post! Dat's fascist, wight-wing cwap.” Vinny was a classic man of the people, working-class, labor-union, liberal.
“I know, Vinny. I like it because it's crap.”
“Murdoch, Jewriani—day're da wurst! Yeah, dese people, dey don't want gun contwol so dey kin wun awound in dare backyawds and shoot squawels. How can you use a huntin wifle in New Yawk? It's wadiculous!”
Vinny's passion with the cause of old-time labor liberalism was charming. But I wanted him to shut up.
“You know that truism, Vinny—keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That's why I read the Post.”
Otis laughed. “That's bullshit if I ever heard it, man.”
“Actually, Amy, now that you mention it, maybe I should move over and sit next to you,” Linus said with a chuckle.
“Linus, I'm proud to be the enemy of anybody with your fashion sense.” Linus was acting a little strange that day. First of all, he was wearing a suit. He normally wore scruffy cords and a T-shirt, and today he was wearing a mildewy herringbone three-piece suit with corduroy patches on the elbows and his usual duct-taped shoes and his hair slicked back. He looked like an erstwhile professor who'd been fired for consorting with his students. I told him as much.
“Yeah, man, you do sort of look like a demented middle manager,” Otis chimed in.
“Okay, everyone, leave Amy alone so I can eat her lunch,” Sol chastised, chomping on somebody's else's hot wings.
“Not this time,” I said, pleased with myself. “I brought you a bone.” I threw the Twinkie in Sol's direction. “Anyway, where's our token Republican to defend me when I need him? I looked at Morgan, who, despite his claims of being an off-the-map Libertarian, was trying to fly under the radar as he perused The New York Times. “Help me out here, Morgan,” I pleaded.
“I'm simply an idle aristocrat fallen on hard times,” Morgan scoffed. “My allegiance is to no one.”
“What about when we elect our new president this fall?”
“I'll be out of here before then. Thank God.” A look of repugnance eclipsed his face.
That Rat Bastard
Later at work that day, I got inspired to call DC Comics and check out my Tragic Comic friend. I called the publicity department and spoke to a senior publicity staffer and explained the situation. “I used to work in publishing,” I said, “so I know the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and frankly I just had to know if he was for real. Plus, I think you should know about it, too.”
The publicist laughed. “You're not the first person who's called about this. Stan Lee works at Marvel, first of all. As far as I know, he's alive and well. You can call the Marvel people about this, but I know this guy's a total scam artist.”
“Really?”
It was strange to me that the Tragic Comic Guy would go to such elaborate lengths with his scam and still get his facts so clearly wrong, almost as if he wanted to be found out by the right kind of amateur detective.
Back at my desk, I heard the familiar bleep indicating new mail. There was a message from Dan already in my in-box with the subject line “F Train.” It read: “Amy, I can't wait to take the F train again. Maybe we could try to run into each other on purpose sometime? Dan.”
I screamed. “Everything okay, Miz Gray?” Sol said. He was wearing a canny smirk. I bit my hand in embarrassment.
“Sorry about that.” I opened a reply and drafted a response with the subject line “Stan Lee Is Not Dead.” In the message I typed Y-e-s, taking a deep breath and then hitting the SEND button.
I was making calls on my Case of the Eurotrash Pulp-Peddlers. My number-one target was Anna Vinka, the recently departed CFO of the publishing division. I called her at home. She was brusque and uncomfortable.
“I can't talk about it.”
“Ms. Vinka, our client is considering a major investment with the Norrskens, and frankly, I would like to know if there is any reason they might not be a safe investment. I think you're in an ideal position to help our client—”
“Miss Gray,” she interrupted. “I worked at KNUT for three weeks, and I signed a confidentiality agreement not to talk about it.”
“I understand,” I said hesitantly. These are tricky situations. “Let me ask you if there are any of your predecessors I might contact who would have more … flexibility about speaking about KNUT.”
She paused. “Tord Ostgaard left about three months ago. He's working at Lloyd's of London now. Ring him. He might be more helpful.”
I did some preliminary research on Ostgaard. He also had been at KNUT for less than a month. Before he started there, however, he had been a trustee of another Norrsken-owned business, a property-management arm called Pickwick Property Management. There were literally thousands of KNUT-controlled companies, shelters, and trusts. I'd seen Pickwick's business filings, but hadn't done news or litigation searches for all of the thousands of KNUT affiliates, excepting the ones that were directly related to the KNUT Publishing division. Even more disconcerting, I discovered a recent article that said Ostgaard was under investigation by the Swedish regulatory arm called the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) for “misappropriation of pension funds for Pickwick.”
I called Mr. Ostgaard, and he, like Ms. Vinka, was unhelpful.
“I can't talk about this,” he barked, and as it sounded like he was about to hang up on me, I yelled into the phone, “Mr. Ostgaard, I am trying to protect my client from getting fucked over by these people.” I didn't know what I meant by that, even as I said it, but he paused.
“I understand you don't want to talk about Pickwick,” I said, trying to sound soothing, “but can we talk about KNUT?”
“That's the problem. You can't separate them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Miss Gray, tell your client to stay as far away from KNUT, the Norrskens, and any of their business as possible.” “I will.” “Now that's all I can say.”
I e-mailed Sol and George right after the calls and wrote the whole thing up. I also did some more news searches, looking for KNUT-related entities and any kind of pension fraud. In fact, the pension managers and several trustees of four other KNUT-owned companies were being investigated for fraud. I sent my bosses everything. The database searches I was doing were long and grueling. With thousands of related company names, the potential search for material was almost endless. Before I knew it, it was eight-thirty and Gus was the only one left in the office with me. No e-mails from Dan.
Gus came by my desk.
“Wassup?” He poked me in the head.
“This case is giving me a headache.”
“Well, it can wait until tomorrow,” he said.
“I know.”
“But this Wild Turkey can't.” He pulled a bottle out of his pocket and we sat and swigged it until 11 P.M. I told him all about Dan. And Edward. And Elliott. And Ben. He laughed and said, “Shit, just ain't the same as when I was datin’.”
“Gus, you're only thirty-two.”
He laughed. “Yes, I guess it's not that different.”
Getting Lucky
It was eleven-thirty and I didn't trust my tipsy self on the subway, so I decided to call a car home. Since I moved to New York I've been using Lucky Car Service. I don't take cars often, usually at night or when I'm incredibly late.
I called them. Mussah, the owner, answered, “Hellooo, Ameee. Of cour
se, my loveleee. No problem.” I packed up my laptop and walked down the back stairs (the elevator was stuck in the basement—again) and sat on the small concrete fleur-de-lis pedestal curling along the stoop.
Originally, when I first went to Lucky, it was run by a guy named Mustafah, and one night he followed me home, calling after me, “Let me take you out on a date. Come on! Let me take you for dinner, meese. Let's go!” I told him I had a boyfriend and he stopped and looked dejected. “He a lucky guy, this boyfriend, eh?” Then he brightened. “We don't have to tell him, eh?”
I still had to walk past the Lucky Car Service every day on the way to the subway, and he'd give me creepy, dark stares. Months later, I walked down the block to get a car and saw a dozen cop cars in front of Lucky and what looked like forty guys on the ground with their hands behind their heads, including Mustafah, a pained look on his face, his flabby arms twisted back into metal cuffs. He was wailing. I felt a swelling in my throat. I ran back in the other direction.
The storefront was boarded-over that night and the company reopened two months later, a block closer to me, with a whole new set of guys running it: Mussah (a former Iranian army general), Moez (who was Tunisian), Sammeh (Lebanese), Muhammed (Egyptian), Mumar (Iraqi), Nasir (Turkish). “What's up with these ‘M’ names?” I asked them once when I was waiting in the dispatch room for a car to the Lower East Side.
“I dunno. We are Muslims. There are a lot of Muslim names that start with ‘M,’ you know?” Mussah told me, “You don't have Jewish name—why not?” I reddened.
“That's true, Amy isn't a Jewish name. How do you know I'm Jewish?” I asked.
“Oh, c'mon!” He laughed, clapping his hands together. “That is what all the guys at the base calls you. You are the nice-looking Jewish girl.” I remembered once telling one of the drivers I was Jewish after he asked if I was Swedish. I laughed.
“Nope. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“You are Christian?” he asked.
“Nope, Jewish.”
“Ah, Jewish,” he said, pausing. “But I like you. You see: Muslims and Jews can be friends, see.” Evidently, word spreads fast.
I would arrive at the base to get a car and I was always in a major rush. “Ameee!!! My loveleee!!” Mussah would sing.
There was one driver, Moez, on whom I had a little crush. I'd go into the dispatcher's office and Mussah would smile and say, “I go call Moez. He is off now, but he will come back for you.” Or he'd say, “He's on a call now, but I know he like you to wait for him.” When he finally returned to the office, all the other guys would say things to him in Arabic and slap his back, and he'd look embarrassed and sheepishly wave to me before he quickly prayed.
Now, sitting on the stoop at work, I saw Moez pull up in a cream-colored 1989 Lincoln. (He drove a vast rotation of long out-of-repair Town Cars.) I tried to pull open the back door. He rolled the back window down. “Is stuck. Hold on.” He reached back from inside and released the door.
“Good safety measures,” I joked.
“Piece of shitty car,” he conceded.
We sat in silence for a while. I relished staring at the back of his neck. He was tall, probably six-two, with strong, large hands and a ropy, thick soccer player's build.
I studied the mirror image of Moez's eyes. Frontalis muscles tensed. Mastoid muscles relaxed. Indicating anxiety. Insecurity. Puzzlement.
When he pulled back onto the road again, I tried to memorize his face. I hoped to be able to decipher this particular arrangement of signs in the future. I saw his mouth framed in the reflection of the interior rearview mirror, and a tiny smile crept onto either side of his mouth. We were right at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge, and he seemed to be laughing to himself.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked him, thinking that I'd done something to embarrass myself.
“I am happy,” he said. I reddened. “To be with you.”
EIGHTEEN
He who fights monsters should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, HORROR
Worth the Price of Admission
“Hey, Sol, did you get what I sent you last night?” I asked.
“You mean that abortion job you call a case?” He looked up, his headset cocking, his mouth twisted into an on-the-verge-of-hysterics half-smile. “Yeah, there have been some complaints about your performance. You're really slacking off here, A. Gray.”
He waved me over to discuss the case some more.
“The client is really happy with the calls you got, and I think they have a pretty good sense that they're not going to touch anything those Norrsken slugs have their grimy little hands in.”
“Okay.”
“I think, to close this up, they'd like to see something that links KNUT Publishing to these incidents. Otherwise, they won't be totally comfortable that this impacts their investment, and I'm telling them it will.”
“How do you know that?” I asked him.
“I don't. I just have a feeling here, and that's what people pay me for. I have a feeling, and then I prove it's right.”
“Well, none of those people are going to talk to me. I think they all had termination agreements that had confidentiality clauses.”
“Here's what I want you to do. There are two people I want you to get in touch with. One is the former lawyer for the indicted pension-fund manager at KNUT Trust V” The lawyer had sued for nonpayment, which meant that he didn't legally have to honor the attorney-client privilege. The other call was to Nars Norrsken's former parents-in-law.
“Norrsken and his American wife, Anne Wallinghurst, divorced six months ago. Call his former in-laws and find out if they'll talk about him.”
“Why would they?”
“The divorce was sealed, but the dockets show her parents testified on her behalf. I have a feeling that he might have alienated them.”
“Why wouldn't we just call the wife?”
“They've been spotted together in the last couple months, and there's some speculation that they've rekindled the marriage.”
The plan was to call the in-laws, be very laid-back, ask about their son-in-law, pretend like we didn't know about the divorce. With these kinds of situations we take a slow approach, and ask something like, “Is there anything you know about Mr. Norrsken's character that our clients should know about before they engage him in business?” It's important, I'd learned in my time at the Agency, to let the interviewee lead the conversation. If they seem to be reluctant, lead them gradually to negatives. If they're bursting with bad information, be sympathetic and encourage them to spill it. If they're anxious and don't seem willing to talk, let it go. The situation we most wanted to avoid was Norrsken finding out about the work we were doing.
I located the parents, who were living in New York, just off Central Park in the Eighties. Sol told me to call them and try to get an interview. Mr. Wallinghurst answered the phone. When I asked about Nars, he said, “Well, you know, he and my daughter are separated.”
“No, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that,” I said quickly.
“Well, maybe I'm not the best person to ask about him,” he continued. “I'm not his biggest fan.”
“No, Mr. Wallinghurst,” I said, my pulse quickening, “I think you could be extremely helpful.” He agreed to meet, and we set up a rendezvous for Friday.
When I got off the phone, I screamed in triumph.
“Try to keep it under control, Gray,” George warned.
“Okay boss,” I said, and I screamed again for good measure.
Nicotine Redux
At eleven, I went out for a ciggie break. The fire escape had been dead-bolted, and now the alarm really worked. (We tried it.) Renora was walking out of the office at the same time, an American Spirit squished between her two small yellowed fingers.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Shitty,” she replied. Renora was doing the Atkins diet
. Although she was already the embodiment of the waiflike heroin-chic Manhattan ethos, she was hoping to be emancipated from the tofu-and-kale diet she'd been maintaining since adolescence.
“I just want some bloody, bloody steak and some fucking fatty milk,” she asserted wistfully. I, who hadn't discovered wheat bread or 1 percent milk until I'd moved to New York, still sympathized with her need to break free from her shackled existence in a city where thinness is tantamount to godliness.
I told her she seemed more relaxed than her usual phobic, twitchy self. I asked her how she was feeling.
“Terrible. I'm exhausted. I have no energy.”
“Well, maybe that's a good thing. For you.”
“This is like the Through the Looking-Glass diet. I'm eating things I haven't eaten since I was, like, twelve. Some of them I've never eaten before, like whipped cream, and I'm not allowed to have any fruit. I'm craving a peach, or a banana.”
“Can't you eat cheese?”
“Cheese, eggs, meat. I'm eating everything I've fantasized about eating for my entire adult life, and all I want is a goddamn banana. Plus I think I might actually be getting fatter.” She was a week into the two-week “induction” period in the diet, and the restrictions during this period were the most rigorous. She explained that further along into the process she could have berries and certain kinds of fruit again.
“But no banana.”
“No. I can never have another banana.” As we both sat there, contemplating life without bananas, two restless souls alone in the world but for their desperate clinging to New York mores of beauty, a guy walked over to the two of us and looked like he was about to say something.
Renora rolled her eyes and continued to talk to me, while the guy, youngish, with brown hair and not particularly attractive, just stood there blankly. Finally she turned to him.