by Alan Glynn
“Aw…” The congresswoman turns her head to one side and extends a hand to stroke my arm. Then she gives it a gentle squeeze. “Are we fighting, Ray?”
“What?”
Behind her, I spot her father and a couple of his cronies shuffling toward the exit. Do I go after them, tap Proctor on the shoulder, make some kind of a scene? I look back at the congresswoman.
“No, we’re not fighting. I’m just a bit—”
“I know. He does that to people, Ray. He says stuff, he turns things around, so you don’t know if you’re coming or going. It’s a technique. I don’t notice it anymore. In fact, I reckon I’m immune. And that’s why I wanted this little reality check.” She pauses. “I don’t suppose you’d like to come and run my campaign, would you?” She seems to mean this, and I wonder if she hasn’t had a glass or two of the local vino. “If you think good candidates are hard to find,” she goes on, “believe me, good campaign managers are even harder.”
Standing there in front of the congresswoman, the room thinning out around us, Clay Proctor gone, I’m no longer sure what’s happening.
“I’m not a campaign manager,” I say. “It’s not what I do.”
“But it could be.”
“Is that a job offer?”
“Nah. You’d turn me down. But a girl can dream, can’t she?”
Why do I feel as if this is another setup? As if Stephanie Proctor is playing an angle here? I guess if she’s just as much of an operator as her father, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
Shaking my head, I look down at the floor. “I’m tired, Congresswoman. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No. But what you have done was a great help. It really was. I hear myself telling people what he’s like sometimes and then it’s me who ends up sounding like the monster.”
“I think I said he was charming.”
“Yes, you did, but…” She studies me closely again. “He pressed a button, didn’t he? And I just don’t know how he does it.” She pauses. “Aren’t you going to tell me what he said to you?”
I consider playing dumb here—and I’d do it, too, if it wasn’t how I already felt. Besides, she’s right. The old man did press a button.
But it’s also none of her business.
I move away and wish her good night.
* * *
Outside, on Madison Avenue, I call Jerry Cronin again and ask him if he wouldn’t mind digging a little deeper into Clay Proctor.
“A little deeper?”
“And a lot further back. All the way to the 1950s, in fact.”
“What is this, Ray? I mean, we’re swamped at the moment.”
“I know, but let me switch a few things around. This is important, Jerry, and there’s no one else I’d trust it with.”
“Sure.” There’s a pause. “Am I looking for anything specific?”
“Not yet. Just cover the basics, then we’ll talk. And thanks.”
The company I run is called Park Row Research. I set it up because I couldn’t do all the work on my own. Making money was never a serious motivation, although it hasn’t hurt. By the time I was fourteen I had overheard plenty of people call me the weird kid, or the geek (today they’d say I was on the spectrum), but I didn’t really mind, because I knew what they meant, or at least what they were referring to—my obsession with data and with facts. I wasn’t into computers for their own sake, I wasn’t a coder or a programmer—it was more than that. I loved information, I loved patterns. I never saw the internet as a highway, super or otherwise—rather, from the get-go, I saw it for what it was, an ocean, vast and heaving, maybe not bottomless, but deep enough to contain more multitudes than we could imagine or ever hope to hold in our minds at any one time. It was where all the secrets lay, many of them just scattered on the silent floor, waiting to be discovered.
In college, I did my thesis on political plagiarism and spent endless hours going through thousands of pages, cross-referencing, comparing, analyzing. Later on, sophisticated algorithms would be developed for this, but at the time it was enough to get me hooked, because not only were there thousands—in fact, hundreds of thousands, millions—of pages out there to trawl through for secrets, there were just as many hours of audio and video, too. So, after interning for a couple of political campaigns, where I ended up doing basic oppo work, I branched out on my own, offering my skills to whoever wanted them.
And my key skill, as it turned out, was pretty rare. It wasn’t even a skill so much as an old-fashioned virtue: patience. Very few people were willing to do what I did, to put in the endless, mind-numbing hours—until, that is, I produced some nuggets of pure gold and it became obvious what we were all sitting on. Now most of the big oppo companies have backroom sweatshops—rows and rows of twentysomething researchers sitting at terminals, with headsets on, combing the internet for shiny baubles of telltale info.
I cross Seventy-Second and keep going. It’s a bit desolate up here at this time of night. I gaze around. There’s passing traffic, sure, but never that much. Everyone is always somewhere else. The glitzy store windows are lit up, and well populated, but even the mannequins—in their carefully arranged tableaux, with their Barbour jackets, riding crops, filigree lingerie, and one-thousand-thread-count bedsheets—all seem lost somehow and hopelessly lonesome.
One of the most extraordinary men I’ve ever met.
Did Proctor just say that to mess with my head? I don’t know. Maybe the “extraordinary” part was just something an old guy like him would say, as he peers back through the dimming years, locating memories, picking them up to examine like smooth pebbles on a beach.
I turn left at Sixty-fourth.
It doesn’t matter, though, because the damage has been done. There’s no way my head won’t be flooded with unwanted thoughts now—about my mother and my father, about my sister, about growing up, about the houses we lived in, all of it. When this happens, it never ends well. That’s because driving it, pumping it, is the monolithic fact of my father’s deep misery, and at the back of that was whatever went on with his father. Which didn’t end well either, of course. But not—it now seems, out of the blue, and according to Clay Proctor—the way we all thought.
I arrive at my building. I slowly walk over to the elevators, press the button, and wait.
Ned Sweeney didn’t kill himself.
The elevator door slides open.
It’s so easy for someone to just throw a thing like that out there, like a grenade. But why would they say it if it wasn’t true?
By the time I’m getting out on five, I feel dizzy. I move unsteadily along the hallway. I have two neighbors on this floor, an old lady who used to be a TV actress, and a young couple in IT with small kids. It’s a nice place, and I like living here, but as I approach the door to my apartment, I feel a queasy sense of insecurity, as if the building itself might turn out to be an elaborate movie set that a crew of technicians could come along and dismantle at a moment’s notice, and then remove.
Once inside, I calm down a little. I have a shower and order up some dinner. No men in overalls with crowbars and wooden crates arrive to take my world apart and pack it away. Just the young delivery guy, who knows me well by now, and always has a word to say about this or that—the weather, a new show on Netflix.
I have a beer with my food and it steadies me. Also, instead of flicking the TV on, I flip open my laptop. My hand hovers for a while over the keyboard, I could go anywhere, but I eventually just do it. I type in the name. There’s nothing there, of course—nothing obvious anyway. I’d have to go a lot deeper, and I will, probably … but not now.
I consider giving my sister a call.
She’s in Boston, married to a real estate guy. But what would I say to her? Remember that toxic strain that ran through our childhoods? Where there were certain things we half knew, or half understood, snippets of conversation we overheard, stuff we went out of our way not to talk about? Well …
She wouldn’t have any
patience with it. Or with me, really. We always got on, but we were very different. Younger by a year and a half, Jill was less guarded. She had a mouth on her, too. I was quiet and tended to stay in the background. We never made a formal agreement about not discussing stuff, it was more that what passed between us—uncomfortable looks, awkward glances—seemed, at the time, to be enough. In fact, I have always assumed that what I pieced together in my head was the same as what she pieced together in hers—that our partial understanding of events was the same. In any case, we’ve never talked about it as adults, either. Our dad died of liver cancer—another good conversation stopper—when I was twenty-three and she was twenty-one, and since then we’ve lived in different parts of the country, with different things going on in our lives. Our mom died five years later.
When I’m done with the food, I tidy up. I crave a sugar hit and struggle with this for a bit. Then, almost to distract myself, I pick up my phone and call Jill—because why not?—and ask her directly if she remembers it the way I do. Dad’s old man? He killed himself, right? That was the story.
“Seriously, Ray?”
I close my eyes. “I’m asking for a friend.”
“Are you high? I’m trying to put the kids to bed, I’ve got work to catch up on, and Jim is in Buenos Aires, plus I’ve got a lousy cold, and what, you want to chat about … what exactly?”
“Never mind.”
“Nope. You called me. You don’t get to do that.”
“I know. But look … you heard me. I’m just asking.”
She sighs loudly. Then there’s the unmistakable sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass. “Did he kill himself? Sure. I mean, I don’t remember being told about it in so many words or anything. As a kid, you just absorb stuff, right? We never talked about it, but that’s what I always understood. And then … Wait.” She sneezes loudly. “Sorry, shit. And then before Mom died I had a few conversations with her about it all.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, and man, that was weird.”
“Why?”
“Well, she said … actually, she said a lot of stuff, which I’ll have to tell you about some day, but this one thing she came out with really surprised me at the time, the word she used. She said Ned Sweeney’s suicide was the crucible. That’s what she called it.” Without telling me to wait, she sneezes again, then takes a clearly audible sip from her drink. “I think what she was talking about was Dad, and the effect it had on him. Or maybe she was talking about us, and how it all trickled down to us, who knows? But remember, Dad was a kid at the time, when it happened. That had to have fucked him up pretty bad. It’d explain a lot. I mean, I have kids and, Jesus, if Jim, for all his faults, if he were to go and do that, it would destroy Ellie and Josh, they’d never get over it. My God, even the thought.”
Our partial understanding, it seems, was the same. And with reason. But what do I say now? I can’t mention Clay Proctor, not without having something to back it up. It wouldn’t be fair.
“How is Jim?” I say. This is an awkward shift, but I don’t want Jill asking me awkward questions either.
“He’s good. He’s finalizing a deal. It’s some apartment complex, I think. He’ll be back on Thursday.”
“Good. Listen, I’m sorry I bothered you with this, Jill. Tell Ellie and Josh their uncle says hi. And look after yourself, okay?”
Standing at the counter, I stare out over the apartment.
That senile old fuck.
Who does he think he is? And how would he have known about Ned Sweeney anyway? Back in the fifties, Clay Proctor was probably a dime-a-dozen young lawyer working at the State Department in Washington.
It’s ridiculous.
Nothing to see here. Time to move on.
I go over and open the fridge, then hunker down at the freezer unit. There’s some Ben & Jerry’s in here somewhere—Strawberry Cheesecake, if I remember correctly.
It’s been there for a while.
But at least if I eat it now, it’ll no longer be a temptation, right?
As I’m scooping out the last spoonful, my phone vibrates on the counter. I pick it up and look at the screen. It’s a text from Jerry Cronin: Don’t know if this is what you had in mind, and more tomorrow, but apparently in the mid-1950s Clay Proctor worked for the CIA.
5
Approaching the subway entrance at Times Square, Sweeney slows down, then keeps walking.
Why? Because he’s not going to get the train to Penn Station and then the 6:13 out to Long Island feeling like this. What use would he be to Laura, or to Tommy? It’s only after another block or two that his real intention becomes clear to him. He’s not just wandering aimlessly here.
He takes a left at Eighth Avenue.
What he’s doing is heading down to Greenwich Village.
He starts moving faster now and more efficiently. Within a few minutes, he’s slipping down into a subway station and then getting on an A train. A few minutes after that, the train is pulling into West Fourth Street. Then he’s making his way over to Sheridan Square and on toward Charles and Perry. He’s retracing his steps, getting ever closer to Mike Sutton’s apartment. It’s on the next block, between Eleventh and Bank.
He moves slowly along the tree-lined street—everything solid now, fixed in its place, sleepy and quiet. This is not how it was on Friday night, not how he remembers it. A yellow cab passes, as one did then, but it’s just a yellow cab. It’s not kinetic, not alive.
He comes to Sutton’s building, passes it, walks on. At the corner, he stops and looks back. A minute goes by. The other night a minute felt like a second. This minute, by contrast, feels like an hour, each of its seconds a slow, ponderous thud.
There are no lights on in the building—though he does seem to remember that the apartment was at the back. He tries to picture it now, the layout, the furniture, but he can’t conjure up as much detail as he could earlier. It merges with other apartments he’s been in, other rooms. Standing here on the corner, he’s not sure what to do next. He could go and see if Sutton’s name is on the doorbell, but if it isn’t, what then? Sit on the stoop and wait for Sutton to show up? Because he’s not walking away from this. He has too many questions that need to be answered.
But a few minutes later, when he spots Sutton approaching from Waverly Place, Sweeney is reminded of what an intimidating presence the guy was on Friday evening and all of a sudden the idea of confronting him doesn’t seem so smart.
But it’s too late. Sutton has seen him.
What did Sweeney have in mind anyway, a direct accusation? That might be a little foolish without anything concrete to back it up.
“Hey…” Sutton gets closer, bobbing his head in recognition. “You’re…” He stops directly in front of Sweeney, clicking his fingers. “The other evening, am I right?”
“Yes.”
He’s a big man, thickset and imposing. There are alcohol fumes on his breath and he’s sweating profusely. He’s also not so steady on his feet. But his eyes are intense, alert and unblinking.
“Sweeney,” he says after the longest time. “Ned Sweeney.”
“Yes.” Sweeney nods, and follows it with a nervous, audible swallow.
Sutton smiles, clearly pleased with himself, and then starts going through the pockets of his overcoat. “So, Ned, what can I do you for?”
“Uh, I…”
Producing a latchkey, Sutton holds it up between his thumb and index finger like a piece of evidence in court. “Aha!”
Sutton clearly remembers who Sweeney is, but he doesn’t seem in the least bit alarmed. He’s certainly not acting as if he knows that Matt Drake is dead. Plus, he’s drunk. Sweeney has to make a little calculation here. “I lost something the other night,” he says. “A fountain pen. It’s engraved. It must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere, or, I don’t know … I must have dropped it.”
“And you got to thinking that maybe I have it? That it’s maybe up there?” He points in the direction of his building
. First floor.
At the back.
That weirdly laid out room.
“Yeah, maybe.”
Sutton holds Sweeney’s gaze, an enigmatic look in his eyes that could mean anything. Nice, well played, or just, I’m so drunk right now. He gives the key a little shake. “Let’s go take a look, shall we?”
They go inside and up to the first floor, where Sutton fumbles again with his key. Stepping into the apartment feels strange to Sweeney. It’s like reentering a dream state, only this time fully awake. The air is stale, probably due to a combination of body odor and cigarette smoke, but it’s also pungent—an extra element in the mix that Sweeney can’t identify. Sutton turns the light on and it’s a shock to see how untidy the place is—empty bottles everywhere, dirty glasses, full ashtrays, items of clothing strewn about, a pile of newspapers on the floor next to the coffee table.
“Oops,” Sutton mutters, “you’ll have to excuse the mess.”
“Looks like you had quite a weekend,” Sweeney says, shaking his head.
“This is Greenwich Village, my friend.” Sutton’s speech is definitely slurred. “A lot of strays and hobos out there, drifters, artists, you name it, and I like to keep what you might call an open-door policy. It gets like this pretty often, and not just on the weekends.”
“Place was really tidy when Matt and I were here on Friday evening.”
Does this sound pushy? Like an accusation? Sweeney’s not sure.
“Well, my housekeeper usually comes in Friday afternoons.” Sutton turns around. “So I guess you were just lucky.”
“Matt Drake wasn’t so lucky,” Sweeney says. “As it happens.”
“Really?” Sutton looks interested all of a sudden. “How so?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Would I be asking?”
Sweeney pauses. “He was killed, Friday night, late. Very late. In the early hours.”
“You’re kidding me. What happened?”
“Uh, it’s not clear—”
“He was killed, you say?”
“Yes … by a car, on Broadway, Midtown somewhere, up in the Forties.” Sweeney waits a moment, then asks, “Did he stay late?”