But what else did she know about him? Even less than he knew about her. He lived with his father in Brooklyn, spent some time overseeing his father's rental houses. Caring for him until he died, but also waiting for something, waiting to be called away. Never talked about his work, either. She'd asked once, but he'd just smiled and shaken his head softly. But he wasn't "morose"—another vocabulary word—he was energetic and fun. He read a lot, she saw. Which she liked. Mostly philosophy and history, topics that didn't much interest her, though the fact that they interested him intrigued her. He had a physical regimen that he performed each day, like the old Chinese ladies exercising on the flat roofs of the apartment buildings in their cities, except tougher. He'd hung a long rope out of his father's top window, secured it, and then climbed straight up from the garden below to the window, feet flat against the clapboard siding, then rappelled downward and done it again. Five times a day he did this. No belts or harnesses, no rock climber's equipment. Fearless, and maybe stupid, yes, but she had been impressed. All arm strength. This explained his arms and shoulders. Rock hard, even a little scary. But he wore loose shirts, never showed himself off. How could a man be so strong like that? And more to the point, why? What dangerous exploit was he preparing himself for?
Jin Li had her suspicions but no answers. The closest she had come to learning had been a few weeks earlier, right before she'd broken it off. They had been walking along Fifth Avenue after eating when a fire truck had raced by. Like most New Yorkers, Jin Li had become inured to the sound of fire truck's sirens, seeing them as a noisy irritation as they passed. "Goddamned things," she'd muttered, then turned to Ray.
He'd looked at her, saying nothing, eyes cold.
"What?"
But he didn't answer. Stood there rigid, as if bracing for an attack. His teeth were set against each other, his eyes unblinking, feet spread apart. An instinctual response. She'd said something he found ignorant, and she sensed that whatever had happened to him—the scar, the unwillingness to say why he'd drifted around the third world for years—related to this very moment. She felt him capable of violence.
"Ray? What is it?"
He stared at her, traveling great distances in his mind.
"Don't look at me like that. Please!"
Then his face eased, blue eyes warm again. Ray had nodded to himself, the emotions put back in the safe place in his head where they'd been, and took a step along the sidewalk with her, as if the moment had never happened. But it had. She had seen into him. Finally, she knew that Ray—
A noise! This time for certain! A door opening downstairs.
She slipped over to the window again, looked out. Two Chinese men were standing on the street below, waiting.
Now she heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of feet stomping upward. They passed her floor and continued higher. Searching from the top, she thought.
Jin Li gathered her small number of things into a pile, pushed a dozen boxes around, and created a tiny hiding hole within the expanse of crumbling cardboard. Here she squatted down into a cannonball position and waited, the smell of dry-rotted paper in her nose.
She did not have to wait long. The two men pushed through the door, the old floorboards creaking under their weight. The Russian custodian, from his voice. And another man, whom she watched through a crack between boxes. Another Chinese man. With a big bandage taped on the end of his nose.
"It is very big room," said the Russian. "Many boxes."
The Chinese man did not answer. She could no longer see him but she could hear him walking heavily along the floor. She smelled a cigarette and assumed the Russian was waiting while the other man finished his inspection. But then she noticed that the Russian had moved to the window behind her. She held her breath and twisted her head around. The Russian was casually sliding the window shut, his tattooed fingers gripping the frame. She'd forgotten to close it! She watched his face. A grimness there. The window was the old kind with iron sash weights that rattled in their tracks, but the man was deliberate and slow, easing the window down with minimal noise, his mouth pressed tight as if trying to hold its sound within him. When he was done, he let his hands drop to his sides. But they opened and closed and opened again expectantly, each hairy finger marked with a bluish spider of ink. Then he stepped forward quickly, making it appear that he had been standing elsewhere.
He knows, Jin Li realized, he knows I'm here.
5
Pain, pain, go away, come back and kill me another day. Bill Martz rose as he always rose now, with pain in his back and knees and feet, not to mention pain between his ass and his balls, which meant his prostate gland was acting up again. He winced as he stood, found his slippers, then inspected his naked self in the bathroom mirror. You look like a hairless orangutan, he thought. He pissed with great relief into the bathtub, which he did whenever he could. No aiming, just fire, let the maid clean up after him. Pissing with freedom was an increasingly important activity to him, even imbued with existential significance, and he cared little what anyone thought. At cocktail parties and dinners at private homes, he often pissed into the bathtub instead of the toilet. Or even in the sink. What were they going to do to him? Nothing! He was Bill Martz!
Connie was making breakfast. His fourth wife. He often wondered why they were together. Once a month or so he forgot her name. She was twenty-eight years younger than he was and the difference showed every day. One of those women who had collected and instituted into their regimens so many beauty secrets that they appeared to be aging at one-tenth the rate that normal people did. Glowing! Bubbly! Peppy! He resented her youthfulness even as he absolutely required it as a condition of their marriage. Soft, bouncy, firm. And he wasn't just talking about her breasts or face or ass. Nope. It was a grim and insufficiently recognized truth that as women drifted into and out of menopause, their sexual selves suffered mightily. No matter what the women's magazines chirped. Looseness. Dryness. Discomfort. Pain. Connie was old enough that menopause was out there, lurking on the horizon in a few years, but he was confident that her ob-gyn had all sorts of endocrino-logical tricks up his sleeve. He'd better. Bill Martz had seen (wife number two) what happened otherwise and it was not a happy thing. He was too rich to be afflicted by a dry vagina!
Why had he married Connie? Why, really? She was beautiful, but so were lots of women. She made him feel good. Well, sure. But why had he actually married her? They weren't going to have any children and he had gotten the snip back in his fifties between marriages two and three, when he was running around so much that he couldn't keep the women straight in his head. He had married Connie because he was lonely and she was there. Simple as that. He didn't love her, not really. He was fond of her, yes. Terrible word, "fond." He had loved his first wife passionately, but she had died of breast cancer at forty-two, and thereafter he had been able only to approximate a decreasing percentage of that original feeling with subsequent women. So, no, he didn't really love Connie. And he doubted she loved him, not if he knew anything about women, though he appreciated her willingness not to make it an issue. Why should she love him, anyway? He wasn't particularly lovable. He wasn't particularly anything, except rich. And nasty. Vanity Fair had once devoted a whole article to how nasty and rapacious he was, and not one word was libelous. He was a nasty, rapacious orangutan who pissed into his bathtub instead of the four-thousand-dollar toilet. I used to be charming, he reflected, back when I cared what people thought of me. Why'd Connie marry him? The moan-ay, of course. The security. But Connie was still just young enough to have children. And why shouldn't she? She had every right to have them. He understood that marrying him might have been a disastrous decision for her. At this he felt a distinct sadness for her, what she'd missed. He had four grown children and they were his only consolation. The rest of it all could go to hell.
Really, his wife was wasting her life by being with him. If he had any courage he would tell her this. She was still pretty enough to go out on the remarriage circuit and
grab a reasonably decent guy—someone with, say, eighty or a hundred mil. He and Connie had sex about twice a month, thanks to the beautiful pills science provided to guys like him, but he had to admit it wasn't great. Connie wasn't the problem. She was fine, or would be fine. He didn't have it, the juice, the mojo, the mustard. The act itself was ghostly, a tissue of sensation atop thousands of earlier iterations. He couldn't feel the pleasure in its originality, his cock no longer the time-travel device it used to be. His rational mind was never overwhelmed. In fact, he smelled death on himself—a sour, exhausted whiff. Whether this was mere aging or his problem in particular didn't matter. There was no pill for it, no woman for it, no end of it, no antidote for it—
—except big action! Making decisions, risking, winning, taking the hit when it came, feeling the force of money. Money as wind, fire, stone! Money as beauty, ugliness, and pain! Money as fear and hatred and love! Only with money were his instincts perfect, his reflexes untouched by age, his passion endless. He couldn't explain this and it certainly wasn't admirable, but it was true.
He pulled his robe tight and shuffled into the kitchen. Connie was there with two plates of eggs. The house staff arrived at nine, so she usually made breakfast. He sat carefully. Connie had put cushions on every chair in the house for him. She knew his prostate hurt. They'd fought about him not going to the doctor. Drove her nuts. And maybe that was why he didn't do it. Forcing his old guy's death-smell decrepitude upon her, a kind of rich man's sicko dominance. I didn't used to be like this, Martz thought, poking his head out the open window and looking down. He could see the morning runners in Central Park, the maples leafing out in the late spring.
He pulled his head back in. "I want to give you some carefully considered advice," he announced grandly. God, did Connie look good. Five hundred sit-ups a day, yoga, tennis, swimming three times a week in the pool in the apartment house, free weights—all her old habits from her modeling days.
She bustled about happily. "I like your advice."
"I think, number one, that I am very lucky to have you around. This isn't about what's good for me. Number two, I think that you are probably wasting your life hanging around an old man like me who can't really fuck you decently anymore, who is crabby and achy and full of his own compacted, neurotic, self-important, and irresolvable bullshit. Okay? You are young enough that you could go find somebody and five years from now you could be feeding a couple of beautiful little children some breakfast, instead of an old man. This is the truth, lady. I'm turning into a rotting bag of meat, Connie, and somebody is going to have to wipe the drool and the shit off of me. Why should it be you? The answer is that it shouldn't. My advice is that you get a quick divorce, nothing contested, and start meeting guys. I'd give you enough money so that you didn't have to worry about anything. Hell, I'll double whatever is in the prenup that you made me sign, and you could actually have a decent life and not hang out with an old bum—admittedly quite rich—like me. Who isn't even charming anymore." He patted his place mat. "That's my morning speech. Now, where's my coffee?"
Connie silently set a cup down in front of him, along with a neat stack of the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the business sections of the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. He read them each day as a rich man, which was to say as if they were the sports pages. Across the city, no more than a few hundred men like him, all possessed of meaninglessly grand wealth and old enough to feel as he did, played the game against each other, against younger men, against technology, information, and the passing of days. They played it as long as they could, and then, if they were smart, they took their winnings at the right moment and retired to Normandy or Palm Beach or a ranch in Montana or someplace nothing much mattered anymore. If they stayed too long in the game, they got cut open, even wiped out. That insurance guy, what's his name, lost $600 million. Should have eased out, let the scandals fall on the shoulders of younger men.
And maybe Bill would do this. But not yet. He had to fix his little huge problem with the hedge fund. He had leveraged his flagship, Martz New Century Partners Fund, into a goddamn $352 million position on Good Pharma and needed to unwind the position before something bad happened. He no longer cared whether he made money; he just wanted out even, or at worst with just a haircut. Lose $20, $30 million, okay, he could live with that, make it up elsewhere. That kind of money could be hidden from the investors easily enough. But he was down $107 million in just over thirty days on the position, and against the prudent and obvious advice of his young, high-priced princelings, he had doubled the bet late, thinking the stock would bounce up, but it had only drifted down further. The kind of error an amateur made. Pure gambling. Now they were whispering about him, he knew it, talking behind his back, saying Big Bill is sucking on a land mine right now . . . Big Bill's lost his fastball . . . Something was wrong with Good Pharma and somebody knew what it was. And wasn't telling Bill Martz. Somebody like that slick fuckwad Tom Reilly. I'm too old to be worrying about being vulnerable to the fate of one small bullshit drug company, he told himself. Too old, too rich, and too smart. Or certainly one would think so, except that he'd taken an unnaturally large position in Good Pharma, expecting that it would give him a fat boost by year's end. All his researchers had reported it was on the verge, great stuff in the pipeline, synthetic skin, cartilage pills, things like that.
Connie put his eggs down. "I put in that dried red pepper we found in Mexico last winter."
"Hmm. Thank you, these look great."
She let her hand linger on his shoulder. "I like old rich bums, by the way, just to finish the conversation."
"What about young rich bums?"
"Not charming enough."
He ate with gusto. At least he hadn't lost his appetite. When he paused, he looked up and said, "Seriously, Connie. I say this all the time but I am serious."
She was waiting for him. "You say that all the time, too. I'm very happy, Bill."
"That's because you are wasting all your maternal energies on a sixty-nine-year old baby. I've had four children. I know how great they are. A few more years go by you can't have kids and I'm out there at the wheelchair showroom."
She smiled, but her eyes were wet. "Please, Billy, this does kind of hurt me when you say this."
"I'm sorry."
"It makes me happy to be with you. Maybe I'm not so wrapped up in the future like you are."
"Probably because you have a lot more of it."
She looked at him straight. "Yes, I do. But so?"
He went back to his eggs. It was an old conversation. Not an untrue conversation but unsolvable, almost comfortable in its familiarity.
"What's really bothering you, Bill?"
He tasted the coffee. Perfect. "Bothering me? I'm bothered by the fact that I've taken a huge bite out of Good Pharma, expecting it to be a takeover candidate. I thought it was cheap. No, not cheap, but reasonable. They have half a dozen drugs in the pipeline. Some will bomb but we think two are huge. But it's too early to get good information yet. We just have inklings. And the market is craving new products. You get the right new product, you get a new demand, okay? People want something that never existed before! I know the number-two guy, Tom Reilly. He's not the CEO but he's the guy who knows what's really going on. Real slick fuckwad, let me tell you. Good Pharma's stock is down thirty-seven percent in the last few weeks. I want to know why. I've asked, and nobody can tell me or will tell me."
"Why don't you ask this Tom Reilly?"
"I have."
"Well?"
"He's avoiding me. Hiding in the weeds."
"So?"
"I'm starting to make his life difficult. I had him followed to a Yankees game two nights ago and messed with his head. Sent him a little message from old Billy-boy."
"Has he called you?"
"No, he's scared. I expected him to call me after the game, but he didn't."
Conn
ie frowned at him, pressing her breasts forward aggressively. "You need to kick some ass, sounds like."
"Think so?" It excited him to hear her say it.
"You're good at that, Bill."
"I can be."
"No, you listen to me," she told him. "Nobody fucks with Billy Martz, right? I've heard you say this to me a thousand times. You're tougher, you're smarter, and you're definitely meaner. You are a mean old bastard, Bill! Get that information out of him so that you can fix the problem. You hear me, Bill? Frankly I don't think you've really given it much effort yet."
He nodded. "I could turn up the heat."
"You could?" she said, her voice disgusted.
"I will turn up the heat. I'll roast the asshole."
"Then go do it, Bill, and stop telling me how fucking miserable I am!" His beautiful wife put her hands on her hips and looked ferociously at him, and in that moment they both knew, again, happily, why he had married her.
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