The Manhattan Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  ‘Yeah, me too. But then I got an email saying they’re gonna start early. They wanna try and have it over by seven. So if there is a big demo firing up they’ll miss all the action.’

  ‘They’re scared of a demonstration?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. BXH is attracting nut jobs like flies on a dead dog. That’s what happens when there’s a smell, ain’t it? See ya. Gotta go.’

  The line went dead.

  She was sure there was still shampoo in her hair as the yellow cab dropped her off at BXH. This time there were people in the lobby. Outside the building there were people too, all muffled up, most of them directly across the street from the main entrance on 45th, hanging out, it looked like. Except it was too cold for hanging out. A few of them stared at her as she headed for the entrance to the bank.

  Some well-heeled types were queuing at the reception desk. MSM journalists no doubt. How would she recognise Laura?

  She needn’t have worried. A tall woman, whose black hair fell in a curtain to the small of her back, came striding towards her. She was wearing tight black trousers and a long black jacket with a Mandarin collar and purple buttons.

  ‘I knew it was you. Frank told me all about your big hazel eyes.’

  She held her hand out. Isabel shook it. Her grip lasted less than a second. Then she passed her a camera bag, as if they’d shook hands just so she’d be able to slip it to her.

  ‘You do know how to press a shutter button?’ she said.

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘Okay, that’s the induction training over. Let’s get up there. I wouldn’t want the dicks from the Wall Street Journal to get all the best seats.’ She nodded towards the four corporate types in pinstripe suits, both the men and the women, who’d already passed security and were waiting at the elevators.

  As the guards viewed Laura’s press pass and invitation, they only glanced at Isabel. There wasn’t even a flicker of recognition that they’d seen her earlier. They ticked twice on a list, then let them through. It felt as if she was crashing an upmarket private party. Was that it? Was she in? It certainly looked like it. And it felt good.

  She was going to surprise Sean’s ass. Maybe she’d blow him a kiss. Maybe she’d throw a goddamned shoe at him.

  They went up alone in the elevator, an elegant pink marble box with a silver handrail, heading up to the fiftieth floor. She’d thought that they’d have time to talk for a few minutes before going into the press conference. But everything was moving very fast.

  ‘What do you think of the merger?’ she asked, leaning towards Laura.

  Laura put a finger to her lips, shook her head violently, as if Isabel had offered to moon the security men.

  The lobby on the fiftieth floor was like the one downstairs, only smaller. It too had a black reception desk, torch style lights and a pink marble floor.

  In front of glossy black doors on the far side of the lobby a couple of tables with badges on them had been set up. In front of the tables there was a short queue, consisting of the Wall Street Journal people they’d seen downstairs and a few others who must have come up before them.

  There were two security guards behind the table and a rope cutting off access to a set of doors. One of the guards was a slim black guy. The other one was a big white guy with a shiny bald head. The black guy was tapping at a handheld device, slowly and deliberately, as everyone waited in front of him.

  Laura held her arm as they joined the queue.

  ‘Your husband’s disappeared. That’s so bad,’ she whispered.

  ‘He’s probably going to be here. That’s why I want to get in.’

  ‘You do know over a million people are reported missing in America every year?’ She peered at Isabel as if she was a slow student, and she was her teacher.

  Isabel shook her head. ‘A million people?’

  ‘Yeah, most of the ones who don’t come home after twenty-four hours have psychiatric problems or addiction problems or both. That covers ninety-five per cent of everyone who’s still missing after the first day. Amazing, huh?’ She looked at Isabel with a condescending expression.

  ‘Sean doesn’t have psychiatric or addiction problems.’ Isabel shook her head. ‘But maybe he will have after I talk to him.’

  Laura looked her up and down, as if appraising her for a date for a friend.

  ‘Were you two getting on, you know what I mean?’

  Isabel nodded, but not too vigorously. She was asking the right questions. To get a high heel stabbed into her toe.

  Laura put her mouth close to Isabel’s ear. ‘I’ll do the talking when we get up to the front.’

  The people ahead of them had moved on.

  They were at the table.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Laura Jenkins from the State Street Times.’ Laura pointed to her. ‘This is my photographer.’

  The guard looked at Isabel as if she might be a terrorist Laura was trying to smuggle in.

  ‘I gotta check the photographer.’ He tapped at his screen. ‘We ain’t got her ID on our system.’

  ‘You got ID on you?’ he said to Isabel.

  She gave him her passport. He looked at it, raised his eyebrows, perhaps because it was British, but said nothing. He tapped at his screen again. Then he held the passport open in front of his device for a few seconds before giving it back to her.

  He started tapping again.

  Isabel’s temples were throbbing. A sinking sensation was pulling at her. She was imagining she was going to be sent back down. And she’d come so close. She looked around.

  Maybe Sean was here. One of the corporate types behind them, a brown haired six-foot athletic guy smiled at her.

  She turned away, pulled her jacket zip up. She looked at the guard holding the hand-sized screen.

  ‘You can go ahead, ma’am,’ he said to her.

  Laura tugged at her arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  She stared at the guard, suddenly remembering something. ‘Where are the rest rooms?’

  He pointed at the opposite corner of the hall. Then his gaze moved to the people behind them.

  ‘Jeez, you’d think this was Fort Knox we were trying to get into,’ said Laura, as they walked away.

  ‘I gotta go. I’ll find you in there.’ Isabel nodded towards the doors the other people had gone through.

  ‘You okay?’ A look of concern flitted across Laura’s face.

  ‘Sure. No problem. See you in there.’

  The toilets were almost all marble too. Even the taps were marble. And there were chunky iron radiators painted pink along one wall. The air in the room was stifling hot. She needed to think.

  She went into one of the cubicles. Everything was building up inside her, tiredness, anxiety and the anger that had driven her here from London.

  She massaged her forehead slowly in small circles. She thought about what she should say to him if she did see him. Could she accept this kind of shit from him, from anyone?

  And if Sean didn’t show, maybe she should get the high and mighty Mr Vaughann to answer a few questions, tell her what had happened on Thursday night, and exactly where Sean was when he’d last seen him. She held her breath. The throbbing in her forehead was easing.

  She heard the door to the lobby swing, the tap-tap-tap of high heels on the marble floor.

  The tapping stopped. Then it started again.

  Someone was pacing up and down. She heard a voice.

  ‘Are you sure the National Guard’s outside?’

  It sounded like Mrs Vaughann’s voice.

  She heard the door to the lobby creaking. She opened her cubicle door just in time to see a straight back, a snow-blonde head of hair and a pair of pink high heels, Manolos they looked like, exiting the toilet.

  It was Mrs Vaughann.

  What was she doing here?

  45

  The leather sofa in Lord Bidoner’s apartment extended all the way along the back wall of the main room. It was deep enough and long enough that a couple could slee
p there, easily.

  Xena was stretched out on it, naked, except for a belt made of brass rings positioned high on her hips. She stretched her long, thin arms out, as if their recent exertions had pleased her.

  She looked sated, though Lord Bidoner knew that that was probably an act. He turned his back on her as he did up his shirt buttons and stared out at the flurries of snow smashing against the glass windows. The slight swaying of the building told him the snowstorm was intensifying outside. It had turned north, but with luck their guest would touch down before it reached La Guardia.

  He could make out the lights of the building opposite but almost nothing distinct could be seen because of the snowflakes now.

  ‘I still can’t work out why Arap called you a traitor when you met him outside Jerusalem.’ He turned to stare at her. She looked even thinner naked.

  She turned on her side snaking her long leg along the edge of the sofa. She knew he was watching her. The blue tattoo of a snake that coiled around her thigh, where a garter might have been, seemed to move as she did, under the soft light from the giant lamps that sat on marble-topped tables at each end of the sofa.

  ‘Did you tell him about the report on the Summer Palace in Beijing?’ she said, softly.

  He turned, as he tucked his pale blue shirt into his black trousers. ‘No, and I didn’t send him the report about Nuremberg either.’ He sat near her, stroking her ankle. There were scars there, but her skin was shiny, her foot long and athletic.

  ‘I know you want to get going,’ he said. ‘But we cannot make our next move until our visitor arrives.’

  He stroked her calf. ‘You have confirmed with the lab that they are ready for the DNA sample?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The doctor is waiting for me to arrive.’

  ‘He doesn’t know the pastor by name?’

  ‘No, just who he worked for.’

  Lord Bidoner stood.

  ‘We are near the end.’

  There was a soft clicking noise from his phone.

  She picked it up from the floor, stood and handed it to him.

  Then she started stretching, as if she was on her way to a run.

  He spoke as he watched her.

  ‘Do not injure him,’ he said.

  He closed the line.

  ‘Your friend is not being cooperative.’

  ‘He will do anything I want when I bring the fire to him. No one ever resists it,’ she said. She kept stretching.

  ‘You are right. And you enjoy doing that, don’t you?’

  She looked at him and smiled.

  46

  The carpet in the press conference room was an opulent wall-to-wall Persian with swirling fronds in forty shades of red and brown. The room looked even more over-the-top than Isabel had remembered it. The far end had a raised area, with a row of chairs behind a long table with a red and gold front. It looked like an altar. There were ten lines of straight-backed blood-red chairs with gold piping around their edges in front of the altar. There was nobody sitting behind it.

  One wall of the room was a giant window. Drifts of snowflakes swirled outside, tumbling against the glass. It was coming down thicker now. She hesitated near the door. Mrs Vaughann was at the front of the room sitting down. Maybe she shouldn’t attract her attention until Sean came in or it became clear he wasn’t coming. She might warn him. She didn’t want Sean to run away if he heard she was here.

  But she wasn’t going to hide either.

  Maybe she’d just wave at Mrs Vaughann if she recognised her. If it upset anyone that she’d come, what the hell did she care? They hadn’t bothered telling her he’d flown to New York. And she had made it clear to a lot of people at the bank that she was looking for him.

  She spotted Laura. She was sitting on her own two rows back from the pack of corporate journalists. She was talking into her phone, using it as a dictation machine it looked like. She grinned at Isabel as she sat beside her, then put her phone down.

  ‘You okay, honey?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you see who’s here?’ said Laura. She jabbed a finger towards the front row, towards Mrs Vaughann. Isabel took a deep breath and looked to the front. Was Mrs Vaughann better known than she’d thought?

  ‘You know Mrs Vaughann?’

  Laura looked at her as if she was a dummy. ‘You can bet your boots on that. She’s just about the biggest charity supporter in New York City. Her picture is forever in the papers. There’s not many publicly acceptable Fifth Avenue philanthropists left after the last few years. She has big connections in the Treasury Department in Washington too. Some people say that’s how her husband got his job.’

  She noticed Laura’s skin. It was flawless.

  Isabel leaned towards her, spoke softly. ‘I overheard her on the phone saying something about the National Guard being outside. Do you think they’re expecting trouble?’

  ‘Honey, there was a riot in this city last weekend. Didn’t you hear about it?’

  She shook her head.

  An older man with thick white hair sat down beside Mrs Vaughann. The two of them began talking animatedly.

  ‘My God, is it hot in here, or is it just me?’

  ‘It’s hot.’ Laura opened her jacket to reveal a purple skin-tight jumper underneath.

  Isabel looked at her watch. It was six thirty. She glanced around. Any moment now she might see Sean. It felt as if something in her muscles, her arms, her neck, was wound up tight, like a spring aching to loosen itself.

  Stay calm.

  She turned her head, scanning the room. Timmy was sitting two rows behind her. He grinned at her. She blanked him. A blast of corporate music blared out. Two big, sixty-inch LCD screens on tripods to their left and right burst into life. She’d hardly noticed them up until this.

  Then they were watching one of those flashy corporate videos. It had drum and base music, and helicopter views of Manhattan, London and Shanghai at night. Glass towers gleamed like stacks of crystals. Images of bridges, hospitals, wind farms, ultra-fast trains fled by. This was the world that high finance was building.

  Then the images changed. Pictures of families, churches, temples, replaced the towers. The face of the bank’s CEO, Fred Pilman, came into view with a halo of other faces around him. Fred looked good, square jawed, determined. He wore his light Bahamas’ tan as if he was proud that BXH still had its own corporate jet waiting to take its titans anywhere they wanted, and to points south whenever they needed a break in the sun.

  ‘Welcome to BXH. America’s international bank for the twenty-first century,’ Fred’s voice boomed from the speakers.

  ‘Soon to be owned by China,’ whispered Laura in her ear.

  Isabel’s hands were in fists in her lap. She turned again, glanced all the way around. Any moment now the doors at the back of the room would open and she would see Sean.

  Then the video screen went blank. It looked as if something had gone wrong. This wasn’t like BXH. They waited. They waited some more. Then a slamming noise echoed through the room.

  And, as if they were all connected by wires, everyone in the room turned their heads towards the door they’d come in through.

  Striding towards them was a giant of a man. He must have been twenty stone, at least. He was well over six feet tall too. In his arms, folded over his stomach, he was carrying a thick yellow pad. His black suit was rumpled, as if he’d been working in it forever. His skin was as white as dough and had a similar consistency.

  He was one of those creatures who live in the bowels of some offices, who don’t get out to see the sun much. As he strode towards the top of the room, he was clearly enjoying every step, he didn’t look to the left or right. By the time he’d reached the table and had sat at a seat in the centre, a buzz of voices, like a hive coming to life, had sprung up from the rows of journalists.

  ‘My name is Adam Bruckhaus Jr,’ he said loudly, over the noise. Did this guy even need a microphone?

  The noise level went down
a notch.

  ‘I represent Hardman, Weiss and Bruckhaus.’ His accent was old-style gravelly New York. He sounded like the kind of guy who ate petitioners, three at a time, on the steps of the courthouse for breakfast.

  The buzz in the room went up another ten notches. It sounded as if the hive was under attack.

  Laura nudged her, hard.

  ‘Holy cow!’ she said.

  It took only a few more words from Adam for Isabel to work out what Laura meant.

  ‘I am the lead insolvency consultant for our firm.’ His brow furrowed, as if he was trying to show everyone how difficult his position was. He placed his hands slowly on the table, spacing them wide in front of him. It looked as if he had, by that gesture, taken possession of it, and everything else in the building beneath him.

  ‘I have the unfortunate duty to announce that BXH will be filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition before midnight tonight.’ He looked at his watch. ‘A little over five hours from now. All of BXH’s retail and business clients will, you’ll be glad to know, receive their deposits back under the appropriate Federal deposit guarantee schemes.’

  ‘Mr Bruckhaus,’ ‘Mr Bruckhaus,’ ‘Mr Bruckhaus,’ voices called out.

  ‘I will not be taking any questions at this time.’

  ‘What about the merger?’

  ‘What about a Federal bailout? They did it for AIG?’

  Mr Bruckhaus stood, pushed his chair back, and headed for the door. A posse of journalists followed him. Others gathered in small groups, gesticulating. Isabel just stared.

  Laura stamped her foot.

  ‘I bet some of their top staff are bringing forward their bonuses right at this stinking moment. They won’t be the ones to lose out. The regular staff will. Thousands of families won’t be sleeping tonight. Did you see Mrs Vaughann?’

  She hadn’t. She looked around. She was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘She followed Mr Shithaus out.’ Laura shook her head.

  ‘Bruckhaus,’ Isabel corrected.

  ‘Whatever.’ Laura shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

  ‘Now BXH can get sold off in a stupid fire sale. And God only knows what that’ll mean for this city. This is a total fucking wipeout. Have they any idea how many people, how many small businesses BXH supports in this town?’