House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  Billings said, “He needs a lawyer is what he needs.”

  At twelve-thirty A.M. Dennis Franciscan had been arrested in the lower concourse men’s room at Grand Central Station in the course of performing an unnatural act with a much older man.

  “Older?” Schliester asked.

  “There’s no accounting for taste,” Billings said.

  Beryl Ross said, “At least it wasn’t a minor,” and all three men looked at her funny and then agreed in chorus. It would have been wrong, Schliester suggested, to keep a child up that late.

  Beryl groaned and shook her head and walked away. The three men took this as a signal that it was time for them to get serious.

  “He resigned?” Gogarty asked.

  Billings shook his head. “Nobody’s said that yet, but yeah, he’s got to.”

  “Who gets the office?”

  “Up for grabs.”

  Interesting, Schliester thought. The Organized Crime Bureau was everybody’s favorite and always had been. It was where Rudy Giuliani made his reputation, and Thomas Dewey before that. Dewey had a highway named after him. No one from any other bureau had ever had a highway named after him. Or even a street, for all anyone knew.

  Elaine Lester walked up to the three of them and said, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Billings knew she meant the two investigators, so he walked away. Schliester and Gogarty followed her to her office. Her hair was loose, which it almost never was. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a blouse that could have been satin.

  How many women wear plaid nowadays? Schliester thought. But plaid skirts always look good on women with good bodies.

  They followed her into the office and she closed the door. Gogarty looked around. “Jesus,” he said. “You don’t even have a window.”

  Elaine smiled exactly the way she would have smiled if she found him witty. She didn’t. “I want your case,” she said.

  “What case would that be?” Gogarty asked.

  “Fiore.”

  “We’re not working Fiore,” Gogarty said.

  Elaine said, “The bullshit’s over, boys. I know what you’re doing. I know Dennis took you off the case and I know you’re still working it.”

  Gogarty and Schliester looked at each other but didn’t say anything. It was still her turn.

  “Dennis is gone,” she said. “His office has windows. I want it. I want your case.”

  “Because that will get you the office?”

  “Because that will get me the office.”

  Schliester wondered whether it would be called Lester Road or Lester Boulevard.

  Gogarty said, “Sorry, sister, there’s no case,” and walked away.

  She saw Schliester looking at her. “What are you looking at?”

  “I was wondering what you were doing for dinner?” he said.

  Now it was her turn to walk away.

  “All right then, lunch?” he asked.

  Jeffrey found himself waking up every morning before the first glimmer of light made its way through the bedroom windows, which looked toward the East River and got the morning light. The first few times he woke up that early, he lay still, hoping to get back to sleep. When that didn’t work, he got out of bed and padded about the apartment, making his own coffee and sometimes a few pieces of toast. The cook wouldn’t be up for hours. He felt like a stranger in his own home.

  If this feeling raised questions in his mind, he put them aside. Not because he didn’t want to deal with them but because he did. Jeffrey believed that the only way to deal with problems was to do something about them. If he wasn’t comfortable at home, the answer was to be elsewhere. It was too late to ask why, and the why didn’t matter in any case.

  His new routine included a stop every morning at the corner of Forty-second and Park, where he got out of the car and bought a Post at the newsstand. He flipped the pages to the columns and looked for one by Noel Garver. If there was one, he read just enough to see what it was about. It was never about Jessica’s party. So he threw the paper in the trash and got back in the car.

  On Fridays he always ate lunch in the Partners Room on the twenty-eighth floor. The Partners Room operated pretty much like a gentleman’s club except that most clubs pretend that gentlemen do not talk business at the table, whereas nothing else was ever discussed in the Partners Room at Layne Bentley. The room itself was an exact replica of the darkly wainscoted formal dining room at Lowthorpe, Everett Layne’s ancestral home overlooking the Hudson at Cold Spring, just across the river from West Point. An immense stone fireplace large enough to roast a goat burned logs the size of telephone poles summer and winter.

  Everett Layne himself sat at the head of the table for the Friday lunches, with the partners ranked to his left and right in descending order of seniority. Jeffrey, not only the youngest partner but the youngest in the one-hundred-and-thirty-year history of the firm, was separated from the gaunt old patriarch by a few dozen square yards of polished mahogany and a sea of throbbingly blue Limoges china and faceted Baccarat crystal that resolved the firelight into a thousand sparkling constellations.

  Mr. Layne invariably set the agenda, which tended to be abstract and philosophical. “I was rather surprised to see in our midweek report…” he might begin, his reedy voice like an electrical hum in the air. Or, “Can anyone explain to me why…” Or, “Has it now become our practice to…” Discussions of principle, in other words, the questions arising more often than not from an incongruity of perspectives that measured the difference between the investment bankers of today and a man whose roots, if not his actual experience, went back to the days of Mellon and Astor. Although the old man harbored no illusions that his vision was shared by any of the men at the table, still he thought it important to keep his ideas alive. It was in fact all he did. At eighty-two, he came in only on Fridays.

  From the very first time Jeffrey attended a Friday afternoon Partners Room luncheon, he hadn’t been shy about speaking up. He was comfortable with the tone of high-minded abstraction, which felt as familiar as the Sunday dinners at home when his father held court in his worn gray suit. His father enjoyed raising large questions about life’s larger issues. It was there, at his father’s table, that Jeffrey learned to feel at ease in a world as thick with ethical options as the woods were thick with trees, tangled but far from trackless.

  On this particular Friday afternoon, Jim Thornton cleared his throat to signal that he was about to speak. Thornton, whose grandfather on his mother’s side was a Bentley, in fact the last Bentley to grace the board of Layne Bentley, managed to be both assertive and shy at the same time and within the firm was universally disliked for that reason. Even his simplest observation came out sounding sneaky and underhanded, as though he were trying to gain an advantage. Layne nodded in his direction.

  “My reading of the prospectus,” Thornton said, looking down, adjusting his silverware, “suggests that these people will be doing medical research in an excessively narrow range. When you get down to it, they’ve really got only one arrow in their quiver. Either they succeed wonderfully or they vanish without a trace. I don’t see how we could feel comfortable steering A-list investors in that direction.”

  The prospectus in question was a proposal for a foundation to do leukemia research unaffiliated with any university or pharmaceutical company. There was a kind of quixotic desperation to the idea as well as to the style of the proposal that Jeffrey found appealing.

  As if on cue, the old man turned from Thornton to Jeffrey, who was seated well below Thornton at the table. “Blaine?” he said, as though only Jeffrey Blaine could answer the objections just posed.

  “They’re working on leukemia, sir,” Jeffrey said. “Jim’s right, it’s a long shot. But it’s the sort of long shot you don’t have to make excuses for if you lose.”

  Martins and Wynebrook, near Jeffrey at the bottom of the table, laughed mirthlessly, short snuffling laughs that could go either way, appreciative or derisive.
/>   “Are we philanthropists now, Blaine?” Layne asked.

  “No, sir,” Jeffrey said. “But we service a great many clients who like to believe that they are.”

  It was at times like this that Jeffrey felt himself to be at home in his own element. More and more, the work bored him. His marriage bored him. But on Fridays, for an hour and a half at lunch, Jeffrey felt a sense of mastery, even of calmness, as though he were floating above the banking industry, seeing it whole, its touch of nobleness as well as the dark and tawdry secrets at its center. He had a sense of command, not the command of other men, which didn’t interest him, but the command of himself and his whole world. A poem he read in college, he didn’t even remember who wrote it, came back to him, haunting him now as it did even then with its sense of unrealized possibilities.

  And we have been on many thousand lines,

  And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;

  But hardly have we, for one little hour,

  Been on our own line, have we been ourselves.

  Apparently satisfied with Jeffrey’s answer, Everett Layne circled a finger in the air, a signal to the waiters to clear the soup bowls and serve lunch.

  Layne said nothing further, and the conversation drifted in a dozen different directions. Jeffrey lost interest and found himself again thinking about the newspaper he had thrown away in the morning. The fact that no column had appeared or was going to appear obviously meant that Noel Garver had been threatened or bribed. He tried to form a sense in his mind of how such a conversation would go. Would it be lines from The Godfather? He didn’t imagine that conversations like that took place in real life. The Chet Fiore he met on the second floor at Stasny’s, in the office at Stasny’s, and in his own living room the next morning, never said anything directly. He made suggestions. And those suggestions instantly became reality, as though he created reality with his words and his will.

  Jeffrey like to work the same way. It was better than giving orders—or maybe, he thought wryly, a better way of giving orders. The thought that he and Chet Fiore shared a common management style tweaked his curiosity, and he wondered if it could possibly be true. He tried to imagine himself approaching Noel Garver with the suggestion that he print nothing about what he had seen at Jessica’s party, and couldn’t quite make the scene come alive in his mind.

  It must have been a bribe, he thought.

  But he knew it wasn’t. Bribery was a last resort, something for weak men who don’t have any other way to make their wills felt.

  He was suddenly gripped by a strange and urgent apprehension that was new to him, new and frightening. He felt as though his mind were transparent and that at least Everett Layne if not any of the others at the table could see straight into his distraction. He was eager for lunch to be over so that he could get back to his office and close his door.

  “There’s a Mr. Luisi on the line for you,” Jennie said as Jeffrey returned. “Shall I take a number?”

  He didn’t know any Luisi, yet he knew that this was the call he had been expecting. There were times, random times, when the light on his phone lit up and he felt as though a warning light of some sort had been turned on in his brain. That light was on again.

  “I’ll take it inside,” he said, hurrying back toward his office.

  The moment he put the phone to his ear, even before he said anything, a surprisingly high-pitched man’s voice said, “Do you know where Riverside Park is?”

  “It’s off Riverside Drive. In the Eighties. What is this about?”

  Riverside Park wasn’t what he had been expecting at all. Not that he knew what he had been expecting. Perhaps the name of a social club on Mulberry Street. Or an Italian restaurant.

  “There’s a car park just above the Ninety-sixth Street ramp,” the voice said. “Four o’clock.”

  There was no reason for a clandestine meeting in Riverside Park, Jeffrey thought. For all he knew, Fiore wanted to talk to him about investing some of his money. Which was perfectly normal. Even if Chet Fiore was everything the newspapers said he was, and Jeffrey tended to believe the newspapers didn’t report things about people unless they were true, still the man was entitled to invest his money.

  As long as it wasn’t undocumented cash, of course.

  The more he thought about it, the clearer it seemed to him that Fiore couldn’t possibly be calling him about anything illegal or even unethical. Fiore was no fool. He knew who Jeffrey Blaine was. He wasn’t about to embarrass himself with an improper proposal.

  These thoughts, like stray clouds on a darkening summer day, random and unsorted, piled on top of each other in such chaotic profusion that he actually had himself convinced that a meeting in Riverside Park wasn’t in the least a signal of danger. He wanted to meet the man. He wanted to hear what he had to say. It was as simple as that. So he told himself that Fiore probably did all his business this way, habits of caution a second nature by this time, even where there was no need for them, even, for example, when he was meeting with a perfectly reputable investment banker for perfectly reputable purposes. It was odd, Jeffrey thought, how often our instincts of self-preservation work against us. There was every reason in the world for Fiore to be as open as possible about his legitimate business meetings. It would give anyone watching a sense of…well, legitimacy.

  Jeffrey made a mental note to bring this point up to Fiore when they met. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was already proving to be a useful associate.

  He buzzed Jennie and asked her to cancel and reschedule his afternoon meetings. Then he rang Martin on the car phone, told him he wouldn’t be needing him, and sent him home to see if Mrs. Blaine had anything for him to do.

  He left the office a little before three and walked crosstown for a few blocks before hailing a taxi. The cab dropped him at Ninety-sixth and Riverside, where he found himself on an overpass with the park to his left and the river and New Jersey beyond it. There was no parking lot in sight. Something must have been wrong with Mr. Luisi’s directions, he thought. It didn’t seem likely anyone would put a parking lot in the middle of a public park, and yet there didn’t seem to be anywhere else it could be.

  He realized that the street under the bridge he was standing on was in fact Ninety-sixth Street, and that it ran directly onto the West Side Highway. There were two gas stations down there but there didn’t seem to be any way to get to them without going all the way around the block. He looked around. A woman with two leashed Rottweilers was going into the park across the street. As she bent to unleash the dogs, he called to her. She looked up and hurried away, keeping her dogs on their chains until she was out of sight.

  There were buds on the trees already, a pastel wash of green. It was early for leaves, but it had been a warm spring. Perhaps the river brought them out early. It didn’t seem there was any green in Central Park yet.

  Or perhaps he hadn’t noticed.

  There was no one else around.

  Jeffrey walked south to Ninety-fifth Street, then east a block, then north to Ninety-sixth. It took him almost five minutes to get to the gas station, and when he got there he realized he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

  “Is there a parking lot around here?” he asked.

  “Two on Ninety-fifth,” the man said. “Right here and up on the other side of Broadway.”

  “Parking lot?”

  “Garages, yeah.”

  “No, not garages, parking lots,” Jeffrey said. “Isn’t there one by the park?”

  The man narrowed his eyes and seemed to weigh him for what felt like a long time. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “What is it you’re looking for?” he asked.

  “A parking lot.”

  “You want to park your car?”

  “I just want to know where it is.”

  “It’s on the other side of the highway,” the man said. “But I wouldn’t park my car there.”

  “I’m not parking my car. I just want to know where it is.”


  He let his annoyance show in his voice, which he realized immediately was a mistake. He was a stranger in this neighborhood, which seemed rundown and slightly on the sordid side.

  “And I told you where it is,” the man said sharply. “Other side of the highway.”

  He turned to a car that had just pulled in. The driver asked for a fill-up.

  “How do I get there?” Jeffrey asked, hanging over the attendant’s shoulder.

  “Under the overpass. Stay to the right. Follow the signs for downtown.”

  “I’m not in a car.”

  “You’re not in a car? Then what the hell—”

  “Just tell me how to get there.”

  The man turned and looked at Jeffrey with undisguised annoyance. He set the clip on the pump control, took a rag off the top of the pump, and carefully wiped his hands. Then he walked out to the sidewalk. Jeffrey followed.

  “All right,” the man said. “You go under the overpass. You’ll be in the park. You go over the fence.”

  “Over a fence?”

  “A railing, a railing. You step over it. You’re in the park. You walk north. You know which way north is?”

  “I know which way north is.”

  “That’s good, that’s very good,” the man said.

  In the normal course of his life, Jeffrey wouldn’t have tolerated being mocked by a gas station attendant. At the moment he didn’t seem to have a choice. He thought about giving up the whole adventure and taking a taxi home, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to stand up Chet Fiore.

  “You’ll pass a playground. Oh, shit, that’s not it. Forget everything I just said.” He turned completely around and pointed toward West End Avenue. “Go up to the corner. A right, then another right. You’re on Riverside Drive. Cross the street. You’re at the park. No railing, none of that shit. You walk into the park. South, about a quarter mile, there’s a path goes down under the highway, comes out at the river. Follow the path, then follow the river north. It’s just past the tennis courts.”

  “Thanks,” Jeffrey said.