Was it an act? He was a successful man, this Jeffrey Blaine. Wasn’t self-assurance part of the package? It usually is. And yet he didn’t seem self-assured. He seemed like a man who didn’t know quite what he wanted. He looked uncertain. Tentative—there was that word again. He mocked himself rather than confess his uncertainty.
She smiled to herself. He had come back to find her, which saved her the trouble of finding him again. Better that way. Much better. How could he ever guess that she was following him when he was the one who went back for her?
For weeks she hadn’t been able to get Chet Fiore’s unexplained appearance at a banker’s daughter’s birthday party out of her thoughts. Gogarty and Schliester were off on something else; they’d dropped the ball. Wall Street and Mulberry Street—either there was nothing to it or there was a hell of a lot. Maybe Schliester was still thinking about it somewhere in the back of his mind, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. And Gogarty’s mind was all front. It didn’t have a back.
Which is why she decided to see for herself what this banker was about. She wanted to get a look at him, and maybe ask the doorman a few questions. But she was a lawyer, not an investigator, and she didn’t quite know what questions to ask. So she ended up leaning against the stone wall on the Central Park side of Fifth Avenue, trying to figure out what to do next, when a car pulled up in front of Blaine’s building.
She didn’t actually see it pull up. She heard it. What she heard was the doorman’s voice. “Good evening, Mr. Blaine.”
What she saw was a handsome man, blondish, a shade over or under six feet, getting out of a dark blue Mercedes. Younger than she imagined. Better looking. But with a straightness to his carriage that was exactly what she would have predicted. So this was Jeffrey Blaine, she thought.
And then she realized that the other man in the back seat of the Mercedes was probably Chet Fiore. She saw him for only a second, not enough to be sure. Maybe her imagination was playing tricks on her; there had been a Mercedes in Gogarty’s report on the fiasco in Prospect Park.
She wrote down the tag number as the Mercedes drove off. She heard the doorman say, “Mrs. Blaine took the car up to the country, sir,” and she realized that it was only by the merest luck that she saw what she had just seen. If god hadn’t, as they say, dropped everything to make sure that not a single car, not a single truck, not a single taxi, not a single bus happened to be coming down Fifth Avenue at the moment the doorman said Blaine’s name, she would have gone home.
Almost as soon as she decided that the man in the Mercedes couldn’t be Fiore, she knew for an absolute certainty that it was. Too much had happened for this to be anyone else. Blaine’s arrival just as she was getting ready to give up and leave, the window of silence on the street, the doorman’s voice, her unimpeded line of sight into the car—it was all so perfect. It had to be Fiore. She was sure of it.
She walked half a block north, where she could still see the front of the apartment building but wouldn’t be as conspicuous, and called the office on her cell phone. She asked Beryl Ross to run the tag number. “Don’t call me back, just leave the answer on my voice mail,” she said.
Beryl was the only person in the office to whom she wouldn’t have had to explain.
A steady stream of cabs was dropping off a steady stream of visitors at Mount Sinai Hospital, just a block to the north, but she didn’t want to take chances so she hailed one and ordered him to wait. She was ready when Blaine came downstairs.
She would have followed him to the train station if he hadn’t made a stop at Barnes & Noble.
She would have said something to him on the checkout line if he hadn’t come back to say something to her.
She liked the idea that he wasn’t really what she had expected at all.
10
Wally Schliester bought himself a whole set of lightweight polyester suits, cut his hair so short his skull showed, and went to work. According to his business card, he was Frederick Linkletter, Senior Booking Manager and Special Assistant in the Exhibitor Relations Department at the Javits Center, the immense glass-and-steel egg crate of a convention center on Eleventh Avenue, a stone’s throw from where the aircraft carrier Intrepid, bristling with fighter jets, protected the West Side of Manhattan from any and all comers. Only Mel Gottlieb, the Javits Center’s personnel director, knew that Schliester was a federal agent, and Gottlieb wasn’t about to tell anyone because the U.S. Attorney’s Office had made it crystal clear to him that his tax problems would go away if and only if he gave his full cooperation.
Schliester planned to spend the entire summer under cover. Greg Billings asked him to take the assignment and he took it even though he didn’t actually work for Billings in the sense that he didn’t actually work for anyone. They were still waiting to hear who would replace the Cocksucker-in-Chief.
Schliester liked undercover work. It gave him a chance to mingle with people who weren’t cops or agents or lawyers.
When Schliester came back from lunch on his fourth day on the job, he found a skinny man in a shiny suit walking back and forth in the corridor outside his office. Schliester recognized him at once. Gus Benini. One of Chet Fiore’s more energetic lieutenants. Which was hardly a coincidence. In Manhattan, most of the crime that wasn’t random was connected sooner or later to Chet Fiore, who was connected in turn to Gaetano Falcone.
Benini was pacing back and forth like a shuttlecock on automatic pilot when he caught sight of Schliester walking toward him. “Are you Linkletter?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Schliester said.
“Good, good. We gotta talk,” the nervous little man said, reaching for the nearest doorknob. “This your office?”
“Hey, slow it down,” Schliester said, moving the man aside with a subtle body block. He opened the door himself.
The office was state of the art, with a lot of glass and chrome, like the Javits Center itself. “You say we’ve got to talk, that’s fine with me,” Schliester said, slipping out of his suit coat, which he tossed onto a glass table. “Let’s start with you tell me who you are.”
A tape recorder in a supply room in the sub-basement of the Javits Center started to turn. Gogarty grabbed his headset and clamped it over his ears. The recorder was voice-activated.
“I guess you’re new here, you don’t know who I am,” Benini said.
“I guess I’m new here,” Schliester agreed.
He walked over to the teak-and-chrome bar, a contraption so elaborate that when Schliester first saw it he was reasonably certain that it hadn’t even been invented yet. “Something to drink?” he asked. The bar had come into the Center with a computer show and hadn’t left when the show did. He pushed a button set into the polished wood at the side of the bar, and a wooden door rolled open without making a sound. The top shelf, which held eight liquor bottles, slid forward. Schliester picked up a whiskey bottle. A tray produced a pair of highball glasses. An ice bucket came up out of the countertop.
“What the fuck did you just do?” Benini asked, bringing the scent of garlic and marinara sauce right up by Schliester’s shoulder.
“When you pick up a bottle, it gives you the right kind of glasses.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Schliester took the glasses off the tray, which withdrew into the innards of the machine. “Try it,” he said.
Benini picked up a gin bottle as gingerly as if he thought it would electrocute him. The bar answered with a pair of martini glasses. “Ha!” Benini scoffed. “What if I wanted a gin and tonic?”
“You program it for what you like.”
“What if there was four of us?”
“There aren’t.”
“It knows?”
“It knows.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Schliester poured himself a drink. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
Benini was studying the machine, wondering what it would do next. “Nah,” he said. “My stomach’s fucked.
I know a guy would love to have one of these.”
“They don’t make them yet,” Schliester said.
Benini shrugged, as though that didn’t matter. “They made this one,” he said.
“They made this one,” Schliester agreed. “You were about to tell me who you are.”
The ice bucket sank back into the countertop after Schliester dropped a pair of ice cubes into his glass. The shelf of bottles backed into the bar and the teak door slid closed.
Schliester moved around behind his desk and put his feet up. Benini started to explain something about an “arrangement” that had been worked out when the Javits Center first went up. “Before that, in fact,” Benini said. “There was an arrangement on the construction.”
“I like to know who I’m talking to,” Schliester said.
“You’re talking to me.”
“And that would be—?”
“What, do you keep a diary or something?”
“Do you know my name?”
“Linkletter. Right?”
Schliester threw up his hands, as though that settled it.
Benini let out a long slow breath. “All right,” he said, “it’s Gus Benini.”
“You didn’t tell me who you’re with?”
“I’m with you, asshole. Now listen and don’t ask so fucking many questions.”
For the next few minutes Benini walked back and forth in front of Schliester’s desk, explaining the “arrangement.” Schliester would give him a list of exhibitors. Benini would take it to his people and come back with the names of the ones he wanted contact information on. Schliester started to ask what he was going to contact them about but cut himself off. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want so many fucking questions. Will there be a question period at the end?”
Benini stopped walking. “You’re being funny, right?” he said.
It was just about the end of the day when Elaine heard that Greg Billings was being given Franciscan’s job. She charged into his office ready for war, only to find his desk bare and his file cabinets already empty. Christ, how long had he known? How long had everyone known? And why was she just finding out now? She was furious. What made the insult even more galling was that Billings was the worst possible choice. He was a machine, and not even an interesting machine.
She reversed field, picking up speed as she neared what had been Franciscan’s office. She heard voices and laughter, but they didn’t slow her down, even though she realized a split second before she hit the door that she was walking in on a full-fledged party to which she hadn’t been invited. A victory celebration complete with a plate full of misshapen stuffed mushrooms and stalks of celery in a glass and a pasty-looking dip that strikingly resembled dog vomit. Champagne. And beer of course, because this was really a beer-drinking crowd even though the champagne had to be there for show. A woman—Billings’s wife—was the source of at least fifty percent of the laughter. Her head was tipped back, that’s how hard she was laughing, but it came down because the other half of the laughter in the room stopped when the door opened. Silence spread through the room like drizzle.
“Elaine,” Billings said through his biggest smile, “I’m so glad you could come.”
Not so glad that you invited me, she thought. She said, “We’ve got to talk.”
“Oh, we’re going to talk. You’re an important part of the team. Have you met my wife? Her name’s Elaine, too.”
The wife was walking toward them. She had two glasses of champagne in her hands, and she held one out for Elaine as her husband introduced them, telling the missus that Elaine was “probably the best attorney in the office.”
Elaine took the glass and said, “You must be very proud of him.” Even before Mrs. Billings could acknowledge how proud she was, Elaine said, “Not going to talk, Greg. Talk now.”
Billings more or less waved his arm around and said, “Well, not now now. I’ve got this little party going.”
“They’ll do fine without you for a couple minutes.”
He didn’t want a scene, so he followed her out the door into the empty corridor. It was no wonder, he thought, that just about no one in the office liked her. Pedal to the metal, yeah, sure, but absolutely no sense of priorities. None.
“I want the Fiore case,” she said.
He didn’t see any reason why not but he didn’t think being pushed into something one minute into his new job was the way to start, so he said, “Well, we’ve got the whole roster to work out.”
What he didn’t say was that he hadn’t even considered inviting her to join his Organized Crime unit.
“Work it out however you have to work it out,” she said. “I want that case.”
He could hear laughter from behind the door and wanted to go back to his own party. “There’s not much there, Elaine,” he said.
She didn’t say anything, which made him think he was supposed to. He thought a second, and then smiled. He had very small teeth, very neat and very white with little spaces between them.
“Oh,” he said, justifying the smile, “you’re thinking about that banker thing. It’s just a rumor, you know. Nothing was ever connected.”
Elaine didn’t tell him that she had watched Jeffrey Blaine get dropped off at his Fifth Avenue apartment by Chet Fiore. And she didn’t tell him she had drinks with Jeffrey Blaine. It was none of his business right now. When she made the case, he’d hear all about it.
“Yes or no?” she said.
“Whatever,” he said. “Fine.”
He invited her back into the party but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she went back to her office and sent word to Schliester and Gogarty that she wanted to see them in the morning. Then she read all the reports the two of them had filed about Schliester’s undercover work at the Javits Center and listened to all the tapes. It was a lot of wasted paper and a lot of wasted hours.
At Layne Bentley the partners thought of themselves not just as bankers but as gentlemen bankers. They kept gentlemen’s hours. They were home for dinner every evening. Lately, though, Jeffrey found himself too restless to stay home after dinner. Jessica went to her room; Phyllis read magazines. He announced that he had work to do and went back to the office.
The hum of voices the minute he stepped off the elevator surprised him. It sounded nothing like what he was used to in the daytime, shrill and edgy, like a machine asking for oil. He followed the sound to the trading floor, where he found eight or ten of the firm’s young traders working their clients on the phones. They led an almost secret existence in the firm, where they were routinely ignored, a sort of upstairs relative one doesn’t talk about. None of them had ever made partner, and none ever would. They weren’t gentlemen. It was that simple.
The traders knew it, but they were willing to come, young men out of Wharton and Harvard and everywhere else, because Layne Bentley had a name that meant something. They stayed only long enough to get their feet wet and develop a client list. The constant turnover, with each year’s class cruder and louder, pushier and more demanding than the last, deepened the rift between the bankers and the traders, who formed an exclusive little club within the firm that boasted as its insignia their state-of-the-art running shoes and the designer jogging suits that they wore for a couple of quick miles around Battery Park City before they came back to the office, filling the air with the smell of their sweat, their takeout Chinese food, and the imported beer they drank straight from the bottle while they made obscene amounts of money chatting up far-flung clients so important they couldn’t be interrupted during the business day even for the possibility of making one or two million dollars.
They commandeered the office’s music system, which during business hours secreted standards and classics at barely audible levels but at night blared out new rock and old jazz, Green Day and Saturday Supercade, Bix Beiderbecke and Illinois Jacquet. Although the clients they screamed at on their phones were most often men in their fifties and sixties with conservative tastes, youth had so completely
replaced probity as the quality one looked for in an investment counselor that the blazing thrum of the music, the occasional triumphant shout or roar of laughter in the background, served as a kind of auditory verification that these young men were offering the latest in cutting-edge financial instruments. To the extent that the young traders had social lives at all, they had them here in the office, mostly in the locker-room camaraderie they shared among themselves but also, more than occasionally, in the company of well-dressed, well-bred young ladies who used chopsticks or their fingers to pick morsels of Chinese food from the cartons, nodded their heads to the beat of the music, their heavily made-up faces wearing looks of cultivated, sensual boredom while their menfolk did business. There is not and never has been an aphrodisiac more powerful than closing an eleven-million-dollar deal.
The first night Jeffrey came by, one of the young men held up a carton of Chinese food, gesturing as he talked on his headset. Jeffrey declined the offer, but stood in the doorway for a moment and watched, picking up shards of conversations from around the room. He found he had more difficulty walking away than he might have expected. The young traders didn’t offend his sense of himself as he imagined they would. They attacked the world with the head-down, reckless, and calculated ferocity of a ballplayer stretching a single into a double.
They were gone by ten-thirty. From his office, Jeffrey heard the abrupt end of the music and the laughter of voices on their way out. A few minutes later he began to hear the muted clatter of the night cleaning staff, an army of black and Irish ladies in nurses’ shoes who would put the rooms back to order, dousing them with deodorizers that by morning would replace the smells of sweat, beer, and Cuban cigars with the gentler aromas of glades and forests. Except for the cleaning ladies, Jeffrey had the entire suite of offices to himself. It was a pleasant, domestic sort of feeling. In the quiet hours of the night, any man becomes something of a Magellan, staking a claim to all the unpeopled spaces his eyes come to rest on.
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