House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  On the Internet it took Jeffrey only a matter of seconds to find a roster of lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. There was only one Elaine. Elaine Lester. The phone book had an E. Lester with an address on West Twenty-third Street. The number put it between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Chelsea. That sounded about right.

  He wasn’t ready to call her yet. It seemed like a big step. But he knew already that he would call. He wrote the address and phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it into his wallet.

  With the computer winking back at him, awaiting his next command, he thought of looking up Chet Fiore to see what he could find out about the man. But that, too, seemed premature right now. Sooner or later Fiore would call, and sooner or later he would get around to asking Jeffrey to serve as his money launderer. Like alchemists looking for the philosopher’s stone, gangsters were always looking for ways to clean money.

  It was an impossible proposition. All money-laundering systems were the same, and they never worked. They didn’t wash the money so much as they ran it through the spin cycle, in the vain hope that if they moved it fast enough and often enough, the trail would become untraceable. But the same technologies that made it possible to fly financial instruments at unprecedented speeds also made tracking the funds a relatively easy job for the authorities.

  The irony, of course, was that venture capital, which was Jeffrey’s field, was precisely the kind of high-risk investment capable of producing windfall profits on a scale that could do an enterprising gangster some good. But only, of course, if one knew the outcomes in advance…

  Jeffrey sprang from his seat as if he’d just been hit with an electric current. He looked around as though he expected to discover he’d been dreaming, then down at his blank yellow notepad, as though it might contain some evidence of this remarkable…what? Insight? Intuition? Money, he realized, travels in dimensions of space and time, like particles in physics, like all material things. Moving it from place to place couldn’t hide it, or hide it sufficiently. But moving it in time was another matter entirely.

  He could feel his pulses pounding, so he got up and walked to the window. It was raining now. In Battery Park, a woman bent to let her dog off the leash. It ran across the grass, leaving big paw prints where it matted down the tall wet grass. The word that came to his mind was evanescent.

  There had to be a catch, but he couldn’t see one. Was it possible, he asked himself, that the answer could be so simple?

  The door to his office was open and he hurried to close it, almost as though he were afraid his thoughts might be overheard if he wasn’t careful enough.

  He settled in back at his desk. There were a million details to be worked out, but he knew that the first step had just been taken.

  Wally Schliester had spent the night with a pretty girl from Kansas City who worked for a company that sold frozen steaks through the mail and over the Internet. She loved her job the way his father had loved being a baker and his uncle had loved his hardware store, all of which drove him crazy when he was a kid but didn’t seem so stupid anymore. And she loved Kansas City so much that at one point he almost slipped and told her he was from St. Louis just to prove to her that at least in geographic terms they were on the same page.

  Now, at eight o’clock in the morning, he was sitting with his partner in a corner office in the suite of offices the U.S. attorney maintained in the South Street Seaport complex. A full-rigged schooner dating from the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth, anyway some other century, was moored practically outside their window. Schliester cradled his coffee cup in both hands as he tried to explain to Gogarty how much he liked his job at the Javits Center. The work consisted for the most part of attending trade shows and the endless round of parties that went on before, during, and after them. He got to meet tons of different people from all over the country, and some from foreign countries, which he liked a lot. And he didn’t have to get in their faces or bang them around, which was a part of police work he had never very much enjoyed. In another life he wouldn’t have half minded doing something like this for a living.

  Gogarty thought he was crazy. “Fine,” he said. “Put in your papers if that’s what you want. I’d go out of my goddamned mind with the fucking boredom of it.”

  “They practically throw broads at me just about every night,” Schliester said. “How is that boring?”

  Gogarty crossed his legs and put them up on the desk. With Gogarty this always signaled surrender in an argument. “Yeah well maybe that part’s all right,” he said. “The broads.” And then he quickly added, “But I’ll bet even that wears after a while.”

  The office door opened and Elaine Lester said, “What wears after a while?”

  She had on one of those tailored suits that make a woman look like a man if she doesn’t have the body for it. Elaine looked like a woman.

  “Getting laid,” Gogarty said.

  Cops were always doing that, she had noticed. If you wanted to work with them, they made a point of treating you like one of the boys, only more so.

  “I’ll bet it does,” she said. “Let’s get serious.”

  She put her briefcase down on the desk. Schliester liked the way she looked from the back. So he stood up and said, “Good morning.”

  The reason he stood up was to show up his partner, who had only enough manners to take his feet off the desk.

  Gogarty said, “Am I correct in assuming, since you ordered us to be here this morning, that you’re taking over the case?”

  Schliester said, “Congratulations,” and offered his hand. She took it. Her skin was cool, her handshake firm, with none of the Dyke Death Grip so many women practiced.

  “I’m taking over the operation,” she corrected. “So far I don’t see that there’s a case.”

  Gogarty turned in his seat, his eyes just about level with her breasts. “Is that any way to say hello?” he asked.

  “I didn’t come here to say hello,” Elaine Lester said. “I came here to find out what the hell you’re doing with all the taxpayers’ money you’re using.”

  Gogarty stood up. He couldn’t put himself on an equal footing with a woman when her tits were in his face. “Hey, what do you think?” he said. “You say hi to a guy like Gus Benini and right away he opens up a vein? This is a smart cookie, this isn’t the Oprah show.”

  “No,” she said. “It sounds more like Howard Stern. How many hours of Mr. Schliester’s heavy breathing and Mr. Schliester pouring drinks for young ladies am I going to have to listen to?”

  Schliester actually blushed. Of course he knew that everything said in his office at the Javits Center was taped, but sometimes in the heat of battle he forgot.

  Gogarty said, “That’s the very aspect of this investigation my partner and I were discussing when you came in. Gets you kind of horny listening to it, doesn’t it? I know it does me.”

  “Something tells me you think that’s funny,” she said.

  He said, “Something tells me you piss standing up.”

  Schliester put himself between the two of them before she could say anything. “All right, all right,” he said. “This isn’t going to work this way, so why don’t we just pretend nobody said anything yet. Hi, I’m Wally Schliester. You must be Deputy United States Attorney Elaine Lester. I hear we’re going to be working together.”

  She smiled. Not a bad smile.

  “Tell me what you know about Jeffrey Blaine,” she said.

  Both of them looked at her like she had just dropped down out of the sky.

  “He bought me a drink,” she said. “I’ll bet you’d like to know why.”

  The end of May brought Jessica’s graduation from Brearley. Jeffrey sent his parents airline tickets, but he had to send Martin to meet their flight. He would have preferred for them to arrive in the evening, when he could have picked them up himself, but his mother came up with one excuse after another for not wanting to leave home “at all hours,” so Ma
rtin ended up standing at the baggage claim area with a sign in his hands. He brought them back to the apartment, where they found a terse note from their daughter-in-law. I’ve got committee meetings all afternoon. But make yourselves at home. Irena will fix whatever you want, it said.

  Gilbert Blaine wandered around the apartment with his hands in his pockets. “Are you sure this is where he lived before?” he asked.

  They hadn’t been to New York in almost ten years. They saw their son once or twice a year, usually for Christmas and a weekend in the summer, always in Massachusetts, because the senior Blaines were disinclined to travel. If there had been any way their granddaughter’s graduation could have been brought to them, they would have preferred it. Their lives were uneventful by design and had always been that way. The trenches were simply dug deeper now that Gilbert was retired. Twice Jeffrey had tried to send them on trips, one of them to England on the occasion of their fortieth wedding anniversary, and both times they came up with excuses not to go. The last time they were in New York, Jessica was in the third grade.

  “She had it all remodeled,” Winifred Blaine said. “Heaven knows I can’t see the difference.”

  She thus managed, in a single sentence, to criticize her daughter-in-law for her extravagance, her husband for making too much of it, and her son for permitting it. It was what Jessica, if she had been there to hear it, would have called “Grandma’s trifecta.” The cause of her annoyance was less the remodeling than the fact that no one met them at the airport—a colored chauffeur certainly didn’t count—compounded by the fact that no one was home when they got there. It didn’t seem too much to expect that for one day in the year, in fact one day in practically ten years, her daughter-in-law could give up whatever it was she ran around doing all the time. Winifred dramatized her irritation by declining the lunch the maid offered.

  Carlos showed them to their room, where Winifred busied herself unpacking. It seemed odd to her that none of the servants was American. There were certainly plenty of Americans who could use a good job with a good family.

  Gilbert wandered around inspecting Jeffrey’s bookshelves, where he found a book he could settle in with on the straight-backed chair in the guest bedroom while his wife went about her business. He sat with both feet flat on the floor, the book held high in front of his chest because his eyes weren’t what they used to be. He was a slender, even stringy man with rigidly erect posture, pale eyes, and pale skin. The resemblance to his son was striking, if one allowed for the addition of thirty pounds and the subtraction of thirty years, although neither Jeffrey nor his father professed to be able to see it.

  The first one home was Jessica, who hurried straight to their room when Carlos told her they were there. She hugged her grandparents, who congratulated her profusely on her graduation. When she heard that they hadn’t eaten she made them accompany her to the kitchen because, she said, she was starved. They glowed under her attention, like children, and the sour mood of the earlier part of the day had utterly vanished by the time Phyllis got home, gushing with apologies. She took them on a tour of the apartment, pointing out walls that no longer existed as though she expected them to remember the way it used to look.

  “That’s what I thought,” Gilbert said. “I said that, didn’t I, dear? I said, This isn’t the same place they used to live.”

  “Of course it is,” Winifred said. “That’s what she’s telling you.”

  “But it’s different, that’s my point.”

  Winifred shook her head as though her husband were being incredibly obtuse. “They took down some walls. It’s the same place.”

  Gilbert fell silent.

  A little later Martin drove them to a seafood restaurant in SoHo, where they met Jeffrey. He shook hands with his father and gave his mother the kind of hug one gives strangers. He knew enough not to offer more. Even at this, Winifred stiffened as though an embrace were something to be endured. Jessica looked away.

  The small talk at dinner was mostly about Jessica, an endless and embarrassing stream of vacant reiterations on the theme of the pride everyone took in her. Graduating near the top of her class. Yale in the fall. Such a remarkable child. She did her best to stay gracious and to avoid grimacing. Meanwhile Martin made his way to the airport and back, where he picked up Phyllis’s mother, who had flown in from Chicago for the graduation. She was able to join them at the restaurant in time for dessert.

  Over brandies back at the apartment, Gilbert questioned Jeffrey closely about business matters. There was, to his mind, altogether too much speculation. It was unhealthy, and sooner or later a price would have to be paid.

  “Investment is speculation,” Jeffrey said.

  “That’s hardly the point, son,” Gilbert said. “Things are out of control. That should be obvious, don’t you think?”

  Before Jeffrey could answer, Winifred Blaine said, “I’m sure Jeffrey knows what he’s doing, dear,” and then turned to Mrs. Armstrong. “My husband fancies he knows a great deal about these things,” she said.

  It sent a chill through the room, as though somehow the whole history of a long and unpleasant marriage had just been told in a single sentence, as though a lifetime of adverse judgments had been condensed into a single gratuitous sneer. Gilbert Blaine, who had been standing by the fireplace, settled into a chair, looking frail and diminished, although nothing in his posture changed.

  “No, you’re right,” Jeffrey said, addressing his father, trying to salvage something of the moment. “There is a kind of recklessness.”

  Winifred smiled, as though she were touched by the gesture. “He always sides with his father,” she said. “Thank heavens we live two hundred miles away. I don’t imagine Jeffrey would have done so well for himself if he had to contend with his father’s advice on an everyday basis.”

  Jessica got to her feet. “I have a couple calls to make,” she said, and walked out of the room. She hated seeing her grandfather put down like that and she resented her father for not doing anything about it.

  Mrs. Armstrong said, “That’s such a lovely fireplace. It must be wonderful in the winter.”

  Everyone agreed it was lovely, and wonderful in the winter. It was a good note to end the evening on.

  In the bedroom, Phyllis said, “I feel sorry for your father. Was it always this bad?”

  It didn’t seem to her it was.

  “It was worse,” Jeffrey said. “There used to be something at stake.” Then he told her he had left some unfinished work at the office.

  He thought of stopping by Jessica’s room on the way out. What could I have done? he would have asked. But he knew it was pointless.

  For as long as Jeffrey could remember, he had watched his mother grind his father into particles, and the bitterest aspect of it all, which Jeffrey recognized with a clarity that made delusion impossible, was that Jeffrey himself, simply by the act of being born, was the hammer she used to bludgeon the poor, meaningless man into something that would have been very like surrender if there had been anything worth surrendering. Like a creature in a laboratory, Jeffrey was designed to be everything his father was not. Every dollar Jeffrey made was one more confirmation of Gilbert Blaine’s failure.

  The doorman hailed him a cab, and Jeffrey gave the driver the address of the office. After a few blocks he asked the man to pull over at the next corner with a payphone. He had his cell phone with him but he didn’t want to use it.

  Out on the street he took the slip of paper from his wallet and then checked his watch. It was after eleven, almost midnight in fact. He dialed the number anyway.

  He knew it was the right E. Lester the moment she answered.

  11

  Even before the doorbell rang, Elaine Lester felt that something strange, even dangerous, was about to happen. She wasn’t quite sure why she felt like that, but the feeling was as vivid as the touch of a cold hand on her skin. This was part of her investigation, wasn’t it? That’s why she initiated the contact. And cleverly, too
.

  She leaned back against the door frame of her bedroom closet, holding the slacks she had just selected. She smiled, a contented smile—if she’d been asked to describe it she might have said mischievous. She had been like that as a child, always in trouble without ever being actually bad. It was odd that the distinct tremble of fear she felt now managed to coexist, side by side, with this comfortable feeling that was almost like serenity, as though one could be hot and cold at the same time.

  She remembered, for the first time in years, that her mother used to say exactly that. She swam before the end of April in the pond behind their house, lap after lap in the frigid water, and afterward, when little Elaine, in her long blue wool coat, held up the towel for her mother to wrap herself in, she would ask, Aren’t you cold? and her mother would laugh and say, Well, yes, cold from the water. But hot from the swimming. You ought to try it.

  She never did. Maybe she was trying it now.

  Slacks, she decided, were best. Not open to ambiguity. Caution was the watchword of the hour. The man was, after all, the subject of an investigation being conducted by her office. Not that anyone was doing any investigating. Certainly not Schliester and Gogarty. They should have jumped at the chance after the way they carried on when her perverted predecessor shut down their investigation into the Wall Street–Mulberry Street connection. But no. They were more interested in riding down the dead-end street of Gus Benini’s shenanigans at the Javits Center.

  Fine. She was conducting her own investigation. Some drinks, a conversation, and now a midnight phone call from Jeffrey Blaine. What could it mean? Her lawyer’s mind ran through the possibilities. Consistent with innocence, consistent with guilt. Cottoning up to the U.S. attorney, whose office might someday be looking to prosecute? Or just a guy with a bad marriage?

  She changed from one blouse to another and then back again. She put on shoes and then took them off because it seemed more natural to be barefoot alone in your own apartment after midnight.