But now, faced with the man and the moment, he held back, looking across the table at Fiore with a bitterness and resentment he hadn’t realized he felt. Chet Fiore had studied him, analyzed him, run his experiments, summoning him here, summoning him there, testing, probing, driving a pin through his body as though he were a curious insect fated by his rarity to be skewered to a velveted board. At that moment it dawned on Jeffrey Blaine with startling clarity that Fiore had been far too ready to exploit the chaos at Jessica’s party. He had to have known in advance that sooner or later the girls would be taken upstairs, that sooner or later one of them would scream, that the boys were to do whatever it took to produce the scream that would bring Chet Fiore onto the scene to restore order. He didn’t see how Fiore could have done it, but he was sure it had been done.
“I can’t help you,” Jeffrey said, setting his napkin on the table. “I’m not a broker. We don’t do stock trading.”
He started to get to his feet.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Fiore said. “Let’s think about this a little more.”
“I don’t have to think about it,” Jeffrey said.
Fiore’s expression didn’t change.
“All right,” Jeffrey said, “let me give you a crash course in reality. How much money do you envision this thing producing?”
Fiore figured that in a couple of years he would like to be clearing forty million a year.
“You don’t have to lowball me, Mr. Fiore,” Jeffrey said. “You wouldn’t be going through all this if you were just talking about forty million. But that’s fine, let’s take your number. You want forty million dollars to come down the laundry chute. Okay. If I had a crystal ball I could turn a hundred dollars into a thousand by lunch, ten thousand by the next day. It snowballs. Forty million is no problem. In fact, I thought you’d say more. The point is in six months I could have any number you want.”
“With a crystal ball.”
“Exactly. But it wouldn’t help anyway. You can make anything happen on paper as long as you keep those papers in your pocket. But you don’t want them in your pocket. You want records. And the SEC monitors records. When a hundred dollars turns into forty million they investigate because that’s a tip-off that the wheel is rigged. They call it insider trading. You’re trying to be discreet but you’re running a red flag up their pole. A five hundred percent return on investment won’t wash. Even a hundred. Maybe once or twice, but not on a steady basis. You could get away with a fifty percent return but that means your initial investment has to be around eighty million. I take it you don’t want to do that.”
“I’d have to tell them where the eighty million came from,” Fiore said.
“Which defeats the whole purpose.”
Fiore didn’t change expression. But he reached out a hand and grabbed Jeffrey’s wrist so hard it made Jeffrey’s eyes water. His fingers probed in among the tendons as though he were trying to pry them loose from the bone. “Listen to me,” he said softly, leaning forward, not relaxing his grip, “I don’t want to hear the problems. You’re smart. Figure something out. I’m sure you can do it.”
He smiled pleasantly as he released Jeffrey’s wrist, as though he hadn’t realized how forceful his grip had been.
Jeffrey returned the smile, trying to ignore the force he had just been shown, willing at least for the moment to accept the smile at face value. “There’s nothing to figure out,” he said. “You figured it out already and it doesn’t work.”
“Make it work.”
“How?”
“I don’t know that,” Fiore shrugged. “But I know you can do it. Take a couple days if you have to. Get back to me.”
Jeffrey shook his head. “It can’t be done,” he said. “If you want to tell Noel Garver to publish his damn story, go ahead and tell him. I’m telling you this won’t work.”
Fiore studied him a moment without speaking. He knew that Jeffrey wasn’t bluffing. “You want to be a tough guy,” he said at last, “go ahead. Get out of here.”
He poured himself some tea, as though Jeffrey were gone already.
Jeffrey got to his feet and reached into his pocket for his money. He put two twenties on the table.
“Keep it, genius,” Fiore said. “Dinner’s on me. Give my love to your wife. And your pretty little daughter. When does she get back from the Cape?”
A thousand alarms clanged in Jeffrey’s ears, and the surge of adrenaline that rushed through his body hit him so hard he could hear the pulses in his temples. He leaned forward, his knuckles on the table, his face close to Fiore’s.
“How do you know where my daughter is?” he demanded.
“Was it a secret? I didn’t know that,” Fiore said, smiling again. There was an edge of nastiness to the smile that hadn’t been there before. “I was talking to Eddie,” he said. “You remember Eddie Vincenzo, don’t you?”
“Are you telling me he’s with her?” Jeffrey said, his voice far too loud. Around the dining room, heads turned.
“Hey, she’s in love with him,” Fiore purred, and then, more quietly, confidentially, he said, “Eddie says she’s got a cunt like candy.”
Jeffrey’s left hand flashed out and grabbed a fistful of Fiore’s shirt. His right hand, balled into a fist, pulled back and started forward. But before he knew what happened, two men from the next table—they must have been Fiore’s men but he hadn’t noticed them before—grabbed his arms, yanked them down, pulled them behind him with expert and excruciating pressure.
Waiters rushed forward from different parts of the room.
“It’s awright, it’s no problem,” one of Fiore’s men growled.
The waiters held their ground.
“He’s okay, he’s not going to be trouble,” Fiore said levelly.
The two men let go of Jeffrey’s arms.
“You tell that slimy bastard to leave my daughter alone,” Jeffrey said in a voice that carried through the whole dining room.
“Hey,” Fiore grinned, “right now it’s the other way around. She can’t get enough of him. But maybe he’ll drop her. Sometimes that happens, you know. Let’s see how things work out with you and me.”
In the mornings, the Goldschmidt home in Truro lay shrouded in a fog that hung over the ocean like a blanket. This was Amy Laidlaw’s time on the beach, when the whole gray world was all her own, the sky the same gray as the water, the same gray as the sand. In a few hours the sun would burn through the fog, and every pebble on the beach would cast a stark shadow. By then she’d be back in her room, waiting sleeplessly for the other girls to get up.
The hardest part of being here was that Jessica and Renée and Grace had all made a pact to ignore the difference between who Amy was and who she had become, treating her with the elaborate and hideous kindness people lavish on terminal invalids. They would coax an almost hysterical enthusiasm into their voices as they suggested something to do for an hour or two of an afternoon. Even a walk into town to the little shop that made its own ice cream elicited shrieks of enthusiasm that would have done a roomful of preschoolers proud. They sensed her withdrawal, the unfathomable aloneness that grew inside her like a tumor, and they were intent on seeing her through it as though it were something that would go away.
There was a line from Hamlet she couldn’t get out of her mind. A month and a half ago they put on the play at Collegiate, with Brearley girls playing the female parts. O how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Justin Riggan played Hamlet beautifully. The way he said that line just broke your heart.
Weary. Stale. Flat. And unprofitable. That was what she thought as she lay in bed every morning waiting for Renée and Grace and Jessica to get up. A set of unconnected adjectives digging into her brain like pebbles in a shoe.
The worst part was that her friends were all squabbling among themselves. They’d go off out of earshot, and then they’d come back wearing tense, artificial smiles, exactly like her parents fighting with each o
ther before the divorce and pretending they weren’t. Amy knew perfectly well what the girls were arguing about. Eddie Vincenzo had followed Jessica to the Cape, and she was sneaking off just about every night to see him. These few weeks were supposed to have been just the girls together and they resented it. They’re probably telling Jessica that she’s being disloyal to me, Amy thought. That having Eddie around was a reminder of what happened.
In fact, Amy didn’t have a problem with Eddie, or even with Georgie, whom she was never going to see again anyway. Her problem was with her father, who made her feel like a total tramp. He hadn’t even been going to let her come to Renée’s house on the Cape at all. She heard her mother fighting with him on the phone about it. When she picked up the extension phone in the TV room, they kept talking about her even though they knew she was on the line. Her father said she shouldn’t be allowed to go off unsupervised. Her mother didn’t even defend her. She just said she wouldn’t be unsupervised because Renée’s mother would be there, and her father said, Renée. Right. That’s the one that was giving her boyfriend a blow job in the next room. Amy hung up the phone and cried. She knew that her father would win because he always won. She was going to have to spend the whole summer locked up in that awful house in Maine with him, which would be like prison except that in prison there were other prisoners.
About two days later some guy showed up at the apartment and made her mother sign for something that turned out to be a subpoena, and Amy’s mother got on the phone with her father in his office, and when she didn’t come out for a couple hours Amy went into her room and found her lying on the bed crying. Her father was going to go into court and take away custody because she was an unfit mother.
The next morning Amy went down to his office without calling him first. He made her wait almost two hours outside his office. His secretary obviously didn’t know what was going on because she kept asking questions about what Amy was going to do in the summer and whether she was excited about graduating and starting college in the fall. This was a week or so before graduation. She talked the way someone talks to a kid who is going to Disney World for the first time.
Amy finally got to go in and told her father she was there to suggest a compromise. She said she would spend the summer with him in Maine the way he wanted if he would let her have a couple of weeks with her friends on the Cape. It was the last time they’d have a chance to be together because they were all going to different colleges.
The only reason he accepted the offer was because he checked his calendar and found some things he didn’t want to give up in the first two weeks in June.
Once they were all together on the Cape, it wasn’t anywhere near as wonderful as it was supposed to be. And then one night Renée’s mother happened to call them on the car phone while they were out and somehow she figured out that Jessica wasn’t with them.
Clarissa Goldschmidt taught sociology at NYU and had written an important book about adolescent boys. She was short and she had thick legs and a voice that sounded like something being dragged behind a car. She waited until all four girls were down for breakfast the next morning, and when she served the first order of pancakes, she said, “I want one of you to tell me what is going on.”
The girls looked at each other as though they were baffled by the question.
Mrs. Goldschmidt said, “Maybe you need a couple minutes to think about it. That might be a productive use of your time.”
She went back to the stove and poured some more batter onto the griddle. When she came back to the table with more pancakes on the platter, she sat down and said, “Let’s put our cards on the table. I’ll go first if that makes it easier for you. Last night I called you in the car. You said you were on your way home. When I said something to Jessica, it was instantly apparent that Jessica was not with you.”
Jessica didn’t wait for the other girls to lie for her. “I was with my boyfriend,” she said levelly.
“Who is?”
“His name is Eddie. You don’t know him.”
“No, but I’ll wager your parents do.”
Amy felt her nerves tighten, like someone twisting another turn into a rope. She felt sorry for Jessica.
When no one said anything, Mrs. Goldschmidt said, “It’s certainly none of my business whether you have a boyfriend, Jessica. I don’t really want to be a chaperon, but I can’t help thinking that if you need these three sidekicks covering for you while you run off to see this particular boyfriend, then it’s not something I want to permit on my watch.”
She asked Jessica to give her word not to see him again while she was staying at the house.
Jessica’s eyes went down to the plate in front of her for just a second, and then she looked up and her eyes were fixed on Mrs. Goldschmidt’s eyes with so much intensity it was almost scary. It wasn’t anger and it wasn’t resentment and it certainly wasn’t hatred. It was just intensity, stripped bare of any content, the way a person can be beautiful without having, say, beautiful eyes or beautiful hair or a beautiful mouth. And this was beautiful, in a way, Amy thought. She wished that just once she could look at her father the way Jessica was looking at Mrs. Goldschmidt now, and she knew that she’d never be able to do it.
“I can’t give you my word about that,” Jessica said.
The upshot was that the four of them were grounded, but late that afternoon, while Mrs. Goldschmidt was working on a paper in the back room she used as a study, Jessica went out the front door and walked into town by herself. She didn’t tell any of them she was going.
For some reason she didn’t understand, Amy started to cry when she heard Renée tell Grace that Jessica was gone. She felt as though she didn’t have a friend anywhere. She knew Jessica and she understood Jessica. Jessica was like a sister to her. She didn’t know these other two girls at all. Not like that.
It was crazy, but she couldn’t stop crying, and they went off and whispered together and then they left the room. She knew they were going to get Renée’s mother, so she ran down to the beach because she didn’t want to face Mrs. Goldschmidt right now.
She sat out on the beach with her knees pulled up to her chin, and she managed to make herself stop crying. She was just watching her shadow move on the sand, as though she were the hour hand of a sundial, when Grace and Renée came and sat next to her. They told her they called her mother because they were worried about her and they got her answering machine. So they called her father.
Which was exactly the same thing that happened the night of the party.
She ran into the water and they had to pull her out, and they practically had to sit on her on the sand.
They told her her father was coming for her, but she knew that wasn’t true. He was sending someone.
It would serve him right, she thought, if she jumped out of the car while it was going over the Sagamore Bridge. Which is what separates the Cape from everywhere else.
As soon as he left the restaurant, Jeffrey walked around the corner onto Mott Street. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Fiore’s goons weren’t following him and then he took out his cell phone and called home.
“Where have you been?” Phyllis asked immediately.
He could have answered by asking her where she had been for that matter, but he really didn’t care. “Never mind that,” he said. “When’s the last time you talked to Jessica?”
“What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked, instantly alarmed.
“Nothing happened,” he said doggedly. “When did you talk to her?”
“This morning. No, it wasn’t this morning. Yesterday,” she said. “What’s this about, Jeffrey?”
“I’m downtown. I’ll be home in half an hour. Call her and tell her she’s got to come home in the morning. We’ll send her a ticket.”
“I wish you would tell me what this is—”
“Just do it,” Jeffrey said, cutting her off. “I’ll be home in half an hour.”
He could hear her still demanding
an explanation, but he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
He had to walk down to Canal Street to find a cab.
He felt the way he imagined people feel when they learn they have a disease that is going to change the rest of their lives. Not cancer, not something that kills them. Paralysis. Deafness. Blindness. Something like that. He felt no anguish, no pain, just an overwhelming sense of loss. And a numbness that at least for the time being made anger impossible.
Phyllis must have heard the elevator because she opened the front door even before he got there.
“What is this about, Jeffrey?”
He knew it wouldn’t have taken any time at all to answer her but he didn’t. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said instead. “Where’s Carlos?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but hurried straight back to the kitchen and down the corridor behind it to the maid’s room. Carlos lived in the maid’s room. The maid was a day worker who came in the morning and left after dinner.
Phyllis followed him.
He knocked on the door. When Carlos opened it, he was wearing a shirt and tie and was slipping into his jacket. “Sir?” he said.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” Jeffrey said. “I’d like you to call whatever airline flies to the Cape. Order a prepaid ticket for tomorrow morning in Jessica’s name. It will be from Hyannis, I assume. A morning flight, after nine if they can, so she’ll have time to get to the airport. But if it’s got to be earlier than that, then make it earlier.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jeffrey walked back into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of scotch. He was going to need it to fill Phyllis in on all these developments. The two of them had never once mentioned the birthday party after it was over. He had never told her the purpose of Fiore’s visit to Bedford Hills the morning after the party, and she never asked.
He asked her if she wanted a drink.
“I just want a goddamn explanation,” she said. “How long are you going to draw this thing out?”
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