For almost two weeks after the funeral she stayed in the house alone, except for the servants. Some people from the company came for the first few days, but when she made it clear to them that she wanted nothing, they stopped coming. Day by day the silence in the house grew until it was like the silence of the desert, simply a natural fact. She took her meals by herself, entering the dining room with a place already set and the food already served. Except for the fact that the food was eaten, no one in the house would have known she had come out of her room.
When she felt she was ready, she sent for Miguel and asked him to book her a flight to New York. She wanted to meet this man Blaine again. She wanted to rip his heart out with her hands.
When she got to Blaine’s office, the obnoxious girl at the front desk told her to wait please and someone would be out for her and she agreed to wait, even though she should have said, No. This man Blaine, this banker, this partner in your company, killed my husband and I do not choose to wait.
She wore a short black skirt and a black silk blouse with no jewelry. Her stockings were so fine that the rich earth color of her skin shone through them, glowing the way her hair glowed. Her face was expressionless, with the abstracted look of an Old World Madonna, distant and self-contained. Her hands were knotted in her lap.
A few moments later she was in an office that one was supposed to think of as a living room, as though this woman who was in reality the man’s secretary was to be thought of as his wife and there would be wine and canapés and conversation with interesting guests until dinnertime. It was a lie, this office that pretended not to be an office, and she despised it, and so she declined the young woman’s offer of something to drink.
The young woman left. From beyond the door Rachel heard telephones ringing, a strange and sterile chirping as though the machines wished to conceal the fact that they were telephones.
Her strength and the bitterness that fueled it blazed in her heart the moment Jeffrey Blaine stepped through the door. “Mrs. Bolling,” he said, striding toward her across the muted patterns of the carpet, “I’m so sorry. I would have come.”
“Cocksucker pig,” she hissed, and would have spat if he were closer.
Jeffrey stopped in his tracks, shocked, momentarily off balance. He had no idea how much she knew, which made it all the more imperative that he be careful. She blamed him for her husband’s death. That much was clear. Nothing further.
He reached out a hand toward her and kept his voice smooth. “You’d better sit down, Mrs. Bolling,” he said.
She remained standing. “My husband is dead,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“Strychnine,” she said. “Did you think nobody would know this?”
The color fled from his face, and even his eyes seemed to dim. His lips were parted, slackly, and for this reason the moment seemed to shock her as much as it did him. Was it possible he hadn’t known about the strychnine? She could see in his face that this was so. She could see it in his confusion. And this confused her because she would have sworn he knew. Desperately, she wanted Jeffrey Blaine to have known, because if he hadn’t known, then there was no way for her to keep her hatred intact.
“It happened exactly the way you showed him it would happen,” she said.
In his mind he could hear Fiore’s phone call to the drug dealer, could hear again that strange coded language Fiore spoke. Fiore made the call and that ugly South American made the delivery. Jeffrey knew almost nothing about how drugs worked and found himself wondering how quickly one knows if one has taken a poisoned dose of cocaine. Or if one knows at all. The answer mattered only to the extent that it mattered whether or not Clint Bolling knew, in his last conscious minutes, that he was being murdered.
“Sit down,” he ordered in a tone that left her no choice.
She dropped back onto the sofa. He moved a chair, close enough already, even closer and sat facing her.
“If your husband died from poisoned cocaine,” he said, “that’s because he used cocaine. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Why did you come to our house?” she asked. He could hear the confusion in her voice. “What were you doing with my husband?”
“I handle some of his investments.”
“It was something illegal,” she protested. “He didn’t want to do it. He wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t threatened him.”
“I imagine you believe that, Mrs. Bolling. I don’t think anyone else will.”
“I’m not going to the police, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” she said.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Jeffrey said, and she knew that he wasn’t.
Her lips trembled. His assurance was so complete, his earnestness so convincing, that she found herself doubting everything. Jeffrey watched as tears formed in her eyes and began to roll slowly down her cheeks, leaving tracks the way raindrops leave tracks on a dirty window.
He let her sit for as long as she felt like sitting, neither of them speaking. When she stood to go, he walked her as far as the elevator and would have accompanied her downstairs if she hadn’t asked him not to. She said she had a car waiting.
Before returning to his office, he took a detour to the computer section. Gabriel Enriquez was by himself, so Jeffrey was free to get right to the point. He asked the young man to familiarize himself with the Bolling account and to learn as much as he could about Bolling’s finances. “I want you to fly out to Oklahoma City next week,” he said. “See what help you can be to the widow.”
He went back to his office and closed the door after telling Jennifer he wasn’t to be disturbed. He unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, which was deep enough for file folders, the only drawer of the desk equipped with a lock. He took out his notes on the Bolling transactions. These were his own copies of the instructions he hand-delivered to Gabriel Enriquez, directing the alterations in the accounts. Gabriel always destroyed his copies as soon as he completed the transactions. But Jeffrey kept his. They were the chips he would cash in if it ever became necessary for him to cooperate with an investigation.
He went over them carefully, analyzing each transaction, satisfying himself that there was no trouble Bolling’s widow could make even if she had a mind to. The trail of illicit transactions was so perfectly hidden, covered over by unimpeachable records, that it would have been impossible for anyone, even if they knew what they were looking for, to find anything.
He couldn’t help admiring the perfection of the scheme. Money grew under his hands the way fire spreads in dry leaves. A hundred thousand dollars became two, became four, became eight. Not so neatly as that, of course. He made sure there were no traceable patterns. As Fiore opened a third, a fourth, and a fifth account, Jeffrey made each of them behave in its own way. One would cash out regularly, in spasms of greedy profit taking; another left the gains to multiply; while a third grew fatter and fatter by plowing its profits back into new investments. Sooner or later they all produced checks that wound up on Fiore’s books but in Jeffrey’s pocket.
He formed a series of offshore corporations in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands and let the money drift its way there. There was no hurry. He had hardly even begun to think of the things this money could buy. He remembered a farmhouse in Normandy where he and Phyllis had stayed for an idyllic three weeks when she was pregnant with Jessica. They bicycled across the countryside during the day, and in the evenings the two of them repaired to the immense kitchen, where they cooked preposterous dinners. The baby, they joked, would be born speaking French. He wondered if the house was still standing. It would be nice to own it, he thought, and promised himself he would look into it. And there were a hundred other things like that he could buy, things he had never known he wanted because they weren’t part of the life he had mapped out for himself.
Money, he was discovering, has a dimension he had never so much as suspected. In a strictly literal sense, there was nothing he could buy now that he couldn’t have bought
before. But the money he earned before wasn’t for the sorts of things he was thinking about now. There is a money of the body, which pays for things with which one surrounds oneself, and a money of the heart. And a money of the hidden self.
In the depth of his reverie, the sound of the telephone came at him vaguely, like the nebulous ringing of a phone in a dream. Annoyed at the interruption—he had explicitly told Jennifer to hold his calls—he hurriedly gathered his papers, patted the edges even, and jammed them back into the folder, as quick and furtive as if the phone had eyes. He returned them to the drawer and locked it before he pressed the button on the intercom to put Jennifer on the speaker. “What is it?” he asked sharply, letting his irritation show.
“Your wife’s on the line, Mr. Blaine. She said it’s urgent,” Jennifer said.
He clicked her off and pressed the button for the lighted line. “What?” he said brusquely. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“I’m in the car, I’m on the way down there.” Phyllis’s voice sounded tense, tinged with hysteria. “Jessica was taken to the hospital.”
All of a sudden his skin stung and the muscles of his body tightened under it, as though he had fallen into a cold bath. He grabbed the phone from its cradle, which automatically cut off the speakers. “What happened? What’s the matter?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything,” Phyllis wailed. “I can’t talk now. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
The phone went dead at his ear. He dropped it back into its cradle as he got to his feet. He felt unsteady. Why the hell couldn’t she have told him anything? I can’t talk now, as though her turmoil and confusion were the first issues to be dealt with. His daughter was sick or in an accident, and he had no way of knowing anything until his wife pulled herself together enough to let him in on it.
Jennifer look up, alarmed, when he came out of the office. It was the look on his face. She had never seen him like that.
“My daughter,” he said. “She was taken to the hospital. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”
He hurried down the corridor and pushed through the door into the men’s room. He stood for a moment with both hands on the sink and took a deep breath. In the silence it seemed to him he could hear his heart beating, so he turned on both taps full force to drown out the sound in a rush of noise. Water splashed against the basin and onto his suit.
He slowed the taps and let his hands dangle in the water for a moment, just for the coolness. Then he cupped water into his hands and lowered his face into it. He heard the door open and grabbed a towel off the stack.
“Oh, Jeffrey.” It was Roger Bogard. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “That Didier thing, the leukemia research, they’ve got management problems. The whole thing’s starting to go soft.”
Most of the junior people on the staff called Jeffrey Mr. Blaine even though he had asked them not to. Roger wasn’t one of them.
“It’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve got to go out. Family problem.”
“I’m not sure it can wait,” Roger said. “We could get stuck holding the whole thing.”
He didn’t ask about the family problem. It was as though he hadn’t heard that part. But that was Roger. In fact, that was virtually all of the younger people in the business. Whatever native instincts for personal connection they may or may not have been born with had been trained out of them, and Jeffrey sometimes wondered what the office would be like when these people became the next generation of partners.
“Get together with Elizabeth,” he said. “Work it out. If it’s not going to turn itself around, withdraw the offering. You make the call.”
Roger looked uncomfortable and lowered his head. They made good money, these children; they swaggered around like overwhelmingly important people and wrote up reports that sounded as though they had inside information from god himself. But they ran like mice for a hole whenever real responsibility was thrust at them.
“I think we’d want you to sign off on it before we did anything like that,” Roger said, studying his shoes.
“Well, that’s not one of the options right now, Roger. You make the damn call,” Jeffrey said.
It felt good to let the anger show in his voice. He flung the towel into the hamper as he pulled the door open.
Downstairs, he didn’t have to wait more than two minutes before the car pulled to the curb in front of him. He slid into the back seat next to Phyllis. “All right,” he said, even before Martin had them moving, “tell me exactly what you know. She called?”
“Her roommate.”
“What did she tell you?”
His voice sounded harsh even to himself, but he knew that she was going to have to be walked through the whole thing step by step, debriefed the way astronauts and soldiers are debriefed, or she would leave out things he should know.
Phyllis took a deep breath and held it while she tried to order her mind, sorting out what needed to be said in what sequence. “All right,” she said at last. “She said Jessica was taken to the hospital this morning. I talked to her again after I talked to you, and she talked to the doctor in the meanwhile. She’s not in danger. Stabilized, she said. She couldn’t wake her up this morning and she was having trouble breathing.”
“Do they know why?”
“Barbara thinks she was using drugs.”
Jeffrey didn’t say anything for a long time. He had considered the possibility of drugs as long ago as her disappearance with Eddie Vincenzo. Not because he had any evidence, but because it seemed like the sort of trouble two kids vagabonding around the country were likely to get into. Then, after she came back for Amy’s funeral, in the few short weeks before she left for Yale, she seemed to him both tense and listless, sometimes in alternation, sometimes both at the same time. It made him wonder.
Phyllis said, “It doesn’t make sense. I just can’t imagine Jessica ever using drugs. It’s not like her.”
“Apparently it is,” Jeffrey said.
“Goddamned son-of-a-bitch cocksucking faggot dwarf,” Schliester shouted as he slammed the door and threw Gus Benini against the nearest piece of furniture. Which didn’t even rattle as Benini bounced off it like a Ping-Pong ball, that’s how skinny Benini was. He landed practically in Schliester’s arms.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“What the fuck?” Schliester shot back at him. “You’re asking me what the fuck? I ought to stick that coat rack so far up your ass it comes out your ears.”
Benini actually glanced over to the coat rack, as though he had better get a handle on what it was going to feel like when it went in. “Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”
Schliester stayed right in his face, his hands all over the skinny little man’s grubby suit. “What happened, asshole, is I had cops here.”
“Cops?”
“All over me. They wanted to know about a shakedown. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Benini shook his head like this was the most baffling thing he had ever encountered. “What would they want with you?”
“That’s what I asked them.”
“Yeah?”
“They weren’t answering questions. They were asking them. Seems one of our clients got shaken down. You’re supposed to shake a little harder, pal. You’re supposed to shake hard enough that they don’t dial 911.”
“They say who?”
“The knife guy,” Schliester said.
The “knife guy” manufactured handmade triple-tempered hunting knives in a barn in Wisconsin. He was famous all over the world, and he had a booth at the Javits Center’s hunting and fishing exposition. Actually, the real knife guy had stayed in a hotel room somewhere south of Times Square while Gogarty impersonated him for Benini’s benefit.
Benini looked confused.
“That bastard must have known I gave you his name,” Schliester said. “What the fuck did you tell him?”
“I didn’t t
ell him shit,” Benini said. “What did you tell them?”
“The cops? I told them I didn’t know anything about it. I told them to let me know as soon as they found out anything. You fucked me good. I could lose my job over this.”
Benini walked in little circles around the office. Apparently he was thinking. He stopped walking and said, “Don’t worry about it. They were guessing. They don’t know you’re involved. As long as you don’t tell them anything, we’re all right.”
Schliester looked like he was going to cry, running a complete and instantaneous transformation from anger to fear. He wished Gogarty were there to actually see it instead of just getting the audio from the room bug. “What do you mean all right? I could lose my job,” he wailed.
“They’re guessing, they’re guessing,” Benini tried to reassure him.
“Yeah, but they’re guessing me,” Schliester whined.
Benini was in a hurry to get out of there. He hated whining. It made him sweat all over and tightened up his stomach so that he felt gassy and uncomfortable. “Just keep your mouth shut,” he said, slipping sideways toward the door. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I don’t want you in touch,” Schliester moaned at the door as Benini disappeared through it. “I’m gonna lose my fucking job.”
He walked over to the door and watched Benini, who walked like a rooster, speeding away like a man who had to go to the bathroom bad. Then he closed the door and said, “He’s on the way out. You ready, partner?”
In the van on Eleventh Avenue Gogarty received the message. He was ready. So was the backup team they had borrowed for the afternoon because someone had to pick up the tail at the beginning while Gogarty waited for Schliester to come out to join him in the van.
In just a few seconds Benini was climbing into his car, which he always left under the No Parking sign at the bus and taxi dropoff in front of the Center. The backup team eased out to follow in a yellow cab, and Gogarty picked up his cell phone and dialed Schliester’s office.
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