The sun was out now, clearing bald patches on the meadow. Last night’s snow was like a dream. Kids shaped woeful snowballs out of what remained. The detectives behind Larry were invisible; none had thought to roam this far. He felt sharp, somehow. Called out of his thoughts. Something glinted in a bush near where he’d emerged.
He tottered over. Birds, flushed from undergrowth, beat out across the white. He extracted a mound of damp fabric. Bluejeans. A pocket rivet was what had winked. A lump inside one leg turned out to be a wad of jockey shorts he pulled on gloves to handle. Urine stains along the venting. In one pocket, a half-punched round-trip Long Island Rail Road ticket. In the other, a mimeographed sheet, ripped in half. And above this jumble a weird little glyph or symbol; hadn’t he seen it somewhere?
Probably this was nothing. The queers came here for assignations, there were vice raids all the time, one of them had lost his pants. Still, it was about the only evidence produced so far, and he hated to put it into the clumsy hands of McFadden, whose case theoretically this was. Out of habit, he carried a supply of forensic baggies. He returned the paper to the jeans, bagged the jeans in plastic, and squeezed the whole package into a large inside pocket of his brushed-wool greatcoat. He wouldn’t mention it to anyone just yet. He wasn’t sure he trusted the system, or any system, not to mishandle it. And no one would bother to mention that Pulaski looked lumpy, since that’s how he looked most days, these days.
28
AT THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK OF JANUARY, a memo had circulated, convening a plenary meeting of the upper tier of management: representatives of the Board, corporate counsel, financial officers, vice presidents, and, from the Office of Public Relations and Community Affairs, Regan Lamplighter, née Hamilton-Sweeney. The only person missing was her father, who was at home, recuperating from the “shock to his system.”
Or so, at least, went the story that circulated in the fractious period before the meeting came to order. In point of fact, Daddy’s system had long been in decline, and the arraignment had come as no shock. By the time Regan had reached him by phone in Chicago, Felicia had already warned him about the federal marshals camped out at LaGuardia; this, and not the snow, had been why they’d waited until Monday to fly him home. In New York, the marshals had agreed not to cuff him, had allowed his chauffeured black towncar to ferry him directly to the courthouse downtown, where Regan waited at a side entrance with his legal team. Though the bond the judge set seemed to her exorbitant, Daddy had trundled out under his own power two hours later, free until the case went to trial. No, the thing keeping him at home wasn’t shock, or even the longer-term corrosion of his faculties. It was that someone had tipped off the media. There had been two dozen reporters waiting for them out on the courthouse steps, a swarm of white locusts. Deep in the background, vans hoisted fifty-foot antennae into the gelatin-gray sky. Regan should have been ready for this; it was her job. But the lead image on the evening news that night would be a two-second clip of her father, looking bleached and confused, while an unidentified and slightly blurry woman clung to his elbow. “We have no comment at this time,” she repeated over and over. The angle varied subtly depending on which channel you were watching.
And it was ridiculous, the way they all covered this! He hadn’t been found guilty of anything, and notwithstanding federal insinuations of profiteering, the worst crime he stood accused of, according to some of the most expensive defense lawyers in the free world, was two counts of insider trading amounting to less than a million dollars—a tiny fraction of what the firm grossed annually. But no one wanted the scene from the courthouse repeated outside the lobby of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building every time Daddy came or went. And so, even as the conference room’s long table filled up, the chair at the head remained empty.
There were some moments of unease after the door closed. Without Old Bill, who would run the meeting? Then, from a seat halfway up Regan’s side of the table, a white head rose. The eyes didn’t seem to see her. The voice should have been inadequate to fill the big room, yet she heard the Demon Brother as if he were broadcasting from her inner ear: “As I’m sure you all know, Bill thought it best he remain at home this week, working on his defense.”
No one spoke, but there was a shift in the texture of the silence, a discomfiture that passed for assent. All heads having turned to him, Amory Gould sat back down. He didn’t bother to cover his mouth when he coughed.
“In his absence, the facts we face are these. Our fearless leader has been charged with running afoul of the securities statutes. Ahem. Which we know have been put in place to harass successful Americans.” His face was bland, but his hands seemed to want to exact some revenge on the pen in front of him, and tugged at both ends. “We have every confidence—every confidence—Bill will be cleared of wrongdoing. Our task in the meantime is to coordinate a response, such that this firm, a legacy of his hard work and, ahem, vision, can rise to the challenges of the moment. To chart, in short, a strategy.” Legacy made it sound as if Daddy were not recuperating, but dead. And who was this we? In the time it took Regan to formulate these objections, Amory must have opened the floor to ideas, because now ambassadors from the various departments began to speak up.
Legal advocated a policy of company-wide silence as it pursued dialogue with the U.S. Attorney. Accounting was conducting an audit. Global Operations required stability above all else, lest vital revenue streams be threatened. For all his showy circumspection, his refusal to move to the head of the table, the nervous coughs he produced at almost algorithmic intervals, Regan knew her step-uncle well enough to see he was enjoying this. Indeed, most of the men contributing to the conversation were allies of the Goulds, and seemed to be competing to say whatever would please him most.
Then she noticed the blond man taking notes in the corner behind her. Still pretending to listen to Amory pretend to listen to everyone else, she snuck a glance back over her shoulder. He had to be the youngest person in the room. His hair was like wheat germ mixed with honey. Shampoo-commercial hair. It was longer than Keith’s, but somehow wholesome, neat, even as it tumbled down past the collar of his arrow-collared shirt. In fact, she’d seen it once before, in the commissary on the thirtieth floor, back around the time she learned of her husband’s infidelity. She’d bumped into him with her tray. At that point, she’d been too distracted to get his name; in her head, he was just the Guy with the Hair. Now, as the syllables of functionaries closer to the empty seat of power flattened and warped into nonsense, she found herself wondering what the Guy with the Hair was doing here. “—Regan?” someone was saying.
She turned back to the yellow pad in front of her, heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry?”
“Artie suggested we hear from Public Relations.” Her step-uncle’s voice was full of something she couldn’t decipher. Farther down, next to the empty chairman’s chair, old Arthur Trumbull, eighty-eight and half-deaf, looked at her with eyes like a horse’s, wet and black and kind. He’d been a Director since her grandfather’s time, and a faithful retainer to the family. “Did you have something to add?”
She cleared her throat in anxious echolalia, trying to remember the points she’d wanted to make. “Well, first I think it should be noted that Daddy is … that my father hasn’t been convicted of anything.” She looked back at her notes from this morning. “I mean, I understand the position of Legal, and wanting to leave room to bargain, but if there’s no proven wrongdoing, why act otherwise? Not having him here right now sends a message to the media people out there. Anything we do will. It seems important—and this is the view of the department—that the message we send is, we’re prepared to fight.”
As she spoke, Amory had risen to gaze at her over the domes of intervening heads. His thin lips smiled. “What an asset to have someone so eloquent here to represent the interests of the family. But things must also be looked at from a business perspective, and I’m afraid sticking our heads in the sand and pretending nothing has happened …
well, it’s a tactic, Regan, not a strategy.”
His attention was uncomfortable, hot, like the light on the surgeon’s forehead just before you go under. “Fine. So here’s a strategy. Pretrial kabuki will take until at least, what, July? And meanwhile, the press is only going to get worse. If we’re going to have any shot at a decent jury, we need a fair hearing from the public. Which means reconsidering the overall corporate image. We have to be seen again as the benevolent giant, the job creator. So what I’d like to do”—crafting this second point, she’d thought of the stadium plan Amory had shown her, but now she wasn’t thinking at all so much as trying to drive a rhetorical thumb into his eye—“what I’d like to undertake these next few months is a comprehensive review of any business we’re doing that affects the local market. Of course, I’d need data on every acquisition, every big position we take for our portfolio, every development project. Once we’ve completed our study, we can think about integrating them into a campaign. Like, Hamilton-Sweeney: Making New York Work.”
“My dear—” Amory turned to his colleagues. “What you’re proposing isn’t practicable. The sheer volume of … An office of, what is it, two people? Ahem. Impracticable.”
From the corner, the Guy with the Hair spoke up. “Well, actually, as far as influencing public opinion, she’s right. Just taking out full-page ads and tossing ducats to orphans, New Yorkers are too jaded not to see through that stuff. You ever listen to that show, Gestalt Therapy?”
Amory had teleported to a spot behind the chairman’s chair. His hands rested on its back.
Artie Trumbull looked up at him. “I agree, Amory. What Regan’s saying makes sense. Leverage the good we’re already doing, we might have more of a fighting chance at the voir dire. Or convince the U.S. Attorney we do, should we choose to pursue a plea.”
As the senior person in the room, he still had influence; his motion to broaden Regan’s mandate passed so quickly that it surprised even her, and the best Amory could do was pretend it was his idea. Unless it was only her first point he really cared about. “Evangelizing for our work, indeed, will be essential. But as far as Bill’s day-to-day schedule, I have to say, I’m not sure this sabbatical isn’t for his own good.” He looked around the table. “Until Bill is cleared of all charges, as he no doubt will be, best to keep him out of harm’s way, no? Absent any objections, it will be proposed at this afternoon’s Board meeting that an interim chair be named.” There was quiet now, even from Artie Trumbull. Even from Hair Guy.
And thus there would be no point in lingering to work the room, Regan was to decide as the meeting broke up. The day’s inevitable outcome would be an assumption of power by Uncle Amory—or a formalizing of the power he’d already, over many years, assumed. She tried to calculate whether she could make it uptown to look in on Daddy and still be back for the start of the official Board meeting at five. Maybe, just barely, if she hurried.
The Rothko canvas near the elevator bank flashed past her, a red wound to match the blue bruise back at the penthouse. The elevator was empty, but then, at the last second, someone stopped the doors from closing: Hair Guy. They stood in mannered silence and watched the numbers count down. The building was a dinosaur, a neoclassical monstrosity from the days before elevators broke the sound barrier. Only when the door opened onto the lobby did she permit herself a look at the man’s face. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
For what? he said.
“For what? For being there, I guess.”
He had a name, he said. It was Andrew. Andrew West. “Well, thanks a bunch, Andrew West.” Then she tapped out into the cold, not daring to look back. Thanks a bunch? She sounded like a third grader. And still there was this stupid gauze on her hand, from when she’d nearly sliced her thumb off. Jesus, Regan, when did everything go so badly off the rails?
29
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN BIBLE Charlie had ever seen was in a motel room when he was six or seven. Usually, to save money, Dad liked to make the trip up to Grandpa’s place in Montreal in a single daylong sprint. The wide new traffic-lightless interstate made it easy. That particular December, though, the stretch that ran through the Adirondacks was subject to fog and ice and closures, and when the darkness caught them north of Albany, they were forced to stop for the night. Dad showed Mom the little dresser-drawer Bible with a look of mild irony, like a man handling someone else’s underthings. He must have thought Charlie, trying to tune in Petticoat Junction on the rabbit ears, didn’t see.
But a decade later, the shooting of his best friend and the subsequent appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ to him personally would send Charlie scrounging for a Bible of his own. He found a copy—several, actually—at the back of the storefront Salvation Army in downtown Flower Hill, where the books smelled like mildew but were only a quarter apiece. He picked a pocket-sized edition stamped inside with the words GIDEONS INTERNATIONAL. Its green-and-gold fake-leather cover wouldn’t have been out of place on a T. Rex record, but that probably wasn’t what made him choose it. Probably it was the memory of that motel room upstate, which he hadn’t thought about once in the intervening years.
Over the next week, cocooned in blankets in his cold basement, he had begun to read. Or re-read; the first few books he’d covered in Hebrew school. Now they worked their way deeper into memory. But it was the Gospel of Mark, mysterious and unJewish, he kept returning to. It said: Forgive yourself, Charlie. It said: Onward. It said: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
The problem was, each new day was just like the previous one. He awoke to the fact of his friend lying in a hospital twenty miles away, comatose (or so Newsday had indicated in a blind item on the shooting). What would Jesus do? Jesus would be on the first train to the City, to be at her side. Charlie, for his part, couldn’t make it past the LIRR. Afternoons after school, he’d stand shivering on the platform, gazing down the empty tracks to the east, as westbound riders always did. As he had with Sam on New Year’s Eve. But what if he got to the hospital to find her eyes open, staring at him like, Why weren’t you there, Charlie? Or what if they stayed closed? What if, while he stood there, her heart stopped? So he ended up back in his room, trying to fathom the workings of the goyish God. (E.g.: If there was no sin so bad as to be unforgivable, why had He withdrawn again into deistic silence after that night in the church? Or, supposing the voice was simply something Charlie had made up to comfort himself, why couldn’t he make it come back?)
Then one afternoon, after weeks of trying, he made it all the way to the City. Rising above the little park that ran between some churches and Second Avenue, Beth Israel Hospital looked like the tower of Barad-dûr, a blinking red eye at its summit. There was so much of it up there, and so little of him down here, where everything was gray: gray paving stones, gray treetrunks, black wrought-iron fencing sooted down to gray. The only spots of color were the knit hats and mittens of the homeless scattered nearby. And copper-topped Charlie, tremendously exposed.
But this wasn’t what stopped him. What stopped him was, he still didn’t know what he’d find inside. What if the bandages made her look like a mummy? What if one eye was missing, its soft pink socket gaping like the eye of a painting that follows you around a room? As long as he stayed out here, everything remained potential, including the possibility that Sam might leap up any minute now to light up a smoke. And then it wouldn’t be that big a deal that he hadn’t come to visit. He felt the weight of the Bible in his pocket. He waited once more for God to speak to him, but all he heard was the wind clacking the bare trees and a bus whooshing past and, closer in, the apocalyptic grumble of an old guy on a bench.
Then, as he tracked the bus down the avenue, it hit him that he couldn’t be more than a dozen blocks from the crash-pad where he and Sam had ended up the night of the Bicentennial. He wondered if her other friends, her City friends, still lived there. He wondered whether they’d been to see her. Whether, indeed, they were still her friends; she’d seemed so keyed up, going to see th
em play on New Year’s. It was as if something had happened to her that autumn, while Charlie had been grounded out on Long Island. If he could find out what it was, he might, belatedly, reach her. Of course this was mostly an excuse for not having the balls to march this instant through the doors of that hospital. Still, he let himself be tugged south, into the East Village.
Though the blocks were ruler-straight, the way they all looked so similar made the house hard to locate, especially if you’d forgotten the number of the street. Another thing he couldn’t quite remember, once he finally found it, was whether its front door had been this banged up last summer. He seemed to recall instead a big graffiti piece like a Burger King crown spreading across the steel. They’d both been high on mushrooms; he’d probably been seeing things. But he did know that it was kept unlocked. (What do you think this is, a country club?) When no one answered his knock, he stepped inside. The ramshackle parlor to his left had been full of black light and kegs of beer and music and punker types he’d done his best to avoid, drag-walking his semiconscious friend to the safety of the basement. In January, it was empty. There wasn’t even plaster on the walls.
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