Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  And then there were his public appearances. His first had been unplanned; a reporter had caught him walking hurriedly down Dunster Street on Tuesday night, two days after Julie’s murder, the same day Storrow’s name and photo made the papers. Caught off guard, possibly drunk, he’d struggled to account for his being on campus: he’d merely stepped out to get air and hadn’t noticed where he was. He wasn’t looking for anything or anyone, just trying to find some space alone. All he wanted was to be left the hell alone.

  Exasperated, he’d raised his voice at the reporter, and under the harsh camera lights, his eyes looked bloodshot, his skin white with angry splotches of red; he’d come off as menacing, unstable.

  The next time Storrow showed himself on TV it was carefully arranged: a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, a week after Julie’s death. It seemed Storrow meant to correct his previous impression: he’d combed his hair and shaved, applied Visine to his eyes, used any tricks at his disposal to resemble more or less a tenser version of the neat, dashing figure who’d so impressed Charlie at their first meeting. His remarks had been prepared: he would not let his sentences falter; he would not lose his train of thought.

  His performance was flawless, and the results had been disastrous. If Charlie hadn’t known Storrow before, he too might have thought what tens of thousands of American viewers must be thinking: this is the face of a stone-cold killer.

  But he had known Storrow, at least he liked to think so. Even Georgia likely hadn’t observed the details of Storrow’s nature as Charlie had. Where others saw severity, he saw adherence to a code of personal integrity. A man so upstanding could have nothing to do with the violence the papers had described. During the day, Charlie was certain of it; only at night, lying in bed, he’d find himself with a different, yet equally vivid and convincing picture of Storrow in his mind—those strong arms with their red-blond curls, hooked around a fragile neck.

  —

  Across the Yard, Georgia was standing with her head upon her father’s shoulder. Mr. Calvin was nearing fifty, but he remained vain and virile, with his dark blond beard and long legs in tight jeans. Of course, thought Charlie, he should have foreseen long ago how things would end for Georgia: running off with Daddy once again.

  In a few hours, he imagined, she’d get into her father’s car and start the drive to wherever she was moving. These might be the last images he had of her, and so, despite himself, Charlie gathered them up like photographs untaken: golden hair, black cap in her hand, white sandals that laced up the back of her brown calves.

  From a distance Charlie watched Georgia view the memorial, the white cloth now removed, and leave the yard beside her father; then he took his own place on the line. A plain bronze square, with Julie’s name, stood at the left of the gate; Charlie paused before it briefly, then stepped out onto Cambridge Street. Up ahead, twenty feet or so from the Bradstreet exit, stood a young woman. She was dressed in black, her hair slicked back; her robe and cap lay on the ground. Alice.

  Understandably, Alice hadn’t dared to join the ceremonies, but it seemed she couldn’t quite stay away either; maybe it was more than curiosity that had lured her. Maybe she’d wished to pay respects or felt genuine regret for what she’d written. Charlie never assumed he had access to what Alice was thinking. Always she kept some secret for herself, some corner of her mind to curl up into, even while she shared the space under his roof.

  “Gerry’s driving me into the city,” she said. “Supposed to pick me up here.” As if that explained her presence in this spot. “We’ll swing by Eliot, grab my bags. If you’re not there, I’ll leave the key under the door.”

  This was good-bye then, Charlie thought, though neither of them chose to say it. He preferred to believe it wasn’t really, that he would see Alice again, in Manhattan, where he would soon begin his studies and she would launch her magazine career. Along with the abuse she’d received for her writing came plenty of attention and more than a few job offers.

  Such willingness to benefit from others’ suffering was, according to Roger, Jasmine, and almost anyone Charlie spoke to about Alice, further proof she had no conscience. Maybe so, but Charlie had come to admire Alice’s toughness. Pity, regret, longing—some of his once-favorite emotions—simply had no hold on Alice and, thanks to her influence, had lost some of their power, also, over him. Fine for lovelorn boys and poets, but of no use—Alice alone helped to remind him—to the man Charlie Flournoy was setting out into this world to become.

  12

  No breaks between, no year abroad to muse and booze and bumble: from college, Charlie moved on to business school and then straight into his first job. The new millennium was here, and these were thrilling times for a fresh MBA keen on success. Start-ups were forming daily; venture capital firms that had declined in the 1980s were rising again, stronger than ever, and Charlie was in a hurry to get working and to establish the sort of accomplished, adult Manhattan life he’d always aspired to have.

  His apartment made him proud each time he crossed its threshold: a one-bedroom rental on Riverside Drive with high ceilings and hardwood floors and a view of the Hudson. While most of the young bachelors he knew were drawn to trendy lofts downtown, to the company of models and Eurotrash and streets crowded with bars, the past two years had taught Charlie to appreciate Morningside Heights. The domain of the good students was how he thought of it—decent, rational, hardworking people who earned advanced degrees and married campus sweethearts and were already saving for their infants’ educations. Each morning, Charlie walked to the subway alongside pretty mothers on their way to Pilates, and he returned each evening among fathers who were equally at ease reading Barron’s as they were Winnie-the-Pooh.

  There was nowhere else he wished to be, he told himself—and told his friends, as well, whenever one of his business school pals tried to induce him to move out west. Silicon Valley was where the truly fantastic entrepreneurial feats were taking place, where it seemed any kid with a dream could stick a “dot-com” at the end of it and own a company worth millions. Such things did happen, though far less often than the Bay Area advocates made out. In any case, Charlie didn’t feel he could afford to put in months or years on speculative projects, nor could he cash in options on hypothetical IPOs when his student loan payments were due. He had debts, substantial and pressing, which required him to find some sort of salaried employment.

  When he’d been hired, just out of school, by Warren Welch Equity, he’d considered himself lucky. VC jobs were hard to come by anywhere, and in Manhattan, they were almost unheard of; at Warren Welch he could survey the field of start-ups on both coasts and do it while collecting a steady paycheck and maintaining his Upper West Side apartment. Moreover, he could justify taking a safer career path on the basis of numbers: out of the thousand-plus business proposals he and the other young hires reviewed in his first year, each passed about fifty up the chain so that Welch and his partners could finally invest in, precisely, four.

  Three of the chosen four that year proved to be Charlie’s recommendations; from then on, Terrance Welch began approaching Charlie for his opinion rather frequently. In April of 2001, Welch made a formal proposition that Charlie work exclusively with him. “You’ll research only my projects; you’ll be my guy now.”

  “It would be a privilege, sir.”

  Welch, as Charlie saw it, was the real brains of the firm: he’d launched and sold four companies by the age of forty-eight. In their interactions, Welch had always been decent with him, though it was true he had a reputation for egomania.

  Only after he’d accepted the offer did Charlie realize what sort of servitude he’d signed on for. Welch would call him up at any hour, any day, usually from an unknown or blocked number, to send him searching for some information on his desk—not because Welch actually needed it, Charlie was sure, but just to confirm that Charlie was in the office as he claimed to be.

  There was no excuse for missing work: not religion, not family, not illness a
nd not, certainly not, a toothache, like the one Charlie suffered from most of that next July. As a result, he neglected the problem for so long that he developed an abscess and then sepsis. He had to be hospitalized for five days and made to rest another five, during which time his main concern was whether his job would still be waiting for him when he returned.

  To make up the lost time, he canceled the vacation he’d been planning with some business school buddies in the Hamptons and spent all of August, while his colleagues were baking on the beach and boiling lobsters, stuck behind his desk.

  Monday evening, Labor Day, he received a call from an old friend: Udi Epstein, his roommate for his first year at business school.

  Hyperactive, foulmouthed, and conceited, Udi had managed to alienate most of his teachers and fellow students in the one year he attended Columbia, but Charlie had always liked him and never doubted his brilliance. Udi had grown up in Israel, on a moshav, with little interest in the farm life he was born to, or in much of anything besides his big sister’s computer. By fifteen he was such an able hacker that the Israeli army had gotten wind of him; they’d offered him a position in intelligence and employed him from the age of eighteen to twenty-three, working with some of their most advanced computer systems. From the IDF, he’d moved on to pursue studies in computer science at the Technion, the most prestigious science university in Israel, but hands-on engagement suited him much better than the classroom. He claimed he’d enrolled for his American MBA merely to improve his communication skills, but he’d given up on those efforts after a year and skipped off to Palo Alto to take a job with a place called Cardcom, heading up its antifraud team.

  “What the fuck’s taking you so long?” Udi asked him. “I sent you my proposal Thursday.”

  The papers stacked on Charlie’s desk stretched a foot high. Welch, he let Udi know, got about a hundred packages addressed to him each month.

  “This one’s not addressed to him. For your eyes only. Nu?”

  “So what? You want my take on it first?”

  “Read it,” Udi instructed him. “Then we talk about what the fuck I want from you.”

  —

  Over the next few days, as his colleagues returned to the office, tanned and refreshed, Charlie reviewed the materials Udi had sent him. The project they described was some kind of data-mining tool, but the proposal was rough, marred by the faults of its author—imperfect English, impatient explanations, and a tendency toward bombast. The claims being made about the potential for this software struck Charlie as unrealistic: no comparable system could cross-reference information from three distinct formats—from video images, to spreadsheets, to cell-phone records—but that was just what Udi insisted his would do. Nor could available technologies handle anything near the volume of data Udi was proposing.

  Very early Monday morning, while Udi was still up working late on the West Coast, Charlie phoned him to discuss the matter further.

  The idea had emerged during his two years at Cardcom, Udi claimed, while he’d been working to identify patterns of fraudulent conduct among users. He and his partner, another engineer named Doug Fincher, had come to realize just how adaptable—and valuable—the system they were developing could be; they wanted to strike out on their own, submit patents, raise capital, build a company. Such efforts, Udi and Doug agreed, would require a third partner to cover the business side—someone who knew how to persuade people and understood the culture of VCs—while they managed the technical one. They were interviewing candidates out in Palo Alto, but Udi already had his choice in mind.

  “I told them how a good talker you are—and you did worked at a VC.”

  “I do work at a VC.” One grammatical error Charlie felt obliged to correct; he had a job, at present, a job that was more or less reliable, as anything involving Udi could not possibly be.

  “You need to come now. Doug expects to meet you for lunch tomorrow.”

  “In Palo Alto?” A call was coming in; he checked the phone: a blocked number. “I need to take this. Could be my boss.”

  “Could be your boss. You could be your boss. You, you stupid asshole.”

  Udi was still cursing him when Charlie switched onto the other line.

  “Thank God, you’re at the office. I’ve been trying your home number. I wasn’t sure I’d reach you.”

  A familiar female voice, a voice that collapsed the last four years into a single moment.

  “It’s me, Charlie. It’s Georgia. Alice might be in trouble.”

  —

  Hours later, on the cab ride to the hospital, Charlie called Udi to apologize for having cut their conversation short. “Personal emergency,” he told him, his excuse made more credible by the sirens in the background. His cab was slaloming between the cars on the West Side Highway, struggling to keep up with the ambulance ahead. Probably the ambulance driver was just impatient with the traffic; at least mental illness didn’t seem to Charlie to require special haste, let alone adding to the mad clamor of the city. He wondered if the noise was distressing Alice, feeding into whatever fantasies had taken hold of her. Though by then she was probably so sedated that nothing could perturb her, the wail of sirens lulling her to sleep.

  “She thinks the police are after her,” Georgia had reported, “because she’s hurt someone—I don’t know if she really has. She was disoriented. Maybe she was on something. I hope that’s all it was: in any case, she seemed very much out of control.”

  That Alice had called Georgia—this alone was proof she was unwell. In possession of herself, Alice wouldn’t dare display an enduring interest in the friend whom she’d disowned.

  “I’m so sorry to foist this on you,” Georgia went on, “but I’m stuck here in D.C.; and I couldn’t think who else in New York to contact. I’m afraid what she might do.”

  He’d offered to check up on Alice, which was what Georgia clearly expected from him, even though he wasn’t sure where Alice was living now or how exactly he would find her. Over a year had passed since he and Alice were last in contact. When they’d first settled in Manhattan, they’d tried to establish an intermittent friendship; she’d invited him to a few parties in Tribeca and Soho, pleased to have someone from her past stand as witness to her inclusion in The Scene, and also, perhaps, so that they’d be safely surrounded by loud music and crowds—the better to avoid difficult subjects. But finally he and Alice had little in common except the things they preferred to forget; each took turns canceling plans, and then, in tacit agreement, they fell out of touch.

  Now, just as Georgia claimed, Alice wasn’t answering her cell, nor was any address listed for her in the White Pages. Charlie checked the Ohio listings and found an S. Kovac on record, but all Alice’s mother could tell him was that her daughter was living on a street with a “very boring, American name.” Alice’s colleagues could no doubt be more specific, but Charlie was reluctant to announce Alice’s troubles to them and risk her blaming him for the indiscretion later. Finally, he came upon a captioned photograph of Alice online: at some red carpet event she’d attended with her boyfriend, a TV producer named Nick Slakey. Nick wasn’t at his office that morning, but his partner offered Charlie his cell number.

  “I’m an old friend of Alice’s,” he told Nick. “I don’t want to alarm you but I’m concerned she might not be well.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “I’m trying to—to get hold of her.”

  “So if you do, you let me know. Because I’m looking for her too.”

  “Okay…”

  “And you can tell her, when I find her, I’m going to run her down. I’m going to drive my SUV up and down her fucking face.”

  Not the response he’d been expecting. “Okay, obviously she’s done something to upset you, but I’ll make sure she’s held accountable if you’ll just help me find her. Can you do that for me, Nick?”

  At close to ten, Charlie reached the address that Nick had provided: a brownstone on Jane Street with potted daisies on the s
toop and a tricycle inside the gate. He rang the bell and a man came down to meet him, a jittery guy in his late forties: Bernie, he said his name was; the building belonged to him, and Alice was his tenant.

  “Can you get her out of here? She won’t answer me. I was about to call the police again.” According to Bernie, the cops had already been by once, the night before, while Alice was still out. “They waited a bit then left. She must have snuck inside just after. I’ve been trying to get in—I’ve got a key, but she’s wedged a chair or something under the knob.”

  Standing outside Alice’s apartment, Charlie heard a German opera blasting within. He shouted to Alice, though he had little hope of being heard, then he continued up to Bernie’s to call the paramedics. A half an hour later, while Bernie and his wife nervously looked on, two large men arrived and broke down Alice’s door. Charlie waited at the entrance: the music was shut off; he could overhear fragments of conversation—Alice shouting, the EMTs trying to calm her—until the noise stopped and the men finally escorted out into the hall a numbed and frightened approximation of the sharp woman he’d once known.

  “Where to, which hospital?” one of the medics asked him. They’d searched Alice’s wallet for an insurance card and, having found none, asked Charlie if he knew her doctor’s name or where she might prefer to receive treatment.

  “I don’t know. Columbia Presbyterian, I guess.” It was the hospital closest to where he lived—most convenient if, as the past couple of hours seemed to suggest, he was going to be the one to oversee Alice’s care.

  —

  Now here he was inside a taxi, trying to keep pace with an ambulance careening ahead, sirens blaring so loudly he’d failed to notice that his cell was ringing. Georgia again. “She’s safe,” he reassured her, “but we’re on our way to a psychiatric hospital. Police are en route, too.”