Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

  The security officer was still debriefing Isabel. Mina took a sidelong glance at the kitchen door, where Lily had been lingering, suspiciously quiet and unhelpful, ever since Mina’s arrival. They hadn’t said hello. Mina had of course made to greet her, at first, but somehow Lily’s entire body had held itself apart from Mina’s arms. Not in disgust but almost with something like shyness. Which made no sense, but the truth was that for once it was nice to be able to stand at Isabel’s side, to rub her back every so often, without feeling like you were stepping on the toes of an employee half your age. Lily also kept looking at her phone, which wasn’t so unusual for some of these younger babysitters but for this one was, as far as Mina could remember, quite a bold display of insolence.

  “I understand,” Isabel said to the security guy. “But I really don’t want to involve the police yet. We know she went into the city voluntarily, with her friends. I don’t want to have our name attached to anything publicly until we think we have reason to do so.”

  “Has anyone contacted either of the other two young women?” he asked.

  “I don’t have their numbers,” Isabel said.

  “And could we contact their families?”

  “I’m not,” Isabel said. “I’m not willing to do that.”

  Mina thought about the girls. They’d all know, even if they hadn’t phrased it thus to themselves, that they’d have no chance of keeping the trip a secret if anyone, however distant an acquaintance, saw them on their way in. Not with Madison in tow. Maybe it was just for fun; maybe she’d paid for their fake IDs, who the hell knew. Could they really be, at this point, unaware that the city might not be the safest place for Bob D’Amico’s daughter right now?

  She tried to remember what the world of men in lower Manhattan had looked like to her, back before it had become the place where her own life unfolded. Maybe this was how she would help; Isabel had never gone into the city as an outsider, and now her daughter was trying to do just that. Mina had some experience, here, that Isabel never would. But she couldn’t think where Madison might go. She’d never been any good at reading the minds of teenage girls, as her own daughter had made perfectly clear.

  “And we’re sure that her father doesn’t know anything further about what she might have planned to do in the city?”

  “By all means,” Isabel said. “If you can find him, please ask him.”

  “Well, then,” the other security guy said, a skinnier man who looked troublingly like he’d love a nap. “There isn’t much we can do but sit tight. But you need to consider, Ms. D’Amico, that one of these other families might have also noticed they’re short one daughter. If somebody else calls the police, then this becomes a different situation.”

  “I know,” Isabel said. “I know.”

  “There’s also the question of someone possibly recognizing her. Someone with a grudge. But I’m not telling you anything you and your husband don’t already know.”

  “Well, nothing I don’t know,” Isabel said, her syllables clipped.

  “Isabel,” Mina said. “I’ll go wait at the station. I mean, what if she comes back? We won’t even know until she makes her way up here. I’ll just go watch the incoming trains. Why not?”

  “I can go,” Lily said.

  Isabel didn’t even look in that direction. She turned to Mina.

  THIRTY-ONE

  They rode the train back in silence, Zoë’s a fuming silence, Allie’s one of fear. Madison felt, given the panic that had driven her out onto Stone Street in the suddenly falling sleet without her winter coat, strangely peaceful.

  Benevolent, actually, was the word. Zoë didn’t have to make up an excuse, now, wouldn’t have to adjust for the fact that any one of those men might have paid more attention to Madison than to her. She wouldn’t be forced to square the mundane end to their actual evening with the evening she’d imagined: the three of them piling into a cab with guys who would buy them peach-colored drinks at whatever velvet-rope club they’d be shuttled into. Some man wedging his fingertips between her skin and her bra, allowing her to feel superior to Wyatt, who probably hadn’t texted her in days.

  The fact was that they’d all been spared these many small embarrassments by the sheer urgency of Madison’s meltdown. Allie, who had brought Madison’s coat out with her when they left the bar, seemed to understand this, too.

  The train skated through Harlem-125th Street and then lower Westchester. Madison rested her forehead against the window, watching the raindrops tadpole their way along the glass.

  Somewhere between New Rochelle and Larchmont, she decided to go for a walk. She’d never been on the train this late before, and she began to wonder who else rode the 8:39 local to Stamford on a Friday night. Surely men with families would have gone home earlier, on a Friday, or else would be in the city drinking up the requisite numbness to board a later homeward train. Overworked, entry-level analysts like the ones at the bar? But surely they all still lived in the city, hadn’t yet been caught by the migratory drift into the more affluent precincts of Connecticut. Housekeepers, nannies, and other domestic help with the weekend off? But they, too, would be on a train in the opposite direction.

  Madison stood and told Allie that she was going to look for the bathroom. Zoë had curled herself into a tight ball, her high heels abandoned on the unclean floor, her eyes closed to the music streaming through her earbuds.

  Just like the slammed crowd back at the bar had created its own pace, its own ecosystem, there was a pleasing rhythm to the train’s progress. Madison would come to the end of a train car, wrap her fingers around the metal handle on the door, brace herself, pull it, let the train’s momentum carry her forward and onto the small jangling platform between cars. Ignore the nighttime whooshing in her ears, look neither left nor right. Grab another, identical metal handle, this time heaving her body weight forward, letting it carry her past the yawning, heavy door and into the new train car. Move in waves through the car, her balance dictated by the motion of the train. Reach the far end of that car, the next door. Repeat.

  And then she was in the bar car.

  A long, grimy bar with fake wood paneling stood at one end of the car, with train seats lining the other end. Metal poles placed at intervals had plastic discs on them, with holes cut out for cups. The car was empty except for a few standing customers clustered at the bar. A man who might as well have served as the actual Metro-North mascot—thick neck, dark hairs pelting his forearms, spider veins burst on his nose, guttural voice and authentic Bridgeport accent—slouched behind the bar, entertaining two women who clutched plastic cups. Two men stood closer to Madison, one reading a newspaper and seemingly younger, the other with his back pressed to the wall, his chin drifting periodically toward his neck.

  “What brings you here, sweetheart?” the bartender said, pulling himself with reluctance away from the two women.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ll have—you have bourbon?”

  The old man at the end of the bar snorted, but the younger guy closest to her didn’t look up from his paper. He had taken a small notebook from his pocket, one of those black leathery ones, and started jotting down notes.

  “Let me make you a deal,” the bartender said. “What do you say we make it ginger ale, and keep it between us?”

  “Please?” she said weakly.

  “Come on, Steve-o,” one of the women chimed in. She beckoned him over and slid one of her cigarettes behind his left ear. “Let us buy her a drink.”

  The bartender grinned at Madison. “These girls have been trying to get me fired for going on decades,” he said. “You wouldn’t want them to finally get their way, right? You wouldn’t do me like that.”

  Madison smiled and tried not to cry.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Ginger ale?” Steve-o asked her. She nodded, and when it came, she had to admit, it was delicious. She let the bubbles sting the roof of her mouth and it was much better than bourbon would have been.

 
She took her cup over to one of the seats at the other end of the car.

  “Rough night?”

  The voice came, unexpectedly, from the man who’d been reading a paper. He had walked away from the bar with his beer, and she saw that he was younger even than she’d thought, not far from her age. He had wild brown hair, thick and coarse like the bristles of a hairbrush, but it was still nice hair. You still wanted to run your hand through it, just to see if it was softer than it looked. He wasn’t attractive, really, but there was something about him that made you want to keep looking. He seemed at ease, despite his wiry energy; he looked like he could feel he belonged anywhere.

  “Rough night?” he repeated, a smile inherent in his voice. “It’s still pretty early to have had a rough night.”

  “Just tired,” she said.

  “You live in Connecticut?”

  “Greenwich.”

  Too late, she remembered her assumed identity for the evening, but like everything else from that night it seemed like it might be, at this point, rumpled and worn out. She figured it was all right to be herself again. There was something about this guy’s face, though, like he was too eager to prove that they knew each other, that they were on the same team.

  “Fun,” he said. “I’m headed to New Haven.”

  “You’re on the wrong train. You’ll have to transfer at Stamford.”

  “Ahh,” he said. “Where were you thirty minutes ago?”

  She kept a blank smile on her face, confused.

  “I figured that out already,” he said apologetically. “I got on the local by accident.”

  “So you’re not from around here?”

  “I live in the city, but I don’t spend a lot of time in Connecticut, usually.”

  “What’s in New Haven?”

  “Just visiting an old buddy who’s up there for law school.”

  “Good for him.” She knew that names like that one, Yale Law, were impressive to the point of rarity, that she shouldn’t let it pass by unmentioned.

  “He’s the smart one,” the man said, winking. He extended his hand. “I’m Gabe.”

  She felt it, again, the familiarity of his face. She tried to remember if Zoë had given out their real names that night at the bar.

  “Eliza,” she said finally, a bastardized version of her Italian middle name. His eyes seemed to flicker, but she told herself it was just a reaction to how long it had taken her to come up with her own name.

  “And I take it you’re underage,” he said, flicking his eyes at the bartender. He slid his beer can down the seat until it rested near her hand.

  “Our secret,” he said. She took a sip and instantly regretted it. She still just did not like beer.

  Just before she picked up the can, he’d smiled again but this time uncertainly, as if worried he’d made one gesture too many. And maybe it was that flaw in his seemingly polished veneer, in his sense of his own right to be there beside her, that surfaced it for her. Where she’d seen him before.

  She stood up, knocking her paper cup from its slot. It had been months ago. The time between that and this collapsed in her mind and she felt it almost like physical violence, the arrival of something more than fear and less than knowledge.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. Don’t worry.”

  “You were at my school,” she said. “At the football game in September with that—that man.” She felt the harsh edges of each word as it left her mouth. “What are you, following me? Because if you are, trust me, you don’t want to be doing that once we hit Greenwich.”

  She was thinking of the sedans, of the measures she felt certain her father had taken. But then she felt it move through her chest like plucked guitar strings: no one knew where she was.

  “I wasn’t following you,” Gabe said. His hands were up in the air between them, as if she were the one invading his space. He kept his voice low in that specific way that meant he was trying to urge her to do the same.

  “Right,” Madison said. “Feeding me a beer in the bar car, just a coincidence.”

  “Yes,” Gabe said. “Of course I recognized you when I saw you. But that afternoon at Greenwich Prep, the football game, that was a coincidence, too. I was just there because I was shadowing Dick Corzar—he’s at Goldman Sachs, he’s a—”

  “I know who Dick Corzar is,” she hissed. She did not. She assumed it was the man who’d accosted her that day at the football game.

  “Okay, well great. So I was writing something that involved him, and he went up to you without even explaining at first who you were. I didn’t know. And then tonight, I recognized you, but you gave me a fake name, so I assumed you did that for a reason. I didn’t want to upset you by bringing up that afternoon.”

  She said nothing.

  “I assume that weekend was an unpleasant one for you,” he pressed further.

  She laughed a little, more just expelled air.

  “I’m a writer,” he said. “I used to write for the Times. DealBook. I’m sure you know what that is.”

  She stared at him, hard, until he began to fidget, to click his pen. She did not read DealBook, and in fact only knew what it was for sure because Jake sometimes used to make Amanda read it, but she wanted him to feel stupid for doubting her.

  “I promise you,” he said. “I got up and came to the bar car because I wanted a beer. I had no reason to believe that Madison D— Come on. How could I possibly have known you’d be on this train?”

  “You don’t want to be following me when we get off this train,” she repeated. “My father has security everywhere.”

  “And I assume that’s why there’s been no press following you at home,” Gabe said, his voice still low and soothing, his hands still hovering in the air as if he might have to block her from leaving. “He must be working very hard to keep everyone away from you.”

  She stared at him again.

  “Well, the apartment in the city is, at this point I would imagine, unlivable,” he said. “I mean, the press have been camped out there for months. I don’t think most of them have figured out that your father’s been back in Connecticut since October.”

  Her fingertips felt cold. This was her fault. She’d been childish, she’d pushed Lily away, she’d ignored so many things her mother had taught her. She was the one who’d brought it to this point, where this nerdy junior reporter—probably not even, probably he answered phones at the Times office—knew more than she did.

  “If you think you’re going to interview me,” she began slowly, “about anything to do with my family, then you clearly have deeply misunderstood who we are.”

  He smiled, which made her want to smash the heel of her hand into his nose.

  “Wow,” he said, breathy—if ersatz—admiration in his voice. “Of course not. That’s not what I meant, far from it. But let me just say this.”

  She started to sidestep her way past him, but he moved, with one step, to block her way.

  “Please,” he said, “just listen. I think your perspective is a valuable one. I think understanding your father as a human being—from the people who know him best—would go a long, long way toward rehabbing his image.”

  He seemed to realize that he’d slipped into his own jargon. He smiled and shook his head, almost sheepish.

  “All I mean,” he began again, “is that I think you have a lot to say. I think your father is being vilified unfairly, and I think you know that. And I think if people are reminded of who he really is—an outrageously successful family man who lives well within, even beneath, his means, when you compare him with his peers, who gives generously to all sorts of real and worthwhile causes, who is beloved in his own community—I think the tide might start to turn. I think people might do what they should have been doing from the start, which is view this whole thing with a wider lens. And I think that you could get your story out there, Madison. I think you could show people just how immature the reaction has been thus far.”

  Everywhere she went, n
o matter what name she gave, what drink she was offered, these men wanted to talk to her about her father. They wanted her to give some part of herself up to them, some vital thing she couldn’t identify.

  “I don’t want to sound full of myself here,” he said, allowing sugary self-congratulation into his voice. “But there is a part of me, yes, that thinks I’d be the perfect person to help tell that story.”

  “Please,” she said. He seemed to realize, then, that he had his hand on her elbow, that he was pressing, however gently, back against her. He let her go as if she’d burned him.

  “Just think about it,” he said. He fumbled beneath the bar and came back brandishing a white card between his index and middle fingers.

  She looked down at the name: Gabriel Scott Lazarus.

  “This isn’t a Times card,” she said, trying not to be proud that he looked impressed. “It doesn’t say the paper’s name anywhere on it.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I left the Times. I’m launching my own site. The Tender Offer. It’s going to be financial news, but human interest. Basically, anything you’d want to know more about after you read DealBook, but that you’ll never see reported there. There’s a lot happening, and only certain aspects of the situation are being reported. A lot has slipped between the cracks.”

  She nodded, and he smiled again.

  “You’re probably one of the very few teenage girls in the country who’d get that name,” he observed.

  She didn’t respond.