by Jimmy Fox
“Nick, thanks for coming,” Zola said, from the monitor. “I’ll meet you on thirty.”
The guard hung a visitor’s tag on Nick and directed him to the proper elevator. Thirtieth through thirty-fifth floors. After a rapid ear-popping ride, he emerged into what sounded like a college football game.
Actually, he found himself on a sort of catwalk; there were offices with sliding glass doors behind him, each with two or three people clutching several phones at once. Below him, in an auditorium-sized room, were a hundred or so men and women at banks of keyboards and monitors and multi-buttoned desk phones. Digital displays and clusters of large screens with rapidly shifting numbers and graphs dangled from the high ceiling.
The scene reminded Nick of the medieval Boschian representations of the damned, occupying themselves with their imbecilic activities or suffering the torments of divine judgment for their earthly sins.
Zola stepped from another set of elevators down the catwalk. Her dark hair was coiled at the back of her head; she wore a rather staid suit. But her grace and beauty radiated through even this business disguise. She walked up to Nick, grasped his right hand in both of hers and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek. Friendly, and no more than that.
They had to step aside to let several hurrying workers pass. Nick caught snatches of their conversation, which seemed to be mainly about some interconnectivity of an Asian currency crisis, a shortage of ship capacity, and a very good coffee crop somewhere.
“Just part of the company, the stock, bond, and commodities trading pit,” Zola said of the scene below them, indicating that they should walk toward the elevators to the higher floors. He could see she was amused by his inexperience in this arena of world finance, and proud at the same time of this anthill of capitalism. But there was something else behind her eyes, something Nick sensed he would hear before this morning was through.
He fondled the small box in his coat pocket for reassurance, for courage.
“On the floors above us,” she said, “are our departments for private investment banking, property management, and insurance. I think we have time for a short tour, don’t we, Gloria?”
Zola checked her watch and glanced for confirmation at the young woman shadowing them. Gloria shrugged with good humor and went to work rearranging her boss’s schedule on an electronic office-in-a-pad.
Thirty minutes later, he sat with Zola in her office on the top floor. It was a big circular room that resembled the windowed observation decks atop airport control towers. Was he crazy or hungover, or was the whole place…rotating slowly? He struggled to remember how much wine he’d drunk the night before. Too much, obviously.
He’d gone through most of the Armiger cash with disconcerting, guilty speed, buying books and documents that interested him, paying off several years’ worth of debts to merchants, credit-card companies, the IRS, his ex-wife–and buying cases of rare Burgundy, single bottles of which in previous days he wouldn’t have even picked up in any shop for fear of dropping them.
“The rotation? It’s very gradual. Most visitors notice it, if at all, only much later,” Zola said. “After an hour or so you get used it. But the view of the city is breathtaking. Sometimes I forget to even look, and it takes someone else’s surprise and delight to bring me to a new appreciation of it.”
“This building used to be, uh”–he snapped his fingers trying to remember–“what was the name of that company?”
“International Maritime Consortium,” she said, “New Orleans’ attempt to emulate Lloyd’s of London. Went bust a few years ago, and we snapped up the building at the foreclosure auction. Yes, there used to be quite a renowned bar up here, the Sextant Club, which I’m sure you frequented at some time in your reckless youth.”
“Ah yes, back when I was a shipping magnate. I recall many a fine Havana and glass of cognac enjoyed here, discussing the price of bauxite.”
Their forced, hollow laughter soon died. Zola looked down, seemingly unable to say what was on her mind. He leaned back in the chair, his arms behind his head. That was a mistake, because he got a dizzying sensation of perilous movement, accompanied immediately by an irrational feeling that he was about to plummet thirty-five stories.
He straightened up quickly and focused on the things moving around with him. The outer ring of the circular floor was divided into two segments by the arrangement of furniture, art, and plants: one segment was the domain of Zola, the other of Mrs. Armiger. At certain points in the rotation, he could see that Armiger wasn’t at her desk, 180 degrees opposite. In an unmoving island in the middle of the floor were the elevators and several desks and chairs used by the personal staff of the two women.
Nick marveled at the quietness that encapsulated them. He reached in his coat pocket and removed the jewelry box. He concealed it in his hand, below the edge of Zola’s desk.
If you don’t do it now, you never will.
“Noise-cancellation technology,” said Zola, interrupting the crucial moment of action. “We’re underwriting a start-up company that specializes in it. We wanted to try it out for ourselves. It’s really amazing. Research being done with Freret. You see how we’re able to dispense with isolating walls and partitions. We think this is going to be a tremendously successful product. More coffee?”
She signaled a secretary; the young man quickly brought the cup and returned to his desk.
“Nick, I have a problem.”
“I know. Should you get me the Breitling or the Rolex for Christmas?” She’d taken him to task often for having no watch.
“No, no,” she said, laughing sadly. She put on a serious face. “Sometimes your flippancy can be so annoying. I’m trying to talk about something important, here. It’s this situation with the Balzar family…”
“Your family, remember?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so,” she said. Her hesitant tone told Nick that she’d been looking in the rearview mirror a lot lately; her audio technology couldn’t cancel that out. “But really, I don’t feel at all close to these people. It’s a terribly distant connection. Merely a hypothetical line on a pedigree chart. I just don’t think it merits all this controversy, and cost.”
She showed him a small back-page clipping from the Wall Street Journal, describing a class-action suit against Artemis Holdings, and Natalie and Zola Armiger personally. Nearly forty provable heirs of Ivanhoe wanted the equivalent of 1000 acres–with a hundred-and-thirty-odd years of interest and damages. The article speculated that a big chunk of cash could be on the line, even if it was settled out of court. The opposing lawyers were preparing for battle, which could go on for years and years. Nick thought of Dickens’ Bleak House, and what a disaster such a case could be for everyone except the lawyers.
“Mother says that your original project was simply to investigate some vague family rumors she’d heard as a child, about this alleged Natchitoches ancestor of ours. She felt it was time to know the truth.”
“‘Alleged’? You don’t believe me? Is having a Jewish ancestor such a problem for you, too?”
“Of course not! But in Mother’s day, and even now, for people like us…” She set her coffee cup down and held it with both hands, as if seeking answers from it. “The point is, why are you doing this to us, Nick?”
“It’s a long story I don’t want to go into now. But this much I will say: your saintly mother paid me $50,000 to obscure your family history, not to bring it to light. The truth was never part of our deal.”
“‘Obscure’? What does that mean? My knowledge of genealogy is deficient–thanks to you–but that doesn’t seem possible. You’ve been completely unsupervised on the project she gave you, and you’ve failed to make timely reports to her. Mother was your client, she trusted you, and yet she had no idea what you’d found. We now think that in the course of your research, you uncovered this somewhat controversial past of ours, and then decided to make some money from it.
“This is all your fault,” she said. “Far from obscur
ing our presumed family history, I understand you told the Balzars where to look for a fast buck: at the last of our line of the family, and the only one, apparently, with any wealth. That seems highly unethical to me. We’re considering a complaint to the proper genealogical certifying body–whatever it is.”
Zola stopped talking and took a deep breath. Waiting for a denial, Nick thought. But he kept quiet and rubbed his hand over his mouth. He would blurt out too much if he started at all. He would tell her what her beloved mother was really like, what she had done, what she was capable of doing, why he was striking back in the only way available to him. He would try to persuade her to break free of Armiger’s poisoned protection, to find the truth on her own, to let him share the joys and sorrows of that search. He had worked it out in the past few days–their escape, sailing away in a magical galleon on a river of red wine…
He slipped the box back into his pocket.
Zola was saying, “Mother wanted to make an offer, handle this affair as quietly as possible. I insisted that we go through the legal system. I was wrong. This thing has turned nasty. We’re hearing very insulting whispers here and there, at our clubs, at restaurants, at parties. I never thought people could be so horrid. We’ve already lost a good deal of business.” She lifted a few pages from a stack of reports on her well-ordered desk. “Investors aren’t sure what our liability is. Confidence is a big issue. This should have been stopped before it became public.”
“You’re beginning to remind me more and more of your mother every day.”
“Meaning?” she countered testily.
“I can see your idealism gradually transforming into her style of moral sophism.”
“Please, Nick, don’t try to turn me against Mother. She is a great woman, a pioneer in this industry. You don’t know her. She’s been terribly upset by this. In fact, she’s quite ill and hardly comes to the office anymore. Her doctors have advised heart surgery. What gives you the right to speak of her in such disparaging terms? Who are you to preach to us? You’ve lied to me and others; you’ve accepted money under false pretenses. In spite of our…our friendship, you’re not part of our family, even at the remove of these Balzars.”
“Sometimes family ties aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
She shot a raised eyebrow at him. “Nick, our relationship has become a problem for me. I think maybe we should let things cool off.”
Nick had felt this was coming, but knowing did not make the impact hurt any less.
“Zola, these months we’ve been together have been…what I mean is, um…look, this isn’t easy for me to say: I don’t want to lose you.”
She turned her chair to look out over the river. Huge ocean-going freighters slid by as if they were models only inches from the windows.
“I think this is for the best, Nick. Maybe when this has all blown over…”
“Yeah,” he said, standing up. “Sure. Thanks for the tour and the coffee. And the past few months.”
As he stepped onto the stationary center of the room, he looked back at her. She was already on the phone, shuffling reports, slowly moving in her own orbit, and then out of view.
At the river’s edge in Woldenberg Park in the Quarter, Nick threw the engagement ring into the brown-and-white water churned up by a departing steamboat. Then he dropped the light-blue plastic jewelry box into a trashcan. Mustn’t litter.
Zola would have commended his public spiritedness.
25
Two opposite streetcars had screeched to a halt. The drivers angrily clanged the bells. Impatient passengers stood up for a better look and shouted insults in the direction of the gray Ford blocking both tracks.
“Get in the back, asshole, or you’re dead meat.”
Nick’s massage therapist, the blond goon who’d held him against the wall, pointed a black pistol at his abdomen from the open front-passenger door of the car.
Nick had been enjoying an afternoon jog on St. Charles Avenue, the day after his unhappy audience with Zola.
The goon behind the wheel, cool as a cucumber, gave the finger to the irate drivers and passengers.
Though the two men ignored his questions as the car hurtled across town, Nick was certain of the destination.
The iron gates at Armiger’s lakeside estate swung open. The gray Ford sped toward the munchkin chateau.
“That meter must be off?” Nick said, stepping from the car when it stopped. “I think you’re padding it. Last time I use this taxi company.”
“You’re a regular David-fuckin’-Letterman,” the blond goon said. “Wonder how funny you’d be with your dick in your mouth.” He took a lock-blade knife from his pocket and flicked it open with deadly skill. “The lady’s waiting for you.”
Armiger sat where Nick had last seen her, similarly attired, a different color scheme and pattern to her caftan. But she seemed years older, not a woman you’d see in the pages of Town and Country, mingling elegantly with other society bigwigs. Now she reminded Nick of a very sick patient in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, prepared for the worst possible news.
The framed picture of Zola and the gold pillbox were close at hand.
Her real religion and hope for salvation. The weak spots in her armor.
She was deep in thought and didn’t seem to notice the incongruity of a nearly naked slob walking into the severe elegance of the room. Nick sat down.
When she finally looked up, in the instant before she composed herself, he saw that weariness, worry, and physical anguish distorted her face. She seemed to have crawled out of one of the canvases of abstract horror downstairs.
She began in a scratchy near-whisper: “This has become more serious than I had imagined, Nick. This claim of heirship. I had never heard of these people before you turned them up. These Balzars.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Nick said. “Our crimes give birth to their own justice. You tried to put one genie in the bottle, and let another one out.”
Very Miltonic, Nick thought; his friend Dion would love it.
“You don’t realize what you’ve done. Not only have you caused an estrangement between my daughter and me, but you have also nearly destroyed what I have struggled so hard to create. Merely with the discovery of one illegitimate union! It would have been much better if my ancestors had cleaned up their own mistakes, as I have,” she said, a deep bitterness slicing up her words. “Never have I seen such an outflow of funds from Artemis, not even in the great bear market of ’73-74. The company is in serious jeopardy, which, fortunately, the financial press hasn’t discovered yet.”
Why is she telling me this? Am I going to walk out of here alive? In the intervening silence Nick formulated and rejected ten scenarios of escape.
“I liked you,” Armiger said, as if he had spoken his thoughts. “Again, my emotions led me astray. I admire talent, intelligence, stubbornness against daunting odds. Repeatedly, I warned you. But I should have seen: people like you make their own rules, take no advice from those who wish them well. Or ill. We are, after all, Nick, much alike.”
“You must not be looking in the same mirror, lady.”
“My penchant for the underdog has been costly,” she said, pressing on in what seemed to Nick more and more like a prepared speech. “Now I must attempt to repair the damage that I am responsible for, just as much as you are. I have had you brought here today to give you a last warning. I am not a monster. And I understand your moral dilemma perhaps better than you yourself do.
“Turn over the Balazar documents to me, documents which I now know you possess–I have my sources in Natchitoches and Natchez. You’ve been wise not to part with them. There is a letter, I understand, about which I can do nothing–for the moment. You were foolish enough to share that with the opposing camp. But without documentary evidence of my descent from Hyam Balazar, the case will be nearly impossible to prove. When I have what you discovered in Natchitoches, I will no longer be a Balazar, as far as anyone can tell. All of this will t
hen become merely the flawed research of a sadly incompetent genealogist. My unfortunate pedigree will then cease to be a liability.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said, “maybe I’ll go to the police? Tell them about Corban and the woman from Poland. The whole sorry spectacle of what your family did to the Balzars pales in comparison with murder. That’ll cost more than any lawsuit. A lot more.”
“You’re smarter than that, Nick.” She gave him a condescending smile. “Who would believe you, a third-rate hack hungry for publicity, a plagiarist? A man who has stolen public documents? The police are more likely to charge you than me. And where do you think those young men work?” she said, feebly pointing outside.
The two goons are cops!? A sudden onset of vertigo made him grab the arms of his chair. Somehow, the idea that they were cops made him more frightened than if they’d been ordinary civilian assassins. He was alone in this mess, with no authority to back him up. The climactic scene from North by Northwest flickered into his consciousness: Cary Grant hangs by one hand over Mount Rushmore, Eva Marie Saint dangling from his other hand, as Martin Landau steps harder and harder on his knuckles…
“I would know the instant you contacted a detective,” Armiger was saying, her voice having regained its customary confidence. “You wouldn’t live long enough to drive to police headquarters.”
As usual, she had all the answers before he even asked the questions. A tricky situation: keeping the documents hurt the Balzars’ case; releasing them, leading to the inevitable discovery that he’d stolen them, would land him in very hot water–certainly he’d be drummed out of the genealogy corps; and giving them to Armiger doomed the documents to perpetual imprisonment, perhaps destruction.
But of all the reasons he could think of at the moment, the most important was that the documents he’d stolen were his ticket to continued health, since Zola had broken off with him. He wished fervently that he’d never accepted Armiger’s money in the first place.