The Showstone

by Glenn Cooper

  One night, after several long days chipping at the rock face, Cal and Jessica collapsed on the living-room floor with their drinks, the room now largely depleted. Cal absently leafed through a photo album of one of his father’s excavations in Israel. His mother had brought Cal to visit Hiram that summer. The boy had been six. Cal lingered over a shot of the three of them, mugging for the camera from a bone-dry trench, each of them holding a spade.

  Jessica turned her head and said, ‘Finally.’

  ‘Finally what?’ he replied.

  ‘You’re crying.’

  He wiped his cheeks with the heels of his hands. ‘It’s dusty in here.’

  ‘Oh please. I know you’re one blocked dude, but it’s been weird watching you act like a zombie.’

  ‘I didn’t cry at his funeral either.’

  ‘You were an angry, macho twenty-year-old who’d just been booted out of the army, right?’

  ‘As I recall.’

  ‘How did he die?’ she asked.

  ‘In a fall at a dig in Iraq.’

  ‘Booze on board?’ she asked.

  ‘Who knows? He was no teetotaler but Muslim country and all – I kind of doubt it. It’s a pity …’ His voice petered out.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I’ve wanted to have a conversation with him. You know, Cal, the forty-something Harvard professor, with Hiram, the sixty-something Harvard professor. I’ve got an office next door to his old one at the museum, did I ever tell you that?’

  ‘No, you did not. What would you say to him?’

  Cal shook his head and reached for the bottle of cold Grey Goose. ‘Not going to go there, kiddo, in fact, I’m going to change the conversation.’

  ‘Said you were blocked.’

  ‘I want to tell you how much I appreciate your hanging in there and doing this week with me. It means a lot.’

  She pulled her red hair to the side so she could peck his cheek.

  ‘I think we make pretty good funeral buddies,’ she said. ‘I wish I didn’t have to abandon ship tomorrow. You going to be all right for the end game?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. The place should be cleared out by Friday.’

  ‘You won’t drink yourself silly, will you?’

  ‘No promises.’

  Jessica used his shoulder to push herself to her feet and told him she had one more job she wanted to finish. She had declared herself highly qualified to go through Bess Donovan’s clothes and jewelry to sort them for donation or consignment sale. The old woman had been a clothes horse who had attended numerous charity galas annually, year after year. She had a lot of dresses, some of them from top designers. More than once, Jessica had told Cal she wished she were a size zero so she could use this skirt or that jacket. Now, all that was left was to plow through were her shoes, current ones in racks, older ones in dozens of shoeboxes stacked at the back of her many closets.

  An hour later Jessica came into the living room holding a shoebox. Cal looked up from a box of books he was taping up.

  ‘Almost done?’ he asked. ‘I’m fried.’

  ‘Yeah. Last couple. You should look at this.’

  ‘Jimmy Choos?’

  ‘Wow, I’m impressed. A man who knows his way around boxing matches and designer shoes. But no, not Jimmy Choos. This was inside.’

  He took the padded envelope that had been folded to fit inside the shoebox. It had been addressed to his mother in his father’s own distinctive calligraphic handwriting with a return address in Mosul, Iraq.

  ‘It’s postmarked July 1989,’ he said, ‘the month he died. It doesn’t look like it’s ever been opened.’

  ‘Well, open it,’ Jessica said impatiently.

  The adhesive was still strong. Inside were a couple of his father’s monographs, titles from the 1980s that Cal knew well, and sandwiched between them was a dusty old washcloth and an index card with a notation, also in his father’s calligraphy.

  John Dee?

  British Museum/Scrying stone?

  The washcloth concealed something with heft. He unwrapped it. The obsidian disk slipped into his hand. The polished surface caught the light from the crystal chandelier and played it back into his face, shrinking his pupils.

  He suddenly looked over his shoulder.

  ‘You okay?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘I thought I heard something.’ It had sounded like someone far away had whispered something he couldn’t understand. ‘It’s nothing. I’m just tired.’

  She pointed at the disk. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I know who John Dee is,’ Cal said, ‘but I don’t have a clue what it is. It was in a shoe closet?’

  ‘Right at the back.’

  He wrapped it in the cloth and put it inside the envelope again.

  ‘Why the hell would he have mailed her something she didn’t open?’ he asked.

  She shrugged a little and yawned a lot. ‘Want me to put it in one of your boxes of books?’ she asked.

  He handed it to her then thought the better of it and took it back.

  ‘No, I’ll take it with me. I like a good mystery.’

  SIX

  Cassie Ferguson was nervous as hell. Peering into the ladies’-room mirror, she reapplied her lipstick, restoring the layer she had lost kissing the cheeks of analyst friends. For an investor-relations person, the first presentation on the first day of a roadshow for an initial public offering was always going to be anxiety-producing but she had the willies in spades. Her chairman and CEO was more than a loose cannon. He was a dozen pieces of heavy artillery rolling around the deck in a Force 12 hurricane.

  She had been hired on the recommendation of one of the board members, who rated George Hamid as the number-one asset of the company and its number-one liability. During her interview with the clean-shaven, kinetic Iraqi-American, Hamid had leapt from his chair and pointed aggressively through the windows toward lower Manhattan and the Harbor.

  ‘You see this view?’

  ‘I see it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a good view, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a very good view.’

  ‘You see this office? It’s a fabulous office, isn’t it? One of the finest you’ve ever seen, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where are you going with this, Mr Hamid?’

  ‘Here is where I am going. I arrived in this country with nothing in my pocket. I lost everything during the first Gulf War. I slept on sofas of Iraqi ex-pats willing to help me, I scratched for every dime. I started this company with two thousand dollars and a line of credit guaranteed by a friend. And now I am the ninth largest residential landlord in America. I’ve become a billionaire. Check my ranking on Forbes – you’ll see. How do you think I did that?’

  ‘I know your history, Mr Hamid. I’ve done my homework.’

  He clearly didn’t like her answer. He thrust out his lower lip showing a purple mucosa full of veins. With his palms he smoothed hair that didn’t need smoothing. It was as gray and dense as a wire bristle brush and hardly moved under his touch. His demeanor was part anger and part pout.

  ‘I built this company on the back of my salesmanship, some might even say showmanship. I am my own best spokesman. I’m a seasoned businessman. I’m seventy-three years old, for God’s sake. Why would I need someone like you, a very young woman, to come and tell me what to do?’

  She put on a sweet face and said, ‘Well, thank you for calling me that. I’m not as young as you might think but I’ll pass on the compliment to Anton, the gentleman who colors my hair. I’ve been in the investor-relations game for seventeen years. I’m the senior vice-president of IR at Bates and Modine, the largest publicly traded commercial real-estate company in the country. I know all the buy-side and sell-side real-estate analysts on the Street – more than superficially. I know their spouses’ and kids’ names, their birthdays, their likes and dislikes, the way they construct their financial models, the corporate-speak that drives them crazy-bad and crazy-good. I even know dirt on some of them. I’ve never had to u
se any of it but it’s there as a nuclear option. It’s your story, Mr Hamid. You will always be the principal story-teller, but I know how to craft the story so you’re able to sell the company’s vision for growth without running afoul of regulatory boundaries and getting yourself in serious hot water. Besides, I used to rent one of your apartments in Brooklyn.’

  His frown disappeared. ‘You did? When? Where?’

  ‘When I first moved to New York, when I was getting started. It was all I could afford. To be honest, it wasn’t great, but the heat worked and I could afford it.’

  He wanted to know which building it was, how long she stayed, how much the rent was. She told him the details.

  ‘Did you pay the rent on time?’ he asked.

  ‘Never late,’ she said.

  He turned his back to her, drank in his world-class view, and said, ‘Okay, Miss Ferguson, you are hired on one condition.’

  ‘Oh yes? What’s that?’

  ‘My accounting department will go back into our records to verify that you paid your rent on time.’

  She assumed that he was kidding but he wasn’t. Her rental records were located and scrutinized. Fortunately, she hadn’t been lying.

  When she started at Hamid Property Holdings, the board’s plan had been to go public within a year, but George Hamid’s impatience condensed the timeline. Now, eight months into her job, the IPO roadshow was happening but her plan for reining in her boss was on ever-thinning ice. He had refused to participate in the dry-runs of his roadshow presentation the bankers had penciled in, saying that any notion he needed to practice was ludicrous. The first time he publicly ran through the full PowerPoint deck was the night before the first investor meeting. At a presentation to the stockbrokers from the investment bank who’d be selling the deal to their institutional clients, Hamid had strayed off script, sometimes wildly, and a twenty-minute talk stretched to a rambling thirty-five. And during the question-and-answer session that followed, he had gone off the reservation and descended into hyperbole, boasts, and downright falsehoods. The lawyers had pressed the head of investment banking at the firm to try to reason with the bombastic CEO and later he reported back to his troops his belief that Hamid understood the stakes and everyone’s concerns, and that he would behave.

  One of the senior investment bankers on the deal button-holed Ferguson as soon as she stepped out of the restroom.

  ‘Big crowd,’ he said. ‘Did you see inside the room?’

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘Must be a hundred analysts.’

  ‘There’s a lot of interest,’ she replied.

  ‘So, how’s our guy going to do? You feel okay about this?’

  ‘If feeling okay is feeling like I want to puke then I’m good.’

  ‘Christ, Cassie, I feel like heaving too. He can’t go spouting off bullshit like last night. He’s got to stick to the verifiable facts. You’ve got to be prepared to jump in if he starts to say something bat-shit crazy, okay?’

  ‘It’ll be like throwing myself in front of a moving train but, sure, why not?’

  She sidled over to Hamid before he took the stage and said to him in her sweetest and most cajoling voice, ‘So George, you’re going to stick to the facts and figures? No embellishments? No speculations?’

  Hamid winked and pinched her arm with his sausage-like fingers. ‘Come on, Cassie, you worry too much. I know what I’m doing.’

  He walked to the podium sporting a huge smile that showed his gleaming teeth, whiter and shinier than anything found in the natural world. One of the first things he had done upon emigrating to the United States was get his teeth capped by a top cosmetic dentist. He believed that a good smile would be important to making it big in America and he never missed a chance to dazzle. The first slide of his presentation was a pro forma summary of the terms of the stock offering. The script had him reading it to the audience, word for word. He looked at it, looked at the audience, and immediately veered into unchartered territory.

  ‘You know, ladies and gentlemen, it is such a pleasure and an honor for me to address you today. I am an immigrant. I am from Iraq. I was a very successful businessman there but nothing like I am now. I was a big enemy of Saddam Hussein and a big help to your government during the first Gulf War, Bush Senior’s war. This country took me in and I have devoted myself to becoming a great American.’

  The banker was standing next to Ferguson at the back of the room.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Just read the slide, George. And anyway, I thought we found out he was one of Saddam’s cronies before he flipped sides,’ he whispered.

  Her eyes were closed. ‘Whatever,’ she whispered back.

  Hamid continued to massacre slide number one.

  ‘I hope you’re going to buy a lot of shares in my company,’ he said, ‘because you look like nice young people and I would like you to make a lot of money from your investment. You know, some people say I can see into the future, you know, like a fortune-teller.’ He laughed; no one else joined in. ‘Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But I can see the future of Hamid Property Holdings very clearly indeed and it’s really quite amazing. At the offering price of eighteen dollars a share, how could you not buy this stock? What are you going to say if you missed the boat and it goes to a hundred?’

  The banker exchanged panicky glances with the lawyers. ‘Shoot me now,’ he whispered.

  When Hamid finished his talk, followed by a dangerously freewheeling question-and-answer session with the Wall Street analysts, his bankers and lawyers huddled to figure out how many financial regulatory landmines he had stepped on and whether they could salvage the rest of the multi-city roadshow. Ferguson wasn’t invited into the gaggle, but she stood a short distance away to eavesdrop when she saw one of her least-favorite people poke his bald head through a side door of the ball room, then fill its frame with his slab of a body. Tariq Barzani was the director of security at the company and more than that, he was George Hamid’s shadow, a bulldog bodyguard, surrogate son, and fixer rolled into one. He had emigrated alongside his older companion in the early nineties and had supposedly fulfilled a similar role in Hamid’s construction company in Kirkuk. She had heard that Barzani had been an Olympic-level powerlifter in his younger days, but she never bothered to look it up. His neck was as big as her thigh, so the story was plausible. She knew he spoke English but rarely heard him converse in anything but Arabic around the office because the only person he interacted with was his boss. She had stopped trying to pretend to be nice to him because all he did was scowl at her and follow her with cold eyes as if he was a hungry dog and she was meat.

  Hamid excused himself from a conversation with a couple of lingering analysts and waved Barzani over.

  ‘What is happening?’ he asked the younger man in Arabic.

  ‘I have the building under surveillance with some of my men,’ he said. ‘I do not think anyone saw me that night, but I do not want to trigger a memory in case I am wrong. Her son is still there. A truck came from a company that buys furniture. There was also a moving company. I had a man speak to the driver of the van. The delivery is going to Massachusetts.’

  ‘He must have been going through her belongings, deciding what to keep and what to sell. What you could not find, perhaps he can.’

  ‘I am sorry I failed you.’

  ‘Please, you did not fail me, Tariq. It was a large apartment and you had limited time. And we cannot be certain that Donovan’s wife even kept the mirror. But thanks to the old man, Najib Toubi, we have a chance to find it. I am happy we did not kill him all those years ago.’

  ‘I should have loosened his tongue back then.’

  ‘We must look forward, not back. Are the police continuing to come to the apartment building?’

  ‘No longer. The detective in charge of the investigation was interviewed in the newspaper yesterday. He said they had no leads.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘What would you have me do?’

  �
�We must rely on ourselves. On this matter, the angels are not speaking.’

  ‘Do you want me to search the son’s house when the moving company delivers the goods?’

  ‘Not now. I’m worried that could allow the police to make a link. Watch him very carefully. Do this personally. I want to know everything he does.’

  ‘But you will be traveling this week. I should not leave your side.’

  ‘I’ll be perfectly fine. Look at them back there.’ Hamid caught a furtive glance from the lead investment banker at the back of the room and waved at him cheerily. The fellow returned an awkward smile and resumed his huddled conversation. ‘See how they love me, Tariq? I am their cash cow. Pull my udder and dollars flow out. These men will take good care of me. Find the mirror, Tariq, and God willing, George Hamid will be able to wipe out that which is rotten in the world.’

  SEVEN

  Although it was only June, it might as well have been a high summer day. The spring had been warm and wet. Lilac blossoms were waning, but daffodils and tulips were in bloom, and honey bees flitted from flower to flower. Cal had thought to fill the hummingbird feeder on his porch and the tiny creatures began to plunge their beaks into the sugary water. It was hot, but it was a dry, comfortable heat. A slight breeze passed into his living room through screened windows. Then one of his neighbors, an architect who was fastidious to the extreme about his weekend yard work, fired up his leaf blower, forcing Cal off the sofa to slam his windows shut.

  He didn’t stay on his feet for long. The funeral and the great dismantling had taken an emotional toll, and the mysteries of the mind–body connection made him feel like a physical wreck. Heavy drinking hadn’t helped. His head and body felt wooden and the spectacle of his living room and hall stacked with packing crates was stupefying. Whenever he allowed himself to look at the cardboard stalagmites on the floor, he audibly groaned.

  The doorbell forced him up again.

  Through the frosted glass he saw a black shirt with white collar. ‘Priest alert,’ he mumbled.

  Joe Murphy gave his condolences at the door and continued to offer sympathies into the kitchen where Cal poured him a coffee from a half-filled pot.