by Alan Glynn
Howard Lewis finished his call, pressed another button on his phone, listened for a moment and then looked at me with a blank expression on his face.
‘Your withdrawal is ready, Mr Spinola.’
*
Gennady arrived at nine-thirty the following morning. I’d just woken up about twenty minutes before he arrived and I was still feeling groggy. I’d intended to be up earlier, but from about seven on I’d kept waking and then falling back to sleep again, slipping in and out of dreams. When I finally managed to get out of bed, the first thing I did was take my MDT pill. Then I removed the bowl from the shelf above the computer. After that, I put on a pot of coffee and just stood around in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, waiting.
There were two possibilities. Either Gennady had done the pills – and if he’d done one he’d have done them all. Or, for some reason, he hadn’t done the pills. I reckoned that when I saw him I would know fairly quickly which one it was.
‘Morning,’ I said, studying him closely as he made his way in from the hallway.
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then I watched him as he silently surveyed my apartment. At first, I thought he was looking for the missing ceramic bowl, but then I realized that he was just registering how different the place was from the last time he’d been here. Looking around with him, following his eye, I registered the changes for myself. The apartment was a mess. Papers and documents and folders were strewn about the place. There was an empty pizza box on the couch and there were a couple of Chinese takeout cartons on my desk beside the computer. There were beer cans and coffee mugs everywhere, and full ashtrays and CDs and empty CD covers and shirts and socks.
‘You some kind of fucking pig?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
He furrowed his brow at this, slightly puzzled, and I knew straightaway that he wasn’t on MDT – not right now at any rate.
‘Where the money?’
After he said this I noticed him glancing over at the shelf above the computer. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he stepped a little closer to the desk and continued his discreet search.
‘I want to pay off the whole thing now,’ I said.
This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.
Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Twenty-two five.’
‘But I want to pay it all off.’
‘You can’t.’
‘But—’
‘Twenty-two five.’
I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five. When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.
‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.
He sighed and shook his head.
‘No time. Too busy.’
He glanced over once more at the desk.
‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.
*
I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out – not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started drinking vodka Martinis.
Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.
The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the headlines.
‘Middle East peace-talks at Camp David break down after two weeks of intensive negotiations. Hurricane Julius arrives off the south coast of Florida, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. And Donatella Alvarez, who has been in a coma for two weeks after a brutal attack in a Manhattan hotel room, dies this afternoon – police say they are now conducting a full-scale murder investigation.’
I stared in shock at the screen as the newscaster went back to the details of the peace-talks story. I grabbed on to the side of the bar, and held it tightly. After a couple of seconds, I mumbled something – maybe audibly, maybe not – and swung around to get off my stool.
I stood there for a moment, swaying from side to side, very unsteadily. The room then began to spin, and I moved, staggering the few yards over to the door. I just about made it out into the street before splatting an evening’s worth of vodka, vermouth and olives up on to the sidewalk.
[ 20 ]
I CONTINUED DRINKING OVER the weekend, mostly vodka, and mostly at home. After all, what else was there to do? I’d just become the subject of a full-scale murder investigation – albeit, and very con veniently, under an assumed name – so surely, in the circumstances, a little drinkie or two could hardly be seen as anything other than appropriate. I wasn’t making any further pretense at reading ‘the material’ either, so I gave in for a while and went back to watching the news on TV. This quickly became all I wanted to watch and again I found myself wading through hours of mindless crap, shouting drunken abuse at the screen as I waited for the next bulletin to come on.
There wasn’t much for the media to say about Donatella Alvarez herself – the woman had died and that’s all there was to it. What most of the reports were focusing on now was the political fall-out from her death. This came in the form of renewed calls for the Defense Secretary to resign. The brouhaha over Caleb Hale’s original comments about Mexico had received a shot in the arm when the Alvarez story first broke, and another one now with her death. I hadn’t followed the story too closely, but I’d been aware of it in the background – aware of it as one of those bizarre developments that takes on a life of its own and enters the news-chain like some kind of virus.
Six weeks or so earlier, Caleb Hale was reported to have said at a private gathering that Mexico had become a liability for the US and that ‘we should just consider invading the damned place’. The source that leaked the story to the Los Angeles Times claimed that Hale had name-checked corruption, insurgency, the breakdown of law and order, the debt crisis and drug-trafficking as the five points on ‘the pentangle of Mexico’s instability’. The source went on to claim that Hale had even cited John O’Sullivan on our ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent’ and had mentioned an op-ed piece he’d once read called ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door’. Caleb Hale immediately issued a classic non-denial denial, but then proceeded, in an interview, to more or less justify precisely what he was claiming not to have said. The President was perceived to be weighing in behind Hale when he not only refused to demand the Secretary’s resignation but also refused to condemn his alleged remarks – which of course opened the floodgates of comment and speculation. Everyone was initially shocked and incredulous, but as the days passed certain influential quarters appeared to warm to the idea, and early conclusions about the Defense Secretary being seriously out of touch softened a little, with some even transforming into a broad endorsement for, at the very least, a tougher line on foreign policy.
Now, with what was perceived as a racially motivated killing tossed into the mix, the debate had gone into ov
erdrive. There were interviews, panel discussions, sound bites, one-liners, earnest reports from dusty border towns, aerial shots of the Rio Grande. I watched from my couch, glass in hand, and got caught up in it all as though I were watching a prime-time soap – continually forgetting in my alcoholic euphoria that I was perhaps just a fingerprint or DNA test away from full involvement in this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
As the weekend progressed, however, and euphoria degenerated into numbness, and then anxiety, and then dread – my viewing patterns shifted. I cut down drastically on news shows, and towards Sunday evening found myself skipping them altogether. Increasingly, it was easier to switch over to channels where there were re-runs of Hawaii Five-O to be found – and Happy Days and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
*
On the Monday I tried to stay sober, but didn’t do too well. I had a few beers during the afternoon, and then opened a bottle of vodka in the evening. I spent most of the time listening to music, and eventually crashed out on the couch that night in my clothes. It had been getting steadily warmer over the previous week and I’d been leaving the window open most nights, but when I jolted awake from a confused dream at about 4 a.m., I noticed immediately that the temperature had dropped. It was a good deal chillier than when I’d fallen asleep, so I got off the couch, shivering, and went over to the window to close it. I sat back on the couch, but as I stared into the blue darkness of the night, the shivering continued. I realized, as well, that my heart was palpitating, and that the unpleasant tingling sensation I had in my limbs wasn’t normal. I tried to identify what was happening to me. One possibility was that my system needed more alcohol, in which case I quickly scrolled down through the options – I could get dressed and go out to a bar, or I could go to a Korean deli down the street and buy a couple of six-packs, or I could just drink the cooking sherry I had in the kitchen. But I didn’t really think booze was the problem, because the very idea now of going outside, to the street, to a neon-lit deli with other people in it, struck terror into me.
So that was it, I thought – I was having a fucking panic attack.
I kept taking deep breaths, and hitting one of the sofa cushions beside me with the back of my hand. It was four o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t call anyone. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t sleep. I felt like a cornered rat.
I sat it out, though – on the couch. It was like having a massive heart attack that went on for an hour but didn’t kill you, or even leave you with any physical after effects, nothing that a doctor might find if he were to subject you to a whole battery of tests.
The next day, I decided I had to do something. I’d slipped too far and too fast, and knew that if I slipped any further I’d be in danger of losing everything – although quite what ‘everything’ now meant was clearly open to interpretation. In any case, I had to do something – but the problem was, what? The most immediate and pressing concern was the Donatella Alvarez situation, but that was out of my control. Then, of course, there was Carl Van Loon. But frankly, my whole association with him was beginning to seem a little remote to me. I found it hard to accept that I had actually ‘worked’ with him, especially on something so improbable as the ‘financials’ of a corporate takeover deal. In memory, our various sessions together – in the Orpheus Room, in his apartment, in his office, in the Four Seasons – felt more like dreams now than recollections of real events, and seemed, as well, to have the twisted logic of dreams.
But at the same time I couldn’t just ignore the situation. Not any longer. I couldn’t ignore the reality that leapt up at me every time I looked at my own handwriting on Van Loon’s yellow legal pad. Remote as it all might seem now, I had been involved with him, and I had helped to shape the MCL–Abraxas deal. So if I wanted to salvage anything from the experience, I would have to confront Van Loon, and as soon as possible.
*
I took a shower and shaved. I still felt fairly lousy as I went into the bedroom to get my suit out of the closet, but it was nothing to what I felt when I tried to put it on. I hadn’t worn it in over a week and now all of a sudden I was struggling at the waist to get the trousers closed. It was my only presentable suit, though – so I had no choice but to wear it.
I took a cab to Forty-eighth Street.
As I walked across the main lobby of the Van Loon Building and rode the elevator up to the sixty-second floor, a sense of dread grew within me. Stepping out into the now familiar reception area of Van Loon & Associates, I identified this feeling, correctly, as the onset of another panic attack.
I hung around for a few moments in the middle of the reception area and pretended to be consulting something on the back of a large brown envelope I was carrying – a name, or an address. The envelope contained Van Loon’s yellow legal pad, but there was nothing written on it. I glanced over at the receptionist, who glanced back at me and then picked up one of her telephones. My heart was beating rapidly now and the pain in my chest had become almost unbearable. I turned around and headed in the direction of the elevators. What had I been proposing to do in any case – confront Van Loon? But how? By returning the projections exactly as we’d left them? By showing him I was on a crash diet of cheeseburgers and pizza?
It had been reckless of me to come in here like this. I obviously hadn’t been thinking straight.
The doors finally opened, but the relief of getting away from the reception area was short-lived, because I now had to contend with the elevator car, the interior of which, with its reflective steel panels, its controlled climate and relentless humming, felt as if it had been custom-built to induce and fuel panic attacks. It was a physical environment that seemed to ape the very symptoms of anxiety – the sinking feeling, the uncontrollable fluttering in the stomach, the everpresent threat of nausea.
I closed my eyes, but then couldn’t help picturing the dark elevator shafts above and below me … couldn’t help imagining the heavy steel cables snapping as the car and its counterweights accelerated rapidly in opposite directions, the car naturally hurtling downwards, free-falling to ground level …
Instead it came to a barely perceptible halt near the foot of this concrete tube, and the door slid gently open. To my surprise, standing there – waiting to step inside – was Ginny Van Loon.
‘Mr Spinola!’
When I didn’t respond immediately, she stepped forward and stretched a hand out to take me by the arm, ‘Are you all right?’
I got out of the elevator car and moved with her into the lobby area, which was crowded and busy, and almost as terrifying – though for different reasons – as the elevator car. I was in a cold sweat now and had started shivering again. She said, ‘My God, Mr Spinola, you look—’
‘Like shit?’
‘Well,’ she replied after a moment, ‘yeah.’
We made our way across the lobby and stopped by a large copper-tinted window that looked out on to Forty-eighth Street.
‘What … what’s the matter? What happened?’
I focused on her properly now and saw that her concern was genuine. She was still holding on to my arm and for some reason this made me feel slightly better. Once I acknowledged that, there was a knock-on effect and I managed to calm down considerably.
‘I was … up on sixty-two,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t—’
‘You couldn’t take the heat, right? I knew you weren’t one of Daddy’s business guys. Anyway, they’re nothing but a bunch of automatons.’
‘Automata. I think I was having a panic attack.’
‘Good for you. Anyone who doesn’t have a panic attack up there has something seriously wrong with them. And you can say automatons if you want.’ She paused. ‘You can say referendums.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to catch my breath, ‘referendums, sure, but you wouldn’t say phenomenons, would you?’
She was wearing black jeans and a black sweater and was carrying a small leather doctor’s bag.
‘Not if I was talking
to you, obviously. Anyway, one’s from Latin and the other’s from Greek, the rules are different, so fuck you. How are you feeling now?’
I took a few deep breaths and held my chest.
‘A little better, thanks.’
Aware, suddenly, of my newly acquired girth, I tried to stand up a little straighter and to breathe in.
Ginny studied me for a while.
‘Mr Spi—’
‘Eddie, call me Eddie. Jesus, I’m only thir—’
‘Eddie, are you sick?’
‘Hhn?’
‘I mean, are you unwell? Because you really look unwell. You’ve …’ – she struggled to find the right words – ‘… you’ve … since that time I saw you in the apartment, you’ve put on some, well … some weight. And—’
‘My weight fluctuates.’
‘Yeah, but that was, what, only two weeks ago?’
I held up my hands. ‘Hey, can’t a fellah have a couple of creamcakes once in a while?’
She smiled, but then said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but I just think you should look after yourself better.’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re right.’
My breathing was more regular now and I felt a good deal better. I asked her what she was doing.
‘I’m going up to see Daddy.’
‘You want to get some coffee instead?’
‘I can’t.’ She made a face. ‘Anyway, if you’ve just had a panic attack, I think you should probably be avoiding coffee. Drink juice, or something wholesome that won’t exacerbate your stress levels.’
I straightened up again and leant back against the window.
‘Come and have a wholesome juice with me then.’
She looked directly into my eyes. Hers were bright blue – sparkling, cerulean, celestial.
‘I can’t.’
I was going to push it, ask her why not, but then I didn’t. I got a flickering sense that she was a little uncomfortable all of a sudden, which in turn made me uncomfortable. It also struck me that feelings of panic probably came in waves, and that while an attack might abate, it might just as easily come back. I didn’t want to be around here if that happened, even with Ginny.
