by Alan Glynn
*
This impression was reinforced almost at once, when I was called in to one of the other offices to go over the last-minute arrangements for the press conference. Organized at admittedly very short notice by one of Van Loon’s staffers, the press conference was being held at five o’clock in a midtown hotel. This much I had been aware of, but when I saw now which hotel, I got a return of that sharp, sinking feeling in my stomach.
‘Are you OK?’
This was one of the staffers. I glanced up and looked at him, simultaneously catching sight of my reflection in a mirror that was on a side wall of the office.
My face was deathly pale.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, it’s just … a … moment, I think—’
I turned around and rushed out of the office, into the men’s room and straight over to one of the washbasins.
I threw some cold water on my face.
The press conference was going to be held at the Clifden Hotel.
*
Van Loon and I arrived at about three-thirty, and already there was quite a bit of commotion in the place. The first inkling for the media that something was up had come earlier in the day, after Van Loon had phoned a few carefully selected people and told them to cancel whatever they’d had on for the late afternoon. The names Atwood and Bloom were mentioned in the same breath and that had been enough to start a wild fire of rumour and speculation. We’d sent out the press release an hour later. Then the phones had started ringing and hadn’t stopped since.
The Clifden was a forty-five-storey tower rising out of a restored landmark building on Fifty-sixth Street, just off Madison Avenue. It was a luxurious hotel with over 800 rooms, as well as full business and conference facilities. The lobby area led on to a glass-enclosed atrium lounge and beyond that again there was a reception room where we would be holding our press conference.
As Van Loon took a call on his cellphone, I looked around the lobby area very carefully, but I honestly didn’t recognize anything. Even though I had a lingering sense of unease about the whole thing, I came to the confident conclusion that I had never been there before.
Van Loon finished his call. We walked into the atrium lounge, and in the time it took us to cross it Van Loon was approached three times by different journalists. He engaged them in a charming, bantering way, but told them nothing they wouldn’t have heard already or read in the press release. Inside the conference room itself there was a lot of activity, as technical crews set up cameras and tested sound equipment at the back. A little further up the room, hotel staff were laying out rows of foldable chairs, and at the top there was a podium, with two long tables on either side of it. Behind these there were mounted stands displaying the respective logos of the two companies, MCL-Parnassus and Abraxas.
I stood at the back for a while, as Van Loon consulted with some of his regular people in the middle of the room. Behind me, I could hear two technicians talking as they fiddled with wires and cables.
‘… I swear to god, whacked on the back of the head.’
‘Here?’
‘With a blunt instrument. You don’t read the papers? She was Mexican. Married to some painter.’
‘Yeah. I remember now. Shit. That was this place?’
I moved away, over towards the doors – so I couldn’t hear them any more. Then I slowly drifted out of the conference room altogether and back into the atrium lounge.
One of the things I remembered quite clearly from that night – from near the end of it, at any rate – was walking along an empty hotel corridor. I could picture it in my mind’s eye still – the low ceiling, the patterned crimson and navy carpet, the magnolia walls, the oak panelled doors flitting past me on either side …
I just didn’t remember anything else about it.
I crossed the lounge and wandered into the lobby area. More people were arriving now and there was a heightened air of anticipation about the place. I saw someone I knew and wanted to avoid, so I slipped over towards the elevators, which were on the far side of the reception desk. But then, as though carried along by some irresistible force, I actually followed two women into an elevator. One of them pressed a button, and then looked at me expectantly, her finger hovering in front of the panel.
‘Fifteen,’ I said, ‘thanks.’
Mingling freely and somewhat sickeningly in the air with my anxiety was the scent of expensive perfume, and the always charged but never acknowledged intimacy of an elevator ride. As we hummed upwards, I felt my stomach churning over and I had to lean against the side of the elevator car to steady myself. When the door slid open at fifteen, I stared out in disbelief at a magnolia-coloured wall. Brushing past one of the two women, I made my exit – stepping a little unsteadily out on to a crimson and navy carpet.
‘Good evening.’
I turned back, and as the two women were being closed off from view, I mumbled some kind of reply.
Left alone now in this empty corridor, I experienced something close to real terror. I had been here before. It was exactly as I had remembered it – the low, wide corridor … richly coloured, luxurious, deep and long like a tunnel. But this was all I could remember. I walked a few paces and then stopped. I stood facing one of the doors and tried to imagine what the room inside was like – but nothing came to me. I walked on, passing door after door on either side, until near the end of the corridor I came to one that was slightly open.
I stopped, and my heart was thumping as I stood there, peering through the chink into what I could see of the room – the end of a double bed, drapes, a chair, everything bright and cream-coloured.
With my foot, I gently tapped the door open a little wider, and stepped back. Framed in the doorway, I could see more of the same, a generic hotel room – but then suddenly, passing across the frame from left to right I saw a tall, dark-haired woman in a long black dress. She was clutching her head and there was blood pouring down the side of her face. My heart lurched sideways and I stepped back, reeling, and fell against the magnolia wall. I got up, and staggered along the corridor, back towards the elevators.
A moment later, behind me, I heard a noise and I turned around. Coming out of the room I’d just been looking into, there was a man, and then a woman. They pulled the door closed and started walking in my direction. The woman was tall and dark-haired, and was wearing a belted coat. She was in her fifties, as was the man. They were chatting, and completely ignored me as they passed. I stood and watched as they walked the length of the corridor and then disappeared into an elevator.
A couple of minutes ticked by before I could do anything. My heart still felt as if it had been dislodged and was in danger of stopping. My hands were shaking. Leaning against the wall, I stared down at the carpet. Its deep colours seemed to be pulsating, its pattern shifting and alive.
Eventually, I straightened up and made my way to the elevators, but my hand was still trembling as I reached out to press the ‘down’ button.
*
By the time I got back to the conference room, a lot of people had arrived and the atmosphere was fairly frenetic. I wandered up to the front, where some of the MCL people had gathered in a group and were talking animatedly.
Suddenly, I heard Van Loon approaching me from behind.
‘Eddie, where have you been?’
I turned around. There was a look of genuine surprise on his face.
‘Jesus, Eddie, what happened? You … you look like you’ve seen—’
‘A ghost?’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘I’m a little stressed out here, Carl, that’s all. I just need some time.’
‘Look, Eddie, take it easy. If anyone’s earned a break around here, it’s you.’ He clenched his fist and held it out in a gesture of solidarity. ‘Anyway, we’ve done our work. For the moment. Am I right?’
I nodded.
Van Loon was then whisked off by one of his people to talk to somebody on the far side of the podium.
I floated t
hrough the next couple of hours in a kind of semiconscious daze. I moved around and mingled and talked to people, but I don’t remember specific conversations. It all felt choreographed, and automatic.
When the actual press conference started, I found myself at the top of the room, standing behind the Abraxas people, who were seated at the table to the right of the podium. At the back of the room – and over a sea of about 300 heads – there was a phalanx of reporters, photographers and camera-men. The event was going out live on several channels, and there was also a webcast and a satellite feed. When Hank Atwood took the podium, there was an immediate barrage of sound from the cameras at the back – clicking, whirring, popping flashbulbs – and this din continued uninterrupted throughout the whole press conference, and even intermittently during the question-and-answer session that followed. I didn’t listen carefully to any of the speeches, some of which I had helped to write, but I did recognize occasional phrases and expressions – even though the relentless repetition of words such as ‘future’, ‘transform’ and ‘opportunity’ only added to the sense of unreality I now felt about everything that was happening around me.
*
Just as Dan Bloom was finishing at the podium, my cellphone rang. I quickly took it out of my jacket pocket and answered it.
‘Hello, is this … Eddie Spinola?’
I could barely hear.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Dave Morgenthaler in Boston. I got your message from this morning.’
I covered my other ear.
‘Listen … hang on a second.’
I moved to the left, along the side of the room and through a door about half-way down that led into a quiet section off the atrium lounge.
‘Mr Morgenthaler?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When can we meet?’
‘Look, who are you? I’m busy – why should I take the time out to see you?’
As briefly as I could, I pitched him the story – a powerful, untested and potentially lethal drug from the labs of the company he was about to go up against in court. I kept it unspecific and didn’t describe the effects of the drug.
‘You haven’t said anything to convince me,’ he said. ‘How do I know you’re not some nut? How do I know you’re not making this shit up?’
The lights were low in this section of the lounge and the only other people nearby were two old guys engrossed in conversation. They were sitting at a table next to some huge potted palm trees. Behind me, I could hear voices resounding from the conference room.
‘You couldn’t make MDT up, Mr Morgenthaler. This shit is real, believe me.’
There was a pause, quite a long one, and then he said, ‘What?’
‘I said you couldn’t—’
‘No, the name. What name did you say?’
Shit – I shouldn’t have said the name.
‘Well, that’s—’
‘MDT … you said MDT.’ There was an urgency in his voice now. ‘What is this, a smart drug?’
I hesitated before I said anything else. He knew about it, or at least knew something about it. And he clearly wanted to know more.
I said, ‘When can we meet?’
He didn’t pause this time.
‘I can get an early flight tomorrow morning. Let’s meet, say … ten?’
‘OK.’
‘Somewhere outside. Fifty-ninth Street? In front of the Plaza?’
‘OK.’
‘I’m tall and—’
‘I’ve seen your photo on the Internet.’
‘Fine. OK. I’ll see you tomorrow morning then.’
I put the phone away and wandered slowly back into the conference room. Atwood and Bloom were together at the podium now, answering questions. I still found it hard to focus on what was going on, because that little incident up on the fifteenth floor – hallucination, vision, whatever – was still fresh in my mind and was blocking everything else out. I didn’t know what had happened between me and Donatella Alvarez that night, but I suspected now that as a manifestation of guilt and uncertainty, this was only the tip of a very large iceberg.
*
After the question-and-answer session had been wrapped up, the crowd began to disperse, but then the place became more chaotic than ever. Journalists from Business Week and Time were floating around looking for people to get comments from, and executives were slapping each other on the back and laughing. At one point, Hank Atwood passed and slapped me on the back. He then turned, and with an outstretched arm pointed an index finger directly at me.
‘The future, Eddie, the future.’
I half smiled, and he was gone.
There was talk among the Van Loon & Associates people about going out somewhere for dinner, to celebrate, but I couldn’t have faced that. With the events of the day so far, I had assembled the possible makings of a full-blown anxiety attack, and I didn’t want to do anything stupid now that would actually precipitate one.
Without saying a word to anybody, therefore, I turned around and strolled out of the conference room. I crossed the atrium lounge and the lobby area and just walked right out of the hotel on to Fifty-sixth Street. It was a warm evening and the air was thick with the muffled roar of the city. I went over to Fifth Avenue and stood at the foot of Trump Tower, looking up the three blocks towards Fifty-ninth Street – at Grand Army Plaza and the corner of Central Park. Why did Dave Morgenthaler want to meet me there? Out in the open like that?
I turned and looked in the opposite direction, at the streams of traffic, dipping and rising, and at the parallel lines of the buildings, trailing towards some invisible point of convergence.
I started walking in this direction. It occurred to me that Van Loon might try to reach me, so I took out my cellphone and switched it off. I kept walking along Fifth, and eventually made a right on to Thirty-fourth Street. After a few blocks, I had reached what I supposed was my new neighbourhood – which was what? Chelsea? The Garment District? Who the fuck knew any more?
I stopped at a dingy-looking bar on Tenth Avenue and went inside.
I sat at the bar and ordered a Jack Daniel’s. The place was nearly empty. The barman poured me the drink and then went back to watching the TV set. It was bracketed high on to a wall just over the door leading to the men’s room, and there was a sitcom showing. After about five minutes – during which time he had laughed only once – the barman picked up the remote and started flicking through the channels. At one point I caught a sudden flash of the MCL-Parnassus logo, and I said, ‘Wait, go back to that for a second.’
He flicked back and then looked at me, still aiming the remote up at the TV set. It was a news report of the announcement with footage of the press conference.
‘Hold it there, for a minute,’ I said.
‘A second, now a minute, Jesus,’ he said, impatiently.
I glared at him.
‘Just this segment, all right? Thank you.’
He dropped the remote down on to the bar and held his hands up. Then we both turned our attentions back to the screen.
Dan Bloom was at the podium, and as the voice-over report described the scale and importance of the proposed merger, the camera panned slowly to the right, taking in all of the Abraxas executives sitting at the table. In the background, there was a clear view of the company logo, but that wasn’t all you could see. There were also several people in the background, standing, and one of them was me. As the camera moved from left to right, I passed across the screen from right to left, and then disappeared. But in those few seconds, you could see me clearly, like in a police line-up – my face, my eyes, my blue tie and charcoal grey suit.
The barman looked at me, obviously registering something. Then he looked back at the screen, but they had already returned to the studio. He looked at me again, with a dumb expression on his face. I lifted my glass and drained it.
‘You can change the channel now,’ I said.
Then I put a twenty on the bar, got up off my stool and left.
[ 26 ]
THE NEXT MORNING I TOOK A CAB to Fifty-ninth Street, and on the way I rehearsed what I was going to say to Dave Morgenthaler. In order to keep him interested, and to buy some time, I would have to promise that he could have a sample of MDT. Then I’d be in a position to make my approach to someone in Eiben-Chemcorp. I was also hoping that by talking to Morgenthaler I might be able to get some idea about who in Eiben-Chemcorp I could approach. I got to Grand Army Plaza at ten minutes to ten and walked around, occasionally glancing up at the hotel. In my head, I had already left Van Loon and the merger behind – at least for the moment.
At five minutes past, a taxi pulled up at the kerb and a tall, thin man in his early fifties got out. I recognized him immediately from the photos I’d seen in archive articles on the Internet. I walked towards him, and although he saw me approaching, he surveyed the vicinity for any other possible candidates. Then he looked back at me.
‘Spinola?’ he said.
I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
We shook hands.
‘This better be worth my while.’
He had jet-black hair, quite a lot of it, and wore thick-rimmed glasses. He looked tired and had a kind of hangdog expression on his face. He was in a dark suit and a raincoat. It was an overcast day and there was a breeze blowing. I was about to suggest looking for a coffee shop, or even going into the Oak Room of the Plaza, seeing as how it was right there – but Morgenthaler had other ideas.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said, and started crossing over towards the park. I hesitated, and then caught up with him.
‘A walk in the park?’ I said.
He nodded yes, but didn’t say anything, or look in my direction.
Walking briskly, and in silence, we went down the steps into the park, around by the pond, up by Wollman Rink and eventually over to Sheep Meadow. Morgenthaler selected a bench and we sat down, facing the skyline of Central Park South. Where we were sitting was exposed and uncomfortably windy, but I wasn’t about to start complaining now.
