by Glynn, Alan
‘Think about it.’
‘OK. I’ll see you on Monday.’
I remained standing by the phone for a couple of minutes after the call to Van Loon, staring down at an open page of my address book.
I had a nervous, jumpy feeling in my stomach.
Then I picked the phone up and dialled Melissa’s number. As I waited for her to answer I could have been back in Vernon’s apartment – up on the seventeenth floor, still at the beginning of all of this, still in those last shining moments before I recorded a message on her answering machine and then went rooting around in her brother’s bedroom …
‘Hello.’
‘Melissa?’
‘Eddie. Hi.’
‘I got your message.’
‘Yeah. Look … erm …’ – I got the impression that she was composing herself – ‘ … what I said on the message, that just occurred to me today. I don’t know. My brother was an asshole. He’d been dealing this weird designer thing for quite a while. And it occurred to me about you. So I started worrying.’
If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Melissa,’ I said, having decided on the spot that this was what I was going to do. ‘Vernon didn’t give me anything. I’d met him the day before he … er … the day before it happened. And we just talked about stuff … nothing in particular.’
She sighed, ‘OK.’
‘But thanks for your concern.’ I paused for a moment. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
Awkward, awkward, awkward.
Then she said, ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine. Keeping busy.’
‘What have you been up to?’
This was the conversation we would be having in these circumstances – here it was – the inevitable conversation we would be having in these circumstances …
‘I’ve been working for the last few years as a copywriter.’ I paused. ‘For Kerr & Dexter. The publishers.’
It was the truth, technically, but that’s all it was.
‘Yeah? That’s great.’
It didn’t feel great, though – or like the truth, my days as a copywriter for Kerr & Dexter suddenly seeming distant, unreal, fictional.
I didn’t want to be on the phone to Melissa any more. Since we’d renewed our acquaintance – however fleetingly – I felt that I had already entered into a consistent pattern of lying to her. Going on with the conversation could only make that worse.
I said, ‘Look, I wanted to call you back and clear that up … but … I’m going to get off the phone now.’
‘OK.’
‘It’s not that—’
‘Eddie?’
‘Yes?’
‘This isn’t easy for me either.’
‘Sure.’
There wasn’t anything else I could think of to say.
‘Goodbye then.’
‘Bye.’
In need of immediate distraction, I flicked through my address book for Gennady’s cellphone number. I dialled it and waited.
‘Yeah?’
‘Gennady?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s Eddie.’
‘Eddie. What you want? I busy.’
I stared at the wall in front of me for a second.
‘I’ve got a treatment done for that thing. It’s about twen—’
‘Give me this in the morning. I look at it.’
‘Gennady …’ He was gone. ‘Gennady?’
I put the phone down.
Tomorrow morning was Friday. I’d forgotten. Gennady was coming for the first repayment on the loan.
Shit.
The money I owed wasn’t the problem. I could write him out a cheque straightaway for the whole amount, plus the vig, plus a bonus for just being Gennady, but that wouldn’t do it. I’d told him that I had a treatment ready. Now I had to come up with one, had to have one for the morning – or else he’d probably stab me continuously until he developed something akin to tennis elbow.
I wasn’t exactly in the mood for this sort of thing, but I knew it would keep me busy, so I went online and did some research. I picked up relevant terminology and worked out a plot loosely based on a recent mafia trial in Sicily, a detailed account of which I found on an Italian website. By some time after midnight – with suitable variations – I’d knocked out a twenty-five-page, scene-by-scene treatment for Keeper of the Code, a story of the Organizatsiya.
After that, I spent a good while searching through magazines for real estate ads. I had decided that I was going to phone some of the big Manhattan realtors the following morning and finally kickstart the process of renting – maybe even of buying – a new apartment.
Then I went to bed and got four or five hours of what passed for sleep these days.
Gennady arrived at about nine-thirty. I buzzed him in, telling him I was on the third floor. It took him for ever to walk up the stairs, and when he finally materialized in my living-room he seemed exhausted and fed up.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He raised his eyebrows at me and looked around. Then he looked at his watch.
I had printed out the treatment and put it in an envelope. I took this from the desk and handed it to him. He held it up, shook it, seemed to be estimating how much it weighed. Then he said, ‘Where the money?’
‘Er … I was going to write you a cheque. How much was it again?’
‘A cheque?’
I nodded at him, suddenly feeling foolish.
‘A cheque?’ he said again. ‘You out of your fucking mind? What you think, we are a financial institution?’
‘Gennady, look—’
‘Shut up. You can’t come up with the money today you in serious fucking trouble, my friend – you hear me?’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘I cut your balls off.’
‘I’ll get it. Jesus. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘A cheque,’ he said again, with contempt. ‘Unbelievable.’
I went over to my phone and picked it up. Since those first couple of days at Lafayette, I had developed extremely cordial relations with my obsequious and florid-faced bank manager, Howard Lewis, so I phoned him and told him what I needed – twenty-two five in cash – and asked if he could possibly have it ready for me in fifteen minutes.
Absolutely no problem, Mr Spinola.
I put the phone down and turned around. Gennady was standing over at my desk, with his back to me. I mumbled something to get his attention. He then turned to face me.
‘Well?’
I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Let’s go to my bank.’
We took a cab, in silence, to Twenty-third and Second, where my bank was. I wanted to make a reference to the treatment, but since Gennady was obviously in a very bad mood, I judged it better not to say anything. I got the cash from Howard Lewis and handed it over to Gennady outside on the street. He slipped the bundle into the mysterious interior of his jacket. Holding up the envelope with the treatment in it, he said, ‘I look at this.’
Then he took off up Second Avenue without saying goodbye.
I crossed the street, and in line with my new strategy of trying to eat at least once a day, I went into a diner and had coffee and a blueberry muffin.
Then I wandered over to – and up – Madison Avenue. After about ten blocks, I stopped outside a realtor’s office, a place called Sullivan, Draskell. I went inside, made some enquiries and got talking to a broker by the name of Alison Botnick. She was in her late forties and was dressed in a stylish navy-blue silk dress with a matching Nehru coat. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was in jeans and a sweater, and could easily have been a clerk in a wine store – or a freelance copywriter – this woman had no idea who I was and consequently had to be on her guard. As far as Ms Botnick was concerned, I could have been one of those new dot-com billionaires on the look-out for a twelve-room spread on Park. These days you
never knew, and I kept her guessing.
Walking up Madison, I had been thinking in the region of $300,000 for a place – $500,000 tops – but it occurred to me now that given my standing with Van Loon and my prospects with Hank Atwood there was no reason why I shouldn’t be thinking bigger – $2 million, $3 million, maybe even more. As I stood in the plush reception area of Sullivan, Draskell, thumbing through glossy brochures for luxury condos in new buildings called things like the Mercury and the Celestial, and listening to Alison Botnick’s pitch, with its urgent lexical hammer-blows – high-end, liquid, snapped-up, close, close, close – I felt my expectations rising by the second. I could also see Alison Botnick, for her part – as she morphed fifteen years off my frame and mentally dressed me in a UCLA T-shirt and baseball cap – convincing herself that I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass the average co-op board’s screening procedure, I would probably want to avoid a co-op apartment.
‘The boards are getting very picky,’ she said, ‘not that—’
‘Of course not, but who wants to be excluded without a fight?’
She assessed this.
‘OK.’
Our manipulation of each other into these respective states of acquisitive and professional arousal could only have led to one thing: viewings. She took me first to see a four-bedroom prewar co-op in the East Seventies between Lexington and Park. We went by cab, and as we chatted about the market and where it was ‘at’ right now, I had that pleasant sensation of being in control – and of being at the controls, as though I had designed the software for this little interlude myself and everything was running smoothly.
The apartment we went to view on Seventy-fourth was nothing special. It had low ceilings and didn’t have much natural light. It was also cramped and quite fussy.
‘A lot of these prewar co-ops are like this, you know,’ Alison said, as we made our way back down to the lobby. ‘They’ve got leaks and need to be rewired, and unless you’re prepared to just gut them and start over, they’re not worth the money.’
Which in this case was $1.8 million.
Next we went to see a 3,200-square-foot converted loft space in the Flatiron District. It had been a textile factory of some kind up until the’50s, had lain vacant for most of the’60s and from the way the place was decorated it didn’t look as if its present owner had made it much past the’70s. Alison said he was a civil engineer who’d probably paid very little for it, but was now asking $2.3 million. I liked it, and it certainly had potential, but it was huddled a little too anonymously in a part of town that was still relatively dull and unexciting.
The last place Alison took me to see was on the sixty-eighth floor of a condominium skyscraper that had just been built on the site of the old West Side rail yards. The Celestial, along with other luxury residential developments, was – in theory – to be the centrepiece of a new urban rejuvenation project. This would roughly cover the area between West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.
‘If you take a look at it, there’s a ton of empty lots there,’ Alison said, sounding like a latter-day Robert Moses, ‘from Twenty-sixth Street up to Forty-second Street, west of Ninth Avenue – it’s ripe for redevelopment. And with the new Penn Station you’ll have a huge increase in traffic – thousands more people pouring in every day.’
She was right, and as our cab cruised west along Thirty-fourth Street, down towards the Hudson River, I could see what she was talking about, I could see the great potential there was for gentrification, for a huge bourgeois-boho makeover of the entire neighbourhood.
‘Believe me,’ she went on, ‘it’s going to be the biggest land grab this city has seen in fifty years.’
Rising up out of the wasteland of disused and neglected warehouse buildings, the Celestial itself was a dazzling steel-frame monolith in a seamless casing of reflective bronze-tinted glass. As the cab pulled up alongside a huge plaza at the foot of the building, Alison started reeling off stuff that she obviously felt I should know. The Celestial was 715 feet tall, had 70 storeys and 185 apartments – also several restaurants, a health club, a private screening room, dog-walking facilities, a ‘smart garbage’ recycling system … wine-cellar, walk-in humidor, titanium-sided roofdeck …
I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
‘The guy who designed this place,’ she said, ‘is even thinking of moving in himself.’
The vast lobby area had pink-veined marble columns supporting a gold-toned mosaic ceiling, but little in the way of furniture or art works. The elevator took us up to the sixty-eighth floor in what felt like ten seconds, but must have been longer. The apartment she was showing me still had some work to be done on it, so I wasn’t to mind the bare light bulbs and exposed wiring. ‘But …’ she turned to me and said in a whisper as she was putting the key in the door, ‘ … check out the views …’
We stepped into an open, loft-style space, and although I was aware of various corridors going off in different directions, I was immediately drawn to the full-length windows on the far side of this bare, white room. There was plastic sheeting on the floor, and as I walked across it, Alison following just behind me, the whole of Manhattan rose dizzyingly up into view. Standing there at the window, I gaped out at the cluster of midtown skyscrapers directly ahead, at Central Park huddled up to the left, at the financial district over to my right.
Seen here from an angle that had a dreamlike quality of the impossible to it, all of the city’s land-mark buildings were in place – but they appeared to be facing, even somehow looking, in this direction.
I sensed Alison at my shoulder – smelled her perfume, heard the gentle swish of silk against silk as she moved.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what do you think?’
‘It’s amazing,’ I said, and turned to look at her.
She was nodding in agreement, and smiling. Her eyes were a vivid green and glistened in a way that I hadn’t noticed before. In fact, Alison Botnick suddenly seemed a lot younger than I had imagined her to be.
‘So, Mr Spinola,’ she said, holding my gaze, ‘do you mind if I ask you what line of work you are in?’
I hesitated, and then said, ‘Investment banking.’
She nodded.
‘I work for Carl Van Loon.’
‘I see. That must be interesting.’
‘It is.’
As she processed this information, maybe slotting me into some real estate client category, I glanced around at the room with its bare walls and incomplete grid of ceiling panels, trying to imagine how it might look fully furnished, and lived in. I thought about the rest of the place, as well.
‘How many rooms are there?’ I asked.
‘Ten.’
I considered this for a moment – an apartment with ten rooms – but the scale of it defeated me. I was drawn irresistibly back to the window and gazed out again at the city – rapt as before, taking it all in. It was a clear, sunny day in Manhattan and just standing there made me feel utterly exhilarated.
‘What’s the ask price?’
I had the impression she was only doing it for effect, but Alison consulted her notebook, flicking through several pages and humming in concentration. After a moment, she said, casually, ‘Nine point five.’
I clicked my tongue and whistled.
She consulted another page in her notebook and then stepped a little over to the left, as though she were now positively lost in concentration.
I went back to looking out of the window. It was a lot of money, sure, but it wasn’t necessarily a prohibitive amount. If I continued trading at my current levels, and managed to play Van Loon the right way, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to put some kind of a financial package together.
I glanced back at Alison and cleared my throat.
She turned around, and smiled politely.
Nine and a h
alf million dollars.
There’d been a certain amount of wattage in the air between us, but apparently the mention of money had somehow defused this and for the next while we wandered in silence through the other rooms of the apartment. The views and angles in each one were slightly different from those in the main room, but they were equally as spectacular. There seemed to be light everywhere, and space, and as I passed through what would be the bathrooms and the kitchen, I had swirling visions in my head of onyx, terracotta, mahogany, chrome – elegant living in a kaleidoscope of floating forms, parallel lines, designer curves …
At one point, I contrasted all of this with the cramped atmosphere and creaking floorboards of my one-bedroom apartment on Tenth Street and I immediately began to feel light-headed, constricted in my breathing, a little panicky even.
‘Mr Spinola, are you all right?’
I was leaning against a doorway now, with one hand pressed against my chest.
‘Yeah, I’m fine … it’s just …’
‘What?’
I looked up, and around, to get my bearings … unsure that I hadn’t had another momentary blackout. I didn’t think I’d moved – didn’t remember moving – but I couldn’t be 100 per cent certain that …
That what?
That from where I was standing, the angle wasn’t different …
‘Mr Spinola?’
‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I have to go now, though. I’m sorry.’
I started walking swiftly along the corridor towards the main entrance. With my back to her, I waved a hand in the air and said, ‘I’ll be in touch with your office. I’ll phone. Thank you.’
I got out into the hallway and straight over to one of the elevator cars.
I was hoping, as the doors whispered closed, that she wouldn’t follow me, and she didn’t.
[ 16 ]
I WALKED OUT OF THE CELESTIAL and across the plaza towards Tenth Avenue, keenly aware of the colossal rectangular slab of bronze-tinted glass shimmering in the sun behind me. I was also aware of the possibility that Alison Botnick was still up on the sixty-eighth floor, and maybe even staring down at the plaza – which of course made me feel like an insect, and more so with each step I took. I had to walk several blocks along Thirty-third Street, past the General Post Office and Madison Square Garden, before finding a taxi. I never once looked back, and as I got settled into the cab I kept my head down. There was a copy of the New York Post lying folded on the seat beside me. I picked it up and held it tightly in my lap.
