“It’s about Matthew.”
He stopped reading but couldn’t look at her. They’d grown distant in recent years. She was a psychologist with a thriving private practice, had been since before they met. She used her maiden name—Stepinack—and few if any of her patients had the slightest idea that she was married to one of the world’s wealthiest men. She’d never cut back on her hours even as he’d grown increasingly successful. Each morning she walked several blocks east from their building on Fifth Avenue to a sunless, ground-floor office off the lobby of a far less glamorous building on Second Avenue. Neither of them talked much about their work, though both were consumed by it. And yet she could still read him like an old, familiar book.
“What does sending a jet to San Francisco have to do with—”
“It’s in your voice,” she said, “the way you sounded when you were starting out, putting those first deals together, as if everything depended on getting it right. You haven’t sounded like that in twenty years.”
“I have six deals in the works. This afternoon I have a board meeting—I can’t honestly remember which company—and then I’m giving a speech to a group of business students at Columbia. And tomorrow is more of the same. Do you really think it’s about Matthew?”
“I know it is,” she said quietly.
The name lingered in the air between them; they both needed a few seconds to accommodate themselves to the new presence.
“It’s always about him,” Julian said quietly.
“He was my son, too.”
Their eyes met, but just briefly. If anything, she’d been the more devastated by his murder two years ago, at least initially. After a week he’d gone back to his routine, but it had taken Caroline nearly a year to reenter her life. Her patients were referred to colleagues; she’d found it impossible to focus on the anxieties and disappointments of other people. When she did resume her life, she did so completely, with her habitual enthusiasm and energy. Not Julian. He went through the motions of being Julian Mellow. Perhaps if they’d had other children he would have been pulled back to life by the demands of parenthood. But they’d not been able to conceive after Matthew was born, and though he didn’t believe in fate or omens or, for that matter, religion of any sort, he’d always held an unexamined faith that having just one child, a son, was his destiny. He’d been an only child too.
“I know you’re convinced that I don’t think about him as much as you do,” Caroline said.
“Not true.”
“You’re convinced you feel his loss more deeply than I do.”
“He was our son.”
“I had to make a decision, the hardest of my life. I could spend the rest of my life grieving, or I could move on. Grieving was by far the more tempting choice—you do realize that, Julian. Grieving would have been much easier. But I decided to move on. You haven’t.”
“Do you have any idea what I’ve accomplished in the past two years? More than seventeen billion dollars in deals.” Such industriousness struck him as monstrous, in light of what had happened to Matthew. Every deal felt like a betrayal, a movement away, leaving Matthew behind. But then again, so did the sunrise each morning, each tick of the clock by his bedside.
“Deals,” she said, practically spitting the word. “You haven’t moved on, not a single inch.”
“I don’t know how,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. Sometimes he felt that if he’d spent more time with Matthew, been a more engaged father, less caught up in deal-making, his son’s death wouldn’t sting quite so hard, and so persistently. He had little to hang on to, few actual memories. The pain was about what might have been, not what was.
“I’ve learned to think of grief as a thing, a kind of object, something hard inside of me, something alien.” She placed a fist over her chest. “A year after Matthew died I put that object on a shelf, a high shelf. I never got rid of it, never threw it away, I just put it to the side. It’s always there, and sometimes…” She shook her head. “Sometimes I can’t help but notice it, and it almost shocks me, the way it did back then. Those are bad moments, bad days. But I just couldn’t carry it around with me, I had to put it somewhere.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You mean you won’t do that. Because you’re too focused on revenge.”
What did she know? He’d been scrupulous about keeping his plans from her, as much for her own protection as anything else. She’d asked about the second phone. He’d told her it had to do with a top-secret deal. For all his success, Caroline was the more ruthlessly practical. She moved on. He never really could. When she’d gotten pregnant, shortly after they met, when he was penniless and she was just twenty-one, she’d insisted on having the baby, despite his reservations. We’ll figure it out, she’d said. And they had. He stood up.
“I have to get to the office.”
“It won’t help, whatever it is you’re planning,” she called after him as he headed for the front door.
Perhaps she was right. It was too soon to tell. If it went well, then he’d know whether he’d done the right thing, whether he could finally move on. And if it went badly, he’d be destroyed, and she’d go down with him.
Chapter 3
Three thousand feet over the Sierra Nevadas, Billy Sandifer gazed out the window of the Gulfstream G650. The jagged landscape was brutal, even raw, yet every hundred miles or so there’d be a single house, or a cluster of houses, and he’d wonder what was going on down there, who lived there, how they got there, whether they were happy to be that isolated. Sometimes his own life seemed equally inscrutable. What was he doing in Julian Mellow’s private jet, on a mission that violated every principle he held, or had once held, or pretended to hold? He was living someone else’s life, someone he hardly knew. His own self, his past—his soul—seemed as remote as one of the distant peaks glimpsed out the window, visible for one moment, then quickly left behind.
He lifted one of the plane’s several phones and dialed the Newman Center back in New Jersey. He heard a recorded message. He’d forgotten how early it still was.
“I’d like to make an appointment to see my daughter,” he said after the beep. “Rebecca Sandifer. I’ll call back later.”
The mountains ended abruptly, replaced by a flat green landscape of squared-off farms that seemed scarcely more hospitable. The flight attendant crossed the cabin and leaned over from the waist.
“We’ll be on the ground in five minutes. Would you like anything else?” He’d almost forgotten someone else was on the plane. Like Becca, he sometimes lost awareness of other people.
“No, thank you.”
She was quite beautiful, he realized—why hadn’t he noticed before? And why didn’t this matter? He was forty-two years old, unmarried. These things should matter.
“Buckle up, then. I’ll see you in San Francisco.”
Chapter 4
In New York, Zach Springer heard the phone ring from somewhere in a dream that involved visiting his childhood home in suburban New Jersey, only instead of the familiar floor plan he found himself staggering through a maze of brightly lit corridors, doors opening into still more corridors. Disturbing, like all of his dreams, and yet he felt a powerful reluctance to wake up that had nothing to do with fatigue—he’d been asleep for eight hours, and he needed no more than six, as a rule. He opened a door, and then another, the ringing growing louder, but there was no phone in sight. He ran down a long hall, as white as a hospital corridor. The ringing grew louder and louder but still he found no phone.
And then he was in his bed, sitting up, groping through the piles of books and magazines on his nightstand, searching for his phone.
“Hello,” he said.
“I woke you up.”
Damn. He should have cleared his throat before answering. Sarah didn’t sound disapproving so much as disappointed, which was worse.
“I was up late,” he said.
“You were asleep an hour before me.”
&nb
sp; “And then I woke up.”
He heard her sigh. “I need to get back to class. I just wanted to remind you to call that guy my principal knows, with the construction business.” He heard a child’s voice, one of Sarah’s third-graders. “Miss Pearlman, can I stop now?” And then Sarah again, in a gentler voice, talking away from the phone. “If you don’t finish the picture I won’t be able to hang it up in our show…great, I’ll be right back. Anyway,” she said in a huskier, more clipped tone, “it’s much harder to reach him in the afternoon.”
Sometimes he felt less responsible than one of her charges at PS 87, the elementary school a few blocks from the apartment they shared on the Upper West Side. He hadn’t had a paying job in three years, and had to be prodded into calling contacts for job leads.
“I’ll call him now,” he said.
“Have a cup of coffee first. You sound like…poo poo. I need to get back to the zoo.”
“I love you.”
“I know,” she said, and clicked off.
He got out of bed pondering whether a woman of profound intelligence and inexhaustible kindness could stop loving someone simply because he was chronically unemployed, perhaps unemployable. Or did love take a back seat to practical considerations for even the most romantic of women once they reached their thirties?
They’d met when he was a ridiculously well-paid analyst at Mellow Partners, set up by friends. She was beautiful and intelligent and Jewish. He was not-bad-looking and successful and Jewish. So they both expected to hate each other but ended up moving in together six months after their first date. The marriage-and-children conversations started almost immediately. Then it all fell apart for him and they stopped discussing much of anything. She’d stuck around, but he wondered how much longer she would. Her teacher’s salary barely covered the rent on their one-bedroom apartment, and his stash from the go-go years with Mellow Partners had dwindled to almost nothing. Sometimes he thought it was a race between which would run out first: his money or Sarah.
Guinevere, their old English sheepdog, met him in the kitchen. She’d been with Sarah when they’d met and still regarded him, from behind a shaggy fringe of white and gray bangs, with suspicion, rarely looking at him directly and approaching him only when summoned by a clap of his hands. Sarah, he knew, had already walked Guinnie, and her food and water bowls were still half full. From a box of Fig Newtons above the sink he removed two cookies and fed them to Guinevere, as he did every weekday morning. Their little secret.
He downed a cup of instant coffee, put on his biking gear, then picked up the scrap of paper with the job contact’s name and number. He knew exactly what he should do. Should was always the easy part: call the contact, pour on the charm, ace the interview, get the job, marry Sarah, produce children, live happily ever after. Instead, he put the contact name back on the dresser. He pulled on a logo-covered bike shirt, pulled up a pair of padded-crotch Lycra shorts, squeezed into his Italian-made biking shoes, snapped on his helmet, maneuvered his $4,800 Orbea Orca racing bike (one of his last purchases as a rising star at Mellow Partners) into the small elevator, and headed downstairs.
In the building’s lobby he ran into a neighbor, Jessica Winter, one of those ubiquitous Upper West Siders who, though far too young to be respectably retired (she looked about thirty-five), seemed never to work and yet appeared to have no trouble maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. It seemed unlikely that she survived on the ten dollars they paid her now and then to walk Guinevere.
“Where are you off to today, Zach?” To his dismay, she put down the grocery bags she was carrying, preparing for a full-blown conversation.
“Nyack.”
“Wow. I’m so impressed. That’s got to be, what, fifty miles each way? And at this time of year.” Her eyes traveled up and down his spandexed frame. At thirty-five, he was in the best shape of his life; three years of unemployment had its benefits, chief among them the ability to take long trips by bike once or twice a week. The body-clinging bike outfit actually made him look even more buff than he was, and the crotch padding in the shorts tended to act as a codpiece, a fact he deeply regretted as Jessica regarded him with undisguised interest.
“Not quite that long.”
“Still…”
She was undeniably attractive, and for a moment he played out a scenario in which he followed her upstairs to her apartment and hammered the final nail into his own coffin. There would be something profoundly satisfying about casting off his last remaining relic of decency, accelerating the slow, inevitable decline by plunging right to the bottom.
“The bike does most of the work,” he said with a modest shrug and a grin. He even patted the seat. That grin had launched a thousand one-night stands, or so it had seemed. There was a time when he dispensed it like a drug. It was a big, toothy grin that sent one side of his mouth north, the other south, forcing his eyes into a squint that somehow accentuated their blueness; inevitably, it was only after he smiled that women would comment on their color. He’d studied his smile quite assiduously in the old days when his star was rising and before he’d met Sarah. Apart from luring any number of women, it had played no small role in successfully closing many a deal at Mellow Partners.
“We should have lunch some time,” Jessica said. “Since we’re both around during the day. We could take Guinevere to the park.”
“That would be nice.” He brushed against her as he squeezed the bike through the door and hoped like hell that he’d never run into her in the lobby again.
• • •
He was five miles from Nyack, a small city on the Hudson River about twenty miles from the George Washington Bridge, when his phone rang. He debated answering it. He was on pace to make it to Nyack in under two hours, not his best time but faster than usual. Some mornings he just seemed to fly along Route 9W; the uphills seemed gentler those mornings, the downhills longer and more numerous, his legs pumping in an unstoppable rhythm. He knew the route so well he was rarely tempted to look up from the pavement. Scenery was irrelevant. The journey was irrelevant. It was all about arriving. Biking, for him, was a very un-Zen-like endeavor.
He retrieved the phone from one of the pockets sewn onto the back of his shirt. The digital display revealed a familiar number.
“What’s up?” he said, maintaining his pace.
“It’s Charlie.”
“I know.” Even without caller ID, the flat, unflappable pilot voice gave him away.
“I’m on the ground at Signature, the private airport in—”
“In San Francisco, I know.” He once knew every private airport in the country.
“Just dropped off your friend.”
“He’s not my friend. Was Julian Mellow on board?”
“Nope, guy flew solo. Apart from a flight attendant and two pilots.”
Zach felt a sudden heaviness in his legs. He wouldn’t make Nyack in under two hours. “I don’t suppose he mentioned why he was going to San Francisco.”
“He doesn’t say much. This must be the fifth time I’ve flown him—”
“Third.”
“Yeah, whatever. Always alone, never with Mr. Mellow. Never could get much out of him other than that he likes his coffee black. Never even told us his name.”
“Okay, thanks for checking in.”
“There’s something else.”
Zach steeled himself for the inevitable request for more money. Charlie was paid by the phone call, fifty bucks for each report of the comings and goings of Julian Mellow’s G650. The information had so far been completely unhelpful. Mr. Mellow is attending a board meeting in Detroit. Mr. Mellow and his wife are visiting friends in Palm Beach. Mrs. Mellow is attending a shrink conference in Chicago. If Sarah ever learned that he was frittering away money on such nonsense, he’d be out on the street.
“We’ve already been through this; I don’t have more money to—”
“I have a different passenger on the way back to New York. I’m in the head now, using my cell ph
one.”
Zach pictured him in the bathroom, whispering into the phone lest his copilot spot him for the traitor that he was.
“Not Mr. X?”
“This guy’s as far from anonymous as you can get and still be homo sapien.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t follow politics and even I recognized him.”
“Come on, Charlie.”
“Harry Lightstone.”
“Harry Lightstone is on your plane?” Zach had to focus hard to keep from veering into traffic.
“He was waiting on the tarmac when we pulled over to the terminal. Practically sprinted to the plane when we lowered the stairs.”
“Alone?”
“Yep, and get this. He asked for a vodka with his bagel. Straight up.”
“Are you dropping him off in DC?”
“Nope, NYC. Oh, one of the attendants is banging on the door, probably thinks I’ve got the runs. I got to go.”
“What time are you landing?”
“Six hours and forty-five minutes, but—”
Zach clicked off, pocketed the phone, and turned his bike around.
Chapter 5
Billy Sandifer stepped out of the Gulfstream and almost tumbled down the stairs when he spotted Harry Lightstone charging across the tarmac. Senator Lightstone hitching a ride on Mellow’s jet? Wasn’t that sort of thing illegal, or at least frowned upon? Well, the senator had a lot on his mind, after what happened last night. It was Billy who had found the girl on the internet, paying her half up front, then phoning to let her know where the senator would be.
The fuel truck was already hitched up to the jet. Quick turnaround. He’d already been informed he’d be flying commercial back to New York. He passed the senator about fifty yards from the stairs.
“’Morning, Senator Lightstone.”
Presidents' Day Page 2
