“Everything’s contracting,” she said. “I heard you speaking with Enrico last week, and you said you were losing investors, not gaining them.”
“You look tired, Claire.”
“Because I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about this.”
“Claire, honey, I know what I’m doing.”
“No, I know, I’m just saying, the optics of the thing, the timing of it—”
“Right,” he said. “The optics.” He blinked.
“Dad.” She hadn’t called him that in over a decade.
“I can’t keep it going,” he said quietly. “I thought I could cover the losses.”
“What do you mean, cover the losses?”
2
Why was Simone shredding documents? Why would Alkaitis leave his receptionist alone in a conference room with several file boxes of incriminating evidence? In his deposition, Alkaitis claimed not to understand the question. Harvey, in his own deposition, offered the opinion that Alkaitis, who in most matters had an impressive capacity for self-delusion, understood finally that it was too late to avoid arrest but possibly hoped to shield Lenny Xavier, his most important investor, who’d understood that it was a Ponzi from the beginning and had provided the occasional infusion of cash. Perhaps Simone was shredding documents precisely because she was only a receptionist, and Alkaitis didn’t think she would understand anything she saw. He was an intelligent man, but he suffered from the tendency of certain long-term senior executives to think of receptionists as office fixtures, not quite on the level of the filing cabinets but close. Perhaps, because Simone was not just new to the office but new to the world—polished in that young-in-Midtown way, but after all only twenty-three years old—Alkaitis was counting on her naïveté, thinking that perhaps she wasn’t someone who would necessarily know that being asked to stay late and help her boss “clear some space in the file cabinets” was a probable indicator of a cover-up. Or perhaps the paper shredding was something of a token effort and we’d already reached the point where it didn’t really matter who saw what.
After some incalculable amount of time had passed, Alkaitis returned to Conference Room B. His demeanour had changed considerably since Simone had seen him last. Were there tears in his eyes? He had the look of a man on a precipice.
“Simone,” he said, “I’d like you to call my wife, please. Tell her it’s an urgent matter and I’d like her to meet me here as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” she said, “right away,” and by the time she reached her desk he was already back in his office, the door firmly closed. She called Vincent, relayed the message, and returned to Conference Room B and the paper shredder.
Simone was surprised when Harvey came in with pizza. This was around seven-thirty. She smelled the pizza before he entered the room.
“Look at you!” he said brightly. “Still at it.”
“I thought you’d left.”
“I was stuck in a long meeting,” he said. “Then I went out for a quick walk and came back with pizza.”
“To supervise me?”
“To take over. You’ve been here for hours and you’re not getting overtime, which obviously isn’t right, and more importantly, the holiday party starts in a half hour.” He set the pizza on the conference table. “Are you hungry? I’m assuming there’ll be food at the party, but you can’t count on passed hors d’oeuvres as a dinner substitute.”
She was hungry. Simone had been at work for nearly eleven hours and was worn through, her eyes burning a little from the dry tower air. The conference room had an L-shaped arrangement of two sofas in a corner, with a lamp on a little table between them. At some point she’d turned off the fluorescents and switched on the lamp, which cast the room in a much gentler light and made her feel slightly better. If there was ever a time when she had some control over her working life, she’d decided, she wouldn’t work under fluorescent lights. Was there some way she could work outside? She didn’t see how—she had an indoor skill set—but the thought was appealing.
“Have as much as you want,” Harvey said, “and then you might as well head over to the party. I’ll stay and finish this.”
“Aren’t you going to the party?”
“I like to make a late arrival.”
“Why are we shredding all these files?” She was midway through her first slice. It was ham and pineapple, the pineapple cloyingly sweet.
“That’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Harvey said. She watched him, but he seemed to have nothing further to say. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, considered a moment, then took a second slice.
“Are you going to answer it?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to offer some pizza to the others.” He left the room with two of the pizza boxes, and Simone finished her slice and left too, gathered her coat and bag at the reception desk and walked out. What was strange was that the day had been so long and so tedious and she’d longed for this moment, but now that she’d been released, she wanted to go back in. She felt certain that something was about to happen. She was increasingly curious about the nature of the time bomb in the office, and she wanted to be there when it exploded.
3
The door to Alkaitis’s office was still closed when everyone else on Eighteen left for the party. On Seventeen, we lingered and procrastinated, except Enrico, who was waiting to board an Aeromexico flight at JFK, and Oskar, who was presently in a nearby bar, looking at Astana real estate on his phone. Harvey was in Conference Room B, looking through the Xavier files. Ron was trying to get a spot of soup off his tie in the bathroom. Joelle was drifting through Facebook. But eventually we were all gathered in a restaurant a few blocks away, clustered by the chocolate fondue station. If it were just us, just the asset management unit, we wouldn’t have had holiday parties, or so we told ourselves later—we weren’t completely depraved—but it wasn’t just us, we were only one corrupted branch of an otherwise perfectly above-board operation, and the holiday party was a large affair, both the asset management group and the brokerage company, the hundred or so people who worked on Eighteen and didn’t quite know who we were.
Later, we all remembered the party differently, either because of the open bar or because, of course, memories are always bent in retrospect to fit individual narratives. We were gossiping and drinking when Alkaitis and his wife arrived, all of us except Ron aware of our impending doom, trying to distract ourselves with banal comments about the food circulating on little trays and by surreptitiously examining our colleagues’ spouses, who seemed shiningly exotic by virtue of not being people whom we saw every day. Ron’s wife, Sheila, had large startled-looking eyes, like a deer. Joelle’s husband, Gareth, was a slow-moving, lethargic person in a too-big suit, with a face so bland you almost couldn’t see him. (“He’s like a sort of black hole,” Oskar said to Harvey, almost admiringly. “He’d make a good secret agent.”) Harvey’s wife, Elaine, was a pretty woman who radiated silent resentment and left after forty minutes, ostensibly because she had a headache. And then Alkaitis arrived with Vincent, who always automatically outshone every spouse in the room. We watched them enter together, two hours late; Alkaitis in his sixties, his wife maybe in her late twenties, early thirties tops, a full-on trophy wife, absurdly gorgeous in a blue dress. There were tasteless jokes to be made but no one made them, although Oskar came close: “Where do you think those two fall on the May-December Gap Measure?” He was two drinks ahead of the rest of us.
“The what now?” Gareth asked.
“It’s Oskar’s personal formula,” Joelle said. “He thinks a relationship can reasonably be classified as creepy if the age difference exceeds the age of the younger party.” There were dark circles under her eyes.
“So if he were, say, sixty-three,” Oskar said, “and she were let’s say twenty-seven—”
“Oh, let’s not,” Harvey said, at his breeziest and most deflective. His written confes
sion was up to eight pages.
“Anyway, she seems nice,” Oskar said, feeling a little guilty. “I talked to her for a while at the barbecue last summer.”
“She always seemed a little hard-edged to me,” Joelle said, which Oskar recognized as Joelle-speak for “paid by the hour,” which was crazy, unless it wasn’t?
“Enrico’s not here,” Oskar said, obviously hoping to change the subject. Enrico’s absence was one of the few things that everyone would agree on later. At that moment, he was on a southbound plane.
Later, Ron told investigators that Jonathan Alkaitis seemed perfectly normal: warm, listening attentively, talking easily with his staff, working the room. But Oskar recalled seeing Alkaitis sitting alone at the bar for several minutes with a look of devastation; later Oskar described it as “kind of a blank expression,” but that description didn’t do it justice; it was more as though death had entered Alkaitis, Oskar thought at the time, as though death had entered him and gazed out through his eyes. Some of us remembered that Alkaitis left the party early. “I think they only stayed about an hour,” Joelle said in her first FBI interview. “It wasn’t a happy night.” She herself left not long afterward, as did Harvey, pleading an unexpected emergency at the office. They would’ve enlisted Oskar—there were after all four paper shredders on hand—but Oskar was nowhere to be found.
Oskar was standing by the door when Jonathan and Vincent Alkaitis walked out. He saw the way Vincent flinched when her husband touched her lower back, and there was such intimacy in this that it seemed wrong to mention it to anyone later, even when he was being grilled for the second or third time about that miserable party. He certainly told no one that he slipped out just behind them, partly out of curiosity and partly because he was desperate to escape. When he stepped out of the elevator in the lobby, Alkaitis and his wife were just walking out onto the sidewalk. A black car waited at the curb. Alkaitis opened the car door for his wife. She shook her head. Oskar watched them, unnoticed, just out of earshot. She wouldn’t get in the car. He heard Alkaitis say, with infinite weariness, “Just at least call me when you get there, please,” at which Vincent only laughed. She turned away from him, walking north into a cold wind. Alkaitis stared after her for a moment before he climbed into the car and left.
Oskar hesitated for only a moment before he began walking north too, following Vincent.
4
Back at the office, Harvey carried the paper shredder and then the Xavier files from the conference room to Alkaitis’s office. Alkaitis wouldn’t be needing his office anymore, and he felt someone might as well enjoy this room in these last few hours before the end. Harvey loved Alkaitis’s office. It was all dark wood cabinetry and expensive fixtures, thick carpet and ornate little lamps. Tonight the room shone like an oasis, a pool of warm light in the chaos, and by nine-thirty Joelle had hauled a paper shredder and a few boxes of folders upstairs to join him. Harvey took the desk chair, Joelle sat on the sofa, and they shredded evidence together. It was almost pleasant.
“What did you tell your husband?” Harvey asked, after they’d been at it for a little while. He’d exchanged a series of increasingly terse text messages with his wife.
“About staying so late, you mean? Emergency at work.” Joelle had been crying earlier, but now she seemed detached, almost dreamy. Harvey wondered if she’d taken something for her nerves.
“Seems pretty general,” Harvey said. He was shredding documents in a steady rhythm, but he’d positioned himself in such a way that Joelle couldn’t see that he was rescuing every third or fourth page. He’d decided to save the most damning pages, because earlier he’d been struck by a thought that was no less horrific for being completely irrational: What if he confessed and no one believed him? What if they thought he was crazy?
“What do you mean?” Joelle asked.
“I mean, that’s kind of a vague excuse.”
“But that’s where people get tripped up with their excuses,” Joelle said. “They get nervous and throw in all these excessive details, and that’s how you know they’re lying.” Was Joelle saving documents too? Harvey couldn’t tell. She stopped sometimes to look at one document or another, but she seemed to be shredding everything, unless she’d left certain key files down on Seventeen.
“My husband never asks for details anyway,” Joelle said. Harvey concluded from this statement that Joelle’s husband was likely having an affair but decided not to share this insight. Harvey was shuffling papers around in a complicated way, winnowing out the most incriminating documents with a casual glance, letting these slip into the open garbage bag behind Alkaitis’s desk instead of putting them through the shredder.
“My wife will want details,” Harvey said after a while. “I’ll get home, she’ll be like, ‘What kind of emergency forced you back to the office after a holiday party?’” He was quiet for a moment, fixing a paper jam. “Would you like a drink?”
“Does Alkaitis keep alcohol in this office?”
“He does,” Harvey said, rising with some difficulty. His knees were bothering him. Alkaitis’s workspace arrangement involved a lot of discreet cabinetry, so it took him some time to locate the Scotch. Harvey poured a tumbler for Joelle and used Alkaitis’s coffee mug for himself. The nice thing about the coffee mug was its opacity. Joelle couldn’t see how little Harvey had poured for himself, so he could stay more or less sober while he saved the evidence of their crimes.
5
At that moment, Oskar was standing by the window of Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre in a high tower on Columbus Circle, drinking wine with Vincent. He’d waited until Alkaitis was gone before he went after her. Vincent had been walking slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, staring at the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” Oskar had said.
She looked at him.
“Oskar.” She managed a smile. “What happened to your coat?”
He’d left it at the party. “I misplaced it. Can I walk with you?”
“Yes.” They walked in silence for a while. The rain had subsided to a drizzle that made the sidewalk sparkle and left a glittering mist on Vincent’s coat, her hair, on Oskar’s folded arms when he looked down at himself. He walked alongside her and willed his mind to go blank. There is only this moment, he told himself. Don’t think of anything else, prison for example, just walk up the street with this beautiful woman. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t yours.
“Where are you headed?” he asked finally.
“Columbus Circle,” she said. “We have—Jonathan has a pied-à-terre by the park. Would you like to come up for a drink?”
“I’d love to.” Columbus Circle was still a half mile away, a half mile as measured by ten uptown Manhattan blocks, ten blocks of night and cold drizzle and headlights, traffic signals and shop-windows and the blank shutters of small businesses closed for the night, steam rising from a plastic chimney in the street, that steam turned luminous by streetlights. At Columbus Circle, two dark glass towers rose over a crescent-shaped shopping mall, facing the darkness of the park. Vincent stopped just outside the entrance to the mall, staring into the heart of the traffic circle, the ring of illuminated benches around the statue of Columbus.
“Everything okay?” He wanted to get upstairs before she changed her mind.
“Do you see a woman sitting there?” She was pointing, and just for a second he did think he saw someone, an impression of movement, but it was a trick of the light, a passing shadow between the beams of headlights as cars pulled in and out of the traffic circle. The benches were empty.
“I thought I saw someone for a second,” he said, “but I think it was maybe just some kind of reflection or something.”
“I keep thinking I see my mother,” Vincent said.
“Oh,” he said, at a loss for the appropriate response to this. Did her mother live in New York? Did she have a habit of trailing Vincent around the city? The moment passed. Vincent was expressionless in the white light of the shopping concourse, but she
seemed to him to be someone who was enduring something, and he didn’t want to ask but of course she knew, she had to, why else would she have been in Alkaitis’s office for so long before the party, why else would she have refused to get in the car, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. We all know what we do here. They were ascending on the escalator to the mezzanine level, a more rarefied elevation where the shops were even more expensive, Vincent’s gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance.
“This way,” Vincent said, and Oskar thought he understood some of the appeal of this place; if you were a person with an enormous amount of money who craved privacy, and if you came in here during normal shopping hours, it would be possible to mingle with the crowds right up until the moment when you slipped through the discreet door that led to the upper lobby, this tastefully lit room with sound-muffling carpets, two doormen, and a concierge, who nodded to Oskar and said good evening to Vincent.
“Good evening,” she said. Did she have a slight accent? He’d never noticed before. She didn’t sound like she was from New York. In the elevator, Oskar glanced at her—the silence between them was becoming a third presence, like another person who’d elbowed in between them and was taking up space—and saw that her gaze was fixed on the camera above the elevator buttons.
“Is it always this quiet?” Oskar asked when they stepped out onto the thirty-seventh floor. They were in a silent corridor of heavy grey doors and low lighting.
“Always.” She’d stopped before one of the doors and was searching in her wallet. She produced a key card, and the door unlocked with a soft beep. “The building’s mostly empty. People buy these places for investment purposes and then show up once or twice a year, if that.”
“Why did you and your husband buy here?”
She was leading him into an aggressively modern apartment, all clean lines and sharp angles, with a gleaming kitchen in which he suspected no one had ever cooked anything. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over Central Park.
“He’s not my husband.” She took off her shoes and padded into the kitchen in her stockings. “But to answer your question, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why he bought this apartment or anything else.”
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