by Jane Haddam
It was five o’clock on a Friday night. Calvin Baird knew that. He could hear his secretary packing up to go home on time for once, and he knew that if he stuck his head out his outer office door he would see the place nearly deserted. Calvin even accepted, in principle, the idea that his employees had a right to desert him. The rights and responsibilities of employees were set out in detail in a brochure the firm had printed to give to all new hires, Working at Baird. Even so, it nagged at him. It worse than nagged at him. The discrepancy was probably nothing. It could certainly be corrected during the ten long days he was away. There was absolutely no reason why he should insist on having it corrected now. He just couldn’t help himself.
If he’d been entirely honest, he’d have admitted he didn’t want to help himself. Yes, the mistake could be corrected while he was away, but he didn’t think it would be. He truly believed that all his employees started frolicking as soon as his back was turned. They threw spitballs and did crossword puzzles and made personal phone calls whenever he was out of the office. The fact that there was never any evidence of any of this didn’t faze him. He was sure it was being done in secret, and that the secrecy was part of the point.
In the outer office, Sidney Stack was putting on her lipstick. Calvin knew that because he had heard her compact snap open and a sharp metallic ting as something—the lipstick tube’s upper half, undoubtedly—went down on the desk. Calvin thought of her going home on the subway to Queens, with the discrepancy uncorrected. He thought of Alexandra Haye, his special assistant, spending her night in whatever disco the single young of Manhattan were frequenting now. He thought of everyone in the office, off work and free of responsibility, leaving him with this mess.
There was another snap and another ting, Sidney packing up and ready to go. Calvin hurried to his office door and stuck his head out. He caught Sidney bending over to pick something up off the floor, presenting her ass to him like a beach ball. Any other man would have felt a faint stirring of desire or a spurt of adolescent appreciation. Calvin Baird didn’t even notice.
“Miss Stack?” he said.
Sidney Stack straightened up and turned around, suspicious. She was a pretty woman nearing thirty, who lived with her parents in Queens and was saving up to get married. Calvin had the uncomfortable feeling that she’d heard this tone in his voice before and didn’t like it.
“I’m giving a birthday party for my father tonight,” Sidney said. “I’ve got people coming at seven o’clock. I really can’t stay late.”
“Of course,” Calvin said. He did his best to smile, but he was angry as hell. That was why Sidney was a secretary, why so many people were secretaries, why women would never get ahead. They always had something else to do that was more important than staying late at the office. He saw Julie Anderwahl come out into the hall from Mark’s office and corrected himself. Julie was an exception.
“We’ve got a major problem,” he told Sidney. “We’ve got a discrepancy in the Europabanc figures.”
“I can’t do anything about a discrepancy in the Europabanc figures,” Sidney said. “I’m really going to have to insist, Mr. Baird. I can’t stay late tonight. I’ve had this party planned for months.”
“If the Europabanc thing falls through, you won’t have to plan anything ever again. You won’t have a job to interfere with your personal life. This is an emergency.”
“My father’s birthday party is an emergency,” Sidney said.
“What’s really the emergency?” Julie Anderwahl asked them. She had drifted in from the hall, attracted by the sound of their raised voices. Calvin thought she looked pale and pasty and just a little ill. “Is there something I can help you with?”
Although Calvin Baird respected Julie Anderwahl’s work habits, he didn’t respect her mind. He didn’t respect the mind of anyone who worked in PR, and he respected the minds of women even less. He thought feminism had been inevitable once women realized how stupid their lives were without real work in the real work force, but he didn’t think women should have been allowed in. They were just so much fluff.
At the moment, they were also his only audience, so he gave it a try. “The Europabanc figures,” he said. “I’ve just been going over them. They’re wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“They don’t add up. I add up the column with our cash on hand, and then I add up the column with the junk bond sales, and then I add the two together, and I don’t get as much as I’m supposed to get.”
“Did you talk to Mark about this? Aren’t those Mark’s numbers?”
“Mark,” Calvin Baird said.
Sidney Stack grabbed her coat from the rack and picked up her pocketbook. “I have to get out of here. You two may want to sit around all night figuring out what numbers belong to who, but I have a birthday party to give. For my father. Like I told you.”
“You’ll never get ahead if you take that kind of attitude,” Calvin told her prissily. “It’s counterproductive.”
“As soon as Joey passes his sergeant’s exam, I’m going to get married,” Sidney Stack said, “and as soon as I get married I’m going to get pregnant, and as soon as I get pregnant I’m going to stop working for good. I’ve had the life of the New York career girl. I just can’t take it. Good night, Mrs. Anderwahl.”
“Good night,” Julie said.
“Silly little ass,” Calvin said. “She’s condemning herself to a life of mediocrity, that’s what she doesn’t understand. She’s just asking to spend the rest of her life in Queens.”
Sidney Stack was out in the hall and really pumping, headed for the reception desk at full speed in spite of her four-inch heels. Calvin sniffed after her and then turned to Julie, who was still standing by his desk, cool and professional.
“Now what do I do?” he asked. “I can’t just let this go. It could bring the whole project down.”
Julie Anderwahl shook her head, stepped back, and said, “Do you have any specific information we can work with? Are these Mark’s numbers? Do you know which set are coming up short?”
“They’re not Mark’s numbers, they’re Jon’s. And I know which set. It’s the cash on hand.”
“Does your assistant know how to operate a computer? It’s Alexa Haye, isn’t it?”
“It’s Alexandra Haye, yes, but I don’t know if she knows how to operate a computer. I suppose she does. They all do coming out of business school these days.”
“We’ll call Mark in anyway,” Julie Anderwahl said. “He definitely knows how to operate a computer, so we won’t have to worry about that. And I’ll get Alexa from the copy room. She was down there making sure we had enough protocol sheets not five minutes ago.”
Julie put her hand to her forehead and rubbed. For a split second, Calvin noticed that she did not look well, that she looked almost green, and the terrible thought came to him that she was going to back out on him too. Then she murmured something about being right back and walked out of the office, and he realized she was going to get the others and come back.
Back in his own office, Calvin sat down in front of the computer printouts and smiled. He’d been behaving like a prima donna out there, of course, and like a weak and petulant man. He was none of those things, but he didn’t mind being perceived that way. There were men who set great store by their dignity and others who wanted to believe in their own integrity, but Calvin had only ever cared about one thing. You went into a fight to win it any way you could. The outcome was the only thing that mattered.
Calvin just wished Jon could have been here, to see how he had turned them all around, and made them do what he wanted.
3
Five hundred and fifty miles away, lying in a high-sided bunk in the captain’s cabin on the Pilgrimage Green, Jon Baird put down the file he had been reading and closed his eyes. It was early yet, and he was alone. The crew had gone into town for dinner and Sheila had gone off with some friends from MacLean. He had hours yet to do the things he wanted to do, without being bothere
d by anyone. Then, tomorrow, the whole pack of them would arrive together and he would be on stage all the time. Sheila would try to crawl into bed with him and when she found out that would be impossible she would cry.
There was a cold stiff wind blowing out on the water, rocking the Pilgrimage Green in its berth. To Jon Baird the motion was like the swaying of a cradle and made him feel he had to go to sleep. Instead, he opened his eyes again, sat up a little straighter, and turned his attention one more time to the file. It was a file he had no business being in possession of, or even reading. His access to it was prohibited by law. For Jon Baird, that was the best of what it meant to be himself, a man with more than a billion dollars, a man with power and connections from one end of the globe to the other, a man who couldn’t be turned down. The deals were fun and the toys were nice and being able to order a dozen suits custom made at Brooks any time he got the urge was a definite kick, especially after a childhood spent wondering if he’d ever be able to buy anything at all. None of that compared with the simple access he had, and the being privy to secrets.
He wore glasses when he read, with real glass in them, so they lay heavily against his nose. He took them off now and rubbed his forehead a little. There was no electricity on the Pilgrimage Green. He had been reading by candlelight, and he had given himself a fair case of eyestrain.
He also had no reason to go on with what he was doing. He had read this file fifteen times since he had first gotten it, and it always said the same things, it always made the same points. He kept rereading it because it gave him comfort. It convinced him he was doing the right thing.
He put it down on the table next to his bed, thought better of that—he could doze off and Sheila could come in—and opened the cabinet under his bunk to put it in there. Just before he let it go he looked at the cover of it one more time, and smiled.
AGENT REPORT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, BACKGROUND.
it said, and under that, the name of the agent whose background had been checked:
GREGOR DEMARKIAN.
Jonathan Edgewick Baird had never in his life allowed himself to depend on anyone relying on reputation alone. He required facts and he required proof and one way or the other he always got both.
Four
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD TOLD everyone on Cavanaugh Street that he was traveling on the Pilgrimage Green because Bennis Hannaford had asked him to—and, in a way, it was even true. It had certainly been Bennis Hannaford who had first brought Jon Baird to Gregor’s attention, first by relaying his message through her brother Bobby and then by digging through Lida Arkmanian’s near-complete set of People magazines to find the articles on Baird’s indictment and the rise of Baird Financial. Since Bennis had been born and brought up on the Main Line, middle daughter of one of its most socially prominent families, her take on Baird and the people he represented was invaluable. Bennis always seemed to know someone’s aunt’s second cousin’s husband or to have gone to camp with somebody else’s first wife’s sister. Gregor sometimes thought she had come out with the entire female population of the Greater Philadelphia Metropolitan Area. However tenuous the connection, Bennis would be able to find it. She would also know enough gossip to fill in the gaps.
“Everybody was surprised as hell when Jon Baird went to jail,” she had told him, “because he was the wrong Baird to have gone to jail. Tony, now, that’s his son—my sister Emma knew him when she was living in New York. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and really strange art. You’d have expected him to go to jail.”
“What about the charges?” Gregor had asked her. “Do they sound like the sort of thing Baird would have been involved in?”
Bennis shrugged, her great black storm cloud of hair hovering in the air around her face, her wide blue eyes looking almost navy. “If you’re asking do I think Jon Baird does things that are against the law, the answer’s yes. And awful lot of things are against the law these days even I don’t think ought to be. If you’re asking do you think he did the things he was accused of doing, I’d have to say he must have. I mean, he pleaded guilty. Some of these guys plead guilty because they get threatened with RICO, but I never heard of that coming up in this case. And it was such a small case. It’s not like he doesn’t have good lawyers.”
“But you find it strange,” Gregor said.
Bennis got out a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “It was a couple, three counts on insider trading and not very serious insider trading. It was nothing, really. Why would he want to bother?”
“Some people are just naturally bent.”
“Well, Gregor, that’s fine, but naturally bent or not, Jon Baird isn’t stupid. These were straightforward insider trading charges, not the fraud charges that get called insider trading because they come under the same law. What Jon Baird went to jail for isn’t even illegal in Switzerland or France. If he wanted to do that kind of thing, why didn’t he just get on a plane and go talk to his brokers over there?”
“Maybe he was keeping his traveling down to pacify the IRS. They get very nervous about people who take too many trips outside the country.”
“If they do, they’re getting ulcers from Jon Baird. I think he owns his Concorde. I know he owns his own 747. No, if you ask me, it’s that second wife of his. All flounce and flooze and forty-thousand-dollar ball gowns from Carolina Herrera.”
Gregor decided not to make an issue of the $40,000 ball gowns from Carolina Herrera. “It’s his second wife what?” he asked Bennis. “Who put him up to insider trading? Who committed the insider trading herself?”
“Who ought to be in jail,” Bennis said. “She was at that American Heart Association thing I went to back in June—although why she bothered is beyond me, because Baird’s first wife was on the committee and she had to know she wasn’t going to get a decent table—but anyway she was there, bopping around like a high-school freshman on marijuana at a Guns and Roses concert. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I thought Jon Baird ought to have been arrested, for marrying her when he was old enough to know better.”
“How much older?”
“I don’t know. But look at it this way, Gregor. Baird has at least twenty years on me if not more, and I’m thirty-six. And I’ll bet I have at least some time on Sheila Baird. Which makes it a minimum of twenty-two or so years, and Baird’s no movie star. He doesn’t work out ten hours a week and have his face lifted in Los Angeles. He’s this grizzled old man with sags under his eyes.”
“I’m this grizzled old guy with sags under my eyes.”
“You’re not dating a representative of the Smith College Bulimia Squad. Of course, you might be a lot older than I think. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to nail down your birthday, because you won’t tell me and Lida and the rest of them don’t remember. I think you were very deprived, you know, growing up in a culture where people didn’t make a fuss over children’s birthdays.”
“They made a fuss over my name day.”
“That’s not the same. Tibor suggested I look up your baptismal certificate in the parish records, and I did, but it was a funny thing. The date of birth had been smudged right out with black gunk. It looked like ink from a typewriter ribbon.”
“Did it?”
“It’s no use not telling me, Gregor. I’ll just go on giving you presents whenever I think it might fit. Donna and I have even discussed giving you two or three surprise parties a year. Besides, we have a clue.”
“What clue?”
“You were born on Friday the thirteenth. Hannah Krekorian says she remembers your mother talking about it to the other women, saying what an unlucky day that usually is but it was lucky for her because she got you.”
“I’m glad she thought so,” Gregor had said, and then he had deflected the subject. The last thing he had wanted to think about was the campaign—subtle at first; now approaching full-scale war—that Bennis and Donna Moradanyan were running to discover his birthday and give him a party. The only
good luck he’d had in that was in the fact that none of the other people on Cavanaugh Street were interested in joining in. Armenian culture really was traditionally Christian, in the most venerable definition of the term. It was entirely uninterested in the physical birth of anything. It cast its vote on the spiritual side.
Gregor himself had cast his vote on the prudent side. The conversation he had had with Bennis about Jon Baird had taken place in the living room of her apartment, among the papier mâché models of trolls and dragons and unicorns she had made to help her revise her latest fantasy novel. That was what Bennis did for a living, and a very good living it was, too. Main Line or no Main Line, she had no family money. Her father, a misogynist of the first water, had seen to that. All the things she did have, and the list was considerable, came out of the series of books on knights and damsels and leprechauns in distress she’d been writing for almost five years now, the good old dependable regularly produced volumes of the Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia that showed up year after year on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list. When Gregor had first met Bennis, he had thought that Zed and Zedalia must be people. As it turned out, they were places. Zed was a place ruled by men. Zedalia was a place ruled by women.
“It all works out,” Bennis had told him, “because none of it is supposed to be real, just taking place in real time.”
Gregor sometimes wondered if Bennis’s life took place in real time, but he let that pass. He understood her mood. He’d gone downstairs in the hope that Bennis would help him decide whether to take Jon Baird up on his proposition. As propositions went, it wasn’t very interesting.
“He says he’s got a link and it has to be in his inner circle,” Gregor had told Bennis, “and I told him that for that he needed a tape recorder and a little old lady with a nasty mind. The whole thing smacks of rich man’s paranoia.”
