Looks were exchanged around the table. Morton Samuels was the most famous lawyer in New York, or the most famous lawyer who hadn’t yet stooped to appearing on CNN to punditize about the latest high-profile murder. Morton Samuels would never appear on CNN, which was one of the reasons he was so highly regarded among the Temple of Dendur set. Lily and Barnett knew him socially. Nevertheless, she felt a tremor of dread, for summoning Morty Samuels while being read your rights was akin to calling for a priest on one’s sickbed.
“I’ll come with you.” She grabbed her purse and stood up.
“You can meet us downtown,” said Jay DiGregorio.
“Call Samuels!” Barnett shouted as he was led from the room. His voice already sounded faint and distant.
Instinctively she reached into her purse for her cell phone, but as she turned it on she realized she didn’t have Morton Samuels’s home phone number.
“Does anyone…”
She glanced around. She was the only one standing in a room of five hundred people. No one spoke. No one moved. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, that strand. She’d call Nanny and ask her to look up the phone number. But first she needed to make an exit.
“It’s some sort of mistake,” she said to the people at her table, all of whom nodded energetically. “We’ll be back for dessert!” She smiled gallantly. They smiled back dubiously.
Her heels clattered on the slate floor as she crossed the enormous room as quickly as possible without appearing to be fleeing. The instant she left the room, voices erupted behind her, growing louder and closer like an approaching tornado. She began to run.
Five
News happened to other people, Peggy had always thought, which is what made reading the Metro section of the Times—full of sordid murders and unfathomable budget cuts and water mains erupting through the asphalt like daffodils in the spring—not merely tolerable but a guilty pleasure. There was reassuring satisfaction in the daily reminder that while the city she’d always lived in continued its slow, inevitable decline, her own world hummed along quite unaffected, even impervious. Dinners were served in restaurants, theater curtains rose at eight, cash machines never ran out of crisp twenty-dollar bills, buses chugged up and down the avenues, diseases were diagnosed and cured or succumbed to, the mail arrived, the phone rang, The New York Times was dropped outside her door each morning at six-thirty precisely. Scanning the Metro section was like reading about some distant, never-to-be-visited land where the government was always on the verge of falling to anarchists—Thank God I don’t live there!—so spotting Lily’s name among the murder and mayhem was startling to say the least.
“Oh my God!”
Monroe Gimmel, sitting across from Peggy at the small kitchen table, peered at his wife over the top of the business section.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’ve arrested Barnett.” She pointed to the small article in the Metro section. “He was arrested last night at the Metropolitan Museum—the Metropolitan Museum—on charges of diverting millions of dollars from company funds to private accounts.”
“Why would he do that? He already makes a fortune.”
“It says that arresting him in public like that was a way of sending a message. Poor Lily. She looked so lovely last night.”
“What kind of message?”
“He’s being taken to Rikers Island pending a bail hearing later today.” Rikers Island. It sounded so hopeless, so final. They might as well have sent him to one of those dank, rocky prisons off the coast of France full of debauched aristocrats with long, greasy hair and rotten teeth.
The phone rang.
“Maybe it’s Lily,” she said as she picked up the receiver, though she feared it might be a reporter.
“Peggy? It’s Lucinda Wells. We have an offer!”
At seven-thirty that morning, Lily caught a glimpse of herself in the gilt Louis XV mirror in the lobby of 913 Park Avenue. She fully expected to be shocked by what she saw, and in fact she was shocked—she looked fabulous. Her hair had come undone a bit, but the coif that Alexandre had constructed earlier that day—no, yesterday—had a bit of dishevelment built in. Her makeup was intact; she hadn’t cried once all night, even when that dreadful man, Jay DiGregorio, had advised her, as she was leaving the police station, once they’d finally sent Barnett to Rikers Island, to take the subway home, since the Justice Department would soon begin confiscating every last cent they had. His exact words: every last cent they had. She’d managed a dismissive chuckle for the prick, and then had a vision: all their wealth transformed into piles of pennies, neatly housed in those brown sleeves she’d enjoyed filling up as a child and exchanging for dollar bills at the First National City Bank on Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. How many fifty-cent rolls would it take to equal what they were worth? she found herself wondering. She imagined stacks and stacks of them piled in one giant pyramid in the center of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. A pile of pennies as big as the Ritz.
She applied lipstick and smiled gallantly at the mirror. It was important not to look too haggard for the children. Thank God she never cried. There were moments over these last hours and, occasionally, over the past years, when she sensed that a good, long cry would feel as restorative as a massage or a hit of pot or one of those purgative therapies her friends raved about. But she invariably stopped herself just before actual tears appeared, responding to a vague but deep-set fear that once she started, she’d never be able to stop. She’d just cry until her body was as shriveled and flat as a prune. It had happened once…well, almost happened. That week Larry kept calling, she cried every time the phone rang, even before Peggy came in to say, for the eightieth time, that he was on the phone and was desperate to speak to her. Tell him I’m not home, she’d said between sobs. Look, Peggy had said, finally. Either talk to the poor boy or stop crying. You’re going to dry up like a prune.
Hah! Every fear, every insecurity, in fact every mental path, straight or twisted, led back to Peggy, and always had.
She was positive the elevator man looked at her strangely when he greeted her with his usual “Morning, Mrs. Grantham.” Had he read something in the paper or seen something on the news, or was he just responding to the way she was dressed, the fact that she was returning home, alone, at seven-thirty in the morning? It occurred to her that she would be the focus of a great deal of unwanted attention in the coming days. Barnett would be returning home that afternoon, she’d been assured by Morton Samuels, who’d shown up at the prosecutor’s office several hours after she’d called him. Perhaps then the whole incident would be forgotten. Not by her, of course. She’d sensed, even as Barnett was being dragged from the Temple of Dendur, that the arrest would have life-changing consequences.
She unlocked the door to the apartment and shut it with unnecessary force, hoping the sound would announce her return and bring the children running. After a long, lonely moment, one of the worst in a long, lonely twelve hours, she went to the kitchen and found Sophie and William eating breakfast. Sophie was in her school uniform. William had on a polo shirt and khakis; his school had abandoned uniforms a year earlier, reluctantly acknowledging that the blue blazers and maroon striped ties, both emblazoned with the school crest, had become virtual “come and get it” signs for gangs of young thugs who regularly descended from poorer neighborhoods uptown to pick the kids clean of their lunch money, personal audio equipment, and, in one incident that was still talked about throughout the Upper East Side, a brand-new pair of custom Nike high-tops. Nanny hovered nearby.
“Hi, Mom,” both children said between slurps of cereal.
She’d told Nanny that Mr. Grantham had been called away on a business emergency and that she’d had to accompany him to the airport and wait with him for his flight to depart. Pretty feeble, but she wasn’t about to tell Nanny Griffen, who sashayed around as if she were first cousin to the Queen of England, that her employer was spending the morning in jail, Rikers Island, no less. They’d all fi
nd out soon enough. Perhaps Nanny already knew. She had cast a rather pitying look at Lily when she first saw her, and was even now looking at the children with a wistful smile, as if they were impoverished orphans.
“How was everyone’s night?” Lily asked gamely.
The children shrugged, their most prolific response these days.
“Where did Dad go?” Sophie asked.
“Cleveland” sprang from her lips. “He has a client there.”
“You must be real tired.”
She sounded almost sympathetic. At fourteen, Sophie affected a world-weary sophistication that seemed at odds with her sweetly pretty appearance, like a child playing dress-up, and looked particularly ludicrous on school days, when Sophie was made to wear the Sacred Heart uniform: blue plaid dirndl, matching skirt, starched white blouse. Sacred Heart (actually, Convent of the Sacred Heart, but Lily, though she hadn’t set foot in a synagogue in decades, could never bring herself to even think the full name), one of the best girls’ schools in the city, had been Barnett’s idea (his mother and several cousins had gone there). Peggy had been mortified (“I tell my friends she’s in private school and hope they’ll leave it at that”). Sophie had inherited Lily’s dark hair and dark complexion and Barnett’s aqua-blue eyes and strong profile. Lily never tired of looking at her.
“I’m exhausted,” Lily said.
William was his sister’s physical opposite. With Lily’s dark eyes and Barnett’s fair complexion, he looked delicate and pensive, though he was neither. At fifteen he was the star forward on Trinity’s soccer team and, judging from the number of calls he received at night, he was popular and gregarious.
“Eat up,” Nanny said from her post by the kitchen sink. “We’re running a bit late.”
“Is your homework done?” Lily asked, asserting maternal control. They both nodded, their second most prolific response.
“They were done by nine sharp,” Nanny said.
She would not acknowledge that. Watching the children eating a balanced breakfast, she felt depressingly superfluous—her kids didn’t need her, the party last night had bubbled on without her, Larry Adler had recovered from her tragic rejection and, infuriatingly, hadn’t gone completely to pot…in fact he looked better than she remembered him.
Now, how had that last thought crept in?
“I think I’ll change,” she announced to no response, and headed to her bathroom, where she washed her face and put on a long bathrobe.
“Bye, Mom,” William said from the doorway to the bedroom. Sophie stood just behind him.
“Come in,” she said. “We need to talk about something.” They stepped into the room, urban Sherpas shouldering enormous, bulging backpacks. One good poke would send them both tumbling backward. “Your father isn’t in Cincinnati.”
“He’s in Cleveland,” William said.
“Well, yes. I mean, no. Last night…” In a brief, lucid moment she’d realized that they might hear something at school. “Daddy was arrested.”
William cocked his head with a one-eye half-squint and lopsided half-smile, his habitual gesture for Huh?
“But it’s okay, really. Everything will be fine. Please don’t get upset,” she said, as if they’d erupted into sobs of remorse. “He should be home today.”
“What did he do?” Sophie asked.
“He didn’t do anything. He’s accused of taking money from one of the funds he manages.”
“Why would you steal your own money?” William asked.
“It’s not his money. It’s money that people and companies give him to invest for them. He’s done very well for them over the years. It’s absurd to think he’d risk everything to—”
“But the market is terrible now,” Sophie said anxiously. “Like, it’s down over a hundred percent.”
“Idiot, how can it be down more than a hundred percent?” William said.
This seemed to injure Sophie more than the news that her father was locked up. And since when did fourteen-year-olds follow the market? At fourteen the only market Lily knew was Gristedes on Broadway, and she wasn’t exactly a socialist, even back in the seventies.
“So he’s in jail now?” Sophie’s voice caught on the word jail.
“But he should be back today. We’ve hired the best attorney that—” That money can buy, she almost said, but what kind of lesson would that send? She felt briefly gratified at the appearance of tears on Sophie’s cheeks, then a surge of pity. She opened her arms. Sophie winced, causing Lily to wonder if she regretted that the proffered limbs, so balletically elegant in a sleeveless gown, weren’t a tad more maternally fleshy. But she stepped forward after a short hesitation and Lily closed her arms tightly around her.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. With one hand she gestured for William to join the family hug, but he stepped away with another cocked-head, eye-squinting, half-smiling huh. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.” Immediately Peggy’s voice began throbbing in her head like an incipient migraine—No kinahurras, Lily—and she regretted her reassuring words. Youthful buoyancy was fine for Barnett—for all Gentiles, Peggy would say, and why shouldn’t they skip through life happy as clams, no one ever tried to wipe them out? But Lily should have known better than to utter a line like “Everything will be fine.” You might as well throw open your window and shout out to the world, “Come and get me!”
Guy was at his desk in his office when Lucinda Wells called to say that the Gimmels had made a counteroffer. Henry Delano, his CFO, was with him.
“We’re burning through way too much cash, Guy,” he said.
“No more than last month. We knew breakeven wasn’t until Q4 next year.”
“But we were counting on a secondary. In this market that may not be possible.”
Guy rubbed his eyes. He always experienced fatigue first as a steady pressure behind his eyes, as if his body were trying to eject worn-out parts. He tried to concentrate on Positano’s burn rate. Last night he and Rosemary had been up very late talking about the apartment at 218 West End Avenue, he fantasizing aloud about life in such abundant, well-lit, and well-located square footage, she agonizing over the price and the prospect of going into debt and then, inevitably, complete financial ruin. He’d initiated sex to put an end to it all and, tired as he was, rose manfully to the task. They were both just twenty panting seconds away from a mutually satisfying conclusion when one of the twins began to cry, joined shortly by the other. “Don’t stop,” he’d moaned into Rosemary’s ear. “Don’t stop,” she’d echoed moistly into his neck, but he felt her stall a second later and almost immediately he sensed that his moment had passed, too.
“Fuck,” he said. The crying had escalated into a duet of anguished howls and hacking moans.
“I’ll go,” she said.
He must have fallen right to sleep, for when he awoke the next morning, priapically ready, despite fatigue, to resume where they’d left off, the boys were in the bed with them and he had no memory of their arrival.
“Fuck.” It was his last word of the previous day and the first of the present one. Bad sign. The boys were curled up between him and Rosemary, Patrick’s head at her breasts, Edward’s at her stomach. Like a small litter, he thought, taking him down a notch further. His morning erection looked immense and inappropriate next to their sleeping, pink innocence. He cupped it as he got out of bed, dressed quietly, picked his way through the mine field of baby gear that lay between the bedroom and the front door, stumbling only once, in the narrow hallway, over an unopened package of disposable diapers the size of a Volkswagen, and left.
“We need to make cuts,” Henry was saying.
“Cuts? We’re growing at seventy-five percent a year.”
“Revenues. Run-rate revenues. Our costs are growing even faster.”
“What about the MyJob contract?” Positano had a bid in with the Internet’s hottest job site. Automatic, “personalized” e-mails would, if Positano got the job, be zipped off to all applicants ackno
wledging their interest in a given job and promising them a response within a specified time. The contract would propel their growth rate into the triple digits.
“It’s not a contract, it’s a bid,” Henry said.
CFOs were professional bad-news givers, he decided, grim reapers who hunched over spreadsheets for hours on end to reach the inevitable and profoundly gratifying conclusion that there wasn’t enough free cash to fund operations. Whereas entrepreneurs, people like him, were optimists at heart. You had to be, to start something in a world as competitive and fast-changing as this one. If you didn’t believe that tomorrow would be better, bigger, richer than today, you…you kept your head down, banging out code in the veal farm, collecting your inadequate check every other week, dutifully making your inadequate retirement contributions. Or you became a numbers man, a treasurer or controller or CFO—he never did understand the difference, though Positano now had one of each—whose role in life was not merely to plan for the worst but, secretly, to relish it.
“The secondary is definitely off?” he asked. In precisely sixty-seven days—six months after the IPO—Positano’s lock-up period would expire; the company, and its executives, would be free to sell shares to the public—assuming the public was interested.
“Not in this market,” Henry said with predictable gloom. “A lot of investors feel burned by Internet companies. We were lucky to get off the IPO.”
“We’re not a dot-com.”
“But our customers are, and if they don’t have money, then neither do we—at least that’s how the market sees it. Kashkin’s report claims that seventy-five percent of our business is from dot-coms.”
“That’s bullshit.” Ron Kashkin was a research analyst with Lehman Brothers who “covered” Positano’s sector, Internet services, issuing long, turgid reports on Positano and its competitors. Guy had nothing but contempt for Kashkin and his kind, though they most often concluded their “analyses” with buy recommendations or the even more desirable and almost as ubiquitous “strong buy.” These “analysts” didn’t really contribute anything to society. They created no jobs beyond employing legions of hardworking, minimum-waged Central Americans to tend to their Hamptons lawns and pools. Instead, they devoted their careers to studying a handful of companies the way an English professor focused on Dickens or Wordsworth, the difference being that a sell-side analyst like Kashkin made in a week what a Dickens or Wordsworth scholar made in a year, if he was lucky. Another difference: Charles Dickens, lucky soul, didn’t have to kowtow to Professor So-and-So, while Guy and Henry spent what seemed like half their time catering to Ron Kashkin and his counterparts at other firms, supplying them with financial results and revenue models, dropping everything to take their calls, flying around the country to speak at their conferences, and all for a single, fuck-all-else purpose: to prop up the company’s stock price. The bottom line wasn’t the bottom line. It was the stock price.
Closing Costs Page 5
