by Jonathan Dee
That last was just barely a question, but the truth was that Mark had nowhere to go today until Haley’s school pickup at quarter to three.
“So my family and I have this house in Howland, off Route 4 but I mean way off, kind of built into the hill that looks back toward town, it’s hard to describe but if you’re driving—”
“I know just where it is,” Mark said. “We’re neighbors.” He was smiling, but Hadi was not. “I mean,” Mark said, shifting in his chair, “we’re a couple acres apart, but we can see your house from our place, which is back off 4 also. Since you’re on the hill and all.”
“I didn’t know that,” Hadi said, and it was clear to Mark from the way he said it that that’s what irritated him—not that he and this middle-class contractor were, relatively speaking, next-door neighbors, but that he’d shown up for this meeting not knowing something relevant that the other guy knew. “Well, good, then you know the location. We built it as a summer place, but between you and me, my family and I are staying up here full-time.”
He paused, and something in Mark, the thing that made him successful with prospective wealthy clients, made him understand that Hadi wanted to be asked why. “Why?” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Not at all. It’s a reasonable question. Let me start by telling you about my work. I used to be an academic, a professor at the Columbia Business School, but I had an idea, an algorithm, and I was able to get some acquaintances to let me make them some money with this algorithm, and in the end I started what’s known as a hedge fund. You know what that is?”
“More or less,” Mark said. It was important to let them condescend to you a little at the beginning, if you could see that was the tone they wanted to set.
“When you get to a certain level in my field, which is basically the investment field, you start to meet people, powerful people, much more powerful than I could ever hope to be. They give you their money to manage, that’s an intimate thing. People drop their guard with you. You get let into those conversations where the line between business and government starts to blur a little bit. Anyway, without—”
Chase came by and dropped a paper bag in front of Mark without a word. In it, he could smell, was an egg sandwich, which he hadn’t ordered, but which she knew he wanted. She’d wrapped it to go, he realized fondly, as a prop, in case he wanted to pretend he had somewhere to be. He took it out of the bag, opened up the warm foil.
“Without getting too specific, I am sometimes privy to information earlier than most people. Information that might cause problems if it spread too widely.”
“Classified things?” Mark asked.
“Not on that level, necessarily. I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, in a nutshell, New York City, my hometown, is not a safe place to be right now, or for the foreseeable future. There are more events coming, of different sorts. Imminently. Good men and women are working around the clock to try to head some of these events off, but they may not be able to, even they acknowledge that much. I mean part of the problem is that you’re called upon to imagine, and prepare for, things that are outside imagining. Turning passenger jets into missiles, for instance. Who imagined that one?”
Mark shook his head.
“I mean, that’s one of the reasons these people call me in,” Hadi said. “Seeing the future. Gaming it out. It’s not a bad description of what I do. But anyway. First things first, which in this case means getting my family out of harm’s way, out of the target zone. What’s her name?”
Mark looked back over his shoulder. “Chase?”
“Thank you. Chase? I’m afraid I’ve let this coffee get cold. And could you also bring me whatever it is you brought Mr. Firth here? It smells amazing.”
“It’s called an egg sandwich,” Chase said mirthlessly. “To go?”
“Yes please. I mean I won’t lie, I don’t consider it some great hardship to move up here. It’s kind of what I wanted to do anyway. I love it here. I grew up in a town like this. I’ve loved it ever since I first saw it. I’m always trying to drag the family up here for weekends. My wife is still pissed that we didn’t build somewhere closer to the good skiing. But that’s what I love about this place, it hasn’t gotten all precious. It isn’t near enough to anything to be attractive to outsiders in that way. So it stays what it is, which is exactly how I like it. Anyway, my wife hasn’t skied for years, so I’m not sure what she’s on about. How long have you lived here?”
All this was taking longer than Mark had expected, and he still didn’t understand where it was going. He was more accustomed to rich people who wanted every meeting to be over in five minutes or less. “All my life,” he said. “Well, not right in Howland. I grew up closer to Pittsfield. My folks still live there.”
“No kidding. What was that like?”
Mark wasn’t sure about the spirit of the question, but figured Hadi had probably never been to Pittsfield. “It’s bigger than Howland, but it’s not exactly a city. It was nice enough. It can’t have been too bad, because none of us moved too far away in the end. I have a brother who lives here in Howland and works in Stockbridge, and a sister in Great Barrington.”
He could see all this was hitting Hadi in some emotional sweet spot (which was why he’d left out the sister who’d moved to Colorado). “See, that’s so great,” Hadi said. “And do you have a family of your own?”
“A wife and a daughter, who’s almost eight.”
“Eight. I should probably ask you about schools, then, but that’s really Rachel’s department, she will want to figure that one out on her own. Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I’m lying in wait for you like this. I have some upgrading I need done on the house, now that we’ll be here full-time. I’ve asked around a bit and your work was recommended to me. Of course I imagine you might be booked up at the moment, and I’d want to get started right away.”
“I could move some things around,” Mark said, without trying to put on too much of an act about it. “One thing to bear in mind is that if any of this work involves breaking ground, winter’s on its way and conditions are hard to predict. If you’re not in a hurry I might even suggest postponing the job until spring.”
Hadi thought. “I see your point,” he said. “But I don’t want to postpone hiring you and then maybe risk losing you to a bigger job. Maybe we can work out some kind of retainer-type arrangement, so that I’m paying to make sure your schedule is clear, so that you can go right to work whenever conditions permit. Exclusivity. Is that kind of thing done in your business?”
More and more effort was going into trying to suppress the physical symptoms of his excitement, his relief. “I’m sure we could sketch out something like that,” he said.
Hadi took a moment to look around Daisy’s—the old Formica counter with cake-stands at either end, the thin, frilly curtains, the sign by the register identifying the credit manager as Helen Waite—with a little smile on his face, as if it were all just exactly what he hoped it would be. Another customer got up to leave, and Hadi smiled and nodded at him, not minding in the least that he got nothing in return.
“I guess I’m sorry to hear the place needs work already,” Mark said. “Since it’s a relatively new construction.” He couldn’t possibly want space added onto it. It was already more than enough for a family of however many kids he had.
“It’s nothing like that,” Hadi said with a smile. “It’s about security. Certain changes, certain installations. Mostly outside the house itself.”
“Security?” Mark said. “I’m not sure I—”
“I know that probably isn’t the kind of work you customarily do. I understand that. I’m not assuming any sort of special expertise on your part.”
“It’s not that. Well, it is that, in part. But what I was going to ask is, why go to the trouble? I assumed you were moving up here full-time because you thought it was safer here.”
“It is,” Hadi said, “relatively. But to a certain extent, I—” He paused as Cha
se, without breaking stride, dropped a white paper sandwich bag on the edge of the table near his elbow. “Look. I am fortunate enough, in this day and age, to be able to do the work that I do pretty much wherever I want to do it. I need a fast, protected internet connection and phone service and not too much more than that. But a lot of money flows through me, or past me at least—other people’s money, I’m talking about, not mine—and disrupting that flow is going to be one of the potential goals of our enemies. In that respect, I bring the sense of diminished safety with me, unfortunately, wherever I go.”
“Ah,” Mark said. He wasn’t sure how much of it to believe. He reminded himself that he wasn’t here to discuss the state of the world, but a job, a job he very badly needed. “As to what you were saying before,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I can put in a bollard or run wires underground as good as, or better than, the next guy. You don’t have to be an expert. But can I ask why me? Why not get someone who is an expert to come up from the city and do it?”
“Because,” said Hadi, “I don’t want this to look too much like what it is. How much are these egg sandwiches, by the way? Couple of bucks?”
He was starting to stand up. “A buck seventy-five,” Mark said. “More with meat.”
“So why don’t you come to the house,” Hadi said. He pulled out three singles, dropped them on the table, and pulled up the zipper on his fleece. “Tomorrow morning, maybe six thirty? I’m up very early.” He smiled warmly but did not shake Mark’s hand before heading out the door, holding the bag with his sandwich in it. Mark watched him through the window; he climbed into the black SUV—the driver’s side—and rolled out of the lot. A tad bit full of himself, Mark thought. But clients’ egos could be gold mines. And there was something else about Hadi specifically—an obliviousness, like an anti-charisma—that Mark felt paradoxically drawn to as well. These were the guys who ruled the world. They didn’t care what anybody thought of them. Maybe that was part of what separated Mark from that class of man: he knew he lacked a certain ruthlessness, but maybe it was even simpler than that, maybe he just put too much stock in the idea that everybody had to like him.
He figured he’d go back home and do some quick internet research on high-tech home security and what could be charged for it. Hadi seemed like a money-is-no-object guy, and why wouldn’t he be? On the other hand, with all his millions he apparently couldn’t buy a neighbor an egg sandwich. Mark pulled out his wallet, gathered up Hadi’s singles, and headed for the register.
—
The southern Berkshires were green most of the year, lush even, the low, wavelike foothills tightly canopied; so when the foliage-tourist season was over and the leaves turned brown and fell, it was invasive, like an x-ray, like the nerves of the earth were exposed. Winter seemed to shrink the area’s geography. People’s sense of where and how they lived depended on seclusion, on privacy, which nature generally provided for free, and then seasonally reminded you to appreciate by taking it away. Neighbors’ properties seemed aggressively close all of a sudden. The grass turned brown as earth and everything felt reduced. The river looked like it was in as bad a mood as every place else, opaque in the dull November sunlight, visible all of a sudden from roads that ran right by it in the summertime without suspecting. Your car smelled like its heater again. You felt wrongly dressed.
Howland differed from neighboring towns in that almost a thousand contiguous acres of it were undeveloped—a land trust dating back to the seventies, when a lawyer from Boston, in the course of preparing his will, was dismayed to hear his ungrateful son express a desire not to be burdened by inheritance of the land his father had lovingly bought up over the course of forty summers. He made those acres a gift to the town instead, on the condition that they never be built upon. Since then the trust had become a favorite charity of the summer people; the old man’s will perversely named the ungrateful son as trustee, but he was a lawyer himself and managed to dump the whole bequest onto a local group called Citizens for Controlled Growth. Even the woods preserved by the trust seemed thinner and less formidable in the weeks before the first snow, or would have if any of the locals bothered to decelerate and glance into them. If you lived there, and saw them every time you drove to town and back, they didn’t register as Controlled Growth, they just looked like nothing.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, if you got away from Route 7 and drove the winding county roads where the year-rounders mostly lived, you didn’t have to go too far before the only colors falling outside the spectrum of brown were on the flags that still scrolled down from porch eaves, or stood at sharp diagonals from brass pole-brackets screwed to support beams. Some people had taken their flags down after a few weeks, but many had not. They knew the flag couldn’t just stay out all winter without getting damaged or ruined, but folding it up and putting it back in the closet seemed too much like forgetting, too much like going back to the indulgent state of mind they’d all enjoyed before, where they took their freedoms for granted, where they weren’t alert to the predations of enemies. The fact that a part of them longed shamefully for just that—for the old life, in which they were not asked to defend the way they lived—helped guilt them into leaving the colors up. The nation was at war; the invisible nature of that war made it both harder and more important to be vigilant. Some even preemptively delighted in the symbolism of allowing the canvas flag to be battered all winter—of spring returning to find Old Glory, bought at the True Value, in tatters, in ribbons, but still there, still flying, evoking something more than just the elements and time.
The Berkshire tourist institutions—Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, The Mount—were closed for the winter, but the restaurants and shops, even the high-end ones, stayed open, sometimes with signs in the window announcing reduced hours. The Mass Pike, running from Stockbridge to Boston, bisected the region west to east; from south to north the towns—Sheffield, Howland, Stockbridge, Lee—were mostly strung along Route 7, itself shadowing the path of the Housatonic, a river that once drove the paper mills whose gorgeous architectural shells still straddled it, some of them restored and tricked up into gallery spaces and shops, others sitting empty, waiting for a buyer, their material decline poignant and picturesque until it was not.
—
Howland still had its own post office, although every few years there were rumors that it would be shut down or folded into the similarly sized post office in Sheffield, six miles away. Usually this rumor came up around election time; whoever was running in the primaries for western Mass’s congressional seat would try to say more stridently than his or her opponent that he or she would fight the bureaucratic fat cats in Washington to protect Howland’s PO from the budgetary reaper. Whether this was in fact a fight that required any cunning or courage whatsoever, or merely a matter of one phone call, one exchange of routine legislative favors, the people of Howland had no real way of knowing. But it remained, for any local candidate, a baseline campaign promise, so the tiny square brick building with the flagpole out front operated on Mill Street much as it had since 1922.
The job of postmaster in a town that size was not a demanding one, but for some reason—its claustrophobic nature, the little uniform you had to wear, the shame attached to government work—no native of Howland had applied to fill it; the position went to a young man named Glenn Brooks, who commuted all the way from Springfield and charged the government a fanciful markup on his travel reimbursements. That markup, though it stayed the same, turned all the more fraudulent after Glenn took up with a Howland woman named Penny Batchelder and, after two dates, started staying over with her on the three nights a week when her sons were with their father. On Monday he’d leave his rumpled Springfield apartment in the morning and return to it in the evening, but Tuesday after work he’d park his car in Penny’s driveway about three miles from town, and unless the weather was bad he wouldn’t so much as turn over the engine again until Friday morning. Penny didn’t give a shit how many people saw his car parked there.
In fact that was both the good and the bad thing about Penny, from his perspective: she didn’t give much of a shit about anything, starting from the moment she got back from dropping the boys off at their dad’s on Tuesday afternoon. She never asked anything of Glenn, or criticized him, or told him his facial hair was stupid, like his last two girlfriends had done. Sometimes she wouldn’t talk at all, for long stretches; sometimes you’d ask her a question and she wouldn’t even answer, like she didn’t hear you, even when she was sitting up in bed next to you, smoking with the lights off and the window open. But she’d come back eventually from wherever her thoughts went to. And when she did, she was crazy. She would let you do anything.
In the mornings she gave him a ride to work, since it was on her way to her job with the medical practice in Stockbridge. He gave her his credit card to use to buy gas, so he could submit the receipts to make it look right with the USPS. Not that he had reason to believe they cared. They might have thrown all his receipts, the legit and the bogus alike, in the shredder for all he knew. It was all so corrupt. But the corruption of it made him feel good somehow: smart. He’d found his way inside it. Corruption was a fact of life, on the governmental level especially, and if you didn’t find your own little way to make it work for you, then you’d be a victim of it. Either or. Maybe he was even undercharging them, just in terms of what he could have gotten away with. It was like paying taxes: there was a line you had to be careful not to cross but you felt like a coward if you didn’t inch as close to it as you could. Still, at the end of every month he felt like a boss of sorts, collecting money for miles he hadn’t traveled, on nights he’d actually spent in the bed of an arguably hot divorcée who didn’t seem to want anything from him except just to be there, to make her not alone, and who in exchange for that would let him do whatever he liked, without making a huge deal about whether she enjoyed it or not.
