“European. Probably East European. Men who traveled six thousand miles or more just to see me die.”
Brighton was hard to read. He didn’t make it to that lofty perch with his heart dangling from his sleeve.
“Maybe your dramatic flair is earned,” he said.
“Fuck that. I’m here to ask you why.”
“What could Rutgers Assurance have to do with assassins in the night?”
“Not Rutgers,” I said. “You.”
“You’ve lost me, Mr. McGill.”
“Oh? Aren’t you the one who said that my name was all over your desk?”
“Yes, but—”
“And doesn’t my place on your blotter have to do with Zella Grisham, Antoinette Lowry, and fifty-eight million dollars that went away during the biggest heist in Wall Street history?”
“What does any of that have to do with men trying to kill you?”
“You don’t know?”
He shook his head and held my stare the way your opponent does before the first round of a fight that he just knows he’s going to win.
“Zella Grisham,” I began, “was arrested for shooting her boyfriend.”
“If you say so.”
“I do and she was. This boyfriend, Harry Tangelo, was in the bed with Zella’s friend Minnie Lesser.” I stopped there to see the cracks appear in the VP’s façade and also because a thrum of rage was rising up somewhere below my heart just above the diaphragm. I don’t think I had ever been so close to violence without perpetrating an actual physical attack.
“I’m not familiar with Grisham’s arrest before the money was found in her possession,” he said. If he could see the rage in me, he didn’t respond.
Maybe he felt secure in physical superiority. Maybe he had a black belt in some Eastern defense art. Whatever he felt he was wrong.
I took a deep breath and held it thrice as long as usual.
Exhaling, I let flow out “How long has your assistant been working for you?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Was she in this office when the heist went down?”
“I don’t remember.” If he was nervous, he sure didn’t show it.
“Maybe she knows more about you than you think.”
Words, for the moment, had abandoned the handsome millionaire. His left eye almost closed and I was allowed a glimpse of the man behind the corporate veneer. This momentary bout of speechlessness was the first indication I had that my predicament was even more complex than I had thought.
He raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Is there anything else, Mr. McGill?”
“Whoever sent those men into my home is going to pay,” I said. “I might not wear the same species of suit that you got but all men bleed and all men die.”
Brighton stood up and I followed suit.
“Mr. McGill, you have to believe me when I tell you that I, nor anyone else at Rutgers, would consider using paid assassins to solve our problems.”
I was allowed to find my way back down the wide hallway to the elevator. The door was open. All I had to do was step in and I was delivered to the twenty-seventh floor. From there I made my way to the outskirts of the glass cage.
The receptionist did her panel-sliding routine and I found myself with her and a dusky-skinned Caucasian man of medium height and middle age, wearing a tan suit with a few dozen scarlet threads shooting through.
“Mr. McGill?” the man said. His face was a pinched isosceles triangle, standing on its pointy chin.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harlow.”
“Yes, Mr. Harlow?”
“You will not be allowed admittance to these premises again.”
“Does that come from you or Mr. Brighton?”
“I am the one speaking, am I not?”
There are few times in a human’s life when the choice is clear and obvious. But there’s always another way, another approach. That’s why most people like a job where there’s a boss and a set of rules written down; a time to arrive and a dollar amount on every hour you toil.
The workingman believes that he has no choice, my long-gone father used to say. He believes that his whole life has been planned out for him. He’s right about the plan but wrong about the destination.
At that moment, in that glass cage, I knew that the only action to take was a solid one-two to the man Harlow’s rib cage and head. I wanted to hit him even though I knew that the act would buy me a prison sentence of interminable length because the rage I felt would certainly kill this stranger.
My action and his death were foregone conclusions.
And then I remembered “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Melville spoke out from his moldering grave, telling me that fate was not inescapable and that this man Harlow would live at least one more day.
41
I took a subway toward midtown and my office. The second-to-the-last car of the A train was empty enough that I could sit on the end, next to the sliding doors. I put in earbuds connected to an ultra-thin MP3 player and listened to the seventies album, Below the Salt, by Steeleye Span, the English folk band. Nasally and dark, mystical and mysterious, the tones seemed to fit my predicament, telling me that the path of my life had been traveled for centuries and who was I to feel so special?
Warren oh was at his post behind the high podium at the front of the Tesla Building.
“Warren.”
“Mr. McGill.”
“How’s the family?” I asked the Chinese-and-black Jamaican man.
“Mother’s coming to live with us.”
“She is?” I stopped.
“She’s too frail to take care of herself and my aunt died in the spring.”
Our eyes met. Understanding, sympathy, and acceptance of our fates were transmitted without words. He gave me a wan Island smile and I nodded — the perennial New York pessimist.
When the electric lock clicked I pushed open the office door expecting to see Mardi, her pale expression of devotion providing a moment of respite from the jagged threat of the streets of New York, encroaching old age, and innate negativity.
Young Ms. Bitterman was there behind her white ash desk but her expression was one of helplessness instead of welcome. Turning my head thirty degrees to the right, I saw the cause of her mild despair. Seated next to each other on my client’s bench was Aura, the woman I loved, and Antoinette, newest leader of a wild pack that had been on my trail for decades.
Aura stood up immediately, taking the two steps needed to reach me.
“Mr. McGill,” Antoinette complained.
“You’ll have to wait a moment, Ms. Lowry.” I took Aura’s hand and led her out into the hallway.
“Bad time?” were the first words she uttered when the door to my office closed behind us.
“If that was all, I wouldn’t need three days.”
“How bad?”
“Baby, I love you. You know that, right?”
When she smiled my heart trilled a high note.
When she kissed me I understood that love is always and only here and now.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you your three days.”
I took her hand and said, “It’s a really hard time, baby.”
“It always is,” she said to my heart.
As Aura walked away I took a moment to breathe before going back into the heavy atmosphere that surrounded my natural enemy and her mindless instinct.
I motioned to Antoinette when I returned to the reception space. She followed me down the aisle to my office. On the way we passed Twill, sitting at his desk, talking on a cell phone.
“Pops,” he said, then nodded at the private agent of industry.
I grunted at my son and plodded toward the back office.