I shut down my laptop and pushed my chair back from the long oak table that serves as my desk. I stretched and worked the kinks out of my neck. Between dialing for Burrowses, checking in with Mike, and talking to Tom Neary, I’d been on the phone for most of the day. I’d told Mike about my walk in the park and about my meeting with our client. He’d already heard from Pierro.
“He called to thank me,” Mike had said, “for bringing you in on this. He said it was a great move, and that you were a great guy, and that everything would be great.”
“Great,” I’d said.
Mike had chuckled. “He’s a salesman-you’ve got to make allowances.”
“Is he really as optimistic as he sounds about all this?” I’d asked.
“At some level. Mostly, I think he’s boxed it up in his head and pushed it off to the side.”
“It works, if you can keep it up,” I’d said.
“It takes a lot of energy.”
I’d told Mike about my meet with Neary, too. He went quiet at the mention of Fred Pell.
“Another reason to go carefully,” he’d said after a while. I hadn’t replied. “I’ll interpret your silence as agreement,” he’d said hopefully and rung off.
Neary’s call came right after. I could have my tour today, he’d told me, if I could meet him at the MWB offices at three-thirty. I was surprised, and pleased, that he’d gotten back to me so soon, and said okay. I rubbed my eyes and checked my watch; it was one-thirty-just enough time for a run.
It had dried out over the weekend, but was still blustery, so I pulled on tights and a wind shell. I headed due west, toward the piers along the Hudson. I hadn’t much time, and I’d done a long run on Sunday, so I was aiming for a quick four miles. I turned north at the river, toward Chelsea Piers. I was running into a steady wind now, and it was an effort to keep an eight-minute pace. The wind eased as I came up to 23rd Street, and I picked it up a little. As I ran, my thoughts turned, not for the first time, to my new neighbor.
I’d seen Jane Lu only once since knocking on her door, and then only briefly. She’d been leaving the building as I was coming back from my run on Sunday morning. She was with a clean-cut, frat-boy type with blond hair and lots of teeth. She was wearing jeans, an orange turtleneck, and tiny, wire-rimmed sunglasses, and she’d given me a smile and a friendly hello. After fifteen fast miles, I wasn’t sure that I’d said anything coherent in return.
She’d been nice as pie to me on Friday night-apologizing profusely for the noise, confessing her kickboxing mania, explaining that she’d been working with my sister, Lauren, for the past six months. She even offered me a Pepsi. And the nicer she was, the more ridiculous I’d felt for having been so irritated. At some point it had dawned on me that Jane recognized my discomfort, and so was being particularly gracious-the better to see me squirm. I’d found this interesting, if slightly annoying. There was a lot interesting about Jane-her considerable physical appeal, her rich, easy laugh, and the powerful intellect that gleamed in her dark eyes. I’d talked with her, with her doing most of the talking, for about twenty minutes before going downstairs, to bed.
I was back from my run in thirty-three minutes. I stretched and showered quickly, and dressed in gray trousers, a white shirt, a blue blazer, and a red paisley tie. And then I headed downtown.
I got off the subway at Wall and William, and walked south. Daylight had begun to fade, and the dark, narrow streets were growing darker. Soon the markets would close and the streets would fill with homeward pandemonium, but just now they were quiet. A few people stood at the entrances of buildings-smoking, talking, watching the traffic pass; a few others made for the subway-the first small trickle of the evening rush. A couple of TV news vans were parked near the old Morgan Guaranty building. Technicians snaked cables on the pavement out front, and bantered with the cops at the Exchange. A group of tourists rested on the worn steps of Federal Hall, studying their maps and debating their next destination. Some street vendors were shutting down for the day; others were setting up. Quiet for Wall Street. Quieter than it was those summers, a century back, when I’d worked down here; quieter than just a couple of years ago-before the party ended, before the bubble burst, and the triumphal march of the imperial CEOs and celebrity analysts finished in a string of perp walks. Quieter than it was before the towers. Maybe it was my imagination, or something the neighborhood brings out in me, but the faces seemed paler, more tired, more worn and used up than I remembered. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.
I knew from Mike’s file that, apart from its London headquarters, New York had been MWB’s largest office. The bank had been the marquis tenant in a prestigious tower at the bottom of Broad Street. It had occupied a quarter of the building, and its executive suites and dining rooms had boasted picture-postcard views. Now, whatever was left of the firm was relegated to two low floors, and there was nothing but a faded spot on the granite out front, where the MWB logo used to be. The lobby guard studied my documents and pointed me at an elevator and told me to get off at three. Neary was waiting for me, wearing a navy suit, a dark tie, and a white shirt.
“Tom,” I said, extending my hand, “thanks again for this.”
“Always happy to have you owe me another large favor. But I still think this is mostly a waste of time.”
Neary led me through a glass door to a reception area. It was small, windowless, and unlovely, furnished only with a steel desk and a swivel chair. Set in the wall to the left of the desk was a gray metal door, and mounted beside it was a card-key reader. A uniformed guard manned the desk. He was a black man in his early fifties who, even sitting down and nearly motionless, managed to look tough, competent, and entirely humorless. He gave me the once-over with eyes like stones.
“Hi, Chet,” Neary said, and flashed an ID card.
“Hello, Mr. Neary. This is your guest?” Chet asked.
“This is him,” he answered. Neary wrote in the logbook and had me sign in too. He walked to the metal door and ran his ID card through the reader. The door gave a click, and he pulled it open.
We were in a corridor that extended to the right and left. Across from us, arranged end-on to the corridor, were row upon row of steel shelves. They reached almost to the ceiling, like library shelves. But the effect was more warehouse than library, as they were stacked not with books but with large, green filing boxes.
I followed Neary off to the left and around the corner. The floor was laid out like a square doughnut, and the four sides were mostly open space, given over to the rows of metal shelves. The aisles between the shelves were narrow, and as we walked past I saw windows at the other end, with dim views of buildings and airshafts. At each of the four corners was a cluster of offices, and in the central core were bathrooms, a kitchen, a room with copy machines, and access doors to the fire stairs and freight elevators. We passed maybe half a dozen people along the way, mostly young, mostly male, all casually dressed. They all knew Neary and greeted him.
The shelves aside, the floor was nicely fitted out. The carpets were coffee-colored and thick, and the walls were covered in a beige fabric. There was dark wood molding at the baseboards and the cornices. But the place had an abandoned, deserted feel nonetheless, and the ranks of high, metal shelves, stacked boxes, and narrow aisles made me slightly claustrophobic.
“We’ve got this floor and the one above,” Neary explained. “They used to be MWB’s back-office operations. We put in the security out front, pulled out the cubicles, and put in the shelves. Upstairs is set up just the same. Come on, I’ll introduce you to someone.”