“How the hell did you get this number?” he demanded.
I suppressed the urge to say something about a bathroom wall. “I’m a PI, Brent, I do this kind of thing for a living. And if I can get a little time with Linda to talk about a case, I’ll happily go away.”
“How the hell did you get this number?” We went on like this for a while. Finally, my patience ran dry.
“Just tell her I need to talk about Gregory Danes, okay? It won’t take more than a half hour of her life, and we can do it at a time and place of her choosing.”
“How the hell did you get-”
“Tell her, Brent.” I hung up.
I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d hear back from Brent- much less from Sovitch- and I had a few hours until my interview with Geoffrey Tyne. I opened my laptop to research the last items on my list of Danes lawsuits. I turned on the television for background noise. It was tuned to BNN, and after twenty minutes of half-bright market commentary, Linda Sovitch came on the screen.
It was a short blurb, no more than fifteen seconds, pitching that night’s segment of Market Minds. Sovitch’s hair hung in a graceful blond bell, framing her face and long neck. Her flawless understated makeup accentuated the blue of her eyes, the curve of her high cheeks, and the fullness of her mouth. She was babbling something about her scheduled guests when my phone rang. It was Brent.
“You know the Manifesto Diner?” I didn’t. “It’s on Eleventh Avenue, between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth. She’ll meet you there this afternoon at three-thirty- exactly- and you’ll have exactly fifteen minutes.” He hung up. It had been easier than I thought.
I changed channels and went back to my laptop and the lawsuits. I stayed there for about an hour, and then I changed into a navy suit, white shirt, and tie and caught a subway downtown. But my mind was not on the interview with Geoffrey Tyne, or even on my meeting with Linda Sovitch. Instead, I was thinking about the last of the court records that I’d read and about making another trip to Brooklyn later that night.
The offices of Klein amp; Sons are downtown, just off Hanover Square, a short walk from the Exchange, a slightly longer one from the Fed, and a stone’s throw from the two cramped rooms my great-grandfather had leased when he founded the firm one hundred years ago. Though it was early afternoon, the narrow street was already in shadow.
The Klein building is a minor Deco masterpiece, with elaborate chevron designs in green and gold around its base and a tower clad in stylized bronze fronds. The lobby is a vaulted cave of polished black stone, inlaid with gilded zigzags. Being there set my teeth on edge.
I didn’t visit the office much as a kid. I was bored and cranky whenever I went, and I annoyed my uncles and was in turn annoyed by them. My father, I suspect, shared many of my feelings about the place and rarely invited me down. And as an adult, I visited even less. So besides my relatives, there were few people there who recognized me. My name was a different matter.
The guards were deferential and apologetic as they waited for word from above to let me pass. And the pale young man who escorted me through the hushed teak-paneled maze of the seventh floor- the managing partners’ floor- was overawed and tongue-tied. Only the sturdy Hispanic woman who led me through the double doors of the conference room and offered me coffee was unimpressed. I said yes to the coffee, and she left me alone.
It was a long high-ceilinged room, with doors at one end and a white marble fireplace at the other. The walls were mahogany panels below the chair rail and plaster above. The ceiling was heavy with molding. Two brass chandeliers hung gleaming above the mahogany oval of the conference table and were flawlessly reflected in its flawless surface. Sixteen green leather chairs surrounded the table, and a pair of matching leather sofas ran along one wall, beneath four tall windows. Along the opposite wall were the photographs.
They were portraits of individuals and groups, expensively mounted and gilt-framed- Klein amp; Sons partners down through the ages. For the first few decades, it was all blood family: Morton Klein, his younger brother Meyer, and their male offspring. As the firm grew and the Klein daughters married, sons-in-law began to appear in the pictures, and by the forties there were a couple of unrelated partners. By the sixties- Klein being rather ahead of its time- it was possible to spot some nonwhite faces in the crowd and even a few women. And the recent photos were of as diverse a group of executives as one could find anywhere on the Street. But evolution has its limits. Klein progeny and their spouses have always held the topmost spots and a controlling interest in the firm.
I walked along the wall until I found my father. He appeared only in the group portraits and only in the back- a pale distracted-looking figure, tall, with straight black hair, a widow’s peak, and an angular sharp-featured face- looks my sister Lauren and I had inherited, down to the green eyes. For a dozen years he’d occupied a spot my grandfather had made for him at Klein, and then one day he didn’t. He never explained why he stopped going to the office, and his in-laws never pressed.
The doors opened and the Hispanic woman returned, carrying a silver tray with a china coffee service on it. Behind her was a gray switch of wood, wearing a blue Chanel knockoff and patent-leather flats: Mrs. Konigsberg. Her cold eyes inspected the coffee service, shifted to me, and narrowed.
Her hair was battleship gray and lay in flat curls against her head. Her precise features were close on her face, and her skin was paper-white. The shoulders beneath her suit jacket were thin as wires, and her tiny hands were veined and spotted like dry leaves. She didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and it had been many years since she’d been five feet tall. She perched half-glasses on her nose and approached.
“Good afternoon, Mr. March. Nice to see you again.” Her voice wasn’t quite a whisper, but it somehow encouraged restraint.
“Always a pleasure, Mrs. Konigsberg.” She examined me and the picture I’d been looking at. Her mouth became a sliver of disdain and she made a tiny clicking noise.
“Well, then… Mr. Tyne is on his way up. Is there anything else you require?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Konigsberg.”
She nodded. “Then I’ll just show him in.” And she did.
I haven’t gone on many job interviews- not the rA©sumA©, what’s-your-greatest-strength, where-do-you-want-to-be-in-five-years kind. Maybe half a dozen apathetic attempts all told while I was in college, maybe fewer. But despite my limited experience and my apathy, there was one bit of wisdom I did acquire about the process: the one about not showing up drunk. Not obviously drunk, anyway. Not extravagantly drunk. Not slurring-your-words, bumping-into-furniture, spilling-coffee, cackling-wildly, pissing-down-your-leg drunk. Not throwing-up-on-your-shoes drunk. Geoffrey Tyne had missed this lesson.
My first clue was the look on Mrs. K’s face as she ushered him into the room- as if someone had simultaneously goosed her and lifted her wallet. Tyne was a medium-sized doughy guy in his fifties, with shiny hair that looked twenty years younger than the rest of him. His face was heavy and flushed, and his small eyes jumped around beneath unkempt brows. His nose was shot with broken capillaries, and his mouth was full of gray teeth. He brushed the lapels of his suit jacket and tugged at his shirt cuffs, and Mrs. K backed away quickly.
My second clue came when he wrapped a moist hand around mine, breathed a gin cloud at my face, called me Mr. Marx, and commented that I didn’t look Jewish. It went downhill from there.
Tyne sat long enough to spill my coffee and tip the sugar bowl; then he rose, to careen around the room and babble. From what I could follow, his rantings had mainly to do with his assignments overseaswhich, as he made it sound, had taken place sometime during the reign of Victoria, in locales he described as the back of beyond and the Fourth effing World. They were peppered with phrases like our little brown brothers, and they went on for a long twenty minutes. For his grand finale, Tyne turned a khaki color, ran trembling hands down his face, and puked on his brogues. Then he collapsed on one of the sofas. I’m not sure when he wet his pants.