This is something he really doesn’t want to do, but what choice has he got?
They’re on Seventh Avenue, and when they get to Fourteenth Street, he tells the driver to go east. Then, when they get to Orchard, he gets him to crawl along, says they’re looking for a car-but that if they reach Delancey to turn left, and on no account to go straight on. It’s bad enough being down here, but he doesn’t think he could bear going right past the building. Looking around, what strikes him first is how ordinary everything is, how there’s no… there’s no trace of what happened. But why would there be? It was a week ago, which is the second thing that strikes him… the relentless, forward-moving, unidirectional, fuck-you nature of time itself. There was before, there was the event, and now there’s afterward. If you’ve got a problem with that, then… you’ve got a problem.
Car’s not here.
They turn left on Delancey.
“No car, sir?”
“No.”
Parking’s pretty crazy in New York, with times, alternate side regs, etc. Also, he can’t remember exactly where he parked, if it was at a hydrant or a loading zone.
“They boot your car, probably.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t see it. It’d still be there. Let’s spin around one more time.”
They loop back onto Grand and then onto Orchard again. It’s definitely not there.
“When you leave it, sir?”
Frank exhales. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious now, isn’t it?
“Week ago,” he says, knowing what’s next.
“Ah, even if they boot it, sir, after two days it gets towed. You want to go to the pound.”
Pier 76.
West Thirty-eighth and Twelfth.
“Okay.” He rolls his eyes. “Let’s go.”
On the way there he calls Deb. He doesn’t want any surprises at the pound, like alarm bells triggering when he hands over his credit card or anything. She’s left him multiple voice messages over the last few days, but he hasn’t actually spoken to her.
So this isn’t going to be easy.
“Jesus, Frank.”
He gets it out of her pretty quickly that he’s not being sought for further questioning, at least not yet. She says that Lloyd has been fielding all of that stuff, and that as she said in one of her messages the FBI is refusing to give them a release date.
Frank swallows.
He looks out at languid, sunny Twenty-third Street, quiet Saturday morning traffic cruising by.
A release date.
He asks how John is.
John went back to California two days ago. He has stuff to do at college. He’ll be back again, though.
He’ll be back when…
Yeah.
“But how are you, Frank? I’m worried about you.”
The reflex response here would be I’m fine, but he’s not fine, so he isn’t going to say it. He mumbles something and turns it around by asking her how she is.
“I guess I’m fine, but counseling helps. It really does, Frank. You should consider-”
“Are there still media people outside your building?”
“Erm… no. They’ve moved on. The damn world has moved on. I can’t even watch the news anymore.” She pauses. “Frank, where are you? Why don’t you come and see us? Let’s talk. Come for dinner. Come tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Well then, how about-”
He makes a vague commitment for early next week sometime and gets off the phone.
Pier 76.
Oh God.
The waiting room is more than half full. It’s hot and stuffy, and peopled by the hungover and the dispirited. It doesn’t take too long, though. He gets called to the window after about twenty minutes. He’s allowed to go and get his registration and other documents from the car, and then after another maybe ten minutes he’s paying with his credit card and being handed a retrieval slip.
Another ten minutes again and he’s heading north on the West Side Highway.
The drive back to West Mahopac passes in a dream-like rush, and it’s only when he gets near his apartment building that he starts feeling weird, and actually a bit sick. That’s when he realizes he hasn’t eaten in… how long? He can’t remember. Eating seems like a sort of weakness, a betrayal, a surrender to the future.
Anyway, once inside the apartment, he makes straight for the bathroom and throws up, or spends a couple of minutes trying to, at least-retching and groaning.
There’s nothing he’d eat in his fridge or in any of the cupboards, and he doesn’t want to go out again, not just yet. Eventually, he finds a couple of granola bars, which he tears open and eats standing at the sink. Then he makes some coffee.
He gets his laptop out, sits on the couch with it, and for the next several hours reads anything and everything he can find on Craig Howley and the Oberon Capital Group.
When Ellen sees Jimmy Gilroy coming through the door, she gets quite a shock. He’s put on a little weight and has a beard. The callow look is gone. He surveys the room, and when he spots her sitting at the bar his face lights up.
They embrace, double-take, reembrace, and then get settled, Jimmy doing a quick survey of the taps and bottles before ordering a Theakston XB.
Ellen is fine with her Leffe.
It’s early Saturday evening, so the place isn’t too crowded. She’d been going to suggest Flannery’s, but she knows too many people there and they’d never be left alone. This place-the Black Lamps, on East Sixteenth-is small, dark, and rickety, with a tiled floor and worn oak fixtures. It’s perfect for a quiet reunion like this.
They spend a few minutes doing catch-up, during which Ellen reacquaints herself with Jimmy’s Irish accent. She also sees definite flickers of his earlier self, but her main impression is of someone who is tired and a bit desperate, someone who has been backed into a corner and can’t see any way out. His pursuit of James Vaughan seemed logical at the outset, given that Vaughan owned most of the companies, most of the players, involved in the original affair-Paloma Electronics, Gideon Global, the Rundles-and given that he’d been around for, if not directly complicit in, the very event that kickstarted this whole thing in the first place, a helicopter crash at a conference in Ireland that resulted in the deaths of six people. But the very idea of pursuing Vaughan for a specific crime, for any wrongdoing at all, in fact, soon began to seem ridiculous, quixotic even. The corporate and legal firewalls surrounding a man like him were impenetrable. So Gilroy decided to focus instead on Vaughan’s business empire, in a general sort of way, and then on his family.
Which was fine, but there were two slight problems here. Three, really.
One, the subject matter was vast, octopus-like, and it expanded exponentially the more he researched it. And two, who gave a fuck? No one.
Which is still the case. Because the simple fact is, no one outside of business or political circles has ever really heard of James Vaughan. So who’s going to want to buy, let alone read, a book about him?
Which leads neatly on to the third slight problem.
In a scenario like this one, how do you pay the rent?
Well, it turns out that Gilroy did indeed sell his apartment in Dublin. He also has that bar work he mentioned. But how does any of this promote… the career?
“It doesn’t,” he says. “The career is in a sort of holding pattern at the moment.”
Ellen looks at him, brow furrowed. Though she knows what he means, because really, her own career as a journalist is in a holding pattern, too. At least he’s got something to focus on, something to be passionate about.
“The thing is,” he continues, “as long as Vaughan is alive, he, or people in his organization, will block this any way they can, and they’ve made things very difficult already, believe me.” He pauses and reaches for his XB. “When Vaughan dies, though? That’s it. Window closed. I mean, all the work I’ve done? It’ll be of historical interest, sure, at some point… but that’s not what I signed up for.”