But-
But.
Crossing Fifth.
He was going to say.
It was always this part of town that made him feel most like an architect, midtown-with its soaring towers and vertiginous canyons, its expanses of glass and steel, its mullions and spandrels… the mongrel skyline rising from an ordered grid, this great aggregate of the revolutionary and the dandified, the conservative and the radical…
Skyscrapers.
Like that one up ahead there, with its granite base, its limestone facade, its bronze-clad cupolas. He comes to the foot of the squat Colgate-Palmolive Building on the corner of Park and Forty-ninth and stops. It’s just over there, on the other side of the avenue, the one with the anchored canopy, and the cars lining up outside, and the flashing lights, and the barriers, and the security, and the photographers, and the crowds…
He crosses to the grassy median and waits, gazing over at this iconic art deco masterpiece.
One of his favorites.
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Something is bugging her, and by early evening Ellen needs to get out of the apartment, she needs a drink, or a couple of hits of a joint, anything that will lead to an altered state of consciousness. Because the one she’s currently in is tired, used up, polluted with the contorted syntax of all the e-mails she had to write this afternoon turning down offers to talk or blog about Ratt Atkinson and his bogus Twitter accounts.
She can’t believe that’s still going on.
A call to Michelle would normally be a reliable route out of the mental ash cloud, but recently Michelle has been too news-focused in her chat, too eager to engage with the stories Ellen needs a little respite from.
But still, that’s not what’s bugging her.
This thrum of anxiety has been with her since she left Frank Bishop earlier-left him standing outside his room in the Bromley Hotel on Seventh Avenue, left him in that wide, desolate corridor, on that ugly multicolored carpet, with its vertigo-inducing geometric patterns.
Frank Bishop is what’s bugging her.
His demeanor, his suit, the things he said, and maybe didn’t say… his hotel room, the books and magazines, the cracked TV screen and the empty vodka bottle.
How would she have reacted, and behaved, in his position? There’s no saying.
Not that it’s any of her concern anymore.
If it ever was.
She heads down to Flannery’s, which is pretty much empty. This is because it’s early, and it’s a Monday, which suits her just fine. She orders-and it’s almost perverse, because it’s not what she normally drinks, or ever drinks, in fact-a Stoli on the rocks. The barman gives her a look. She shrugs. What? She has to explain?
I’m looking to break a code, to enter someone’s mindset.
Right.
Not that it works, of course. The Stoli. As a drink it does, sure, but that’s all.
She’d probably be better off if she had someone to talk to. Charlie’s not here, which is a pity, because she watched some of the Carillo trial earlier and feels that she’s maybe ready to reengage. After more than a week, Mrs. Sanchez is still on the stand, and Ray Whitestone is getting her to deconstruct the household, its comings and goings, its rhythms and routines, and in quite staggering detail.
She’d like to get Charlie’s take on it.
But he’s not here.
The gorgeous Nestor is, though. She sees him emerge from the kitchen, obviously finished with his shift and heading off. He spots her at the bar, makes a discreet toking gesture, and flicks his head in the direction of the alleyway up the street.
She’s all over it.
A few minutes later they’re passing his joint back and forth and discussing why teleportation as seen in Star Trek is technically impossible.
Looking into Nestor’s eyes, and not entirely without irony, Ellen says, “Beam me aboard, Scotty.”
“Never going to happen, because… think about it-”
“Yeah, I am.”
“You’ve got to obliterate the human body, which is ten to the power of forty-five bits of information, and then reassemble all that shit somewhere else without so much as putting a single itty-bitty molecule out of place. I don’t think so.”
Ellen is wondering how Nestor would react to being hit on by a forty-one-year-old woman when something occurs to her.
Reassembled bits of data.
She passes the joint back, exhaling thick smoke, and looks away. Various corollaries of the thought that has just struck her seem to be forming now in clusters around her brain.
The bottle of Stoli and the cracked TV screen… when did he throw one against the other? And why? Isn’t it suddenly obvious? It was just before they spoke on Friday, when he was drunk and watching Craig Howley being interviewed on Bloomberg. And the solution? He said he was no longer interested in the problem, only in the solution, but when she asked him what that was, he told her to ask Lizzie.
Ask my daughter.
The last thing he said was that maybe he and Ellen had one more shot at this.
What did that mean?
She leans back against the alley wall.
Then there was the suit and tie, and the clean-shaven look, which she took to mean…
But-
Maybe she misread that one completely.
“You cool?”
Ellen turns back to Nestor. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She takes out her phone. “I’m sorry… to do this, but…”
Without finishing her sentence, she turns away again and wanders out of the alley.
Standing on Amsterdam, she stares down at her phone, trying to work out what to do.
A fire truck rushes past, siren screaming.
It’s Craig Howley, isn’t it? Private equity, Paloma…
But what?
She Googles him. Goes to News.
The first few stories are about him taking over the Oberon Capital Group, his appearance on Bloomberg, his press conference. Then there’s a story about something called the Kurtzmann Foundation. She clicks on it.
Ellen hates using her phone for looking stuff up on the Internet. The screen is too small, the keys too fiddly. But she enlarges the text and reads.
Gala benefit… Jessica Bowen-Howley… Monday evening… 7:30… the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel…
She looks up and gazes out at the passing traffic.
Stoned, but not stoned.
Unconvinced, disbelieving, tired of all this.
She looks back down at her phone. What time is it? Just after seven.
Shit.
She turns around. “Sorry, man.” This to Nestor. “I have to go.”
Nestor shrugs and rolls an index finger.
Next time.
Ellen walks to the corner and flags down a cab going east.
They cross Park at Fifty-seventh Street.
Still seething, Howley is hunched forward, neck and shoulders all tense, switching his phone from one hand to the other. He’s desperately anxious to move this situation forward.
Fifty-fifth.
In just a few blocks Pawel will be swinging to the left, around the median, and they’ll be pulling up at the Waldorf.
He can’t hit the red carpet like this, can he? Looking distracted, angry, a scowl on his face? It wouldn’t be fair to Jessica. There will be A-list celebrities here, Hollywood actors, sports stars, senators and congressmen, people who know how to smile in public, schmooze, work the big room.