As she reads, she jots down notes on a loose sheet of graph paper.
Born in Carthage, North Carolina, forty-seven years ago, Jeff Gale majored in psychology and economics at NCSU and then got an MBA at Harvard Business School before going on to do stints at Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. After five years at Citigroup he was appointed vice president of the New York Federal Reserve, and then, just in time to see the company clock up losses of nearly $4.2 billion, he took over as CEO of Northwood Leffingwell. Amid embarrassing lawsuits over the bank’s foreclosure practices, as well as SEC claims that statements he made to Congress may have misrepresented Northwood’s health, Gale’s tenure at the bank was not an easy one. More recently, however, things seemed to have been looking up, with the bank’s share price finally crawling out of the single digits.
Gale was married and had two teenage daughters. A Forbes profile describes him as obsessive and detail oriented. Standard stuff, then, and fairly tedious, but it’s a brand of tedium that Ellen has grown used to over the years. It’s part of her stock-in-trade-wading through data and looking for patterns, glitches, the one thing no one else sees.
She goes through some photos of Gale now, on Google Images, but doesn’t see anything of any interest at all. Apart from the fact that he was about five-ten, pale, and balding.
She looks over at the TV. They keep going back to the crime scene in Central Park, recycling the few precious, banal facts that are known about the case. Ellen finds all of this frustrating. If she were working on the story herself-for a paper, say, like Val Brady is-what would she be doing now? Would she be on the phone to this or that contact? Would she be camped outside Jeff Gale’s house?
Maybe.
But if so, wouldn’t she need a little more to work with, a lead, something concrete?
When the food arrives, Ellen gets a beer from the fridge and sets up at the kitchen table.
She eats in silence, staring over at her desk.
Something bugging her.
What is it?
Ever since she did that piece on John Rundle with Jimmy Gilroy a year and a half ago, nothing has been the same. He called her up out of the blue one afternoon, this diffident, inexperienced Irish journalist, and within a couple of days she was involved in the fastest-moving, most exciting story she’d ever worked on. Senator John Rundle, sniffing out the possibility of a party presidential nomination, was found to have lied about a trip he made to the Congo on behalf of his brother, Clark, CEO of engineering giant BRX-a trip on which a private security contractor just happened to “go postal” in a tiny village and massacre nine people. As if that wasn’t enough, Clark Rundle was subsequently indicted for murdering the owner of the private security company by bashing the man’s brains in with a fucking laptop.
She and Gilroy led on every aspect of the story, scooping all other news outlets, and then drawing the whole thing neatly together for the next issue of Parallax. It was a thrilling time in her professional life, a definite high point, but these days she can’t shake off the suspicion, even the fear, that she was perceived to have gone too far-and that she’ll never be permitted to go that far again.
Why, and by whom, remains a mystery, but she’s been around long enough to know that certain people just don’t like people like her. Over the years she’s been harassed, followed, and offered money and had her various accounts hacked into. This feels different, though, more subtle. Recession notwithstanding, Parallax has lost a lot of advertising revenue recently, and for his part Max Daitch hasn’t seemed quite as fearless as he once did. Maybe it’s her imagination, maybe not, but the atmosphere around the office has had a weirdly muted feel of late.
As for Jimmy Gilroy, Ellen doesn’t know. He sort of disappeared into the story in a way she’s rarely seen. He was of the opinion that what they did together only scratched the surface, and from what she understands he has spent the last eighteen months immersed in a follow-up piece, excavating the background to the original story, but sinking ever deeper into it, traveling to London, Paris, and the Congo.
Getting lost, chasing ghosts.
She pushes the remainder of her food aside and finishes what’s left of the beer.
But does she envy him this for some reason? Maybe. She certainly envies someone something. What that is, or might be, exactly, she doesn’t know. On consideration, though-and looking over at her desk again-she knows it probably isn’t the Jeff Gale story.
Or shouldn’t be.
And as if to confirm this, her phone rings.
She picks it up and looks at the display.
Val Brady.
She hesitates, but lets it ring out. Then she waits for a moment and checks to see if he’s left a message.
He has. “Hi, Ellen, Val Brady here. Er… nothing really, I just thought I’d check in with you, seeing as how we were, you know… talking today. Funny thing about this story, it’s… it’s flat, there’s nothing there. I’ve talked to a lot of people since this morning, associates of Gale’s, people who knew him well, people who could even be classed as adversaries of his, in a business sense, but it all comes across as so fucking boring, you know? He does, they do, that whole world. I mean, these people don’t go around shooting each other, that’s for sure. So maybe it was just one of those random things.” He pauses. Ellen looks over at the window, out at the darkening, orange-washed street. “Hey,” Brady goes on, “I just feel bad that that hard-on of yours had to go to waste, you know. Maybe next time.” Another pause, during which she can feel the recoil from his brain exploding. “Listen, Ellen”-this quickly-“I’ll talk to you again, okay? Take it easy.”
Poor bastard, he couldn’t resist it. Or make it sound like he was one of the boys.
But-
Something weird.
She walks over to the window and stands there looking down, thinking… what if he’s wrong? What if he’s wrong about all of it?
His approach, his conclusion.
Some people walk by on the other side of the street, huddled into their coats, laughing.
A yellow cab passes.
What was it he said… the story was flat and they were all so boring?
And then it hits her.
Of course.
None of that is the point, is it?
She turns back around and glances at the TV, where for the hundredth time today they’re showing the scene down in Central Park-the yellow tape, the guys in baggy white suits, the photographers, the media pack, the onlookers.
That’s the point.
She walks toward the corner of the room, staring directly now at what’s on the screen.
Calculating… extrapolating.
And suddenly she’s sure. It’s as real as a headache.
This is going to happen again.
3
IF ALICE HARVILL HOLLAND WEREN’T ICED RIGHT NOW ON TRIBURBAZINE, this dinner would be a lot less bearable than it is. She hasn’t been able to eat, though. Not properly, anyway. She’s had a few morsels, a pickled beet, some of the smoked yucca, a fried plantain, but that’s all. And it’s such a shame, because the food here at Bra is usually so exquisite. She can’t drink, either. With Triburbazine you absolutely can’t drink.
Unless, of course, that is, you’d prefer to. Before slipping into a coma.
And a nice one… deep, thick, lasting.
To sleep, perchance to dream.