She picks up her Veen.
But you make your choices.
She looks over at Bob. He’s talking nonstop, and has been since this morning when the news broke. Jeff Gale this, Jeff Gale that and Jeff Gale the goddamn other thing.
She knows it’s all very shocking, but right now “shocking” is a bizarrely relative term.
The other two-their guests, the Spellmans-are happy to let the great Bob Holland dominate the conversation. Toby Spellman is a wuss in any case, and Lynn is clearly afraid of Alice, won’t even look at her.
So the dynamic at the table isn’t great.
“He was going to turn things around for Northwood,” Bob is saying, “no doubt about it, it was just a question of time.” He forks a roasted scallop into his mouth and chews, impatient to go on talking. “He’d gotten all of that SEC shit behind him, the hearings were over, and most of the MUI documentation had been shredded. Far as I could see it was a clean slate going forward.” He shakes his head. “Absolutely tragic.”
Alice glances at Lynn. She’s a brittle creature, pretty in a grotesque sort of way. Trying too hard, and yet not trying hard enough. What is she, thirty-six, thirty-seven? Wait till she hits fifty. If she makes it that far.
Alice is fifty-two.
Unbidden, an image floats into her mind of Lynn stretched out naked on a marble slab, writhing, all pale and skinny. It’s not a sexual image. God forbid. More like something cold and scientific, a specimen, a bacterium wriggling in a petri dish.
She exhales loudly.
Bob is still talking.
More food arrives.
A cigarette would be nice at this point. Pity she doesn’t smoke.
“Yeah, but listen, Toby, it’s simple.” Bob raises an index finger. “Profit outsourcing, that’s the key to this thing, always has been. Low overseas tax rates…”
And on it goes.
Pork belly, snapper, mango, coffee.
People gliding past, greetings from across the room, fluttering fingers, flushed faces. Music that’s barely identifiable as music, more like some chilly blue vapor rippling down her spine.
Without warning, Lynn turns to look at her, wide-eyed, smile sharp as a blade.
“Alice,” she says softly, “are you okay?”
Oh yes.
Alice nodding it, oh yes, oh yes.
Eventually, the dinner draws to a close. They get up to leave, are given their coats, shuffle out onto the broad, breezy expanse of Columbus Avenue. And here, standing under the sidewalk canopy, waiting for their car to pull up, and gazing south over a bobbing river of yellow cabs to an elegant redbrick apartment building on the other side of the avenue, Alice Harvill Holland comes to a curious realization. Dr. Engdahl prescribed her the Triburbazine for anxiety and nausea, both of which she’s been suffering from lately, and on what has seemed like an industrial scale-but it’s as if he knew she’d need something even stronger, somehow knew she’d need more protection… the pharmaceutical equivalent, say, of Kevlar, or a plutonium suit, or just plain cotton wool, but miles and miles of it, wrapped around her, endlessly, soundlessly, layer after layer after layer.
But why? For what?
For this.
She sees it all in slow motion, and doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t feel her heart rate increase by a single beat, doesn’t flinch. The two figures rush forward, one raising a gloved hand and pointing it at her husband’s head, the other efficiently elbowing Toby Spellman in the abdomen and pushing him to the ground.
Lynn’s hysterical scream and the gunshot come in the same moment. The scream lasts a good bit longer, though-enough to soundtrack the violent sideways lurch of Bob’s head, the ripping apart of his face, his backward collapse onto the sidewalk and the rapid retreat down the block, through the panicking, parting crowds, of the two…
The two… what’s the word?
Perps.
Yes, that’s it.
She looks around, speckles of blood everywhere now, on the sidewalk, on her own dress, even on Lynn’s contorted face, a part of Alice wondering if some of this isn’t maybe more than blood, if it isn’t lumpier, gristlier, if some of this isn’t, in fact, tissue from Bob’s brain.
And the man had a serious brain. When they met, over twelve years ago, he was day-trading in his shorts from the apartment he’d lived in with his first wife-who left him because he was day-trading, and to the exclusion of all else. It took him a few years, but he made over twenty million dollars at it, partnering up with some equity guys and then starting his own shop.
The rest is history.
They didn’t call him Exponential Bob for nothing.
But here, tonight, that’s all over. His second wife gazes out from under the canopy of a restaurant on Columbus Avenue, and it’s quite a scene… Bob dead on the sidewalk, Toby Spellman crouched down next to him, Lynn Spellman having a sort of epileptic fit while still standing… Alice herself frozen, like a model, posing for a photo long after the photographer has gone.
All around her now the nighttime colors and textures of the city are stretching, and in every direction, like pizza dough or chewing gum. There are sirens, too, rising, piercing, closing in. But a few moments later, when the police arrive, something happens. The adrenaline in Alice’s body kicks in, digs in, starts going to work on what’s left of the Triburbazine.
“I’m Detective Brogan,” she hears a voice saying. “With the NYPD.”
She turns and looks into the man’s pasty Irish face.
“I understand this is your husband,” he says.
She nods.
“Can you tell me his name, who he is?”
“Yes.” She stares down at the body. “His name is Bob Holland.” She starts to shake at last, and uncontrollably, her hands, her arms, even her voice. “He works on Wall Street. He runs a… a hedge fund, Chambers Capital Management.”
TWO
The photo dates from sometime in the summer of 1972 and shows Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Adnan Khashoggi, and a 43-year-old James Vaughan on a yacht in Key Biscayne, Florida. Jacqueline Prescott, who later went on to work for Vaughan, can be seen in the background holding a cocktail shaker.
– House of Vaughan (p. 59)
4
MOST MORNINGS, by the time he gets to the office, Craig Howley has already done about two hours’ work. On Mondays, it’s more likely to be three. This is because James Vaughan insists on kickstarting the week with an 8 A.M. meeting of senior investment and consulting staff to review all Oberon deals either in play or on the table. Howley will get up at five, therefore, and pore over any relevant files or documentation, and continue doing so through breakfast and in the back of the car on the way to the office. He believes it’s essential to get ahead of any perceived curve. Vaughan himself seems able to pull this off instinctively, without any apparent effort-certainly without having to get up at 5:00 A.M. and probably without even having to look at a single quarterly report. Which is kind of annoying. But it’s part of his thing, of what makes him the great Jimmy Vaughan.
On his way up in the elevator, Howley anticipates the usual sniping and goading that goes on at these meetings, as different people seek to impress Vaughan by championing or attacking this or that deal. He also anticipates a lot of speculation, some of it informed, most of it hopelessly uninformed, about what happened over the weekend. At first, the general perception-the story, if you will-was that the Jeff Gale killing in Central Park on Saturday morning was an isolated incident. It was a random shooting, and as such, for the victim’s family, a terrible tragedy.
But the killing of Bob Holland twelve hours later on Columbus Avenue changed all of that.
Now, it seemed, the two incidents were linked.