“I’m envious.”
“Doesn’t yours?”
“No, I wish.”
“It’s nice. I swim a lot.”
“I saw your tan,” he said and touched her shoulder. It was warm, like she’d just been in the sun.
“Look.” She pointed to a sign. Right beneath the name of the place, Giordano’s, block letters were spread out. “Congratulations to Simeon Rothschild.”
“That’s him.”
A waitress stood in the reception area, which had linoleum floors and potted plants. She wore a green vest and could have been working a casino.
“Names?”
“Melissa Tyllis. And this is my guest, Jake Russo.”
The waitress didn’t bother to check anything off, and she told them to go ahead.
The room itself was better than the reception area. All the concrete in the roof had been covered by dark wood. It was a wide-open space and almost twenty round tables were spread across the floor, like coasters on a coffee table. Rothschild was a popular guy. A band sat in the corner and most of the members had tiny plates in their hands. One middle aged man, the youngest in the group, struggled with a shrimp.
“Where is Mr. Rothschild?” Jake asked.
She scanned.
“I don’t see him yet.”
“I’ve never gotten a chance to talk to him.”
“You haven’t? Well, he’s very busy. I’m surprised though. He’s very good at being open about projects. You’ll meet him tonight.”
“Is he as good at PR as you are?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how could I not give you a good report?”
She laughed, a little loudly.
“I didn’t want that to be a problem.” She grabbed his arm. “I asked you, remember.”
“I remember.”
“And it isn’t a conflict of interest?”
“I think that I’ll still be able to write puff pieces about ‘Sunny Sarasota’ without a conflict of interest.”
Mel introduced him to the people who came around. He handed out and received business cards. There were a lot of them: a director of public relations; a business development director; an architect; a strategic planner.
“How many people work here?” His suit pockets were full of thick-stock business cards.
“We’re growing very quickly.” She held a martini and didn’t look like she was worried about spilling. He liked that. “In fact, we’re growing a little faster than Palmstead, I’ve heard.”
“Is that true?”
“That’s just what I’ve heard.”
“Who told you?”
“Oh, you just see it in e-mails. I don’t know how they know really.”
“Well, Rothschild won’t catch up to Palmstead just yet, right?”
Mel stood silent. She was looking over his shoulder.
The man standing behind Jake had short white hair, disheveled intentionally. He was wearing a tuxedo with a tight knot at the tie and a wide cummerbund. He stood taller than Jake but it might have been because of his heels. The veins in his face drew little marker lines on his skin. His chin jutted out a little and he looked like he was tilting his head a few extra degrees.
“We’ll catch up to Palmstead soon enough.”
The most noticeable thing were the eyes. They were black, surrounding a deeper black in the pupil.
“Hello Simeon,” Mel said. “We were just talking about you.”
“Hi, Mr. Rothschild,” Jake said quickly. “I’m Jake Russo. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Did you say Mr. Rothschild?” He looked around the room. “That’s my father. I don’t see him here. Please call me Simeon.”
“Certainly-”
“I’ll tell you something.” His face moved while his eyes stayed steady. “That’s one reason we’re already catching up to Palmstead. They have such an antiquated approach to things. I’m sure that everyone there is calling Jerry ‘sir,’ or ‘Mr. Rubenstein,’ or something formal like that. His staff is busy bringing his puppies caviar instead of scoping new sites. Does he still have that dog?”
“Well, when I interviewed him, there was a dog in the room…”
“Jake,” Mel said, “I told Simeon I’d be bringing you. And he’s read your work, of course. So he knows you’ve met Mr. Rubenstein.”
“He and I play golf sometimes,” Rothschild said, flicking his wrist. “Well, we did. Now things have gotten a little more serious.”
“I see.”
“And that’s off the record. Mel, make sure he doesn’t write too much.”
“Don’t worry. I mostly talk about the good things. It’s just about trends. Lifestyles. Pretty soft focus.”
“That’s good.” He waved at someone. “I have to duck off. It was nice to meet you. And remember, we will catch up.”
He walked away, his chin raised. He moved quickly and stood behind someone else. Jake saw a man turn and start laughing.
“So that was him?”
Mel smiled and nodded.
“Yes, that was him.”
“He snuck up on me.”
“He gets involved in a conversation,” she said, “whether you know it or not.”
CHAPTER 9
It always started with the rolls.
The way people passed around the basket. The little pads of butter, slipping inside their foil wrappers. People looked disappointed if you didn’t take a roll and spread it thick with butter. It was like an insult. What they didn’t realize was that if you took one roll, there was no reason not to take another. He passed the basket on to Mel and hoped nobody would notice.
There were eight people at the table, including Jake and Mel. Three of the others were developers for Rothschild, and the other three were unaffiliated. They’d all decided that Jake’s job was the most interesting and they asked him questions about it. They eventually asked if he needed a roll.
“I’m fine,” he insisted.
That was the problem with fancy meals. Even if he ordered chicken for the main course, they always found ways to surround it with other food that he’d never asked for. Turtle soup seemed to spontaneously condense, thick with chunks of meat and swimming with fat. Someone at the table requested shrimp and it arrived surrounded by bowls of butter. Little pools to drown it in, so it dripped a yellow trail on the tablecloth. Mel had one, but she didn’t spill.
He gave them the usual speech about his job. Most of it was true. How he’d wanted to be a reporter since he was a boy. He’d been editor of the high school paper, huddled in rooms cutting and pasting articles for the Xerox machine. Then he’d gone on to write in college. He was lucky enough to get a job straight out and earn a chance to work his way up. A decade’s worth. They asked him where he’d been when one event or another happened in New York and he told them.
“And so why did you come here?” a middle-aged man asked before he sucked on a shrimp tail.
Jake brushed his hair back. That was where the editing came in. He had a different reason sometimes, but never told them Thompson’s reason. The real one. He said he wanted a change of pace. He wanted to see more of the country. He wanted to do a different type of writing. He couldn’t tell if they’d bought it or were just being polite. The two things looked the same.
“But enough about me,” he said. “I bore myself.”
“Well, not us,” a woman said, and her husband nodded. He was one of the Rothschild employees. Jake decided to distract them.
“So what do you do for Rothschild?”
“I’m on the construction end of things. I make sure these communities get built. But nothing like this building,” he said and laughed. “God awful, isn’t it?”
“Just the outside.”
“I guess. I’ll be on a site tomorrow though, supervising a new project. I make sure things get done.”
“That must be satisfying.”
“It is,” the man said. “You watch something really come full circle. It starts out just a patch of land and then ends up as a place where people live. My wife’s heard this a million times.”
“I haven’t heard it lately,” she muttered.