Garnish. Such a benign-sounding word. Like parsley sprigs and radish roses.
And what wages?
He’d replayed, over and over, that odd exchange with Tom Galvin. Thanks for letting me kick in on that Italy thing. Who was the guy, really? In the age of the Internet, the information had to be out there, and Danny, if nothing else, was an ace researcher.
Sitting at his desk in the small alcove off the living room that was now his “study”-his office had become Abby’s bedroom-Danny opened a browser on his old MacBook Pro. LinkedIn had a long list of Thomas Galvins. Halfway down that roster was a Thomas X. Galvin who’d graduated from Boston College, worked for Putnam Investments, and was the founder, chief executive, chief investment officer, and managing director of Galvin Advisers on Saint James Avenue in Boston.
Bingo.
Rex, who was now curled atop Danny’s shoes, heaved a long soulful sigh and nuzzled even closer.
Galvin Advisers of Boston, Mass. The website was nothing more than a secure portal, a page showing an overhead view of Boston’s Financial District, and a log-in box that asked for user name and password. Above it, the words: This website is intended solely for the employees and investors of Galvin Advisers.
Danny’s girlfriend, Lucy Lindstrom, arrived with dinner in a white plastic bag. Takeout from a place on Newbury Street: a salad for her and linguine with shrimp scampi for him. He could smell the garlic, the warm olive oil, oregano, a vinegary bite.
She leaned over to stroke Rex’s face, causing him to close his eyes in bliss. Then she gave Danny a squeeze and a kiss. Her hair gave off a faint whiff of cigarette, which told Danny she’d spent the day doing outreach. She was a psychiatrist for the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and she spent two days a week on the streets of Boston, trying to bribe and wheedle homeless people to come in and get treated.
She wore a pale gray turtleneck under a blue V-neck sweater with black jeans and a great old pair of black leather boots that Danny loved seeing her in. She was wearing her chunky black glasses, which Danny was convinced she used to make herself plainer, and thus less vulnerable, at work. It gave her a sort of winsomely studious look.
They’d been going out for three years, but they’d known each other since freshman year at Columbia. Back then, before life had kicked them both around, Lucy Lindstrom seemed unattainable. To Danny, she was the It Girl of his college class. She had blond hair that came down in unruly ripples to her shoulders, a sharp nose and chin, blue-gray eyes, a dazzling smile, an endearing overbite.
Back then, she’d been way out of his league. Frankly, she still was.
The two decades since college had etched faint lines around her mouth and vertical worry lines between her pale eyebrows. It wasn’t just the years; she’d also survived an unhappy first marriage.
Danny knew she was overly sensitive about the signs of aging, indoctrinated like most women by fashion magazines.
Danny couldn’t care less. He thought Lucy was more beautiful now than when she was a freshman.
She set the round foil take-out pans on the dining table and eased off their cardboard lids.
“Hard day?”
“Mostly a lot of walking around. I need a shower.” Lucy never complained about her work. He admired that.
“Glass of wine first?”
“Sure, why not?”
He pulled the cork out of a chilled bottle of Sancerre and poured them each a glass. They clinked. The wine was crisp, citrus and chalky.
“Street outreach?”
She nodded. “There was this guy at South Station today, sleeping on a bench. He looks like he’s seventy, but he could be ten years younger-you know how the street ages them. Well, the police tried to take him to one of our day shelters, but he refused to go. Really fought with them. So I tried.”
She looked pained, as if reliving the moment. And at the same time tender, transported. She felt a deep connection with the homeless guys. As far as Danny was concerned, they were vagrants and bums, but they were Lucy’s children, her wards, not her patients.
“I told him it’s getting to be really cold at night and he should sleep at the Night Center, not out on the street. But he said people were tampering with his food and they’ll get to him if he goes to sleep. He started babbling-all kinds of nonsense. Word salad.”
He nodded. “Paranoid schizophrenic.” He found her work fascinating but also fundamentally baffling: How could she bear taking care of people who didn’t want her help?
“Probably. We need to get him on Risperdal, but first I need to get him to talk. So I asked if I could sit with him and he said no. I said I just wanted to help. He said, ‘What the hell can you do for me?’ So I said, ‘Well, I have cigarettes.’ And he said, ‘Oh, okay.’” She took a sip of wine.
Danny laughed. “Suddenly you couldn’t shut him up.”
“I gave him a five-dollar gift certificate for McDonald’s, a cigarette, and a pair of white tube socks.”
“So he’s coming in to see you?”
She shook her head. “Later, maybe. First I have to get him to trust me. But you know, there’s something really… moving about this guy.”
“How so?”
“There’s an intelligence in there. A really great, interesting mind locked away, deep inside. It’s sort of heartbreaking.”
The phone rang.
No, he thought. Don’t let it be Tony Santangelo from Asset Recovery Solutions again. He was about to let it go to voice mail when he checked the caller ID: 212 area code and the name of his literary agency, Levitan Freed Associates.
His agent, Mindy Levitan, rarely called except when she was in the middle of negotiating a deal for him.
It couldn’t be good news.
“How’s life in the salt mines?” Mindy said. She had a raspy voice from years of smoking, which she’d only recently been able to quit with the help of a Russian hypnotist.
“Excellent,” he lied. “Deep into it.” For several years now, he’d been working on a biography of a nineteenth-century robber baron named Jay Gould.
“Good, good. That’s what I like to hear.” She said it without enthusiasm. “So listen, Danny. Sorry to call you at suppertime, but I just got into my country house and checked my messages. And I got a call from Louisa.” Louisa Penniman was Danny’s editor. She was a legendary editor of “serious” nonfiction. She’d made her bones on “inside the Beltway” books about politics and a couple of presidential memoirs. She was widely feared and even more widely disliked.
“You’re breaking up,” Danny said. “I’m losing you.”
“Nice try. We’re both on landlines. Listen, this is serious, Danny. She wants to cancel the book.”
4
Danny felt his mouth go dry. “She wants to cancel because I’m a few months late?”
“First, kiddo, it’s not ‘a few’ months, it’s fifteen months-”
“Okay, but-”
“You know how bad things are in the industry. Publishers are all freaking out about e-books. They’re looking for any excuse to cancel contracts these days.”
“Was there ever a time when things weren’t bad in publishing?”
Mindy gave a quick, rueful laugh, more a bark. “Louisa Penniman doesn’t screw around.”
“This isn’t just a threat? I mean, you think-she’s actually serious?”
“As cancer,” Mandy said. Then, quickly, she added: “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”
Mindy Levitan had gotten him a bigger advance for his biography of Jay Gould than he’d ever expected. It helped that his first book, The Kennedys of Boston, had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, even though it didn’t sell particularly well. Or actually win the Pulitzer, for that matter.