The headache had started as a band across my forehead and behind my eyes, but by mid-afternoon it had worked its way out to every part of my skull and was pounding like a jackhammer.
I paced around the room for hours, trying to absorb the pain – glaring at the phone, willing it to ring. I couldn’t understand why that guy hadn’t called me back yet. I looked at the money. That was half a million dollars there, lying on the floor, just waiting for someone to come along and take it…
By early evening, I found that walking around didn’t help much any more. I was having intermittent bouts of nausea now and was shivering all over, fairly constantly. It was easier, I decided, to lie on the makeshift bed of stacked blankets and a duvet, tossing and turning, and occasionally clutching my head in a vain attempt to ease the pain. As it got dark, I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point, I woke up retching – desperately trying to empty my already empty stomach. I coughed up blood on to the floor and then lay flat on my back again, staring up at the ceiling.
That night – Thursday night – was interminable, and yet in one sense I didn’t want it to end. As the veil of MDT lifted further, my sense of horror and dread intensified. The torment of uncertainty gnawed away at the lining of my stomach and I kept thinking, What have I done? I had vivid dreams, hallucinations almost, in which I repeatedly seemed to come close to an understanding of what had happened that night at the Clifden Hotel – but then, since I was unable to separate what my fevered mind was concocting from what I was actually remembering, it was never close enough. I saw Donatella Alvarez calmly walking across the room, like before, in a black dress, blood pouring down the side of her face – but it was this room, not the hotel room, and I remember thinking that if she’d taken such a serious blow to the head, she wouldn’t be calm, or walking around. I also dreamt that the two of us were on a couch together, entangled in each other’s arms, and I was staring into her eyes, aroused, excited, engulfed in the flames of some nameless emotion – but at the same time it was my old couch we were on, the one from the apartment on Tenth Street, and she was whispering in my ear, telling me to short-sell tech stocks now, now, now. Later, she was sitting across the table from me in Van Loon’s dining-room, smoking a cigar and talking animatedly, ‘… because you norteamericanos don’t understand anything, nothing…’ – and then I seemed to be reaching out in anger for the nearest wine bottle…
Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle, but a cane or a statuette – each one like a shard of coloured glass hurtling in slow-motion through space after an explosion, each one vainly promising to form into a solid memory, into something objective and recollectable… and reliable…
At one point, I rolled off the duvet, holding my stomach, and crawled across the floor through the glistening darkness to the bathroom. After another fit of retching, this time into the toilet bowl, I managed to get up on to my feet. I leant over the wash-basin, struggled with the faucets for a moment and then threw some cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection in the mirror was ghostlike and barely visible, with my eyes – clear and moving – the only sign of life.
I dragged myself back into the living-room, where the dim shapes on the floor – the smashed boxes, the crumpled clothes, the open briefcase full of money – looked like irregular rock formations on some strange and dusky blue terrain. I slumped back against the wall nearest to the telephone and slid down into a sitting position on the floor. I stayed there for the next couple of hours, as daylight seeped in around me, allowing the room to reconstitute itself before my eyes, unchanged.
And I came to some accommodation with the pain in my head, as well – so long as I remained absolutely still, and didn’t move, didn’t flinch, it obligingly receded into a dull, thumping, mindless rhythm…
27
WHEN THE PHONE RANG BESIDE ME, just after nine o’clock, it felt like a thousand volts of electric current piercing my brain.
I reached over – wincing, my hand shaking – and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Spinola? It’s Richie, at the desk.’
‘Hhhn.’
‘There’s a Mr… Gennady here to see you? Shall I send him up?’
Friday morning.
This morning. Well, yesterday morning by now.
I paused.
‘Yeah.’
I put the phone down. He might as well see me – see what he would be in for shortly.
I struggled to get up off the floor – each movement I made like another charge of electric current through my brain. When I eventually got up I noticed that I was standing in a small pool of my own piss. There were blood and mucus stains on my shirt and I was trembling all over.
I looked down at the briefcase full of money, and then back at the phone. How could I have been so stupid, so vain? I looked over at the windows. It was a bright day. I walked over to the door, very slowly, and opened it.
I turned, and took a few paces back into the room, and then turned again to face the door. At my feet, there was a large, crushed box, its spilt contents – saucepans, pots, various kitchen implements – splayed out like intestines on the floor.
I stood there, an old man suddenly – feeble, stooped, at the mercy of everything around me. I heard the elevator opening, and then footsteps, and then a couple of moments later Gennady appeared in the doorway.
‘Whoa… fuck!’
He looked around in shock – at me, at the mess, at the sheer size of the place, at the windows – obviously unable to decide if he was disgusted or impressed. He was wearing a pin-striped two-button suit, a black shirt and no tie. He’d shaved his head and was sporting a three-day stubble on his chiselled face.
He looked me up and down a couple of times.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’
I mumbled something in response.
He came a little further into the room. Then, side-stepping the mess on the floor, he made his way over to the windows, irresistibly drawn to them, I suppose – just as I had been on that first visit here with Alison Botnick.
I didn’t move. I felt nauseous.
‘This is certainly a change from that shit-hole you had on Tenth Street.’
‘Yeah.’
I could hear him behind me, pacing along by the windows.
‘Shit, you can see everything.’ He paused. ‘I heard you’d found yourself quite a place, but this is amazing.’
What did that mean?
‘There’s the Empire State. The Chrysler Building. Brooklyn. I like this. You know, maybe I’ll get a place here myself.’ I could tell from his voice that he had turned around now. ‘In fact, maybe I’ll take this place, move in here. How’d that be, jerkoff?’
‘That’d be great, Gennady,’ I said, half turning around, ‘I was going to look for a room-mate anyway, you know – to help with the repayments.’
‘Listen to this, a comedian with shit stains on his pants. So, Eddie, what the fuck’s going on here?’
He walked around the other side of the mess and came back into view. He stopped when he saw the briefcase of money on the floor.
‘Jesus, you really don’t like banks, do you?’