“And the manuscript?”
“Of course the manuscript.”
“Why not just the book? You don’t really need the thief if your property is returned.”
“I like to look my enemies in the eye,” Evangeline uttered.
“I could turn her over to the police for the theft,” I said, thinking about her father’s enemies and the material of her desk and chair.
“No. I will pay you one hundred thousand dollars for the woman and the book.”
“That’s a hefty late fee.”
“I’m paying for your discretion, Mr. McGill.”
“Most people already know the general content of the nine books of the father of history,” I said, feeling the need to sound knowledgeable in that room of rarefied access and wealth.
“Do we have a deal?”
“One hundred thousand dollars, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds good. One hundred for me and also equal amounts for Hiram Stent’s and Hector Laritas’s families.”
“All right,” she said as if the amounts were nothing.
“What about Josh Farth?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“What if Mr. Farth resents my intrusion on his business?”
“Mr. Farth works for me,” she said. “He will do as I say.”
“Some of us down below the top floor don’t see the world the same way you do, Ms. Gray. And anyway, I might have a problem with Mr. Farth’s way of doing business.”
“If Josh is guilty of some felony having to do with my requests then he will find himself on his own,” she said, rapping her knuckles once and with finality on the tabletop of bone.
Henry Lawrence Richards, not of the Fantastic Four, was tasked by the woman on the top floor to give me a cash down payment of ten thousand dollars. He handed me a brown envelope with the money sealed inside, the two bodyguards flanking me.
I tore the envelope open and counted the cash, twice, because when I was a child my father taught me that you could never trust the rich.
34
I flew back to New York’s LaGuardia Airport and took a taxi, arriving at the Tesla Building at 3:56.
I was looking at my watch, just inside the big brass doors of that perfect Art Deco feat of architecture: a huge room replete with blue walls lined with brass plating; pink, black, and green tiled floors done in a curving abstract design, and a broad fresco of workers, naked women, and saints that had no pantheon, just the faith of their people. I liked the classical and yet revolutionary decor despite my dislike of my father and his beliefs. I think I might have smiled a moment before something hard pressed into the right side of my upper back. I looked up at the high reception desk and twisted my lips even before the man behind me spoke.
“Let’s take a walk, Mr. McGill,” an unfamiliar voice said.
I turned my head sixty degrees or so and saw the man I’d first beheld on Monday looking at Marella Herzog and ignoring me. The probable gun he held against my shoulder blade was hidden under the fabric of his dark yellow trench coat. This supposed weapon was held in his left hand, as I could see his right encased in a plaster cast, its swollen fingers poking through.
Beyond the paid stalker’s angry visage I could see that Warren Oh, the Jamaican black-and-Chinese senior guard for the Tesla, was talking on the phone.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Lett?” I asked pleasantly.
“We can go upstairs to your office and you can tell me where Marella Herzog is and how I can get to her.”
“You plan to shoot my receptionist, too?” I asked as if requesting extra butter on my vat of movie theater popcorn.
“Don’t fuck with me, brother,” Alexander Lett said. “I got a cushion on this piece. I’ll be a block away before they even know you’re dead.”
I was beginning to detect a pattern in my life. This model of behavior was a hybrid of capitalist necessity and proletarian existentialist angst; or, more accurately, modern-day potentates and their anger-driven gunsels.
“But surely no one has asked you to kill me, Mr. Lett,” I said. “I mean you didn’t even know me when you took on this job.”
“Move it, McGill.”
“I’d like to, Mr. Lett, but my assistant is a delicate thing and I’d feel terrible if I brought fear or worse into her life.”
“Have it your way.”
These last few words he might have meant for my epitaph. I didn’t think that this was the case but human nature is not always predictable. Lucky for me — prediction had no place in the equation of our interchange.
“Hold it right there,” a third, very authoritative voice demanded.
Alex and I both looked in the direction of the command. There we beheld four policemen; three in uniform and one plainclothes Captain Carson Kitteridge.
Once again I could feel the heartbeat of my wife calling me strong, realizing that strong could also be scared.
Alexander Lett’s olive profile was the epitome of desperation. I could see in that visage the questions that beset men when they’ve taken one step too many down a bad path. Why did I do it? How can I get out of it? These are the unanswerable and useless questions that go through our minds when someone shoves a gun in our side or calls for us to halt.
“Let me see your hands,” Kit said clearly.
The civilians crowding the foyer of the Tesla Building were now pressing toward the edges and exits.
“I got a gun in my left,” Alexander Lett admitted loudly.
The fleeing crowd became a bit more frantic.
To his credit Warren Oh stayed at his post.
“Bring it out holding it by the butt,” Kit said, and I wondered if I’d be shot.
There was a tense moment in which many thoughts and sensations transpired.
As the pressure of the muzzle eased from my side and Alexander Lett’s sour breath assailed me, I was thinking that the most important moments of my life had nothing to do with intelligence or insight. I was a brute among brutes and would die according to my nature and its affiliations. This thought comforted me; it allowed that Fate was my master and not free will.
It was then that I saw the long-barreled pistol emerge from under the yellow fabric. Alex held the butt with his forefinger and thumb. The three uniforms moved quickly then, grabbing the gun and throwing the already injured Lett to the hard, multicolored tile floor.
“Go easy on him, Kit,” I said loudly enough for the prisoner to hear. “Alex here an’ me is old friends. He was just jokin’.”
“With a loaded gun?” the captain asked.
“You know, man, you work with dynamite long enough and you start to forget how dangerous the shit is. Right, Alex?”
“Uh-huh,” the confused thug agreed.
“I’m still takin’ him down. If he doesn’t have a license he’s gonna do time. He might anyway. Reckless endangerment.”
After Lett was searched, chained, and trundled off in a police car, Warren Oh and I were informally deposed by a sergeant named Reese. After all that, Kit and I took the elevator upstairs to my office.
The door had been replaced and the wall inside rebuilt. My keys still worked and everything was right with the world.
“How’d you get here so quickly?” I asked Kit when we passed into the empty reception area.
“You know we always have a few men on the Tesla. That many tourists always attract your people.”
My people. Captain Carson Kitteridge would always see me as a criminal and my race as like-minded felons.
“But why were you here?”
“I came by to ask a question.”
“Serendipity then?” I said as I entered the key-code to the back offices.
“Why’d you give Warren the high sign if Lett was a friend of yours?” Kit asked when we were seated in my personal office.