Frank Bishop, by contrast…
Who’d ever heard of him before last Friday?
No one.
This is an ordinary guy who’s suddenly living the unimaginable nightmare of having his personal life-family tragedy, professional failures, character flaws, the lot-projected onto the Jumbotron screen of public consciousness.
From total anonymity to full-spectrum media blitz in a matter of hours.
There’s no comparison.
She looks into her glass.
Not that it’s a competition or anything.
Later, walking back to her apartment along Amsterdam Avenue toward Ninety-third Street, Ellen wonders how Frank is doing. He still has a story to tell, that’s for sure-a unique perspective, at the very least, and to put it at its most neutral, on a significant public event.
She’s not going to call him, though.
She should.
If she was doing her job right.
But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she doesn’t know what that is anymore.
For most of Monday morning Craig Howley avoids going anywhere near Vaughan’s office. He knows that it has already been vacated, divested of all traces, etc., and that he’s free to rearrange the furniture in any way he sees fit, but still, there’s something very final, very Rubicon-esque, about this, about stepping over the threshold.
It isn’t so much like taking over the Oval Office after a previous incumbent’s four- or even eight-year term-a better analogy, Howley thinks, would be how L. Patrick Gray must have felt in 1972 taking over as director of the FBI following J. Edgar Hoover’s nearly four decades in the job. Howley doesn’t know if Gray occupied the same physical space as Hoover, if he took over his actual office, but man, he must have been feeling the pressure.
Howley himself is certainly feeling it.
At least when a four- or eight-year term is up, it’s up.
At least Hoover was dead.
In any case, Howley chairs the usual 8:00 A.M. meeting of senior investment directors in the conference room. He then spends an hour or so floating around the hallways, popping into other people’s offices and engaging in a form of banter that ends up being slightly awkward and forced. He also stands around reception for a while making calls and sending texts.
Displacement activity.
At around midday, just before he’s due to go for lunch with Paul Blanford, the CEO of Eiben-Chemcorp, Howley makes his way over to what has traditionally been thought of as Vaughan’s personal corner of the fifty-seventh floor. He couldn’t count the number of times in the last year that he has sat outside this office, waiting for the nod from Jacqueline Prescott. But now, suddenly, here’s Angela, already in place at her new desk. He has a few words with her before making his way into the main office.
He stands inside the door and closes it behind him. The layout and design of this huge space are pretty much old school, lots of mahogany paneling and red leather furniture; carpeting; blinds; a big, solid desk; anonymous artworks. Vaughan had the conference room renovated six months ago, but hadn’t gotten around to doing his own office yet, even though he’d apparently been talking about it for some time.
Howley will do it now, though-gut the place and start from scratch.
He has a few ideas.
Brushed steel and travertine, custom fabrics and smoked glass. A couple of really big fishtanks, a walk-in humidor, a bocce court. Indulgent, yes, to a certain degree. He figures he’s earned it, though. This may well be the last office he ever occupies, so he’s determined to put his personal stamp on it.
But the truth is that there’s a lot more to be rearranged around here than the furniture. It’s something that has become plain to him over the last few days.
What it is, essentially, is a matter of survival.
He walks across the room to the big desk and sits behind it. He looks out on all that James Vaughan-up until last week sometime-surveyed. He thinks of the decisions that have been made from behind this desk, the deals struck, the strategies devised, the vast web of Oberon-related business that has been conducted. Howley has even been involved in some of it himself-over the last year, obviously, but also before that, from the other side of the fence. He and Vaughan were instrumental in setting up a supply chain out of Afghanistan of the precious metal thanaxite, an essential manufacturing component used in advanced robotics. More specifically, it was needed for a program called the BellumBot-an autonomous battlefield management system-that was in development at Paloma Electronics.
All of which is perfectly fine, but if Howley is really to succeed here on his own terms, he’s going to have to be more assertive, more proactive.
He swivels from side to side in the chair.
He’s going to have to do something about James Vaughan.
Because despite all of Vaughan’s good wishes and declarations of support, and despite his various health problems, as long as the man has a breath left in his body he will continue to run things-at some level, consciously, unconsciously, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
He was at it the other day, making that call just before the press conference, blowing hot and cold, actually trying to undermine-or so it seemed-the whole event. And it was the same up in his apartment that time, the way Howley was ushered into the fucking kitchen and then more or less dismissed after twenty minutes.
Mind games.
The ultimate example of which, of course, is this business with the “black file.” Howley has wondered on more than one occasion recently if Vaughan wasn’t in the grip of some form of creeping dementia, but not after that.
It was too calculated, and controlling.
However, there was one thing about the other day that puzzled Howley and that he thought about a lot over the weekend. He even discussed it with Jessica.
The boys at Eiben?
This new medication Vaughan is on?
It was the second time the old man had mentioned it, and it seemed to be something he was genuinely excited about. It also seemed to be something that was outside his normal arena of calculation and control-this despite the glaring fact that Eiben-Chemcorp was actually one of the companies listed in the file.
It was almost as if mentioning this new medication he was on had been a slip of the tongue, and therefore, in Howley’s view of things, a demonstration of weakness. Possible demonstration, at any rate. It was certainly worth looking into, certainly worth rearranging his first official lunch for.
As he’s leaving the office to meet Paul Blanford at the Four Seasons, Angela tells Howley that a producer from Bloomberg has called to schedule a meeting for tomorrow morning. Howley is pleased about this. Putting down his marker as Oberon’s new leader in a TV interview-something Vaughan would never have done-seems to him the right way to go about things.
He sets a time for the meeting with Angela. Then, just as he’s turning to go, he asks her to draw up a list of interior designers who specialize in executive office suites.
It’s not the dingy rooms, or the long soulless dingy corridors, or the oppressive rattling dingy elevator cars, Frank doesn’t mind those, but he wishes he’d picked a different hotel, in a different neighborhood. The Bromley-midtown, near Seventh Avenue-is rube central, the obvious place you’d pick on the map if you were heading to that New York City for the first time and had tickets to see a show.
But he’s not going to change hotels now. It’d be too much hassle. Not that it actually would be any hassle. All he’s got by way of stuff is the few things he accumulated this morning on a quick trip to the nearest Duane Reade.