Roberto said.
“He’s my mother’s dog,” Sam reminded him.
“She thinks that dog is a child,” Roberto said. “By the way, Mrs. Rice was looking for you. Something’s wrong with her computer.”
Annalisa Rice was on the phone when Sam knocked on her door. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she was saying. “But Paul wants to go away with these people ...” She motioned for Sam to come in.
Every time Sam stepped into the Rices’ apartment, he’d try to summon up a nonchalance at his surroundings, but he was always awed. The floor in the foyer was a sparkly white marble; the plaster walls were yellow cream and looked like frosting. The foyer was deliberately spare, though an astounding photograph hung on one walclass="underline" an image of a large dark hairy woman nursing an angelic blond baby boy. The woman’s expression was both maternal and challenging, as if she were daring the viewer to deny that this was her child. Sam was mesmerized by the woman’s enormous breasts, with areolas the size of tennis balls. Women were strange creatures, and out of respect for his mother and Annalisa, he pulled his eyes away. Beyond this foyer was another entry with a grand staircase, the likes of which one saw only in black-and-white movies. There were a few duplexes in the building, but they had narrow, sharply turning staircases, so anyone over the age of seventy-five always moved out. This staircase, Sam guessed, was at least six feet wide.
You could have an entire party on the staircase.
“Sam?” Annalisa asked. She had a sharp, intelligent face, like that of a fox, and she was a fox, too. When she’d first moved into the building, she’d worn jeans and T-shirts, like a regular person, but now she was always dressed. Today, she was wearing a white blouse and a gray pencil skirt and velvet kitten-heeled shoes and a soft, thick cashmere cardigan that Sam, from his experience with private-school girls, surmised cost thousands of dollars. Usually, when he came up to help her with the website, she spent time talking to him, telling him about when she was a lawyer and had advocated for runaway girls, who were usually running away from abuse, and how they often ended up in jail. She’d traveled to every state to help these girls, she’d said, and sometimes it made her question human nature. There were people out there who were capable of terrible things, of abandoning their children or beating them to death. To Sam, the people she talked about must have lived in a different era, but Annalisa said it was happening every minute — somewhere in America, a girl was abused every nineteen seconds. And then sometimes she’d tell the story of meeting the president. She’d met him twice — once when she was invited to a reception at the White House, and another time when she’d spoken before a Senate committee. It sounded much more interesting to Sam than Annalisa’s life now. Just last week, she told him, she’d gone to a lunch for a new handbag. She found the concept funny and said she was surprised the handbag hadn’t been given its own chair and a glass of champagne.
Annalisa always made jokes about it, but Sam suspected she wasn’t thrilled with this new life. “Oh, I am,” she said, when he asked her about it. “I’m happy to organize a luncheon to raise money to send computers to disadvantaged children in Africa. But all the women attend in their fur coats, and after the luncheon, they all leave in their chauffeured SUVs.”
“New York’s always been that way,” Sam volunteered helpfully.
“There’s no use fighting it. And there’s always some other lady who’d be happy to take your place.”
Today, however, Annalisa was in a rush. “Thank God you’re here, Sam,” she said, starting up the stairs. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. We’re leaving tonight,” she said over her shoulder.
“Where’re you going?” Sam asked politely.
“So many places it’s insane. London. China. Then Aspen. The Aspen part is supposed to be the vacation, I think. Paul has a lot of business in China, and the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas, obviously. We’ll be gone for three weeks.”
Annalisa led him down the hall to the cheerful little room, done up in light blues and greens, that she called her office. She flipped open the top of her computer. “I can’t get on the Internet,” she said. “I’m supposed to have some kind of advanced wireless system that allows you to go online anywhere in the world. But it’s not much use if I can’t even get online in my own apartment.”
Sam sat down in front of the computer. His hands flew over the keys.
“That’s funny,” he said. “The signal is scrambled.”
“What does that mean?”
“In layperson’s terms, it means there’s a giant computer, maybe even a satellite, that’s scrambling the signal. The question is, where is the satellite system coming from?”
“But aren’t there satellites everywhere?” Annalisa asked. “For GPS?
And those satellite images of people’s neighborhoods?”
“This one’s stronger,” Sam said, frowning.
“Could it be coming from upstairs? From my husband’s office?”
“Why would he have a satellite system?”
Annalisa shrugged. “You know how men are. For him, it’s another toy.”
“A satellite is not really a toy,” Sam said with adult authority. “Govern-ments have them.”
“In a large or small country?” Annalisa asked, attempting to make a joke.
“Is your husband home? We could ask him,” Sam said.
“He’s almost never home,” Annalisa said. “He’s at his office. He’s planning to go from his office to the airport.”
“I should be able to fix it without him,” Sam said. “I’ll change your settings and reboot, and you should be fine.”
“Thank God,” Annalisa said. She knew Paul would have been irritated if Sam had had to go into his office, but on the other hand, if he had, she simply wouldn’t have told Paul. Exactly what did he have in that office, anyway, besides his fish? What if something went wrong while they were away? They had enough trouble in the building as it was — the in-the-wall air-conditioning units hadn’t been approved, so Paul had had the French doors cut in half and air-conditioning units installed in the bottom portion, which was what he should have done in the first place —
but Mindy Gooch still refused to talk to her. When Annalisa approached her in the lobby, Mindy would say coldly, “Enjoying the apartment, I hope,” and walk away. Even the doormen, who had been friendly at first, had become somewhat aloof. Paul suspected the doormen didn’t deliver their packages on time, and although she said he was being paranoid, he wasn’t all wrong. There had been a contretemps over a beaded Chanel jacket worth thousands of dollars that the messenger service had sworn was delivered; it was finally discovered two days later, having been left in Schiffer Diamond’s apartment by mistake. True, the bag hadn’t been labeled properly, but even so, it did make Annalisa wonder if the other residents disliked them. Now she was worried about Paul’s computers.
What if something happened while they were halfway around the world in China?
“Sam?” she said. “Can I trust you? If I gave you my keys — to keep, just while we’re away, in case something happens — could you keep it a secret? Not tell your mother or anyone? Unless there was a real emergency.
My husband’s a little paranoid ...”
“I get it,” Sam said. “I’ll guard the keys with my life.”
And moments later, he was headed downstairs with the keys to the magnificent apartment hanging heavy in the pocket of his jeans.
Later, at the house in Windsor Pines, Beetelle sat at the vanity in her powder room and rubbed the last of the La Mer cream into her face.