He hung on the rail until he could see the outline of the pickup launch, then went quickly into the cabin and down the gangway to the lower deck, wanting to assure himself that the prisoner was ready to be brought ashore.
Chapter Ten
"Seriously, Jason, this ought to be called 'Cholesterol Corner' or 'Arterial Sclerosis Way' or something," Charles Kirby said, looking down at his Rudy Guiliani hero sandwich, which contained a precarious mountain of corned beef, pastrami, Muenster cheese, and Swiss cheese, with a dripping mantle of Russian dressing and coleslaw at its lofty summit. Altough he had been tempted by the Barbra Streisand, with its multiple strata of turkey and roast beef, he'd found himself incapable of reading its name off the menu, thinking it had a rather unmanly ring.
"Why's that?" Jason Weinstein said, and stretched his mouth to encompass a pastrami, corned beef, and liver-heaped Joe DiMaggio, which he'd chosen over a Tom Cruise only because he'd never been a big fan of the latter's movies.
Kirby pushed his chin at the window. "Well, with that Lindy's Famous cheesecake place on the corner, and the Famous Ray's pizza joint across the street, somebody could build a famously successful practice opening a walk-in cardiac center on the block, don't you think?"
Jason shrugged indifferently, bit into his food, and reached across the table to grab a half-sour dill off the pickle dish, visibly chagrined over its nearer proximity to Kirby. Why Jason hadn't simply asked him to pass the pickles across the table rather than opting for the boardinghouse reach, as his grandmother would have called it, was something that Kirby couldn't for the life of him understand. He was a Wall Street lawyer, for God's sake. Where the hell were his dining manners?
He reached for his knife and fork, cut a wedge off his sandwich, and ate it in silence, having decided that any attempt to raise it to his mouth would result in an unstoppable landslide of sliced meat and cheese — Jason's ability to perform that gravity-defying task notwithstanding.
Suppose you need to have grown up in Brooklyn, he thought.
Jason chewed and swallowed with unfettered relish. "Better than sex, isn't it?"
"Maybe not for me," Kirby said. "But pretty good, I admit."
Jason gave him a look that said there was no accounting for taste.
"Okay, talk. Why'd you spring for lunch?"
Kirby sat for a moment.
"You represent the Spartus consortium. Or at least your firm does," he said. "I want to know who's buying its stake in UpLink."
"Whom you happen to represent."
"There isn't any conflict of interest," Kirby said. "The sale's a matter of public record—"
"Or will be once the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed," Jason said. "To be accurate."
Kirby shrugged. "All I'm asking is that you save me some legwork."
Jason lowered his Joe DiMaggio to his plate and regarded it with a kind of lusting admiration.
"You suppose they cure the meat themselves?" he said.
"Come on, Jase," Kirby said.
Jason looked him. "Sure, why not, but you never got it from me," he said. "The high bidder's a firm in Michigan called Midwest Gelatin. I don't guess I need to tell you its specialty."
Kirby scowled. "Some local jelly producer has the capital to buy up thousands of shares of UpLink? You're shitting me."
"I speak the truth," Jason said. "And that was gelatin, not jelly. It's used in everything from home insulation to sneaker insoles to ballistic testing. There's also a pharmaceutical variation which goes into the headache pills you gulp by the bottle. For your information, Midwest happens to be the largest chemical manufacturer of its type in the country."
"It public or private?"
"Number one," Jason said. "It's a subsidiary of a canning company which is wholly owned by a public corporation that manufactures plexiglass sheeting. Or chinaware, I frankly forget which."
Kirby considered that while Jason dove into his sandwich.
"Are you aware if there's anyone, um, of note, in Midwest Gelatin's upper management? Or that of its parent companies?"
Jason was looking at him again.
"You want to follow the paper trail, find out who's behind the move on UpLink, I suggest you talk to Ed Burke when we get to the park," he said.
"Our Ed?" Kirby pointed to the front of his uniform shirt, on which the word STEALERS was printed in gold capital letters. "The first baseman?"
"The canner's one of his biggest clients," Jason said, nodding. "Just please promise that my name won't enter the conversation."
"Thought I already had."
Jason shook his head. "No, no, you didn't."
Kirby made the scout's honor sign with his index and middle fingers.
"Promise," he said.
Satisfied, Jason turned to watch a thin, elderly-looking waiter scoot past the table with a tall stack of dishes expertly balanced on his arm.
"He's been working here since I was a kid," he said. "Three decades hustling on his feet, can't imagine how he does it."
"Could be he loves it here as much as you do," Kirby said.
Jason's gaze continued following the waiter's energetic trajectory down the aisle.
"Bet that's it," he said very seriously, and took another huge bite of his improbable sandwich.
Reynold Armitage's twenty-two-room duplex was in a palacial landmark building with balustrades and cornices and an ornate iron-and-glass marquee shading its Fifth Avenue entry opposite Central Park. The trappings of status and wealth were as evident — some would say egregiously evident — within his apartment as they were without; passing through the front door, one entered a long, wainscoted reception hall leading into an octagonal salon and then a living room with a parquet floor, massive fireplace, and haughty oil portraits under a vaulted ceiling. Continental silver gleamed on antique tables, Venetian glass goblets and decanters winked diamond points of light from breakfront cabinets, and dynastic Chinese vases perched like fragile blooms atop finely wrought marble gueridons.
Marcus Caine found it all very impressive, though not nearly so much as the scrupulous attention Armitage had payed to concealing the matrix of integrated electronic systems designed to compensate for his physical disabilities — most of which relied upon Monolith's leading-edge voice-recognition technology.
Ordinary men fit their homes with handicap access ramps, priviliged ones with lifts and elevators, he'd once told Caine. I want you to give me something better than either.
Caine sat sipping his vermouth as the parlor doors opened seemingly of their own volition, and the master of the house made his entrance… the grandiosity of which was unaffected by his wheelchair-bound condition. In a certain way, rather, it lifted him from the merely pretentious and gave him an air of solitary dauntlessness. Don Quixote stalking windmills, Ahab versus the white whale, persistance against any odds. It was the warp and woof of highest drama.
"Close," Armitage said in a barely audible undertone, his power wheelchair carrying him forward with the faintest mechanical hum. Behind him the double doors swung quietly shut. "No interruptions, take messages."
He came up to his guest and halted the chair with a joystick on its left armrest. Once it had been on his right side, but over the past several years that hand had become too seriously atrophied to be of any use.
''Marcus," he said, raising his voice to a normal level. "Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was on a call. Fortunately you look quite settled. Absorbed in meditation, even."
''Admiration,'' Caine corrected. He indicated his surroundings with a slight flick of his hand. "This is a fascinating room."