The boy didn’t answer, but kept rotating the plate on its metal post.
Nimec wondered if the steady rat-a-tat of the speed bag had drowned out his voice, called out at a louder volume.
Chris was oblivious. Or seemed to be. Ignoring Nimec, he gave the weight another turn, climbed onto the bench, and then stretched out on his back, sliding under its rack to grip the barbell resting across its uprights.
“Hey, Chris, get away from there!”
Nimec had shouted at him this time, starting toward the bench, no longer contemplating what would happen if a single plate clunked down on the kid’s big toe. He’d been pressing two hundred pounds with that bar — about double Chris’s weight — and didn’t want to imagine the consequences of it somehow falling on his chest.
Behind him, Megan had cut short her exercise and turned to see what was going on. Standing near the bag, she watched Chris sit up, slowly toss his legs over the side of the bench, and hop off onto the floor, as if only then having become aware of Nimec.
“Chris, did you hear me?” Nimec stood crossly in front of him. “You know the rules.”
And he did. In fact, Nimec thought, he’d always shown impressive maturity in the gym after being cautioned about its do’s and don’ts, staying away from its equipment when unsupervised, earning a fair amount of latitude while hanging around to observe Nimec’s workouts. This wasn’t in the least bit like him.
Nimec stood waiting for an answer, instead got a blank stare and silent shrug.
He looked at Chris with equal parts anger and confusion, not knowing what to make of his unresponsiveness. And the kid’s wooden attitude wasn’t exclusively reserved for him. He’d gone from fawning over Meg to acting as if she wasn’t there.
“Okay if I go downstairs?” Chris asked. His tone flat, not a jot of defiance or stubbornness in it.
“I think you’d better,” Nimec said.
Chris went past him to the elevator, touched his index finger to the biometric access control pad beside its door, and entered like a sleepwalker.
Nimec stood alongside Megan as the car descended, tugged confoundedly at his chin.
“You have any idea what that was about?” he asked.
Megan groped for something to say that would offer a bona fide insight.
“None, Daddy-O,” she replied, giving up. “But you might want to consider changing the code on that lock till after the kid is past puberty.”
“Throne’s all yours, Collins,” Jeffreys said, and rose from his stool to make room for his young reliever.
It was nine-twenty-five according to Jeffreys’s wristwatch, which he set against the official clock in the big room upstairs at least once a week just to stay on the ball. The hour between nine and ten was when things were slowest in the building. The first wave of traders was over, these men being mostly relics around his own age who were programmed to show up early, looking for some other graybeards to bargain with in person, or maybe check their office answering machines, devices they still saw as being the latest in high-tech gadgets. The second wave wouldn’t start till eleven, eleven-thirty, when the younger dealers came in from their home offices after they got through doing whatever it was they did to earn money over the Internet.
A quiet time, Jeffreys thought, and a good one for him to stretch his legs for a few minutes, pick up a coffee at the corner doughnut stand, argue some Middle Eastern politics with Musaf the vender, and have a smoke out on the sidewalk. You couldn’t do that last thing anywhere else nowadays, not without getting slapped with a fine, or even risking arrest and a thirty-day jail term. Made you feel like some punk kid sneaking out of the house to toke up on happy weed, thank you Mr. Mayor, and hope your high-toned friends fancied the expensive cigars they smoked out there in those private golf clubs in Aruba, Acapulco, Hawaii, or whatever other hideaways you’d zip ’em off to on your private jet every single weekend. Ran this town like a Puritan, his personal life like an Arab sheik. According to the newspapers, his Eminence even had “sin rooms” for his guests to slink into at some of the parties he’d thrown in his Park Avenue townhouse before taking office.
Jeffreys stepped down from the guard platform, mentally praising himself for having voted for the other clown in the last election.
“Anything you want me to bring back?” he asked the relief man.
“Yeah,” Collins said. “Halle Berry.”
“Cream cheese or butter?”
“Butter.” Collins grinned. “That much woman, you better ask for lots extra on the side.”
“If I can get her for under a buck, she’s yours.”
Jeffreys hitched up his trousers by the belt, slipped on his jacket, and patted it down for his cigarettes. Much as he hated to admit it, he did feel a little conscience-stricken about smoking, not because the current boss of City Hall had done everything under the sun, moon, and stars to make him feel that way, but because his wife had asked him to quit the habit as a kind of New Year’s resolution. He’d tried sticking to it for Rosie’s sake, and done an okay job this past month or so. Might even have succeeded better if it wasn’t for the heavy-duty stuff on his mind, having to be a tattler for that investigator from Belgium… which reminded him of something.
“There ought to be somebody name’a Katari showin’ up any minute,” he said, pointing to the note he’d jotted in the margins of the guest book. “African guy from Israel, can’t speak English.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ask,” Jeffreys said. “He gets here, you need to page Avram Hoffman in the main room and show him along.”
Nodding, Collins took his place on the stool behind the guard podium.
A moment later Jeffreys turned and left the building.
Avram was back in the main hall, his morning worship concluded, the prayer shawl and phylacteries returned to their pouch in the cloakroom. Activity seemed to be picking up at the tables, though hardly by leaps and bounds.
Avram glanced at the row of wall clocks over the glass booth near the passage from which he’d emerged. They displayed the time in each of the world’s major trading centers, and served as reminders to check his cell phone, which he’d turned off before entering the chapel forty-five minutes earlier. There was a voice message from Katari, a courtesy call in jumbled English and Hebrew to say he was en route from his hotel on Madison Avenue. E-mail messages from business contacts in Antwerp, Tokyo, and Mumbai. Also a couple of missed calls in the past ten minutes, their numbers blocked to his caller ID display. Avram had a hunch about their source, and delayed checking the e-mail to wait for his unknown caller to try him again.
He heard the cell phone ring within minutes and thumbed the TALK button.
“Yes?”
“Good of you to answer.”
Avram recognized Lathrop’s voice in an instant.
“I was at morning services,” he said. “You understand.”
“Sure. A pause to cleanse your soul.”
“Improve it,” Avram said. “There are rabbis, Talmudic sages, who give the opinion that man is superior to the angels. In the sense that God made them as perfect as they can be, wholly spiritual beings, while we who possess dual spiritual and material natures have the ability to transcend what we are. To refine ourselves.”
“Gems in the rough.”
“Something like that, right.” Avram shrugged. “I’m always searching for betterment on all fronts.”
“Then you’ll be happy to take a look at the best.”
Avram’s pulse quickened.
“What have you got for me?”
“I said take a look.”