Graveland: A Novel (14 page)

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty weird, alright. And because this was the third hit, or attempted hit anyway, the story is just going to mushroom, you know. With everyone waiting to see what happens next. I’m telling you, watch what it does overnight.” He pauses. “The cops are going apeshit, as well. I mean, this is
really
bad for the city.”

Ellen can’t believe it. “They’ve got
nothing
?”

“That’s my understanding.” He pauses. “I spoke to one senior detective on the case earlier this evening, and it was incredible, I’d never seen anything like it, he was putting his hands together, looking up, and saying,
Just one lousy clue, Lord, that’s all I ask, just one lousy fucking clue
.”

Ellen is stunned, but before Val Brady has a chance to ask
her
any questions, she mumbles something and gets off the phone.

She makes it back to the apartment in about two minutes flat.

She goes straight to her desk, calls up the file, and sits watching it with her jacket still on.

Adrenaline has cut a swathe through her buzz from the joint, and the clip isn’t quite the lost Kubrick masterpiece it seemed like it might be back in Flannery’s, but it nonetheless gives a much clearer idea of what happened outside the Rygate than the MSNBC version—the one that’s been running for most of the day, and that the cops and the Feds are now presumably going through with a fine-tooth comb.

This
one shows faces.

It’s fleeting, but you can see them—two young guys, white, nondescript, sort of scruffy. They’re like members of some indie band you’ve never heard of.

But who
are
they?

She watches it again.

The first thing you see is Lebrecht emerging from the revolving doors and then the uniformed doorman suddenly lurching sideways. He collides with Gray Hoodie; they entangle and in turn collide with another man, who falls over them and rolls onto the sidewalk. In the background, there’s a melee as Woolly Hat struggles with a couple of suited limo drivers. There’s a lot of shouting, but no words can be made out, and then there’s a really loud bang, which everyone reacts to by pulling back—including Ellen, but only for a split second. In the confusion, Woolly Hat breaks free, Gray Hoodie struggles to his feet, and they both take off in different directions. Gray Hoodie heads straight out into the traffic. Someone then slides over the front of a car to follow him, but this person is immediately blocked by a bus. When the bus moves on, Gray Hoodie has disappeared. In the stunned aftermath, one of the limo drivers clutches his side, and another comes to his aid. The doorman pulls out his cell phone and barks into it as an ashen-faced Scott Lebrecht leans back against the wall, poking a finger—curiously—into his own chest.

Sirens are soon rising in the background, and as the first one closes in on the scene, Ellen withdraws.

The clip is jerky and blurry in parts, but enough of it is clear, in three- and four-second bursts, to make it feel like there’s something there, something in it to be
seen
.

If you look hard enough.

She takes off her jacket and sits at the desk, hunched forward, leaning in close to the screen.

And watches it again.

And again.

She pauses, fast-forwards, rewinds. Plays it with sound, plays it without.

Eventually—after maybe the ninth or tenth replay—she does spot something. It’s tiny, hardly a lead at all, and may well prove to be of no significance whatsoever, but at the same time it’s the kind of thing she could imagine Val Brady’s NYPD source zeroing in on.

She plays it over and over. Gray Hoodie is on the sidewalk, wrestling with the doorman, and at one point in the struggle—
for less than a second
—his zip-front jacket gets shoved up a bit, over his abdomen. Under the jacket he’s wearing a dark T-shirt, and on the T-shirt something is printed, some lettering, a word or words.

She freeze-frames it.

The only thing she can make out, the only thing that’s clearly visible, is a single letter, an uppercase
A
. It’s in some weird font. The succeeding couple of letters are a complete blur.

And that’s it.

She grabs the image, saves it, and prints off a copy.

She holds up the page to study it.

A.

Significance? There can’t possibly be any. It just
seems
like it might be significant because it’s the only concrete, extractable, quasi-evidentiary element from the whole clip. There’s no point at which the gun is visible, for instance. The two faces are visible, okay, but that’s of no use to Ellen. It’s not like she’s got any face-recognition software and a database she can run them through.

So … just a fragment of something printed on a T-shirt, then?

Yeah. She sighs, and places the sheet of paper next to the keyboard on her desk. She leans back in the chair.

Either she stops this right here, or she takes it forward in some way.

But how?

For a few minutes, in the still silence of the apartment, staring into space, she mulls it over.

A.

A.

A.

She glances at the sheet of paper again.

The font
is
weird. Half Gothic-y, half futuristic. What does she know about fonts? Not a lot.

She leans forward and reaches for the keyboard.

8

F
RANK OPENS HIS EYES.
It’s morning. He must have fallen asleep at some point, even though it felt like he was awake all night. He remembers lying there staring into the void, aware of each hour passing on the clock, his thoughts on a continuous loop but at the same time maddeningly, perpetually incomplete.

He tried to go over his finances, to calculate how long he might be able to string things out, but the figures kept dissolving and re-forming, refusing to compute into any comprehensible pattern.

He tries again now, sitting on the edge of the bed. Fully awake this time, he finds it just as hard, though for different reasons. He may have simplified everything—recalibrated his priorities, consolidated his accounts, cut down on his outgoings—but all of that was done in the context of paid employment. Now, with a negligible severance package and any prospects of new employment hopelessly compromised, the figures might compute, but not into any pattern he
wants
to comprehend.

He takes a shower and gets dressed.

His phone is on the kitchen table. He passes it on his way to the fridge.

OJ first.

But holding the fridge door open, about to reach in for the Tropicana carton, he hesitates. Then he turns quickly and picks the phone up from the table. Like an idiot, he’s been putting this off, as though the delay were some form of Zen discipline.

He turns the phone on and waits.

Keys in his PIN.

Waits.

Fridge door still open.

No messages, no voicemail.

Fuck
.

He goes back and rereads the various texts he has sent to Lizzie since Saturday. There are four of them, all short and to the point. Call me, basically. Plus, he’s left her about three voicemail messages.

Again,
call me
.

Now. Here’s a simple question. Is his daughter—as her mother seems to think—just a selfish, thoughtless little bitch … or is there something
wrong
?

He doesn’t know, but neither does Deb—which is surely the salient point here. Because okay, maybe Deb would be right to see a link between Frank’s current vulnerable state and his sudden concern for Lizzie … but if it turns out that something actually
is
wrong, how would that even matter?

In what universe?

He closes the fridge door.

Then he opens it again and takes out the OJ. He drinks directly from the carton, empties it, tosses it in the trash.

Coffee next.

This he drinks standing at the window, gazing out, distracted, but also thinking, making another calculation.

He could be up there in two hours.

What else has he got on today? He’s unemployed.

After he finishes the coffee and rinses the cup, he heads into the bedroom and gets a small carryall down from the top of the wardrobe. In reality, he could be up there in two hours, stay for another two, and be back in time for a late lunch.

But what if he needs to stay?

What if—

He packs the bag. A change of clothes. Some stuff from the bathroom.

You can’t argue with being prepared.

On his way down to the car, Frank is aware of a faint thrum of excitement running alongside the more regular and familiar rhythm of his anxiety.

He knows what it is.

He’s been stuck in a deadening routine here—in this apartment, in this town—for many months, and despite the distressing nature of the immediate circumstances, despite the fact that he may well be
back
here in a matter of hours, it feels like he’s escaping.

*   *   *

From the backseat of the car, cell phone in hand, Craig Howley gazes out at the Sixth Avenue traffic. After a good deal of hesitation, he calls Angela and tells her to cancel his appointments for the morning—two meetings, one at nine, the other at ten thirty, and a conference call at twelve. It’s probably because he doesn’t usually do this—has he ever?—that Angela asks him if he’s alright, but he reacts to her perfectly reasonable question by snapping. “I’m fine. Jesus. Just reschedule those, would you?”

Angela then reminds him, frostily, that he has a lunch appointment at one. It’s at Soleil on Madison Avenue, with Gary Wolinsky, and he can’t possibly skip it.

“Okay, okay.” He sighs loudly. “I’ll be there.”

When they’ve finished, he powers off his phone and slips it into his jacket pocket. As he does so, he looks down at the cream-colored folder on the seat next to him, the faded, almost grubby appearance of the cover contrasting sharply with the shiny red leather of the upholstery.

He still can’t believe what a high-risk strategy this seems to be on Vaughan’s part. On the one hand, yes, it’s a vote of confidence in Howley, but on the other … isn’t Vaughan very deliberately goading him? It’s like an act of loyalty and an act of betrayal.

Simultaneously.

The two things, inextricable, but mutually exclusive.

And Howley can’t even talk to him about it, because there’s nothing to say, nothing to negotiate. He just has to make a simple decision—whether or not he’s going to accept the job on these terms.

Howley looks up.

He certainly didn’t see this coming—though he can hardly claim he didn’t see the old man coming, can he? The old man’s been there all along.

The old man’s
always
been there.

Howley looks out the window. The traffic has been moving at a crawl up to this point, but suddenly there’s a break, and a spurt, and in no time they’re at the Fifty-seventh Street lights. Howley tells his driver not to turn here, as he normally would, but to go straight on. When the lights change they surge forward, and two blocks later they’re turning left onto Central Park South.

Howley then tells the driver to pull over, that he needs to get out of the car and walk around for a bit. The driver pulls over, but can’t stop for long, can’t park. He looks into his rearview mirror, awaiting instructions.

Howley grabs the folder, and a bottle of water from the bar, and as he’s reaching for the door he tells the driver to head on to the Oberon Building, that he’s fine, that when he’s ready he’ll … get a cab.

Or something.

Once out of the car, Howley takes off into the park at a brisk pace and makes his way over to the Mall. Near the end of this tree-lined thoroughfare he stops and picks out a bench on the east side that is dry and relatively clean. He sits down and glances around. He doesn’t know why, but he feels somewhat out of place here, in this little patch of virtual countryside. What is it? The smoothness of his silk suit? His pristine leather shoes? The scent of his cologne? Do any of these really sit well in the context, in this fresh, chilly environment he has so unexpectedly found himself in?

It’s also been a while since Howley was actually
in
Central Park, and he can’t believe how many people are out—strolling, jogging, walking dogs—and at nine fifteen on a weekday morning. Who are these people anyway, he thinks, and why aren’t they at work? His weekdays are spent in offices and conference rooms, in elevators and hallways, in traffic, with all of the people around him busy too, engaged in similar work-related activities.
These
people, on the other hand … what, are they retired, independently wealthy, on vacation?

He opens the bottle of water and takes a few gulps from it. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and throws the half-empty bottle into a trash can next to the bench.

He picks up the folder and flicks through it, recognizing certain pages—pages he has already read up to half a dozen times—and then he closes it again.

Holding the folder out in front of him, he stares at its cream-colored cover, still surprised that Vaughan has entrusted him with this, because … it’s just that the damn thing is so dangerous. It’s like a live grenade in his hands, and if he were so inclined he could fling it out there, and do some serious damage with it …

Reputations, careers,
lives
.

But—

Even by the way he’s holding it, the care, the hesitancy, it quickly becomes apparent to him that that’s not what he’s going to do.

Or anything like it.

Essentially, this is a cache of incriminating evidence—details, going back years, of Byzantine deals that could, at best, be described as unorthodox.

And at worst? Well, no point dwelling on it.

The takeaway message here is that the Oberon Capital Group is, and must remain, a private company. The disclosures that a public offering would entail, in relation to financial structuring, tax arrangements, salaries, options, profitability, and so on, are quite simply unthinkable.