Brightness Falls (23 page)

WE ARE UNABLE TO PROCESS YOUR TRANSACTION AT THIS TIME.

"Bullshit," he said aloud. Nothing wrong with his account, should be two grand in there easy. He pressed the balance inquiry button, hearing the shuffling of feet and impatient moans from the back of the line, feeling the eyes drilling into his back. Whenever this had happened before, he had usually been prepared for possible failure, but now he was certain that some kind of mistake had been made and it wasn't his fault, goddamnit, and he wasn't some ghetto nigger who kept a negative balance, though the numbers on the machine said he was considerably overdrawn. If this had been his bank he would have stomped inside and demanded justice. He tried one more time to make a withdrawal while attempting to block out the sounds of pissed-off white people, finally ripping his card from the machine and storming out to the anonymity of the crowded sidewalk.

By the time he showed up in Russell's office a few hours later, Washington had converted his compounded humiliation into amusing anecdotes. He told Russell how he'd wandered off to the men's room as the check was arriving and hung out for a while, leaving a notoriously cheap Dutch publisher to pick up the tab, and then evinced surprise and indignation when he finally returned to find the check paid. And his morning's attack of flatulence—whoa, what a hoot, a deliberate
épate-ment
of the bourgeoisie. After a few minutes he realized, to his amazement, that he felt marginally better.

If anyone asked, he could truthfully say Russell was his man—one of his best friends—but he'd sooner jump out the window than appear too vulnerable in front of him. He believed Russell counted on him to stay cool and keep up appearances. He was not particularly conscious of dissimulation; it was ingrained for him to be one way with Russell and another way with Harold and somebody completely different in black company. Even if Washington had wanted to confide, Russell would not have really grasped the racial element, the way in which for him it was always like being the only woman in the room when a Tampax commercial came on TV. When he fucked up, somehow he always felt the scarlet N light up across his chest. Russell was completely out to lunch on the Racial
Thang.
Sometimes he forgot Washington was black, and other times he thought it was just swell even though it didn't really make any difference—all of that was solved by the civil rights movement, bro', and we intelligent, educated, right-thinking white folks are just tickled to death to have black pals. Yeah, slap me five on that one! Occasionally, Russell figured he got a few extra style points for hanging out with the blood. But Crash was all right, not like the white people who
tried
so fucking hard—who just casually happened to say, "You know, I actually really like the new Michael Jackson album," and, "I see Jessie Jackson made an interesting speech in Chicago the other day." Oh, yeah? Well, gosh, thank you, white guy. And I just love old Jackson Browne.

Just now Russell appeared to be far away; he wore a troubled expression which was, to Washington's suspicious eye, freighted with guilt. "I'm fine," he insisted lamely when asked.

"Problems at home?" Washington had never believed in the perfection of the Calloway union, if only because everyone else did. And he didn't believe monogamy was a viable condition.

In response Russell shook his head pensively. "Did you know that rich bitch Casey Reynes is pregnant?" he said, out of nowhere.

"Jesus, no."

"Now Corrine's all eager to spawn."

"I hope that baby's white."

"What? Wait a minute ..." Russell examined his friend's face closely. "You didn't. No
way."

"Okay, have it your way, I didn't ..."

"I don't believe you," Russell said, clearly hoping to be convinced. "Casey Reynes? Her majesty, Queen of Wilmington, Southampton, Park Avenue and Belgravia? You fucked her?"

"A gentleman doesn't discuss these things."

"You're not a gentleman."

"Okay, I fucked her."

"When?"

"I don't have the dates handy."

"You dog," Russell said happily.

"Speaking of fucking, what do you think about Jeff's new story?"

"What new story?"

"New issue of
Granta,"
he said casually. Washington liked to deliver the news personally, and he could see that this was a scoop, Russell's expression modulating from blank to black. Even if Jeff's story had been harmless it would have hurt Russell to learn of its existence from someone else.

"About a glamorous, happening young New York couple. Not a bad story, a little racier than his early stuff. I was going to ask you if it's part of the novel, but I guess..."He left Russell to complete the thought, knowing he was too proud or angry to ask for his copy and suddenly feeling he'd been semicruel in mentioning it. But he'd been curious; the story was clearly based on Russell and Corrine. Washington stood up. "Maybe you got time to sit around and shoot the shit, but I got work to do." Sotto voce he added: "That fine new assistant of yours, you don't mind if I ask her out for a friendly drink, do you?"

The protesters were gone by the time Washington left for the day, the mangy bastards. Trying to jam up his action. But here he was, striding into a crisp evening, inhaling the smell of thawing concrete, party spoor and female hormones in the air, having dodged the bullet for yet another day. He had been meaning to get busy on the Fanon book, but even inside his hermetically sealed office he could feel the wild call of the spring night. He could hear the scratching at his heart's door of a dog that needed to be walked.

16

At six-fifteen on a May morning crisp as fresh currency, a gray stretch limousine rolled up to the curb in front of a limestone Beaux-Arts mansion in the East Seventies, trailing—like an infant of its species—a gray town car in its wake. Four steroid abusers, armed and decorous in dark three-piece suits, debarked from this fleet, two of them to guard the sidewalk outside the door while the other two staked out positions on either end of the block.

At six-thirty the principal resident of the townhouse emerged at the top of the steps, towered over by another bodyguard. Verging on the plump, his pinkish head hatless and semihairless, his dapper figure snugly wrapped in a charcoal double-breasted suit too rakish in cut for a banker and not quite dramatic enough for a gangster, he stood five-foot-three in his shoeless state, five-six-and-a-half in his custom loafers with elevator instep. The men waited below, taut in their gabardine as their leader looked up and down the street, popped a finger in his mouth and held it up to the wind. "Like Bobby Dylan says, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Right?"

A cheerful chorus of assent rose from the troops.

"And you don't need a detective to know who blows who. Excuse me,
whom.
That's my free advice for today, boys. Now let's walk."

Every weekday morning Bernard Melman departed for work in this fashion. His house, built by an offspring of financial vampire Jay Gould, was one of the largest private residences in the city, and currently shared a block between Fifth and Madison with a men's club, a CIA safe house, several mansions subdivided into cooperative apartments, and the consulates of two troubled foreign powers.

If the weather was inclement, Melman might step into the waiting limo, where two of the men would join him while the others jumped into the idling sedan, and thus the caravan would proceed down Fifth Avenue. But today he set off on foot toward Madison, and the bodyguards rapidly deployed themselves around him in a flying wedge formation while the vehicles pulled off in the other direction and turned south on Fifth, as blaring taxis swerved into the middle lanes and barreled past, the lugubrious fleet driving at walking pace down the Avenue, parallel to the pedestrian group on Madison, connected by walkie-talkie. Until recently these cars had been black, but then someone wrote in a magazine that it looked like a funeral procession every morning and Melman had immediately traded in for the lighter-colored cars, commenting that it was not so much that he was superstitious, but he hated the idea people might think some anonymous corpse was paying the tab for cars that
he
owned.

Meanwhile, on Madison, early-morning joggers and dog-walkers yielded the sidewalk to this black gabardine juggernaut. Melman delighted in creating havoc among his troops, stopping abruptly or veering off on a whim, testing his men like a coach.

The pulling guard on the left side this May morning, entirely ignorant of his boss's interest in King Charles spaniels, was clipped when he failed to open ranks in order to allow Melman to admire a pair of them leading an elegantly thin blue-haired matron down the street.

"Give me some room here, boys." Bending over to pat the cowering brown-and-white spaniels, he practically barked himself. "Good little guys. We have five of them at home," he informed the owner.

"Don't you just adore them," she said nervously. "I don't know what I'd do without-Paolo and Reggie."

Whether this man was someone terribly important whom she should know or simply a mobster, which was her first guess, it seemed wise to humor him, and the fact of his five King Charleses certainly spoke in his favor, this being the dog owned by all the right sort of people—Pat Buckley and all that crowd. Among the young striving professional set it was currently the thing to own a sharpei or two—hairless, wrinkled Chinese grotesques that looked like pigs wrapped in blankets of half-dried pie dough, which in the opinion of this matron only those seriously tyrannized by fashion could covet. King Charleses, on the other hand, were cute and lap-sized, like most of the dogs favored by the mature, cultivated woman, and relatively quiet and low-strung compared with Yorkshire terriers or toy poodles; she couldn't help thinking there must be some good in a man who had five of them.

"You be good boys. And a good morning to you, madam," Melman said in parting, wincing a little as he straightened up—he suffered chronic lower back pain—and the defense closed around him again.

Melman's elaborate security system was, his detractors would say, unnecessary—serving essentially the same purpose as his Tintoretto or his wife's rubies. Not that there weren't some who would be happy to receive news of Bernard Melman's demise. In the course of a dozen corporate takeovers, four of them hostile, he had made enemies, though none of them was likely to gun him down on the street. And while his name and picture were frequently in the press, it was equally unlikely that he would be mobbed by adoring fans. His rivals ridiculed his entourage, as well as the regal scale on which he lived and consumed; periodically, certain voices in the press and the business community questioned his methods.

Not a man to beg for approval, Melman attributed the animosity he inspired in some quarters to jealousy, to anti-Semitism and to the fear and loathing of the clubby old-boys of corporate America. He was the dark outsider who'd barged in to ask for their daughters' fair hands, corporately speaking—with the understanding that if denied he would elope. He had started with a frumpy little furniture-manufacturing concern owned by an uncle of his first wife and used it as a vehicle to acquire other, larger companies. He was a guppy swallowing tuna; the big fish always laughed at him until the lights suddenly went out. Then they called him a shark. Usually he sold off parts of the new companies, keeping those with giant transferable tax losses or other useful assets and merging them with the rest of his empire. He saw value no one else saw—in food processing, toy and cement manufacturing, discount retail chains and auto parts. Again and again he outsmarted the stock analysts, not only in buying but in selling short at the brink.

Melman had withdrawn from college for a year after suffering a breakdown. He was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive, and his mood swings had been partially tamed by medication. His subsequent buying sprees were punctuated by periods of retrenchment which, as only his closest associates were aware, often coincided with his own periods of depression. On this rhythm he had acquired a fortune that would any day now exceed a billion dollars, and abruptly he had developed a historical sense. He began to read biographies of empire builders like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and of the mercantile masters of America's first gilded age, a century before, delightedly conscious of the fact that from that time to this, no private citizen anywhere had made nearly as much money as fast as Melman and a handful of the other men who lived within a five-block radius of his house. A few of the new plutocrats were based in Los Angeles or London, but the financial markets from which these new fortunes derived, insofar as they had a physical location, were based in New York, and all the new titans kept a residence somewhere within half a mile of Park Avenue and 72nd Street, decorated by the same two or three decorators.

Bernard Melman did not lack for friends and admirers. No reporter ever had trouble finding quotable testimony to his graciousness and generosity. His second wife, a stunning Amazonian blonde who had been the decorator's assistant when Melman had had one of his apartments redone five years before, was devoted to him. An orphan from an obscure Appalachian background, she was judged by many to be the most beautiful of the trophy wives of New York nouvelle society and was rumored to be entirely faithful to her husband.

Melman's bankers and lawyers loved him; the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum, in front of which institution he was currently dangling a donation of ten million dollars, were lavish in their praise. Many of the arbitrageurs who speculated on the movement of takeover stocks were profoundly grateful. And there were very few of the old Social Register Wasps and Our Crowd Jews who weren't delighted to attend his parties; what was left of old New York society was not nearly vital enough, after the democratizing blitzkrieg of the sixties, to resist the transfusion of this bright new money of the eighties. And why should it, some of its members suggested. If it had taken a generation for the Rockefellers to gain admittance to the parlors of the Astors, it took only a hundred million or so 1987 dollars for the current crop of financial wizards to purchase a guest list of sterling old names and high-voltage celebrities. Some Jewish members of the financial community harbored a seldom whispered fear that Melman and other financial buccaneers were giving them all a bad name. Melman's high profile was a little galling to the old crowd, whose families had lived demurely on Fifth Avenue for a century and founded the great Jewish investment-banking houses that Melman had circumvented in his impatient parvenu binge of acquisition, and who were proud to say they couldn't find Cleveland—Melman's birthplace—on a map. But most turned up at his dinners on time.