Graveland: A Novel
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Authors: Alan Glynn
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For E, R & C
CONTENTS
ONE
In early 2001, having saddled the pharmaceutical giant with huge debt and cut its workforce by a third, Vaughan’s Oberon Capital Group sold Eiben-Chemcorp for a profit of $457 million. It appears, however, that Oberon did this in the full knowledge that an R&D scandal involving leaked samples of a trial “smart drug” was brewing at Eiben. What is more—and is perhaps more shocking—they then shorted the buyer’s stock in order to make a double killing on the transaction.
—
House of Vaughan
(p. 23)
1
J
EFF
G
ALE LEAVES HIS BUILDING AT 8:15
A.M.
It’s a Saturday morning, and Seventy-fourth Street is quiet. A taxi glides by. Across the street an old lady stands with her poodle waiting for it to take a dump.
The sun is shining, but it’s still a little chilly.
Jeff Gale limbers up. He puts in his earbuds, taps on his iPod, and takes off for Central Park, which is three blocks away. As usual, by the time he gets to Madison Avenue he has pretty much clicked into gear, running in sync with the music and staying ahead of his anxieties, none of which will make it with him as far as Fifth, let alone the entrance to the park at Seventy-second Street.
He’ll gather them up again on his way back.
One by one.
This renovation kick Felicia’s on, for instance. How unnecessary it is, and how he’s had to pass his resentment off as indifference. Simply because he hasn’t got the time or the energy to deal with it.
Or
her
.
Which is nothing, of course, in comparison with the next anxiety—being at the helm of Northwood Leffingwell. What a bizarre, unending fever dream
that’s
turned out to be, his shift from the number two position at the New York Fed not exactly proving to be the best-timed career move in Wall Street history.
What with all this supposedly long-overdue reform looming.
De-reg, re-reg.
It’s a joke.
But as for the
next
anxiety, don’t even go there.
He swallows.
The girls, what else? Is he spoiling them, screwing up their chances of having a normal childhood? Is
Felicia
? Will the girls ever have the motivation to accomplish anything in their lives, given that they’re incredibly, obscenely wealthy? They’re not out of place at Brearley, that goes without saying, but they are a bit (a lot) when they visit North Carolina, where Jeff’s originally from, and where they must seem pretty exotic to their subprime cousins.
Mean little Manhattan rich girl bitches.
It’s with the angled lens of Fifth Avenue widening just ahead of him that Jeff remembers he didn’t take his pill before coming out. It’s still sitting on the shelf of the medicine cabinet in his bathroom.
Damn
.
Felicia distracted him with a catalog of marble samples for the vestibule.
Verde guatemala or nero marquina.
But what’s he supposed to do now?
The music alone’s not going to cut it. This weird, minimalist European jazz a guy at the office turned him on to isn’t working at all this morning. Without the medication, it’s just too much, too jangly, too grating.
Crossing Fifth, he tugs at his earbuds, pulls them out.
Without the medication, in fact, running itself is too much. He only
does
it to get out of the house. That’s because work, as excuses go, tends not to fly this early on a Saturday morning, not in normal circumstances anyway, whereas a run in the park does.
Plus, he has a gym at home that he never uses, so this is actually good for him. He just doesn’t enjoy it. That’s why before leaving the house he usually takes an anti-anxiety pill, which he then washes down with a counterintuitive triple espresso.
His secret formula.
Other guys he knows in their forties
love
running, and tennis, and lifting weights.
Jeff would prefer to be working.
Jeff would always prefer to be working.
But on he trots—two blocks south, then into the park, and around to the left—lumbered now with all of this unfiltered crap in his head.
As he passes the playground—which is already pretty busy, despite the hour—he imagines having Elena and Jordan at his heels, imagines them still being small enough to head in there for a quick turn on the climbing pyramid or the swings.
Ellie and Jojo.
His precious girls.
When did they get to be so big?
At a steady pace, he makes his way along East Drive, down through the Dene. Other runners flit past. Sunlight flickers through the trees to his right and reflects against high apartment-building windows to his left.
Verde guatemala or nero marquina.
It’s insane.
There’s also been talk of gold fittings for the main bathroom. She’s going to
ruin
the place. Make it look like the Donald Trump–inspired fuckpad of some low-rent Saudi sheik. Which he can’t allow. If only on the grounds of taste. Though actually, in these days of the deferred stock option, the twelve million dollars Felicia has penciled in for the job may well end up being needed elsewhere.
The cash bonus no longer a given.
Heading sharply downhill now, he builds a little momentum.
New structures.
For a new paradigm.
At which point he glances up and sees them. Two runners, twenty yards away and closing in.
In front of him, though.
Directly in his path
.
Jeff’s not an expert or anything, but he knows there’s an etiquette here, something about—what is it?—following the counterclockwise flow of …
“Hey,”
he says, almost before he thinks it, New York indignant.
But nothing.
No reaction.
He glances around, not all the way … enough, however, to realize that they’re down in a little hollow here—granite apartment buildings high to his left, okay, but
very
high, and not much now to his right either, just a steep clay mound leading up to some patchy dry grass.
The two runners are very close. He swerves to avoid them. They swerve, too.
And meet him head-on.
“HEY.”
The collision, the distribution of force, is uneven—
they’re
prepared, Jeff isn’t. He falls and hits the path, sideways, hurting his arm. He immediately swings around and looks up, trying to focus, somehow imagining that what he’ll be seeing is faces.
Recognizable, explicable.
But all he sees instead—barely recognizable, and far, far from explicable—is an extended arm, a gloved hand, and the gray barrel of a gun.
* * *
The delivery arrives. It comes in two pallets, fifty cartons to a pallet, two units to a carton. That’s two hundred new LudeX consoles, three-quarters of which are on pre-order, meaning they’ll have fifty units on display.
Fifty
.
These will sell out within minutes, literally, which in turn means the rest of the day is going to be a living nightmare—apologizing, explaining, the two things you’re never supposed to do. But whoever said
that
clearly never worked in retail, because it’ll be “I’m sorry, we’re sold out,” followed by “We only got fifty units in,”
all
fucking day.
Frank Bishop signs for the delivery and starts hauling the cartons from the receiving area into the already overloaded stockroom. As the manager, he gets to do this—come into work early on a Saturday, before eight, and strain his back in such a way that he’ll be in pain for the rest of his shift, and probably for a lot longer than that. The two young salesguys will be in at nine, but that’s too late, the stuff has to be ready to go when the doors open—and since he was recently instructed to cut twenty hours a week from payroll there’s no one else here to do it.
It’s his responsibility.
In the loosest possible sense of the word, of course.
Because Frank Bishop knows what responsibility means, he’s had plenty of it in his day, and doing
this
job? Getting LudeX consoles onto the shelves of a PalEx store in a suburban mall in upstate New York in time for a 9
A.M.
onslaught by an army of pimply geeks? That barely qualifies.
But Frank is happy to have the job. There’s no question about that. At forty-eight, and in the current climate, he could just as easily have landed on the scrap heap. There are days when this certainly feels like the scrap heap, but most of the time he just gets on with it.
He has bills to pay.
It’s as simple as that, his life reduced to a monthly sequence of electronic bank transfers.
College fees, allowances, rent, utilities, car, food.
Fuck.
Close his eyes for a second and Frank can be right back before any of this got started, twenty-five, thirty years ago—a different world, and one in which this degree of a financial straitjacket was something he only ever associated with his parents, with that whole generation.
It wasn’t going to happen to him, though. Not a chance.
But then who paid for him to go to college? Exactly. And arrogant little prick that he was, he took every bit of it for granted, never once imagining, for example, that his old man might have had other things he could be doing besides working his ass off holding down two jobs he more or less hated.
One of which, ironically, was not unlike this one.
Frank exhales loudly, no one around to hear him, and reaches down for another carton.
He carries it into the stockroom and adds it to the pile by the main door.
Back then, as well, it was all about possibilities opening up—relationships, career moves, the
world
. Now it’s the opposite, possibilities are closing down all around him. The world? Forget about it. Career moves? He’s lucky to
have
this job, and there aren’t any others out there waiting for him. As for relationships, well … unless it’s paid for or virtual, that ship’s
sailed
.
Frank exhales again, even louder this time.
Is there anything less attractive than self-pity?
Not really, but at least he knows how to bitch-slap it back into place whenever it gets out of hand. Because the truth is he doesn’t really feel sorry for himself at all. He has two kids that he adores, and even though they’re both off at college now, he is completely and utterly defined by them. The world of twenty-five years ago, for all its breathless sense of expectation, of the open road ahead, didn’t have
them
in it. This one does, and that’s all that matters. This one, for all its oppressive sense of disappointment, of the economic jackboot in the face, is infinitely superior.
When he has carried in the last carton, Frank rips one open. This will be his first look at the new, long-awaited LudeX upgrade.
Like he gives a crap.
He takes a unit box out and turns it over. The sight of the Paloma Electronics logo, the powder blue stripe, sets off a tiny ripple of anxiety in his brain.