Graveland: A Novel (13 page)

Sometimes he wonders how he ever managed to sit at a drawing board at Belmont, McCann and
work,
how he ever used modeling software, read contracts and building codes, how he ever steered a whole project through from initial concept to launch.

It’s only been a couple of hours since he left, but now he’s even beginning to wonder how he held down his job at the mall for so long.

How he spoke to people, interacted.

He reaches for the remote, hesitates, doesn’t touch it. He considers standing up.

Or maybe stretching out on the couch.

There’s really no move he can make here that’s going to be the right one, is there? This is paralysis of the will, good and proper.

He stares at the blank TV screen.

The thing is, without the job at the Paloma outlet, there’s no reason for him to
be
in this apartment, let alone in West Mahopac.

There’s no money for it now, either.

So what’s he going to do?

He’s already cut his expenses to the bone. The move from working as an architect in the city to selling electronics out here in the boonies was about as much of a downsize as he could have ever envisaged being necessary. He did the math and made all the adjustments. The one thing he didn’t factor in, he supposes now, was a sort of fatal, infantile compulsion on his part to eventually whine about it.

Deb would have factored that in.

Deb.

Deb-or-ah.

But then …

He stands up. Where’s his phone? He gets it from the kitchen table and checks for messages.

Nothing.

He scrolls for Deb and hits
CALL
. It’s been a while since he’s done this.

It rings. She’ll be at work. Plenty of that for lawyers.

“What is it, Frank?”

Her tone.
Christ
.

“Have you heard from Lizzie?”

Stony silence for a second, then a panicky “Why?”

“
Have
you?”

“No. Yes. Over the weekend. Saturday, I think.
Why?
”

He sighs. “Nothing, it’s just that I’ve left a couple of messages for her and she hasn’t gotten back to me.”

“Jesus, Frank, is that all? She’s got a life, she’s busy. She’s a
student
.”

“Yeah.” He stares out the window, at the car dealership across the street. “I know.”

Then, in one of those classic Deb changes of pace—he can picture it, the lip bite, the head shake—she says, “Frank, honey, are you alright?”

Honey?

There’s no question of his coming clean here, about the job, not
now
—she’d link the fact that he’s vulnerable with this sudden concern for Lizzie, and make a big deal out of it.

“I’m fine.”

And that’s it. Nowhere left for either of them to go.

Didn’t take very long, did it?

Afterward, he remains in the same position, looking down, the phone in his hand.

He’ll call Lizzie again, leave one more message.

He glances up.

And after that?

*   *   *

When they’ve all left, Craig Howley goes back to his office, sits at his desk, and gazes out the window.

There are a lot of things that he’s not.

He’s not a sentimentalist, he’s not a hedonist, he’s not a
fool
. But for a few moments now he thinks he can allow himself to feel just a little giddy. It’s quite a sensation …

And he wants to mark it.

When he walked past Angela’s desk on his way in here, he had an impulse to ruffle her hair, or to … to …

See?

He’s no good at this.

He hasn’t told Jessica yet. Should he call her now, or wait until later?

Chairman and CEO of the Oberon Capital Group.

Damn,
that sounds good.

Ideas are already fighting for airtime in his head. There’s so much to do, so much restructuring and reorganizing that Oberon could benefit from.

He swivels in his chair.

And that’ll be the first hurdle, now that he thinks about it. He’s been the chief operating officer of the company for a year now, and in recent months something more than that, but the truth is there’s still a lot about the place he doesn’t know, information he’s not privy to. And the reason for this is quite simple. The company, in a hundred different ways, is the very embodiment of its founder—a fact that, in turn, might help explain the culture of secrecy around here … the general reluctance ever to do interviews, for example, or to attend conferences, or to nurture any kind of a profile outside of financial and Washington circles. If a corporation is indeed a person, then no one can seriously doubt that the Oberon Capital Group
is
James Vaughan.

But all of that’s going to have to change.

The old man may have spent decades preserving his anonymity, but Howley will have no problem going on Bloomberg or Fox and talking the company up, talking the industry up—because that’s what it needs right now, people like him to go out and tell it like it is.

He smiles, briefly amused by his own enthusiasm.

It’s true, though. Private equity has an image problem—the predatory thing, the bonuses, a couple of lavish and regrettably high-profile birthday parties held in the last year or two—but Howley doesn’t see why that trend can’t be reversed.

He swivels around to his desk, reaches for a pen and a legal pad, and starts writing.

Notes, headings, bullet points.

Not exactly a to-do list, not exactly a mission statement either—something in between maybe.

At the very least, he wants to have his thoughts clear for when he next speaks to Vaughan.

He wants to hit the ground running.

After a few minutes, he checks the time. He and Jessica have a dinner later on with some friends. He’ll tell her then, when he can see her reaction. It won’t be a real surprise—she’s been predicting this, or a version of it, for months—but she will be pleased.

When Howley looks up again, having jotted down another half page of notes, he is surprised to see that Jacqueline Prescott is outside his office. She’s standing at Angela’s desk. The two women talk for a bit. Then Jacqueline passes something—it looks like a file folder of some kind—to Angela.

Vaughan’s office is on the other side of the fifty-seventh floor, and it’s a fairly rare occurrence to see his PA over here. Despite her years, Jacqueline is still the old man’s Praetorian Guard, his firewall—everything that’s directed to him, or that comes from him, must go through her first.

So what’s
this
? Those notes Vaughan mentioned?

Howley studies Jacqueline for a moment, fully aware that out of the corner of her eye she’s probably observing him, too. Quite the piece of work, she’s soon gliding off down the hallway, that finishing school deportment of hers, after nearly fifty years, still operating at full tilt.

Howley then makes a show of going back to his own notes. But he doesn’t have long to wait. Angela comes in almost immediately, holding the file folder in her hand.

“Mr. Howley,” she says, arriving at his desk and holding the folder out to him, “Ms. Prescott has asked me to give you this.”

“Thank you, Angela.”

He takes the folder and places it on his desk without looking at it. He’s aware—from her expression, from her body language, even from a slight residue of tension in the air arising from Jacqueline Prescott’s visit—that Angela knows something is afoot and wants to be briefed on it.

But he’s afraid she’s going to have to wait.

He freezes her out with a thin smile, and when he’s alone again he looks down at the folder, closely studying its blank and slightly faded cream-colored cover. This, if Howley is not mistaken, is one of James Vaughan’s legendary “black files.”

So called.

Vaughan is no slouch in the technology department, but when it comes to data storage—or the storage, at any rate, of
certain
data—he appears to have a preference for the non-digital, the legacy, which is to say, hard copies only, and kept in folders like this one.

For as long as anyone can remember—and generally that’s nowhere near as long as Vaughan himself can remember—these cream-colored folders have been a feature of life here at Oberon HQ. The old man often has one under his arm, he consults them at meetings, and there are always two or three on his desk.

Howley can’t be sure until he looks, of course, but he’s guessing that the folder he has in his hands right now contains some pretty interesting material. At the same time, it seems amazing to him that the old man would even let something like this out of his sight. Because for anyone wishing to arrive at a full understanding of the Oberon Capital Group, access to the contents of these files would surely have to be considered essential, the final piece of any puzzle.

Howley takes the folder in his hands and flicks through it. It’s only about fifty or sixty pages. Some contain graphics, others just solid blocks of text.

So what’s going on here? Is this some kind of a coded vote of confidence?

Howley has no other choice but to see it that way.

He smiles to himself and opens the folder at the first page.

*   *   *

It’s after seven when Ellen sits at the bar in Flannery’s on Amsterdam and orders an eight-ounce cheeseburger with smoked bacon, a Caesar salad, and a pint of Leffe.

A sip or two into the pint and someone appears at her side.

“Hey, Ellie, what’s up?”

“Charlie!”

Ellen comes to Flannery’s quite a bit and has gotten to know a few of the regulars. Charlie here is a retired … something, she’s never quite been able to establish what. But
he
knows what
she
does, and he enjoys analyzing the stories of the day with her. Ellen enjoys this, too, because Charlie’s taste in news, not unlike her own, runs to the conspiratorial, and it’s a useful exercise every now and again to have to pull stuff back from the edge of crazy.

Not that
he’s
crazy, but he’s freer in what he can say than she is. His newsroom is the barstool, and standards there tend to be a lot less stringent. Tonight, though, she’s surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that all Charlie wants to talk about is the Connie Carillo trial. For obvious reasons, she has missed the coverage today and isn’t up to speed on developments. He gives her a quick rundown (more stuff about the lobby, how it’s lit, traffic, etc.), which he then follows up with a pretty incisive analysis of the subtle effects Joey Gifford’s newfound celebrity seems to be having on both the content
and
the delivery of his ongoing testimony.

Interesting as Ellen finds this—and as she demolishes her eight-ounce cheeseburger—she does try to steer the conversation around to the shooting at the Rygate today. But to no avail. Charlie is dismissive of the whole affair, seeming to imply that it’s all somehow way too obvious and predictable. Ellen would like to tease this out but knows she’s not going to get the chance. In any case, they’re soon joined by a few other people, and the conversation opens up and at the same time, inevitably, dissipates.

Two pints and a shot of Jameson’s later, Ellen finds herself heading out to smoke a joint with Charlie and a guy from the kitchen called Nestor. There’s an alley two doors down from the bar, and that’s where they go. Nestor is probably twenty-two or twenty-three, a physics major apparently, and in his tight little cook’s shirt and check pants—at least as far as Ellen is concerned—distractingly ripped.

As they pass the joint around, the conversation flits from one thing to another—the kitchen politics at Flannery’s, the right ingredients for a Reuben sandwich, what the fuck a “babyccino” is, and the routine abuse these days of the word “quantum.” When they come out of the alleyway to head back to Flannery’s, Amsterdam Avenue has notched things up a couple of gears, in terms of sound levels, color display, pixilation, and Ellen herself now feels—the word bounces back into her head, on a curve, from earlier—
ripped
.

Distractedly ripped.

In the bar again, she starts into a pretty intense conversation with a friend of Charlie’s about the bizarre rules governing Super PACs, but from where she’s sitting the TV set at the end of the bar is in her direct line of vision, and she can’t take her eyes off it.

They’re showing the MSNBC clip from before, and it strikes her now that it’s actually little more than a blur. You can see there’s some kind of a tussle going on, just about. Then there’s one clear shot of Scott Lebrecht looking dazed, another of the doorman being helped back onto his feet, and a very shaky few seconds of someone running out into the traffic on Broadway.

But we see this hooded figure from behind.

And that’s it.

She visualizes her own clip and it seems—from memory, through the prism of being stoned—to be so much more substantial, riper, brimming with texture and detail. From that moment on she can’t get it out of her head. She needs to see it again, as soon as possible, and on a proper-sized screen. Within ten minutes, therefore, she has extricated herself from Flannery’s and is floating up Amsterdam Avenue toward Ninety-third Street.

At Ninety-first something occurs to her and she takes out her phone. She’s assuming Val Brady is on the story, so she calls him up.

“Ellen? What’s happening?”

Dispensing with any niceties, she gets straight into it. What’s he hearing? Basically. Is there much reliable CCTV footage? Do they have any kind of a fix on the perps yet? What are his sources in the NYPD saying? Are arrests imminent?

Val Brady laughs, at her refined social skills presumably. Then he sighs. “I wish I had something for you, Ellen, but the well is dry. As a fucking bone.” There are voices in the background. He’s in a bar, or a busy newsroom, she can’t tell which. “The thing is,” he goes on, “from what I’m hearing in the department? They’ve got nothing. And not publicly yet, but they’ve even stopped talking about it in terms of a regular terrorist threat. They’re thinking more Beltway sniper now, with some kind of a twist to it, political maybe or … who knows. It’s all just guesswork. The eyewitness accounts they have so far are pretty confused, and they’re not holding out much hope either for the surveillance material they’ve managed to gather.”