Graveland: A Novel (21 page)

She gets off the phone and starts texting.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

Look at her, withholding already. Didn’t take long.

She sends a quick text to Max Daitch and another one to Val Brady. There’s not much she can do, stuck here for the next two hours. Val might as well get a jump on things. Maybe relay some details to her later.

Give and take.

She leans back, takes a deep breath. She glances over at the shoulder.

Then she turns to Frank.

So she can tell him to pull in and stop the car.

*   *   *

“
That’s
a relief.”

Craig Howley looks up from his laptop.

“What is?”

Jessica is standing in the middle of the room, hand on hip. She nods at the TV. “
That
is. They’ve caught those guys.”

From his position on the couch, Howley looks at the screen for a moment—a tenement building downtown somewhere, police cars, armed officers—and then he reads the crawl. “They haven’t exactly
caught
them, though, have they?” he says. “A siege? What I’d be asking is how they let that happen.” He turns back to his laptop. “I thought they had these things down to a fine art.”

On the screen of his laptop there’s a sequence of market data charts showing previous private equity IPO performance levels. He scrolls down through them, stopping occasionally to study this or that one more closely for a moment.

He’s looking for ammunition.

And the evidence here, as far as
he’s
concerned, is pretty encouraging. On an each-way bet it’s still a negative benefit outcome—because they either flatline or they tank. Which is just as well, because as Vaughan has so subtly illustrated with his “black file,” the idea of Oberon opening its books to public scrutiny is a non-runner anyway.

Howley closes the laptop and looks back at the TV screen.

There is a panel discussion going on, and it’s getting quite animated. “Look, it’s
very
clear,” someone is saying, “check it yourself, it’s Title Eighteen of the United States Code, section thirty-one oh nine…”

“What are they talking about?” Howley says.

Jessica turns around. She’s still standing there in the middle of the room with her hand on her hip. She does that sometimes. It’s her slightly haughty, noncommittal way of watching TV—watching, but ready to drop it and walk away at a moment’s notice. “Oh, they’re discussing the, what did you call it, the
fine art
of how to execute a search warrant.”

“Arrest or search?”

“Search. That’s what they said. Why?”

“Because they’re different. With a search you’re obliged to … knock and announce, I think they call it.”

“How do
you
know that?”

“The curse of a photographic memory. I read it somewhere. Who can say?”

“Well, one of these guys is arguing exactly that, he’s saying they followed procedure, and the other one is saying they’d have been within their rights to just barge in there unannounced.”

“Uh-uh.” Howley shakes his head. “Though it’s a pity they didn’t. Because look.” The street scene from earlier is on again. “The city doesn’t need this.”

Jessica turns back and looks at it.

“No, it certainly does
not
.” She shakes her head as well. “With the benefit coming up? Please.” She clicks her tongue. “They’d better resolve this fast, that’s all I can say.”

The benefit is a Kurtzmann Foundation fund-raiser, a gala event Jessica has been working on for months.

She turns around again. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready, darling? The Lowensteins will be here in an hour.”

He nods,
yes
,
yes
.

When she leaves the room he opens the laptop again. His statement for tomorrow is still a little rough around the edges, but he’ll keep chipping away at it. There are certain subtle points he needs to make, ideas he needs to implant. A lot of people will be paying attention.

Though
on
that, something occurs to him.

He glances up at the TV again.

If this siege thing has any legs at all, it’ll swamp the next couple of news cycles, at least, and there’s one person he knows who’ll be happy about that.

James Vaughan.

People know the Oberon name, the brand, but very few people have actually heard of Vaughan himself, and that’s how he’d like to keep it. Howley can well imagine how much Vaughan is dreading the public nature of this handover tomorrow—especially if it’s going to be presented in the context of his ailing health.

So any distraction will be welcome.

And this one certainly seems to be shaping up nicely.

Vaughan won’t be at the press conference himself, but he’ll be referenced endlessly, and his office will be inundated with media requests.

Howley closes the laptop again and puts it down beside him on the couch. He looks around for the remote but can’t find it.

He gets up and stands there, Jessica-style, staring at the screen.

This is crazy stuff.

But however it pans out over the next six, twelve, even twenty-four hours, he’s pretty sure that with words like “explosives” and “evacuation” now creeping into the narrative, Vaughan won’t have a whole lot to worry about in the morning.

*   *   *

When he looks up, and around, and sees that they’re at 110th Street already, Central Park just over to the right, Frank realizes, remembers, that he hasn’t been into the city for months, three or four at least. But gliding down Fifth now, he feels nauseous, dizzy, as though he’s being delivered to his own execution.

Ellen Dorsey is driving.

He turns to his left and looks at her. She’s staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, arms rigid.

Tense, silent.

The last two hours have been like this, neither of them wanting to speak—he, for obvious reasons, and she … well, who knows? Maybe she’s embarrassed. Maybe she’s out of her depth. Maybe she’s calculating how much money she can make out of this.

He doesn’t know.

He’s glad she’s driving his car, though.

Because
he
couldn’t.

He stares out the window now, the cross streets clocking down like a ticking bomb … Fifty-seventh, Forty-second, Thirty-fourth, Twenty-third.

She takes a left at Fourteenth and gets onto the FDR Drive.

The Lower East Side is a part of town that somehow seems abstract to Frank, as they approach it—doesn’t seem like a Lizzie sort of place at all. What comes to mind, if he does think about it, is the Tenement Museum … immigrant families, old photographs, vintage storefronts, fire escapes, raggedy kids playing around a water hydrant, that street panorama from
Godfather II
. He knows these are stereotypes, but it’s not as if he ever had occasion to come down here, when he was working in the city.

Which was midtown. Mostly.

Uptown, a bit.

Mostly where he lived was Brooklyn, and that, he thinks
,
definitely
is
a Lizzie sort of place, the house they had in Carroll Gardens, for instance … up the stoop, in the door, take the stairs two at a time and over to the right … her
room
 …

So vivid.

What he hopes here, for this, the ideal outcome, is that he arrives on Orchard Street just as they’re parading the three of them out of the building, perp-walking them out the door, the two brothers first, whatever they look like—he doesn’t know,
or
care—and then the girl. He’s standing there, he looks up
and it isn’t her
 …

It’s someone else, someone taller, skinnier, darker, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t Lizzie, and this is all a mistake, a misunderstanding.

Wires got crossed.

Ellen Dorsey here got her facts wrong.

Slumped in the car seat now, staring down, he replays this scene multiple times in his head.

“Are you ready, Frank?”

“What?”

He looks up, and around. They’re on Grand Street.

“We’re just coming to Orchard now,” she says.

Before he has properly refocused, they’re turning right and facing north again. He was certainly right about the fire escapes. And up ahead, two blocks, he sees it—the crowds, the police barriers, the blue lights rotating. He can’t see beyond that. Because this is just the periphery.

“
There’s
a space,” he says, pointing. “We’re not going to get much closer than this. We can walk.”

Ellen Dorsey nods and pulls in.

Quickly, they get out of the car and start moving.

Frank’s heart is pounding. Earlier he was concerned about media intrusion, journalists, photographers. He was also concerned for a while about seeing Deb. But now he feels he’ll be able to bypass all of that. Because the only thing he’s concerned about right now is Lizzie, and the idea that she’s somewhere in the middle of this circus.

They come to Delancey, and it starts there, on the far side—the barriers, the onlookers, the cops, the outside broadcast units, the camera operators, the booms, the cables and tripods and mikes, the reporters.

Frank turns to his left. Ellen Dorsey has her phone out.

“Wait,” she says to him. She then obviously sees the panic in his eyes and takes him by the arm. “Just wait a second, I’m going to call someone, okay?”

He waits, standing there, staring ahead.

“Val? Ellen. We’re here. Anyone there you can talk to?”

The next ten or fifteen minutes float by in a headachy haze, as they are met by men in dark suits and uniforms. They are then guided forward—cameras clicking and whirring behind them—through the barriers and on to a second set of barriers just before the next intersection. At one point it takes Frank a few seconds to realize that he is standing beside Deb. She looks just as shell-shocked as he feels, and it takes them another few seconds to acknowledge each other, to react, to embrace.

Interviews follow—interrogations, really—with representatives from different law enforcement agencies. These take place in the back of a large van, or maybe it’s a trailer, Frank isn’t sure of anything that’s happening. He answers whatever he’s asked, but doesn’t feel that any of the questions make sense. He asks several questions of his own—though they’re all the same question, really—but no one will give him a straight answer.

More time passes.

Then Frank finds himself back outside, standing next to Deb again, looking from behind a barrier at a long, deserted section of the street—no people, no cars, not even parked ones. It stretches all the way to a corresponding barrier just beyond Stanton Street. And there appears to be another one beyond that again, on East Houston.

What worries Frank is that no one here seems to know what’s going on, or is even prepared to say what they
think
is going on.

He looks around.

Almost without him noticing it, night has fallen. It’s dark now, city dark, an orange wash from the streetlights suffusing everything. There is an eerie silence, too, with a muffled backdrop of normal sounds—distant traffic, distant sirens.

Then something occurs to him. Where’s Ellen Dorsey? He hasn’t seen her for a while and doesn’t see her anywhere now.

He looks at Deb. They don’t know what to say to each other. But they’re here, and they’re together, and they’re waiting.

It’s not just them, though.

Everyone is waiting.

*   *   *

Lizzie is drowsy. She’s been drifting in and out of sleep for some time now, in and out of actual dreams, too … little narrative passages that for all their weirdness and anxiety-laden expansiveness have been a welcome respite from—she opens her eyes—from
this
, the silent, musty, horrible, box-like,
coffin
-like little apartment they are trapped inside of.

She is sitting on the floor in the kitchen, leaning back against the wall, under the window, in the tiny space between the table and the cupboards, and she’s been here … since this started.

Forever, it feels like.

Though still, it must be what, nearly five hours already?

What time is it?

She doesn’t have a watch, and her cell phone is out in the other room.

There’s no clock in here.

What gets her is the silence, the virtual silence anyway. She can hear traffic, and the occasional siren, but she can’t hear any of the regular building sounds, no flushing toilets, no muffled voices, or creaking floorboards from upstairs.

But she knows why. It’s because they’ve evacuated the building, isn’t it? Probably the whole street, and the buildings behind as well.

It was that one word Alex used,
explosives
. Otherwise, she’s sure they would have stormed in by now, with tear gas or stun grenades or whatever the hell it is they use in these situations.

But the thing is, Lizzie doesn’t know if Alex and Julian actually have any explosives. Alex grabbed that backpack from the table pretty fast. Was it just to get his gun? Or was there something else in it? Does Julian have anything stashed in his bedroom?

Lizzie didn’t make a decision to stay in the kitchen like this, on the floor—not consciously, anyway. It just came about. For the initial twenty minutes, or half an hour, she stood a couple of inches inside the kitchen door and didn’t move a muscle, barely even took a breath. Neither did Alex or Julian; they just stood where they were, frozen, waiting for something to happen, for someone to make a move.

Then the phone rang, the landline.

Julian and Alex flinched. Alex gestured for Lizzie to
move,
to get back, as though the phone itself were about to explode.

Lizzie did move back, into the position she’s in now.

She sat there, trembling, and listened, as first Julian, and then Alex, tried their hand at … negotiation? Is that what it was? She couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but she heard enough to know that either they didn’t know what they were doing or they didn’t care.

A few more quick phone calls followed, and then … nothing at all. Obviously some sort of a waiting game. For her part, Lizzie waited where she was, thinking Alex might come in and tell her something, try to comfort her—she wanted him to, and was prepared to wait for
him
—but it’s as if she wasn’t even there.