One Fifth Avenue (20 page)

At seven o’clock, Mark and Grace came to Mindy’s apartment for a pre-meeting. “The bottom line is, they’re going to pay cash,” Mindy said.

“They’re financially sound. They’re worth about forty million dollars . . .”

“And they’re how old?” Grace asked.

“Young. Early thirties.”

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“I always hoped Julia Roberts would buy the apartment. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have Julia Roberts here?”

“Even Julia Roberts probably doesn’t have twenty million dollars cash to buy an apartment,” Mark said.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“Actresses are not good tenants,” Mindy said. “Look at Schiffer Diamond. She left her apartment empty for years. It caused a huge mouse problem. No,” she went on, shaking her head. “We need a nice, stable couple who will live in the building for twenty years. We don’t want any more actors or socialites or someone who will attract attention. It was bad enough when Mrs. Houghton died. The last thing we need are paparazzi camped outside the building.”

The Rices arrived at seven-thirty. Mindy brought them into the living room, where Mark and Grace were sitting stiffly on the couch. Mindy had brought out two wooden chairs and motioned for the Rices to sit.

Paul was more attractive than Mindy had imagined he’d be. He was sexy, with the kind of dark curly hair that reminded Mindy of a young Cat Stevens. Mindy distributed small bottles of water and perched between Mark and Grace. “Shall we begin?” she said formally.

Annalisa took Paul’s hand. She and Paul had made several visits to the apartment with the real estate agent, Brenda Lish, and Paul was as enamored of the apartment as she was. Their future lay in the hands of these three odd people staring at them with blank, slightly hostile faces, but Annalisa was not afraid. She’d survived rigorous job interviews, had appeared in debates on TV, and had even met the president.

“What’s your typical day like?” Mindy asked.

Annalisa glanced at Paul and smiled. “Paul gets up early and goes to work. We’re trying to start a family. So I’m hoping to be busy with a baby soon.”

“What if the baby cries all night?” Grace asked. She was childless herself, and while she adored children, the reality of them made her nervous.

“I hope he—or she—won’t,” Annalisa said, trying to make a joke. “But we’d have a nanny. And a baby nurse at first.”

“There’s certainly enough room in that apartment for a baby nurse,”

Grace said, nodding agreeably.

“Yes,” Annalisa said. “And Paul needs his sleep as well.”

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“What do you do in the evenings?” Mindy said.

“We’re very quiet. Paul gets home at about nine, and we either go out to dinner or we eat something at home and go to bed. Paul has to be up at six in the morning.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?” Mark asked.

“No,” Paul said. He was about to say “We don’t like a lot of people,”

but Annalisa squeezed his hand. “We don’t do a lot of socializing. Except on the weekends. Sometimes we go away.”

“One has to get out of the city,” Mark agreed.

“Do you have any hobbies we should know about?” Grace asked. “Play any musical instruments? You should know that there’s a rule in the building—no playing of musical instruments after eleven P.M.”

Annalisa smiled. “That rule must be left over from the jazz era. And One Fifth was built a little before that fun was over—Was it in 1927? The architect was . . .” She paused as if thinking, although she knew the answer by rote. “Harvey Wiley Corbett,” she continued. “His firm also designed much of Rockefeller Center. He was considered a visionary, although his plans for elevated sidewalks in midtown didn’t work out.”

“I’m impressed,” Grace said. “I thought I was the only one who knew the building’s history.”

“Paul and I love this building,” Annalisa said. “We want to do everything we can to maintain the historical integrity of the apartment.”

“Well,” Mindy said, looking from Grace to Mark, “I think we’re all in agreement.” Mark and Grace nodded. Mindy stood up and held out her hand. “Welcome to One Fifth,” she said.

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“That was easy. It was so easy, wasn’t it?” Annalisa said to Paul in the Town Car, riding back to the hotel.

“How could they reject us?” Paul said. “Did you see them? They’re freaks.”

“They seemed perfectly nice to me.”

“What about that Mindy Gooch?” Paul asked. “She’s one of those bitter career women.”

“How do you know?”

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“I see them all the time. In my office.”

Annalisa laughed. “There aren’t any women in your office. There are hardly any women in your industry.”

“There are,” Paul said. “And they’re all like Mindy Gooch. Dried-up husks who spend their whole lives trying to be like men. And not succeed-ing,” he added.

“Don’t be so hard on people, Paul. And what difference does it make?

We’ll probably never see her.”

Back at the hotel, Annalisa sat on the bed, reading through the bylaws of the building, which Mindy had put together into a neat, printed pamphlet for new occupants. “Listen to this,” Annalisa said as Paul brushed and flossed his teeth. “We have a storage room in the basement.

And there’s parking. In the Mews.”

“Really?” Paul said, removing his clothes.

“Maybe not,” Annalisa said, reading on. “It’s a lottery. Every year, they pick one name out of a hat. And that person gets a parking spot for a year.”

“We’ll have to get one,” Paul said.

“We don’t have a car,” Annalisa said.

“We’ll get one. With a driver.”

Annalisa put the pamphlet aside and playfully wrapped her legs around his waist. “Isn’t it exciting?” she said. “We’re starting a new life.”

Knowing she wanted to have sex, Paul kissed her briefly, then moved down to her vagina. Their lovemaking was slightly clinical and always consisted of the same routine. Several minutes of cunnilingus, during which Annalisa climaxed, followed by about three minutes of intercourse. Then Paul would arch his back and come. She would hold him, stroking his back. After another minute, he would roll off her, go to the bathroom, put on his boxer shorts, and get into bed. It wasn’t exactly exciting, but it was satisfying as far as orgasms went. This evening, however, Paul was distracted and lost his hard-on.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, raising herself up on her elbow.

“Nothing,” he said, pulling on his shorts. He began pacing the room.

“Do you want me to give you a blow job?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Just thinking about the apartment,” he said.

“Me, too.”

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“And that parking spot. Why does it have to be a lottery? And why do you only get it for a year?”

“I don’t know. Those are the rules, I guess.”

“We have the biggest apartment in the building. And we pay the most maintenance. We should get precedence,” he said.

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Three weeks later, when Annalisa and Paul Rice had closed on the apartment, Mrs. Houghton’s lawyer called Billy Litchfield and asked to see him in his office.

Mrs. Houghton might have chosen an attorney from an old New York family to manage her legal affairs, but instead had retained Johnnie Toochin, a tall, pugnacious fellow who had grown up in the Bronx. Louise had “discovered” Johnnie at a dinner party where he was holding court as the city’s brightest up-and-coming young lawyer in a case of the city ver-sus the government over school funding. Johnnie had won, and his future was doubly assured when Mrs. Houghton hired him on retainer. “There are as many criminals in the ‘establishment’ as there are in the ghettos,”

Mrs. Houghton was fond of saying. “Never forget that it’s easy for a man to hide his bad intentions beneath good clothes.”

Happily for Mrs. Houghton, Johnnie Toochin had never been well dressed, but after exposure to money and superior company, he had definitely become establishment. His office was nearly a museum of modern furniture and art, containing two Eames chairs, a sharkskin coffee table, and on the walls, a Klee, a DeKooning, and a David Salle.

“We should see each other more often,” Johnnie said to Billy from behind a massive desk. “Not like this, though. The way we used to at parties.

My wife keeps telling me we ought to go out more. But somehow there’s no time. You’re still out and about, though.”

“Not as much as I used to be,” Billy said, quietly resenting the conversation. It was the same conversation he seemed to have often now, every time he ran into someone he hadn’t seen in ages and likely wouldn’t in the future.

“Ah, we’re all getting old,” Johnnie said. “I’ll be sixty this year.”

“Best not to talk about it,” Billy said.

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“You still live in the same place?” Johnnie asked.

“Lower Fifth,” Billy said, wishing Johnnie would get on with whatever it was that had caused him to call this meeting.

Johnnie nodded. “You lived close to Mrs. Houghton. Well, she adored you, you know. She left you something.” He stood up. “She insisted I give it to you in person. Hence the visit to my office.”

“It’s no trouble,” Billy said pleasantly. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Well,” Johnnie said. He stuck his head out the door and called to his assistant. “Could you get the box Mrs. Houghton left for Billy Litchfield?”

He turned back to Billy. “I’m afraid it’s not much. Considering all the money she had.”

Best not to talk about that, either, Billy thought. It wasn’t polite. “I wasn’t expecting anything from her,” he said firmly. “Her friendship was enough.”

The assistant came in carrying a crude wooden box that Billy recognized immediately. The piece had sat incongruously among priceless bibelots on the top of Mrs. Houghton’s bureau. “Is it worth anything, do you think?”

Johnnie asked.

“No,” Billy said. “It’s a sentimental piece. She kept her old costume jewelry in it.”

“Perhaps the jewelry’s worth something.”

“I doubt it,” Billy said. “Besides, I wouldn’t sell it.”

He took the box and left, balancing it carefully on his knees in the taxi going home. Louise Houghton had always been proud of the fact that she came from nothing. “Dirt-poor farmers we were in Oklahoma,”

she said. The box had been a gift from her first beau, who had made it for her back in school. Louise had taken the box with her when she’d left at seventeen, carting it all the way to China, where she worked as a missionary for three years. She had come to New York in 1928, looking for money to support the cause, and had met her first husband, Richard Stuyvesant, whom she had married, much to the consternation of his family and New York society. “They considered me a little farm girl who didn’t know my place,” she’d tell Billy on the long afternoons they used to spend together. “And they were right. I didn’t know my place. As long as one refuses to know one’s place, there’s no telling what one can do in the world.”

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Back in his apartment, Billy set the box down on his coffee table.

He opened the lid and extracted a long string of plastic pearls. Even as a penniless young girl, Louise had had style, sewing her own clothes from scraps of material and adorning herself with glass beads, cheap metals, and feathers. She was one of those rare women who could take the tackiest item and, by wearing it with confidence, make it look expensive. Of course, after she took New York by storm, she didn’t need to wear costume jewelry and acquired a legendary collection of jewelry that she kept in a safe in her apartment. But she never forgot her roots, and the box of costume jewelry was always on display. On afternoons when they sat in her bedroom, where Louise felt it was safe to gossip, she and Billy would sometimes engage in a silly game of dress-up, decorating themselves in various pieces of costume jewelry and pretending they were other people. Now Billy stood up, and staring into the mirror over the mantelpiece, he wrapped the pearls around his neck and made a face. “No, no,” Louise would have said, laughing.

“You look like that awful Flossie Davis. Pearls aren’t for you, darling.

How about a feather?”

Billy went back to the couch and began carefully laying out each piece on the coffee table. Some of the pieces were ninety years old and falling apart; Billy decided he would wrap each piece in tissue paper and bubble wrap to keep them from suffering further injury. Then he picked up the box, meaning to put it on his own bureau, where it would be the last thing he saw before he went to sleep and the first thing he saw in the morning; in that way, he might keep Louise and her memory close to him. As he lifted the box, the top slammed shut on his finger. Billy opened the lid and glanced inside. He had never examined the box empty, and now he saw a small latch tucked into the back. No wonder Louise had always kept the box, he thought. She would have found it romantic—a box with a hidden compartment. It would have been a magical piece for a bright fourteen-year-old girl who had only fairy tales to nourish her dreams.

It was a small, simple latch made of bronze, a tongue held in place by a tiny knob. Billy unhooked the latch and, using a nail file for leverage, lifted out the wooden shelf. There was indeed something in the hidden compartment, something wrapped in a soft, gray pouch fastened with a 140

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black cord. Billy warned himself not to get too excited: Knowing Louise, it was probably a rabbit’s foot.

He untied the cord and peeked inside.

What he saw made him immediately want to tie the cord again and pretend he’d never seen it. But a perverse curiosity prevailed, and slowly, he inched off the pouch. There was old gold, rough-cut emeralds and rubies, and in the center, an enormous crudely faceted diamond. The piece was as big as his hand. Billy began to shake with excitement, to which was quickly added fear and confusion. He picked up the piece and carried it over to the window, where he could examine it more closely in the light. But he was quite sure of what he held in his hand. It was the Cross of Bloody Mary.