Spygirl (21 page)

For regular subway riders in the morning, there is a certain steadfastness and comfort in being so familiar with your surroundings, particularly when they're as urine-stinking and oppressive as the New York City underground. In July, the summer draws every hidden stench out of winter's dormancy, and the subways become a repository for every punishing odor. It's
my
stinking subway car, they're
my
belligerent, schizophrenic winos with me every day. Time passes. Attachments develop. I see the same people daily, and I keep a running mental log of their evolution. I remember reading Harriet the Spy's impressions of the New York
City subway: “I don't think I'd like to live where any of these people live or do the things they do. I bet that little boy is sad and cries a lot. I bet that lady with the cross-eye looks in the mirror and feels just terrible.” Of course, I'm somewhat more evolved than Harriet was at nine years old. I noticed a sign one day in the stairway leading downstairs into Bergen Street, my stop on the F train. It read:

This is the kind of John Hughes story that I dreamed up on mornings when I got enough sleep to be cognizant. Eyeing cute boys, I could create elaborate narratives of our meeting. On a July morning, I was at Broadway-Lafayette when I felt someone tap me on the shoulder.

I swung around, poised for war, and a cute blondish guy with a guitar strapped on his back was smiling at me.

“Hey,” he said. “Were you at that Built to Spill show last week?”

I thought about it. “No.” But wait, I
was
at that show. Wasn't I? Not having had my coffee yet, I was in my usual morning stupor, racking my brain to remember. He looked puzzled.

“It's okay,” he said, raising his hand as he painfully coped with my rejection. “You're probably, like, Why is this weird guy bothering me at eight-thirty in the morning?’ ”

“Yeah,” I said, unwittingly. He started to turn away.

“No—wait. I'm just confused.”

“About talking to me?”

“No, about the show. Honestly, I'm not a morning person. I'm totally out of it.”

“Well, that makes one of us.” He put out his hand. “I'm Dan.” I shook it.

“Amy.”

“I'm pretty sure I remember you from that show. At Maxwell's. Last Friday.”

It came back to me like a slap in the face. What an idiot. “You're right. I was totally there. Sorry about that. I'm really only semiconscious until I have my iced grande skim half-caf no-foam latte.”

“Wow. You don't have any problem saying that.”

“Years of practice. Ask me what my middle name is before noon, and I'd say iced grande skim half-caf no-foam latte.” We chuckled a little. He was an art director for a new dot-com start-up. We talked about how much we liked Built to Spill. As we pulled into Twenty-third Street, I shuffled my bag around to alert him that I was getting off.

“Well … it was nice to meet you.” It seemed like as soon as I'd said that the subway doors were opening and I was spilling mindlessly onto the platform. “Nice meeting ya,” his voice trailed after me, as I turned around with a thousand other semiconscious people, none of whom knew I'd just blown my opportunity with what seemed like a nice guy and forgotten to give him my number. “Fuck!” I yelled to myself, drawing irksome looks from the straphangers swarming past me. The train pulled away, leaving only a rush of wind and the memory of my blunder.

Renora and I had become regular smoking buddies. Although our friendship was forged out of convenience—Linus, Gus, and Wendy had decided they were all quitting—they were all back off the wagon and Renora and I were actually becoming friends. Plus it was a gossip-fest.

“Any budding romances you know about around the office?” I asked her. The only in-office action I had known about had gone down—
literally
—years prior between Diana Flynn and the infamous stapler-thrower.

“No.” We were yearning for some secret tryst to spice up the office life. Never mind that there was a serious dearth of women to participate in said dalliances, or that by recusing ourselves we eliminated 70 percent of the possibilities for further entertainment.

“I think Linus is kind of cute.”

“Yeah,” I said mindlessly. “Wait, Linus? Seriously?”

Though she was already red-faced, it still wasn't hard to detect some embarrassment from Renora. “Yeah, well, he's smart. It's just his personality, I guess, that's cute. Whatever.”

I thought about them together. It was too weird to contemplate, but they did have similar coloring. Pale-skinned, Germanic, high-cheekboned features mixed with a little rosiness around the cheeks from hard drinking. “You guys would look cute together,” I offered.

“Okay,” Renora said, pulling a fresh American Spirit out from behind her ear. “So, if you had to sleep with anybody in the office, who would it be?”

“Ugh. That's not a choice, it's a curse.”

“That's why it's so fun.”

I went through the checklist in my mind. No, no no, no no, no.

“So?”

“I can't pick.”

“C'mon. You have to.”

I wanted my choice to be original, and saying “Evan” would have been obvious, and the thought of him in any amorous light was disturbing.

“Okay. I have it. But my pick is conditional.”

“On what?”

“On the person losing fifty pounds.”

She looked stumped. “Is it Adrienne?”

“Ha-ha. No, it's a man. Or a boy, at least.”

“I have no idea.”

“It's Assman.”

“Whaaaaaaatttttt???!” Her scream made my eyes water. “Are you joking? Assman? Ha! Ha-ha-ha!” Renora was laughing and coughing, with her cigarette hand cupping her mouth. “Ha! Assman!”

I was protective. “He used to be an athlete. He was the captain of his high school football team. He'd be hot if he weren't heavy,” I protested. “He's a diamond in the rough!” But the cork was out of the bottle. She danced in the hallway back into the office, quietly singing “Amy and Assman, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G …”

It was mid-July I sensed the onset of emotional gangrene. Numbness set in. It was alarming but predictable, considering my symptomatically dormant love life. When one doesn't use a limb, it starts to die. But I was also due for a new case, and it was possible I was just bored.

Evan was trying hard to look like he was working. Eyes squinted. Lips parted. I walked around behind his desk and leaned
over and whispered in a gravelly voice, “ Whatcha doin’? ” He nearly ejected from his seat.

“Uh, nuthin’.” He slammed his laptop closed. Now I was embarrassed.

“Sorry to sneak up on you, Ev I just wanted a new case.”

He sighed. “Okay, okay.” He opened his computer again and appeared to shudder at the barely distant memory of me freaking him out. “Gray, don't sneak up on me again.”

“Now that I know you're gathering intel on the teen-porn industry, I won't tell a soul.”

“Ha-ha,” he erupted, expressionless. “Nah, I was downloading Napster shit.”

“I haven't gotten into that yet,” I confessed.

“Dude,” he protested. “It's insane. Check this out.” He opened his computer screen and pulled up a window with songs written down it. “Okay, I have the entire Bob Dylan Basement Tapes.” He scrolled down. “The new Built to Spill album, every Yo La Tengo album ever, the AC/DC song TNT, a bunch of ELO …” He suddenly eyed the room nervously as Sol plodded past him, and slammed his computer shut. “Just don't let Sol see you doing it, he's onto us. He told Assman the other day that if he caught him again he'd cut him loose.”

“Believe me, I won't.”

He handed me a folder. “So it's two guys. Niels Norrsken and his son Nars.” He put his hand to his mouth to indicate he was divulging top-secret intelligence. “They're father and son.”

“Thanks, dickwad. I figured.”

“Hey,” he admonished, “you're insulting dickwads everywhere.”

The subjects, Evan explained, were Swedes, but had lived in Paris, Prague, and Berlin, which made finding information on them somewhat more difficult. European countries have different laws about public information, and often it's not available through
our databases. But the son, Nars, had married and divorced an American girl, and both of them had done some business in the U.S. They ran a massive publishing empire headquartered in Sweden, and the father, Niels Norrsken, had recently retired and put the son in charge of their company. The client was a wealthy New York hedge-fund manager considering about $20 million of diversification in their company's publishing wing. The Norrskens’ company was called KNUT, which gave the perenially gutter-minded Evan and me a good chuckle.

I went back to my desk and started working on the case. The Norrskens had assembled their filthy publishing fortune managing a group of trashy tabloids and soft-porn publications sold all over Europe. In the new technology-based economy, the Norrskens and their smutty rags were practically throwbacks. There was something almost charming about these robber barons making their living printing actual newspapers and magazines.
Piddle Paddle, The Daily Rear, Granny Fanny:
These formed the foundation of the ill-gotten Norrsken fortune.

Their American presence was appropriately immoderate. When in New York they were socialites of the order that attended events hosted by Puff Daddy. The father, once a dashing playboy, now looked more like a pastier version of the aging Siegfried and Roy. (Either one, really; I can't tell them apart.) The skin on his face appeared partially collapsed after facelift surgeries. Pulled tightly across his mouth and over his eyes, it showed effects of hard living and age in the corners of his eyes and neck, where he had a suspended purse of tissue like a chicken's gizzard.

There were a number of defamation lawsuits against their company, KNUT Enterprises, and the umbrella company KNUT Publishing. Lawsuits aren't necessarily a red flag, however. In fact, so rarely do we investigate a company that has no lawsuits against it that finding
nothing
would probably be a red flag. Such
lawsuits were considered routine, and they usually were, since they rarely went to trial and were typically settled out of court. But the moral implications of the flagrant lies they printed were considered incidental. The subject of many stories featuring infidelity, sex addiction, or other disgraces were expected to suck it up. Unless the financial awards were huge and threatened the sine qua non, no one cared.

Just then I got an e-mail from George, who was sending me their newest press release, just put out that day: “A. Gray, to be reviewed, sincerely, George.”

KNUT Enterprises had made a net profit of $4.9 million in 1999 on gross revenue of $38 million. In case you're wondering, that's good. The company was clearly very profitable, but these figures were way down from the previous year, when they had made $19 million on $59 million. Most of the losses were for the final quarter of the year, when they had acquired a papermill in Canada and a bunch of real estate investments. The release warned about possible net losses in the next quarter, but insisted these were “largely resulting from recent acquisitions,” and, they insisted, “were not to be taken as an indicator of the financial results of the company.” It didn't seem to be coincidental that this release had just been made available, long after most companies had already published their earnings for that quarter.

The company's CFO had resigned only weeks before, according to wire reports, and he was the fifth individual with that job in the past twelve months. Also, I noticed KNUT had changed its American accounting firm only a few weeks prior as well. Something seemed afoot, and I was ready to trip them up.

At lunch that day, Sol sauntered in and began picking pieces of Swiss from the waxed paper under my ham-and-cheese.

“Hey, how about, Can I have your cheese?” I said. “Or thank you?”

Sol, smiled, chewing. “I don't have to ask. It's the lunch tariff. It's written into your contract.” He grabbed some of Otis's supersize fries and chomped with satisfaction. George was laughing.

“What you've got to do is have a decoy lunch,” Gus advised.

“I keep a stash of Doritos on me at all times,” Linus added.

Sol's pilfering meant that we all had to mooch off one another. It was a vicious cycle of graft. I stole a couple of bites off Evan's meatball sub, who took Otis's bag of salt-n-vinegar chips, while he pilfered Wendy's pickle and the crusts from a homemade peanut-butter sandwich, and so on. Wendy even purloined a bite of Wally Yoo's potato chips, promptly spit it back out on a napkin, and said, “What the hell is this?”

“They're crispy dried shrimp,” Wally said, smacking his lips together with satisfaction, popping in some more freeze-dried crustaceans.