The Accident (7 page)

During one of these interviews, Charlie was asked if there had been any particular event that triggered his reform, the total transformation of his lifestyle that began the summer after his junior year in college. He gave up alcohol and drugs entirely. He dedicated himself to studies, and his spare time to volunteer work. Almost overnight, he evolved from a singularly irresponsible, selfish, substance-abusing teenager into an extraordinarily serious, sober, and earnest young adult.

“No,” he said, with a relaxed, easy smile spreading across his face, maintaining unflinching eye contact with the camera. “I just thought it was time to grow up.”

CHAPTER 8

“C
ome on, come on, come
on
.” Alexis tugs on Spencer’s arm.
“Please.”
After she’d hung up with Isabel, she’d thought, what the hell, the damage was already done. No further harm in a good-morning quickie. “Dude,” she’d said to Spencer, slipping under the sheets. “Wake up.”

But that was more than an hour ago—it wasn’t that quick, when all was said and done—and now he won’t get up. She studies this man lounging in her bed, the pretentious, obnoxious, but good-looking and undeniably talented writer—a tech blogger now, submitting short stories and working on a screenplay—she’d met a few months ago, at a party in a Bushwick loft to which she was dragged by a hyperactively social, unfailingly upbeat publicist she knew from a publishing house—assistants like Alexis aren’t on guest lists; they’re the hangers-on, the plus-ones—after they’d had an insanely unaffordable round of drinks at one of those Midtown hotel bars populated mostly by forty-something men wearing a strict uniform of bespoke suits with working buttonholes at the cuffs.

It was quite a different selection of men out in the Brooklyn ex-slum, feral beards and architectural mustaches, tattoos and piercings, engineer’s boots and clunky key chains dangling from the belt loops. Another type of uniform, perhaps even more complex and studiously maintained than the one in Midtown, just not as expensive.

She glances again at her handheld screen, the blurry digital line between personal and professional. Facebook won’t be a problem; only a few people liked Alexis’s status update, and Isabel isn’t especially engaged with Facebook anyway; she’s a weekend lurker. But Twitter, that’s a whole different story. Almost everyone at ATM is tweeting and retweeting constantly. Isabel isn’t one of them, thank God, but still she’s going to hear about it. In the kitchen, or the ladies’ room, or in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start, someone will turn to Isabel, and making conversation will ask, “So whatever happened to that anonymous submission that Alexis was loving? You sign that up?”

And then Alexis will be fully fucked.

She tugs Spencer’s arm, trying to actually drag him out of bed.
“Please.”
He has broken up with Alexis more than once. As it happens, they are at the moment broken-up.

He finally rises, starts pulling on his paint-spattered jeans and concert T-shirt, a New Wave show that took place in the East Village a few years before the guy was born.

First item today will be a long, punishing, atoning workout. It’s time for her to start getting ready for this year’s marathon; she’s a little behind schedule, slower than usual to recognize that winter ended and it was time to start outdoor running again. Then a doctor’s appointment, then a wax, a mani-pedi. And finally some unglamorous shopping—running shoes, underwear, toiletries, groceries. Not exactly the
Sex and the City
retail fantasy.

Nor was her weekend, spent immersed in that damn manuscript instead of the beach-and-binge-drinking lifestyle of one of her six allotted weekends in Southampton, a summer rental she’s sharing with at least two dozen friends, acquaintances, and strangers; the list of who’s entitled to what bed on what weekends looks like the org chart for a Fortune 500 corporation. But while everyone else tanned and partied, Alexis sat on peeling white wicker in the shade of the sagging back porch, turning manuscript pages in her lap, swatting away mosquitoes.

But once again, this will be another author and project she will not get a chance to represent, yanked out from under her, at dawn.

Her gym bag is now packed, except for reading material. She looks at her little leather Luddite notebook, re-reads her scant editorial notes on
The Accident
; there’s practically nothing she thinks should be changed about the manuscript. Then she glances at the compulsively maintained Excel spreadsheet in which she keeps track of her reading. She runs her eyes across row #709, whose column A reads
ANONYMOUS
, column B
THE ACCIDENT
. She auto-sums the 2:15 and 5:15 and 4:30 and 3:30 and … she spent more than fifteen hours reading this photocopy that she denied having, because of the impure motive that led her to make the copy in the first place: the hope that it could be hers, and hers alone.

She wakes up her Kindle and opens a newly imported file, a submission from a friend of one of Isabel’s notably unprofitable clients. Alexis reads the first page—not bad. She learned the hard way to always read the opening page before committing any further time to anything; you can learn a lot on first pages about the many different ways that a manuscript can be awful. But this page 1 is not, so this is what she’ll read on the elliptical machine. Or something else. She has three dozen submissions loaded onto the device.

She played it wrong with
The Accident
. She was too impatient, too gregarious, too reckless. She needs to buckle down, to get serious, to continue to pay her dues. She’s only twenty-five years old. Even if there are other twenty-five-year-olds who’ve risen above her current station, they’re the exception, not the rule. Her own time will come. But that time is not now.

Finally Spencer is dressed. Alexis pulls him out the door before he has a chance to dawdle, ask for coffee, whatever.

They step out onto the Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk. A delivery truck rumbles past, drowning out all other sounds. A taxi screeches to a stop. A small army of Hispanic contractors, all wearing tan work boots and jeans, loiters in front of a newly converted manufacturing building, waiting
for the strike of 8:59 a.m., when they’ll be allowed to access the unit, to begin their noisy messy undocumented day of sanding floors and plastering ceilings and installing sound-dampening double-pane windows to three-million-dollar lofts.

At the corner she stops. “So,” she says.

In the ATM office, only three of the assistants are men, and at least one of them is gay, probably two. The third is on every level unacceptable. So Alexis needed to seek out broader dating horizons—perhaps not dating; whatever this is—often in Brooklyn, where most people her age live, unrelenting boosters of their adopted borough, disdainful of Manhattan. But Alexis’s vision of herself has always been in Manhattan, walking to work at a literary agency or a publishing house, surrounded by the throbbing, insistent life in the center of the city.

“This is where we part?” Spencer asks.

She nods.

“That was killer.” She knows he means the sex. Their conversation last night was nil, and this morning’s consisted almost entirely of her trying to get him the hell out of her apartment.

She’s beginning to suspect that Spencer doesn’t actually like her all that much. And she has to admit that the feeling is rather mutual. Maybe she should stop sleeping with him. “I’ll give you a call.”

“That’d be awesome,” he says, without meaning it. For Spencer everything and everyone is awesome and killer, or, when he’s feeling retro-ironic, groovy and neat. It drives her bananas. “We’ll hang.”

“Mmm,”
she says, and turns and walks away, past the Korean deli, where the cute Mexican kid is swabbing the sidewalk with an eye-burning bleach solution. “Morning, Miss,” he says.

His familiarity makes her realize
—damn
—that in her haste to get rid of Spencer, to get out of her little hovel, she forgot her wallet. She needs her ID for the gym. There’s a new morning-front-desk guy, a prissy officious little twit who she knows will not let her in without the damn card.

Alexis takes a step off the concrete curb and down onto the blacktop
pavement, distracted. She takes another step, then another. She hears a car screeching, and she turns to face a black sedan—

The Mexican kid yells,
“Cuidado! Cuidado!”

But she’s frozen, unable to move, staring at the oncoming grille.

“M
iss?” The boy is holding her arm, as well as his mop. “Miss? You okay?” She nods.

“The fuck ya thinkin’?” It’s the driver of the sedan, his window rolled down, yelling at her. “Ya know what a red light means?
Do. Not. Walk
. The fuck?” He asks, and clearly wants an answer; this is not rhetorical. “The fuck?” He shakes his head in disgust, and pulls away.

She stands, trembling, electrified with fright. She retraces the long half-block back to her building, shakily. Opens the front door to the standard-issue tenement, red brick and dirty limestone and rusty fire escapes. She walks down the short, dim hallway. Inserts the key to her apartment door, the worst unit in the building—1F, first-floor front, two steps below grade, facing garbage cans.

Alexis pushes open the door, steps inside, shuts the door behind her. She turns away from her door, into her apartment—

A man is standing on the far side of the room, holding the manuscript. Caught in the act, surprised, yet moving very quickly, while Alexis remains frozen, again.

CHAPTER 9

“I
s your car handy?” Hayden opens the closet, takes out a small suitcase, places it on the bed.

“Yes,” Kate answers, turning from the window, surprised. She didn’t expect to see him again today.

“Good.” He opens the top drawer of the bureau, filled with her under-things. He should have known better. Should have opened a lower, non-underwear drawer. “Um …” He beckons Kate. “Could you, uh, help me pack?”

“What’s going on?”

“We need to wind down this operation.”

“By
wind down
, you mean terminate? Immediately?”

“This instant.”

She sweeps up bras and panties and socks in her forearms, dumps them into the bag. She seems out of joint.

“Don’t worry, Kate. You did
good
.” Hayden gathers up a small stack of her jeans and T-shirts, neatly folded. “This development has nothing to do with
you
. But something else has happened.”

She doesn’t say anything while she gathers another armful, sweaters and outerwear, and transfers the pile to the leather and canvas bag, a piece of quietly elegant luggage that Hayden suspects cost at least a
thousand euros, tactile evidence that she has a lot of money to spend on luggage, and on vacations, and in fact on whatever the hell she wants. He resents it, a bit; she works for him, after all.

On the other hand, it’s true that Hayden too has a couple of swollen bank accounts. One of them is just a bit of family money, the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ Back Bay house. The taxes and maintenance were exorbitant on Marlborough Street, and his Boston-based sister wouldn’t deign to live in such a grand building, after Goo and Ga—their nicknames, for a half-century—died. Willa called the house a mansion, and it clashed with her career, and the persona that went with it, as a mediator, specializing in gang intervention and conflict resolution, driving around South Boston in a filthy banged-up Hyundai. And of course Hayden didn’t have any use for a tall gloomy six-bedroom townhouse in downtown Boston; neither did his other sister Ellen, a pampered Greenwich housewife.

So they sold the big brick heap, paid the taxes, and split the proceeds. Which is how Hayden found himself with three-quarters of a million unearned dollars, parked in electronic records managed by private bankers. He has never felt the urge—and never really had the time—to spend it. So it’s still sitting there, more patient than he thought money could be, awaiting a catastrophic illness, or a late-life crisis. He’d long anticipated a debilitating midlife crisis, but midlife seems to be coming and going without incident.

The other swollen account is a numbered one in Switzerland that contains roughly twenty-one million euros, or somewhere north of thirty million dollars, depending on exchange-rate fluctuations. This too is a chunk of unearned money, albeit from a completely different type of source.

“L
et me get this straight,” Hayden said, a year ago, in a different country. “Your husband is the person who stole fifty million euros from Colonel Petrovic?”

Kate smiled, tight-lipped and joyless. Then she shrugged her shoulders, an afterthought add-on to the noncommittal smile.

“And you want immunity for this? For Dexter?”

“And for me.”

“For you?”

Kate nodded.

“Did you play any role in the theft?”

She shook her head.

“But you knew about it?”

“No, not … not at the time. It happened last winter.”

He leaned toward Kate, his elbows on the table in the café atop the Georges Pompidou Center. “Then why do you need immunity?”

“I don’t, really. But you never know.”

This was bizarre. “And where
is
this money?”

“Well, we have—that is,
Dexter
has—half of it. The other half is, uh, unavailable. At the moment.”

Hayden raised his eyebrows.

“Dexter had a co-conspirator. She has the other half. I think.”

“You
think
?”

Kate huffed, blowing a slow stream of air out of swollen cheeks. “I just discovered this, Hayden, and it sort of ruined my life. So give me a fucking break.”

Hayden looked away from Kate, out over the café on the Beaubourg rooftop, off to the south, the picture-postcard images of Paris—the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, the severe geometry of the Louvre, the machine-age elegance of
La Tour
. This beautiful city, onetime capital of the world, center of high culture and international intrigue. Now a political backwater, an engine driven by food and fashion, by tourism, by the centripetal pull of the big city in a small country, irrelevant.