Alpha 1 (6 page)

Holden shrugged. “I guess it’s none of my business.”

“Come on, you want to go out? Let’s get you some action. It’s time.”

Holden looked at Jimmy. He wasn’t sure. It had been two years since Meg’s death and he hadn’t been with another woman since. Not once. He hadn’t even been tempted. In his younger years, before he met Meg and married her, he’d been a real ladies’ man. He’d slept with so many women he couldn’t even hazard a ballpark figure of how many there’d been. He’d opened more bottles of champagne in fancy clubs than any other playboy in Manhattan. But that had all changed when he met Meg. Once he met her he’d had eyes for no other girl. When she died he’d thought he would never love again.

“What’s the point?” he said to Jimmy.

“What’s the point? Are you kidding me? It’s necessary, man. It’s a part of life. It’s what men do.”

“Not me.”

“You used to do it.”

Holden was quiet. Jimmy watched him. “We’re not going to Ruben’s,” Jimmy said. “I’m taking you somewhere nice for a change. Somewhere you’ll have a chance to meet a nice girl.”

Holden looked down at the oil-stained overalls he was wearing. “We’re not getting into any nice clubs like this.”

Jimmy looked at him. It was true. They were filthy. They had engine grease on their hands, their faces, in their hair. Their overalls were a mess. Then he had an idea.

“What about your office?”

“You know I only go there when I absolutely have to.”

It was true. Ever since his wife’s death it had been as if Holden was hiding away from his real life. He was supposed to be this hotshot Wall Street guy but he did everything he could to stay away from his own company. He only went there for meetings, which were rare. He directed everything by email or on the phone. He’d set everything up so that he could run things from home, during the night when he couldn’t sleep. During the day he didn’t have to go near the place. Instead, he spent his days at the shop with Jimmy, fixing engines. Jimmy wasn’t sure when he slept.

“The office is closed,” Jimmy said. “No one’s there. They’ll never even know you were there. We could just go there and grab a couple of suits and take a quick shower.”

Holden didn’t want to do it. He’d have rather had a few beers with Jimmy down at Ruben’s, but he knew he couldn’t always do things his way. He had to take his friend’s wishes into account too. “You really want to do this?” he said.

“Life is for living, Holden. The way I see it, you don’t have a choice. If you spend one more night down at Ruben’s with me, drinking beer in that dark, lonely place, you’ll die.”

Holden drove past Ruben’s and took them back to the West Financial Group building. He pulled up in front of the main entrance. The building was closed but it wasn’t completely abandoned. Holden and Jimmy walked up the steps to the front doors and knocked on the thick glass. A moment later a uniformed security guard came to the door.

“Not tonight, fellas,” the security guard said through the glass. “We got the police on our speed dial here.”

“Hang on,” Holden said. He dug in his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a security pass.

The security guard leaned forward to look at it. “Put it in the reader,” he said.

Holden inserted the card into the reader and a green light came on. The guard looked at the screen on his side of the glass. Suddenly he looked very surprised. He hurriedly opened the doors.

“Oh, Mr. West. My apologies, Sir. I didn’t quite recognize you in the dark.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Holden said as he and Jimmy walked in. “You’re just doing your job like the rest of us. That’s what you’re here for.”

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” the guard said as they crossed the lobby toward the same brass elevator they’d taken earlier.

Once inside, Holden put the security card into the elevator control.

“You know, you’re pretty lucky to have your own building like this,” Jimmy said. “You really should get more use out of it. Most people don’t have this.”

Holden looked at him and smiled. “This is nothing,” he said. “You should see the plans I had for London.”

“I didn’t know you had plans for a London office.”

“Yeah, but that was before Meg died.”

“Before Meg died and you put the whole rest of your life on hold?”

Holden nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose you could put it like that.”

XII

O
NCE THEY GOT TO THE
top floor Holden led Jimmy to his personal office. On the way they passed the reception, a number of stunning glass-walled boardrooms, and client areas with white leather sofas and stainless steel coffee machines. Everything in the building was top of the line. Jimmy had seen it all before but that didn’t make it any less impressive. When they got to the doors of Holden’s office he had to swipe the card again to get in.

“You sure you got enough security?” Jimmy said.

Holden smiled. “I know, it’s ridiculous. The building designers put it all in. I think if any thief made it this far they deserve to get what they came for.”

Jimmy laughed. They entered the office. It was a huge space, more like an expensive hotel suite than an office. They were in a seating area but off to the side was a dressing room with an adjoining bathroom. On the other side was the actual office with a desk and computer. Holden hadn’t sat at that desk since Meg’s death. Sometimes Jimmy worried about him, but Holden seemed to always have a pretty clear idea of what he was doing and why. He’d created a multi-billion dollar financial group single-handedly. When Meg died he’d sort of gone into hibernation, but he still spent his nights carefully directing the corporation, growing it into one of the most powerful financial houses in the world. From time to time, Jimmy would read an article about Holden in the Wall Street Journal. The journalists always spoke about him in mysterious terms. They made a big deal about how he’d continued to grow his financial empire while apparently dropping off the face of the earth. If only they knew he was fixing cars just a few blocks from Wall Street. They’d be amazed.

“In here,” Holden said. They went through to the dressing room. “You ever tried one of these showers?”

Jimmy shook his head. The bathroom was all frosted glass, it almost looked like stone, and the shower looked like something out of the space age. It was a glass capsule and there was no sign of where the water came from.

“Well go for it,” Holden said. “I’ll go after you.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“How do I use it?”

“Just stand in it and close the door. When the door closes it will start automatically. It’s like a carwash. You’ll be clean in no time.”

“How will I shut it off.”

“You can tell it to stop with your voice.”

“You’re kidding?”

“For real. Or you can just wait for it to finish automatically.”

Holden left Jimmy to change. He went out to the dressing room to select their clothes. Luckily they were both the same size. There was row upon row of suits, shirts, socks, shoes, belts, sun glasses, everything a man could possibly need. Holden picked out a couple of suits and laid them on the dressing table.

Then he crossed the suite and entered his office. He looked around. Everything was as it had been, as it has always been. His mahogany table was directly across from him in front of a wall of glass that looked out over the New York skyline. There was a laptop on the table in the exact position he’d left it the day his wife had died. The papers had been tidied up into a pile but they were from the deal he’d been working on that day. That deal hadn’t gone through. Nothing had gone through in the couple of months after the accident. Holden’s staff had thought that he might not be coming back to work any time soon. Some of them thought that if they wanted to keep their jobs they had better come up with deals of their own. But pretty soon the nighttime messages began arriving. Holden told each and every trader and analyst that worked for him exactly what to do. Under Holden’s invisible leadership, West Financial Group had secretly become the most lucrative trading house on Wall Street.

The current project he was working on, the turbocharger patents he was looking at, was the first piece of work he’d become personally involved in since Meg’s death. For Holden it was more than a deal, it was personal. It meant something to him. No one at the firm understood it, they saw it as an eccentric personal interest of the company founder, a man who was still struggling to get over the death of his beloved wife, but to Holden it meant so much more than that. It was his way of proving that old things, things that had supposedly died, like good old fashioned American automobiles, could live again.

His heart might still be broken, but there was nothing wrong with his head. He knew he could make a success of the turbocharger patent. On a complete whim he’d guessed that some old mechanic somewhere in the country would be in agreement with him.

He walked over to his desk. There was a photo in a silver frame, a photo of Meg. He picked it up and looked at it. She looked beautiful, as beautiful as she ever had. Holden sighed. It hurt him to look at it, and it hurt him to have to admit it to himself, but the time had come for him to move on. Realizing how he’d felt about Lucy had taught him that much. Loosing his wife had hurt him deeply, he’d never forget about her for as long as he lived, but two years of mourning was enough. If he’d been smart he would have asked Lucy out earlier and now she’d be going out with him and not that other guy. He couldn’t let life keep passing him by.

He hadn’t realized he’d been ready to move on until he’d seen Lucy kiss that guy. That had been the moment when he knew his heart wasn’t as dead as he’d thought. It was alive and it was still kicking.

“Wow,” Jimmy called from the other room. “That was amazing.”

“I put out some suits in the dressing room,” Holden said as he got into the shower.

When Holden got out of the shower he felt like a new man. He was ready to move forward, into the future, and embrace the life he’d been given. Meg would have wanted it. As he stood next to Jimmy and got into his perfectly fitted suit he began to feel more optimistic than he had in a long time.

“So,” Jimmy said, “what was that patent we were looking at earlier?”

“You tell me,” Holden said. “You’re the engine expert.”

“It’s a smart idea, that’s for sure. I’ve never seen anyone try something like that. Not even the major car companies, not even in the sixties and seventies. It’s bold.”

Holden smiled at him.

“How did you know where to look for it?” Jimmy said.

“I just had a hunch,” Holden said. “I figured if I could dream of it, there must be someone else, someone more expert, who’d had the same dream.”

“And you got your patent lawyers to search for anything that remotely resembled it? How did you know they’d find it?”

“I figured, if this is a good idea to me, there’s got to be at least one other guy in the country mad enough to have thought of it. And if someone thought of it, my patent lawyers would find it.”

“That was it? That was seriously all you had to go on? A dream?”

Holden shrugged. “I’ve always been good at dreaming. But what do you think of it, Jimmy?”

Jimmy thought for a few seconds.

“More power, more efficiency. You could bring a lot of old engines into the twenty-first century with a turbocharger like that. I’d say there’ll be interest.”

Holden nodded.

“It’s going to make you a boatload of money, isn’t it?” Jimmy said.

Holden slapped Jimmy on the back affectionately. “That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s what excites me about this idea. Maybe there’ll be money, maybe the whole idea will be a complete bust. There’s only one way to find out.”

“So you’re going to buy the patents?”

“
We’re
going to buy the patents.”

“You and me together?”

“That’s right,” Holden said.

“Can I afford that?” Jimmy said.

“You’ll find out,” Holden said.

“Who owns them now?”

“I have no idea,” Holden said. “The name’s on the filings, someone based here in New York, but I’ve got no idea if he’s a crackpot working in his basement or a guy with a whole company behind him.”

“And you’ve got no idea if he’s going to want to sell either.”

Holden winked at Jimmy. “He’ll sell. Who could possibly resist the two of us?”

XIII

L
UCY COULDN’T SLEEP.
No matter how long she lay on the sofa bed, sleep just would not come to her. All she could think about was the man who’d handed her the envelope. Who was he? What did he want with her? What had she agreed to do at the address on Park Lane? She wasn’t the kind of girl who walked into something like this lightly. She hadn’t been with many boys in her life. No matter how hard things had become for her family, she’d never once considered selling sexual favors for money. She just wasn’t like that. That wasn’t an option that was a part of her life. She wasn’t from that world and she never thought about it. She was happier earning a dollar tip selling a cup of coffee than a thousand dollars for some unspoken, unspecified agreement that she’d managed to get herself into.

As she tossed and turned in her bed she wondered what her parents would think if they ever found out where that money had come from. What would she tell them? They’d see that the check was from some big financial company. They’d never believe her if she said it was a tip from a customer. In fact, if she said that they’d probably guess immediately what she was expected to do in return for it. They were naive but they weren’t
that
naive.

She decided to tell them it was an advance from her employer. She’d say she was being trained as a manager at the diner and that Christopher was paying her a thousand dollar bonus. They’d believe that. They had no choice. They needed that money badly. With a baby in the house the heat
had
to stay on, the refrigerator
had
to be stocked, the rent
had
to be paid.

She wondered what the man would be like, Jefferson Lund. Even his name sounded expensive. She wondered what he’d done to make all his money. Was he a nice person? Was he a good man? She didn’t know. She knew he’d made an impression on her, but that was because he was so rich. Everything about him had told her he was rich, the way he was dressed, the way he spoke, the way he held himself.