City of Dreams (31 page)

The boy shook his head, as if he did not understand.

Then the father managed to get one word out. “Eyes.”

“Eyes? Eyes, Pa?”

The father’s brows twitched. The lids tried to close, as if there were a bright light, as if he were squinting in a bright light. And then the muscles around his eyes relaxed. And his breathing stopped.

NINE

Wednesday Afternoon

P
ETER WAS READING ANOTHER ARTICLE
that Antoine had e-mailed.

“Listen to this,” he said to Evangeline. “‘Richard Riley was beaten to death with a hammer by one or more assailants, who left his body on the stairs of the old Daggett Tavern, originally Woodward Manor, one of the great estates of pre-Revolutionary New York. His son, Timothy, aged thirteen, was hiding in the house. The boy found his father holding a piece of chalk in his hand, having just drawn an X on one of the stair treads.’”

“The poor kid,” said Evangeline.

“‘The son could not identify the murderers. He did not see them and heard mostly muffled voices. Richard Riley was known to have had troubles with Hell’s Kitchen gangs, but a motive for the slaying has not been established. He will be buried from Sacred Heart Church on Monday.’”

“That’s it?” said Evangeline.

“Too bad we don’t have an index for the
New York Post
,” said Peter. “The
Times
was already turning into the gray lady. Sensational murder but no sensationalism.”

Just then, Peter’s phone rang.

“Owen T. Magee here.”

“What’s your decision?” said Peter Fallon.

“What’s yours?”

Peter glanced at the cover of the
Daily News
. “You got the wrong guy in the Yankees hat. So make me an offer or get off the phone.” That sounded more impolite than he usually played it, but he didn’t like these guys enough to be polite. And he was lying. He always lied better if he did it aggressively.

Owen T. Magee’s voice remained neutral. “We’ll up the offer. Twenty percent.”

“Twenty?” Peter said it out loud and glanced at Evangeline, who was sliding the laptop accross the table. “That’s not much to save America from itself.”

Peter pressed the speaker button so that Evangeline could hear.

“It comes to two hundred and ninety-six million dollars,” said Owen T. Magee. “Not even the handwritten manuscript of a Shakespeare play is worth that much.”

“Some things are priceless,” said Peter. “Unlike a pile of rudely printed old bonds that won’t be worth twenty-five grand if the Supreme Court finds against you.”

Owen T. Magee ignored that and pressed ahead. “We’ll also pay a thousand dollars a day and expenses.”

“There’s a load off my mind.” Peter noticed Evangeline tapping away.

Owen T. Magee said, “Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, leave town, too.”

Evangeline began to gesture for Peter’s attention.

Peter told Owen T. to hang on, then he muted the phone and asked her, “Do I take this deal?”

“You want to know what they know,” she said. “That’s not a bad payday. And like they say, keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“I’ve calmed down. I’m thinking they work with Joey Berra. I’m thinking he’s some mafia enforcer they’ve hired for muscle.”

“But he’s the one who told me not to trust Arsenault.”

“He could make a world of trouble for you, no matter who he works for.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“I’m not, but seeing that picture of you in the Yankees hat reminded me of someone else in a Yankees hat.” She slid his computer over to him and pointed to the picture she had sent from Fraunces Tavern: the lone male diner. On the seat next to him was what looked like a Yankees hat. And he was stocky like Joey. “I think that’s him. I think we stay in this until we get a few more answers. Then you can explain to the NYPD why you were in Central Park yesterday wearing a Yankees hat.”

Peter thought of a dozen arguments against what she was saying, then he clicked on the telephone again and said, “All right. We’re in business.”

“Excellent,” said Owen T. Magee. “We would much rather be with you than against you. I’ll have the terms adjusted and some of the historical papers collected. I’m in meetings until six. Come down to my law office at the Flatiron Building any time after that, we can formalize all this and put you to work.”

“Am I protected now?” said Peter. “You threatened to remove your protection.”

“We have less power than you think,” said Owen T. Magee.

“What about Delancey? What kind of deal does he have?”

“Twenty percent,” said Magee. “But a clause in the contract addresses the issue of payment should you join forces. You would split the twenty percent. See you after six.”

Peter clicked off and called Delancey. No answer at the bookstore or on Delancey’s cell. So he texted:

You have a new partner. Me.

“That’s your due diligence on Delancey,” said Evangeline. “Now what?”

“We have until six o’clock.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost four thirty.”

“If you say ‘four thirtyer—’”

“I
was
going to suggest drinks at the Harvard Club.” He leaned back and locked his hands behind his head. “Put on that black Chanel suit, some pearls—”

“What’s up your sleeve?”

“Can’t a man ask his beautiful fiancée to have a drink with him?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Who are we meeting?”

“The accountant of Avid Investment Strategies.”

She dropped the attitude. “Arsenault’s firm? Who arranged that?”

“Oh”—he tried to sound casual—“the chief reporter for MarketSpindot-com.”

Evangeline gave him a long look, then went into the bedroom and closed the door.

So, he thought . . . that went well.

But a few minutes later, she emerged in the black Chanel and the white pearls, and she said, “Put on a tie.”

I
T WAS RUSH
hour, so catching a cab would not be easy. Instead, they took the subway to Times Square and walked across Forty-fourth Street.

At the corner of Forty-fourth and Avenue of the Americas, Peter stopped. “Look up there.”

The National Debt Clock was flashing on the side of a building. A real estate developer had installed it in 1989 to warn Americans of the trouble they were getting into by spending and spending and kicking their bills down the road. Back then, the sovereign debt of the United States had been two trillion dollars. Twenty years later, after the Bush tax cuts, the war on terror, the bank bailouts, the auto bailouts, the stimulus package, and all the rest, it was over twelve trillion and rising.

“A hundred grand a second.” Peter watched the numbers spin.

“You could go blind looking at it,” said Evangeline.

“They turned it off for two years under Clinton. The economy was thriving, tax revenue was up, spending was under control, so the deficit began to shrink. Now, I’ll bet Alexander Hamilton is spinning as fast as the clock in his crypt down at Trinity Church.”

“Can Arsenault stop the spin simply by finding a few old bonds?”

Peter shrugged. “Smart people like the Concord Coalition have been on this case for years, and the numbers are still spinning, so—”

“Maybe Arsenault has another motive?”

“That would be?”

“Simple greed? Complicated greed?”

“At least those are things we can understand.”

“So let’s go drink to greed.” She pointed ahead to the American flag and the Harvard H hanging over a crimson awning just beyond the Algonquin Hotel.

“Don’t call it greed,” he said. “Call it enlightened self-interest.”

In a city where enclaves of moneyed exclusivity were as common as Starbucks, the Harvard Club of New York might have been the biggest of them all. But the only real prerequisite for membership was attending Harvard. If you had a degree—and you could pay your bar bill—the likelihood was that you could join.

Once, Harvard had been a bastion of old boys’ sons, and their fathers had filled the club. But as the face of the college had changed, so had the club. Now it was exclusivity with a democratic overtone. And that, as Peter explained to Evangeline, was why the son of a Boston Irish bricklayer like him could rub elbows with descendants of the old-money aristocracy like her.

“It’s not aristocracy,” said Evangeline. “The word is
meritocracy
.”

“That means we now have to
earn
our right to keep everyone else out.”

“Who says you’ve earned it?” she said.

“Well . . . I’m marrying you.”

And as enclaves went, the Harvard Club was more like an auditorium of exclusivity, a theater to dramatize the rewards of accomplishment.

You walked under the crimson awning, through a vestibule, up into a lobby with leather chairs, newspapers, first-strike prints of old college scenes, cloakroom to the right, bar to the left, stairway leading to library, billiard room, guest rooms. Then you passed through the oak-paneled Grille Room, where well-heeled grads were already enjoying pre-theater suppers.

And ahead you saw a brightening. You went through a portal, beneath a balcony that was part of the second-floor library, and the ceiling suddenly rose three stories. A quarter acre of leather sofas and Persian carpets spread before you like a professor’s vision of tenured heaven. High windows poured down the light of a spring evening. Two great chandeliers dominated the airspace. Portraits of gowned Harvard presidents gazed from the paneling. And the huge gray head of an African elephant, immortalized when Teddy Roosevelt shot him, seemed to be charging right through the wall.

“Welcome to Harvard Hall,” said Peter. “The club brochure says that some critics consider it, and I quote, ‘to be the finest clubroom in the Western Hemisphere.’”

“Just the hemisphere? Why not the whole world?”

“Typical Harvard modesty.”

“That’s like saying typical New York manners.”

Peter looked around. “I’d bet the manners in here are pretty good.”

“Not much modesty, though,” she said. “Just ask the elephant.”

They both scanned the room for Kathy Flynn’s hair.

There were a few dozen people scattered across the great space . . . old grads, young couples, businessmen reading their
Wall Street Journals
in the quiet company of Mr. Walker, Black, waiters in crimson jackets moving discreetly, wives waiting for husbands, husbands waiting for wives, and reservations waiting in the adjacent dining room.

But no redheads. So Peter and Evangeline took a grouping of four leather chairs near the entrance, where they would be easy to spot.

Peter wrote down his membership number on a club tab and ordered a New Zealand sauvignon blanc for Evangeline and a glass of New Amsterdam for himself.

As the drinks arrived, Peter’s cell phone buzzed. A text message from Kathy Flynn: There yet?

Peter texted her a yes and put the phone back into his pocket.

“Who’s that?” asked Evangeline.

“Ms. Flynn.”

“You’re texting with her? Be careful or I may put ‘texting with her’ into the same category with ‘looking at her ass.’”

The phone vibrated again. Peter pulled it out.

Stuck in traffic. Watch for tall, skinny guy, horn-rims, nervous. Name Carl Evers.

He typed back, will do. Then he handed the phone to Evangeline so that she could read the message. “Okay?”

She made a face.

He hit the button. Then he drained his beer and ordered another.

It wasn’t long before they saw someone familiar entering the dining room, but not anyone they were waiting for.

Will Wedge and his daughter stopped in the doorway and scanned the room.

Will was a hail-fellow from Boston, an old prepster whose blond hair had gone mostly gray and whose belly had expanded until his height had faded into the fat. He was also a principal in Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, a Boston brokerage. A few years earlier, he had enlisted Peter Fallon to find that lost Shakespeare manuscript.

His daughter, Dorothy, noticed Peter and Evangeline and came straight over to play the greeting scene that unfolded in the Harvard club a hundred times a day: hellos and handshakes and how’s-the-family chitchat.

“What brings you to New York?” Evangeline asked that.

“I’m here to spend a little time with my baby girl,” was Will Wedge’s answer. “She’s living in the big city now.”

“Doing what?” Peter felt that he had to ask that one.

“I’ve set my sail in the world of publishing,” said Dorothy. “I started as an editorial assistant, now I’m an assistant editor.”

“Right,” said Wedge. “She was making twenty-two thousand, now she’s making twenty-six. Did you ever try living in Manhattan on twenty-six thousand dollars?”

Dorothy gave her father a playful slap on the arm. “Daddy.”

“Doing any business?” That came from Peter to Will Wedge.

“On the board of the Paul Revere Foundation,” said Wedge. “I’m told we’re making a big announcement on Friday.”

Then Evangeline said, “So you know Austin Arsenault?”