The Garden of Betrayal (7 page)

“We’re done, right?” Kate asked, addressing her mother.

“Yes,” Claire answered. “The only thing you need to work on are the arpeggios in the first ritornello. The transitions could be a little crisper. Otherwise,
bravissimo.”

“Bella signora,”
Phil said, kissing his fingers.
“Grazie molto.”

Kate flashed him another smile and then settled her violin in its case.

“I’m going out for a few minutes,” she said casually. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

“Going out where?” Claire asked, looking up from her music with a troubled expression.

“Java Joe. Phil’s laptop is acting kind of wonky, so I’m going to take a look at it for him. I think his registry’s messed up—maybe a bad cluster on the hard drive or something.”

Kate was a self-taught computer whiz who kept herself in pocket money by tending to our neighbors’ networks and hardware. And Java Joe was where all the neighborhood teens hung out. Still, there was a breathy undercurrent to her voice as she said Phil’s name that made the feeling I had before come back stronger.

“It’s a school night,” Claire said. “What do you think, Mark?”

Kate flushed, her expression stormy, but she almost never answered her mother back. She looked at me instead. I made a show of checking my watch, frowning to indicate that I shared Claire’s concern. One of the first rules of parenting was never to undermine your spouse. But it was a bridge I’d had to cross before. Kate was seventeen. No matter how difficult for Claire, or for me, we had to let her grow up.

“It’s six-thirty. I don’t think it’ll be a problem as long as you’re home in time to set the table. Say an hour from now?”

“Mom?” Kate asked.

Claire bit her lip and nodded.

“Take your phone.”

“I’ll be right back.”

The front door banged thirty seconds later, and Claire and I were alone. Walking around the piano, I began folding the music stands.

“You think she likes him?” I asked, when I couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

Claire shrugged, eyes fixed on her keyboard.

I tucked the music stands behind a curtain drape and gazed out across the treetops toward the Hudson. A tug was nosing a barge upstream, fighting against the current. Claire’s silences frightened me. Half the time I didn’t know what touched them off, and I never knew how long they’d last. She’d brighten suddenly, as if emerging from behind a cloud, and we’d have a couple of good days, days that reminded me of what things used to be like. But inevitably the cloud would return.

A movement on the street below caught my attention, and I saw Phil and Kate on the corner. They were standing beneath a streetlamp, in a puddle of light. He touched her arm and said something that made her laugh. She tipped up her face, and he kissed her.

“I’m scared, too,” I said, turning to look at Claire. “Every time she leaves the apartment. But Kate’s going to be in college next year. It’s normal for her to want to be more independent, and to start having relationships.”

“And what about us?”

The question surprised me.

“What do you mean?”

Claire shook her head and began playing. A nocturne: Chopin, op. 9, no. 2. It was an old favorite, a piece she used to play in the evenings after we put Kyle and Kate to bed. I’d slump on the couch with a glass of wine, exhausted from work, and travel, and baths, and pajamas, and endless rounds of “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” She’d glance up occasionally to smile at me as she played, and I’d remember the offer I’d made her at the biscotteria: whatever she wanted. It had been a good deal for me, and I’d wondered at my luck, right up until the moment when my luck ran out. I turned her words over in my mind as I listened to the familiar music. What about us—after Kate was gone? It was something I worried about. More than anything else, it was Kate who kept the cloud at bay.

I glanced out the window again. Kate and Phil were still embracing. I looked back to my wife. Her shoulders were hunched, the way they got when she was hurting. I felt a pang of guilt, remembering that I’d forgotten to buy flowers. Kate’s relationship with Phil was something I’d have to think about later. Right then, I needed to do what I could to ease Claire’s pain.

I was at the office the next morning, buried in fallout from the previous day, when the intercom buzzed. I’d slept badly and was feeling tired and irritable.

“What’s up, Amy?”

“Theresa Roxas calling on your direct.”

“Don’t know her,” I replied testily, assuming she was a journalist. The press had been hounding me nonstop, intent on learning where I’d obtained the Nord Stream video.

“She claims Alex sent you an e-mail introducing her.”

“Hang on.”

I grabbed my mouse and scrolled through my in-box. I’d received more than a hundred e-mails overnight and had time to get through only about a third of them. Sure enough, there was a note from Alex in the middle of the stack, the subject line theresa roxas. I noticed it had been sent just after three a.m. and hoped he hadn’t stayed up all night drinking. Alex stopped by most mornings to say hi, but it was after ten and I hadn’t seen him.

“Found it,” I said, clicking on the e-mail. “Is Alex in today?”

“I don’t know. Would you like me to check?”

I took a moment to read the e-mail before responding:
Theresa Roxas will be contacting you today with some important information
.

It wasn’t notably terse by trading-desk standards, and it certainly seemed lucid, but the late hour and indistinct mention of “important information” made me a little suspicious. The energy markets attract all
sorts of lunatic conspiracy theorists, and I was constantly getting calls from people anxious to persuade me that international Zionists secretly controlled OPEC, or some similarly paranoid nonsense. I didn’t have time to waste on a crazy woman Alex had met in a bar.

“I’ll pick up,” I said reluctantly. “And yes, please try to get hold of Alex for me. I’d like to speak to him.”

“Will do.”

I switched to my direct line.

“Ms. Roxas? This is Mark Wallace.”

“Theresa,” she said, pronouncing it the Spanish way. I could hear voices in the background, as if she was calling from a public place.

“Theresa,” I repeated. “Thanks for calling. Alex sent an e-mail saying you have something to tell me.”

“Yes. But I don’t want to talk on the phone. I’d prefer to meet in person.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose wearily. There aren’t that many things you can’t talk about on the phone. Maybe she was still at the bar and needed someone to come settle the check.

“Do you mind my asking how you and Alex know each other?”

“We’re old friends.”

I waited, but it was all she had to say on the subject.

“My schedule’s really very difficult right now,” I said, doing my best to sound regretful. “Are you sure you can’t give me a preview?”

“You’re familiar with seismic reprocessing?”

The question caught me off guard. Energy companies had been using seismic studies—effectively, terrestrial sonar—since the early 1930s, to help them find oil and gas. Seismic reprocessing was a more recently developed technique that took advantage of computational advances to reanalyze old data, revealing originally unobtainable detail. It wasn’t a subject many people knew about.

“Generally,” I admitted cautiously.

“And you’re aware that Aramco did extensive seismic work at Ghawar in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s?”

Aramco had been the original name of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state oil company. And Ghawar was Saudi’s largest oil field—the largest oil field in the world. Now she had my complete attention.

“Yes.”

“So, we should meet.”

I felt a little dizzy, exhaustion vanquished by excitement. Ghawar’s geology was the most fiercely guarded secret in the energy markets, because the Saudis didn’t want the market to know how much oil they were capable of producing. Information was power—if prices were low, the Saudis could hint at shortages. If prices were high, they could talk about bringing more capacity on-line. Reprocessed seismic data would go a long way toward shedding light on the truth of their situation, by revealing how much oil they’d started with. I counted to three, willing myself to calm down. The chances that someone I’d never heard of had gotten hold of Saudi secrets and picked me to share them with were slim to none.

“I’m not an engineer,” I cautioned, making another stab at drawing her out. Experience had taught me that people tended to talk more freely when they thought you didn’t understand them. “If you have technical data, I’ll need help interpreting it.”

“Interpretation won’t be a problem,” she said flatly. “Are we getting together or not?”

I realized I wasn’t going to learn anything more on the phone. I glanced at my in-box unhappily—another four e-mails had arrived while we’d been speaking. But I couldn’t risk missing out on a scoop of this magnitude. I had to hear what she had to say.

“Absolutely. When and where?”

“Now would be good. I’m at Café Centro, in the MetLife Building.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said, abandoning any pretense of reserve.

“I’ll be seated. The table’s in your name.”

The line clicked and went dead. I shouted for Amy and then grabbed my keyboard. Better I knew who Theresa was before we spoke. Google returned eight hits for “Theresa Roxas,” four of them a MySpace page for a sultry Philippina baton twirler. I tried “Theresa” and “Roxas.” A hundred and sixty-five thousand hits, the first half-dozen for a Catholic school in Mexico. I was fuming at Google and trying both of Theresa’s names and words to do with the oil industry when Amy finally joined me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been trying to locate Alex. Lynn hasn’t heard from him, and he isn’t answering his cell. I just left a voice mail asking him to call you.”

Lynn was Alex’s assistant and also Amy’s neighbor in Brooklyn. They were members of the same church.

“Try his home, please,” I said, pointing toward my phone. “Speed-dial seventeen.”

“The machine,” Amy announced a few seconds later. “You want me to leave another message?”

I nodded unhappily and shoved the keyboard away, frustrated by my inability to learn anything useful. Rising, I put on my suit coat.

“I’m going to go meet this Roxas woman,” I said, as Amy settled the receiver back onto its cradle. “Keep trying Alex’s home and cell. I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible.”

“I will. And don’t forget you have lunch at the Palace hotel with Senator Simpson.”

“Shit.” I had forgotten. My day had been a mess before I heard from Theresa, and it seemed it was only going to get worse. I shook my head, tempted to swear again, and noticed Amy frowning.

“Sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

Amy dropped her eyes to my shirtfront and reached out to straighten my tie.

“I could call the super at Alex’s building and have him go up and knock on the door. Maybe Alex isn’t hearing his phone for some reason.”

It was delicately put, but I knew her well enough to read between the lines.

“You mean because he’s home sleeping off a drunk?” I asked quietly.

Amy nodded.

“Lynn came and spoke to me. She’s worried. She thinks it’s time for someone to have a word with his father.”

I sighed, imagining what a conversation with Walter on the subject would be like.

“Are people talking about it on the trading floor?”

“Not yet,” she said, eyes still lowered. Amy was as uncomfortable with gossip as she was with swearing.

“I feel like a jerk. I should’ve spotted it sooner.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Amy said, sounding a little abashed by her own forwardness. “It’s only gotten bad recently. And you can’t always be looking out for other people’s problems.”

“‘Therefore do not worry about tomorrow,’” I recited, “‘for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’”

“Matthew six,” she said, looking surprised and delighted. “Amen.”

It was a verse I’d learned in family therapy. The only way I knew not to worry about tomorrow was to abdicate responsibility for my life, or to stop caring about the people I loved. Neither seemed like a good idea. I liked Amy, though, and—regardless of what Matthew had to say on the subject—I knew she worried about me.

“Amen,” I repeated.

Café Centro is a big place, with intricately patterned stone floors and multiple dining areas separated by rows of brown leather banquettes and gleaming glass panels. Located right next door to Grand Central Terminal, it’s always busy. I gave the maître d’ my name, and he led me on a serpentine course toward a table in the far corner. A woman who looked to be in her early thirties was sitting alone, reading the
Financial Times
. She had on a crisp white blouse, a tight black skirt, and smoke-colored nylons. Her hair was done up in an elaborate French twist—a term I knew only because I’d helped Kate attempt one once—and she had a turquoise leather portfolio leaning against her chair leg. Delicate half-glasses perched on the tip of her nose. The overall effect was of a Latin Audrey Hepburn playing a Wharton business school grad. Every guy in the place was surreptitiously checking her out. She set down her paper as I approached and offered me her hand.

“Theresa Roxas.”

“Mark Wallace,” I answered, feeling slightly dazzled. Up close, she looked even better.

She lifted a small silver pot to fill two cups with steaming coffee as I sat down, and then nudged one toward me.

“Congratulations on the Nord Stream story. Your name’s in all the papers.”

“Thanks.”

She lifted her cup to her lips and blew on it lightly, eyes fixed on my face. I had the sense she was waiting for me to elaborate, and wondered
if my first instinct had been correct. Maybe she was a journalist, and everything she’d told me had been a calculated ruse to draw me out.

“I’m sorry to seem brusque,” I said, “but if you’ve been reading about me in the paper, you must realize that I’m unbelievably busy right now. So, if you have information for me, I’d really appreciate getting to it.”