The Messenger (8 page)

“Nelson Mandela,” the young man says straightaway.

“Really?”

“That’s right, Mandela …” Some of the other guys come by and knock on the glass and laugh at him. After a dozen stupid questions it’s over and he puts his arm around her and smiles while Sharee takes their picture with Daria’s camera. Then he ducks back out to make some serious money, his real hobby.

“That was good,” says Sharee.

“He’s going to get a lot of Italian girlfriends emailing him now,” Daria says. “Okay, so … what about an eligible bachelor who is maybe just a little bit older? You know, we give these girls hope. You might marry the first one, and if you do he’ll turn out like this second guy. He’s going to be successful, be a good father, make lots of money, still hot …”

“The whole fantasy, huh?” says Sharee.

“It’s exciting, but it’s a happy life.”

“We should hook her up with Maliya over at NASDAQ,” says Candace.

“Yeah, she knows all the business news people.”

“I don’t want to impose, but it’s only five minutes. It might be fun?”

“Oh, they’d be happy for the break. And you could interview some women too, show them some positive role models,” Sharee says, as if she were the first person on the globe to think of such a thing.

“That’s a very good idea,” Daria says, and squeezes her arm.

“We do all the work anyway.…”

His name is Burke, and he’s in his thirties. Used to women, you can tell. Confident and dark. Good hair, in shape, but maybe wound a little tightly, like some soldiers she has seen.

He likes to laugh over dinner, a kind of a happy-hour meal—burgers and nachos and beer. There are three or four others from NASDAQ, all friends, and they tease her about Italy and tell her all about MSNBC and various celebrities from business television they have met. Mixed in are behind-the-scenes horror stories meant to impress her, a foreigner, not even a business reporter, who doesn’t understand the first thing about the exchanges. She’s totally safe and they have fun showing off for her. One of Maliya’s friends is Urjal, who’s a media specialist and prods her for more information on
Klic!
’s corporate parentage. Does he suspect something or is he just researching? She shrugs and laughs, spreads out her vowels, talks faster than anyone else, becomes the life of the party, and can’t help but notice that everybody is happy to see her getting along so well with Burke.

Will alcohol help or hurt the antidote she has been given? she wonders.

Later, in the cab back to the hotel, Burke is happy with what is shaping up to be an easy conquest. He sees her craning her neck at the window. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” he says, looking into her eyes.

All she has to do is smile, she is thinking.

A few more blocks and they are at the Grand International. In the elevator she lets him kiss her, and he is fumbling at her dress by the time they get through the door into her room. He is laughing and joking about how fast everything is going. She doesn’t even pull the curtains, pushes his head down between her legs and lets him
work for it. He doesn’t mind at all, and as he is climbing up atop of her he gentlemanly asks about a condom.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Don’t worry about anything.”

It is over soon, too soon really, for her to relax and remember Ali, and beautiful Tété, and Leonardo’s laugh.… Those three, that’s all. That’s her entire database of love. Unexpected knowledge accumulated along the way as she filled out her pretend identity. With Burke it is fast and thrilling, and crazy because they are strangers, and when it’s done they lie there, panting, her clothes only half off, and him still in his shirt and socks.

“I guess you have to go?” she says to him.

“No, no …”

“If you have to go, I’ll understand. I have to work in the morning, too.”

He turns and looks at her across the bed. He frowns a little, then smiles. “Okay, sure. You’re probably right.”

She watches him get up, find his pants, tuck himself in. The beautiful tie that gets loosely knotted around his neck. “Can I call you?” he says.

“Sure, but I’m going to be working the whole time.”

“I hope I didn’t disappoint you.”

“Not at all,” she says. “I like American men.”

W
aking up in the night, a little sweaty, a little lost, probably from the alcohol, probably from the shock of being somewhere utterly strange and bizarre, she sees by the bedside clock that it’s almost five-thirty. She orders a minimalist breakfast from room service, then waits, staring out into the foggy blue light of dawn. She feels fine more or less. Jet-lagged, a little hungover, a little sore from Burke, but she asked for it.

But something has clicked in her dreams. She realizes that she has been making bad tactical decisions, just buzzing off in the wrong direction. Yes, she could destroy America one Burke at a time, or she could try to think logically. For a moment there are tears in her eyes. Fear, she decides. She is scared. Anyone would be. Look at what she is trying to do—it’s immense. Look at the finality of what she has already done. She will be dead soon herself. As dead as Burke or any of the others she’s touched. The whole world, going down the toilet together, martyrs, infidels, rich, poor, black, white, and brown—all washed away.

In the mirror she examines herself for signs of disease. Nothing.

She paces out into the room, stands naked by the windows, looking down onto the empty street. Someone could see her now, if
they were only watching. Someone with a sophisticated spy camera that could see in low light.

There is the sound of the room service, and she puts on her robe, much too large for her, and goes to get her breakfast. Powered up with a chocolate croissant and a double espresso, she begins to get a little clarity. From the telephone directory and by Googling, she develops today’s targets.

Should she go for the FBI, for the mayor’s office, for City Hall?

Go for it. And maybe go for the hospitals today too, she thinks. Nothing throws off a civilization like thousands of dying people pounding on the emergency room entrance doors. Might as well get them off to a good start.

Once outside it’s the names she sees. Logos are everywhere, on walls, the sides of trucks, splayed out across the gigantic shopwindows. Of course, she’s seen the garish European version, but this is … everywhere. So thoroughly embedded into the fabric of Manhattan daily life that for those who reside in this fantastic hellhole it has become invisible—just as a fish cannot see water. She gawks like a tourist. It is, after all, her role. Enjoy it, enjoy it …

She has two credit cards, one from
Klic!
and one in her own name, both handed to her by Youssef as she was leaving the Adlon. With them she withdraws a thousand dollars and begins doling out twenties to cabdrivers as she crisscrosses the city.

At each stop, the same routine. Go in, ask a question. Ask to see someone who might help her obtain … it can be anything, a job application, an interview, a bit more information than the receptionist can provide. If possible, shake hands politely. Hand over one of her dwindling supply of
Klic!
business cards.

The clerks and lower-level assistants that she encounters take her in their stride. “Crazy people come through here all the time,” one young assistant with rebellious blue hair tells her. She gains access to waiting rooms, bathrooms, and elevators, elevators, elevators. In the city’s bloodstream now, she thinks.

A great many people love Italy, it turns out. A significant percentage
are descended from Italian immigrants and jump at the chance to try out some half-remembered childhood phrases on her, everyone groping for their vocabulary, and apologizing for their accents.

After only a few stops, she discovers the famous New York brusque attitude, and takes immediate pleasure in killing the grouches and gatekeepers—human T-cells, little better than slime—who run on a fuel of envy and petty jealousy, and who only exist to slow her down. She always hands them a card. When she is alone in an elevator, she takes some remainders and first breathes on them, then licks them in the hope of increasing their lethality. These cards are reserved for the worst of the species.

She makes a note to shop for better shoes, and stops for lunch at a funky, jam-packed restaurant on Forty-fourth near the Avenue of the Americas. Over a plate piled with huge portions of tasteless greasy food, she studies her handy tourist map, trying to figure out if she is anywhere close to striking the Port Authority, which sounds like the most important thing around, but she discovers that she is ten blocks from Greeley Square and thus close to Macy’s.

Soon she is wandering through the gigantic store, letting her fingers trail over fabrics, plastics, and leathers. She makes a pretense of checking the prices, smiles and asks for help.

By then she’s sick of the new shoes she’s worn since Berlin, and lets a pair of shopgirls put them in a bag while she slips on a fabulous pair of Dr. Martens ankle boots. Deciding to abandon her assault on the Port Authority, she takes a short cab ride down to Twenty-third Street and over to Fifth Avenue near the Flatiron Building, pleasing the driver with a crisp twenty. She picks up a pair of tights, a short dark skirt, and a big loose sweater with a hood from the Gap. She decides to change, twirls in the mirror and assesses herself—a spoiled art student spending plenty of Daddy’s money. She’d like a haircut, but that’s against the rules. She fishes in her bag, and finds the perfume they gave her back in Berlin.… It is only the size of a lipstick. She turns it over and over in her hands, admires the way the light plays over the facets.

And then gives herself a spritz.

On the corner a business center is advertised, and she has them run up another five hundred
Klic!
business cards. She wanders the neighborhood until she can pick up the cards, pile into a cab, and drop everything off back at the Grand. Then goes out and does it all over again.

By using her time profitably in the waiting rooms of the corporate headquarters, she has learned many things about the way the American capitalist monster functions. At this moment she is sitting in the offices of McCann Worldgroup, looking around, marveling at the way her mind is changing after only two days in America. Liberating.

Maybe it is a land of liberty, of free thinking. Or maybe she’s just growing up. First of all, she has ceased to blame it all on the Jews—the Jakob Schiffs, and the Rothschilds, the Loebs, the Kleins … Greed is universal, and times have changed. After all, the richest man in the world is a Mexican. No, she has discovered the new truth about capitalism—it does not discriminate, except against the poor. Race and nationality mean nothing—all it takes to get in the door is cash, whether from Bahrain or Buenos Aires.

So, it’s not the Jews, or more correctly, not
only
the Jews. Neither is it the gangsters, or the robber barons like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan. They’ve been left in the dust by vast corporations with no seeming purpose at all, conglomerates who have their filthy fingers in every imaginable pie. The police, the teachers, and the armies of entire governments are in their thrall. Still, her more liberal thinking hasn’t stopped her from visiting Proskauer Rose, the United Jewish Communities, and the World Bank offices—little whirlwind assaults on old dragons in their lairs.

She is starting to understand the allure of the American dream—it’s the idea of a supposedly level playing field. Once seen, it’s everywhere. Peddled at every opportunity. It’s what they recruit you with; black, white, brown, gay, or straight, you can do it too! It’s the carrot on the stick dragging second-generation immigrants into business
schools and chaining them to decades of debt. But even the business magazines admit that with the high cost of education, the promise of success is being denied to a growing percentile of the lower class.

Of course, facts don’t really get in the way; with so few dreams in its arsenal, this particular capitalist whimsy lives on—anyone with grit, determination, and a willingness to get their hands dirty can pull themselves up from the very bottom of the pyramid. And then, once you’ve gotten to the top, it’s time to give back. This scenario is worshiped in thousands of ways, commemorated in Rockefeller Center, in the Guggenheim, in the Brill Building, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Koch Theater, the Ronald McDonald House, and the Harvey Milk High School.
This bench is dedicated in memory of our loving mother, from Grace, Billy, and Chad
. The dead determine where you sit.

She plays anthropologist as she wanders along, trying to find any remnant of the original island of Manhattan. Of course there is nothing left of the indigenous peoples … tricked, starved, or murdered off their land by the tightfisted Dutch in the middle of their turn as masters of the earth. Then, as European fortunes went, so went the Neue World. The Dutch gave way to the English, and the English fell to their rebellious offspring. Colonizers giving way to robber barons, captains of industry giving way to international capital. Money flying through the air at light speed. The belly of the beast.

She works her way down her list, visiting offices, asking if there are any cute guys she can talk to, being told to wait, or bounced to whoever handles their marketing. By the afternoon she has reduced it to a formula. She grabs an espresso at the Cinema Brasserie and then walks up to Forty-sixth Street into the Barnes & Noble store and wanders through the sections, admiring the universe of books they have there.

It’s easy, being an arrow.

Even in New York, Americans are too polite, she thinks. She asks to use restrooms, she fills out forms, she shakes hands. She
checks her balance at the ATM. She shops. She runs her hands down the banisters, inquires of the security personnel if there is a place to smoke. She touches all the faucets in the restroom, the toilet paper, all the latches on all the doors, the lever on the soap machine.

A helpful janitor tells her where the closest fire station is. He even stands out in front of the consulate of the Philippines and points it out for her.