I read a story about One57 in a magazine at an airport in Dubai shortly after the plans for the building were announced. It was more of a puff piece than a serious article, and one of the claims it made was that the residences on the higher floors and the Park Hyatt hotel lower down would be completely physically separate. I remember thinking that sounded like bullshit. Management wouldn’t want an arrangement like that. The maintenance guys wouldn’t. And the emergency services would definitely be against it. The only people with an interest in spreading a perception like that were in sales and marketing, as they tried to extract every last dollar from the deep pockets of their privacy-conscious clientele. Back then I’d wondered if that view made me cynical. Now it was time to see if I was right.
I made my way across to Seventh Avenue, walked one block north to 58th Street, then looped around until I found the loading dock for the Park Hyatt. I climbed up onto the concrete slab, found a path through the storage area, and followed the sound of voices. They were coming from behind a door marked Auxiliary Plant Room. I knocked and a sudden silence descended. I tried the door. It opened with a piercing shriek from its hinges, and inside the room I saw four stocky guys in overalls playing cards around a table fashioned out of upturned milk crates and a Store to Let sign from a commercial real estate agent. There were a dozen carryout cups on the table, with lids. It could have been coffee in them, I thought. Or it could have been something else.
“Excuse me, fellas. Sorry to interrupt your game.” I pulled out a business card I’d pinched from Rooney’s office and handed it to the nearest of the guys. “I’m here to check the security door between the hotel and the apartments. Someone reported faulty contacts. It’s probably nothing, but a thing like that, I’ve got to check. No one wants an alarm going off in the middle of the night.”
The guy I’d given the card to glanced at my aluminum case and nodded. “You need the service elevator. Go right, right again, then all the way to the end of the corridor. You’ll see twenty-five buttons set out in a square. Two basements. Twenty-one guest floors. And two that are blank, like spares just filling the space. Hit the one on the right and hold it for ten seconds. Then it’ll take you where you need to go. Only, you’ll come out in a kind of closet. It’ll be locked. You’ll need a key to get through to the apartment side, so you’ll have to go see Pablo and sign one out. He’s our supervisor. But do us a favor? Don’t tell him you saw us.”
“Thanks for your help. And don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul. I won’t even need to disturb Pablo. I’ve got a kind of passkey that should do the job just fine.”
I once read in a different magazine that a house is a machine for living in. If that’s true, then Klinsman’s apartment was a machine for flaunting wealth in. I opened the main door—the alarm wasn’t armed and the lock took fifteen seconds to pick, which proves it’s true that there’s nothing more dangerous than thinking you’re safe—and stepped into a foyer that must have been thirty feet wide. Its floor and walls were finished in black-and-white marble, like zebra hides that had been petrified and polished. I continued through a squared-off arch into a living room—or great room, as the sales brochure probably called it—which was thirty feet deep by sixty wide. That was the whole width of that part of the building. It was like stepping into a designer furniture store. There were pieces by all the big guns—van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Noguchi—everywhere I looked, all jumbled in with no rational organization or division between living room and dining items. The space itself was completely open except for six massive circular pillars arranged evenly around the perimeter. There weren’t any walls—just full-height windows with narrow, delicate frames on all three sides. Central Park was laid out to the north, a deep green canyon carved out through the angular cliff-edged buildings. The Hudson flowed languidly past on the western side, and the East River balanced things up on the right. The room was so high up it was like looking at a model of the city, a sanitized facsimile, not the real thing. It was fascinating to gaze out for a few minutes, but I knew I could never live in a place like that. I didn’t see the point. If you want to live in New York, then live in New York. Not perched above it. A city should be a thing you participate in, not look down at through a triple layer of self-cleaning glass.
I left the living room, moved back across the foyer, and started down a corridor that took me past a giant kitchen with an attached breakfast room. Next I came to a bedroom, about fifteen feet square, not counting its full bath. My attention was drawn because it was completely dark. I went inside and switched on the light. The windows were covered with blackout blinds, and in place of a bed and a dresser and the normal bedroom things, this room was fitted out with a pair of floor-to-ceiling cabinets along the full length of the north and south walls. Each had glass doors, digital thermometers with displays built into the frames, and racks and racks of wine bottles were lined up inside. Each slot was numbered, and the bottles were lying with their corks facing out so I couldn’t see their labels. They wouldn’t have meant much to me anyway, but I’d scanned the file at the courthouse and seen the list of the ones that had been destroyed by the fire at Klinsman’s mansion. I wondered if I’d recognize any of the same kind here. And I wondered if any of them were worth more than an apartment, like the one I’d pretended to find.
The next door led to another bedroom of the same size, also dark, with an identical setup for storing wine. The next room, which was in the southwest corner, was laid out as a home office. Two whole sides were made of glass, with more stunning, sterile views. There was another giant column set just in from the angle of the windows. A large antique yew desk with a riot of ornate carving took up much of the north wall. An iMac with a giant screen was sitting on top of it, so I took a black box out of my case—the same kind Robson had used at Rooney’s office—and hooked it up. While it took care of copying everything on the computer, I searched the desk drawers. They were full of the normal kinds of clutter—pads of paper, pens stolen from hotel bedrooms, a letter opener, loose AA batteries rolling around, chargers for obsolete phones, operating instructions for a first-generation Blackberry—but nothing significant.
The wall above the desk was covered with framed pictures. There was a large one in the center with eighteen small and medium ones clustered around it, giving the impression that someone flung them toward the top corner of the room and they somehow got stuck in motion. The focus of the biggest one was a guy in fake fatigues with the name Klinsman taped to his chest, a hunting rifle in his hands, and an elephant at his side. It was lying on the ground with half its skull blown away. The guy was smiling. He was in most of the other pictures, too. Some with the dead elephant. Others, in a Jeep, or standing in the bush, or near a lake, or by some scenic vista. But regardless of these other shots, my eyes kept getting drawn back to the first image. Regardless of any Chinese government connection, and whatever lay behind the share-shorting deal, Klinsman and I were going to have a conversation before this thing was over.
There were two armchairs by the east wall, angled toward each other. They were covered with tobacco leather, heavily distressed, I’d guess artificially. A campaign chest with polished brass corner protectors and locks sat between them for use as a table. A large shell sat on it, apparently serving as an ashtray based on the way it was stained and the trace of cigar odor that lingered around it. There were framed images on this wall, too. Seven of them. They were all the same size, set out in two rows with four above and three below, and a blank space at the bottom right denying the symmetry. They were all graphs. Their titles were company names. Their vertical axes showed values in millions of dollars. Their horizontal axes, time. In all of them the values had declined, rapidly. Each one had a sticker applied inside the glass, at the top right where there was space above the plot line. They were star-shaped. The first two, starting at the top left, were gold and were embossed with #1. The next was a yellowy #3. Then a silver #2. The lower row started with another silver #2. Then there were two more gold #1s. It was very strange. The opposite of a glory wall. More of an homage to disaster. The financial equivalent of a chauffeur hanging photographs of wrecked limousines. I could see why Klinsman wouldn’t want to display them at his office. Why he wanted to display them at all was still a mystery. Maybe they were some kind of masochistic motivation device. Maybe he thought that being confronted by his failures would drive him to do better. Or maybe they were someone else’s failures—some bitter rival—and he had them there to gloat over. Either way, it was weird.
I moved on to the drawers in the wooden chest. The bottom two were empty, but in the top one I found a blue folder. There were two items inside it. The printout of a graph, with the same kind of drastic downhill profile as the framed ones but with dates from only a few weeks ago. And a star, embossed with a gold #1. Whoever’s performance he was immortalizing, it evidently hadn’t improved of late.
There was a subdued ping to my left. The process of copying Klinsman’s computer files was complete, so I dropped the file back in the drawer, collected my black box, and continued my recce. The next room, heading east now, was around fifteen feet by ten. It was lined with built-in wooden bookshelves. Made of alder, by the look of them. They were beautiful. The work of a true craftsman. I could inspect every detail, because there weren’t any books on them. There was no furniture of any other kind, either. Just a pallet in the center of the floor, made to support twelve narrow wooden crates. The kind that valuable paintings are transported in. There were numbers stenciled on the sides, but no indication of the artist or the work.
The final area—the toe of the boot-shaped floor plan—occupied about a third of the overall space. It was the master suite, with a door that could be locked to keep any family members or visitors at bay. It had two full baths on the right-hand side of its private corridor. On the left there was a walk-in closet. It had two doors, and the storage options suggested it had been laid out with his and hers sections in mind, but the room wasn’t segregated inside. One rail was in use at his end. Five suits were on it, hanging in monochrome order from black to pale gray. There were a dozen shirts, all white with monograms, and two pairs of khaki pants. One drawer contained underwear. Four pairs of shoes were jumbled on the floor. The rest of the rails, drawers, shelves, cupboards, nooks, and display cases—there seemed to be acres of places to hold things—were empty. The only other items in there were suitcases. There were two of them at the far end, leaning against the wall. They were full of women’s clothes, along with the musty smell that comes from being closed up for too long. I shut the cases again and was about to leave through the second door when it struck me—I was in a place about twenty-five feet long by twelve feet wide. That’s three hundred square feet. More than three times the net living area a soldier gets in a barracks. And it was a closet. Which wasn’t even being used.
The bedroom was at the end of the corridor. It was twenty feet by thirty, with floor-to-ceiling windows providing views to the north, the east, and the south. There was only one piece of furniture. A bed. It was circular, and had been set in the center of the room like an island. I sat on the edge and looked out. I could see shrunken versions of some of my favorite buildings dotted around the toylike city, way below. The Citicorp was there. Rockefeller Center. The shiny top of the Chrysler. The sight reminded me of all the times as a kid I’d go with my father to the observation deck at the Empire State Building. He’d quiz me on what had changed as visit by visit we watched the city evolve. The memories are still there, fused together like a time-lapse movie in my head. The perspective this place gave was very different, though. And not just because I was looking south, not north.
I gazed out until the shadows began to lengthen, then hauled myself up, grabbed my case, and started toward the exit. I was halfway there when, on the spur of the moment, I ducked into the first of the bedrooms that had been fitted out as a wine cellar. I opened the door to one of the cabinets. Picked out a bottle at random. It was a red. A Bourgogne, Domaine Leroy Richebourg. I checked the label and found its date: 1949. I googled it and saw that a bottle of that vintage had just sold for $6,000. A bargain, compared to the Chateaux Margaux. I put it in my case, and set the doctored Yellow Tail in its place in the cabinet. Then I retraced my steps out of the apartment, through the locked door, and down in the hotel’s service elevator. I found my way back to the auxiliary plant room. The same guys were inside, playing the same game.
“Thanks for your help, fellas.” I stopped just inside the door. “They did need a little adjustment, but those sensors are fine now. Shouldn’t hear any more about them for a long time. But before I go, I have something for you.” I opened my case and took out the bottle of Richebourg. “Enjoy. Just do me one favor. If Pablo catches you, don’t tell him it came from me.”
Robson was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor when I got home. His laptop was open in front of him, and he was surrounded by half a dozen uneven stacks of paper.
“I got us a printer.” Robson scowled. “You owe me.”
“Sure.” I reached for my wallet. “How much was it?”
“Not for buying it. For getting it set up. The damn thing’s possessed. I had to take it upstairs and threaten to throw it out of the window before it bent to my will.”
“That sounds tough. How about if I make it up to you with Chinese food?”
“That might work.”
“Do you fancy going out?”
“Not really.”
“Well, that’s good. Because I have carryout waiting for us in the kitchen.”
We ate our food quickly—old habits—while I outlined what I’d found in Klinsman’s apartment. Then we tossed the trash and headed back to the living room to confront Robson’s piles of papers.
“What have we got?” I was trying to make sense of his stacking scheme.
“Not much. Just a bunch of stuff about Rooney’s security business.” Robson pointed with his foot. “We’ve got accounts. Lists of clients. Lists of employees. Contractors. Suppliers. Sample proposals. Standard letters—follow-ups, price-rise notices, service reminders. It’s all totally boring. There’s nothing about Pardew, his file, why it was taken, returned, or what was removed from it. Nothing about Spangler. No mention of any JD. I’m just hoping this whole exercise doesn’t turn out to be a bust.”
“What about the locked files?”
“I haven’t got into them, yet. I hate to do it, but maybe it’s time to ask Harry.”
“I can do that. I’ll call him, set up a meeting for tomorrow. If he’s free.” I retrieved my case and took out the black box. “In the meantime, I have some files of my own to check. I want to see what secrets Klinsman is hiding on his home computer.”