Chapter 9

Evan

Paranoia was a disease whose symptoms I didn’t recognize right away. Or maybe that’s the essence of it: nothing is as it seems. The world rearranges itself while you aren’t looking. You never know you’re suffering from it.

“Evan? Honey, are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Mom, I’m here.”

My parents often called to catch up after their workday ended. I’d stepped outside the office to take the call, pacing for warmth in the chilly November night. Until I noticed a dark figure sitting in the front seat of a car parked down the block. Just sitting there, unmoving. He’d been there for at least fifteen minutes. Watching me.

“I said, how was your weekend? It was Julia’s birthday, right?”

“Yeah. Um, it was good.”

“I hope you two did something nice.”

I hadn’t told them I’d gone to Las Vegas. It felt like a jinx, telling them even that, spreading any aspect of the story further than it needed to go. A family of tourists was walking down the block in an unwieldy amoeba, arguing about the best way to get back to their hotel. I ducked behind them, trying to blend in and get a better look at the figure in the car without his seeing me. We got closer and closer, and finally I could see clear through the window. It was a chauffeur, his cap pulled low over his forehead. Asleep.

“Hey!” One of the kids glared at me. I’d stepped on his heel.

“Shit. Sorry,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing, Mom. I should go.”

The same thing kept happening all week. The towel hanging crooked when I was sure I’d left it straight. My desk chair spinning in slow circles when I returned from lunch. And a hot flare of panic until I eventually realized the explanation. Julia wiping the toothpaste from her mouth in the morning, leaving the towel askew. Roger pushing past my chair on his way to the bathroom. Chan and his colleagues were businessmen, not thugs. They weren’t going to corner me and press a gun to my head in some dark alley. Whatever they did was going to be more subtle than that.

*  *  *

We got to the airport in Las Vegas on Sunday evening for the red-eye home. I stood in front of the departures board. The destination cities were organized alphabetically, and near the end of the list was Vancouver. The flight was leaving a few minutes after ours.

I could do it. I could afford the ticket. I had my passport with me as ID—my British Columbia license had expired a few months earlier—and I had my duffel bag in hand. I’d arrive near midnight, get a room in an airport motel. There was a Greyhound that headed east out of Vancouver in the morning. My hometown sat near the end of the line. I imagined walking into the grocery store, near where the bus dropped me off. Finding my parents in the back, doing inventory or reviewing the accounts at the end of the day. They would be surprised to see me, but maybe not that surprised. I could sleep in my own bed, with the familiar rush of wind through the tall pine trees outside. I could be doing all that tomorrow. It was right within my reach—a chance to run away and pretend this never happened.

“Evan?” Chuck emerged from the airline’s first-class lounge and caught me staring at the board. “They’re calling our flight. Come on, let’s go.”

*  *  *

“I’m sorry, hon,” Wanda said. It was Monday morning. I’d gone home to change after the flight, then went straight to Michael’s office. Wanda could probably tell that I was underslept and in desperate need of a shower. I hadn’t had time to wait for Julia to finish hers. “He’s completely jammed today. I can’t fit you in anywhere. You want me to get him a message?”

“You can just tell him that I’d like to see him. Need to see him.”

“What’s it regarding?”

I shook my head. “He’ll know.”

I tried again on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday. It was the same story. Door shut. Wanda shaking her head. It had been almost a full week since I’d found out, and the knowledge was starting to solidify within me. Telling Julia had done no good. I knew I owed her the truth—I couldn’t just flee to Canada, if only for that reason: the thought of telling her what I’d done over the phone or in an e-mail had made me too sick to go through with it—but she seemed utterly uninterested in it. The sting of her cold reaction only lasted for a few moments. So Julia was in a bitchy mood—I still had bigger problems. I decided to try to use this mess to my advantage. There was more than one way that I could have theoretically discovered the truth. Maybe Chan had let something slip, and I’d put two and two together. I’d show Michael that I knew exactly what he was up to. Show him that I wasn’t so easily duped after all.

Late on Friday afternoon, I tried one more time. Wanda sighed. “I’m sorry, Evan, but you’ll have to wait until Monday. Mr. Casey is about to leave for the weekend.”

“Who is that?” Michael strode into the hallway, pulling on his coat. “Oh, Evan. Wanda, you know you can always send Evan straight in.”

“That’s okay.” I stepped back. “I don’t want to interrupt.”

“I have an appointment, but we can talk along the way. That’ll be better, in fact. Get your coat and meet me at the elevator.”

Downstairs, Michael and I climbed into the back of a town car idling by the curb. It sped off, heading west. “Just give me another minute,” Michael said, his thumbs punching the keys of his BlackBerry. Then he glanced up, saw the look on my face, and grinned unnervingly. “Relax, Evan. This is going to be fun.”

  

The car came to a stop.

“My favorite place in the city,” Michael said, climbing out. We were out past the wasteland of 11th Avenue, in front of a nondescript building. The elegant silver lettering above the door was so discreet that you had to know what to look for.

“Mr. Casey,” a voice boomed as we walked inside. A man in a dark green suit shook Michael’s hand. He had slicked-back hair, a signet ring on his pinkie, a big barrel chest, and spindly legs. Like a toad with a very good personal shopper. “We’re so glad you could make it in this evening.”

“Bruno, this is one of my associates, Evan Peck.”

He extended a hand. Soft, pink, recently moisturized. “Bruno Bernacchi. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I glanced around the room. The cars gleamed under the bright lighting like sleeping animals. Maserati of Manhattan. It was empty except for the three of us. Bruno noticed me looking. He had a quick, darting gaze that didn’t miss a thing.

“We normally close at five o’clock,” Bruno said to me in a conspiratorial tone. “But we’re always open for Mr. Casey. One of our very best customers.”

“Your message said it was delivered today?”

“Just this afternoon. It’s the newest model, a beauty. They aren’t officially available until next year. There’s a waiting list already, but you’re at the top of the list, of course, Mr. Casey.”

“I’d like to take it for a test drive.”

“Of course. I have in mind a route through Westchester. Wait until you see how this one handles the curves.”

“Actually, I’d like to take Evan along. This is the only time I can give him all week. So the two of us need to talk during the drive—multitask, you know what I mean?”

Bruno’s smile wilted. His pink hands fluttered, his fingertips pressed together.

“I know you have your rules,” Michael said. “But Bruno. I’ve given you a lot of business over the years. Surely we can take it out for a spin.”

I could see the calculation ricocheting through Bruno’s eyes. Michael was smiling, but he was dead serious. A man whose wishes were dangerous to deny.

“You’ll be here when we get back?” Michael said through the open window on the driver’s side. It was a two-seater sports car, as precise and elegant in design as a piece of sculpture. I was in the passenger seat. For the first time, I understood why people liked to describe an engine as purring. The vibration felt like a warm heartbeat. “We’ll be a few hours.”

Bruno started to open his mouth, then swallowed. He looked severely pained, but he nodded. “Of course, Mr. Casey. I’ll be here.”

“Ready?” Michael said after he’d rolled the window up. “Don’t forget to buckle up.”

  

We drove in silence for a long while up the West Side Highway.

“I’m going to take us over the bridge,” Michael finally said. He glanced over his shoulder, pulling into the right lane and then onto the exit for the George Washington Bridge. “You can’t really get a feel for it in the city. What do you think so far?”

“It’s…uh, nice.” Nice? That was a stupid thing to say. But I was silently panicking, and it was making me dumb. We were headed to New Jersey. The Pine Barrens. Michael was taking me out there to kill me—or worse. It was insane, but it was all I could think.

“Wait until you see it on the open road.”

Friday evening, and the bridge was predictably jammed. Michael answered e-mails on his BlackBerry, glancing up whenever the traffic inched forward. I stared out the window, frantic but numb. Trapped. It was winter dark outside, and the caramel leather interior of the car was lit with a golden glow. What was I going to do, get out of the car and make a run for it? That seemed like the stupidest option of all.

Finally we made it off the bridge and into New Jersey. Michael turned onto the Palisades Parkway. There was a physical relief when we accelerated onto the highway, the engine finally flexing its muscles, opening up the way it was intended to.

“So Evan,” Michael said. “I have good news. We’re going live with the WestCorp deal.”

“That’s—that’s great.”

“I’ve reallocated the fund’s capital, and I’m doubling our position on WestCorp. This is going to be one for the books.”

He looked at me. The speedometer was steadily climbing. He was weaving from lane to lane without signaling, and I felt my pulse accelerating along with the car. “You should be proud, Evan,” Michael said. I wished he would look at the road. “It’s extremely rare to work on a deal like this. At any point in your career. You’ve done a stellar job. The fact that you’re so young only makes it more impressive.”

He glanced ahead. “That’s our exit,” he said. “Next one.”

The sign said we were entering Alpine, New Jersey. We swung around the bending off-ramp, the car handling the curves as beautifully as Bruno had promised. The busy highway vanished, and moments later we were driving down quiet streets. There were high, manicured hedges and towering old trees, wrought-iron gates at the end of every driveway. You couldn’t even see the houses. These were rich people. I wondered if this was where Michael lived.

We came to a dead end, a cul-de-sac. Michael stopped the car in front of a gate, one even higher and grander than the others we’d passed. “We’re here,” he said, turning off the engine. “Get out of the car.”

My legs were shaking as I climbed out. Michael stood in front of the gate, hands in his pockets. It was dark—cloudy, no moon, no streetlights—but Michael seemed to know what he was looking at. I stood next to him, and after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, it materialized. The shape of a house in the distance, down the long driveway.

“A few years ago,” Michael said, “my wife told me she was tired of the city. She was sick of all the noise, the honking, the traffic. She wanted a yard. She wanted to be able to go outside in the morning and look at trees and flowers. She said she missed having nature around her.”

He shook his head. “I grew up on a farm. You knew that, right? In the middle of South Dakota. You want nature? That’s all there is out there. I had to get up every morning at dawn. Milking the cows, shoveling manure, waist-deep in shit before the sun came up. And after school, there was more. There was always more. It was mud and dirt and hay and shit everywhere. This”—he gestured at the boxy hedges and clipped grass—“isn’t nature. Not to me.”

“But my wife…” He laughed, shook his head again. “My wife grew up in the suburbs. This is practically the wilderness to her. Me, I like the city. I like taxis and elevators and restaurants. But she wanted to move. She said she wasn’t going to raise our kids in some apartment. So we bought this place a few years ago. Renovated, fixed it up, redid the yard. You want to see it?”

It took me a second to realize the question wasn’t rhetorical. “Oh, um, sure,” I said.

Michael punched a four-digit code into the keypad next to the gate. A moment later, it opened with a mechanical screech. He’d left the keys in the Maserati, in the cul-de-sac. I guess the chances of it getting stolen were low in this neighborhood. People here already had their own fancy sports cars. Michael kept talking.

“When she first raised the issue, I shut it down. I told her no: it’s my money, I’m going to spend it the way I want. And we have a penthouse, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like the kid would be deprived. But she pushed and she pushed. And then I realized—it’s like when you have something and it doesn’t mean too much to you. But it means a lot to the other person. It means an enormous amount to them. And if you give it to them, maybe it’s a little sacrifice for you, but they are going to owe you for the rest of your life. You let them have their way now, and you’ll have the upper hand on everything else. Leverage, right? So I told my wife okay. Let’s pick out a house.”

We were finally there. The house was enormous: a circular driveway with a fountain in the middle, a grand entrance flanked by tall columns. It looked like one of the old French castles that Julia and I saw during our summer in Europe—the same kind of expensive-looking stonework and old-fashioned architecture. But the fountain in the driveway was empty and dry. Every window in the house was dark.

“That’s the thing, Evan.” Michael turned to face me. “Sometimes you have to do things in life that you don’t really want to do. But you have to bear in mind that there’s a bigger picture. Do you understand what I mean?”

I was newly aware of how quiet it was. How we hadn’t seen a single person since we exited the highway. At least the dark concealed the nervous swallow in my throat. But if Michael was going to do something to me, I realized, he would have done it by then. “Yes,” I said. “I think I do.”

He gestured at me to follow him down a path around the side of the house, which opened out to the backyard. Actually, it wasn’t a backyard. It was more like the grounds of a country club: tennis courts, a pool, terraced stone patios. The yard was immaculate, but it was obvious that no one was living there. There should have been some sign of life. A chair on the patio, a toy or a ball left in the middle of the lawn. A smudge on the windowpane from a curious hand pressed against it. Anything.

“What do you think of it?”

“It’s really nice.”

“I never even spent a single night out here. My wife didn’t, either. It was a good thing we didn’t sell our place in the city.”

“Why didn’t you move in?”

He shrugged. Michael looked human-size, for the first time, like an ordinary man. One whose life contained mistakes, maybe even regret. “Like I said. She wanted to live out here to raise our kids. When that didn’t materialize, we didn’t have any reason.”

He stared at the back of the house. A long moment passed. The wind rustled the nearly bare branches of the trees. It felt like we were a thousand miles from Manhattan. Then Michael smiled that disturbing grin of his. “Well, I got my way in the end.”

As we skirted the side of the house, back toward the driveway, I slowed my pace to look through one of the windows. Gradually the room came into focus, like a darkened fishbowl. It was completely empty. The walls blank, the floor bare and uncovered. There was one lonely drop cloth in the corner of the room. A ladder and a bucket of paint. It looked like the job had been abandoned halfway through. Like whoever it was couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  

Back at the car, I moved toward the passenger side. Michael put his hand on my shoulder.

“Why don’t you take over for a while?” he said. “You ever driven a Maserati?”

This was the old Michael, back again. The Michael whose orders you obeyed without question. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. “Come on, Peck. It’ll be fun. You don’t get to do this every day.”

My knees were shaking again as I walked to the driver’s side. I turned the key in the ignition, and I remembered that my driver’s license had expired. Test-driving a car like this without a license seemed idiotic. I wondered if I should tell Michael. But he interpreted my pause as something else.

“You do know how to drive stick, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s go. Take us back the way we came.”

I’d only driven stick in my parents’ old truck, the one they used when our newer car was in the shop. This was nothing like that. But soon enough, I got the hang of it. All you needed was a light touch. Not to control the car but to meld with it. Feel the acceleration and the curves within your own body. Trust that it was going to be okay. From the corner of my eye, I saw Michael smiling.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“They’re addictive. I have two already. Never get the chance to drive them. Just don’t have the time. But I felt like we needed to celebrate. It’s been a big couple of weeks. Take a right up here. We want to head back to the bridge.”

I nodded.

“So Wanda said you were trying to get an appointment all week. What did you want to talk to me about?”

I was trying to merge onto the southbound Palisades Parkway, glancing over my shoulder for an opening. It was one thing driving the Maserati on the empty streets of Alpine, New Jersey. It was another driving it in thick highway traffic. A single scratch on this car would probably send me into bankruptcy. I hadn’t really been listening. “I’m sorry, Michael. What did you say?”

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Oh.” The steering wheel went slick under my palms. “The, um. I wanted to talk to you about the Las Vegas trip.”

“What about it?”

The traffic was even heavier than it had been an hour earlier, coming out. I could feel the Maserati bucking underneath me, growling at the speed I was forcing it to hold to. Part of me wanted to drop this, move on. But I couldn’t. I had to do it, now or never. I took a deep breath. “Well, when I delivered the papers—”

“Yes, Chan was very happy with them.”

“Well, as I was about to leave, he told me that he wanted to stay in touch with me. Chan’s daughter was there, too, translating for us. She’s applying to colleges in the fall. I think they want my help with it. They know I went to Yale.”

Michael laughed. “Typical. Greedy bastards.”

“I guess I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do. Or what they’re expecting me to do. I don’t have connections like that.”

“Of course you don’t. You can’t buy your way into Harvard or Yale.”

I felt a surge of relief. “Exactly.”

“Listen, Evan. These guys think everything has a price tag. They want more, more, more. We’ve held up our end of the bargain. It’s done. Anything else is icing on the cake, and they’ll have to pay extra for that. So Chan’s daughter will apply next year. By that point, this deal will be wrapped up. There won’t be anything they can do.”

I was processing. “So you want me to—”

“No. Evan. I don’t want you to do anything. I’m not asking you to do anything. Do you understand? You handle this as you see fit. Right?”

A low-riding Camaro swerved in front of me. I slammed on the brakes.

“Jesus,” Michael said. “Be careful.”

I could feel the sweat gathering between my shoulders.

“Listen,” he said. “Evan. You know how to play this game. That’s one of the reasons I hired you. You’ve got the right instincts. You’re sharp. You see things clearly. I don’t have to tell you what to do. You were made to do this kind of work. And there’s no higher compliment than that.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence, down the parkway, back across the George Washington Bridge. I thought about what Michael was saying. The confidence he’d had in me all along. He’d said as much to Brad that night in Las Vegas. Ambitious. A hard worker. Perfect for this project. He had no reason to lie to Brad, no way of knowing I was listening. He was telling the truth that night. Michael really did see something in me. And maybe it was something that I was only just starting to see in myself.

  

We drove down the West Side Highway, approaching midtown. The sign for West 54th Street loomed in the distance. I signaled and started to move into the left lane.

“No,” Michael said. “Keep going.”

“Isn’t the dealer on Fifty-Fourth Street?”

“You’re going to drop me off downtown first. Take it to West Twelfth Street.”

Michael was back on his BlackBerry, squinting at the screen and responding to e-mails. As we passed the Lincoln Tunnel, his phone rang.

“Babe,” he answered. “Yes. Yes. I’m almost there. Ten minutes, okay?”

He had me take West 12th to Bleecker, then hang a right and loop down to West 11th. Finally, on a street lined with town houses and trees, Michael had me pull over.

“Up there, on the right,” he said. “The house with the green door.”

Before he climbed out of the car, he leaned over and pressed on the horn. The sound blared through the quiet. Michael paused outside the car, one hand on the door, then ducked through the frame to look at me. “Good talk, Evan,” he said. “See you on Monday.” The door closed with a satisfying thump.

The door of the town house swung open. A figure, silhouetted by the light from the front hall, moved out on the stoop. She was petite and curvy, with wavy hair. Brown hair. I remembered the pictures of his wife from his office: a cool blonde, sleek and slender. Michael kissed this other woman, reaching down to grab her ass. She smiled and swatted his hand away, a joke they shared. Then they stepped inside and closed the door.