Lily caught her reflection in the brass elevator doors of 11 William Street. Dark glasses despite the late-night hour, silk scarf wrapped around her head and tied under the chin, gray flannel trousers, midcalf raincoat, hands shoved in the pockets as if clutching a pistol. Greta Garbo as Ninotchka, she thought, briefly gratified, though in fact her right hand clutched the plastic card that Barnett had been issued for after-hours access to the office, but never mind.
After signing in with the night attendant, careful to write so illegibly that only a pharmacist could read the signature, she checked her watch: 11:45.
A single overhead light cast a milky fluorescence over the windowless reception area on the sixteenth floor. She slid the access card into a slot in a small gizmo beside a glass door and heard a dull click as the lock disengaged. She stepped inside for the second time in as many days, doubling the total number of visits she’d ever made to the office, having made a point of avoiding the grubby source of the funds that had financed the co-op, the house, the dresses, the vacations, the charitable donations, the household help, the everything else that had constituted her lifestyle.
Zelma’s office was vast—his desk seemed a tennis court away from the doorway—and furnished with the same generic antique reproductions with which Barnett had filled his office. Every horizontal surface was piled with paper: reports, magazines, newsletters, brochures, prospectuses. One of Barnett’s tech investments, she’d found out after his disappearance, had been a company that facilitated online document management. PaperFree.com, it was called. No wonder they’d lost every penny. If Zelma’s office was any indication, the paperless society was just another investor pipe dream, right up there with the perpetual-motion machine and male birth-control pill.
She began searching his desk, having no idea what exactly she was looking for. What she did know was that the Feds and Zelma were keeping her completely in the dark—as had Barnett, for that matter. She needed to know more about the charges against her husband, and since no one was telling, she’d been forced to go looking.
His desk yielded nothing of interest, so she turned to the long credenza behind it. The office was lit by the pale, blue-gray light from thousands of windows of the surrounding skyscrapers, giving her the uncomfortable feeling of being trapped inside a black-and-white TV. She felt at once nakedly vulnerable and reassuringly invisible, suspended in a dense, twinkling grid.
She was beginning to despair at finding anything relevant when she came upon a file labeled simply BJG. She immediately thought of the monograms on the dress shirts Barnett had made for him at Sulka. Their luggage had been similarly monogrammed, as had the towels in the guest bathroom, the small, tasteful sign at the end of the Southampton driveway, their formal stationery. Their entire joint existence had been branded BJG—why hadn’t that bothered her all those years?
The file contained few papers. There was a printout of an e-mail sent to all employees announcing Barnett’s “leave of absence.” She scanned several copies of letters from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office detailing the charges against Barnett. One line that caught her attention read “We launched our investigation in response to a request from senior Grantham, Wiley & Zelma management.” The only other papers of interest were a series of photocopies of canceled checks. These were company checks, made out to numbered accounts, in very large denominations: fifty thousand dollars, seventy thousand dollars, one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. The dates on the checks spanned six years. The backs of the checks had been photocopied as well, revealing that they had been deposited at a variety of banks in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Belize. The signature on the front of the checks was unmistakably Barnett’s.
Damn him. He’d signed those checks, dozens and dozens of them. And now he was doubtless trotting the globe, from Switzerland to Belize, visiting his accounts, while she slept on a pullout couch with a mattress manufactured by a sadist during the Civil War.
Later, with an envelope containing photocopies of the checks tucked under her left arm, she left the building and walked quickly along William Street toward the subway. The sidewalk was deserted; downtown Manhattan felt spooky at night, all gated stores and empty lobbies, as if abandoned not for the homeward commute but due to panic or plague. Two blocks from the subway station she thought she heard someone behind her, but when she turned there was no one.
A block later she heard footsteps moving closer. This time, when she turned around, there was someone—a tall, stocky man in a long dark coat with a wool cap pulled over his forehead. Nothing alarming about him except the way he seemed to look away from her, down and to his left, even as he seemed to be walking straight at her. She turned back and focused on the subway stop half a block ahead.
Suddenly he was right next to her, and then she felt him tugging at the envelope.
“Stop that!” she yelled. Still glancing down, making it all but impossible to identify him, he made another grab for the envelope. This time she cradled it to her chest, protecting it with both arms, and began running to the subway. She fully expected to feel a hand on her shoulders, if not a knife in her back. But she heard rapid footsteps heading south; she briefly turned and saw him running away. Just then a yellow cab appeared at the corner. She jumped into the street and flagged it down.
Inside, she caught her breath and tried to make sense of what had just happened. It seemed unlikely that a random pickpocket had targeted a manila envelope. So he had been following her, and wanted those check photocopies. Who was it?
At Fourteenth Street the taxi ran a red light and almost collided with a sanitation truck.
“Are you trying to get us killed?” Lily said as she strapped on her seat belt. Her second brush with death that night.
“You are kidding me? Please, sit back and enjoy the ride, okay? I will handle the driving.” The driver’s accent was formal Indian mixed with lilting Caribbean.
His weary, patronizing tone reminded her of Barnett whenever he’d deigned to respond to her inquires about the family finances. Sit back and enjoy the ride, okay?
The fare came to just over fifteen dollars. Though she had a twenty in her wallet, she gave him a hundred-dollar bill—a handout from Peggy—without apology and was surprised and disappointed when he made change without protest: four twenties and a five.
“I’d like a receipt with your medallion number,” she said. Not that she had any intention of reporting the driver to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. She just wanted to piss him off.
“You see, solid as a rock.”
Victor Ozeri rapped an enormous knuckle on a portion of the dining-room wall next to the kitchen door.
Rosemary heard the dull, architectural plan-destroying thump of flesh making contact with an unmovable object, in this case a support beam in her new apartment at 218 West End Avenue.
“No way we can move the door four inches. Not unless you want the building to come down on top of us.”
Ozeri grinned—inappropriately, she thought. Falling buildings were no longer a laughing matter, if they ever had been. He seemed to delight in delivering bad news—or was it rather that bad news was the only kind he dealt in? Did contractors ever call clients to tell them a job was progressing ahead of schedule and under budget? Were floor tiles ever easier to remove than anticipated, paint faster to dry than expected, appliances delivered early and with all necessary parts? Or were contractors like those saintly doctors you read about who dealt only with the terminally ill, delivering bad news as dispassionately as a weather forecast.
Ozeri was at least six-five and so barrel-chested and bandy-legged, he looked like he, and not the building, might topple over. His head was a geography of outsized features: huge, deep-set boulders for eyes beneath an unbroken thicket of eyebrow, a long, craggy arête of a nose jutting from a pale, undulating desert of hairless cheeks. Though he towered over most people, he positively dwarfed his workmen, most of them shortish South Americans who regarded him as if he were a large, frisky dog.
“But we were assured the door could be moved,” Rosemary said. The use of the passive voice disguised the fact that she couldn’t recall precisely who had done the assuring. Their architect? Ozeri? Or Guy himself, who had spent a good two hours one morning pounding, with proprietary zeal, on every wall in the apartment to determine which ones could be safely obliterated, until the downstairs neighbors had complained to the doorman?
Ozeri rapped the wall again. “You were mis-assured,” he said, his lips curling into a smug grin.
She retrieved the architect’s plans from the double stroller, which was parked just inside the front door, and in which the twins slept soundly. Back in the dining room, she unfurled the plans on the radiator.
“If we can’t move the door,” she said, “then we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here. And if we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here, it has to go there, which means the breakfast area—”
“Which means there is no breakfast area.”
For want of four inches, a breakfast area is lost—Rosemary leaned against the wall until she realized it was caked with plaster dust.
“Can’t you just…” She brushed off her sweater, but the plaster dust seemed to have bonded with the angora. “I don’t know, shave a few inches off the beam?”
He shook his head and rapped the offending section of the wall.
“Please stop doing that,” she said, rubbing her temples at the first dull throb of a headache. “What are we going to do?”
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth trilled from Ozeri’s waist. In one practiced motion he unholstered his cell phone and flipped it open. While he consoled what was clearly a deeply distressed client, she went into the kitchen and looked around. Without appliances and cabinets the room looked smaller than she remembered. How were they going to squeeze in a table and chairs? In one corner she saw a small patch of linoleum that had somehow eluded the workers’ efforts to strip the floor down to the original plywood under-floor. She counted five layers of linoleum and thought wistfully of her mother’s holiday au gratin potatoes. Along the ceiling, moldings had been ripped off, leaving angry scars. Capped-off pipes jutted pointlessly from the wall, wires hung limply, awaiting connections. Strange, that one had to completely destroy a room in order to improve it, the way a cult breaks down a target’s emotional stability, removing all positive memories and associations, in order to begin constructing the desired mental framework. Moving the door had been such a small thing next to the tectonic shifts their architect had proposed for the rest of the apartment. Entire walls had already been destroyed, and new ones would be constructed—of plaster, of course, not Sheetrock—with rounded corners, gently contoured recesses, and big swaths of opaque glass blocks here and there to channel sunlight to places in the apartment where nature and the building’s original layout had not heretofore allowed it to penetrate. (Guy had particularly liked this part of the plan, ingeniously illuminating the dark kitchen by what he probably viewed as redirecting the course of the solar system.) Floors would be re-parqueted to eliminate clues to the apartment’s earlier configuration, new moldings installed to seamlessly gird the new, more open spaces. With such grand transformations in the works, moving the kitchen door four inches to the left had been too small a detail to pay much attention to.
She speed-dialed Guy’s office on her cell phone and left the kitchen while it rang. But the open expanse of the apartment, where formerly there had been discrete and, she now felt, cozy rooms, left her feeling small and vulnerable, so she retreated back to the problematic but hearteningly four-walled kitchen and left Guy an urgent message.
“Look, we could push that wall out six inches,” Ozeri said as he reholstered his phone. “Or we could just rip it down and install an island, a California kitchen like the one I put in 12D.”
There was something unsettling about the way Ozeri breezily proposed destroying walls that had been in place for seventy-five years. Her education and professional life had been dedicated to appreciating the past, maintaining it.
“I’m guessing you never met a wall you didn’t want to tear down,” she said.
“They begin to quiver when I enter a room.”
“Doesn’t anyone ever ask to you leave things alone?”
His face darkened. “Where would I be without these old rabbit warrens?”
“These rabbit warrens worked just fine for a lot of people.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Tearing down walls is the new status symbol.”
“It is?”
“It’s a sign of wealth. If you’re strapped for space but you can’t afford to move to a bigger place, what do you do? You make one bedroom into two, you put up a wall! Say you need a home office but can’t afford an apartment with a library. You put up a wall in the living room to make two small, cramped rooms out of one. But if you’ve really arrived? Ah, now you buy a place with more rooms than you need and start combining them. Two small bedrooms become one big master suite. A guest room becomes a closet. A walk-in closet becomes a central-air-conditioning hub. Now we’re talking luxury.”
“But the architects who designed these old buildings, they had a reason for what they did.”
“And the people who are buying them today have their reasons, too.”
“I wonder if the people who move in after us will put the walls up again. Restoring apartments to their original floor plans will be the new luxury.”
“Speaking as a contractor, that would be just fine with me.”
He smiled broadly but Rosemary was vaguely discomfited by the thought of walls going up and down in Manhattan apartments like hemlines.
“We have cabinets arriving on Wednesday,” Ozeri said. “I need to know where they’re supposed to go.”
Rosemary promised to let him know once she and Guy had consulted their architect.