Graveland: A Novel Read online

3

  IF ALICE HARVILL HOLLAND WEREN’T ICED RIGHT NOW ON TRIBURBAZINE, this dinner would be a lot less bearable than it is. She hasn’t been able to eat, though. Not properly, anyway. She’s had a few morsels, a pickled beet, some of the smoked yucca, a fried plantain, but that’s all. And it’s such a shame, because the food here at Bra is usually so exquisite. She can’t drink, either. With Triburbazine you absolutely can’t drink.

  Unless, of course, that is, you’d prefer to. Before slipping into a coma.

  And a nice one … deep, thick, lasting.

  To sleep, perchance to dream.

  She picks up her Veen.

  But you make your choices.

  She looks over at Bob. He’s talking nonstop, and has been since this morning when the news broke. Jeff Gale this, Jeff Gale that and Jeff Gale the goddamn other thing.

  She knows it’s all very shocking, but right now “shocking” is a bizarrely relative term.

  The other two—their guests, the Spellmans—are happy to let the great Bob Holland dominate the conversation. Toby Spellman is a wuss in any case, and Lynn is clearly afraid of Alice, won’t even look at her.

  So the dynamic at the table isn’t great.

  “He was going to turn things around for Northwood,” Bob is saying, “no doubt about it, it was just a question of time.” He forks a roasted scallop into his mouth and chews, impatient to go on talking. “He’d gotten all of that SEC shit behind him, the hearings were over, and most of the MUI documentation had been shredded. Far as I could see it was a clean slate going forward.” He shakes his head. “Absolutely tragic.”

  Alice glances at Lynn. She’s a brittle creature, pretty in a grotesque sort of way. Trying too hard, and yet not trying hard enough. What is she, thirty-six, thirty-seven? Wait till she hits fifty. If she makes it that far.

  Alice is fifty-two.

  Unbidden, an image floats into her mind of Lynn stretched out naked on a marble slab, writhing, all pale and skinny. It’s not a sexual image. God forbid. More like something cold and scientific, a specimen, a bacterium wriggling in a petri dish.

  She exhales loudly.

  Bob is still talking.

  More food arrives.

  A cigarette would be nice at this point. Pity she doesn’t smoke.

  “Yeah, but listen, Toby, it’s simple.” Bob raises an index finger. “Profit outsourcing, that’s the key to this thing, always has been. Low overseas tax rates…”

  And on it goes.

  Pork belly, snapper, mango, coffee.

  People gliding past, greetings from across the room, fluttering fingers, flushed faces. Music that’s barely identifiable as music, more like some chilly blue vapor rippling down her spine.

  Without warning, Lynn turns to look at her, wide-eyed, smile sharp as a blade.

  “Alice,” she says softly, “are you okay?”

  Oh yes.

  Alice nodding it, oh yes, oh yes.

  Eventually, the dinner draws to a close. They get up to leave, are given their coats, shuffle out onto the broad, breezy expanse of Columbus Avenue. And here, standing under the sidewalk canopy, waiting for their car to pull up, and gazing south over a bobbing river of yellow cabs to an elegant redbrick apartment building on the other side of the avenue, Alice Harvill Holland comes to a curious realization. Dr. Engdahl prescribed her the Triburbazine for anxiety and nausea, both of which she’s been suffering from lately, and on what has seemed like an industrial scale—but it’s as if he knew she’d need something even stronger, somehow knew she’d need more protection … the pharmaceutical equivalent, say, of Kevlar, or a plutonium suit, or just plain cotton wool, but miles and miles of it, wrapped around her, endlessly, soundlessly, layer after layer after layer.

  But why? For what?

  For this.

  She sees it all in slow motion, and doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t feel her heart rate increase by a single beat, doesn’t flinch. The two figures rush forward, one raising a gloved hand and pointing it at her husband’s head, the other efficiently elbowing Toby Spellman in the abdomen and pushing him to the ground.

  Lynn’s hysterical scream and the gunshot come in the same moment. The scream lasts a good bit longer, though—enough to soundtrack the violent sideways lurch of Bob’s head, the ripping apart of his face, his backward collapse onto the sidewalk and the rapid retreat down the block, through the panicking, parting crowds, of the two …

  The two … what’s the word?

  Perps.

  Yes, that’s it.

  She looks around, speckles of blood everywhere now, on the sidewalk, on her own dress, even on Lynn’s contorted face, a part of Alice wondering if some of this isn’t maybe more than blood, if it isn’t lumpier, gristlier, if some of this isn’t, in fact, tissue from Bob’s brain.

  And the man had a serious brain. When they met, over twelve years ago, he was day-trading in his shorts from the apartment he’d lived in with his first wife—who left him because he was day-trading, and to the exclusion of all else. It took him a few years, but he made over twenty million dollars at it, partnering up with some equity guys and then starting his own shop.

  The rest is history.

  They didn’t call him Exponential Bob for nothing.

  But here, tonight, that’s all over. His second wife gazes out from under the canopy of a restaurant on Columbus Avenue, and it’s quite a scene … Bob dead on the sidewalk, Toby Spellman crouched down next to him, Lynn Spellman having a sort of epileptic fit while still standing … Alice herself frozen, like a model, posing for a photo long after the photographer has gone.

  All around her now the nighttime colors and textures of the city are stretching, and in every direction, like pizza dough or chewing gum. There are sirens, too, rising, piercing, closing in. But a few moments later, when the police arrive, something happens. The adrenaline in Alice’s body kicks in, digs in, starts going to work on what’s left of the Triburbazine.

  “I’m Detective Brogan,” she hears a voice saying. “With the NYPD.”

  She turns and looks into the man’s pasty Irish face.

  “I understand this is your husband,” he says.

  She nods.

  “Can you tell me his name, who he is?”

  “Yes.” She stares down at the body. “His name is Bob Holland.” She starts to shake at last, and uncontrollably, her hands, her arms, even her voice. “He works on Wall Street. He runs a … a hedge fund, Chambers Capital Management.”

  TWO

  The photo dates from sometime in the summer of 1972 and shows Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Adnan Khashoggi, and a 43-year-old James Vaughan on a yacht in Key Biscayne, Florida. Jacqueline Prescott, who later went on to work for Vaughan, can be seen in the background holding a cocktail shaker.

  —House of Vaughan (p. 59)

  4

  MOST MORNINGS, by the time he gets to the office, Craig Howley has already done about two hours’ work. On Mondays, it’s more likely to be three. This is because James Vaughan insists on kickstarting the week with an 8 A.M. meeting of senior investment and consulting staff to review all Oberon deals either in play or on the table. Howley will get up at five, therefore, and pore over any relevant files or documentation, and continue doing so through breakfast and in the back of the car on the way to the office. He believes it’s essential to get ahead of any perceived curve. Vaughan himself seems able to pull this off instinctively, without any apparent effort—certainly without having to get up at 5:00 A.M. and probably without even having to look at a single quarterly report. Which is kind of annoying. But it’s part of his thing, of what makes him the great Jimmy Vaughan.

  On his way up in the elevator, Howley anticipates the usual sniping and goading that goes on at these meetings, as different people seek to impress Vaughan by championing or attacking this or that deal. He also anticipates a lot of speculation, some of it informed, most of it hopelessly uninformed, about what happened over the weekend. At first, the general perception—the stor
y, if you will—was that the Jeff Gale killing in Central Park on Saturday morning was an isolated incident. It was a random shooting, and as such, for the victim’s family, a terrible tragedy.

  But the killing of Bob Holland twelve hours later on Columbus Avenue changed all of that.

  Now, it seemed, the two incidents were linked.

  Now, as a result, this possible link had become the story.

  As Howley emerges from the elevator car and into Oberon’s steel and glass reception area, he is joined by Angela, his PA. Efficient and fiercely loyal, Angela is a brunette in her late forties who has worked for Howley since his early days at the Pentagon.

  “Morning, Ange.”

  “Mr. Howley.”

  They proceed toward the central conference room, and as Angela takes his coat and briefcase, she discreetly informs him that Mr. Vaughan has just called in sick.

  “What?”

  “Just now. It was actually Ms. Prescott I spoke to. She passed on the message.”

  Jacqueline Prescott is Vaughan’s PA, and has been since Angela herself was probably in kindergarten.

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “She didn’t say exactly. Under the weather, something along those lines.”

  In the twelve months he’s been at Oberon, Howley doesn’t think he’s seen Vaughan miss a single one of these Monday morning sit-downs.

  “Well, well.”

  “Ms. Prescott also said that Mrs. Vaughan would like you to call her after the meeting.”

  Howley nods.

  Hhmm.

  What’s that about?

  A moment later, arriving at the door of the conference room, he feels a twinge of apprehension. It’s strange. He’s chaired a thousand meetings in his day. What’s different about this one?

  No point being coy. He knows what it is. He’ll be the most senior guy in the room. Which also means that for the next sixty minutes or so he’ll effectively be the Oberon Capital Group. And that’s bound to ignite more succession talk, fuel the chatter he knows has been going on for some time.

  Without Vaughan in the room, too, the dynamic will be different, it’ll shift, and that’s always unpredictable.

  “Ange, get me a green tea, will you? Decaf.”

  He’s already had coffee and doesn’t want to overdo it.

  He steps inside. Everything in Oberon’s main conference room—recently renovated according to specs laid down by Vaughan—is white, or on a spectrum, snow, ivory, alabaster, vanilla. The room’s only saving grace, for Howley, and no doubt for the rest of them, is its spectacular view over Central Park.

  “Morning, gentlemen.”

  Clearly, word has spread that Vaughan won’t be making it in today, and there’s already a certain tension in the air. Seated around the table are the heads of the various industry-specific investment groups, as well as the CEO of Lyndon Consulting, a firm that works exclusively with Oberon to assess performance levels and devise rationalization plans.

  Howley gets straight into it, deciding to make no reference to Vaughan’s absence. This sets a tone, and within a matter of minutes—and somewhat to his surprise—he feels a growing confidence. They discuss proposals to buy a Phoenix-based electric utility operator, a chain of British health-food stores, and an equity fund that manages $35.6 billion on behalf of two Swedish pension schemes. Views are expressed, relevant data is presented, figures are pored over. And Howley listens. He defers, solicits further information, and then outlines a provisional strategy for each of the deals. The whole thing goes very smoothly. Afterward, as Howley is chatting with the CEO of Lyndon Consulting about “poor old” Bob Holland, one of the group heads comes up to him and shakes his hand, doesn’t say anything, just gives him a very firm handshake that seems to speak volumes. A few minutes later, two other group heads approach and ask him straight out what his position is on the IPO question.

  This is a tricky one.

  Filing for a public ticker is not necessarily the panacea that some people think it is. High-profile private equity firms have offered in the past, started well, and then seen their share prices plummet. It’d also involve opening the company’s books to public scrutiny, and as a Pentagon man that’s something Howley would find particularly distasteful. In fact, he’s pretty much ad idem with Vaughan on this, but at the same time he’s aware that that’s not what these guys want to hear.

  “Look,” he says to them, just above a whisper, “we’re in a volatile phase here, so let’s take it one step at a time, okay?”

  This is sufficiently cryptic and conspiratorial to mean anything and everything—and, crucially, nothing. It seems to satisfy them.

  When he gets to his office, Angela already has the call in to Meredith Vaughan. Personally, he’d have waited a bit, but he’s not going to argue. Angela only ever acts in his best interests.

  It’s Meredith that’s the problem.

  He can’t take her seriously. She’s forty-six years younger than Vaughan—a man who’s already been married five times—and yet she acts, and expects to be treated, like she’s the First Lady. She’s very attractive, he supposes, but that’s hardly relevant.

  “Meredith, hi.”

  “Thanks for getting back to me, Craig.”

  And then there’s that awful come-hither pussycat voice of hers.

  “No problem. How’s Jimmy?”

  “He’s not too bad, a little tired. I think he’s got a mild chest infection or something.” She pauses. “I wasn’t going to let him go in today.”

  “Of course not.” Howley is about to say something here about calling a doctor when he remembers that Vaughan sees a doctor every single day—his own personal physician, no less, a man employed to monitor a serious blood condition Vaughan has, along with anything else that might come up.

  Such as a mild chest infection.

  “But listen, Craig,” Meredith says. “Jimmy wants you to come for dinner tonight. Is that okay?”

  This is not a question. Or an invitation.

  “Sure.”

  “He just wants a quiet chat.”

  Code for don’t bring Jessica.

  “Of course.” Howley knows the routine here. Vaughan needs to eat early. “Seven good?”

  “Perfect. We’ll see you then.”

  We?

  After he puts the phone down, Howley looks at his desk, at a big report on it that he has to read for an upcoming symposium he’s addressing on opportunities in the clean energy sector.

  Wind turbines, solar power, shale gas.

  He reaches for the report and skims through a few pages. He’s distracted, though, and his eyes glaze over. He glances out the window and replays the meeting in his head.

  It was subtle, not much you could put your finger on, but he was right—the dynamic here at Oberon HQ has indeed shifted.

  * * *

  Ellen Dorsey wakes up tired. Technically, she got plenty of sleep, but it wasn’t the restorative kind, not by a long shot. It was more like eight hours of enhanced interrogation, but without any actual questions or clear notion of what her interrogators might have wanted her to reveal. It felt like one continuous garbled dream based on what she’d been doing over the previous sixteen hours—online research mainly, plus one or two brief phone calls (no more, solely because it was a Sunday) and a quick trip down to Bra on Columbus Avenue, with assiduous note taking throughout, countless pages of them scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper.

  She hadn’t slept well on Saturday night, either, partly due to this heightened sense she’d had of what she might wake up to. And when she did wake up to something, to the Bob Holland killing—the Sunday morning newsfeed already engorged with it—she felt there was no route back.

  She felt this was her story.

  However irrational that may have seemed. And impractical.

  And now, on Monday morning, mainly impractical.

  Because as a news item it’s covered, everyone’s on it—it’s not like she’s got a jump on th
e story. In addition to which the new issue of Parallax will be out on Thursday, so anything she might come up with in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours would be too late anyway. And next month’s issue, in news-cycle terms, may as well be a century away. There’s always the online edition, but it’s not exactly a premium site for breaking news.

  Even if she had any to break.

  Despite all of this, Ellen feels energized.

  She e-mails in her copy for the Ratt Atkinson piece and then heads out for some breakfast. Over coffee she goes through the papers, where it’s wall-to-wall Jeff and Bob. The pattern of coverage is pretty much the same everywhere, as it has been since yesterday morning—an outline of what happened, a profile of each victim, and some editorializing. The outlines are sketchy, because not much seems to be known, the level of detail in the profiles depends on which paper it is, and the editorializing is remarkably consistent—all of them reaching more or less the same, and perhaps obvious, conclusion, i.e., that Wall Street bankers are being targeted by a group of highly organized domestic terrorists. A single reference is made to a months-old report detailing intelligence-community concerns that al Qaeda operatives in Yemen may have been planning attacks against certain leading Wall Street institutions.

  And beyond that, just yet, no one seems willing to go.

  No mention is made of any possible connection with the Occupy movement, and very little is said about what—or who—might be next. In the blogosphere, predictably, things are a little different. Convenient lists are drawn up, after-the-fact manifestos are posted, and each-way conspiracy theories are formulated.

  When she leaves the coffee shop, Ellen takes the subway to midtown, walks around for a bit with her earphones in, listening, thinking, and then stops by the Parallax offices to see Max Daitch. With the new issue almost—but not quite—put to bed, the place is fairly hectic.

  “Hi, Ellen,” Ricky, the features editor, says as he passes her in the hallway. “Got the Ratt piece, thanks. Cutting it a bit fine, though, no?”

  Ellen shrugs.