Graveland: A Novel Page 5

  A deadline’s a deadline.

  In Daitch’s office, there’s a meeting in progress, some minor crisis. She stands in the doorway, and waits.

  Sitting at his desk, partly hidden behind piles of books and papers, Daitch looks tired, under siege. Standing in front of the desk, in a semicircle, are three young tech guys.

  Two beardies, one baldy.

  Lots of jargon.

  Daitch doesn’t stand a chance.

  The magazine’s website is fairly primitive, barely on the grid, in fact—no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app, no Facebook page even—and that’s more than likely the source of the problem here. Max claims to be a technophobe and a Luddite, and he probably is, but he’ll also argue in private that no one has yet worked out a convincing business model for any of this stuff. If he was going to commit the magazine to a digital future, he’d like to feel that the range of possible outcomes wasn’t limited to either financial self-harm or institutional suicide.

  “Well,” he says eventually, dragging the word out, and then exhaling loudly, “I don’t know, do I?” He gets up. “You fucking figure it out.”

  End of meeting.

  Ellen steps back to let the boys pass.

  Max remains standing and then waves Ellen in. “What’s the matter with me?” he says. “I’m not even forty, and I can’t get a handle on this shit.”

  “You were born forty, Max. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I have to worry about it. These pricks are at the gate. It’s all very well me taking a stand, old man shakes his fist at Twitter, but how long is that tenable? Sooner or later—”

  “Get a handle on it, Max. It’s not hard.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He sits down again. “So what’s up?”

  “Jeff Gale. Bob Holland.”

  “What about them?”

  “In case you didn’t know, Max, someone shot them both dead over the weekend. I’m interested in who and why.”

  “No shit.” He leans back in his chair and swivels from side to side. “What about Jane Glasser?”

  This was to be Ellen’s next subject in the presidential hopefuls series, the congresswoman from West Virginia whose own staff members were recently caught on a YouTube video calling her “the she-devil.”

  “Yeah, I’m on that, but … this is news.”

  Max groans. And she knows why. It’s the same argument as before, the same argument as always. Parallax calls itself a news magazine, but what does that mean anymore? The phrase is almost archaic, like “fax machine” or “long-distance telephone call.” The issue that’s coming out on Thursday, for instance, has some good stuff in it—a piece on China’s new mega-cities, and an interview with Alexandre Desplat—but for the next four weeks the magazine will sit on newsstands and coffee tables across the country blithely unaffected by anything new that actually happens.

  “I know,” Max says, “I know. We have to ramp up the online side of things. I know. In fact, I should call those three guys back in here right now, shouldn’t I? Give them the green light, give them the keys.” He pauses. “But you know what? It wouldn’t make any difference.”

  Standing there in front of him, listening, Ellen is torn between going, Yeah, yeah, Max, whatever, and leaning across the desk to slap him in the face.

  He winces. “Don’t look at me like that, Ellen. Not you.”

  Then she feels bad. They go back a long way and have never fallen out, which for her has to be some kind of a record. “What is it, Max?”

  He turns away for a moment and gazes out the window. Then he says, “Do you know who owns Parallax these days, Ellen?”

  She’s about to answer, but hesitates. Does she know? Maybe not. As a contributing editor, she should know, and certainly did know at one stage—it was Wolper & Stone, and was for decades. But then Wolper was bought out by MCL Media. Wasn’t that it?

  And now?

  “Isn’t it MCL?”

  “Sure, yeah, but who owns them?”

  Penny dropping, she clicks her tongue. “Oh.”

  Max leans forward. “Last year MCL was bought out by the Mercury Publishing Group, who is owned by Offtech … who, in turn”—he squeezes his eyes shut for a second, as though in pain—“has just been bought out by Tiberius Capital Partners.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Exactly.” He leans back in his swivel chair. “Let the asset stripping begin.”

  “Oh, Max.” She feels even worse now. And stupid. For not having known. Parallax survives almost forty years as an independent organ, a supposedly fearless voice in print journalism, and then in the space of two or three years it disappears into a Russian nesting doll of corporate ownership.

  “They could switch us out like a light, Ellen, any time, and they’re going to, it’s simply a matter of when.” He taps out a drumroll on the edge of his desk. “So listen to me, start asking around for work, okay?”

  “Jesus.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Max.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Anywhere you go will be lucky to get you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. But I’m just being realistic. You said it yourself, what’s happening out there is news. Once opened it has to be consumed immediately. Or it goes bad. Or needs to be refrigerated.” He looks up at her. “Something like that.”

  When she gives it a little thought, Ellen isn’t surprised by any of this. It’s a combination of things—the current climate principally, but also the curious, gradual fact of Max’s diminished fearlessness. The Luddite thing, she believes, is part affectation and part defense mechanism. But what she really believes, and can’t satisfactorily explain, and definitely isn’t ready to articulate just yet, is that since she and Jimmy Gilroy wrote that piece on Senator John Rundle eighteen months ago, this magazine has been more or less doomed, with Max’s own doom—professionally speaking, at any rate—an unfortunate and inevitable piece of collateral damage.

  She holds his gaze for what feels like a long time.

  But there’s only one way forward here, and it applies to both of them.

  “So,” she says eventually, “you want to hear what I’ve got?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He draws a hand across his thinning hair. “Shoot.”

  Ellen pulls a chair over, sits down, and starts telling him about how she spent the weekend—about her quick visits to the two crime scenes, the first in Central Park, the second on the sidewalk outside Bra on Columbus Avenue. She describes how she met and spoke with various people at these locations, and then got follow-up texts or phone messages. She lists the different subjects she spent most of yesterday researching online, anything from algorithmic trading to real estate litigation to forensic ballistics. “And from all of which,” she says, summing up, “I did manage to extract at least one interesting and possibly relevant observation. It’s something I haven’t seen a single reference to yet, not anywhere, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there’ll be one.” She pauses. “Or maybe not. You never know. But it is weird.”

  “What is? What’s weird?”

  “Okay, look, everyone’s saying that this is the work of terrorists, right? And maybe it is, but an assumption is also being made, and it’s based on nothing as far as I can see—”

  “What assumption?”

  “That these terrorists are highly organized, and professional, and that therefore the two shootings were carried out by the same people. Now maybe there’s an official narrative being put out for some reason, that’s always possible, I don’t know…”

  “But?”

  “Well … from talking to different people, and putting it all together, my understanding of it is that Jeff Gale took a clean shot to the forehead, and no one saw the perps, whereas Bob Holland had half his face and head blown off on a busy sidewalk with literally dozens of people watching.”

  Max nods slowly. “Different MO.”

  “Completely. The weapons wer
e different, that’s clear from the ballistics, even to me … and the psychology of it was different. I mean, look at the whole approach.” She hunches forward a little more and lowers her voice. “So that can only mean one of two things—different perps, with no connection, or the same perps, but they’re a bunch of clowns and are making this up as they go along. Either way, what we’re being fed at the moment is clearly a line of bullshit, and this story isn’t even two days old.”

  * * *

  By the time Frank Bishop gets to work on Monday morning the feeling he’s had since he woke up—a low-lying sense of dread—has intensified considerably. It’s not a full-blown panic attack, not yet, but he suspects he’s getting there. And he tries to pin it down, to locate the starting point, the catalyst—because there usually is one, a specific moment when you see or hear or even just remember something, and it’s like a change in wind direction or a sudden shift in temperature. Was it a dream he had? He can’t remember. When you wake up feeling this shitty it usually is a dream, an insidious wormhole into some forgotten corner of your unconscious.

  Though now that he thinks about it he actually went to bed feeling shitty, so …

  What did he do yesterday? Nothing. It was a Sunday. He slept half the day and flicked through the pages of the New York Times and watched TV.

  Oh … that was it. He remembers now.

  He watched part of a documentary on some cable channel about the architect Frank Gehry, and it reminded him of how his own career as an architect has turned to dust. What bothers him is not the alternative life he has ended up leading, here in Mahopac, and at Winterbrook Mall, so much as the stuff he never got around to doing in his original life, professionally speaking, at any rate—the civic buildings, the bank offices, the bridges … the grand unrealized projects. That’s what bugs the crap out of him whenever he thinks about it. Which, to be fair, isn’t that often. But when he does, like last night, and now this morning, the feeling tends to linger, and thicken.

  He waits until Lance has arrived before calling the regional manager. The place is quiet, and they’ll be lucky if three or four people wander in all morning. Though given the state he’s in today, Frank doesn’t want to take any chances. He talks to this guy at the same time every Monday, to go over numbers and staffing issues, and while it’s a perfectly routine call, it’s never that easy. Only in his late twenties, the regional manager is a bit of a jerk and clearly perceives himself to be on some “upward trajectory” within the Paloma management constellation. Frank gets all of this and plays along. He’s not an idiot. It’s part of what he has to do if he wants to keep getting a paycheck every month. But he doesn’t have to like it.

  “Frank, my man,” the regional manager says when the call is put through, “talk to me.”

  “Saturday,” Frank says at once, emphatically, and as if that’s all that needs to be said—one word, nothing else, not even the guy’s name.

  Which is Mike.

  “Saturday? What do you mean, Saturday? I don’t understand, Frank.”

  “I mean, Saturday, Mike. Fifty units of the LudeX.” Then, instead of a judicious edit, he lets the tape roll. “Jesus, what was that meant to be, some kind of a fucking joke?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Hesitating, Frank looks out over the stockroom from his little office in the corner. No contingency plan here, it would seem. Though whatever this is, it didn’t just happen. Something is spurring him on. It feels like anger, but if so, what’s he angry about? Not the LudeX situation, that’s for sure. He couldn’t give a shit about the LudeX situation. Is it his increasing dread, then, his anxiety, but redirected somehow, transmuted into this belligerent little snit he seems to be having? Maybe, but he’s confused and doesn’t feel entirely in control.

  “It was insane,” he says. “We were turning customers away all day.”

  “We allocated—”

  “Oh come on, allocated. That’s ridiculous.” He leans back in his chair. “I don’t know, do you people sit around all day thinking this shit up? Allocated.”

  There is a short silence. Then, “Frank, have you been drinking?”

  Frank laughs at this. “No, Mike, I haven’t. It’s a little early in the day, don’t you think? But is that all you can come up with? I’ve been drinking?”

  “What the—”

  “Because I question your fucking judgment?”

  “Jesus, Frank.”

  There is another silence. Frank presses the back of his head against the wall. He’s being reckless here, and he isn’t sure why—why now, why like this. But what does strike him is that in terms of tone, whatever about content, there’s no reason why any conversation between himself and Mike shouldn’t unfold in precisely the way this one has. It’s what should be normal. His being deferential to Mike, on the other hand … that’s what’s absurd. At the same time, if he doesn’t climb back through the looking-glass, and pretty quickly, he’s going to be in serious trouble.

  “Listen to me, Mike,” he says. “What I—”

  But he freezes. He can’t do it. Not at the moment.

  “Frank?”

  “Let me call you back later, okay?”

  He puts the phone down.

  After a couple of seconds, he gets up out of the chair and starts walking across the stockroom, expecting the phone behind him to ring at any second. He hopes it doesn’t, and actually suspects—on the basis that Mike must have been as relieved to end the conversation as he was—that it won’t.

  He goes outside to the loading area and takes a few deep breaths.

  Anyway, this probably isn’t a situation Mike would be all that well equipped to deal with—disaffected staff member getting confrontational, using abusive language. He might be trained for it, in theory, but given his age it’s unlikely he’s had any direct or relevant experience. With jobs so hard to come by these days, people tend to be more careful in their behavior.

  Frank stares out over the vast, largely empty parking lot to the rear of the mall.

  So … what was he thinking? What was on his mind?

  With jobs so hard to come by and all.

  He doesn’t know. Could this be a turning point, though? A tipping point?

  Maybe.

  But to what?

  In the absence of a cigarette to smoke, or a soda to drink, he takes out his cell phone and scrolls down through his list of contacts.

  He stops at Lizzie’s number.

  He didn’t want to call her yesterday, because that would have been too soon after their conversation of the night before. No doubt today is still too soon.

  But he’s worried about her.

  He makes the call. No answer.

  Leave a message.

  He doesn’t.

  What would it be? I’m worried about you? I love you? It makes my heart ache just to say your name?

  With his stomach jumping, he puts his phone away, turns around and goes back inside.

  * * *

  On his way up in the elevator, Craig Howley straightens his tie. He’d have liked a little time to freshen up before coming here, but it was a busy day. Hectic actually. The worst part was the two hours he spent on a conference call with three executives from a struggling Asian hotel chain, Best Pacific—a company whose senior and subordinated debt Oberon recently acquired, an act that then necessitated Oberon’s shedding the chain’s pension fund along with seventeen hundred of its employees.

  Tough, yes, certainly, but what planet were these people living on? Barking at him over the phone wasn’t going to change the basic facts of the situation.

  Vaughan’s absence didn’t help much either, it has to be said.

  The elevator door slides open.

  At which point Howley remembers just where he is, and what he’s in for here. The foyer to James Vaughan’s Park Avenue apartment is a palace of onyx and alabaster, a trompe l’oeil cathedral. Howley has lived on Park himself—though a good bit farther up, and it was at least fifteen years ago,
different job, different marriage, different life. He currently lives in a handsome townhouse on Sixty-eighth, but this place is simply of a different order.

  “Meredith!”

  And there she is—sculpted purple sheath dress, crimson lips, coruscating eyes, raven black hair. Gatekeeper, keeper of the flame. Howley more or less hates this woman, but he has to admit that he has a weird, tingly kind of crush on her at the same time. He couldn’t imagine having sex with her, wouldn’t want to in a million years, nor could he imagine even having a meaningful conversation with her, but there’s something there, something that renders—not her, actually, but him incomprehensible.

  “Craig, how are you?”

  And the pussycat voice. Over the phone, it’s like a joke. In person, it’s more like an intimidating sex toy, black, solid, shiny.

  Unknowable, but in your face.

  A lot of people, Howley included, have expended a good deal of time and energy speculating about the nature of Vaughan’s relationship with this woman. Of course, the knowledge that five fairly formidable wives preceded her only complicates matters. Howley himself knew Ruth, who stretched back into the early nineties, and who at the time seemed like a perfect lady, smart as a whip and rake thin—a victim of cancer, sadly, but also, in many people’s eyes, the calculating bitch who took over from Megan, his eighties wife. To those in the know, however, Vaughan’s real wife—the way people have a real president, the one they grew up with, and that in a strange way defines them (LBJ in Howley’s case)—was Kitty. She stretched from the early eighties right back to the mid-fifties. She was the sweetheart, the mother of his children, the woman behind the man. The first two wives, the early ones, Howley knows nothing of. He assumes they were probably a bit like this one, sexy, distracting, ill-advised.

  “I’m good,” he says, mwah-mwahing her. “Kept on my toes, you know, with the boss out sick and all.”

  “The boss,” she says, mock dismissively, and leads him along the main hallway. To Howley’s surprise, they head for the kitchen. He’s been to the apartment many times before and is usually led into the library or straight into the dining room. This is his first visit to the kitchen, which is huge, brightly lit, and fitted out with cabinets and surfaces of brushed steel, black chrome, and polished marble.