Limitless

22

OVER THE WEEKEND, I stuck to this new dosage regime, and monitored my progress fairly closely. I decided not to go out, just in case anything went wrong – but nothing did go wrong. There were no clicks or jumps or flashes, and it appeared that whatever was in the Dexeron actually worked – which wasn’t to say that I was in the clear, of course, or that I wouldn’t ever be having another blackout again, but it definitely felt good to be back. All of a sudden, I was confident, and clear-headed, and buzzing with ideas and energy. If the Dexeron went on working, my future path was laid out in front of me, brick by brick, and the only thing that I had to do was follow it, undistracted, unrepentant. I would re-acquaint myself with the MCL-Abraxas material and then I’d go and smooth things over with Carl Van Loon. I’d get trading again and make some money, and move into the Celestial Building. I’d eventually extricate myself from involvement with people like Van Loon and Hank Atwood and set up an independent business structure of my own – the Spinola Corporation, SpinolaSystems, Edinvest, whatever.

I couldn’t get Ginny Van Loon out of my mind as I entertained these thoughts, and I tried now to slot her in at some appropriate point along the way. She resisted, however – or the idea of her resisted – and the more resistance there was the more agitated I became. Eventually, I put these feelings aside, compartmentalized them, and moved on to the MCL-Abraxas material.

I read through all of the documents, and marvelled at how I hadn’t been able to understand them before. It certainly wasn’t the most exciting material in the world, but it was still relatively straightforward. I re-acquainted myself with how the Black-Scholes pricing model worked and did up the projections on the computer. I ironed out any difficulties there’d been, including the discrepancy in the third option that Van Loon had pointed out to me that day in his office.

The other thing I did over the weekend – apart from a hundred sit-ups each morning and evening – was to get back into some serious news consumption. I read the papers online and watched all the major current affairs shows on TV. There was very little mention of the Donatella Alvarez murder investigation, other than a brief appeal for anyone who might have witnessed anything to come forward – which meant, presumably, that the police had come up with no leads on Thomas Cole and were now clutching at straws.

There was quite a lot of coverage of the Mexico story. A number of high-profile attacks had taken place – on tourists, and on US citizens, chiefly businessmen, living in Mexico City. One company director had been shot dead and two others had been kidnapped and were still missing. These incidents were being directly linked to the foreign policy debate that was raging in the press – and in which the ‘i’ word was now routinely being used. What had yet to be plausibly constructed in the public mind, despite talk of safety concerns for US citizens, not to mention threatened Mexican expropriation of foreign investments, was a rationale for any invasion that might take place – but they were clearly working on it.

I also looked at how the markets had been performing since the big drop in tech stocks the previous Tuesday, and did some preliminary research for the coming Monday morning – which was when I planned to re-activate my account with Klondike.

Late on the Sunday evening, I was restless and decided to go out for a while. It was only when I hit the warm night air, and started walking, that I understood just how much better I really felt. Unlike before, I now had a strong physical sense of MDT, an almost buzz-like tingling in my limbs and head. At the same time, I didn’t feel intoxicated in any way. I just felt fully in control of my faculties – stronger, more awake, sharper.

I went to a few different bars, drank soda water and talked all night long. In each place I went to, it only took me a few minutes to start up a conversation with someone and then a few more after that to attract a circle of listeners around me – these people apparently fascinated by what I had to say, as I talked about politics, history, baseball, music, anything that found its way into the conversation. I had women coming on to me, too, and even some men, but I had no sexual interest in these people and tactfully deflected their advances by raising the polemical temperature of whatever discussion we were involved in. I am aware that this might make me sound obnoxious and manipulative, but it really didn’t play that way at the time, and as the night marched on and they all got drunker, or more wired, and eventually started dropping out, I felt more invigorated, and – frankly – like some kind of minor god.

I got home at about 7.30 in the morning and immediately started sweeping through the financial websites. I’d shifted all of my funds out of the Klondike account on signing up with Lafayette – except for the deposit, which it had been necessary to leave in order to keep the account open. I was glad now that I’d done this, but as I eased my way back into trading throughout the course of the day, I found that I missed the company of other traders and the atmosphere of a ‘room’. Nevertheless, it was remarkable how quickly I regained the confidence to make big trades and to take considerable risks, and by Tuesday afternoon – when Gennady phoned – I had already notched up about $25,000 in my account.

I’d forgotten that Gennady would be phoning and I was in the middle of devising a complicated trading strategy for the following day when the call came. I was in quite a buoyant mood and didn’t want any trouble, so I told him I’d have the ten pills ready for him on Friday. He immediately wanted to know if I’d have them any time before then and if he could come and collect them. Slightly irritated by this, I said that no, I wouldn’t, and he couldn’t – and that I’d see him on Friday morning. When I put the phone down, I gave some thought to how I was going to deal with the Gennady situation. It had the potential to become a very serious problem indeed, and although I had no choice but to give him the ten pills this time, I didn’t like the idea that he’d be out there, probably scheming his way up the Organizatsiya ladder – and also possibly even scheming against me. I would have to come up with something – a scheme of my own – and soon.

On the Wednesday, I went out shopping to get a couple of new suits. Thanks to a combination of not eating and doing hundreds of sit-ups, I’d lost a little weight over the previous five days – so I figured it was now time, finally, to inject some new life into my wardrobe. I got two wool suits, one of them a steel grey and the other a midnight blue – both by Boss Hugo Boss. I also got cotton shirts, silk ties, pocket squares, boxers, socks and shoes.

Sitting in the back of a cab on the way home from midtown, surrounded by scented, post-modern shopping bags, I felt exhilarated and ready for anything – but when I got upstairs to the third floor of my building I experienced again that sense I’d often had on MDT of being hemmed in, of not having enough space. My apartment, quite simply, was too small and cramped, and I was going to have to address that issue, as well.

Later on that evening, I wrote a lengthy and carefully phrased note to Carl Van Loon. In the note, I apologized for my recent behaviour and attempted to explain it by referring obliquely to a course of medication I’d been on but had now completed. I ended by asking him to let me come and talk to him, and enclosed the note in a folder with the revised projections I’d drawn up. I’d originally been going to have the package couriered to his office the following morning, but then I decided to deliver it in person. If I bumped into him in the lobby or in the elevator, well and good – if not, I’d wait and see how he responded to the note.

I spent the rest of the evening, and most of the night, studying an 800-page textbook I’d bought a few weeks earlier on corporate financing.

The next morning I did my sit-ups, drank some juice and had a shower. I chose the blue suit, a white cotton shirt and a plain ruby tie. I got dressed in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom, and then took a cab to the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street. I felt fresh and confident as I entered the lobby and strode over to the elevators. People were whizzing by in all directions and I had the sensory impression of cutting my way through a dense fuzz of commotion. As I waited for the elevator doors to open, I glanced over at the section of the enormous bronze-tinted window where I had stood wheezing in panic with Ginny the previous week, and found it hard to relate to the scene in any meaningful way at all. Neither was there the slightest hint in the elevator car, as it hurtled up to the sixty-second floor, of my earlier fear and anxiety. Instead, I eyed my reflection in the steel panels of the car’s interior and admired the cut of my new suit.

The lobby area of Van Loon & Associates was quiet. There were a few young guys standing around chatting and letting off occasional volleys of boisterous laughter. The receptionist was looking at something on her computer screen, and seemed to be engrossed in it. When I reached her desk, I cleared my throat to attract her attention.

‘Good morning, sir. May I help you?’

She showed a flicker of recognition, but also of confusion.

‘Mr Van Loon please.’

‘I’m afraid Mr Van Loon is out of the country at the moment. We don’t expect him back until tomorrow. If you would…’

‘That’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’d like to leave this package for him. It’s very urgent that it be brought to his attention as soon as he returns.’

‘Of course, sir.’

She smiled.

I nodded, and smiled back.

Stopping short of clicking my heels, I then spun around and headed over towards the elevators again.

I went home and traded online for the rest of the day, adding a further ten grand to my pile.

So far, the combination of MDT and Dexeron had worked really well for me, and I kept my fingers crossed. I’d been on it for nearly a week now and I hadn’t had the merest hint of a blackout. But for Gennady’s visit I decided to mess up my apartment a little, deliberately. I wanted to play down the intensity of high-dosage MDT and try to convince him that taking more than one pill every couple of days was actually dangerous. That way I could slow him down and give myself a little breathing space. However, I really had no idea what I was going to do about him.

When he came in the door on Friday morning, I could see that he had regressed a little. He didn’t say anything, but just held out his hand and shook it in a gimme motion.

I took a tiny plastic container with ten MDT pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into my spiel about dosage, he had popped one of the pills into his mouth.

He closed his eyes and remained still for a few moments – during which time I stood still as well, and said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and glanced around. I had tried to make the place look untidy, but it hadn’t been easy – and there was certainly no comparison at all between how the place looked now and how it had looked the previous week.

‘You get some, too?’ he said, nodding his head at the general tidiness.

‘Yes.’

‘So you get more than ten? You tell me only ten.’

Shit.

‘I got twelve,’ I said, ‘I managed to get twelve. Two extra for me. But that was a thousand bucks. I can’t afford any more than that.’

‘OK, next week, you get me twelve.’

I was going to say no. I was going to say fuck you. I was going to run at him and see if the physical kick of a triple dose of MDT would be enough to let me overpower him and maybe choke him to death. But I did nothing. I said, ‘OK.’

Because what if it went wrong and I got choked to death – or, at best, I drew the attention of the police? And was finger-printed, booked, keyed into the system? I needed a safer and much more efficient way to get myself out of this situation. And it had to be permanent.

Gennady held his hand out again, and said, ‘The seventeen-five?’

I had the money ready and just gave it to him without saying anything.

He put it into his jacket pocket.

As he was going out the door, he said, ‘Next week, twelve. Don’t forget.’

Carl Van Loon phoned me at seven o’clock that evening. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response, but I was glad – because now, one way or the other, I could proceed. I’d been getting restless, prickled by an increasing need to be involved in something that would consume all of my time and energy.

‘Eddie.’

‘Carl.’

‘How many times are we going to have to do this, Eddie?’

I took a relatively subdued comment like that as a good sign, and launched into a defensive broadside that culminated in a plea to let me get involved again in the MCL-Abraxas deal. I told him that I was fired up and brimming with new ideas and that if he took a good look at the revised projections he’d see just how serious I was.

‘I have looked at them, Eddie. They’re terrific. Hank’s here and I showed them to him earlier. He wants to meet you.’ He paused. ‘We want to get this thing off the ground.’

He paused again, longer this time.

‘Carl?’

‘But Eddie, I’m going to be straight with you. You pissed me off before. I didn’t know who – or what – I was talking to. I mean, whatever it is you’ve got, some kind of bipolar shit, I don’t know – but that degree of instability is just not on when you’re playing at this level. When the merger is announced there’s going to be a lot of pressure, wall-to-wall media coverage, stuff you can’t imagine if you haven’t already been there.’

‘Let me come and talk to you, Carl, face to face. If you’re not satisfied after that, I’ll back off. You won’t hear from me again. I’ll sign confidentiality agreements, whatever. Five minutes.’

Van Loon paused for a full thirty seconds. In the silence, I could hear him breathing. Eventually, he said, ‘I’m at home. I’ve got something on later, so if you’re coming round, come round now.’

I had Van Loon back onside within ten minutes. We sat in his library, drinking Scotch, and I spun out an elaborate tale for him of an entirely imaginary condition I was supposed to be suffering from. It was easily treatable with light medication, but I had reacted adversely to a certain element in the medication and this had resulted in my erratic behaviour. The medication had been adjusted, I’d completed the course and now I was fine. It was a thin enough story, but I don’t think Van Loon was actually listening very closely to what I was saying – he seemed, rather, to be mesmerized by something in the timbre of my voice, by my physical presence, and I even had the feeling that what he wanted more than anything else was just to reach over and touch me – and be, in a sense, electrified. It was a heightened version of how people had reacted to me before – Paul Baxter, Artie Meltzer, Kevin Doyle, Van Loon himself. I wasn’t complaining, but I had to be careful about how I dealt with this. I didn’t want it to cause any interference, or to unbalance things. I figured the best way to harness it was to keep busy, and to keep whoever I was exerting an influence over busy as well. With this in mind I swiftly moved the conversation on to the MCL-Abraxas deal.

It was all very delicate, Van Loon said, and time was of the essence. Despite a number of hitches, Hank Atwood was anxious to proceed. Having devised a price structure to bring to the table, the next step was to propose who should get the top jobs, and what shape the new company should have. Then it would be on to meetings, negotiations, bull sessions – the MCL-Parnassus people with the Abraxas people – ‘… and us in the middle.’

Us?

I took a sip from my Scotch. ‘Us?’

‘Me, and if it works out, you. Jim Heche, one of my senior vice-presidents knows what’s going on, my wife knows – and that’s about it. Same thing with the principals. Hank’s just brought in a couple of advisers, he’s being very cautious. That’s why we want this thing wrapped up in a couple of weeks, a month tops.’ He drained the whisky from his glass and looked at me. ‘It’s not easy keeping the lid on something like this, Eddie.’

We chatted for another half hour or so and then Van Loon said he had to go out. We arranged to meet the following morning at his office. We’d have lunch with Hank Atwood and then set the ball rolling in earnest.

Van Loon shook my hand at the door and said, ‘Eddie, I sincerely hope this works out. I really do.’

I nodded.

On the way from the library to the main door of the apartment, I’d glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Ginny…

‘Just don’t let me down, Eddie, OK?’

… if she was at home.

‘I won’t, Carl. I’m on this, believe me.’

But there was no sign of her.

‘Sure. I know that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

The lunch with Hank Atwood went very smoothly. He was impressed by my command of the material relating to the deal, but also by my wide-ranging knowledge of the business world in general. I had no problems answering the questions he asked me, and I even deftly managed to turn a few of them back on Atwood himself. Van Loon’s relief that things were finally working out was palpable, and I could also sense he was pleased that my performance was reflecting well on Van Loon & Associates. We’d gone to the Four Seasons again, and as I sat looking out over the room, fiddling with the stem of my empty wine glass, I tried to recall the details of what had happened the last time I’d been there. But I soon had the weirdest feeling that what I was conjuring up, like a misremembered dream, was unreliable. It even occurred to me that I hadn’t been there before, not really, but had constructed this memory from what someone had told me, or from something I’d read. However, the sense of distance from that other time which this created was welcome – because I was here now, and that was all that counted.

I was enjoying it, too – though I only picked at the food and didn’t have anything to drink. Hank Atwood relaxed quite a bit as the lunch progressed, and I even saw in him a little flicker of that needy reliance on my attention that had become such a feature of earlier, similar relationships. But that was fine. I sat there in the Four Seasons and revelled in the heady atmosphere, reflecting occasionally – when I reminded myself who these men were – that what I was experiencing could well have been the prototype for an extremely sophisticated virtual reality game.

In any case, this lunch was to be the start for me of a busy, strange and exciting period in my life. Over the following two or three weeks I got caught up in a constant round of meetings, lunches, dinners, late-night confabulations with powerful, tanned men in expensive suits – all of us in search of what Hank Atwood kept referring to as ‘vision lock’, that moment when the two parties could agree on a basic outline for the deal. I met with various sorts of people – lawyers, financiers, corporate strategists, a couple of congressmen, a senator – and was able to hold my own with all of them. In fact, somewhat to the alarm of Carl Van Loon, I became, in a couple of respects, pivotal to the whole thing. As we approached the critical mass of vision lock, the few of us who were actually in on the deal became quite pally, in a corporate, cliquey kind of way, but I was the one who provided the social glue. I was the one who was able to paper over the cracks between the two markedly different corporate cultures. In addition to this, I became utterly indispensable to Van Loon himself. Since he couldn’t bring in his usual teams of people to work on the deal, he increasingly relied on me to monitor what was going on and to digest and process huge amounts of information – from Federal Trade Commission regulations to the intricacies of broadband, from appointment times to the names of people’s wives.

While all of this was going on, I managed to do other stuff as well. I made it most days to the Van Loon & Associates gym to burn off some of my excess energy, spending time on different machines and trying to do an all-round work-out. I managed to keep track of my Klondike portfolio and even got a little action in on the company trading floor that Van Loon had told me about. I bought a cellphone, which was something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I bought more clothes, and wore a different suit every day – or, at least, rotated six or seven suits. Since the act of sleeping didn’t feature too prominently in my life any more, I also got to read the papers and do research, sitting at my computer – late at night, and often deep into the night…

Another part of my life, and one that I couldn’t ignore – unfortunately – was Gennady. Given that I was so busy in this increasingly blurred continuum of waking time, I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next time, that I’d take steps to contain the situation. But how? I didn’t know how.

Each time he came, too, I was shocked by how much he’d changed. That smack addict’s pallor had gone and there was a healthy glow to his skin now. He’d had a haircut, and had started wearing suits as well – though they weren’t anywhere near as nice as mine. He’d also taken to arriving by car, a black Mercedes something or other, and had guys waiting for him downstairs. He had to let me know this, of course, and more or less directed me to look out of the window and down at his entourage, waiting on Tenth Street.

Another thing Gennady did which annoyed me, was to shake one of the pills out into his hand the moment he got them, and then pop it into his mouth – right there in front of me, as though I were a coke-dealer and he was checking out the product. He also used to dispense the rest of the pills into a little silver pillbox he had, which he kept in the breast-pocket of his jacket. He’d pat this part of his jacket and say, ‘Always be prepared.’ Gennady was an asshole and I physically couldn’t bear to have him in the room. But I was powerless to stop him, because he obviously had moved up in the Organizatsiya, so how did I even begin to deal with that?

What I did was compartmentalize it, deal with it at the time and then move swiftly on.

I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.

Mostly, though, my time was spent huddled in various offices and conference rooms of the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street, with Carl and Hank Atwood and Jim Heche, or with Carl and Jim and Dan Bloom, the chairman of Abraxas, and his people.

Late one night, however, I found myself alone with Carl in one of the conference rooms. We were having a drink, and since we were close to agreeing a deal, he brought up the subject of money, something he hadn’t mentioned since that first night in his apartment on Park Avenue. He passed a comment about the commission rate we’d be getting for brokering the deal, so I decided to ask him outright what my share would be. Without batting an eyelid, and distractedly consulting a folder on the table, he said, ‘Well, given the scale of your contribution, Eddie, it won’t be anything less than forty. I don’t know, say, forty-five.’

I paused, and waited for him to go on – because I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. But he didn’t say anything else, and just continued staring at the folder.

‘Thousand?’ I ventured.

He looked at me, and furrowed his eyebrows. He seemed slightly confused.

‘Million, Eddie. Forty-five million.’

23

I HADN’T ANTICIPATED earning that kind of money so quickly – not having imagined, in the first place, that the MCL-Abraxas deal would be so lucrative for Van Loon & Associates. But when I thought about it, and looked at other deals, and at the way these things were structured, I realized that there was nothing unusual about it at all. The combined value of the two companies concerned would be somewhere in the region two hundred billion dollars. Based on that, our brokerage fee – point something of a per cent – would yield, well… handsomely.

I could do plenty, I thought, with that kind of money. I devoted quite a while to thinking about it, in fact, but it didn’t take me long, either, to feel aggrieved that I wasn’t in possession of any of the money now. It took me even less time to get working on Van Loon for an advance.

When he put the folder aside and I had his attention again, I explained to him that I’d been living on Tenth Street and Avenue A for about six years, but that I felt it was time for a change. He smiled awkwardly at this, as if I’d told him I lived on the moon – but he perked up considerably when I added that I’d been looking at a place in the Celestial Building over on the West Side.

‘Good. That sounds more like it. No disrespect, Eddie – but I mean Avenue A, what the fuck is that all about?’

‘Income levels, Carl. That’s what it’s about. I’ve never had enough money to live anyplace else.’

Obviously thinking he’d put me in an awkward position, Van Loon mumbled something and looked uncomfortable for a moment. I told him I liked living down on Avenue A and Tenth Street, and that it was a great neighbourhood, full of old bars and weird characters. Five minutes later, however, I had him telling me not to worry, that he’d arrange financing immediately so I could buy the apartment in the Celestial Building. It’d be a routine company loan that I could settle later, further down the line, whenever. Sure, I thought, nine and a half million dollars – a routine loan.

I phoned Alison Botnick the next morning at Sullivan, Draskell, the realtors on Madison Avenue.

‘Well, Mr Spinola, how are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

I told her I was sorry for having run off that day, making a joke out of it. She said, oh, not even to mention it. Then I asked her if the apartment was still on the market. It was, she said, and all the work on it had just been completed. I told her I’d be interested in seeing it again, that day if possible, and in talking to her about entering a bid.

Van Loon had also said he’d write a reference letter for me, which would probably make it unnecessary for Sullivan, Draskell to pry into my tax returns and credit history – and would mean, if everything went well, that I could sign the contracts almost immediately and move in.

This had now become the controlling dynamic in my life – immediacy, acceleration, speed. I shifted rapidly from scene to scene, from one location to another, with little sense of where the joins met. For example, I had to see several people that morning, and in different places – the office on Forty-eighth Street, a hotel uptown, a bank down on Vesey Street. Then I had a lunch appointment with Dan Bloom at Le Cirque. I squeezed in seeing the apartment again after lunch. Alison Botnick was waiting for me when I arrived up on the sixty-eighth floor – almost as though she hadn’t left since my last visit and had been waiting patiently for me to return. Barely recognizing me at first, she was then all over me, but within about five minutes, probably even less, I had put in a bid at a small but strategic amount over the ask price and was gone – back to Forty-eighth Street and another meeting with Carl and Hank and Jim, to be followed by cocktails at the Orpheus Room.

As this last meeting was wrapping up, Van Loon took a call at his desk. We were now very close to announcing the deal, and everyone was in an upbeat mood. The meeting had gone well, and even though the hardest part lay ahead – seeking Congressional, FCC and FTC approval – there was a real sense of collective accomplishment in the room.

Hank Atwood stood up from his chair and strolled over to where I was sitting. He was in his early sixties, but looked trim and wiry and very fit. Even though he was short, he had a commanding, almost threatening presence. Landing a gentle punch on my shoulder, he said, ‘Eddie, how do you do it?’

‘What?’

‘That extraordinary recall you’ve got. The way your mind processes everything. I can see it working.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

He went on, ‘You’re on top of this thing in a way that I find almost…’

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

‘… almost… I mean I’ve been in business for forty years, Eddie, I’ve headed up a food-and-drinks conglomerate, I’ve run a movie studio, I’ve seen it all, every trick in the book, every kind of deal there is, every kind of guy you can meet…’

He was looking directly into my eyes now, standing over me.

‘… but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you…’

I wasn’t sure if this was meant as a declaration of love or an accusation, but just then Van Loon got up from his desk, and said, ‘Hank… someone here to say hello.’

Atwood turned around.

Van Loon had stepped away from his desk and was walking across the room towards the door. I stood up from my chair and moved behind Atwood. Jim Heche had wandered about half-way down the room and taken out his cellphone.

I turned to face the door.

Van Loon opened it and motioned to whoever was there to come in. I could hear voices outside, but not what they were saying. There was a brief exchange, followed by a short burst of laughter, and then – a couple of seconds later – Ginny Van Loon appeared in the room.

I felt a quickening in my chest.

She pecked her father on the cheek. Then Hank Atwood raised his arms, ‘Ginny.’

She came towards him and they embraced.

‘So, you had a good time?’

She nodded, and smiled broadly.

‘I had a blast.’

Where had she been?

‘Did you try that osteria I told you about?’

Italy.

‘Yeah, it was great. That stuff, what was it called, baccalà? – I loved it.’

The north-east.

They went on chatting for the next minute or so, Ginny focusing all her attention on Atwood. As I waited for her to disengage and – I suppose – notice me, I watched her closely, and realized something that should have been obvious to me before.

I was in love with her.

‘… and it’s really cool how they name streets after dates…’

She was wearing a short grey skirt, a dusty blue cardigan, matching top and black leather pumps, all stuff she’d probably bought in Milan on her way back from Vicenza or Venice, or wherever she’d been. Her hair was different, too – not spiky any more, but straight, and with a bit at the front that kept falling into her eyes, and that she kept having to flick back.

‘… Twentieth of September Street, Fourth of November Street, it resonates…’

She looked over and saw me, and smiled – surprised and not surprised.

Van Loon said, ‘I guess history is pretty important to them over there.’

‘Oh, and what are we,’ Ginny said, turning suddenly to her father, ‘one of those happy nations that hasn’t got any history?’

‘That’s not what-’

‘We just do stuff and hope no one notices.’

‘What I-’

‘Or we make it up to suit what people did notice.’

‘And in Europe that’s not what happens?’ said Hank Atwood. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’

‘No, but… well, I don’t know, take this Mexico shit that’s going on at the moment? People over there can’t believe we’re even talking about invading.’

‘Look, Ginny,’ Van Loon said, ‘it’s a complicated situation. I mean, this is a narco-state we’re dealing with here…’ He went on to paint what had been in a dozen newspaper editorials and op-ed pieces recently: a vast fevered mural depicting instability, disorder and impending catastrophe…

Jim Heche, who had drifted back up the room, and had been listening closely, said, ‘It’s not only in our interests, Ginny, you know, it’s in theirs, too.’

‘Oh, invade the country to save it?’ she said, in exasperation, ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘Sometimes that’s-’

‘What about the nineteen-seventy UN injunction,’ she said, her voice accelerating rapidly, ‘that no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal affairs of any other state?’

She was standing in the centre of the room now, ready to fend off attacks from any quarter.

‘Ginny, listen to me,’ Van Loon said patiently. ‘Trade with Central and South America has always been crucial to-’

‘Oh, Jesus, Daddy, that’s all spin.’

Looking like his daughter had just kick-boxed him, Van Loon threw his hands up.

‘You want to know what I think it’s about?’ she went on, ‘I mean really about?’

Van Loon looked dubious, but Hank Atwood and Jim Heche were obviously interested, and waiting to hear what she had to say. For my part, I had retreated to the oak-panelled wall behind me and was watching the scene with mixed feelings – amusement, desire, confusion.

‘There’s no grand plan here,’ she said, ‘no economic strategy, no conspiracy. It wasn’t thought out in any way. In fact, I think it’s just another manifestation of irrational… something – not exuberance exactly, but…’

Losing patience a little now, Van Loon said, ‘What does that mean?’

‘I think Caleb Hale had a couple of drinks too many that night, or was maybe mixing booze with his Triburbazine pills, or whatever, and he just lost the run of himself. And now they’re trying to gloss over what he said, cover their tracks, make out as if this is a real policy. But what they’re doing is entirely irrational…’

‘That’s ridiculous, Ginny.’

‘We were talking about history a minute ago – I think that’s how most history works, Daddy. People in power, they make it up as they go along. It’s sloppy and accidental and human…’

The reason I was confused during those few moments, as I stared over at Ginny, was because in spite of everything – in spite of how different they looked and how different they sounded – I could so easily have been staring over at Melissa.

‘Ginny’s starting college in the fall,’ Van Loon said to the others. ‘International studies – or is that irrational studies? – so don’t mind her, she’s just limbering up.’

Tapping out a quick timestep in her new shoes, Ginny said, ‘Up yours, Mr Van Loon.’

Then she turned and walked over in my direction. Hank Atwood and Jim Heche converged, and one of them started speaking to Van Loon, who was back sitting at his desk.

As Ginny approached where I was standing, she threw her eyes up, dismissing everything – and everyone – behind her. She arrived over and poked me gently in the stomach, ‘Look at you.’

‘What?’

‘Where’s all the weight gone?’

‘I told you it fluctuates.’

She looked at me dubiously, ‘Are you bulimic?’

‘No, like I said…’

I paused.

‘Or maybe schizophrenic then?’

‘What is this?’ I laughed, and made a face. ‘Sure it’s not medical school you’re going to? I’m fine. That was just a bad day you caught me on.’

‘A bad day?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hhmm.’

‘It was.’

‘And today?’

‘Today’s a good day.’

I felt the impulse to add some sappy comment like and it’s even better now that you’re here, but I managed to keep my mouth shut.

A brief silence followed, during which we just looked at each other.

Then, from across the room, ‘Eddie?’

‘Yeah?’

It was Van Loon.

‘What was that thing we were talking about earlier? Copper loops and… AD-something?’

I bent slightly to the left and looked around Ginny, over at Van Loon.

‘ADSL,’ I said. ‘Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Loop.’

‘And…?’

‘It permits transmission of a single compressed, high-quality video signal, at a rate of 1.5 Mbits per second. In addition to an ordinary voice phone conversation.’

‘Right.’

Van Loon turned back to Hank Atwood and Jim Heche and continued what he was saying.

Ginny looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

‘Excuse me.’

‘Let’s get out of here and go somewhere for a drink,’ I said, all at a rush. ‘Come on, don’t say no.’

She paused, and that flicker of uncertainty passed over her face again. Before she could answer, Van Loon clapped his hands together and said, ‘OK, Eddie, let’s go.’

Ginny immediately turned around and moved off, saying to her father, ‘So where are you lot going?’

I slumped back against the oak-panelled wall.

‘The Orpheus Room. We’ve got more business to discuss. If that’s OK with you.’

She made a dismissive puffing sound and said, ‘Knock yourselves out.’

‘And what are you doing?’

As she looked at her watch, I looked at her back, at the soft dusty blue of her cashmere cardigan.

‘Well, there’s something I’ve got to do later, but I’m going home now.’

‘OK.’

The next short while was taken up with goodbyes and see you laters.

Ginny drifted over to the door, waved at me, smiled, and then left.

On our way down to the Orpheus Room a couple of minutes later, I had to shake off an acute sense of disappointment and refocus my attention on the business at hand.

My bid for the apartment in the Celestial Building was accepted the following day, and I found myself signing all of the documents the day after that again. Van Loon’s letter had silenced any enquiry into my tax affairs, and with the financing arrangements equally discreet, I have to say I had a very easy time of it. Less easy was deciding how I wanted the place to look. I called a couple of interior designers and visited some furniture showrooms and read various glossy magazines, but I remained undecided and fell into an obsessive cycle of plan and counter-plan, colour scheme and counter-colour scheme. Did I want it all spare and industrial, for example, with gunmetal-grey surfaces and modular storage units – or exotic and busy, with Louis XV chairs, Japanese silk screens and red lacquer tables?

When Gennady arrived at the apartment on Tenth Street that Friday morning, I had already started packing some of my stuff into boxes.

I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.

He came in the door, saw what was happening and lost his temper almost immediately. He kicked a couple of boxes over and said that was it. ‘I’ve had enough of you and your two-faced guinea shit.’

He was wearing a baggy, cream-coloured suit with a swirling pink and yellow tie. His hair was slicked back and he had steel-rimmed, reflective sunglasses resting on the tip of his nose.

‘I mean, what the fuck is going on here?’

‘Take it easy, Gennady. I’m just moving to a new apartment.’

‘Where?’

This was going to be the hard bit. Once he understood where I was moving to, he’d never be happy to go on with the arrangement as it was. I’d paid off all of the loan by that stage, so essentially the arrangement between us was me dealing him twelve MDT pills a week. I didn’t want to go on with this arrangement either, of course, but clearly there’d be a difference of opinion about the nature of any changes we might make.

‘A place in the West Thirties, on Twelfth Avenue.’

He kicked another box.

‘When are you moving?’

‘Early next week.’

The new place wasn’t ready in terms of décor and furnishings, but since it had a shower and phonelines and cable, and since I didn’t mind eating delivery food for a while – and since I really wanted to get out of Tenth Street – I was prepared to just move into it straightaway, as it was.

Gennady was now breathing through his nose.

‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve got my social security number and my credit-card details. It’s not like you’ll be losing track of where I am. Besides it’s only across town and up a bit.’

‘You think I’m worried about losing track of you?’ He threw a hand up in the air dismissively. ‘I’m tired of this…’ – he pointed to the floor – ‘… coming here. What I want is to meet your dealer. I want to buy this shit in bulk.’

I shook my head and clicked my tongue.

‘Sorry, Gennady, that’s just not going to be possible.’

He stood still for a second, but then lunged forward and punched me in the chest. I fell backwards, over a full box of books, arms outstretched, and whacked my head on the floor.

It took me a few moments to sit up, and a few more to rub my head and look around in bewilderment, and then to get up on my feet again. I thought of a hundred things to say to him, but didn’t bother with any of them.

He had his hand out.

‘Come on, where are they?’

I stumbled over to the desk and got the pills from a drawer. I went back and handed them to him. He swallowed one of the pills and then spent the next couple of minutes carefully transferring the rest of them from the little plastic container I’d given him to his silver pillbox. When he’d finished doing this, he discarded the plastic container and put the pillbox into the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘You shouldn’t take more than one of those a day,’ I said.

‘I don’t.’ Then he looked at his watch, and sighed impatiently. ‘I’m in a hurry. Write down the address of this new place.’

I went over to the desk again, still rubbing the back of my head. When I found a piece of paper and a pen, I considered giving him a false address, but then thought what would the point be – he did have all my details.

‘Let’s go. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.’

I wrote down the address and handed him the piece of paper.

‘A meeting?’ I said, with a hint of sarcasm in my voice.

‘Yeah,’ he smirked, obviously missing the sarcasm, ‘I’m setting up an import-export company. Or trying to. But there’s so many fucking laws and regulations in this country. You know how much shit you have to go through just to get a licence?’

I shook my head, and then asked him, ‘What are you going to be importing? Or exporting?’

He paused, leant forward a little and whispered, ‘I don’t know, you know… stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Hey, what do you want, this is a complicated scam I’m working on – you think I’m going to tell a cocksucker like you about it?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘OK, Eddie,’ he said, ‘so listen. I’m giving you until next week. Set up a time with this person and we’ll meet. I’ll cut you in for a commission. But fuck with me, and I’ll rip your heart out with these two hands and fry it up in a skillet. Do you understand me?’

I stared at him. ‘Yes.’

His fist came from out of nowhere, like a torpedo, and landed in my solar plexus. I doubled up in pain and staggered backwards again, just avoiding the box of books.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, did you say yes? My mistake.’

As he was walking down the stairs, I could still hear him laughing.

When I was able to breathe normally again, I went over to the couch and lowered myself on to it. I stretched out and stared up at the ceiling. For some time now, Gennady’s personality had been threatening to spiral out of control. I was going to have to do something about it, and soon – because once he saw the apartment in the Celestial Building there’d be nothing I could do. Not any more. It’d be too late. He’d want in. He’d want everything.

He’d ruin everything.

However, a bit later – when I thought matters through more fully – I came to the conclusion that the real crisis wasn’t with Gennady at all. The real crisis had to do with the fact that my supply of MDT was haemorrhaging – and at an alarming rate. Over the past month or so, I’d been dipping into it several times a week, indiscriminately, without ever bothering to count how many pills were left – thinking each time that I’d count them the next time. But I never did. I never got around to it. I was too caught up in things, too caught up in the relentless drumbeat inside my own head – the MCL-Abraxas deal, the Celestial Building, Ginny Van Loon…

I went into the bedroom. I opened the closet, took out the big brown envelope and emptied its contents on to the bed. I counted the pills. There were only about two hundred and fifty of them left. At the current rate of consumption – plus Gennady’s regular supply – they’d all be gone in a couple of months. Even if I eliminated Gennady from the equation, that would still only add a few more weeks to the total. So ultimately… a few weeks, a few months – what difference did it make?

This was the real crisis I was facing, and in the end, it came back – again – to Vernon’s little black notebook. Somewhere in that list of names and telephone numbers there had to be someone who knew about MDT, about its origins, and about how dosage levels worked, and maybe even about how to get a new supply line up and running. Because if I was to have any chance of fulfilling this great, unlooked-for destiny that was stretching out before me, I had to address these issues – either or both of them, dosage and supply, and I had to do it now.

I took out the notebook and went through it again. Using a red pen, I crossed out the numbers I’d already tried. On a separate piece of paper, I made a fresh list of selected numbers I hadn’t tried. The first number on this new list was Deke Tauber’s. I’d been reluctant to call him before, because I hadn’t imagined there’d be much chance I’d get through to him. In the 1980s he’d been a bond-salesman, a Wall Street jock, but now he’d recreated himself and was the reclusive leader of an eponymous self-improvement cult – Dekedelia.

The more I thought about it, however, the more sense it made for me to call him. Regardless of how weird or reclusive he’d become, he would still know who I was. He’d known Melissa. I could invoke the old days.

I dialled the number and waited.

‘Mr Tauber’s office.’

‘Hello, could I speak to Mr Tauber please.’

Suspicious pause.

Shit.

‘Who may I ask is calling?’

‘Erm… tell him it’s an old friend, Eddie Spinola.’

Another pause.

‘How did you get hold of this number?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business. Now, may I speak to Mr Tauber, please?’

Click.

I really didn’t like people hanging up on me – but I knew it was probably going to keep happening.

I looked at the list of numbers again.

Who is this?

What do you want?

How did you get hold of this number?

The thought of going through the list and crossing each number out, one after the other, was too demoralizing, so I decided to persist with Tauber for a while. I visited the Dekedelia website and read about the courses they offered and about the selection of books and videos they sold. It all seemed very commercial and had clearly been designed to attract new recruits.

I surfed around for a bit, and found links to a wide range of other sites. There was a directory of fringe religions, an awareness network called CultWatch, various ‘concerned parents’ organizations and other sites dealing with issues such as mind control and ‘recovery facilitation’. I ended up at the homepage of a qualified exit counsellor in Seattle, someone who had lost his son fifteen years previously to a group called the Shining Venusians. Since this person had mentioned Dekedelia on his homepage, I decided to find his number and give him a call. We spoke for a few minutes and although he wasn’t much help he did give me the number of a concerned parents group in New York. I then spoke to the secretary of this group – a concerned and clearly deranged parent – and got the name, in turn, of a private investigation agency which was conducting surveillance of Dekedelia on behalf of some members of the group. After several attempts and a lot of dissembling, I got to speak to one of the agency’s operatives, Kenny Sanchez.

I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but eventually agreed to meet me – at the skating rink in Rockerfeller Plaza.

Two hours later we were pacing up and down Forty-seventh Street. Then we drifted on to Sixth Avenue, past Radio City Music Hall and up towards Central Park South.

Kenny Sanchez was short and paunchy and wore a brown suit. Although he was serious and obviously very circumspect when it came to his work, he started to relax after about ten minutes and even became quite chatty. Exaggerating slightly, I told him I’d been a friend of Deke Tauber’s for a while in the 1980s, but that we’d lost touch. This seemed to fascinate him, and he asked me a few questions about it. By answering these freely, I created the impression that I was willing to share any information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.

‘The basic tenet of this cult, Eddie,’ he told me, in confidential tones, ‘is that each individual needs to escape the inherent dysfunction of the family matrix, and – get this – to re-create themselves independently in an alternative environment.’

He stopped for a moment and shrugged his shoulders, as if to distance himself from what he’d just said. Then he continued walking.

‘When it started up, Dekedelia was no more, or less, flaky than any of a dozen other of these outfits – you know, with lectures and meditation sessions and newsletters. Like all the others, too, it had an aura of cheap, second-hand mysticism about it – but things changed pretty quickly, and before you knew it the leader of this quote-unquote spiritual movement was producing best-selling books and videos.’

I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to let me know that he was on top of his brief.

‘The problems started soon after that. A succession of people – always young, usually stuck in dead-end jobs – seemed to just disappear into the cult. But there was nothing illegal about it, because the members were always careful to write “goodbye” letters to their families, thus…’ – he held up the index finger of his right hand – ‘… cleverly pre-empting any missing-person investigations by the police.’

He was focusing on three individual cases, he said, young people who had disappeared within the past year, and he gave me a few details about each of them – stuff I didn’t particularly need to hear.

‘So, how are your investigations going now?’ I asked.

‘Erm… not so well, I’m afraid.’ He clearly hadn’t wanted to say it, but it didn’t look as if there’d been much choice. Then, as though to compensate, he added, ‘But there seems to be something strange going on at the moment. Within the past week or two, rumours have been circulating that Deke Tauber has taken ill. He hasn’t been seen, hasn’t given any lectures, hasn’t done any book-signings. He can’t be reached. He’s effectively incommunicado.’

‘Hhmm.’

I felt the time had now come for me to show my hand.

I said I had reason to believe that Deke Tauber was taking a strange, physically addictive designer drug and that if he was ill it might be because the only known supplier of the drug had… disappeared recently, leaving all of his clients high and dry – as it were. Kenny Sanchez was naturally very interested in this, though I did keep it quite vague and told him almost immediately what I needed – which was information on an associate of Tauber’s, a Todd-something. I told him that if he helped me out with this, I’d pass on any further information I managed to uncover about the drug thing.

In trying to impress me, Kenny Sanchez had lost his professional bearings somewhat, but he still managed to balk convincingly at the notion of revealing, to a third party, information he had learned during the course of an investigation.

‘Information on an associate of Tauber’s? I don’t know, Eddie – that’s not going to be easy. I mean, we’re bound by rules of confidentiality…’ – he paused – ‘… and ethics… and stuff…’

I stopped on the corner of Sixth and Central Park South and turned to face him. He stopped as well. I looked directly into his eyes.

‘How do you get information in the first place, Kenny? It’s a commodity, like anything else, no? A currency? This would simply be an exchange…’

‘… I suppose…’

‘I mean, what are sources anyway?’

‘Yeah, but…’

‘There has to be some give and take, surely.’

I kept on at him like this until he eventually agreed to help me out. He said he’d see what he could do, and added – sheepishly – that if he tried he could probably get access to Tauber’s phone records.

I spent the weekend packing up the remainder of my stuff and having most of it moved into the Celestial. I got to know the main guy, Richie, at the desk in the lobby. I checked out a few more furniture showrooms, as well as having a look at the latest in kitchen appliances and home entertainment systems. I bought a complete set of Dickens, something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I also learned Spanish – something else I’d been meaning to do for ages – and read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original.

Kenny Sanchez called me on Monday morning. He asked if we could meet, and suggested a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue in the Eighties. I was going to object, and suggest somewhere a little closer to midtown, but then I didn’t. If this was to be one of his little private investigator things – meeting in public places, like skating rinks and coffee shops – then so be it. I made a few calls before going out. I set up an appointment for later with my Tenth Street landlord to hand over the keys. I made an unsuccessful attempt to set another one up with the guy who was going to be tiling my bathroom. I also spoke to Van Loon’s secretary and scheduled a couple of meetings for the middle part of the afternoon.

Then I went down to First Avenue and hopped in a cab.

That was last Monday morning.

As I sit now in the eerie quiet of this room in the Northview Motor Lodge, it seems incredible to me that that was only five days ago. Equally incredible, given all that’s happened since, is what I was doing – setting up business meetings, worrying about bathroom tiles, taking what I imagined were sensible steps to address the MDT situation…

Outside there has been a subtle shift in the light. The darkness has lost its edge, and it won’t be long now before a blue tinge starts seeping up from the horizon. I am tempted to put the laptop down, to go outside and look at the sky, and feel the vast stillness that surrounds this small clearing on the edge of a Vermont highway.

But I stay where I am – inside, in the wicker armchair – and continue writing. Because the truth is, I don’t have that much time left.

In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the place as we sped by. It was closed and looked strangely flat and unreal, like an abandoned movie set. I allowed my head to replay what I could remember of the dinner there and of the reception in Rodolfo Alvarez’s studio afterwards – but soon those painted figures, lurid, bulging, multiplying, were all I could see, and I had to stop. I blocked it out by reading the charter of passenger’s rights on the back of the seat in front of me.

When I got to the coffee shop, Kenny Sanchez was sitting in a booth, eating a plate of ham and eggs. There was a large brown envelope on the table beside his coffee cup. I sat down opposite him and nodded a suitably discreet hello.

He wiped his mouth with his napkin and said, ‘Eddie, how are you? You want something to eat?’

‘No, I’ll just have a coffee.’

He nabbed a passing waitress and ordered the coffee.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said and tapped the envelope.

I felt my heart beat a little faster.

‘That’s great. What is it?’

He took a sip from his coffee.

‘We’ll come to that, Eddie – but first, you’ve got to be straight with me. This designer drug thing – how real is it? I mean, how do you even know about it?’

Obviously – having gone off and had himself a little think – he’d concluded that I was trying to put one over on him, to finagle the information out of him without giving anything substantial in return.

‘It’s real all right,’ I said, and paused. Then the waitress arrived with the coffee, which gave me a moment to think. But there was nothing to think. I needed the information.

When the waitress had gone, I said, ‘You know all these performance-enhancing drugs you read about in the papers, and that are tainting sport – swimming, track-and-field, weight-lifting? Well, this is like one of those, except it’s for the brain – a kind of steroid for the intellect.’

He stared at me, unsure of how to react, waiting for more.

‘Someone I knew was dealing them to Tauber.’ I nodded at the envelope. ‘If those are Tauber’s phone records, then this guy’s name is probably on there, too. Vernon Gant.’

Kenny Sanchez hesitated. But then he picked up the envelope, opened it and pulled out a sheaf of papers. I could see straightaway that it was a print-out of telephone numbers, along with names, times and dates. He riffled through them, looking for something specific.

‘There,’ he said after a moment, and held a page out, pointing at a name, ‘Vernon Gant.’

‘So is there a Todd listed on there, as well?’

‘Yes. Just three or four calls, all around the same time, a period of a couple of days.’

‘And after which there are no more calls from Vernon Gant either.’

He looked back at the pages, flicking them over, one by one, checking what I’d said. Eventually, he nodded and said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ He put the sheaf of papers down on the envelope. ‘So what does that mean? He disappeared?’

‘Vernon Gant is dead.’

‘Oh.’

‘He was my brother-in-law.’

‘Oh.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. He was a jerk.’

We were both silent for a few moments after that. Then I took a calculated risk. I picked up the sheaf of papers, and when they were firmly in my hand, I raised my eyebrows at him interrogatively.

He nodded his assent.

I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.

‘That’s a New Jersey number, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. I checked. The calls were to a place called United Labtech, which is somewhere near Trenton.’

‘United Labtech?’

He nodded, and said, ‘Yeah. You want to take a drive out there?’

His car was parked just up the street, so within a few minutes we were heading down the Henry Hudson Parkway. We took the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey and then got on to the Turnpike. Kenny Sanchez had given me the envelope to hold when we got into the car, and after a few minutes on the road I’d taken the pages out and had started examining them. It was obvious that Sanchez was a little uncomfortable about this, but he didn’t say anything. I managed to keep things ticking over by talking, and asking him questions – about cases he’d worked, about anomalies in the law, about his family, whatever. Then, suddenly, I was asking him questions about the list. Who were these people? Had he tracked all of the calls? How did that work?

‘Most of the numbers,’ he said, ‘are connected to the business end of Dekedelia – publishers, distributors, lawyers. We can account for them, and for that reason have eliminated them. But we’ve also isolated a list of about twenty-five other names that don’t check out, that we can’t account for.’

‘Who are they to? Or from?’

‘To and from – and fairly regularly, as well. They’re all individuals living in major cities throughout the country. They hold executive positions in a wide range of companies, but none of them seems to have any connection to Dekedelia.’

‘Like… er,’ I said, homing in on one of the few out-of-state numbers I could find, ‘this… Libby Driscoll? In Philadelphia?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hmm.’

I looked out of the window, and as the gas stations, factories, Pizza Huts and Burger Kings flitted past, I wondered who these people could be. I tried a few theories out for size. But I soon became distracted by the fact that Kenny Sanchez now seemed to be looking in his rearview mirror every couple of seconds. For no apparent reason, he also changed lanes – once, twice, and then a third time.

‘Anything wrong?’ I said eventually.

‘I think we’re being followed,’ he said, switching lanes again and then accelerating.

‘Followed?’ I said. ‘By who?’

‘I don’t know. And maybe we’re not. I’m just being… cautious.’

I craned my neck around. The traffic coming from behind was flowing across three lanes, the whole busy highway winding back serpent-like over a hilly, industrial landscape. I found it hard to imagine how Sanchez could have isolated one car from all of these and thought it was following us.

I didn’t say anything.

A few minutes later, we took the exit for Trenton and after driving around for what seemed like ages finally arrived at an anonymous single-storey building. It was low and long, and looked like a warehouse. There was a large parking area in front of it that was about half-full. The only identifying mark in the whole place was a small sign at the main entrance to the car park. It had the name ‘United Labtech’ on it, and underneath a logo that strained for scientific effect – a kind of multiple helix set against a curving blue grid. We drove in and parked.

It suddenly occurred to me how close I might be to meeting Vernon Gant’s partner, and I felt a rush of adrenalin.

I went to open the door, but Sanchez put a hand on my arm and said, ‘Whoa there – where are you going?’

‘What?’

‘You can’t just walk in there. You need some kind of a cover.’ He reached across me and opened his glove compartment. ‘Let me do it.’ He took out a handful of business cards, flicked through them and selected one. ‘Insurance is always good for this type of thing.’

Undecided about what to do, I chewed for a moment on my lower lip.

‘Look, I’m just going to establish that he’s in there,’ Sanchez said, ‘It’s the first step.’

I hesitated.

‘OK.’

I watched Sanchez get out of the car, walk over to the entrance of the building and disappear inside.

He was right, of course. I would have to approach Todd Ellis very carefully indeed, because if I blurted out something inappropriate as soon as I met him – especially if this was where he worked – I might easily scare him off, or blow his cover.

As I sat there waiting in the car, my cellphone rang.

‘Hello.’

‘Eddie, Carl.’

‘What’s up.’

‘I think we’re there. Vision lock. Hank and Dan. I’ve asked them both to dinner in my place this evening, and it looks like we could be getting a final handshake.’

‘Great. What time?’

‘Eight-thirty. I’ve cancelled your meetings for this afternoon, so… where are you, by the way?’

‘New Jersey.’

‘What the-’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Well haul your ass back in here as quick as you can. We’ve a lot to go over before this evening.’

I looked at my watch.

‘Give me an hour.’

‘OK. See you then.’

My head was reeling as I put the phone away. Too many things were happening at once now – locating Todd Ellis, the deal, the new apartment…

Just then Kenny Sanchez re-appeared. He walked briskly over to the car and got in.

I looked at him, silently screaming well?

‘They say he doesn’t work there any more.’

He turned to face me.

‘Left a couple of weeks ago. And they don’t have any forwarding address, or number where he can be reached.’

24

WE DROVE BACK TO THE CITY in almost total silence. I had a jumpy, nauseous feeling in my stomach at the thought that Todd Ellis had just disappeared into thin air. I also didn’t like the fact that he no longer worked at United Labtech, because if that’s where they produced MDT, what chance would I stand of getting any more without an inside connection? When we were about half-way through the Lincoln Tunnel, I said to Sanchez, ‘So, do you think you’ll be able to trace him?’

‘I’ll try.’

I sensed from his tone that he was a little fed up. But I didn’t want to leave him like that. I needed him on my side.

‘You’ll try?’

‘Yes, but I wish…’

He stopped and sighed impatiently. He didn’t want to say it, so I said it for him.

‘You wish you had more to go on than just my frankly implausible story.’

He hesitated, but then said, ‘Yes.’

I thought about this for a moment, and when we were coming out of the tunnel, I said to him, ‘These people on the list, the twenty-five or so names you can’t account for? Have you spoken to any of them?’

‘A few of them, when we first started tracking his calls.’

‘When was that?’

‘About three months ago. But it was a dead end.’

I took out my cellphone and started dialling a number.

‘Who are you calling?’

‘Libby Driscoll.’

‘But, how did-’

‘I have a good memory… Libby Driscoll, please.’

A couple of moments later, I put the phone down in my lap.

‘She’s out sick. Has been for a week.’

‘So?’

I took the pages out of the envelope and went through them. I found another of the out-of-state numbers, checked it with Sanchez and then called it.

It was the same story.

We were on Forty-second Street now and I asked Sanchez if he could drop me off at Fifth Avenue.

‘It’s just a guess,’ I said, ‘but if you call every name on that shortlist, I think you’ll find that they’re all sick. Furthermore, you’ll also probably find that the three people you’re looking for – the missing cult members – are, in fact, people on that list-’

‘What?’

‘-living out successful new identities, fuelled up on MDT-48 supplied by Deke Tauber.’

‘Jesus.’

‘But the supply has run out and that’s why they’re getting sick.’

Sanchez pulled up just before Fifth Avenue.

‘My guess,’ I went on, ‘is that everyone on the list is really someone else. Like you said, they re-create themselves in an alternative environment.’

‘But-’

‘They probably don’t even know they’re taking it. He gives it to them – I don’t know, somehow – but the most likely pay-off is that he gets a percentage of their fat executive salaries.’

Kenny Sanchez was staring straight ahead now and I could almost hear his mind working.

‘Look, I’ll get on this straightaway,’ he said, ‘and I’ll call you as soon as I have anything.’

I got out of the car, still feeling mildly nauseous. But as I walked up Fifth Avenue towards Forty-eighth Street, I also felt vaguely satisfied at how deftly I’d managed to keep Kenny Sanchez onboard.

I spent the afternoon with Carl Van Loon going over stuff we’d gone over a hundred times before, especially our public relations strategy for dealing with the announcement. He was very excited about finalizing the deal, and didn’t want to leave anything to chance. He was also excited about having it happen at his apartment on Park Avenue, which – although he’d forgotten it now – had been my idea. In all the hectic activity of the past few weeks, Hank Atwood and Dan Bloom had only met face to face twice – fairly briefly and in formal business settings. I had suggested, therefore, that a casual dinner in Van Loon’s apartment might be a better setting for this next and most crucial meeting, on the basis that a congenial, clubby atmosphere with brandy and cigars would more easily facilitate the one thing that remained to be done in this whole affair – which was the two principals eyeballing each other across a table and saying, Fuck it, let’s merge.

I left the office at around 4 p.m. and went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my things – including the envelope of MDT pills. It was strange closing the door for the last time and walking out of the building, because it wasn’t just that I was leaving an apartment behind, a place I’d been in for six years – I felt at some level that I was leaving myself behind. Over the past few weeks, I had shed much of who I was, and even though I’d done this with considerable abandon, I think I’d unconsciously felt that as long as I was still living in the apartment on Tenth Street I would always have the option, if it became necessary, to reverse the process – as though the place contained a part of me that was ineradicable, some form of genetic sequencing embedded in the floorboards and the walls that could be used to reconstitute my movements, my daily habits, all of who I was. But now, climbing into the back seat of a cab on First Avenue – with the last few items from the apartment stuffed in a holdall – I knew for sure, finally, that I was cutting myself adrift.

A little over an hour later I was gazing out at the city from the sixty-eighth floor of the Celestial Building. Surrounded by unpacked boxes and wooden crates, I was standing in the main living area, wearing only a bathrobe and sipping a glass of champagne. The view was spectacular and the evening that lay ahead promised, in its own way, to be equally spectacular. And I remember thinking at the time that, well, if this was what being adrift was like, then I reckoned I could probably get used to it…

I got to Van Loon’s place on Park Avenue for eight o’clock and was shown into a large, chintzy reception room. Van Loon himself appeared after a few minutes and offered me a drink. He seemed a little agitated. He told me that his wife was away and that he wasn’t very comfortable entertaining without her. I reminded him that apart from ourselves, the dinner was just going to be Hank Atwood, Dan Bloom and one adviser apiece from their respective negotiating teams. It wasn’t some extravagant society bash he was throwing. It would be simple, casual, and at the same time we’d get a little business done. It would be discreet, but with far-reaching implications.

Van Loon slapped me gently on the back ‘“Discreet, but with far-reaching implications.” I like that.’

The others arrived in two shifts, about five minutes apart, and soon we were all standing around, glasses in hand, pointedly not discussing the MCL-Abraxas merger. In line with the casual dress-code for the evening, I was wearing a black cashmere sweater and black wool trousers, but everyone else, including Van Loon, was in chinos and Polo shirts. This made me feel slightly different – and in a way it reinforced the notion that I was taking part in some super-sophisticated computer game. I was identified as the hero by being dressed differently, in black. The enemy, in chinos and Polo shirts, were all around me and I had to schmooze them to death before they realized that I was a phony and froze me out.

This mild feeling of alienation lingered through the early part of the evening, but it wasn’t actually unpleasant, and it occurred to me after a while just what was going on. I’d done this. I’d done the merger negotiations thing. I’d helped to structure a huge corporate deal – but now it was over. This dinner was only a formality. I wanted to move on to something else.

As if they somehow sensed this in me, both Hank Atwood and Dan Bloom, separately, discreetly, intimated that if I was interested – down the line, of course – there might be some… role I could play in their newly formed media behemoth. I was circumspect in how I responded to these overtures, making out that loyalty to Van Loon was my first priority, but naturally I was flattered to be asked. I didn’t know what I would want from such an arrangement in any case – except that it would have to be different from what I’d been doing up to that point. Maybe I could run a movie studio, or plot some new global corporate strategy for the company.

Or maybe I could branch out altogether, and diversify. Go into politics. Run for the Senate.

We drifted into an adjoining room and took our places at a large, round dining table, and as I elaborated mentally on the notion of going into politics, I simultaneously engaged with Dan Bloom in a conversation about single malt Scotch whiskies. This dreamy, distracted state of mind persisted throughout the meal (tagliatelle with jugged hare and English peas, followed by venison sautéed in chestnuts), and must have made me seem quite aloof. Once or twice, I even saw Van Loon looking over at me, a puzzled, worried expression on his face.

When we were about half-way through the main course – not to mention all the way through two bottles of 1947 Château Calon-Ségur – the conversation turned to the business at hand. This didn’t take long, however, because once the subject had been raised, it quickly became clear that the details and the fevered number-crunching of recent weeks were largely cosmetic and that what counted more than anything else right now was agreement in principle. Van Loon & Associates had facilitated this, and that was where the real brokering skill lay – in orchestrating events, in making it happen. But now that the thing was virtually on auto-pilot, I felt as if I were watching the scene from a distant height, or through a pane of tinted glass.

When the plates had been cleared away, there was a tense pause in the room. The conversation had been manoeuvring itself into position for some time, and it seemed now that the moment was right. I cleared my throat, and then – almost on cue – Hank Atwood and Dan Bloom reached across the table and shook hands.

There was a brief flurry of clapping and air-punching, after which a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and six glasses appeared on the table. Van Loon stood up and made a show of opening the bottle, and then there was a toast. In fact, there were several toasts – and at the end there was even one to me. Choosing his words carefully, Dan Bloom held up his glass and thanked me for my keen focus and unstinting dedication. Hank Atwood added that I had been the lifeblood of the negotiations. Van Loon himself said he hoped that he and I – having together helped to broker the biggest merger in the history of corporate America – would not feel that our horizons had in any way been limited by the experience.

This got a hearty laugh. It also eased us out of the main order of business and moved us safely on to the next stage of the evening – dessert (glazed almond brittle), cigars and an hour or two of untrammelled bonhomie. I contributed fully to the conversation, which was wide-ranging and slightly giddy, but just below the surface, thrumming steadily, my fantasy of representing New York in the US Senate had taken on a life of its own – even to the extent of my seeing it as inevitable that at some future date I would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

This was a fantasy, of course, but the more I thought about it, the more the fundamental notion of entering politics actually made sense to me – because getting people on my side, getting them energized and doing things for me, was precisely what I seemed to be good at. After all, I had these guys – billionaires in Polo shirts – competing with each other for my attention, so how hard could it be to woo the attention of the American public? How hard could it be to woo the attention of whatever percentage of registered voters would be required to get me elected? Following a carefully worked-out plan I could be sitting on sub-committees and select committees within five years, and after that, who knew?

In any case, a good five-year-plan was probably just what I needed – something to burn up the incredible energy and breath of ambition that MDT so easily engendered.

I was fully aware of the fact, however, that I didn’t have a constant supply of MDT, and that the supply I did have was alarmingly finite, but I was nevertheless confident that one way or another, and sooner rather than later, I would be overcoming this problem. Kenny Sanchez would locate Todd Ellis. He would have a constant supply of the stuff. I would somehow gain permanent access to this supply. It would all – somehow – work out…

At around 11 p.m., there was a general movement to break up the proceedings. It had been agreed earlier that there would be a press conference the following day to announce the proposed merger. The story would be strategically leaked in the morning, and the press conference would take place in the late afternoon. The glare of media coverage would be intense, but at the same time everyone was looking forward to it.

Hank Atwood and I were still sitting together at the table, contemplatively swirling brandy around in our glasses. The others were standing, chatting, and the air was thick with cigar smoke.

‘You OK, Eddie?’

I turned to look at him.

‘Yeah. I’m fine. Why?’

‘No reason. You just seem, I don’t know, subdued.’

I smiled. ‘I was thinking about the future.’

‘Well…’ He reached over and very gently clinked his glass against mine. ‘… I’ll drink to that…’

Just then, there was rap on the door and Van Loon, who was standing nearby, went over to open it.

‘… immediate and long-term…’

Van Loon stood at the door, looking out, and then made a motion to shoo in whoever was there – but whoever was there obviously didn’t want to be shooed in.

Then I heard her voice, ‘No, Daddy, I really don’t think-’

‘It’s just a little cigar smoke, for godsakes. Come in and say hello.’

I looked over at the door, hoping that she would come in.

‘… either way,’ Atwood was saying, ‘it’s the promised land.’

I took a sip from my glass.

‘What is?’

‘The future, Eddie, the future.’

I looked back, distracted. Ginny was stepping tentatively into the room now. When she was just inside the door, she reached up to kiss her father on the cheek. She was wearing a strappy satin top and corduroy trousers, and was holding a suede clutch bag in her left hand. As she pulled away from her father, she smiled over at me, raising her right hand and fluttering her fingers – a greeting which I think was meant to take in Hank Atwood as well. She moved a little further into the room. It was only then I noticed that Van Loon had his arm stretched out to greet someone else who was coming in behind her. A second or two later – and after what looked like a vigorous handshake – a young man of about twenty-five or twenty-six appeared through the door.

Ginny shook hands politely with Dan Bloom and the other two men, and then turned around. She stood at the table and put a hand on the back of an empty chair that was positioned directly opposite where I was sitting.

The young man and Van Loon were talking now, and laughing, and although I found it hard not to look at Ginny, I kept glancing over at them. The young man was wearing a hooded zip-front thing, a black crew-neck T-shirt and jeans. He had dark hair and a little goatee beard. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I recognized him. At any rate, there was something about him, something around him that I recognized. He and Van Loon seemed to know each other quite well.

I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to conduct an interview.

‘So, gentlemen, what are we talking about?’

‘The future,’ said Atwood.

‘The future? Well, you know what Einstein had to say about that?’

‘No, what?’

‘He said I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.’ She looked at me directly, and added, ‘I tend to agree with him.’

‘Hank.’

Suddenly, Van Loon was waving an arm in our direction, and indicating for Atwood to come over.

‘Excuse me, my dear,’ he said, and made a strained face as he got up. He walked around the table, and it occurred to me then who the young man was – Ray Tyner. As movie stars reportedly often do, he looked a little different in real life. I’d read about him in the previous day’s paper. He’d just come back from shooting a movie in Venice.

‘So,’ Ginny said, looking around, ‘this is where the cabal meets, the secret movers and shakers, the smoke-filled back-room.’

I smiled. ‘I thought we were in your dining-room.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yeah, but I ain’t never had dinner in here. I eat in the kitchen. This is the control centre.’

I nodded over at Ray Tyner. Atwood and Bloom and the others had all gathered around him now, and he seemed to be telling a story.

‘So, who’s running the control centre now?’

She turned around in her chair for a moment to look over at him. I stared intently at her profile, at the curve of her neck, at her bare shoulders.

‘Oh, Ray’s not like that,’ she said turning back, ‘he’s sweet.’

‘Are you two an item?’

She pulled her head back, a little surprised at my question.

‘What are you, moonlighting for Page Six now?’

‘No, I’m just curious. For future reference.’

‘Like I said, Mr Spinola, I don’t think of the future.’

‘Is he why you wouldn’t go for a drink with me?’

She paused. Then she said, ‘I don’t understand you.’

I was puzzled at this.

‘What don’t you understand?’ I said.

‘I don’t know…’ Her face changed, as she tried to think of the words. ‘I’m sorry – it must be an instinctive thing – but I get the feeling that when you look at me, you’re seeing someone else.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I stared uncomfortably at my brandy glass. Was it that obvious? Ginny resembled Melissa, it was true, but until that moment I hadn’t realized what a deep impression the likeness they shared had made on me.

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the other side of the room, and the group started to break up.

I looked at her again.

‘I don’t think of the past,’ I said, trying to be clever.

‘And the present?’

‘I don’t think of that either.’

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ she said, and then laughed. ‘It goes soon enough.’

‘Something like that.’

Ray Tyner had come up behind her now. She turned slightly and twisted her arm up to reach him. He took her hand and she got out of the chair.

‘Ray, this is Eddie Spinola, a friend of mine. Eddie, Ray Tyner.’

I reached over and we shook hands.

I was inordinately pleased that she had described me as a friend of hers.

Up close, Ray Tyner was almost preternaturally good-looking. He had amazing eyes and the kind of smile that meant he could probably work a room without even bothering to open his mouth.

Maybe I’d ask him to be my running mate.

I got back to the Celestial just after twelve. It was to be my first night in the new apartment, but I didn’t have anything to sleep on. In fact, I didn’t have any furniture at all, no bed, or sofa, or bookshelves, nothing. I had ordered some stuff, but none of it had been delivered yet.

I wasn’t going to be doing much sleeping in any case, so it didn’t really matter. Instead, I wandered from room to room, through the huge, empty apartment – trying to convince myself that I wasn’t upset or jealous or in any way put out at all. Ginny Van Loon and Ray Tyner made a fabulous-looking couple – and next to a bunch of old business farts smoking cigars and talking percentages, they looked even better.

What was there to be upset about?

After a while I got my computer out of its box and put it on a wooden crate. I went online and tried to catch up with the day’s financial news.

25

I WAS BACK IN FORTY-EIGHTH STREET the next morning at around seven-thirty, drafting speeches and making some final changes to the press release. Given that the announcement was only a couple of hours away and that secrecy was no longer an issue, Van Loon had been able to call some of his regular people in to get the PR machinery up and running. Although this was a great help, the place was now busier than Grand Central Station.

Before leaving the apartment, I had taken my usual dose of five pills – three MDT and two Dexeron – but then at the last minute I had gone back and rummaged in the holdall bag and taken two more, one of each. As a result, I was operating at full tilt, but I found that my accelerated work-rate was intimidating some of these Van Loon regulars – people who probably had a lot more experience than I had. To avoid any friction, therefore, I set up a makeshift office in one of the boardrooms and got some work done on my own.

At around ten-thirty, Kenny Sanchez called me on my cellphone. I was sitting at a large oval table with a laptop computer and dozens of pages spread out in front of me when he rang.

‘I have some bad news, Eddie.’

I got a sharp, sinking feeling in my stomach.

‘What?’

‘Well, a couple of things. I’ve located Todd Ellis, but I’m afraid he’s dead.’

Shit.

‘What happened?’

‘Hit-and-run accident, about a week ago. Around where he lived, in Brooklyn.’

Fuck.

This flooded in on me now – without Todd Ellis, what chance did I have? Where did I go? Where did I even begin?

I noticed that Kenny Sanchez was silent.

‘You mentioned there were a couple of things,’ I said. ‘What else?’

‘I’ve been re-assigned.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve been re-assigned, given another case to work on. I don’t know why. I kicked up shit, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s a big agency. This is my job.’

‘So… who’s looking after it now?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe no one.’

‘Is this normal – I mean, interference like this?’

‘No.’

He sounded very pissed off.

‘I worked the phones all yesterday afternoon when I left you, and even late into the evening. Then this morning I get called in to make a report and they tell me I’m needed on another case and to hand over all my paper-work.’

I thought about it for a second, but what could I say? Then I just said, ‘What else did you manage to find out?’

He sighed, and I pictured him shaking his head.

‘Well, you were right about the list,’ he said eventually. ‘It was incredible.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Those out-of-state numbers? You were right. They all seem to be cult members living under assumed names. Most are sick, but I got to speak to some of them.’ There was a brief pause, during which I heard him sighing again. ‘Of the three I was originally looking for, two are in the hospital and one is at home suffering from severe migraines.’

I could tell by his tone that despite having been reassigned he was excited at the progress he’d made.

‘It took a while to get anyone to speak to me, but when I did, it was amazing. The longest conversation I had was with a girl called Beth Lipski. It seems the standard Dekedelia make-over involves a completely new identity – chemically-assisted alteration of metabolism, plastic surgery, new “designated” relatives, the lot. And just like you said, career advancement is the measure of a successful new identity, with 60 per cent of income going back into the organization. Shit, it’s like a cross between the Freemasons and the Witness Protection Program.’

‘Why did she talk?’

‘Because she’s afraid. Tauber has cut off all contact with her, and she feels nervous and lost. She has a permanent headache and can’t work properly. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her. I don’t even think she knows she’s been taking a drug – and I didn’t want to push her over the edge by bringing it up. She was paranoid about talking to me in the first place, but then once she started she couldn’t stop.’

‘So how do you think he gives them the drug?’

‘Apparently, he has them all on a programme of vitamins and special diet supplements, so I guess he slips it in there somehow. And that’s obviously the source of his power over these people, and of his supposed charisma.’ He paused. I heard him stamping his foot, or banging his fist on something. Then he said, ‘Damn! I really can’t believe this shit. I’ve never worked on such an interesting case before.’

I didn’t have time for this now – Kenny Sanchez having a career crisis down the phone at me. I felt a slight queasiness all of a sudden. I took a deep breath, and then asked him if he had come up with anything on United Labtech.

He sighed again.

‘Yeah, I did,’ he said, ‘one thing anyway. It’s owned by the pharmaceutical company, Eiben-Chemcorp.’

Soon after that, I told him I had to go, that I was at work. I thanked him, wished him luck, and got off the phone as quickly as I could.

I put the phone down on the table and stood up.

I walked across the room, slowly, and stood at the windows. It was a clear, sunny day in Manhattan and from up here on the sixty-second floor everything was visible, there to be seen, and picked out, every landmark, every architectural feature – including some less obvious ones, such as the Celestial Building over to my right, or the old Port Authority Terminal further down, on Eighth Avenue, where Kerr & Dexter had their offices. Standing at this window, in fact, I saw that my whole life was laid out in front of me, like a sequence of tiny incisions in the vast microchip of the city – street corners, apartments, delis, liquor stores, movie-theaters. But now, instead of a deeper and more permanent line being cut into the surface, these minute nicks were in danger of being smoothed over and levelled off.

I turned around and stared at the plain white walls on the other side of the room, and at the grey carpet and at the anonymous company furniture. I hadn’t given in to panic yet – though it surely wouldn’t be long in coming. The press conference was scheduled for the afternoon, and already the thought of it filled me with a sense of dread.

But then something else occurred to me, and with the single-mindedness of a condemned man, I latched on to it – and wouldn’t let go.

Sanchez had mentioned Eiben-Chemcorp. I knew I’d heard that name somewhere quite recently, and after a couple of minutes I remembered where. I’d seen it at Vernon’s that day – in the Boston Globe. Vernon had apparently been reading about an upcoming product liability trial in Massachusetts. As far as I could recall, a teenage girl who’d been taking Triburbazine had murdered her best friend and then killed herself.

I walked back over to the table and sat in front of the laptop. I went online and searched the Globe archives for more detail on the story.

The girl’s family had filed a lawsuit looking for punitive damages against Eiben-Chemcorp. In the trial, the company would be defending charges that its anti-depressant drug had caused ‘loss of impulse control’ and ‘suicidal ideation’ in the girl. Dave Morgenthaler, a personal injury lawyer, was to be the lead counsel representing the plaintiffs, and according to one article I read, he had spent the last six months collecting depositions from expert witnesses – among them scientists who’d been involved in the development and production of Triburbazine, and psychiatrists who would be willing to testify that Triburbazine was potentially harmful.

My mind was racing now. I picked up a pen and started doodling on a piece of paper, trying to link all of this together.

Eiben-Chemcorp owned Labtech, which was where MDT seemed to have come from. That meant, in effect, that MDT had been developed and produced by an international pharmaceutical corporation. This corporation, in turn, was facing high profile – and potentially very damaging – litigation.

In fact – I turned back to the computer and went into one of the financial websites, and there it was – due to adverse publicity surrounding the case, Eiben-Chemcorp’s stock had already suffered quite a lot, having apparently dropped to 69⅞ from a high earlier in the year of 87¼. This growing public interest in the case would probably continue as the trial date approached. I found numerous articles that had already touched on what would surely be a key point in the trial: if human behaviour was all about synapses and serotonin, then where did free will fit into the picture? Where did personal responsibility end and brain chemistry begin?

Eiben-Chemcorp, in short, was in a very vulnerable position.

I was too, of course – but what I then wondered was how I could use my knowledge of MDT to leverage some advantage out of Eiben-Chemcorp. A supply of MDT in return for not talking to Dave Morgenthaler, perhaps?

I stood up and wandered around the room.

It seemed to me that information coming out in court about an Eiben-Chemcorp product that hadn’t ever been tested, and had already caused numerous deaths, would have a devastating effect on the company’s share price. It was a stark, high-risk option, but given the circumstances it was probably the only option I had left.

I passed by the window again, but didn’t look out this time. After a good deal of thought, I decided that the most practical first step would be to establish contact with Dave Morgenthaler. I would have to be careful how I approached him, but to pose a credible threat to Eiben-Chemcorp, I would need to have Morgenthaler primed for the kill. I would need to be able to set him loose at a moment’s notice.

I made some enquiries and found the number for his office in Boston. I called it immediately and asked to speak to him, but he was out of the office for the day. I left my cellphone number and a message: that I had some ‘explosive’ information about Eiben-Chemcorp and wanted to meet him as soon as possible to discuss it.

When I put the phone down again, I tried to get back to work, to redirect my attention to the MCL-Abraxas deal and to the press conference in the afternoon, but I found it very difficult. I kept reliving the past few weeks in my mind and wishing I’d done this or that – wishing, for instance, that I’d investigated Deke Tauber a little earlier, which might have meant reaching Todd Ellis before he left United Labtech…

I then wondered if there’d been any connection between his death and Vernon’s. But what was the use? Whether Todd Ellis’s death had been accidental or not, that route was now closed off to me. I’d had no choice but to come up with an alternative.

I went over to the window again and gazed at the buildings opposite – gazed down along these vast, vertical plates of steel and glass, all the way down to the streets below, and to the tiny rivulets of people and traffic. This city would be buzzing soon with news of the deal and I would be there when the news broke. But I felt removed from it all now. I felt as though I had entered a confused dream, knowing somehow as I did so that I wouldn’t ever be coming out of it again…

This impression was reinforced almost at once, when I was called in to one of the other offices to go over the last-minute arrangements for the press conference. Organized at admittedly very short notice by one of Van Loon’s staffers, the press conference was being held at five o’clock in a midtown hotel. This much I had been aware of, but when I saw now which hotel, I got a return of that sharp, sinking feeling in my stomach.

‘Are you OK?’

This was one of the staffers. I glanced up and looked at him, simultaneously catching sight of my reflection in a mirror that was on a side wall of the office.

My face was deathly pale.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, it’s just… a… moment, I think-’

I turned around and rushed out of the office, into the men’s room and straight over to one of the washbasins.

I threw some cold water on my face.

The press conference was going to be held at the Clifden Hotel.

Van Loon and I arrived at about three-thirty, and already there was quite a bit of commotion in the place. The first inkling for the media that something was up had come earlier in the day, after Van Loon had phoned a few carefully selected people and told them to cancel whatever they’d had on for the late afternoon. The names Atwood and Bloom were mentioned in the same breath and that had been enough to start a wild fire of rumour and speculation. We’d sent out the press release an hour later. Then the phones had started ringing and hadn’t stopped since.

The Clifden was a forty-five-storey tower rising out of a restored landmark building on Fifty-sixth Street, just off Madison Avenue. It was a luxurious hotel with over 800 rooms, as well as full business and conference facilities. The lobby area led on to a glass-enclosed atrium lounge and beyond that again there was a reception room where we would be holding our press conference.

As Van Loon took a call on his cellphone, I looked around the lobby area very carefully, but I honestly didn’t recognize anything. Even though I had a lingering sense of unease about the whole thing, I came to the confident conclusion that I had never been there before.

Van Loon finished his call. We walked into the atrium lounge, and in the time it took us to cross it Van Loon was approached three times by different journalists. He engaged them in a charming, bantering way, but told them nothing they wouldn’t have heard already or read in the press release. Inside the conference room itself there was a lot of activity, as technical crews set up cameras and tested sound equipment at the back. A little further up the room, hotel staff were laying out rows of foldable chairs, and at the top there was a podium, with two long tables on either side of it. Behind these there were mounted stands displaying the respective logos of the two companies, MCL-Parnassus and Abraxas.

I stood at the back for a while, as Van Loon consulted with some of his regular people in the middle of the room. Behind me, I could hear two technicians talking as they fiddled with wires and cables.

‘… I swear to god, whacked on the back of the head.’

‘Here?’

‘With a blunt instrument. You don’t read the papers? She was Mexican. Married to some painter.’

‘Yeah. I remember now. Shit. That was this place?’

I moved away, over towards the doors – so I couldn’t hear them any more. Then I slowly drifted out of the conference room altogether and back into the atrium lounge.

One of the things I remembered quite clearly from that night – from near the end of it, at any rate – was walking along an empty hotel corridor. I could picture it in my mind’s eye still – the low ceiling, the patterned crimson and navy carpet, the magnolia walls, the oak panelled doors flitting past me on either side…

I just didn’t remember anything else about it.

I crossed the lounge and wandered into the lobby area. More people were arriving now and there was a heightened air of anticipation about the place. I saw someone I knew and wanted to avoid, so I slipped over towards the elevators, which were on the far side of the reception desk. But then, as though carried along by some irresistible force, I actually followed two women into an elevator. One of them pressed a button, and then looked at me expectantly, her finger hovering in front of the panel.

‘Fifteen,’ I said, ‘thanks.’

Mingling freely and somewhat sickeningly in the air with my anxiety was the scent of expensive perfume, and the always charged but never acknowledged intimacy of an elevator ride. As we hummed upwards, I felt my stomach churning over and I had to lean against the side of the elevator car to steady myself. When the door slid open at fifteen, I stared out in disbelief at a magnolia-coloured wall. Brushing past one of the two women, I made my exit – stepping a little unsteadily out on to a crimson and navy carpet.

‘Good evening.’

I turned back, and as the two women were being closed off from view, I mumbled some kind of reply.

Left alone now in this empty corridor, I experienced something close to real terror. I had been here before. It was exactly as I had remembered it – the low, wide corridor… richly coloured, luxurious, deep and long like a tunnel. But this was all I could remember. I walked a few paces and then stopped. I stood facing one of the doors and tried to imagine what the room inside was like – but nothing came to me. I walked on, passing door after door on either side, until near the end of the corridor I came to one that was slightly open.

I stopped, and my heart was thumping as I stood there, peering through the chink into what I could see of the room – the end of a double bed, drapes, a chair, everything bright and cream-coloured.

With my foot, I gently tapped the door open a little wider, and stepped back. Framed in the doorway, I could see more of the same, a generic hotel room – but then suddenly, passing across the frame from left to right I saw a tall, dark-haired woman in a long black dress. She was clutching her head and there was blood pouring down the side of her face. My heart lurched sideways and I stepped back, reeling, and fell against the magnolia wall. I got up, and staggered along the corridor, back towards the elevators.

A moment later, behind me, I heard a noise and I turned around. Coming out of the room I’d just been looking into, there was a man, and then a woman. They pulled the door closed and started walking in my direction. The woman was tall and dark-haired, and was wearing a belted coat. She was in her fifties, as was the man. They were chatting, and completely ignored me as they passed. I stood and watched as they walked the length of the corridor and then disappeared into an elevator.

A couple of minutes ticked by before I could do anything. My heart still felt as if it had been dislodged and was in danger of stopping. My hands were shaking. Leaning against the wall, I stared down at the carpet. Its deep colours seemed to be pulsating, its pattern shifting and alive.

Eventually, I straightened up and made my way to the elevators, but my hand was still trembling as I reached out to press the ‘down’ button.

By the time I got back to the conference room, a lot of people had arrived and the atmosphere was fairly frenetic. I wandered up to the front, where some of the MCL people had gathered in a group and were talking animatedly.

Suddenly, I heard Van Loon approaching me from behind.

‘Eddie, where have you been?’

I turned around. There was a look of genuine surprise on his face.

‘Jesus, Eddie, what happened? You… you look like you’ve seen-’

‘A ghost?’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘I’m a little stressed out here, Carl, that’s all. I just need some time.’

‘Look, Eddie, take it easy. If anyone’s earned a break around here, it’s you.’ He clenched his fist and held it out in a gesture of solidarity. ‘Anyway, we’ve done our work. For the moment. Am I right?’

I nodded.

Van Loon was then whisked off by one of his people to talk to somebody on the far side of the podium.

I floated through the next couple of hours in a kind of semiconscious daze. I moved around and mingled and talked to people, but I don’t remember specific conversations. It all felt choreographed, and automatic.

When the actual press conference started, I found myself at the top of the room, standing behind the Abraxas people, who were seated at the table to the right of the podium. At the back of the room – and over a sea of about 300 heads – there was a phalanx of reporters, photographers and camera-men. The event was going out live on several channels, and there was also a webcast and a satellite feed. When Hank Atwood took the podium, there was an immediate barrage of sound from the cameras at the back – clicking, whirring, popping flashbulbs – and this din continued uninterrupted throughout the whole press conference, and even intermittently during the question-and-answer session that followed. I didn’t listen carefully to any of the speeches, some of which I had helped to write, but I did recognize occasional phrases and expressions – even though the relentless repetition of words such as ‘future’, ‘transform’ and ‘opportunity’ only added to the sense of unreality I now felt about everything that was happening around me.

Just as Dan Bloom was finishing at the podium, my cellphone rang. I quickly took it out of my jacket pocket and answered it.

‘Hello, is this… Eddie Spinola?’

I could barely hear.

‘Yes.’

‘This is Dave Morgenthaler in Boston. I got your message from this morning.’

I covered my other ear.

‘Listen… hang on a second.’

I moved to the left, along the side of the room and through a door about half-way down that led into a quiet section off the atrium lounge.

‘Mr Morgenthaler?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When can we meet?’

‘Look, who are you? I’m busy – why should I take the time out to see you?’

As briefly as I could, I pitched him the story – a powerful, untested and potentially lethal drug from the labs of the company he was about to go up against in court. I kept it unspecific and didn’t describe the effects of the drug.

‘You haven’t said anything to convince me,’ he said. ‘How do I know you’re not some nut? How do I know you’re not making this shit up?’

The lights were low in this section of the lounge and the only other people nearby were two old guys engrossed in conversation. They were sitting at a table next to some huge potted palm trees. Behind me, I could hear voices resounding from the conference room.

‘You couldn’t make MDT up, Mr Morgenthaler. This shit is real, believe me.’

There was a pause, quite a long one, and then he said, ‘What?’

‘I said you couldn’t-’

‘No, the name. What name did you say?’

Shit – I shouldn’t have said the name.

‘Well, that’s-’

‘MDT… you said MDT.’ There was an urgency in his voice now. ‘What is this, a smart drug?’

I hesitated before I said anything else. He knew about it, or at least knew something about it. And he clearly wanted to know more.

I said, ‘When can we meet?’

He didn’t pause this time.

‘I can get an early flight tomorrow morning. Let’s meet, say… ten?’

‘OK.’

‘Somewhere outside. Fifty-ninth Street? In front of the Plaza?’

‘OK.’

‘I’m tall and-’

‘I’ve seen your photo on the Internet.’

‘Fine. OK. I’ll see you tomorrow morning then.’

I put the phone away and wandered slowly back into the conference room. Atwood and Bloom were together at the podium now, answering questions. I still found it hard to focus on what was going on, because that little incident up on the fifteenth floor – hallucination, vision, whatever – was still fresh in my mind and was blocking everything else out. I didn’t know what had happened between me and Donatella Alvarez that night, but I suspected now that as a manifestation of guilt and uncertainty, this was only the tip of a very large iceberg.

After the question-and-answer session had been wrapped up, the crowd began to disperse, but then the place became more chaotic than ever. Journalists from Business Week and Time were floating around looking for people to get comments from, and executives were slapping each other on the back and laughing. At one point, Hank Atwood passed and slapped me on the back. He then turned, and with an outstretched arm pointed an index finger directly at me.

‘The future, Eddie, the future.’

I half smiled, and he was gone.

There was talk among the Van Loon & Associates people about going out somewhere for dinner, to celebrate, but I couldn’t have faced that. With the events of the day so far, I had assembled the possible makings of a full-blown anxiety attack, and I didn’t want to do anything stupid now that would actually precipitate one.

Without saying a word to anybody, therefore, I turned around and strolled out of the conference room. I crossed the atrium lounge and the lobby area and just walked right out of the hotel on to Fifty-sixth Street. It was a warm evening and the air was thick with the muffled roar of the city. I went over to Fifth Avenue and stood at the foot of Trump Tower, looking up the three blocks towards Fifty-ninth Street – at Grand Army Plaza and the corner of Central Park. Why did Dave Morgenthaler want to meet me there? Out in the open like that?

I turned and looked in the opposite direction, at the streams of traffic, dipping and rising, and at the parallel lines of the buildings, trailing towards some invisible point of convergence.

I started walking in this direction. It occurred to me that Van Loon might try to reach me, so I took out my cellphone and switched it off. I kept walking along Fifth, and eventually made a right on to Thirty-fourth Street. After a few blocks, I had reached what I supposed was my new neighbourhood – which was what? Chelsea? The Garment District? Who the fuck knew any more?

I stopped at a dingy-looking bar on Tenth Avenue and went inside.

I sat at the bar and ordered a Jack Daniel’s. The place was nearly empty. The barman poured me the drink and then went back to watching the TV set. It was bracketed high on to a wall just over the door leading to the men’s room, and there was a sitcom showing. After about five minutes – during which time he had laughed only once – the barman picked up the remote and started flicking through the channels. At one point I caught a sudden flash of the MCL-Parnassus logo, and I said, ‘Wait, go back to that for a second.’

He flicked back and then looked at me, still aiming the remote up at the TV set. It was a news report of the announcement with footage of the press conference.

‘Hold it there, for a minute,’ I said.

‘A second, now a minute, Jesus,’ he said, impatiently.

I glared at him.

‘Just this segment, all right? Thank you.’

He dropped the remote down on to the bar and held his hands up. Then we both turned our attentions back to the screen.

Dan Bloom was at the podium, and as the voice-over report described the scale and importance of the proposed merger, the camera panned slowly to the right, taking in all of the Abraxas executives sitting at the table. In the background, there was a clear view of the company logo, but that wasn’t all you could see. There were also several people in the background, standing, and one of them was me. As the camera moved from left to right, I passed across the screen from right to left, and then disappeared. But in those few seconds, you could see me clearly, like in a police line-up – my face, my eyes, my blue tie and charcoal grey suit.

The barman looked at me, obviously registering something. Then he looked back at the screen, but they had already returned to the studio. He looked at me again, with a dumb expression on his face. I lifted my glass and drained it.

‘You can change the channel now,’ I said.

Then I put a twenty on the bar, got up off my stool and left.

26

THE NEXT MORNING I TOOK A CAB to Fifty-ninth Street, and on the way I rehearsed what I was going to say to Dave Morgenthaler. In order to keep him interested, and to buy some time, I would have to promise that he could have a sample of MDT. Then I’d be in a position to make my approach to someone in Eiben-Chemcorp. I was also hoping that by talking to Morgenthaler I might be able to get some idea about who in Eiben-Chemcorp I could approach. I got to Grand Army Plaza at ten minutes to ten and walked around, occasionally glancing up at the hotel. In my head, I had already left Van Loon and the merger behind – at least for the moment.

At five minutes past, a taxi pulled up at the kerb and a tall, thin man in his early fifties got out. I recognized him immediately from the photos I’d seen in archive articles on the Internet. I walked towards him, and although he saw me approaching, he surveyed the vicinity for any other possible candidates. Then he looked back at me.

‘Spinola?’ he said.

I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’

We shook hands.

‘This better be worth my while.’

He had jet-black hair, quite a lot of it, and wore thick-rimmed glasses. He looked tired and had a kind of hangdog expression on his face. He was in a dark suit and a raincoat. It was an overcast day and there was a breeze blowing. I was about to suggest looking for a coffee shop, or even going into the Oak Room of the Plaza, seeing as how it was right there – but Morgenthaler had other ideas.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said, and started crossing over towards the park. I hesitated, and then caught up with him.

‘A walk in the park?’ I said.

He nodded yes, but didn’t say anything, or look in my direction.

Walking briskly, and in silence, we went down the steps into the park, around by the pond, up by Wollman Rink and eventually over to Sheep Meadow. Morgenthaler selected a bench and we sat down, facing the skyline of Central Park South. Where we were sitting was exposed and uncomfortably windy, but I wasn’t about to start complaining now.

Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘OK, what’s this about?’

‘Well, like I said… MDT.’

‘What do you know about MDT and where did you first hear about it?’

He was very direct in his approach, and obviously intended to interrogate me as he would a witness. I decided that I would play along with this until I had him in a position where he couldn’t just walk. In the way I answered his questions, I got several key ideas across to him. The first was that I knew what I was talking about. I described the effects of MDT in almost clinical detail. He was fascinated by this, and had pertinent follow-up questions – which also confirmed for me that he knew what he was talking about, at least in terms of MDT. I let it be known that I could supply the names of possibly dozens of people who had taken MDT, subsequently stopped and were now suffering acute withdrawal symptoms. There would be enough cases to establish a clear pattern. I let it be known that I could supply the names of people who had taken MDT and had subsequently died. Finally, I let it be known that I could supply samples of the actual drug itself for analysis.

When we got to this point, I could see that Morgenthaler had become quite agitated. All of the stuff I’d told him would be dynamite if he could bring it out in court – but of course at the same time I had been tantalizingly non-specific. If he walked away now, he’d be walking away with nothing more than a good story – and this was precisely where I wanted him.

‘So, what next?’ he said. ‘How do we proceed?’ And then added, with the merest hint of contempt in his voice, ‘What’s in this for you?’

I paused, and looked around. There were some people out jogging, others walking dogs, others pushing strollers. I had to keep him interested, without actually giving him anything – not yet, at any rate. I also had to pick his brains.

‘We’ll come to that,’ I said, echoing Kenny Sanchez, ‘but first, tell me how you know about MDT.’

He crossed his legs, folded his arms and leant backwards in the bench.

‘I came across it,’ he said, ‘in the course of my research into the development and testing of Triburbazine.’

I waited for more, but that seemed to be it.

‘Look, Mr Morgenthaler,’ I said, ‘I answered your questions. Let’s build up a little confidence here.’

He sighed, barely able to hide his impatience.

‘OK,’ he said, assuming the role of expert witness, ‘in taking depositions relating to Triburbazine, I spoke to a lot of employees and ex-employees of Eiben-Chemcorp. When they described the procedures for clinical trials, it was natural for these people to give me examples, to draw parallels with other drugs.’

He leant forward again, obviously uncomfortable about having to do this.

‘Several people, in this context, made reference to a series of trials that had been done on an anti-depressant drug in the early Seventies – trials that had gone disastrously wrong. The man responsible for the administration of these trials was a Dr Raoul Fursten. He’d been with the company’s research department since the late Fifties and had worked on LSD trials. This new drug was said to enhance cognitive ability – to some extent anyway – and at the time, it seems, Fursten had spoken endlessly about his great hopes for it. He’d spoken about the politics of consciousness, the best and the brightest, looking towards the future, all of that shit. Remember this was the early Seventies, which were still really the Sixties.’

Morgenthaler sighed again, and exhaled, seeming to deflate in the process. Then he shifted on the bench and got into a more comfortable position.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there had been some serious adverse reactions to the drug as well. People had apparently become aggressive and irrational, some had even suffered periods of memory loss. One person intimated to me that there had been fatalities and that this had been covered up. The trials were discontinued and the drug – MDT-48 – was dropped. Fursten retired and apparently drank himself to death in the space of a year. None of the people I spoke to can prove any of this, no one will confirm anything. It has the status of hearsay – which of course, in terms of what I’m trying to do, is of absolutely no use.

‘Nevertheless, I talked to some other people in the weird, wonderful world of neuropsychopharmacology – try saying that when you’ve had a couple of drinks – people who shall remain nameless, and it turns out that there were rumours floating around in the mid-Eighties that research into MDT had been taken up again. These were only rumours, mind…’ – he turned and looked at me – ‘… but now, what, you’re telling me this stuff is practically on the fucking streets?’

I nodded, thinking of Vernon and Deke Tauber and Gennady. Having been quite evasive about my sources, I hadn’t mentioned anything to Morgenthaler about Todd Ellis, either, and the unofficial trials he’d been conducting out of United Labtech.

I shook my head.

‘You said the mid-Eighties?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And these trials would be… unofficial?’

‘Clearly.’

‘Who’s in charge of research now at Eiben-Chemcorp?’

‘Jerome Hale,’ he said, ‘but I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with it. He’s too respectable.’

‘Hale?’ I said. ‘Any relation?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and laughed, ‘they’re brothers.’

I closed my eyes.

‘He worked with Raoul Fursten in the early days,’ Morgenthaler went on. ‘He took over from him, in fact. But it’s got to be someone working under him, because Hale’s more of a front-office guy now. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s Eiben-Chemcorp – it’s a pharmaceutical company withholding selective information in the interests of profit. That’s the case we’re making. They manipulated information in the Triburbazine trials, and if I can prove they did the same with MDT and show a pattern… then we’re home free.’

Morgenthaler was allowing himself get excited about the possibility of winning his case, but I couldn’t believe that in his excitement he had so easily passed over the fact that Jerome Hale and Caleb Hale were brothers. The implications of that seemed enormous to me. Caleb Hale had started his career in the CIA in the mid-1960s. In my own work for Turning On, I had read all about the CIA’s Office of Research and Development, and of how its MK-Ultra projects had secretly funded the research programmes of various American drug companies.

The whole thing suddenly took on an unwieldy, headachy scale. I also saw just how far out of my depth I was.

‘So, Mr Spinola, I need your help. What do you need?’

I sighed.

‘Time. I need some time.’

‘For what?’

‘To think.’

‘What’s there to think? These bastards are-’

‘I understand that, but it’s not really the point.’

‘So what is the point, money?’

‘No,’ I said emphatically, and shook my head.

He hadn’t been expecting this, obviously assuming all along that I had wanted money. I sensed a growing nervousness in him now, as if he had suddenly realized that he might be in danger of losing me.

‘How long are you staying in town?’ I asked.

‘I have to get back this evening, but-’

‘Let me call you in a day or two.’

He hesitated, unsure of how to answer.

‘Look, why don’t-’

I decided to head him off. I didn’t like doing it, but I had no choice. I did need to get away and think.

‘I’ll come up to Boston if necessary. With everything. Just… let me call you in a day or two, OK?’

‘OK.’

I stood up, and then he did as well. We started walking back towards East Fifty-ninth Street.

This time I was the one stage-managing the silence, but after a few moments something occurred to me and I wanted to ask him about it.

‘That case you’re working on,’ I said, ‘the girl who was taking Triburbazine?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Did she… I mean, was she really a killer?’

‘That’s what Eiben-Chemcorp is going to be arguing. They’re going to be looking for dysfunction in her family, abuse, any kind of background shit they can find and dress up as motivation. But the fact is, anyone who knew her – and we’re talking about a nineteen-year-old girl here, a college student – anyone who knew her says she was the sweetest, smartest kid you could meet.’

My stomach started churning.

‘So, basically, you say it was the Triburbazine, they say she did it.’

‘That’s what it comes down to, yeah – chemical determinism versus moral agency.’

It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.

‘Do you believe that’s possible?’ I said. ‘That a drug can override who we are… and can cause us to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise do?’

‘What I think doesn’t matter. It’s what the jury thinks. Unless Eiben-Chemcorp settles. In which case it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. But I’ll tell you one thing for free, I wouldn’t like to be on that jury.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you get called in for jury service and you figure, OK, a few weeks’ break from my crappy job, and then you wind up having to make a decision on something of this magnitude? Forget it.’

After that we continued in silence. When we got back to Grand Army Plaza, I told him again that I’d phone him soon.

‘A day or two, yeah?’ he said. ‘And please do, because this could really make a difference. I don’t want to push you, but-’

‘I know,’ I said firmly, ‘I know.’

‘OK.’ He held up his hands. ‘Just… call me.’

He started looking around for a taxi.

‘One last question,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Why all this outdoor, park-bench stuff?’

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Do you have any idea what kind of power structure I’m up against in Eiben-Chemcorp? And what kind of money is at stake for them?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Well, it’s a lot, on both counts.’ He stuck his arm out and hailed a taxi. ‘I’m under constant surveillance from these people. They watch everything I do, my phones, e-mail, my travel itinerary. You think they’re not watching us now?’

The taxi pulled up at the kerb. As he was getting into it, Morgenthaler turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Spinola, you may not have as much time as you think.’

I watched the cab drive away and disappear into the flow of traffic on Fifth Avenue. Then I took off in that direction myself, walking slowly, still feeling a bit nauseous – not least now because I realized that my plan was unworkable. Morgenthaler may have been slightly paranoid, but it was nevertheless clear that threatening to play hardball with a huge pharmaceutical company was not a good idea. Who would I be approaching in any case? The Defense Secretary’s brother? Apart from how complicated that made things, I couldn’t see a company like Eiben-Chemcorp standing for blackmail in the first place, not with all of the resources they’d have at their disposal. This, in turn, made me think of how Vernon had died, and of how Todd Ellis had left United Labtech and then conveniently been run over. What had happened there? Had Vernon and Todd’s little scam siphoning off and dealing supplies of MDT been found out? Maybe Morgenthaler wasn’t being paranoid after all, but if that was how things really were I was going to have to come up with another plan – something a little less audacious, to say the least.

I arrived at Fifty-seventh Street, and as I was crossing it I looked around. I remembered that one of my earliest blackouts had occurred here, after that first night in Van Loon’s library. It’d been a couple of blocks over, on Park. I’d been overcome with dizziness, and had stumbled, and without any explanation found myself a block further down, on Fifty-sixth Street. Then I thought about the major blackout I’d had the following evening – punching that guy in the Congo down in Tribeca, then that girl in the cubicle, then Donatella Alvarez, then the fifteenth floor of the Clifden…

Something had gone seriously wrong that night, and just thinking about it now caused a stabbing sensation in the pit of my stomach.

But then it struck me… the whole sequence here – MDT, cognitive enhancement, blackouts, loss of impulse control, aggressive behaviour, Dexeron to counteract the blackouts, more MDT, more cognitive enhancement – it was all tinkering with brain chemistry. Maybe the reductionist view of human behaviour that Morgenthaler was going to pitch to his jury was right, maybe it was all down to molecular interaction, maybe we were just machines.

But if that was the case, if the mind was simply a chemical-software program running in the brain – and pharmaceutical products such as Triburbazine and MDT were simply rewrite programs – then what was to stop me from learning how all of that stuff worked? Using the supply of MDT-48 I had left, I could focus my powers of concentration for the next few weeks on the mechanics of the human brain. I could study neuroscience, and chemistry, and pharmacology, and even – goddammit – neuropsychopharmacology…

What would there then be to stop me from making my own MDT? There had been plenty of underground chemists in the old LSD days, people who had sidestepped the need to cultivate supply sources in the medical or pharmaceutical communities by setting up their own labs in bathrooms and basements all around the country. I was no chemist, for sure, but before I took MDT I hadn’t been a stock-market trader, either – far from it, in fact. Excited now at the prospect of getting started on this, I quickened my pace. There was a Barnes & Noble at Forty-eighth Street. I’d stop in there and pick up some textbooks and then get a cab straight back to the Celestial.

Passing a news-stand I saw a headline on a paper referring to the proposed MCL-Abraxas merger and remembered that I still had my cellphone powered off. As I walked along, I took it out and checked it for messages. There were two from Van Loon, the first puzzled, the second slightly irritated. I would have to talk to him soon and come up with some pre-emptive excuse for my absence over the coming weeks. I couldn’t just ignore him. After all, I owed the man nearly ten million dollars.

I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, browsing through college textbooks – enormous tomes in fine print, with charts and diagrams and a blizzard of italicized Latin and Greek terminology. Finally, I picked out eight books with titles like Biochemistry & Behaviour, Vol. 1., Principles of Neurology and The Cerebral Cortex, paid for them by credit card and left the store weighed down with two extremely heavy bags in each hand. I got a cab out on Fifth Avenue, just as it was starting to rain. By the time we pulled up at the Celestial, it had turned into a downpour, and in the ten or so seconds it took me to hobble across the plaza to the main entrance of the building, I got soaked. But I didn’t care – I was excited and dying to get up to the apartment so I could make a start on these textbooks.

When I was inside, walking across the lobby, the guy on the desk, Richie, waved over at me.

‘Mr Spinola. Hi. Yeah… I let those guys in.’

‘What?’

‘I let them in. They just left about twenty minutes ago.’

I walked over towards the desk.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Those guys you said were delivering something. They were here.’

I put the bags down, and looked at him.

‘I didn’t say anything to you about any guys delivering… anything. What are you talking about?’

He swallowed and looked nervous all of a sudden.

‘Mr Spinola, you… you called me about an hour ago, you said some guys were coming to deliver something and that I was to give them a key…’

‘I called you?’

‘Yes.’

Water was dripping now from my hair down into the back of my shirt collar.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, as though to reassure himself. ‘The line was bad, you said so yourself, it was your cellphone…’

I picked up the bags and started walking very quickly towards the elevators.

‘Mr Spinola?’

I ignored him.

‘Mr Spinola? Are… are we OK about this?’

I got into an elevator, pressed the button and as the car climbed up to the sixty-eighth floor, I could feel my heart beating so hard that I had to take deep breaths and bang my fist on the side panels of the car a couple of times to steady myself. Then I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. Drops of water sprayed everywhere.

At sixty-eight, I picked up the two bags and slid out of the car before the elevator door was even fully open. I rushed along the corridor to my apartment, dropped the bags on the floor and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. When I got the key out, I had a hard time getting it into the keyhole. I eventually managed to get the door open, but the second I stepped inside the apartment I knew that everything was lost.

I’d known it downstairs in the lobby. I’d known it the second I heard Richie say the words, I let those guys in…

I looked around at the damage. The boxes and wooden crates in the middle of the living-room had been knocked over and smashed open, and everything was strewn about the place. I rushed over and searched through the mess of books and clothes and kitchen implements for the holdall bag where I’d been keeping the envelope with the stash of MDT pills in it. After a while I found the bag – but it was empty. The envelope with the pills in it was gone, as was Vernon’s little black notebook. In the vain hope that the envelope was still around somewhere – that it had maybe just fallen out of the bag – I searched through everything, and then I searched through everything again. But it was no use.

The MDT was gone.

I went over to the window and looked out. It was still raining. Seeing the rain from this high an angle was weird, as though a couple more floors up and you’d be clear of it, looking down through sunshine at grey blankets of cloud.

I turned around and leant back against the window. The room was so large and bright, and there was such a small amount of stuff in it, that the mess in the centre wasn’t even that much of a mess. The room hadn’t been trashed, because there was so little in it to trash – just my few belongings from Tenth Street. They’d done a much better job on Vernon’s place.

I stood there for quite a while – in shock, I suppose – not thinking anything. I glanced over at the open door. The two Barnes & Noble bags were still outside in the hallway, sitting on the floor next to each other, looking as though they were patiently waiting to be carried inside.

Then the phone rang.

I wasn’t going to answer it, but when I noticed that they hadn’t yanked the phone cable out of the wall, as they had with the computer and the TV, I went over to it. I bent down and picked it up. I said hello, but it went dead immediately.

I stood up again. I went over and edged the two bags inside the door with my foot. Then I shut the door and leant back against it. I took a few deep breaths, swallowed, closed my eyes.

The phone rang again.

I went over and answered it as before, but – as before – it went dead. Then almost immediately it rang again.

I picked it up but didn’t say anything.

Whoever it was didn’t hang up this time.

Eventually, a voice said, ‘So, Eddie, this is it.’

‘Who is this?’

‘You went too far talking to Dave Morgenthaler. Not a good idea-’

‘Who the fuck is this?’

‘-so we’ve decided to pull the plug. But… just thought we’d let you know. Seeing as how you’ve been such a sport and all.’

The voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. There was no emotion in it, no hint of an accent.

‘I shouldn’t be doing this, of course – but at this stage, I almost feel that I know you.’

‘What do you mean pull the plug?’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed already that we’ve taken the stuff back. So, as of now, you can consider the experiment terminated.’

‘Experiment?’

There was silence for a moment.

‘We’ve been monitoring you ever since you showed up that day at Vernon’s, Eddie.’

My heart sank.

‘Why do you think you never heard back from the police? We weren’t sure at first, but when it became obvious to us that you had Vernon’s supply, we decided to see what would happen next, to conduct a little clinical trial, as it were. We haven’t had that many human subjects, you know…’

I stared out across the room, trying to cast my mind back, trying to identify signs, tells…

‘… and boy, what a subject you turned out to be! If it’s any consolation to you, Eddie, no one has ever done as much MDT as you have, no one’s ever taken it as far as you have.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I mean, we knew you really must’ve been hitting it hard when you cleaned up at Lafayette, but then when you moved in on Van Loon… that was amazing.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Of course, there was that little incident at the Clifden-’

‘Who are you?’ I repeated, dully now, almost mechanically.

‘-but tell me, what exactly did happen there?’

I put the phone down, and kept my hand on it, hard, as though by pressing it like that, he – whoever he was – would go away.

When the phone rang again, I picked it up at once.

‘Look, Eddie, no hard feelings, but we can’t risk having you talking to private detectives – not to mention Russian loansharks. Just know that you’ve been… a very useful subject.’

‘Come on,’ I said, a sense of desperation welling up in me all of a sudden, ‘is there no way… I mean, I don’t have to…’

‘Listen, Eddie-’

‘I didn’t give Morgenthaler anything, I didn’t tell him anything…’ – there was a crack in my voice now – ‘… couldn’t I just get…some kind of supply, some…’

‘Eddie-’

‘I’ve got money,’ I said, clutching the receiver tightly to stop my hand from trembling. ‘I’ve got a lot of money in the bank. I could-’

The line went dead.

I kept my hand on the receiver, just like I had the last time. This time, however, I waited a full ten minutes. But nothing happened.

I finally lifted my hand away and stood up. My legs were stiff. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, back and forth for a while. It felt like I was doing something.

Why had he hung up?

Was it because I had mentioned money? Would he be calling back in a while with a figure? Should I be ready?

How much did I have in the bank?

I waited another twenty minutes or so, but nothing happened.

Over the next twenty minutes again, I convinced myself that his hanging up on me had been some kind of a coded message. I’d offered him money, and now I was going to have to sweat it out until he called me back with a figure – which I’d better have ready.

I stared down at the phone.

I didn’t want to use it, so I took out my cellphone and rang Howard Lewis, my bank manager. He was on another call. I left a message for him to call me back on this number. I said it was urgent. Five minutes later, he returned the call. Between what I’d made trading recently and money I’d borrowed from Van Loon for the decorating and furnishing of the apartment, there was just over $400,000 in the account. Since Van Loon had gotten involved in my financial affairs on a personal level, Lewis had reverted to his earlier obsequious mode, so when I told him that I needed half a million dollars in cash – and as quickly as possible – he was flustered but at the same time so eager to please that he promised to have the money ready for me first thing in the morning.

I said OK, I’d be there. Then I closed up the phone, switched it off and put it back in my pocket.

Half a million dollars. Who could turn that down?

I paced around the room, avoiding the mess in the centre. Every now and again, I glanced over at the phone on the floor.

When it started ringing again, I leapt towards it, bent down and picked it up in what seemed like a single movement.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Spinola? It’s Richie, down at the desk?’

Shit.

‘What? I’m busy.’

‘I just wanted to check that everything was all right. I mean, about that-’

‘Yes, yes, everything’s fine. There’s no problem.’

I hung up.

My heart was pounding.

I stood up again and continued pacing around the room. I considered tidying up the mess, but decided against it. After a while I sat down on the floor, with my back to the wall and just stared out across the room, waiting.

I stayed in that position for the next eight hours.

Normally, I would have taken a dose of MDT in the afternoon, but since that hadn’t been possible, I was overtaken with fatigue by late evening – something I identified as the earliest stage of the withdrawal process. As a result of this, I actually managed to get some sleep – even if it was fitful and disturbed. I had no bed, so I stacked up some blankets and a duvet on the floor and used that to sleep on. When I awoke – at about five in the morning – I had a dull headache and my throat was dry and raspy.

I made a cursory effort to tidy the mess up, just for something to do, but my mind was too clogged with anxiety and fear, and I didn’t get very far.

Before I went to the bank, I took two Excedrin tablets. Then I rooted out my answering machine from one of the smashed wooden crates. It didn’t look as if it had sustained too much damage, and when I connected it up to the phone on the floor, it appeared to be working. I got my briefcase from another crate, put on a coat and left – avoiding eye-contact with Richie at the desk down in the lobby.

In the cab on the way to the bank, with the empty briefcase resting on my lap, I experienced a wave of despair, a sense that the hope I was clinging to was not only desperate, but clearly – and absolutely – unfounded. As I looked out at the traffic and at the passing, streaming façade of Thirty-fourth Street, the notion that things could somehow be reversed, at this late stage, suddenly seemed, well… too much to hope for.

But then at the bank, as I watched an official stack my briefcase full with solid bricks of cash – fifty and hundred dollar bills – I regained a certain amount of confidence. I signed any relevant documents there were, smiled politely at the fawning Howard Lewis, bid him good morning and left.

In the cab on the way back, with the now full briefcase resting on my lap, I felt vaguely excited, as if this new scheme couldn’t fail. When the guy phoned, I’d be ready with an offer – he’d have a proposal… we’d negotiate, things would slip neatly back into place.

As soon as I got up to the apartment, I put the briefcase down on the floor beside the telephone. I left it open, so I could see the money. There were no messages on the answering machine, and I checked my cellphone to see if there were any on that. There was one new one – from Van Loon. He understood I needed a break, but this was no way to go about taking one. I was to call him.

I powered off the phone and put it away.

By midday, my headache had become quite severe. I continued taking Excedrin tablets, but they no longer seemed to have any effect. I took a shower and stood for ages under the jet of hot water, trying to soothe the knots of tension out of my neck and shoulders.

The headache had started as a band across my forehead and behind my eyes, but by mid-afternoon it had worked its way out to every part of my skull and was pounding like a jackhammer.

I paced around the room for hours, trying to absorb the pain – glaring at the phone, willing it to ring. I couldn’t understand why that guy hadn’t called me back yet. I looked at the money. That was half a million dollars there, lying on the floor, just waiting for someone to come along and take it…

By early evening, I found that walking around didn’t help much any more. I was having intermittent bouts of nausea now and was shivering all over, fairly constantly. It was easier, I decided, to lie on the makeshift bed of stacked blankets and a duvet, tossing and turning, and occasionally clutching my head in a vain attempt to ease the pain. As it got dark, I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point, I woke up retching – desperately trying to empty my already empty stomach. I coughed up blood on to the floor and then lay flat on my back again, staring up at the ceiling.

That night – Thursday night – was interminable, and yet in one sense I didn’t want it to end. As the veil of MDT lifted further, my sense of horror and dread intensified. The torment of uncertainty gnawed away at the lining of my stomach and I kept thinking, What have I done? I had vivid dreams, hallucinations almost, in which I repeatedly seemed to come close to an understanding of what had happened that night at the Clifden Hotel – but then, since I was unable to separate what my fevered mind was concocting from what I was actually remembering, it was never close enough. I saw Donatella Alvarez calmly walking across the room, like before, in a black dress, blood pouring down the side of her face – but it was this room, not the hotel room, and I remember thinking that if she’d taken such a serious blow to the head, she wouldn’t be calm, or walking around. I also dreamt that the two of us were on a couch together, entangled in each other’s arms, and I was staring into her eyes, aroused, excited, engulfed in the flames of some nameless emotion – but at the same time it was my old couch we were on, the one from the apartment on Tenth Street, and she was whispering in my ear, telling me to short-sell tech stocks now, now, now. Later, she was sitting across the table from me in Van Loon’s dining-room, smoking a cigar and talking animatedly, ‘… because you norteamericanos don’t understand anything, nothing…’ – and then I seemed to be reaching out in anger for the nearest wine bottle…

Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle, but a cane or a statuette – each one like a shard of coloured glass hurtling in slow-motion through space after an explosion, each one vainly promising to form into a solid memory, into something objective and recollectable… and reliable…

At one point, I rolled off the duvet, holding my stomach, and crawled across the floor through the glistening darkness to the bathroom. After another fit of retching, this time into the toilet bowl, I managed to get up on to my feet. I leant over the wash-basin, struggled with the faucets for a moment and then threw some cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection in the mirror was ghostlike and barely visible, with my eyes – clear and moving – the only sign of life.

I dragged myself back into the living-room, where the dim shapes on the floor – the smashed boxes, the crumpled clothes, the open briefcase full of money – looked like irregular rock formations on some strange and dusky blue terrain. I slumped back against the wall nearest to the telephone and slid down into a sitting position on the floor. I stayed there for the next couple of hours, as daylight seeped in around me, allowing the room to reconstitute itself before my eyes, unchanged.

And I came to some accommodation with the pain in my head, as well – so long as I remained absolutely still, and didn’t move, didn’t flinch, it obligingly receded into a dull, thumping, mindless rhythm…

27

WHEN THE PHONE RANG BESIDE ME, just after nine o’clock, it felt like a thousand volts of electric current piercing my brain.

I reached over – wincing, my hand shaking – and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Spinola? It’s Richie, at the desk.’

‘Hhhn.’

‘There’s a Mr… Gennady here to see you? Shall I send him up?’

Friday morning.

This morning. Well, yesterday morning by now.

I paused.

‘Yeah.’

I put the phone down. He might as well see me – see what he would be in for shortly.

I struggled to get up off the floor – each movement I made like another charge of electric current through my brain. When I eventually got up I noticed that I was standing in a small pool of my own piss. There were blood and mucus stains on my shirt and I was trembling all over.

I looked down at the briefcase full of money, and then back at the phone. How could I have been so stupid, so vain? I looked over at the windows. It was a bright day. I walked over to the door, very slowly, and opened it.

I turned, and took a few paces back into the room, and then turned again to face the door. At my feet, there was a large, crushed box, its spilt contents – saucepans, pots, various kitchen implements – splayed out like intestines on the floor.

I stood there, an old man suddenly – feeble, stooped, at the mercy of everything around me. I heard the elevator opening, and then footsteps, and then a couple of moments later Gennady appeared in the doorway.

‘Whoa… fuck!’

He looked around in shock – at me, at the mess, at the sheer size of the place, at the windows – obviously unable to decide if he was disgusted or impressed. He was wearing a pin-striped two-button suit, a black shirt and no tie. He’d shaved his head and was sporting a three-day stubble on his chiselled face.

He looked me up and down a couple of times.

‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

I mumbled something in response.

He came a little further into the room. Then, side-stepping the mess on the floor, he made his way over to the windows, irresistibly drawn to them, I suppose – just as I had been on that first visit here with Alison Botnick.

I didn’t move. I felt nauseous.

‘This is certainly a change from that shit-hole you had on Tenth Street.’

‘Yeah.’

I could hear him behind me, pacing along by the windows.

‘Shit, you can see everything.’ He paused. ‘I heard you’d found yourself quite a place, but this is amazing.’

What did that mean?

‘There’s the Empire State. The Chrysler Building. Brooklyn. I like this. You know, maybe I’ll get a place here myself.’ I could tell from his voice that he had turned around now. ‘In fact, maybe I’ll take this place, move in here. How’d that be, jerkoff?’

‘That’d be great, Gennady,’ I said, half turning around, ‘I was going to look for a room-mate anyway, you know – to help with the repayments.’

‘Listen to this, a comedian with shit stains on his pants. So, Eddie, what the fuck’s going on here?’

He walked around the other side of the mess and came back into view. He stopped when he saw the briefcase of money on the floor.

‘Jesus, you really don’t like banks, do you?’

With his back to me, he bent down and started looking at the money, taking wads of it out and flicking through them.

‘There must be three or four hundred thousand dollars here.’ He whistled. ‘I don’t know what you’re into, Eddie, but if there’s much more where this came from, you might want to think of investing some of it. My import company’s going to be up and running soon, so if you want in for some points… you know, we can talk about a price.’

Talk about a price?

Gennady didn’t know it, but he was going to be dead soon – in a few days’ time, after his supply of MDT had run out.

‘Well,’ he said, straightening up again and turning around, ‘when am I going to meet this dealer of yours?’

I looked at him, and said, ‘You’re not going to meet him.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not going to meet him.’

He paused, breathing out through his nose. Then he stood looking at me for about ten seconds. The expression on his face was like that of a thwarted child – but a thwarted child with a switchblade in his pocket. Slowly he took it out and flicked it open.

‘I thought this might happen,’ he said, ‘so I did some homework. Found out a few things about you, Eddie. Been keeping an eye on you.’

I swallowed.

‘You’ve been doing pretty well recently, haven’t you? With your business associates and merger deals.’ He turned and started pacing across the room. ‘But I don’t think Van Loon or Hank Atwood would be too happy to hear about your association with a Russian loanshark.’

I looked at him, starting to feel a little thwarted myself.

‘Or about your history of substance abuse. Wouldn’t play too well in the press either.’

My history of substance abuse? That was history. How could he know anything about that?

‘It’s incredible what you can find out about someone’s past, isn’t it?’ he said, as though reading my thoughts. ‘Employment records, credit history – even personal stuff.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

As he said this, he turned and walked quickly back to where I was standing. He held the knife up near my nose and waved it from side to side.

‘I could re-arrange the elements of your face, Eddie, nicely, creatively, but I’d still want the answer to my question.’ He stared into my eyes, and repeated it, this time in a whisper, ‘When am I going to meet this dealer of yours?’

I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’

There was a brief pause, and then he punched me in the stomach with his left hand – just as swiftly and efficiently as he’d done once before in my old apartment. I doubled up and fell back on to some boxes, wheezing and clutching myself with both arms.

Gennady then took off again, pacing back and forth across the room.

‘You didn’t think I was going to start with the face, did you?’

The pain was simultaneously awful and something I felt at a curious remove from. I think I was too concerned about how my privacy had been invaded, about how Gennady had managed to dig up my past.

‘I’ve got a whole file on you. This thick. It’s all out there, Eddie, information – for the taking, detail like you wouldn’t believe.’

I looked up. He had his back to me now and was waving his hands about. Just then something caught my eye – something sticking out of the smashed box of kitchen implements in front of me.

‘So what I want to know, Eddie, is this: how do you propose to explain all those years of mediocrity to your new friends at the top? Eh? Writing that turgid shit for K & D? Teaching English in Italy without a work permit? Fucking up the colour separations at Chrome magazine?’

As he was speaking, I reached over to the box. Sticking out of it was the wooden handle of a long, steel carving knife. I took hold of it and eased it out of the box, my head pounding from the effort of trying to control the shake in my hand – to say nothing of having to lean across in the first place. I then struggled up on to my feet, being careful to keep the knife behind my back.

Gennady turned around.

‘And you were married once, as well, weren’t you?’

He came across the room towards me. I was dizzy now, seeing him in double as he approached, the background white and pulsating. But despite this unsteadiness, I seemed to know what I was doing – everything was clear and in place, anger, humiliation, fear. There was a logic to it all, an inevitability. Was this how it had been up on the fifteenth floor? I didn’t see how it could have been, but I also knew that I would never find out.

‘But that didn’t work out either, did it?’

He stopped for a moment, and then came a few steps closer.

‘What was her name again?’

He held the knife up and waved it in my face. I could smell his breath. My heart and head were pounding in unison now.

‘Melissa.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Melissa… and she’s got, what, two kids?’

I widened my eyes suddenly and looked over his shoulder. When he turned to see what I was looking at, I took a deep breath and brought the carving knife around. In a single, swift movement, I drove the point of it into his belly and grabbed the back of his neck with my other hand for leverage. I pushed the knife in as hard as I could, trying to direct it upwards. I heard a deep, gurgling sound and felt his arms flailing up and down, helplessly, as though they’d been cut adrift from the rest of his body. I gave a final shove to the knife and then had to let go. It had taken a huge effort to do this much and I just staggered backwards, trying to catch my breath. Then I leant against one of the windows and watched as Gennady stood in the same position, swaying, staring at me. His mouth was open and both his hands were clasping the wooden handle of the knife – the only part of it that was still visible.

The pounding in my head was so intense now that it short-circuited any sense of moral horror I might have felt at what I was watching, or at what I had done. I was also concerned about what was going to happen next.

Gennady took a couple of steps towards me. The look on his face was one of mingled incredulity and fury. I thought I was going to have to move aside to avoid him, but almost immediately he tripped on a torn box and came crashing forward on to a pile of large format art and photography books. The impact of this must have driven the knife in a little deeper – and fatally – because after he had fallen, he remained completely still.

I waited for a few minutes, watching and listening – but he didn’t move or make any sound at all.

Eventually – and very slowly – I went over to where he had come down. I bent over him and felt for a pulse on the side of his neck. There was nothing. Then something occurred to me, and drawing on a final reserve of adrenalin I took him by the arm and rolled him over on to his back. The knife was lodged at a skewed angle in his stomach and his black shirt was now sodden with blood. I took a couple of deep breaths, and tried not to look at his face.

I lifted the right side of his jacket with one hand, raised it, and tentatively put my other hand into his inside breast pocket. I fished around for a moment, thinking I wasn’t going to find anything – but then, folded in a flap of material I felt something hard. I got hold of it with the tips of my fingers and drew it out. I held it still for a moment – my heart thumping against the walls of my chest – and then shook it. The little silver pillbox made a small but very welcome rattling sound.

I got up and went back over to the window. I stood still for a few seconds in a vain attempt to ease the pounding in my head. Then I leant back against the window and slid down into a sitting position. My hands were still shaking, so in order to keep the pillbox steady I placed it on the floor between my legs. Concentrating really hard, I screwed the top off the box, put it aside and then peered down. There were five pills in the box. Again, working very carefully, I managed to get three of them out of it and on to the palm of my hand.

I paused, closed my eyes and involuntarily relived the previous couple of minutes in my mind – kaleidoscopically, luridly, but accurately. When I opened my eyes again, the first thing I saw – a few feet in front of me, like an old leather football – was Gennady’s shaved head, and then the rest of him, splayed out on the flattened pile of books.

I raised my hand, took the three tablets into my mouth and swallowed them.

I sat there for the next twenty minutes, staring out across the room – during which time, like a cloudy, overcast sky breaking up and clearing to blue, the pain in my head slowly lifted. The shake in my hands faded, too, and I felt a gradual return – at least within the parameters of MDT – to some kind of normality. This was borrowed time, and I knew it. I also knew that Gennady’s entourage was probably downstairs waiting for him, and that if much more time elapsed, they might get curious, or concerned even – and things might then get complicated.

I screwed the top back on to the pillbox and slipped it into the pocket of my trousers. When I stood up, I noticed the stains on my shirt again – as well as a couple of other signs of the general state of degradation I’d fallen into. I went over towards the bathroom, unbuttoning my shirt on the way. I took off the rest of my clothes and had a quick shower. Then I changed into some fresh clothes, jeans and a white shirt – making sure to transfer the pillbox into my jeans pocket. I went over to the telephone on the floor, called information and got the number of a local car-service. I then called the number and ordered a car for as soon as possible – instructing them to have me picked up at the back entrance to the building. After that, I gathered a few things into the holdall, including my laptop computer. I picked up the briefcase full of cash and closed it up. Then I carried both the briefcase and the holdall to the door, and opened it.

I stood there for a moment, looking back into the room. Gennady was almost lost from view in the general mess of things, my things – boxes, books, clothes, saucepans, album covers. But then I saw a small trickle of blood making its way out on to a clear part of the floor. When I saw another one, I was overcome with a feeling of nausea and had to lean against the side of the door to keep my balance. As I was doing this, a sudden squeal sounded from the centre of the room. My heart jumped, but as the high-pitched, slightly muffled tone settled into an electronic rendition of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1, I realized that it had to be Gennady’s cellphone. The zhuliks downstairs were obviously getting restless, and would doubtless be on their way up soon. With no choice but to keep moving, therefore, I turned around and closed the door behind me.

I took the elevator down to the basement car park and walked the length of this huge interior space, past rows and rows of concrete pillars and parked cars. I made my way up a winding ramp to the concourse at the rear of the building. Fifty yards to the left of where I came out, a couple of trucks were making deliveries at a loading dock – probably to one or other of the Celestial’s several restaurants. I waited around for about five minutes, staying out of view, until a black, unmarked car arrived. I signalled to the driver and he stopped. I got into the back, with the briefcase and the holdall, and paused for a moment. After I’d taken a couple of deep breaths, I told the driver to get on to the Henry Hudson Parkway, going north. He pulled around by the side of the building and then turned left. The traffic lights at the next block were red, and when the car stopped I turned around to look back. There was a Mercedes parked at the kerb of the plaza. A few guys in leather jackets were standing next to it on the sidewalk, smoking. One of them was looking up at the building.

The lights changed, and as we were pulling away – suddenly – three police cars appeared out of nowhere. They pulled up at the kerb of the plaza and within seconds – the last thing I could make out – five or six uniformed cops were running over towards the main entrance to the Celestial.

I turned back around. I didn’t understand it. Since I’d left the apartment, there couldn’t have been enough time for anyone to get up to it, get into it… call the cops and then for the cops to arrive…

It didn’t make sense.

I caught the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. He held my gaze for a couple of seconds.

Then we both looked away.

28

WE CONTINUED NORTH.

As soon as we got on to Interstate 87, I felt a little less tense. I sat back in the car and stared out of the window, stared at the miles of highway flitting by and blending, slowly, into a continuous, hypnotic stream – a process which allowed me to smother any thoughts I was having about the last couple of days, the last couple of hours, and especially about what I had just done to Gennady. But after nearly forty minutes of this, I couldn’t help turning my mind to what I had decided to do next, to the immediate future – the only kind of future I seemed to have left.

I told the driver to cut over and drop me off in someplace like Scarsdale or White Plains. He considered this for a couple of minutes, looked around at his options, and eventually took me into the centre of White Plains. I paid him – and in the vague hope that he might keep his mouth shut, I gave him a hundred-dollar tip.

Carrying the holdall and the briefcase – one in either hand – I wandered around for a while until I found a taxi on Westchester Avenue, which I then took to the nearest car-rental outlet. Using my credit card, I rented a Pathfinder. Then I immediately got out of White Plains and continued north on Interstate 684.

I passed Katonah and took a left at Croton Falls for Mahopac. Off the highway now and driving through this quiet, hilly, woodland area, I felt displaced, but at the same time strangely serene – as though I had already passed over into some other dimension. Shifts in perspective and velocity intensified my growing sense of unreality. I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car for ages – and not, in any case, out of the city, and at such speed, and never high up like this in one of these SUVs…

As I approached Mahopac itself, I had to slow down. I had to make an effort to refocus on what I was doing, and on what I was about to do. It took me a while to remember the address that Melissa had written down for me in the bar on Spring Street. It eventually came to me, and when I got into town, I stopped at a gas station to buy a map of the area so I could work out how to get to where she lived.

Ten minutes later I’d found it.

I cruised right on to Milford Drive and pulled up at the kerb in front of the third house on the left. The street was quiet and canopied with trees. I reached over to the back seat, where I’d put the holdall. I opened a side pocket of the bag and pulled out a small notebook and a pen. Then I took the briefcase from the passenger seat and placed it on my lap. I tore a page out of the notebook and wrote a few quick lines. I opened the briefcase, stared at the money for a moment and then secured the note inside so that it was clearly visible.

I got out of the car, pulling the briefcase after me and started walking along the narrow pathway towards the house. There was an area of grass on either side of the pathway and on one of them there was a small bicycle lying on its side. It was a single-storey, grey clapboard house, with steps leading up to it and a porch at the front. It looked like it could do with a lick of paint, and maybe a new roof.

I went up the steps and stood on the porch for a moment. I tried to peer inside, but there was a screen on the door and I couldn’t see properly. I crooked my index finger and rapped it on the frame of the door.

My heart was thumping.

After a moment, the door opened and standing before me was a spindly little girl of about seven or eight. She had long, dark, straight hair and deep brown eyes. I must have shown how surprised I was because she furrowed her eyebrows and said, officiously, ‘Yes?’

‘You must be Ally,’ I said.

She considered this for a moment and then decided to nod in the affirmative. She was wearing a red cardigan and pink leggings.

‘I’m an old friend of your mother’s.’

This didn’t seem to impress her much.

‘My name’s Eddie.’

‘You want to speak to my mom?’

I detected a slight impatience in her tone and in her body language, as though she wanted me to get on with it – to get to the point so she could get back to whatever it was she’d been doing before I came along to disturb her.

From somewhere in the background a voice said, ‘Ally, who is it?’

It was Melissa. All of a sudden this began to seem a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.

‘It’s a… man.’

‘I’ll…’ – there was a pause here, pregnant with momentary indecision, and maybe even a hint of exasperation – ‘… I’ll be there in a minute. Tell him… to wait.’

Ally said, informatively, ‘My mom’s washing my kid sister’s hair.’

‘That’d be Jane, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yeah. She can’t do it herself. And it takes ages.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because it’s so long.’

‘Longer than yours?’

She made a puffing sound, as if to say, Whoa, mister, you’re nowhere near as informed as you think.

‘Well, listen,’ I said, ‘you’re obviously all busy here.’ I paused, and looked directly into her eyes, experiencing something like vertigo, but with both feet on the ground. ‘So why don’t I just leave this with you… and you can tell your mom I was here… and that I left this for her.’

Being careful not to seem in any way pushy, I leant forward a little and placed the briefcase on a rug just inside the door.

She didn’t move as I did this. Then she looked down suspiciously at the briefcase. I took a couple of steps back. She glanced up at me again.

‘My mom said you were to wait.’

‘I know, but I’m in a hurry.’

She assessed this for plausibility, intrigued now – whatever she’d been doing before I arrived apparently forgotten.

‘Ally, I’m coming.’

The urgency in Melissa’s voice cut into me and I knew I had to get away before she appeared. I’d been going to tell her not to open the suitcase until I left. Now it would make no difference.

I backed down the steps.

‘I’ve got to go, Ally. It was nice meeting you.’

She furrowed her eyebrows again, altogether unsure about what was going on now. In a small voice, she said, ‘My mom’s just coming.’

Stepping backwards, I said, ‘Will you remember my name?’

In an even smaller voice, she said, ‘Eddie.’

I smiled.

I could have stared at her for hours, but I had to break away and turn around. I got back to the car and climbed in. I started the engine.

Out of the corner of my eye, as I was pulling away, I was aware of a sudden movement at the door of the house. When I got to the first junction, and was about to turn left, I glanced into my rearview mirror. Melissa and Ally were standing – holding hands – in the middle of the street.

I made my way over towards Newburgh and then got back on to Interstate 87, heading north. I decided I would keep going until I got to Albany and then take it from there.

It was early afternoon as I arrived in the outskirts of the city. I drove around for a bit and then parked in a side street off Central Avenue. I sat in the car for twenty minutes, staring at the wheel.

But take what from here?

I got out and started walking, briskly, and not in any particular direction. As I moved, I replayed the scene with Ally over and over in my mind. Her resemblance to Melissa was uncanny and the whole experience had left me stunned – blinking at infinity, shuddering in sudden, unexpected spasms of benevolence and hope.

But as I moved, too, I could feel Gennady’s silver pillbox lodged in the pocket of my jeans. I knew that in a few hours’ time I would be opening the box, taking out the two tablets that were left in it, and swallowing them – a simple, banal sequence of movements that was all too finite and bereft of anything even approaching benevolence or hope.

I wandered on, aimlessly.

After about half an hour, I decided there wasn’t much point in going any further. It looked like it was going to start raining soon, and in any case the unfamiliarity of these busy commercial streets was becoming a little disconcerting.

I stopped and turned around to go back towards the car. But as I did so I found myself staring into the window of an electrical goods store in which there were fifteen TV sets banked up in three rows of five. On each screen, staring directly out at me, was the face of Donatella Alvarez. It was a headshot. She was leaning forward slightly, her eyes big and deep, her long, brown hair casting one side of her face into shadow.

I stood frozen on the sidewalk, people passing behind and around me. Then I stepped a little closer to the window and watched as the news report continued with exterior shots of Actium and the Clifden Hotel. I moved along the window and stepped inside the door so I’d be able to hear the report as well as see it – but the sound was quite low and with the traffic passing behind me all I could hear were fragments. Over a shot of Forty-eighth Street, I thought I caught something about ‘… a statement issued this afternoon by Carl Van Loon’. Then, ‘… a re-appraisal of the deal in the light of negative publicity’. And then – I was really straining to hear now – something like ‘… share prices adversely affected’.

I looked around in exasperation.

There was another display of TV sets tuned to the same channel in an alcove at the back. I quickly walked the length of the store, past VCRs and DVDs and stereos and ghetto-blasters, and just as I got to the other end, they were cutting to a piece of footage from the MCL-Abraxas press conference, the one with the camera gliding across the top of the room from left to right. I waited, my stomach jumping, and then after a couple of seconds… there I was, on the screen, in my suit, gliding from right to left, staring out. There was a curiously vacant look on my face that I didn’t remember from the first time I’d seen this…

I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the footage on the news, and it had jogged his memory. He’d recognized me as Thomas Cole, the guy who’d been sitting opposite Donatella Alvarez at the restaurant, and who’d later been speaking to her at the reception.

After the press-conference footage, they cut to a reporter standing in front of the Celestial Building. ‘Following up this new lead,’ the reporter said, ‘police then came to Eddie Spinola’s apartment here on the West Side to question him, but what they found instead was the body of an unidentified man, believed to be a member of a Russian crime organization. This man had apparently been stabbed to death, which means that Eddie Spinola…’ – they cut back to the footage from the press conference – ‘… is now wanted by police for questioning in relation to two high-profile murders…’

I turned around and walked swiftly back to the other end of the store, avoiding eye-contact with anyone. I stepped out on to the sidewalk and turned right. As I passed along by the window-front, I was acutely aware of the multiple screens showing yet another re-run of the press-conference footage.

On my way to the car, I stopped at a pharmacy and bought a large container of paracetamol. Then I stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of Jack Daniel’s.

After that, I got back on the road, still heading north, and left Albany as fast as I could.

I avoided the Interstate highways and took secondary roads, passing through Schenectady and Saratoga Springs and then up into the Adirondacks. I took a random, circuitous route, and wove my way towards Schroon Lake, oblivious of the natural beauty that was all around me, my head buzzing instead with an endless succession of garbled images. I veered over into Vermont, staying on secondary roads and worked my way up through Vergennes and Burlington, and then over towards Morrisville and Barton.

I drove for seven or eight hours, pulling in only once, for gas, at which point I also took the last two pills in the silver box.

I stopped at the Northview Motor Lodge at around ten o’clock. There was no point in driving any further. It was pitch dark now, and where was I going to go in any case? On up to Maine? New Brunswick? Nova Scotia?

I checked into the motel using a false name, and paid for the room in cash. In advance.

Two nights.

After I got over the initial shock of the décor and colour schemes in the room, I lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

According to the TV news bulletin I’d seen earlier, I was now a wanted murderer. That wasn’t quite how I saw myself, but given the circumstances I knew I’d have a pretty difficult time bringing anyone else around to my point of view.

It’s a long story, I’d have to say.

And then I’d have to tell it.

Whether or not I had realized it at the time, I realized now that this was why I’d packed my laptop computer in the holdall. The last coherent thing I would ever do would be to tell my story, and leave it behind for someone else to read. I lingered on the bed for quite a while, thinking things through. But then I remembered that I didn’t have that much time left in which to be coherent.

I got off the bed, therefore. I switched on the TV set, but kept the sound down. I took out the laptop from the bag, as well as one of the bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I put the plastic container of paracetamol tablets on the little bedside table. Then I sat down here in this wicker armchair, and with the sound of the ice-machine humming in the background, I got started.

It’s now Saturday morning, early, and I’m beginning to feel tired. This is one of the first signs of withdrawal from MDT – so it’s just as well that I’ve more or less finished here.

But finished what?

Is this a true and honest account of how I came close to doing the impossible, to realizing the unrealizable… to becoming one of the best and the brightest? Is it the story of a hallucination, a dream of perfectibility? Or is it simply the story of a human lab rat, someone who was tagged and followed and photographed, and then discarded? Or is it – even more simply again – the last confession of a murderer?

I don’t know any more, and don’t even know that it matters.

Besides, I’m feeling drowsy, and a little weak.

I think I’m going to lie down for a while.

I’ve just slept for about five hours, fitfully, tossing and turning. For the whole time, it felt like I was having a continuous, full-on anxiety dream, and when I woke up I had a headache behind my eyes which quickly spread out to the rest of my skull. Disorientated, groggy, nauseous, I then got off the bed, came back over here to the wicker armchair and replaced the computer on my lap.

It’s now around midday, and the TV is still on, tuned to CNN.

Clearly, something major has been happening since yesterday evening, or early this morning. I’m looking at shots of battleships stationed in the Gulf of Mexico, of ground troops being deployed along border areas, of Defense Secretary Caleb Hale in emergency session with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Along the bottom of the screen a band of text announces that a live presidential address from the Oval Office is about to commence.

I close my eyes for a while, and when I open them again the President is on the TV screen, sitting at his desk. I can’t bear to turn the sound up, and as I study him closely, and see the alert, gorged MDT expression in his eyes, I realize that I can’t bear to look at him any more either. I reach out for the remote control and flick over to another channel, cartoons.

I gaze down at the keyboard of the laptop. My head is pounding now, and getting steadily worse. It’s time to shut off the computer and put it aside. I look over at the small table next to the bed, and at the plastic bottle on it containing 150 paracetamol tablets. Then I look at the keyboard once more and, wishing the command had a wider, smarter application – wishing it could somehow mean what it says – press ‘save’.