Resurgence (23 page)
“Yeah, even though, hard as that might be to believe.”
“
Wow
. Laurel would kill him for sure.”
He hasn’t seen her eyes get this round since she stopped blushing three days ago. But that’s the only sign she might be reverting to her former self because she lets the sheet puddle to the floor around her ankles, narrows her eyes, and looks him over like he’s the one standing naked in a doorway.
“You look nice,” she says in lieu of goodbye.
“So do you.”
Her image stays with him on the walk to the Chelsea office, getting in the way of remembering to look for oncoming traffic to the right, and disrupting focus once he’s safely seated at his desk in his London outpost.
Why couldn’t he have said she looked lovely standing there in the doorway like a diminutive latter-day Venus rising from a dropped sheet instead of a shell? He wouldn’t have had to say breathtakingly lovely, would he? Or pulchritudinous, for chrissake. What would have been the harm in telling her she was appealing in both mind and body? Would that have amounted to a lifetime commitment? Or even a length-of-stay commitment?
He squanders another five minutes on this debate before shifting to faulting himself for not kissing her goodbye. But if he had kissed her goodbye, he’d still be there and she’d be getting a late start for what could be the biggest day of her life.
He sends a nameless assistant for coffee and goes through the motions of applying himself to the work at hand. He’s a little disappointed there are no fires to put out, either here or at the New York office. But he may be premature about the opposite shore; they won’t be up and running for another five hours.
Calculating the time difference reminds him he still has half a day to get through before the meeting with Laurel Chandler. He selects at random from the manila folders fanned out on his desk, hoping to find a proposal enticing enough to keep his mind off current events, but an impact study of the nearly completed Docklands Light Rail system doesn’t do the job.
Apparently nothing’s going to do the job, he concludes after leafing through the rest of the material laid out for him. Although a glance at the window shows the predicted rain has materialized, that’s not enough deterrent to keep him shut inside an office where the only things of interest are the clock and the phone. Ignoring the just arrived coffee, he grabs his coat and umbrella and leaves the office without saying where he’s going or when he’ll be back.
If this trek in the rain had any conscious purpose, it would be to prioritize distractions, and right now he can’t even count them. The first tube station he comes to is Sloane Square, where he considers spending the next hour or two on the underground. But that seems like a cop-out, so he moves on until he’s confronted with the behemoth Victoria Station and its many avenues of escape. Again, he eschews shelter and mechanized transport in favor of self-propelled martyrdom in the rain, and slogs on this way until he’s surrounded by a bland stretch of bureaucratic architecture in Westminster’s Victoria Street.
If he looks up at all, it’s only to notice that the curtains in these buildings are consistently too long and puddle on the windowsills like Amanda’s sheet puddled around her delectable ankles in the bathroom doorway.
The next thing that catches his eye is a middle-aged woman, hunched over on a pebbledash bench, changing from fashionable shoes into black Reeboks, the better to support her tourism. This unattractive sight goes to show how out of place he is in this neighborhood; he’s dressed too well to be either bureaucrat or tourist—more evidence of his redundancy.
He’s crossed Broadway and glimpsed New Scotland Yard before that significance impacts on him. And now he’s the one sitting on a pebbledash bench contemplating change. Change in the way he regards Rayce’s death: Making it out to be foul play instead of either suicide or accident; stretching rational belief to link it with the deaths in the states; imagining how quickly he’d be dismissed—in every sense of the word—if he attempted to bring any of that to the attention of a chief inspector.
After wasting fifteen minutes on this fruitless meditation, he ducks into Sainsburys for a cheese and pickle sandwich. While there, he picks up a container of rhubarb yogurt, Amanda’s new favorite among flavors she’s never tried before.
Rain is bucketing down now, so taking the tube back to the office no longer seems like a cop-out. The ride from St James’s Park to Sloane Square takes just long enough to give rise to a fresh concern, whether he can conceal his mental disarray in Laurel’s presence.
An audible stir in the outer office alerts him to Laurel’s arrival. Her newly minted celebrity has obviously preceded her; the receptionist calls her by name before Laurel identifies herself as his next appointment.
Maybe to make up for going so far afield the last time they got together, she is all business. All business to the extent of not even offering a hand to shake, let alone a cheek to kiss. He matches her mode and replaces his work in progress with the several bound presentations containing the best reasoned options for her financial future.
Three hours later, she is leaning toward the most conservative plan, the one he favors that would see her retain interest in the family law firm as silent partner, invest other inherited assets in a diversified portfolio to include real estate development, long-term stocks, growth funds, municipal bonds, and select Internet start-ups.
She has few comments or questions until they get around to the subject of her personal real estate, which he advises her to liquidate in the near future. She agrees, but stipulates that it not go on the block until after the August wedding, reminding that August is the earliest she can make a firm decision about any of her ties to New Jersey.
The meeting winds down with him brushing off as much of her profuse thanks as he can and remain polite. At his insistence, she takes all of the bound proposals with her for review and allows him to see her into a cab.
“Bemus is already upset with me for coming here alone, but I reminded him he shouldn’t be seen in your presence, either,” she says as they move out to the street, where he’s lucky to flag down a cab on the third try.
“Two things,” he says before the cab pulls away. “Insist on a pre-nup, and tell Rachel I said hello.”
Nate somehow got through an unfashionably early dinner with the manager of the London office. They picked a casual spot on King’s Road, where food took a backseat to shoptalk. This did nothing to improve Nate’s growing sense of inadequacy after such a nonproductive day. But the interlude did move him closer to making the first decision of the day—a decision inspired by something Amanda said this morning, and by Laurel’s no-nonsense demeanor this afternoon.
Now, although the rain has stopped and he has time to burn, he takes a cab rather than walk from the restaurant to Albert Hall. He directs the driver to let him off on Prince Consort Road nearest the stage door, where he regrets not having left his raincoat at the office, along with his document case and umbrella. But it’s too late to do anything about that now. He’ll just have to put up with the encumbrance, and with whatever image a damp, wrinkled coat projects.
Why is he bugging himself about this anyway? No one will mistake him for a roadie. Or even a casual concertgoer. He drapes the coat over one shoulder before clipping an all-access pass to the lapel of his bespoke suit coat, and enters the hall with forty-five minutes to go before the scheduled start of the concert.
The phalanx of venue stewards and private security guards at the stage entrance processes him through as just another dignitary. Inside, he’s met with personnel who appear to know him on sight and take for granted he’s there in a professional capacity. That assumption holds when he moves along a low-ceilinged corridor toward the dressing rooms, where other early birds are clustered at intervals. A few acknowledge him; one sidles up to him, crablike in gait and manner.
“We should talk,” Saul Kingsolver says without preamble.
“That ship has sailed,” Nate says without slackening pace, pretending interest in the name placards on the dressing room doors. He confronts two more recording magnates, who similarly think he’s still the fast track to Colin Elliot. He brushes them off, intent on reaching a place where the organizers might be expected to congregate. He’s not really on the lookout for Amanda, he’s only collecting echoes of past experiences at this venue and acting as an unofficial overseer. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.
On the arena floor, he moves toward the roped off VIP seating near the stage. It’s safe to say the organizers went for the exclusive let that provides five thousand-plus seats, which are already starting to fill. They probably went for the whole show package, too. The stewards and full complement of labeled dressing rooms he saw earlier would attest to that. And that means they also have use of any available function rooms.
He considers taking a stroll on the Grand Tier to see who might be schmoozing in the Prince of Wales Room, say—not that he’s looking for anyone in particular. Not just yet, anyway.
Before leaving this level, he surveys the entire amphitheatre, recalling his initial distaste for gilt and crimson ostentation that now doesn’t seem quite so vulgar. Within this panoramic view, he takes in the large acoustic diffusing disks suspended beneath the domed roofline to reduce echo, and they look less like a fleet of flamboyant flying saucers than they used to. The dominant pipe organ isn’t as imposing or churchly as remembered. Tonight, the elaborate arched Gallery, refuge of standees, doesn’t strike him as a laughably pretentious irony, and the voluminous drapes in the boxes don’t seem like the archaic affectation he once thought them to be.
In this forgiving mood, he bucks throngs of incoming concertgoers to get to the elevator lobby, where he might also find a cloakroom and be rid of the damp raincoat.
He finds what he’s looking for, hands the coat off to the attendant, and recoils from a firm grip on the shoulder just relieved of the coat. No one who knows him would dare lay a hand on in that manner, so when he turns around he’s prepared to confront a stranger, not Brownell Yates, last seen when he followed through on the porn purchase from Sid Kaplan’s girlfriend.
“What the fuck?” Nate distances himself from the surprisingly well-groomed, well-dressed contact who’s sporting the credentials of
Celebrity Sleuth
, a semi-reputable rag with a name that says it all. “What in hell are
you
doing here?”
“Same as you. Keepin’ nose to the wind, ear to the ground, and eye to the keyhole. That is what you’re doin’, isn’t it?” Brownie says. “I’ve been watchin’ you check out the scene like you figured the baddie was waitin’ in the wings or somethin’, and you may not be far off on that.”
“On what?” Nate steers the resurrected scribe into an alcove where they’re less likely to be overheard. “What baddie?”
“You know. The guy we both think did the three over in the States and maybe could be tied to an unfortunate death over here, and maybe could be lookin’ to do your boy some damage.”
In another setting, Nate would frogmarch the overreaching asshole out the door, inform him their spotty history does not entitle him to this much latitude. “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I doubt you do either,” he says instead.
“Sure you do. Sure I do,” Brownie says. “I’m talkin’ about what could happen if a certain investigative journalist took his act on the road, out to the boondocks and maybe—”
“What are you saying? Have you got something? Something concrete?” Nate gets right in Brownie’s face, smells his surprisingly gin-free breath.
“Bimmerman concrete enough?”
“Jesus!” Nate can’t pretend this cattle prod of a remark hasn’t jolted him to the core. “No . . .
no
, don’t say anything else. Not here. Not now.” He fumbles a business card from his breast pocket.
“Call me tomorrow.” Nate hands Brownie the card without elaborating and heads back the way he came. All pretensions are gone now. Now he’s openly looking for Amanda. Eagerly looking for Amanda.
Backstage is alive with artists, technicians, and heavy security. If he can pick Bemus out of the herd, he’ll have a starting point. But it’s David Sebastian who’s the beacon. David, who used to stand out in any crowd as an adversary, is about twenty yards distant, heads together with the event manager, so Amanda can’t be too far away. Nor can Colin.
Several headliners extend high fives as Nate moves through the assembly. He probably should be paying closer attention to who they are, and calculating who among them could be looking for new management. Amanda would know; Amanda would know to a month—to a week—when any given contract expires, and to a man which ones are shopping for new handlers.
This sidebar to his thinking—this demonstrable truth— already has him smiling when he spots her, positively aglow amidst a trio of her idols. He elbows Chris Thorne aside, and shoulders past Robert Palmer and Michael Hutchence to get to her.