'I asked for it,' said his father.
'I am sorry!' the nurse said to Ray. 'I think you just don't understand here. I think you need to be a little more sensitive to the situation. I realize that you have not spent much time with people who are'-she glanced at Ray's father-'who are sick and dying, yes, we can say that, but-'
'What was that?' croaked Ray's father suddenly. 'What did you say about my son?'
The pretty young nurse turned to him and spoke more gently. 'I said, I know he has not spent much time around people who are-'
'That's exactly what I thought you said.' His father lifted both arms in excitement, pulling on his tubes, turning his fevered eyes directly upon her. 'Let me tell you something, lady, my son Ray there has spent years around the dead and dying, he has seen fields of the dead, laid out in rows by the hundreds, burnt, crushed, drowned, he has seen the dead buried by the thousands, he has held the tiniest little babies that were-'
'Dad, Dad, that's enough!'
His father glared at the young nurse, who, for her part, looked at Ray in stunned wonder, at last realizing-as had another woman a few nights earlier-that she had no idea who he was.
9
They'd been happy once. And this was just the kind of rainy spring Manhattan evening he used to like. 'Your wife is in the car downstairs,' his secretary would say. Then came a quick brush of the hair in his private washroom. Adjust the silk tie in the mirror, shoot a look at Tom Reilly, guy on his way up. Then, downstairs, the company car would be idling by the curb, Ann waiting expectantly, and soon they'd head to yet another swanky dinner party. He'd let his hand slide along Ann's long firm thigh, eager to show her off, eager to hit the evening hard, plunge unabashedly into all the falsely earnest conversation, the self-congratulatory mannerisms, the grinning and groping, the money ogling and power sniffing, drinking neither too little nor too much, all on the happy glide path of intimacy with people who made things happen. He still remembered the night when Bill Gates was in the room- the richest man in the world is in this room, Ann, right now, the richest man who ever lived — and the time Jack Welch dropped by to pay his respects… but now, tonight it was different, now both of them were lost in their thoughts as the wet night slid by the windows outside, Ann next to him but with zero idea what he was walking into, that he was feeling weird spiders of pain crawl over his chest and left shoulder. Should he tell her, his doctor wife? She'd ask him what was wrong, why he was so stressed out. Nothing, sweetie, just a dinner party at Martz's mansion in the sky, twenty rooms thirty stories up in the air. Martz, the man who is stalking me. Tom had to go, no matter what, pretend nothing was wrong. The invitation had come yesterday. A straight-up test to see if Tom was avoiding Martz. Well, fine. He'd just swallowed a couple of beta-blockers at the office to zap out his anxiety. Martz would find the opportunity to take Tom aside and say, six months ago you were begging me to buy your stock and I do and so now what? Sniffing him for the anxiety that had been zapped out. There was something diseased and awful about Martz. Predatory, vulturish, his many hundreds of millions made by buying and selling the work of others, never had created or produced or invented anything himself, just slithered in when companies were weak or underfunded or down on their luck and sunk in his money-sucking fangs. And that was when Tom was going to look him in the eye and say, Bill, you know as well as I do that the market is irrational sometimes, and the best we can see somebody has been driving down the price, maybe selling on the way down in order to buy back everything at a lower price later. Now you must stop hounding me
… Well, he'd say something like that, flat-out lie, just knock it back at Martz in a moment of high-stakes poker…
But Tom was unconvinced by his own line of bullshit and so felt around in his head wondering if he could feel the absence of anxiety. How long did beta-blockers take to kick in? He should know the answer, given all the drug efficacy reports he'd read. He could ask his wife, but she'd want to know why he was taking them, how he'd gotten them. Why was he so worried? It was not just Martz, no sir. There was more, much more, bad more. His fate, Tom understood all too well now, teetered upon a mere four words, words that were vague and deeply unimaginative: send them a message. Yes, he had said something like that, send them a message, send CorpServe, the office- cleaning and paper-shredding service, a message that he did not want them snooping around in his executive suite or anywhere else at Good Pharma. They were very thorough and got their cleaning done between the hours of seven and four every night as per the contract, but over the last few months several of his people had reported that they wondered if their papers had been pushed around a bit on their desks. The service's workers seemed unresponsive to a few casual questions. Like they were trained to be that way. Were they stealing? Looking for inside information? Hired by a Good Pharma competitor? It was all subtle, unprovable stuff, unless you installed hidden cameras, hired corporate espionage experts, the whole nine yards, a paper trail that eventually could be subpoenaed by a disgruntled, big-shoes investor like Martz or the neat freaks at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had ordered that the IT department actually enforce the mandatory shutdown of all network workstations after six-thirty p.m., as well as upgrade the instant encryption of intracorporate and outgoing e-mail. Did this give him a margin of security? Not necessarily. So when a new report came that there was a particular question-just a question, mind you-about the service, something about some of the bags of paper for shredding maybe not quite all getting into the big mobile shredder parked at street level, he told his building services chief the words he had repeated to himself nearly every hour since he had vomited under his seat at the Yankees game: 'I don't want people screwing around with our information! Send them a message that we want cleaning and paper waste removal and if we have to worry about them, we will tear up the contract and not pay them a dime. But frankly, I don't want to have to go find another service at this time of year. This outfit is cheap. So have a talk with them. Send them a fucking message they won't forget.'
How he wished he had a recording of this comment. It would prove that Tom Reilly was innocent of anything. A bit nasty, perhaps, but innocent. Send them a fucking message they won't forget. He'd said it to James Tonelli, his facilities and operations manager, an eager, overly aggressive forty-year-old who prowled the building constantly checking on heating, cooling, plumbing, fire alarms, you name it. James, who was from Brooklyn, had simply said, 'Don't worry, I'll take care of it,' nodding as he did so, maybe some idea half hidden in his eyes, and so Tom had done just that, he had not worried, because James had said he'd take care of it.
They had not discussed how that might be accomplished, which Tom suspected would probably mean that James would have a ferocious little chat with the representative of the service company, a good-looking Chinese woman, he thought he remembered, having maybe met her once, and question the company's procedures and on- site supervision practices. The usual stuff. But then, a few days ago, he reads in the tabloid newspaper that two Mexican girls working for that same company have been found murdered out by the beach in Brooklyn? Still wearing the company uniforms? That sounded like a fucking message they won't forget. The girls had been recognized by some Good Pharma staffers, and the corporate relations office had confirmed they had worked in Good Pharma's offices that very night. Tom had simply nodded when told this and said, 'If there's any inquiry, just please refer it to legal.' At least the company name hadn't made it into the news. So far, anyway. And the next day James Tonelli calls in sick, and the day after that. Was this something to worry about? Was that a message Tom wouldn't forget? He wasn't sure. Well, yes, he was sure. He could construct rational reasons that might prop up his hopes, but his gut told him the two things were connected. There had always been a bit of talk about whom James knew in Brooklyn, whom his family was connected to. The Lucchese family, the Gambinos. These were just names, right? Did they really mean anything anymore? What was Tom, an expert in the Mafia? Wasn't the Mafia finished in New York, wiped out by RICO prosecutions? Just a joke that you enjoyed while watching reruns of The Sopranos? We actually kill people, ha-ha. Everybody thinks we are gone, ha-ha-ha. He realized that the Metro section of the paper sometimes had stories on organized crime. He should pay more attention to these things! The speculation about James had actually added a positive aura to his presence, and in general he got things done quickly-solved union issues, city inspector issues, anything that came up. He seemed to know whom to call and how to talk to them when he did. A very valuable skill set.
So Tom could worry about James. But Martz, the man who would be his host in ten minutes, didn't care about James or two dead Mexican girls. He cared about Good Pharma's stock price. In the last two weeks it had taken another dive, dropped another 17 percent. Why? Anyone's guess. Too many sellers! Usually companies knew why their stock was going up or down. Analysts issued reports, made recommendations, knowledgeable people
