first place.
'Maybe this is God's way of letting me even up things a bit. It can't be something easy or it doesn't really count, does it?'
'I could end up knowing more about these trials than the NIH does,' Stone said. 'Because it doesn't sound like you guys actually know much at all.'
'Let me think about it and send you an e-mail tonight. Whatever comes up, it'll be 'scrambled eggs.''
'Thanks, Atlas.'
'Scrambled eggs' was a reference to a made-up code system they'd used in college. A name or number was encoded by interlacing it with their old phone number. This time the interlaced number would be an access code for proprietary NIH data.
'I do not think I'm long for the world here at the
'I sure as hell hope you've got a new career concept ready for the day when they give you the ax.' Dale's attempt at a light tone did not quite disguise his concern.
'Funny, but that's the second time I've received that advice in the last half hour. I deem that unlucky.'
'Stone, sometimes I think you ought to try not living your life so close to the damned edge. Maybe you ought to start practicing a little prudence, just to see what it feels like.'
'I'm that wild ox we used to talk about I like to scrounge. But I also like to look around for the biggest story I can find. I'm trying to get an interview with a guy on Bartlett's staff. Maybe our 'scrambled eggs' will flush him out.'
'Just take care of yourself and keep in touch.'
'You too.'
And they both hung up.
Was this going to do the trick? he wondered. As it happened Stone Aimes already knew plenty about Bartlett's business affairs. He had been a lifelong student of Bartlett the man, and as part of his research into the Gerex Corporation he had pulled together an up-to-date profile of Bartlett's cash-flow situation. If you connected the dots, you discovered his financial picture was getting dicey.
Bartlett was overextended and, like Donald Trump in the early 1990s, he needed to roll over some short-term debt and restructure it. But his traditional lenders were backing away. He had literally bet everything on Van de Vliet. If his research panned out, then there was a whole new day for Bartlett Enterprises. That had to be what he was counting on to save his chestnuts.
The funny thing was, Bartlett didn't really like to spend his time thinking about money. One of his major preoccupations was to be in the company of young, beautiful women, usually leggy models.
Bartlett also had an estranged wife, Eileen, who reportedly occupied the top two floors of his mansion on Gramercy Park. Rumor had it she was a paranoid schizophrenic who refused to separate or give him a divorce. She hadn't been photographed for at least a decade, but there was no reason to think she wasn't still alive and continuing to make his life miserable.
Another tantalizing thing to know about Winston Bartlett was that he had bankrolled a Zen monastery in upstate New York twenty years ago and went there regularly to meditate and recharge. He had once claimed in a Forbes interview, that the monastery was where he honed his nerves of steel and internalized the timing of a master swordsman.
The Forbes interview was also where he claimed he had quietly amassed the largest collection of important Japanese samurai swords and armor outside of Japan. For the past five years he had been lobbying the Metropolitan Museum of Art to agree to lend its dignity to an adjunct location for his collection, and to name it after him. The Bartlett Collection. Winston Bartlett lusted for the prestige that an association with the Met would bring him.
At the moment some of his better pieces were housed in a special ground-floor display in the Bartlett Building in TriBeCa. Most of the collection, however, was in storage. He had recently bought a building on upper Park Avenue and some people thought he was planning to turn it into a private museum.
He walked back to the lobby of his building and stood for a moment looking at himself in the plate glass. Yes, the older he got, the more the resemblance settled in. Winston Bartlett. Shit Thank goodness nobody else had ever noticed it.
Chapter 4
When Ally and Knickers walked into her lobby, Alan, the morning doorman, was there, just arrived, tuning his blond acoustic guitar.
Watching over her condominium building was his day job, but writing a musical for Off Broadway (about Billy the Kid) was his dream. He was a tall, gaunt guy with a mane of red hair he kept tied back in a ponytail while he was in uniform and on duty. Everybody in the building was rooting for him to get his show mounted, and he routinely declared that he and his partner were this close to getting backers. 'We're gonna have the next
Knickers immediately ran to him, her tail wagging.
'Hey, Nicky baby, you look beautiful,' he effused. Then he struck a bold E minor chord on his guitar, like a flamenco fanfare, and reached to pat her. 'Come here, sweetie.'
'Hi, Alan. How's everything?' Seeing him always bucked Ally up. He usually came on duty while she was out for her run, and she looked forward to him as her first human contact of the day. He was younger than she was- early thirties-but she thought him attractive in an East Village, alternative-lifestyle sort of way. He was very proud of the new yin and yang tattoos on his respective biceps. She admired his guts and his willingness to stick to his dream, no matter the degradation of his life in the meantime.
'Doing great, Ms. Hampton. Things are moving along.'
'Alan, I've told you a million times to call me Ally.' Anything else made her feel like a hundred-year-old matron.
'Hey, right, I keep forgetting.' Then he nodded at the manila envelope Grant had just given her. 'Pick that up on your run?'
'I was ambushed by my ex-brother. He passed it along.'
'What's that mean?' he asked with a funny look. 'Brothers are for keeps.'
'Unfortunately, you're right, Alan. The whole thing was long ago. And not far away enough.' She was urging a reluctant Knickers on through the inner door. 'Seeing him just now was sort of like an aftershock. From a big earthquake in another life.'
'Sounds like you need a hard hat,' he said, and turned back to his guitar, humming. And dreaming.
She took the elevator up to the top floor and let herself into her apartment, as always feeling a tinge of satisfaction at where she lived. Home, sweet home.
Her loft-style apartment was in an idiosyncratic building whose six-year-old renovation had been designed by her old architectural firm, just before she had to leave and take over CitiSpace. It was their first big job in the city. She was the one who had designed the large atrium in the middle and the open glass elevators that let you look out at tall trees as you went up and down.
She loved the building, but at the time she couldn't have begun to afford an apartment there. Later, when she could, none was available. Then she heard through the managing agent that a German owner, after completely gutting his space, had to return to his homeland in a hurry and was throwing it on the market for half what he’d paid.
