test of the theorem that opposites attract.
It looked like Jackie had learned enough to start feeling paranoid again, so I took the hint and stood up, reaching out my hand to Brad. Jackie joined me.
“Thanks for all your time and information,” she said “Very good of you.”
The faintest suggestion of pleasure flickered across his face.
“Not at all. I like to be of help. We’re basically a service organization here, so I guess it’s in the DNA,” he said, warmly, and I believed him.
It was pleasant to have him walk us all the way down to the lobby and help Eugenia sign us out. He paid her a crisp little compliment, something like, “Don’t you look put together today, Eugenia,” which caused her to toss back a bountiful smile. I thought to myself, there isn’t enough genius in the world to fully divine the social subtexts of a modern American corporation. Lord knows I never could.
It was still summer when we got out to the street, only now the air was palpable, a fine concoction of heat, humidity and fetid reek of a style available exclusively on the midsummer streets of New York City.
“This clinches it,” I said. “I’m spending the rest of the summer in the Hamptons.”
“Pretty cruel, given where I’m going.”
“Not at all. NYU’s like a resort.”
“That’s why I picked it.”
“Oh, not because they have special deals for FBI agents? Or lawyers following their disbarment for impersonating FBI agents?”
She grimaced.
“I called Brad on my cell phone last week when I was alone in Web’s office. Told him to call me back on Web’s land line, so he heard ‘Welcome to the Nassau County office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you know your party’s extension, dial it now, yadda, yadda.’ So technically, I never said I was with the FBI. I was going to straighten him out today, but it didn’t actually quite come up, not directly, and it was going so well, I never got around to it.”
“Just hope Brad and Maryanne never end up sitting together on an airplane.”
It was a relatively short drive from the parking garage back up the East Side and over to First Avenue. Jackie didn’t seem in the mood to talk, and that was okay with me. I needed a chance to think, something a lot of chatter wouldn’t have helped. I offered to park and walk her in, but she wouldn’t let me.
“Don’t try babying me,” she said, opening the car door and dragging her bags out of the backseat. “You won’t be any good at it.”
“Say Jackie, what’re the chances you can get on a computer before they operate on you?”
She closed the door and leaned in the open window.
“I don’t know. Given what I’ve done today, I might as well just steal one.”
“Don’t move for a second,” I said, though I made her wait for almost five minutes while I wrote out some stuff on a piece of notepaper and handed it to her. “You said you could find out anything on the Internet. See if you can answer those questions.”
After reading it, she folded the paper and stuck it in her shirt pocket.
“Census data is all online. You can actually look at scans of the forms the census workers fill out. Yearbooks, I don’t know. Depends on the school, but I’m guessing they only started putting that stuff online in the last five years or so. Most colleges have alumni sites. I could try that. I was already going to check into Neville and Hugh. It would help if I knew what you were getting at,” she said, “though if past experience is any guide, you aren’t about to tell me.”
“Just see what you can find out.”
“Right, and then what. You’re the last person on the planet who doesn’t have a computer, cell phone or answering machine. If I don’t catch you at home, that’s it.”
“Give me the paper back.”
I wrote down a phone number and email address.
“This is my daughter. Call her and ask her if you can email everything you get—I’d like to see any original documents—and have her print it out and overnight it to my house.”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“She’ll do it as a favor to you. Better than me asking directly.”
“I can’t believe I’m going into the hospital for life-defining surgery and you give me a ridiculous assignment.”
“You said not to baby you.”
She shook her head, stuffed the paper back in her pocket and collected her bags off the sidewalk. I committed myself to at least watching her till she got through the entrance, so I saw her when she turned around and looked back. I was too far away to clearly see her expression, which had something sadly complicated going on, but I heard her say, “You do the best you can, Sam,” and then something else, but by now she was too far away and I missed it as she disappeared through the entrance to the hospital.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL was only a few blocks away so I was out of Manhattan in a few minutes, heading east. There was one more stop I had in mind, one I hadn’t shared with Jackie. I’d written the address down on the top of a map of Long Island I kept stored in the console, now on the passenger seat to help me plot my course.
General Resource Recovery was located near Massapequa, a town just above the south shore of the Island. Their ad in Thomas Register promised fair prices for scrap metal of all kinds, and an assortment of high-quality, contaminant-free recycled material. There was a phone number, so I could have called ahead, but I knew Ivor Fleming was always delighted by a surprise visit.
It was getting late in the afternoon, so I hustled along as fast as the traffic on the Long Island Expressway and Wantagh Parkway would let me. I made it there by quarter to four, relieved to see an open parking lot instead of a tall chainlink fence and guard hut. A plain one-story office block fronted the lot. Behind and above you could see an elevated transport system for lifting and sorting a mountain of tangled, rusty red scrap. Somewhere out of sight a furnace was cooking up the goodies, separating elements and alloys, oxidizing and vaporizing trace materials and issuing ingots, rods and pellets of gleaming semi-molten steel.
I located the big black pickup as I approached the entrance. It was close in, but not in a reserved spot, of which there were only two. The one with the bulky black Mercedes had a sign that said, “Don’t even think of parking here.”
Passing through the heavy wooden entrance doors, only partly assisted by pneumatic door openers, I saw in my mind’s eye a coffee-table book—
I was about to approach the guards when I noticed the foyer expanded out from the entrance into a large room, at the opposite end of which was another set of double doors, and on the walls to either side a pair of huge murals. The first thing I thought of was heroic industrialism, like in 1930s Soviet art, with heavily muscled men and women, in squared-off profile, toiling with backs straight, eyes forward. But that wasn’t quite it. The paintings had an abstract quality, an imprecision of form and composition that almost suggested a parody of their presumed subject. But not quite. The factories in the background were partly made of boxes and smoke stacks, but also office towers, redwoods and ancient campaniles. The colors were indescribable except to say they were dark and light, familiar and entirely out of context. But not a mishmash—there was a strong organizing sense underlying both the paintings that reminded me of Picasso. Or maybe Hieronymus Bosch.
I wished Allison was there to explain to me what I was looking at. Or better yet, the guy who painted them.
