Catherine, who leans in closely to me.
“I don’t trust people who are comfortable speaking publicly, what’s-his-name excepted.” She nods toward Andrew. I smile, as she adds: “Are you feeling okay?” It’s not the kind of question you ask in polite company, which means I must look terrible.
“Head wound.”
“Really?”
“Just overwhelmed. Journalists are accustomed to being pilloried, so this kindness takes some getting used to.”
I excuse myself and make my way around the crowd absorbed in lunch, silverware clinking on plates and voices mixing like a dissonant symphony. Out in the hallway, I expect to see the guy with the long leather coat, but no sign of him. I wonder if I imagined him before. I did see him, didn’t I?
“Excuse me.” A voice from behind me. I turn. I blink to focus on a man I vaguely recognize. It’s the man with the shiny head I saw sitting near the front of the room. With bony fingers, he extends a phone.
“You dropped this on your way out.” It’s my iPhone.
“You okay?”
I nod and take the device. “Thanks.”
I walk to the restroom and toss cold water onto my pale face. My body pulses with a dull ache, not just physical but also emotional: loneliness; maybe the absence of my son or someone to share this moment with. Instinctively, I lift my phone from the counter, and realize I’ve missed three texts from an “unknown” number.
I tap the screen. The first message is cryptic. “I got your message. Are you feeling okay? I remembered something.”
The second message continues the first. “Something weird. Call me.”
The third message is shorter. “Faith.”
6
I hit send on the phone number provided in the second text.
“I can’t talk,” Faith answers with a whisper after the third ring. “In class.”
Class?
“I can’t talk either. In bathroom.”
She laughs. “Nathaniel Idle? From the subway?”
“To be clear, I’m not in an actual stall.”
“Call me later. Please.” She clicks off.
I look in the mirror again, and see staring back someone who looks flushed by a schoolboy infatuation.
The rest of the lunch passes relatively quickly, the assembled having paid their homage to Andrew and, by extension, some rumpled journalist, and they need to get back to finding acquirers for their start-ups. As I walk out, Andrew approaches me just as he gets intercepted by an admirer, a small woman, fortyish, with a wave in her hair and thick glasses.
“Mr. Leviathan. .”
“Andrew, please,” he gently corrects her.
“Andrew, my son is Ralph Everson, from the second class at the Montessori. Your contributions have meant the world to him. He’s still struggling but he’s turned the corner.”
“Ralph.” He pauses, senses my gaze and looks up at me for an instant, a rare moment in which I’ve seen him caught off guard. Can he be expected to remember every child his contributions have helped? “I’m so glad he’s benefiting from the program.” He recovers. “Can we discuss momentarily? I want to bid farewell to our honoree, and give him a hard-earned check.”
“Of course, Mr. Leviathan. I mean, Andrew.”
He shakes her hand.
He steps toward me, leans in and near-whispers a self-effacing goodbye.
“Please forgive me if my speech was a little too much. It sounded less sentimental when I wrote it in the shower.”
“Mine sounded a little funnier when I wrote it on the car ride down.”
He gives me a firm handshake and a check for $1,000, which I take with a silent nod of sincere appreciation. It’s new backpack time. He pats me once on the back in parting. He’s a few inches more than six feet, mildly taller than me, but his gesture seems to come from high above, like you’d get from Dad or an elected official. I’d like to like him and can’t identify why I remain on the fence.
I see his eyes gaze over my shoulder. “Gils, hang on a second.” Gils, I notice, is sadly devoid of obvious medical quirks. He’s a first-generation French immigrant but with the distinct lack of panache.
“I’m glad you came.” Andrew smiles, as he walks over to his old partner. “Want to stay and grab a coffee?” Gils glances at me, aware he’s being watched, then back at Andrew, then drops his gaze and shakes his head, uncomfortable, used to playing second fiddle. I have an instant sense of their cliched dynamic: Andrew, the innovator, took up the stage, and Gils, the implementer, made sure the numbers worked. I wonder how many people get to say no to Andrew, even if just for coffee.
Andrew turns to find Montessori mom so I head to the valet to retrieve my car. Outside, I suck in fresh air and check my messages. Polly? Faith? Nope. A scan of daily news items. Equally unsatisfying.
I feel the valet behind me. He’s jingling the keys to my car, or, I should say, to Polly’s hand-me-down. She may have left me, but-after having great financial success in the start-up world before I met her-she left me with some good stuff. In place of the tattered, rollover-prone SUV I drove for a decade, I drive a three-year-old black Audi A6, which Polly told me without room for debate was safer for toting our precious cargo.
The car isn’t Polly’s only generosity. It is out of guilt, I suppose, that she’s also given me the keys to her in- town loft, a major upgrade from my former apartment out in Richmond. I fall to sleep in it many nights not picturing Polly and Isaac in her Marin mansion, the two puzzle pieces of my nuclear family, nestling just fine on their own. I think about what I could’ve done differently to save us and whether the very act of creating Isaac, an accidental night of passion, was somehow both the flowering of deep love and its undoing.
“How old is your little one?” The parking valet extends the keys to me with a right hand absent the top quartile of his right index finger that I hope is an age-old accident involving a sharp object and not inflicted by someone else.
He’s looking in the middle of the backseat at Isaac’s car seat, which, with its straps and harnesses, seems safe enough to use on a space mission. My head pulses, the edges of the car seat fuzzy.
“Shy of a year. Isaac.”
“The DustBuster phase.”
“How’s that?”
“They love the gadgets that make sounds and do crazy things like make dirt disappear from the floor.”
I smile. Children are instant bonding. Complete strangers want to talk burping techniques and other toddler trivia.
I climb into the car, feeling an urge to quickly get away from the departing luncheon crowd and into a more comfortable setting, namely, asking subtle but intrusive questions; I’m headed to find out more about Sandy Vello.
I hit the gas and turn onto El Camino Real, a thoroughfare that stretches through Silicon Valley, when I see something that changes my immediate plans. A car length back, behind the wheel of a brown sedan, drives the man, he of the long, black leather coat. Hard to miss that long, square head. I move one lane to my right and he does the same.
I’m approaching a hotel and take a sharp right into its parking lot. He follows.
I pull into a parking spot near the green awning of the hotel entrance. It’s too public here for anything too bad to happen, I’d like to think.
My shadower pulls into a nearby spot and steps out, a picture of cardiovascular noncompliance. Five-feet- eight, round belly where all the weight goes, besides his cranium. He’s opened his black jacket to reveal a button-
