For months, Morgan wondered how long he would be able to look at that view, if his lack of employment would force him to relocate, take some job outside the city where he’d be a nobody, a nothing, working for a company that the Wall Street Journal barely knew existed, a company whose CEO wore a cowboy hat rather than a three-piece suit. Where the offices were decorated with shag carpeting and the secretaries were all fifty and overweight.
That was a world Morgan refused to live in.
So he took in the crisp air, and remembered why he fell in love with this city in the first place. And he thanked his benefactors for giving him the chance to stay.
“Hello?” he said.
“Morgan, it’s Chester.”
“Oh, hey, what’s up?”
“Just wanted to let you know I talked to Leonard, and he told me you and Goggins cleared almost twenty grand today. That’s quite a haul.”
Morgan smiled. He was well aware of how much money they were bringing in, but he’d learned one thing in business and that was never to brag to your boss about how well you were doing. At the end of the month, when all the receipts were tallied up, you’d get all the praise you needed. Braggarts were so nineties.
So to hear this from Chester during his first week of work, to Morgan that was all the praise he’d need for a month.
“I know you haven’t received a paycheck yet,” Chester said, “but you deserve a bonus.”
Morgan’s jaw dropped. He stopped walking and leaned up against a mailbox. Then he had to move when a man asked him to move so he could deposit a letter.
“I…I don’t know what to say… Thanks, I guess.”
“You’ve earned it,” Chester said. “But you will need to do one thing for me.”
“Anything.”
“I’m glad to hear that. And if you do this for me, you’ll get a hundred grand on the spot. I’ll need you to sign one piece of paper, for tax purposes, but you’ll have six figures to play with by the time you’re hungry for dinner tonight.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Yes, I’m kidding you. In fact, we never want to see you again. Goodbye, Morgan.”
“Wait! I was kidding, too!”
“I know, stupid. Be on the corner of Thirteenth and
Avenue A in half an hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
“One more thing, Morgan.”
“What’s up?”
“Do you like the suit you’re wearing?”
“I guess so. It was one of the first ones I bought when
I got my job in banking.”
“Too bad. Because you’re never going to wear it again after today.”
37
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jack said. He was staring out the window of our cab as we sped uptown to meet William
Hollinsworth.
Rather than responding, I studied Jack’s face. For some reason it made me think about his clean desk, how for some reason there was something holding him back from returning fully to a normal life.
We’d never had a chance to have a real talk about
Paulina’s article and what it had done to him, and it was probably for the better. When a man’s reputation, and maybe his soul, is nearly destroyed, the last thing he wants to do is revisit it. But it was clear that Jack hadn’t quite gotten past it, that he was still between two worlds.
The wistful look on his face confirmed my thoughts.
It was not the look of a face simply admiring the beauty of a city, but the look of a man who wasn’t sure if he’d ever see these sights again.
Sixth Avenue was crowded, full of taxis, livery cabs and black company cars carrying executives and bluecollar workers alike home from a long day’s work. Traffic in the city had actually gotten better over the last few months, but it was a wolf wrapped in sheep’s clothing.
The decrease in traffic was primarily due to a cutback in both taxis and hired car services, but also a massive drop in truck deliveries that ordinarily clogged up New
York’s arteries during the early morning. With so many stores and restaurants closing due to massive revenue drops, there was natural belt tightening in the quantity and frequency of transports it took to ship in new supplies.
Nevertheless, traveling through the city during the seemingly endless rush hour times was still a harrowing proposition, and the fact that it took forty-five minutes rather than an hour to go from midtown to upper Manhattan was a small victory at best.
We eked past taxis crawling slower than they needed to, trying to squeeze out a few extra pennies from their charges. Businessmen who would normally be glued to their BlackBerries in the backseat, blissfully unaware of this common practice, now stared at the rising fare ready to berate the driver for taking his sweet time.
Prior to leaving, I left Curt Sheffield a message filling him in on where we were headed. He needed to know what was going on. Like Paulina said, I didn’t know who to trust, but I wanted to leave a trail just in case. I could trust Curt to follow it if something bad happened.
We merged onto Central Park West, and several minutes later arrived at the Columbia campus. Jack paid the driver and tucked the receipt into his wallet. We got out, checking our pockets to make sure all our belongings had arrived with us.
A few months back, I’d forgotten my wallet in a taxi, and was dismayed to think I’d have to spend the whole day in line at the DMV while explaining the situation to my credit card companies and, worst of all, Wallace
Langston, who would need to order me a new corporate card. Yet just half an hour after realizing the gaffe, I received an e-mail from a Mr. Alex Kolodej, the kindly driver who’d found my wallet in the backseat of his cab, put two and two together between my driver’s license and business card, and even drove by my office to drop the wallet off.
He refused any sort of reward, and drove off with the plain smile of a Good Samaritan.
Amanda, on the other hand, had forgotten her purse at a bar just a few weeks ago, and returned home later that night to find no less than twenty-five hundred dollars in charges racked up. Ironically they were not at jewelry or electronic stores, the bastion of people looking to make a quick splurge with a stolen card, but rather from places like
Home Depot and Ace Hardware. A sign that whoever had taken her bag was way behind on their home renovations.
A small thing perhaps, but I considered it a sign of the times. For years, after the mayor and cops had cleaned the city up, New York was known as one of the safest big cities in the world. Like any city, of course you needed a modicum of common sense, the knowledge that despite this change if you wandered into the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time you were playing Russian roulette.
But now, New York didn’t feel quite as safe. There was a constant tension, a thickness in the air, that something combustible could ignite at any moment. There were too many people out of work, too many people unable to afford their homes, too many businesses hanging on for dear life.
And when a city is being stretched like a piece of taffy, just the slightest bit of tension will cause it to snap.
The Columbia University department of history was located in a building called Fayerweather Hall. It looked
