Center. He still got a kick out of it, just as he did when he was a snot-nosed kid living at the wrong end of Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach. Coming into the city with his dad had been a big deal, especially at Christmastime.
A light snow was falling, like movie snow, it was so fine and sparkly, and it was getting dark fast, making that huge tree glimmer and shine. He squinted his eyes, making the tree go all hazy the way he used to do as a kid. How about that, huh? Beautiful thing to see, even at his age.
Even the skaters were still fun to watch. The babes in their little pleated skating skirts were the best ones. You couldn’t put on an outfit like that and step out onto the ice unless you could skate like an angel. Then you had the guys. Something about a guy lifting one leg and skating along like a friggin’ swan just didn’t sit right with him, never had.
Like guys who took tub baths instead of showers, tough to trust. The really good guy skaters had to be fairies, right? And the really bad ones, like this gangsta character who just took a header and slid butt-first into the wall, should not have been on the ice for any reason whatsoever.
“Hey, Spazmo! Yeah, I’m talking to you, the great one! Nice move, man, look like Wayne friggin’ Gretzky out there!”
He laughed and looked at his watch. The office Christmas party started at six, and here it was now already quarter past. After the endless flight from Fairbanks friggin’ Alaska, he’d gone straight to his room at the Waldorf and gotten a few hours’ sleep, leaving a wake-up call with the operator for four-thirty.
He’d stopped in at P.J.’s for a couple of pops and lost track of the time. But yeah, he was pumped about the party. It would be the first official event at the new corporate offices at the top of the Empire State Building. Somebody said they were having Gladys Knight, but that could have just been the water cooler talking.
He wasn’t sure what time the big boss would show up for this wing-ding, but that was something he definitely didn’t want to miss. Most employees never got the chance to see the man himself. The Queso Grande, the honcho, the muckety-muck, the man behind the curtain. Yeah, tonight was going to be very special. There was even a crazy rumor about the way the old man was going to arrive tonight. He had no idea how, but he was pretty sure the boss man wasn’t going to be stepping off a Fifth Avenue bus.
Better get a move on. He turned away from the skaters and started walking quickly east along the beautifully decorated mall toward Fifth Avenue. Christmas shopping was going full-bore now, and he had to be careful about knocking anybody down who got in his way. People, when they saw his size, normally got out of the way fast. But in a crowd like this, it was tough to move fast without seriously injuring anybody.
Paddy hung a right on Fifth and started walking south down to Thirty-fourth Street. The crowds were amazing, especially the lines across the street forming outside the Saks windows. Something was also going on farther along the avenue, because they had these giant searchlights shooting straight up into the clouds. You could see the beams sweeping back and forth through the snow, lighting up the dark bellies of the low-lying clouds and flashing across the tall spires that lined the street of boyhood dreams.
It took him all of ten minutes to reach the Empire State. The searchlights, on flatbeds, were right outside the main entrance, aimed up at the tower. The tower at the top was always lit up with beautiful lights, sometimes red, white, and blue or red and green like now for Christmas. But the searchlights were crisscrossing the building, and it looked like some kind of Hollywood premiere or something. All kinds of TV trucks with big dish antennas out there, too. Something big was going on, all right.
Walking inside the three-story lobby, Paddy felt a touch of pride. After all, this was his office. Kind of.
He’d come a long way from the Brooklyn dockyards where he was just another punk longshoreman with a thirty-inch neck and a whole lot of attitude. He was now an important part of a multinational organization with a fancy corporate headquarters at one of the most famous buildings in the world. After September 11, 2001, it had become the tallest building in New York again.
He looked around the lobby, his lobby, taking it all in. Art deco, he thought they called it. Looked good to him. Glitzy, but old-fashioned glitz. He’d never been upstairs to the corporate offices before, so he went over to the fancy marble info desk and spoke to the nice little Jewish lady who looked as if she’d been behind that counter her whole life. Her nameplate said “MURIEL ESB.” Esb? Esb didn’t sound like any Jewish name he’d heard of, and then he realized maybe it was the initials of the building? Yeah.
“Welcome to the Empire State Building! How may I help you?”
“How you doing, Muriel?” Paddy asked her, showing her his employee ID card, “I’m looking for the TSAR Christmas party?”
“Oh! Aren’t you the lucky one, Mr. Strelnikov? That’s going to be something to see. Especially from up top where you’ll be.”
“Something to see? You mean Gladys Knight?” He could give a flying crap about Gladys Knight, but hey, it was Christmas, stick with the spirit.
Muriel smiled. “Didn’t you see all the searchlights out there? And the TV cameras? It’s not Santy Claus they’re waiting for, you know.”
“Yeah? Who they waiting for?”
“Your famous boss! He’s supposed to arrive at seven o’clock. That’s one half-hour from now, so you’d better get up there.”
“What’s he doing, flying in on Air Reindeer or something?”
“Something like that,” she said, and they both laughed, and he asked her again where he was supposed to go.
“Your cocktail reception is on the very top floor, where the 102nd Floor Observatory used to be. A lot of people aren’t too happy about losing that observation deck, you know, Mr. Strelnikov. Even though we still have the one on the 86th floor, the 102nd was the best.”
“Well, what are you going to do? That’s progress for you. You take care of yourself, huh, Muriel? And Merry Christmas to you and all the other little Essbees.”
The company had bought the whole top third of the Empire State two years ago, all the way from the 70th floor up to the 102nd floor. They’d spent a cool hundred mil or so gutting the place and outfitting it as befits the North American headquarters of Technology, Science, and Applied Research, Inc.
TSAR. Like the old Russian rulers. It was just more of the boss’s sense of humor to call his huge company that. You had to hand it to the guy. For a bona fide genius and one of the top ten richest billionaires on the planet, the guy had a lot of style. But what he did that Paddy admired most, he took care of his people. All the way down to the little guys like Paddy himself. If you could call him a
Paddy stepped into an empty elevator and hit the express button for the top floor. It shot up like a friggin’ rocket, and he stepped out a couple of minutes later. It was like landing on another planet.
A marble-floored glass room now took up the whole top floor of the Empire State. The ceiling and walls, all glass and steel, had to be seventy-five feet above the heads of all of the people milling around drinking and schmoozing. He made his way over to the windows on the Fifth Avenue side. All around him were the tops of the towers of Manhattan and, overhead, the snow clouds lit up by the searchlights on the streets below. In the center of the room was a square glass elevator tower that went right through the ceiling and up to some kind of radio tower or something that rose another twenty stories or so above where he was standing.
There was a big covered platform about halfway up the tower and a lot of activity going on. He walked around a little, trying to see what the deal was, but it was impossible to see from down here.
“King Kong supposed to show up again tonight?” he asked the bartender at one of the many bars around the edges of the room. Most of them had lines, people waiting for a drink, but, for some reason, not this one.
The guy laughed and said, “You’d think, huh? No, just the world’s richest man, is what they tell me.”
“Gimme a vodka rocks, will you?”
“Vitamin V, coming right up.”
“Thanks.”
“You work for this guy?” the barkeep said, filling a tumbler with the bar hooch and sliding it over.
“Yeah. Long time.”
“You in sales? I’ll tell you why. I’d like to get one of those new Zeta machines for my kid. You know, the little computer that looks like a brain? I tried every CompWorld in town, but they’re all like back-ordered forever.”
“I ain’t in sales. Sorry.”
“Hey, no problem. You want another?”
