red light means? Do. Not. Walk . The fuck?” He asks, and clearly wants an answer; this is not rhetorical. “The fuck?” He shakes his head in disgust, and pulls away.
She stands, trembling, electrified with fright. She retraces the long half-block back to her building, shakily. Opens the front door to the standard-issue tenement, red brick and dirty limestone and rusty fire escapes. She walks down the short, dim hallway. Inserts the key to her apartment door, the worst unit in the building—1F, first-floor front, two steps below grade, facing garbage cans.
Alexis pushes open the door, steps inside, shuts the door behind her. She turns away from her door, into her apartment—
A man is standing on the far side of the room, holding the manuscript. Caught in the act, surprised, yet moving very quickly, while Alexis remains frozen, again.
CHAPTER 9
“I s your car handy?” Hayden opens the closet, takes out a small suitcase, places it on the bed.
“Yes,” Kate answers, turning from the window, surprised. She didn’t expect to see him again today.
“Good.” He opens the top drawer of the bureau, filled with her under-things. He should have known better. Should have opened a lower, non-underwear drawer. “Um …” He beckons Kate. “Could you, uh, help me pack?”
“What’s going on?”
“We need to wind down this operation.”
“By wind down , you mean terminate? Immediately?”
“This instant.”
She sweeps up bras and panties and socks in her forearms, dumps them into the bag. She seems out of joint.
“Don’t worry, Kate. You did good .” Hayden gathers up a small stack of her jeans and T-shirts, neatly folded. “This development has nothing to do with you . But something else has happened.”
She doesn’t say anything while she gathers another armful, sweaters and outerwear, and transfers the pile to the leather and canvas bag, a piece of quietly elegant luggage that Hayden suspects cost at least athousand euros, tactile evidence that she has a lot of money to spend on luggage, and on vacations, and in fact on whatever the hell she wants. He resents it, a bit; she works for him, after all.
On the other hand, it’s true that Hayden too has a couple of swollen bank accounts. One of them is just a bit of family money, the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ Back Bay house. The taxes and maintenance were exorbitant on Marlborough Street, and his Boston-based sister wouldn’t deign to live in such a grand building, after Goo and Ga—their nicknames, for a half-century—died. Willa called the house a mansion, and it clashed with her career, and the persona that went with it, as a mediator, specializing in gang intervention and conflict resolution, driving around South Boston in a filthy banged-up Hyundai. And of course Hayden didn’t have any use for a tall gloomy six-bedroom townhouse in downtown Boston; neither did his other sister Ellen, a pampered Greenwich housewife.
So they sold the big brick heap, paid the taxes, and split the proceeds. Which is how Hayden found himself with three-quarters of a million unearned dollars, parked in electronic records managed by private bankers. He has never felt the urge—and never really had the time—to spend it. So it’s still sitting there, more patient than he thought money could be, awaiting a catastrophic illness, or a late-life crisis. He’d long anticipated a debilitating midlife crisis, but midlife seems to be coming and going without incident.
The other swollen account is a numbered one in Switzerland that contains roughly twenty-one million euros, or somewhere north of thirty million dollars, depending on exchange-rate fluctuations. This too is a chunk of unearned money, albeit from a completely different type of source.
“L et me get this straight,” Hayden said, a year ago, in a different country. “Your husband is the person who stole fifty million euros from Colonel Petrovic?”
Kate smiled, tight-lipped and joyless.
She stands, trembling, electrified with fright. She retraces the long half-block back to her building, shakily. Opens the front door to the standard-issue tenement, red brick and dirty limestone and rusty fire escapes. She walks down the short, dim hallway. Inserts the key to her apartment door, the worst unit in the building—1F, first-floor front, two steps below grade, facing garbage cans.
Alexis pushes open the door, steps inside, shuts the door behind her. She turns away from her door, into her apartment—
A man is standing on the far side of the room, holding the manuscript. Caught in the act, surprised, yet moving very quickly, while Alexis remains frozen, again.
CHAPTER 9
“I s your car handy?” Hayden opens the closet, takes out a small suitcase, places it on the bed.
“Yes,” Kate answers, turning from the window, surprised. She didn’t expect to see him again today.
“Good.” He opens the top drawer of the bureau, filled with her under-things. He should have known better. Should have opened a lower, non-underwear drawer. “Um …” He beckons Kate. “Could you, uh, help me pack?”
“What’s going on?”
“We need to wind down this operation.”
“By wind down , you mean terminate? Immediately?”
“This instant.”
She sweeps up bras and panties and socks in her forearms, dumps them into the bag. She seems out of joint.
“Don’t worry, Kate. You did good .” Hayden gathers up a small stack of her jeans and T-shirts, neatly folded. “This development has nothing to do with you . But something else has happened.”
She doesn’t say anything while she gathers another armful, sweaters and outerwear, and transfers the pile to the leather and canvas bag, a piece of quietly elegant luggage that Hayden suspects cost at least athousand euros, tactile evidence that she has a lot of money to spend on luggage, and on vacations, and in fact on whatever the hell she wants. He resents it, a bit; she works for him, after all.
On the other hand, it’s true that Hayden too has a couple of swollen bank accounts. One of them is just a bit of family money, the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ Back Bay house. The taxes and maintenance were exorbitant on Marlborough Street, and his Boston-based sister wouldn’t deign to live in such a grand building, after Goo and Ga—their nicknames, for a half-century—died. Willa called the house a mansion, and it clashed with her career, and the persona that went with it, as a mediator, specializing in gang intervention and conflict resolution, driving around South Boston in a filthy banged-up Hyundai. And of course Hayden didn’t have any use for a tall gloomy six-bedroom townhouse in downtown Boston; neither did his other sister Ellen, a pampered Greenwich housewife.
So they sold the big brick heap, paid the taxes, and split the proceeds. Which is how Hayden found himself with three-quarters of a million unearned dollars, parked in electronic records managed by private bankers. He has never felt the urge—and never really had the time—to spend it. So it’s still sitting there, more patient than he thought money could be, awaiting a catastrophic illness, or a late-life crisis. He’d long anticipated a debilitating midlife crisis, but midlife seems to be coming and going without incident.
The other swollen account is a numbered one in Switzerland that contains roughly twenty-one million euros, or somewhere north of thirty million dollars, depending on exchange-rate fluctuations. This too is a chunk of unearned money, albeit from a completely different type of source.
“L et me get this straight,” Hayden said, a year ago, in a different country. “Your husband is the person who stole fifty million euros from Colonel Petrovic?”
Kate smiled, tight-lipped and joyless.