Before the Fall Read online

  She comes in wearing black jeans and a pre-wrinkled silk blouse, a brown-eyed blonde, barefoot, holding an electronic cigarette.

  “There they are,” she says brightly.

  Magnus stands, holds out his hand.

  “I’m Magnus. Kitty’s friend.”

  She nods, but doesn’t shake. After a moment, he lowers his hand. Layla sits on the sofa next to Scott.

  “Can I tell you something weird?” she asks Scott. “I flew to Cannes in May with one of your pilots. The older one. I’m pretty sure.”

  “James Melody,” he says, having memorized the names of the dead.

  She makes a face—holy shit, right?—then nods, touches his shoulder.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “Your arm?”

  He moves it for her in its new sling.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “And that little boy. Oh my God. So brave. And then—can you believe?—I just saw a thing about the daughter’s kidnapping, which—can you imagine?”

  Scott blinks.

  “Kidnapping?” he says.

  “You don’t know?” she says with what seems like real shock. “Yeah, the boy’s sister back when she was little. Apparently, someone broke into their house and took her. She was gone for, like, a week. And now—I mean to survive something like that and then die so horribly—you couldn’t make this stuff up.”

  Scott nods, feeling bone-tired all of a sudden. Tragedy is drama you can’t bear to relive.

  “I want to throw a party in your honor,” she tells him. “The hero of the art world.”

  “No,” says Scott. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” she says. “Everybody’s talking. And not just about the rescue. I saw slides of your new work—the disaster series—and I love it.”

  Magnus claps his hands together suddenly at great volume. They turn and look at him.

  “Sorry,” he says, “but I told ya. Didn’t I tell you? Fecking brilliant.”

  Layla draws on her electronic cigarette. This is what the future looks like, Scott thinks. We smoke technology now.

  “Can you—” she says, “—if it’s okay, what happened?”

  “To the plane? It crashed.”

  She nods. Her eyes sober.

  “Have you talked about it yet? To a therapist, or—”

  Scott thinks about that. A therapist.

  “Because,” says Layla, “you’d love my guy. He’s in Tribeca. Dr. Vanderslice. He’s Dutch.”

  Scott pictures a bearded man in an office, Kleenex on every table.

  “The cab didn’t come,” says Scott, “so I had to take the bus.”

  She looks puzzled for a moment, then realizes he’s sharing a memory with her and leans forward.

  Scott tells her he remembers his duffel bag by the door, faded green canvas, threadbare in places, remembers pacing, looking for headlights through the window (old milky glass), remembers his watch, the minute hands moving. His duffel held clothes, sure, but mostly it was full of slides, pictures of his work. The new work. Hope. His future. Tomorrow it would begin. He’d meet Michelle at her office and they’d review their submission list. His plan was to stay three days. There was a party Michelle said he had to go to, a breakfast.

  But first the cab had to come. First he had to get to the airfield and get on a private plane—why had he agreed to that? The pressure of it, to travel with strangers—rich strangers—to have to make conversation, discuss his work or, conversely, be ignored, treated like he didn’t matter. Which he didn’t.

  He was a forty-seven-year-old man who had failed at life. No career, never married, no close friends or girlfriends. Hell, he couldn’t even handle a four-legged dog. Was that why he had worked so hard these last few weeks, photographing his work, building a portfolio? To try to erase the failure?

  But the taxi never showed, and in the end he grabbed his bag and ran to the bus stop, heart beating fast, sweating from the thick August air. He got there just as the bus was pulling in, a long rectangle of windows lit blue-white against the dark. And how he climbed on, smiling at the driver, out of breath. He sat in the back, watching teenagers neck, oblivious to the domestic houseworkers riding beside them in tired silence. His heart rate slowed, but his blood still felt like it was racing. This was it. His second chance. The work was there. It was good. He knew that. But was he? What if he couldn’t handle a comeback? What if they gave him another chance and he choked? Could he really come back from the place he was? Napoleon in Elba, a beaten man, licking his wounds. Did he even want to—deep down? Life was good here. Simple. To wake in the morning and walk on the beach. To feed the dog scraps from the table and scratch her floppy ears. To paint. Simply to paint, with no greater goal.

  But this way he could be somebody. Make his mark.

  Except, wasn’t he somebody already? The dog thought so. The dog looked at Scott like he was the best man who ever lived. They went to the farmers market together and watched the women in yoga pants. He liked his life. He did. So why was he trying so hard to change it?

  “When I got off the bus,” he tells Layla, “I had to run. They were gonna close the airplane doors, right? And, you know, there was part of me that wanted that, to get there and find the plane was already gone. Because then I’d have to get up early and take the ferry like anyone else.”

  He doesn’t look up, but he can feel them both looking at him.

  “But the door was open. I made it.”

  She nods, her eyes wide, and touches his arm.

  “Amazing,” she says, though what she means isn’t clear. Is she speaking of the fact that Scott nearly missed the fateful flight, or the fact that he didn’t?

  Scott looks up at Layla, feeling self-conscious, like a small bird that has just sung for its supper and now waits for the seed.

  “Look,” says Scott, “it’s very nice of you, to see me, to want to throw me a party, but I can’t handle that right now. I just need a place to think and rest.”

  She smiles, nods. He has given her something no one else has, insight, details. She is part of the story now, his confidante.

  “You’ll stay here of course,” she says. “There’s a guest apartment on the third floor. You’d have your own entrance.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “That’s very—and I don’t want to be blunt, but I feel like I should ask—what’s in it for you?”

  She takes a hit off her e-cigarette, exhales vapor.

  “Sweetie, don’t turn it into some kind of thing. I’ve got the room. I’m impressed with you and your work, and you need a place to be. Why can’t it be simple?”

  Scott nods. There is no tension in him, no desire for confrontation. He just wants to know.

  “Oh, I’m not saying it’s complicated. You want a secret maybe, or a story to tell at cocktail parties. I’m just asking so there’s no confusion.”

  For a moment she looks surprised. People don’t usually talk to her this way. Then she laughs.

  “I like finding people,” she says. “And the other thing is—fuck this twenty-four-hour news cycle. This people eater. Just wait, they’re all on your side now, but then they turn. My mom went through it when my dad left her. It was all over the tabloids. And then when my sister had that problem with Vicodin. And last year I had that thing when Tony killed himself, and just because I showed his work they painted this whole picture of us, how I was, like, a gateway drug or something.”

  She holds his eye, Magnus forgotten on the other sofa, waiting for his chance to shine.

  “Okay,” says Scott after a moment. “Thank you. I just need—they’re outside my house, all those cameras, and—I don’t know what to say other than I went for a swim.”

  Her phone bloops. She takes it out, looks, then looks at Scott, and there’s something on her face that makes him shrink inside.

  “What?” he says.

  She flips her phone around and shows him the Twitter app. He leans forward, squ
inting at a row of colorful rectangles (tiny faces, @ symbols, emojis, photo boxes) without a hint of comprehension.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” he says.

  “They found bodies.”

  Chapter 16

  Ben Kipling

  February 10, 1963–August 23, 2015

  Sarah Kipling

  March 1, 1965–August 23, 2015

  People use the word money like it’s an object. A noun. Which is—that’s just ignorance.”

  Ben Kipling stood at a tall porcelain urinal in the wood-paneled bathroom of Soprezzi. He was talking to Greg Hoover, who stood beside him, swaying, pissing against the concave sheen that shielded his dick from view, speckles of piss drizzling down on his six-hundred-dollar tasseled loafers.

  “Money is the black vacuum of space,” Ben continued.

  “The what?”

  “The black—it’s an easement, yeah? A lubricant.”

  “Now you’re talking my—”

  “But that’s not—

  Kipling shook his dick, zipped. He went to the sink, put his hand under the soap dispenser, and waited for the laser to sense his warmth and spritz foam into his palm. And waited. And waited.

  “It’s friction, right?” he said without pausing. “This life of ours. The things we do and are done to us. Just getting through the day—”

  He made increasingly insistent circular gestures under the sensor. Nothing.

  “—the job, the wife, traffic, bills, whatever—”

  He raised and lowered his hand, looking for the mechanical sweet spot. Nothing.

  “—come on with this fucking thing already—”

  Kipling gave up, moved to the next sink, as Hoover stumbled over to a third.

  “I talked to Lance the other day,” Hoover started.

  “Hold on. I’m not—friction, I’m saying. Drag.”

  This time, when he put his hand under the sensor, foam fell gently into his hand. Kipling slumped with relief, rubbed them together.

  “The pressure brought to bear on a man just getting out of bed in the morning,” he said. “Money is the cure. It’s a friction reducer.”

  He moved his hands under the water faucet, blindly expecting (once more) the sensor to do its job and send a signal to the switch that turns on the tap. Nothing.

  “The more money you have—goddammit—the more—”

  Enraged, he gave up entirely, shaking soap from his hands onto the floor—let someone else clean it up—and moved to the paper towel dispenser, saw it too was operated by a sensor, and didn’t even make the attempt, choosing instead to wipe his hands on his eleven-hundred-dollar suit pants.

  “—money you have, do you see what I’m—it alleviates the drag. Think of the slum rats in Mumbai crawling around in the muck versus, like, Bill Gates, literally on top of the world. Until, ultimately, you have so much dough your whole life is effortless. Like an astronaut floating free in the black vacuum of space.”

  Hands clean and dry finally, he turned and saw Hoover has had zero trouble with any of the sensors, soap, water, paper towels. He tore off more sheets than he needed, dried his hands vigorously.

  “Sure. Okay,” he said. “But what I’m saying is, I talked to Lance the other day, and he used a lot of words I really didn’t like.”

  “Like what? Alimony?”

  “Ha-ha. No, like FBI, for one.”

  A certain unpleasant clenching sensation hit Kipling right around the sphincter.

  “Which is,” he said, “—obviously—not a word.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a—never mind—why the fuck is Lance talking about the FBI?”

  “He’s hearing things,” Hoover said. “What kind of things? I asked. But he won’t go into it on the phone—we had to meet in a park. At two o’clock in the goddamn afternoon, like the great unemployed.”

  Kipling, nervous suddenly, went over and checked under the stall doors to make sure there were no other designer-suit types crapping in silence.

  “Are they—did he say we should be—”

  “No, but he may as well have. You know what I—because why else would he—especially when—especially because if you think of the trouble he could get in—”

  “Okay. Okay. Not so—”

  He couldn’t remember suddenly if he’d checked under the last stall, checked it again, straightened.

  “Let’s table this,” he said. “I wanna hear it, obviously, but—we need to finish with these guys. Not leave them hanging.”

  “Sure, but what if they’re—”

  “What if they’re what?” said Kipling, the scotches working like a time delay on a 1940s long-distance phone call.

  Hoover finished the sentence with his eyebrows.

  “These guys?” said Kipling. “What are you—they came from Gillie.”

  “That doesn’t mean—shit, Ben, anyone can be got to.”

  “Got to? Is that—are we in The Parallax View suddenly and no one bothered to—”

  Hoover worked the wet wad of paper like it was a ball of dough, kneading and squeezing.

  “It’s a problem, Ben. That’s all I’m—a major fucking—”

  “I know.”

  “We need to—you can’t just—”

  “I won’t. Don’t be such a girl.”

  Kipling went to the door, pushed it open. Behind him, Hoover balled up his wet paper towel and fired it at the garbage can. It went in clean.

  “Still got it,” he said.

  * * *

  As he approached the table, Kipling saw that Tabitha was doing her job. She was lubricating the clients with booze and telling the men—two Swiss investment bankers vetted and referred by Bill Gilliam, a senior partner at the law firm that handles all their deals—inappropriate stories about men she blew in college. It was two thirty on a Wednesday. They’d been at this restaurant since noon, drinking top-shelf scotch and eating fifty-dollar steaks. It was the kind of restaurant men in suits go to to complain that their pools are too hot. Among the five of them, there was a net worth of almost a billion dollars. Kipling himself was worth three hundred million on paper, most of it tied up in the market, but there was also real estate and offshore accounts. Money for a rainy day. Cash the US government couldn’t track.

  Ben had become, at age fifty-two, the type of man who said Let’s take the boat out this weekend. His kitchen could be used as backup if the power ever went out at Le Cirque. There was an eight-burner Viking range with grill and griddle. Every morning he rose to find half a dozen onion bagels laid out on a tray with coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice, along with all four papers (Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Post, and the Daily News). When you opened the fridge at the Kiplings’, it was like a farmers market (Sarah insisted they eat only organic produce). There was a separate wine fridge with fifteen bottles of champagne on ice at all times, in case a New Year’s Eve party broke out unexpectedly. Ben’s closet was like a Prada showroom. Wandering from room to room, one wouldn’t be wrong to assume that Ben Kipling rubbed an urn one day and a genie popped out, and now all he had to do was say I need new socks out loud anywhere in his apartment and the next morning a dozen pairs would appear out of fucking nowhere. Except in this case the genie was a forty-seven-year-old house manager named Mikhail, who majored in hospitality at Cornell and had been with them since they moved into the ten-bedroom estate in Connecticut.

  The TV over the bar was showing highlights from the Red Sox game last night, sportscasters running the odds of Dworkin breaking the single-season hit record. Right now the man was on a fifteen-game hitting streak. Unstoppable was a word they used, the hard consonants of it following Ben to his seat.

  In forty minutes, he’d head back to the office and sleep off the meat and the booze on his sofa. Then at six the driver would take him up the parkway to Greenwich, where Sarah would have something on the table—takeout from Allesandro’s probably—or no, wait, shit, they’ve got that dinner tonight with Jenny’s fi
ancé’s parents. A meet-and-greet kind of thing. Where were they doing that again? Someplace in the city? It’s gotta be in his calendar, probably written in red like a twice-prolonged appointment for a barium enema.

  Ben could picture them now, Mr. and Mrs. Comstock, he the portly dentist. His wife with too much lipstick, in from Long Island—Did you take the Grand Central or the BQE? And Jenny would sit there with Don or Ron or whatever her fiancé’s name is, holding hands, and telling stories about how she and her parents “always summer on the Vineyard” without realizing how privileged and obnoxious that sounds. Not that Ben was one to talk. This morning he’d found himself debating the estate tax with his personal trainer and he’d said, Well, look—Jerry—wait till you’ve got a hundred million plus in mixed assets that the government wants to tax twice and see if you still feel the same.

  Kipling sat, exhausted suddenly, and picked up his napkin reflexively, even though he was done eating. He dropped it into his lap, caught the waiter’s eye, and pointed to his glass. Another one, he said with his eyes.

  “I was just telling Jorgen,” said Tabitha, “about that meeting we had in Berlin. Remember when the guy with the John Waters mustache got so mad he took off his tie and tried to strangle Greg?”

  “For fifty million, I woulda let him,” said Kipling, “except it turned out the fucking guy was broke.”

  The Swiss smiled patiently. They had zero interest in gossip. Nor did it seem that Tabitha’s exaggerated cleavage was having its usual effect. Could be they’re queer, thought Kipling with zero moral judgment, just a computer recording facts.

  He chewed the inside of his cheek, thinking. What Hoover said to him in the men’s room was ricocheting around in his brain like a bullet that had missed its target then took an unlucky hop off the pavement. What did he know about these guys, really? They’d come recommended from a reliable source, but how reliable was anyone when you get right down to it. Could they be FBI, these boys? OFAC? Their Swiss accents were good, but maybe not great.