Down Here (26 page)

I tapped the thick-rimmed, smaller-than-stock wheel, with its center horn button and three brushed-aluminum “holed” spokes. It wasn’t exactly a bolt-in—the turn-signal lever had to be shortened, so I wouldn’t risk snagging my left leg when I got out—but the look was still semi-original.

“Were they fast?” she asked, rolling up her window as we entered the tunnel. “When they were new, I mean.”

“The Hemi Roadrunner was one of the legitimate kings of the street, back in its glory days,” I said, not mentioning that the reincarnation I was driving wasn’t a Hemi. Or that the hogged-out wedge motor in mine would have
inhaled
anything that was prowling the boulevards back then.

“Didn’t they come with air conditioning?” she said, reaching in her pocketbook for a tissue.

“Not the serious ones,” I told her. “Those were stripped to the bone.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Different people, different pleasures,” I said.

“Did you want a car just like this when you were a kid?” she asked, as we exited the tunnel and got in line for the toll booths.

“I wanted a lot of things when I was a kid,” I said, wishing I could pull back the ice in my voice as soon as I spoke.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to . . . I’ve just noticed that some of the men I know, they collect all kinds of things they wanted when they were young. One of the guys I work with, he’s got every baseball card ever made, I bet.”

“Well, I
say
it’s my hobby, but this is the only car I have,” I said, chuckling to muffle what she had triggered with her innocent question. “And I’ve had it a long time, like a project that never gets completed.”

“Are you going to make it perfect?”

“Perfect?”

“Like, what’s the word I’m looking for . . .
concours
? I have clients who fix up old cars so they’re exactly like they were brand-new. Then they have shows for them.”

“No,” I laughed. “I’m going to make it perfect, all right. But perfect for me, not for anyone else. Besides, I don’t see a piece of Detroit iron like this making the grade in that company.”

We took an E-ZPass lane, letting the scanner read the box I had fastened to the windshield instead of having to pay the toll in cash. Very efficient system. Speeds the traffic flow. And keeps very good records. I have “spares” I can use when I want to go certain places to do certain things, but tonight wasn’t anything I cared if the government knew about.

“The LIE’s a pain at this hour,” she said. “But it’s still the fastest . . .”

“I’m in no hurry,” I said.

“It must be frustrating.”

“What?”

“Having such a fast car, and not being able to
go
fast.”

“Not all the time, no. But that’s okay. Sometimes, knowing you
can
do something is pretty much as good as doing it.”

“That’s how
I
feel,” she said. “About my work. But that’s a mistake I can’t make too often.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“In my job, being very good at something, even being
brilliant
at it, doesn’t count. Only results do. If you allow yourself to just, I don’t know,
luxuriate
in your abilities, like a bubble bath with soft music and candles, you can forget that the world—
my
world, anyway—isn’t about strategy, it’s about success.”

“I thought those were the same thing.”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat so her whole body was facing me, despite the seatbelt. “Strategy is what I
love.
The game of it. But if I come up with a perfect strategy to, say, put a deal together, and I don’t
make
the deal, my bonus is going to be light that year.”

“I think I know what you mean.” I goosed the throttle to switch lanes ahead of an overfilled minivan. “Kind of like my book, isn’t it?” I said.

“Strategy?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I already sold it. The book, that is. I’m talking about my
idea
for it. I know it’s perfect. But if I can’t bring it off, the book will still happen, but it won’t be as good as if—”

“That’s
one
idea,” she said. “I was talking more about . . . models.”

“Models?”

“Ways of doing things. Ones you develop over time, testing and retesting . . .”

“Like a system for picking winners at the racetrack?”

“A little more sophisticated than that, I hope,” she said, chuckling. “And a little more successful, too. None of those ‘systems’ really work, do they?”

“I never heard of one that did,” I told her, pure truth.

“Here we go,” she said. “You know the Maurice Avenue switch-off?”

“Sure,” I said. “I once worked as a cab driver. To get perspective for a piece I was doing.”

“Okay, now just follow it around until we get to Sixty-first.”

“That’s Maspeth, right?”

“Yes, it is. Not many people from the City know that.”

“That’s one of the things about having a car,” I said. “You go places where the subway doesn’t.”

“I have a car, too, remember? Turn . . . there! Yes. Now just go along until I tell you to turn again.”

“You like that Audi?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Whoever did the interior-design work on it was a genius.”

“Is it pretty quick?”

“It has a turbocharger,” she said, almost smugly. “I got a ticket when I went upstate for a ski weekend once. The officer said he clocked me at a hundred and ten. But he only wrote me up for eighty-five.”

“If it had been me, he would have written me up for a hundred twenty.”

“Because your car is so fast, you mean?”

“No. Because I’m about the polar opposite of a pretty girl.”

“That’s cynical,” she said, grinning to show me she didn’t really think so.

I followed her directions for a few minutes, watching the densely packed little houses give way to flatland.

“There!” she said.

“Where? That’s not a restaurant. It looks like—”

“An old factory?” she said, pleased with herself. “That’s what it was, once. Now it’s condos. And one of them is mine.”

“Okay, I get it. You want to change out of your work clothes before we—?”

“I do want to change,” she said. “But I also want to cook. Okay?”

“Beautiful,” I said.

^“
W
hat did this place use to make?” I asked her, following her directions to drive around to the back.

“Some kind of containers, I think. Metal. As I understand, the conversion to plastic would have been too expensive. And the work wasn’t there anymore, anyway.”

“This is pretty neat,” I said, looking at a vertical steel-barred fence with an inset gate.

“Use this,” she said, handing me a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.

I inserted the card in the slot, and the gate swung open. We were facing a four-story building that looked like poured concrete, painted the color of cigarette smoke. Laura reached in her purse, pulled out a remote garage-door opener. She pressed the button; a triple-wide steel door rolled up soundlessly as the gate closed behind us.

Inside, there were individual spaces for parking, enough for thirty or so cars.

“Use number seven,” she said. “It’s mine.”

I backed the Plymouth in carefully—the car in stall number six was her silver Audi.

“That’s slick,” I said. “You own the space on the other side of it, too?”

“Actually, I do. But I don’t just own the parking spaces; they come with the units upstairs. So I have six slots; you get two with each apartment.”

“You own
three
apartments?” I asked, cutting the ignition with the car in gear so the engine wouldn’t diesel on me—big-block Mopars will do that sometimes.

“Me and the bank,” she said, flashing a quick grin.

We got out, me extra-carefully, so that the Plymouth’s door wouldn’t ding her Audi.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, standing by the front fender. “There’s a
lot
of space between the slots. This used to be the loading bay for the factory. Even with two slots per unit, we have a ton of space left over. See that?” she said, pointing to a chain-linked enclosure to my right.

“Yeah.”

“That’s for storage. Every unit-holder gets a certain amount of space in there, too. You supply your own lock.”

“Damn! Something like that in Manhattan would set you back a—”

“If you think this is a bargain, wait till you see upstairs,” she said.

^“
T
here’s an elevator,” she said. “But I always walk. Sometimes, it’s the only exercise I get all day. Do you mind?”

Without waiting for an answer, she unlocked the stairway door and started up ahead of me. Halfway up the first flight, I realized Michelle had read Laura Reinhardt better secondhand than I had in person; if she was suffering from secretarial spread, I couldn’t see a hint of it.

Her unit was on the top floor. Two locks, deadbolt and doorknob. She stepped inside, flicked on a light, said, “Well?”

The apartment opened directly into a broad expanse of hardwood floor, bleached so deeply it was almost white. The side wall was exposed brick, beautifully repointed. At the end of the room was a corner-to-corner set of pale-pink drapes. She hit a switch and the drapes parted, revealing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

“Jesus!” I said.

I wasn’t acting. The wall opposite the exposed brick was a complex arrangement of brass piping, holding what looked like teak shelves. Hardcover books with somber jackets alternated with framed photographs and an assortment of small objects I couldn’t make out from where I was standing. Modernistic furniture was scattered about as if at random, but it looked so . . . tailored that I figured it for a professional’s touch.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you the quick tour.”

I followed her into a kitchen that I knew the average yuppie would commit several felonies for. A stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer lorded it over a granite-block island and a black porcelain double sink. The cabinets looked like they had been fashioned from the same teak as the bookshelves. The stove didn’t appear to have any burners on it. A chrome table sat off to one side, with eight matching chairs. An eat-in kitchen, big enough to hold Thanksgiving dinner.

Before I could ask about that, she was on the move again.

“My office,” she said, pointing to a spacious room with a window facing the same direction as the one in the living room. It looked like high-tech heaven, mostly in carbon-fiber black. A flat-screen computer monitor; a multi-line phone with both wired and cordless handsets; one of those fax-photocopier-scanner things. Under a desk with a black marble top, a large paper-shredder—my money was on cross-cut.

“There’s more,” she said, pulling me by the hand.

We passed a blue-tiled bathroom, a bedroom—“It’s really a guest room,” she said—and then came to a room dominated by a big-screen TV and a single white leather recliner. “If I were a man, I’d probably claim this was a den,” she chuckled.

The master bedroom was a good three hundred square feet, with plenty of room for the queen-sized bed with a Mondrian-pattern headboard, and a garage-sized closet. The attached bath had a two-person Jacuzzi, and it didn’t cramp the area. One wall was a triptych of mirrors.

“How big do you think the whole thing is?” she asked, walking back toward the living room.

“Twenty-five hundred?” I guessed.

“Closer to
thirty
-five,” she said. “See what I mean about a bargain?”

“I guess that depends on what you paid. But I can’t imagine anything
like
this going for less than—”

“Right around four hundred,” she said.

“About the going rate for a decent two-bedroom on the Upper West Side.”

“You wish,” she said. “For that kind of money, you’re buying a rehab project.”

“Well,
this
one sure didn’t come the way it is now.”

“Oh, that’s true,” she said, perching confidently on one of the modern chairs. “But I didn’t have to do
structural
stuff. It wasn’t really all that expensive. And it’s a good investment.”

“That I can believe,” I said, sitting down myself.

“I’m going to go change,” she said, getting to her feet. “Take a look around, you’ll see what I mean.”

I
listened to her heels click on the hardwood floors. Couldn’t pick up the sound of a door closing anywhere, but that didn’t tell me anything—the walls were thick, and the bedroom was a couple of sound-muffling turns away.

She’s gone from arm’s-length to “make yourself at home” pretty damn quick,
I thought. But there were too many possibilities, dice tumbling in my head.

I stood up, made a slow circuit of the living room. In one corner, I found a white pillar so smoothly mounted it looked as if it had grown from the floor. On its base, a black-glazed pot sat in a tray of gray pebbles, still gleaming from its last watering.

Inside the pot was a bonsai tree. Magnificently sculptured, thick-trunked, with a complex branch formation . . . but no fruit, and only the occasional leaf. Dangling from the branches were dozens of tiny glass bottles: some clear, the others in shades of green, blue, red, and brown. Each bottle had markings of some kind—pieces of labels, smears of paint, logos, brand names.

I’d seen bottle trees before. In a lush back courtyard of a palatial mansion in New Orleans, and a dirt patch that passed for the front yard of a shotgun shack in Mississippi. But a miniature one? In the middle of a New York living room?

I fanned my hand rapidly in front of the branches, listening hard. The tinkle of the glass was so faint I couldn’t be sure I actually heard it.

“Like my tree?”

She was standing behind me, not quite close enough to touch. Wearing a tangerine kimono that came to mid-thigh. Her feet were bare, and her dark hair glistened, as if she had just showered.

“It’s . . . exquisite,” I said.

“I’ll bet I’ve been working on it longer than you have on that car of yours,” she said.

“Working on it? You mean, keeping it—?”

“No. I
made
it. I bought the bonsai, but you have to prune them to get the exact shape you want. It’s constant work. The bottles . . . I took a course in glass blowing, and I figured out how to do the rest.”