Limitless (32 page)

In the cab on the way to the bank, with the empty briefcase resting on my lap, I experienced a wave of despair, a sense that the hope I was clinging to was not only desperate, but clearly – and absolutely – unfounded. As I looked out at the traffic and at the passing, streaming façade of Thirty-fourth Street, the notion that things could somehow be reversed, at this late stage, suddenly seemed, well … too much to hope for.

But then at the bank, as I watched an official stack my briefcase full with solid bricks of cash – fifty and hundred dollar bills – I regained a certain amount of confidence. I signed any relevant
documents
there were, smiled politely at the fawning Howard Lewis, bid him good morning and left.

In the cab on the way back, with the now full briefcase resting on my lap, I felt vaguely excited, as if this new scheme couldn’t fail. When the guy phoned, I’d be ready with an offer – he’d have a proposal … we’d negotiate, things would slip neatly back into place.

As soon as I got up to the apartment, I put the briefcase down on the floor beside the telephone. I left it open, so I could see the money. There were no messages on the answering machine, and I checked my cellphone to see if there were any on that. There was one new one – from Van Loon. He understood I needed a break, but this was no way to go about taking one. I was to call him.

I powered off the phone and put it away.

By midday, my headache had become quite severe. I continued taking Excedrin tablets, but they no longer seemed to have any effect. I took a shower and stood for ages under the jet of hot water, trying to soothe the knots of tension out of my neck and shoulders.

The headache had started as a band across my forehead and behind my eyes, but by mid-afternoon it had worked its way out to every part of my skull and was pounding like a jackhammer.

I paced around the room for hours, trying to absorb the pain – glaring at the phone,
willing
it to ring. I couldn’t understand why that guy hadn’t called me back yet. I looked at the money. That was half a million dollars there, lying on the floor, just
waiting
for someone to come along and take it …

By early evening, I found that walking around didn’t help much any more. I was having intermittent bouts of nausea now and was
shivering
all over, fairly constantly. It was easier, I decided, to lie on the makeshift bed of stacked blankets and a duvet, tossing and turning, and occasionally clutching my head in a vain attempt to ease the pain. As it got dark, I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point, I woke up retching – desperately trying to empty my already empty stomach. I coughed up blood on to the floor and then lay flat on my back again, staring up at the ceiling.

That night – Thursday night – was interminable, and yet in one sense I didn’t want it to end. As the veil of MDT lifted further, my sense of horror and dread intensified. The torment of uncertainty gnawed away at the lining of my stomach and I kept thinking,
What have I done
? I had vivid dreams, hallucinations almost, in which I repeatedly seemed to come close to an understanding of what had happened that night at the Clifden Hotel – but then, since I was unable to separate what my fevered mind was concocting from what I was actually remembering,
it was never close enough
. I saw Donatella Alvarez calmly walking across the room, like before, in a black dress, blood pouring down the side of her face – but it was
this
room, not the hotel room, and I remember thinking that if she’d taken such a serious blow to the head, she wouldn’t
be
calm,
or
walking around. I also dreamt that the two of us were on a couch together, entangled in each other’s arms, and I was staring into her eyes, aroused, excited, engulfed in the flames of some nameless emotion – but at the same time it was my old couch we were on, the one from the apartment on Tenth Street, and she was whispering
in my ear, telling me to short-sell tech stocks now, now,
now
. Later, she was sitting across the table from me in Van Loon’s dining-room, smoking a cigar and talking animatedly, ‘… because you
norteamericanos
don’t understand
any
thing,
no
thing …’ – and then I seemed to be reaching out in anger for the nearest wine bottle …

Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a
cigarette
or a candle, not a wine bottle, but a cane or a statuette – each one like a shard of coloured glass hurtling in slow-motion through space after an explosion, each one vainly promising to form into a solid memory, into something objective and recollectable … and
reliable
…

At one point, I rolled off the duvet, holding my stomach, and crawled across the floor through the glistening darkness to the
bathroom
. After another fit of retching, this time into the toilet bowl, I managed to get up on to my feet. I leant over the wash-basin,
struggled
with the faucets for a moment and then threw some cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection in the mirror was
ghostlike
and barely visible, with my eyes – clear and moving – the only sign of life.

I dragged myself back into the living-room, where the dim shapes on the floor – the smashed boxes, the crumpled clothes, the open briefcase full of money – looked like irregular rock formations on some strange and dusky blue terrain. I slumped back against the wall nearest to the telephone and slid down into a sitting position on the floor. I stayed there for the next couple of hours, as daylight seeped in around me, allowing the room to reconstitute itself before my eyes, unchanged.

And I came to some accommodation with the pain in my head, as well – so long as I remained absolutely still, and didn’t move, didn’t flinch, it obligingly receded into a dull, thumping, mindless rhythm …

W
HEN THE PHONE RANG BESIDE ME
, just after nine o’clock, it felt like a thousand volts of electric current piercing my brain.

I reached over – wincing, my hand shaking – and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Spinola? It’s Richie, at the desk.’

‘Hhhn.’

‘There’s a Mr …
Gennady
here to see you? Shall I send him up?’

Friday morning.

This
morning. Well, yesterday morning by now.

I paused.

‘Yeah.’

I put the phone down. He might as well see me – see what
he
would be in for shortly.

I struggled to get up off the floor – each movement I made like another charge of electric current through my brain. When I
eventually
got up I noticed that I was standing in a small pool of my own piss. There were blood and mucus stains on my shirt and I was
trembling
all over.

I looked down at the briefcase full of money, and then back at the phone. How could I have been so stupid, so vain? I looked over at the windows. It was a bright day. I walked over to the door, very slowly, and opened it.

I turned, and took a few paces back into the room, and then turned again to face the door. At my feet, there was a large, crushed
box, its spilt contents – saucepans, pots, various kitchen implements – splayed out like intestines on the floor.

I stood there, an old man suddenly – feeble, stooped, at the mercy of everything around me. I heard the elevator opening, and then footsteps, and then a couple of moments later Gennady appeared in the doorway.

‘
Whoa
…
fuck
!
’

He looked around in shock – at me, at the mess, at the sheer size of the place, at the windows – obviously unable to decide if he was disgusted or impressed. He was wearing a pin-striped two-button suit, a black shirt and no tie. He’d shaved his head and was sporting a three-day stubble on his chiselled face.

He looked me up and down a couple of times.

‘What the fuck’s wrong with
you
?’

I mumbled something in response.

He came a little further into the room. Then, side-stepping the mess on the floor, he made his way over to the windows, irresistibly drawn to them, I suppose – just as I had been on that first visit here with Alison Botnick.

I didn’t move. I felt nauseous.

‘This is certainly a change from that shit-hole you had on Tenth Street.’

‘Yeah.’

I could hear him behind me, pacing along by the windows.

‘Shit, you can see everything.’ He paused. ‘I heard you’d found yourself quite a place, but this is amazing.’

What did
that
mean?

‘There’s the Empire State. The Chrysler Building. Brooklyn. I
like
this. You know, maybe I’ll get a place here myself.’ I could tell from his voice that he had turned around now. ‘In fact, maybe I’ll take
this
place, move in
here
. How’d that be, jerkoff?’

‘That’d be great, Gennady,’ I said, half turning around, ‘I was going to look for a room-mate anyway, you know – to help with the repayments.’

‘Listen to this, a comedian with shit stains on his pants. So, Eddie, what the fuck’s going on here?’

He walked around the other side of the mess and came back into view. He stopped when he saw the briefcase of money on the floor.

‘Jesus, you really
don’t
like banks, do you?’

With his back to me, he bent down and started looking at the money, taking wads of it out and flicking through them.

‘There must be three or four hundred thousand dollars here.’ He whistled. ‘I don’t know what you’re into, Eddie, but if there’s much more where this came from, you might want to think of investing some of it. My import company’s going to be up and running soon, so if you want in for some points … you know, we can talk about a price.’

Talk about a price?

Gennady didn’t know it, but he was going to be dead soon – in a few days’ time, after his supply of MDT had run out.

‘Well,’ he said, straightening up again and turning around, ‘when am I going to meet this dealer of yours?’

I looked at him, and said, ‘You’re not going to meet him.’

‘
What
?’

‘You’re not going to meet him.’

He paused, breathing out through his nose. Then he stood looking at me for about ten seconds. The expression on his face was like that of a thwarted child – but a thwarted child with a switchblade in his pocket. Slowly he took it out and flicked it open.

‘I thought this might happen,’ he said, ‘so I did some homework. Found out a few things about you, Eddie. Been keeping an
eye
on you.’

I swallowed.

‘You’ve been doing pretty well recently, haven’t you? With your business associates and merger deals.’ He turned and started pacing across the room. ‘But I don’t think Van Loon or Hank Atwood would be too happy to hear about your association with a Russian loanshark.’

I looked at him, starting to feel a little thwarted myself.

‘Or about your history of substance abuse. Wouldn’t play too well in the press either.’

My history of substance abuse? That
was
history. How could he know anything about that?

‘It’s incredible what you can find out about someone’s past, isn’t it?’ he said, as though reading my thoughts. ‘Employment records, credit history – even personal stuff.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

As he said this, he turned and walked quickly back to where I was standing. He held the knife up near my nose and waved it from side to side.

‘I could re-arrange the elements of your face, Eddie, nicely, creatively, but I’d
still
want the answer to my question.’ He stared into my eyes, and repeated it, this time in a whisper, ‘
When am I going to meet this dealer of yours?
’

I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’

There was a brief pause, and then he punched me in the stomach with his left hand — just as swiftly and efficiently as he’d done once before in my old apartment. I doubled up and fell back on to some boxes, wheezing and clutching myself with both arms.

Gennady then took off again, pacing back and forth across the room.

‘You didn’t think I was going to
start
with the face, did you?’

The pain was simultaneously awful and something I felt at a curious remove from. I think I was too concerned about how my privacy had been invaded, about how Gennady had managed to dig up my past.

‘I’ve got a whole file on you.
This
thick. It’s all out there, Eddie, information – for the taking, detail like you wouldn’t believe.’

I looked up. He had his back to me now and was waving his hands about. Just then something caught my eye – something sticking out of the smashed box of kitchen implements in front of me.

‘So what I want to know, Eddie, is this: how do you propose to explain all those years of mediocrity to your new friends at the top? Eh? Writing that turgid shit for K & D? Teaching English in Italy without a work permit? Fucking up the colour separations at
Chrome
magazine?’

As he was speaking, I reached over to the box. Sticking out of it
was the wooden handle of a long, steel carving knife. I took hold of it and eased it out of the box, my head pounding from the effort of trying to control the shake in my hand – to say nothing of having to lean across in the first place. I then struggled up on to my feet, being careful to keep the knife behind my back.

Gennady turned around.

‘And you were married once, as well, weren’t you?’

He came across the room towards me. I was dizzy now, seeing him in double as he approached, the background white and pulsating. But despite this unsteadiness, I seemed to know what I was doing – everything was clear and in place, anger, humiliation, fear. There was a logic to it all, an inevitability. Was this how it had been up on the fifteenth floor? I didn’t see how it could have been, but I also knew that I would never find out.

‘But that didn’t work out either, did it?’

He stopped for a moment, and then came a few steps closer.

‘What was her name again?’

He held the knife up and waved it in my face. I could smell his breath. My heart and head were pounding in unison now.

‘Melissa.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘
Melissa
… and she’s got, what,
two
kids?’

I widened my eyes suddenly and looked over his shoulder. When he turned to see what I was looking at, I took a deep breath and brought the carving knife around. In a single, swift movement, I drove the point of it into his belly and grabbed the back of his neck with my other hand for leverage. I pushed the knife in as hard as I could, trying to direct it upwards. I heard a deep, gurgling sound and felt his arms flailing up and down, helplessly, as though they’d been cut adrift from the rest of his body. I gave a final shove to the knife and then had to let go. It had taken a huge effort to do this much and I just staggered backwards, trying to catch my breath. Then I leant against one of the windows and watched as Gennady stood in the same position, swaying, staring at me. His mouth was open and both his hands were clasping the wooden handle of the knife – the only part of it that was still visible.

The pounding in my head was so intense now that it short-circuited
any sense of moral horror I might have felt at what I was watching, or at what I had
done
. I was also concerned about what was going to happen next.

Gennady took a couple of steps towards me. The look on his face was one of mingled incredulity and fury. I thought I was going to have to move aside to avoid him, but almost immediately he tripped on a torn box and came crashing forward on to a pile of large format art and photography books. The impact of this must have driven the knife in a little deeper – and fatally – because after he had fallen, he remained completely still.

I waited for a few minutes, watching and listening – but he didn’t move or make any sound at all.

Eventually – and very slowly – I went over to where he had come down. I bent over him and felt for a pulse on the side of his neck. There was nothing. Then something occurred to me, and drawing on a final reserve of adrenalin I took him by the arm and rolled him over on to his back. The knife was lodged at a skewed angle in his stomach and his black shirt was now sodden with blood. I took a couple of deep breaths, and tried not to look at his face.

I lifted the right side of his jacket with one hand, raised it, and tentatively put my other hand into his inside breast pocket. I fished around for a moment, thinking I wasn’t going to find anything – but then, folded in a flap of material I felt something hard. I got hold of it with the tips of my fingers and drew it out. I held it still for a moment – my heart thumping against the walls of my chest – and then shook it. The little silver pillbox made a small but very welcome rattling sound.

I got up and went back over to the window. I stood still for a few seconds in a vain attempt to ease the pounding in my head. Then I leant back against the window and slid down into a sitting position. My hands were still shaking, so in order to keep the pillbox steady I placed it on the floor between my legs. Concentrating really hard, I screwed the top off the box, put it aside and then peered down. There were five pills in the box. Again, working very carefully, I managed to get three of them out of it and on to the palm of my hand.

I paused, closed my eyes and involuntarily relived the previous couple of minutes in my mind – kaleidoscopically, luridly, but
accurately.
When I opened my eyes again, the first thing I saw – a few feet in front of me, like an old leather football – was Gennady’s shaved head, and then the rest of him, splayed out on the flattened pile of books.

I raised my hand, took the three tablets into my mouth and
swallowed
them.

I sat there for the next twenty minutes, staring out across the room – during which time, like a cloudy, overcast sky breaking up and clearing to blue, the pain in my head slowly lifted. The shake in my hands faded, too, and I felt a gradual return – at least within the parameters of MDT – to some kind of normality. This was borrowed time, and I knew it. I also knew that Gennady’s entourage was probably downstairs waiting for him, and that if much more time elapsed, they might get curious, or concerned even – and things might then get complicated.

I screwed the top back on to the pillbox and slipped it into the pocket of my trousers. When I stood up, I noticed the stains on my shirt again – as well as a couple of other signs of the general state of degradation I’d fallen into. I went over towards the bathroom, unbuttoning my shirt on the way. I took off the rest of my clothes and had a quick shower. Then I changed into some fresh clothes, jeans and a white shirt – making sure to transfer the pillbox into my jeans pocket. I went over to the telephone on the floor, called
information
and got the number of a local car-service. I then called the number and ordered a car for as soon as possible – instructing them to have me picked up at the back entrance to the building. After that, I gathered a few things into the holdall, including my laptop computer. I picked up the briefcase full of cash and closed it up. Then I carried both the briefcase and the holdall to the door, and opened it.

I stood there for a moment, looking back into the room. Gennady was almost lost from view in the general mess of things,
my
things
– boxes, books, clothes, saucepans, album covers. But then I saw a small trickle of blood making its way out on to a clear part of the floor. When I saw another one, I was overcome with a feeling of nausea and had to lean against the side of the door to keep my balance. As I was doing this, a sudden squeal sounded from the centre of the room. My heart jumped, but as the high-pitched, slightly muffled tone settled into an electronic rendition of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1, I realized that it had to be Gennady’s cellphone. The
zhuliks
downstairs were obviously getting restless, and would doubtless be on their way up soon. With no choice but to keep moving, therefore, I turned around and closed the door behind me.