Paranoia (24 page)

She turned to her laptop and tapped at a few keys. “Now, I want your undivided attention. We’re going to watch some television interviews Goddard has given over the years—an early one from
Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser
, several from CNBC, one he did with Katie Couric on
The Today Show.
”

A video image of a much younger Jock Goddard, though still impish, pixielike—was frozen on the screen. Judith whirled around in her chair to face me. “Adam, this is an extraordinary opportunity you’ve been handed. But it’s also a far more dangerous situation than you’ve been in at Trion, because you’ll be far more constrained, far less able to move about the company unnoticed or just ‘hang out’ with regular people and network with them. Paradoxically, your intelligence-gathering assignment has just become
hugely
more difficult. You’re going to need all the ammunition you can collect. So before we finish today, I want you to know this fellow
inside and out
, are you with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“Good,” she said, and gave me her scary little smile. “I
know
you are.” Then she lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Listen, Adam, I have to tell you—for your own sake—that Nick is getting very impatient for results. You’ve been at Trion for how many weeks?—and he has yet to know what’s going on in the skunkworks.”

“There’s a limit,” I began, “to how aggressive—”

“Adam,” she said quietly, but with an unmistakable note of menace. “This is
not
someone you want to fuck with.”

40

Alana Jennings lived in a duplex apartment in a redbrick town house not far from Trion headquarters. I recognized it immediately from the photograph.

You know how when you just start going out with a girl and you notice everything, where she lives and how she dresses and her perfume, and everything seems so different and new? Well, the strange thing was how I knew so much about her, more than some husbands know about their wives, and yet I’d spent no more than an hour or two with her.

I pulled up to the town house in my Porsche—isn’t that part of what Porsches are for, to impress chicks?—and climbed the steps and rang the doorbell. Her voice chirped over the speaker, said she’d be right down.

She was wearing a white embroidered peasant blouse and black leggings and her hair was up, and she wasn’t wearing the scary black glasses. I wondered whether peasants ever actually wore peasant blouses, and whether there really were peasants in the world anymore, and if there were, whether they thought of themselves as peasants. She looked too spectacularly beautiful. She smelled great, different from most of the girls I usually went out with. A floral fragrance called Fleurissimo; I remembered reading that she’d pick it up at a place called the House of Creed whenever she went to Paris.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi, Adam.” She had glossy red lipstick on and was carrying a tiny square black handbag over one shoulder.

“My car’s right here,” I said, trying to be subtle about the brand-new shiny black Porsche ticking away right in front of us. She gave it an appraising glance but didn’t say anything. She was probably putting it together in her mind with my Zegna jacket and pants and open-collar black casual shirt, maybe the five-thousand-dollar Italian navy watch too. And thinking I was either a show-off or trying too hard. She wore a peasant blouse; I wore Ermenegildo Zegna. Perfect. She was pretending to be poor, and I was trying to look rich and probably overdoing it.

I opened the passenger’s side door for her. I’d moved the seat back before I got here so there’d be plenty of legroom. Inside, the air was heavy with the aroma of new leather. There was a Trion parking sticker on the left rear side of the car, which she hadn’t yet noticed. She wouldn’t see it from inside the car either, but soon enough she would, when we were getting out at the restaurant, and that was just as well. She was going to find out soon enough, one way or another, that I worked at Trion too, and that I’d been hired to fill the job she used to have. It was going to be a little weird, the coincidence, given that we hadn’t met at work, and the sooner it came up the better. In fact, I was ready with a dumb line of patter. Like: “You’re kidding me. You do? So do I! How bizarre!”

There were a few moments of awkward silence as I drove toward her favorite Thai restaurant. She glanced up at the speedometer, then back at the road. “You should probably watch it around here,” she said. “This is a speed trap. The cops are just waiting for you to go over fifty, and they really sock you.”

I smiled, nodded, then remembered a riff from one of her favorite movies,
Double Indemnity
, which I’d rented the night before. “How fast was I going, officer?” I said in that sort of flat-affect film-noir Fred MacMurray voice.

She got it immediately. Smart girl. She grinned. “I’d say around ninety.” She had the vampish Barbara Stanwyck voice down perfectly.

“Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.”

“Suppose I let you off with a warning this time,” she came back, playing the game, her eyes alive with mischief.

I faltered for only a few seconds until the line came to me. “Suppose it doesn’t take.”

“Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.”

I smiled. She was good, and she was into it. “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”

“Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.”

“That tears it,” I said. End of scene. Cut, print, that’s a take.

She laughed delightedly. “How do you
know
that?”

“Too much wasted time watching old black-and-white movies.”

“Me too! And
Double Indemnity
is probably my favorite.”

“It’s right up there with
Sunset Boulevard
.” Another favorite of hers.

“Exactly! ‘I
am
big. It’s the pictures that got small.’”

I wanted to quit while I was ahead, because I’d pretty much exhausted my supply of memorized noir trivia. I moved the conversation into tennis, which was safe. I pulled up in front of the restaurant, and her eyes lit up again. “You know about this place? It’s the best!”

“For Thai food, it’s the only place, as far as I’m concerned.” A valet parked the car—I couldn’t believe I was handing the keys to my brand-new Porsche to an eighteen-year-old kid who was probably going to take it out on a joyride when business got slow—and so she never saw the Trion sticker.

It was actually a great date for a while. That
Double Indemnity
stuff seemed to have set her at ease, made her feel that she was with a kindred spirit. Plus a guy who was into Ani DiFranco, what more could she ask for? Maybe a little depth—women always seemed to like depth in a guy, or at least the occasional fleeting moment of self-reflection, but I was all over that.

We ordered green papaya salad and vegetarian spring rolls. I considered telling her I was a vegetarian, like she was, but then I decided that would be too much, and besides, I didn’t know if I could stand to keep up the ruse for more than one meal. So I ordered Masaman curry chicken and she ordered a vegetarian curry without coconut milk—I remembered reading that she was allergic to shrimp—and we both drank Thai beer.

We moved from tennis to the Tennis and Racquet Club, but I quickly steered us away from those dangerous shoals, which would raise the question of how and why I was there that day, and then to golf, and then to summer vacations. She used “summer” as a verb. She figured out pretty quickly that we came from different sides of the tracks, but that was okay. She wasn’t going to marry me or introduce me to her father, and I didn’t want to have to fake my family background too, which would be a lot of work. And besides, it didn’t seem necessary—she seemed to be into me anyway. I told her some stories about working at the tennis club, and doing the night shift at the gas station. Actually, she must have felt a little uncomfortable about her privileged upbringing, because she told a little white lie about how her parents forced her to spend part of her summers doing scutwork “at the company where my dad works,” neglecting to mention that her dad was the CEO. Also, I happened to know she had never worked at her father’s company. Her summers were spent on a dude ranch in Wyoming, on safari in Tanzania, living with a couple of other women in an apartment paid for by Daddy in the Sixth in Paris, interning at the Peggy Guggenheim on the Grand Canal in Venice. She wasn’t pumping gas.

When she mentioned the company where her father “worked,” I braced myself for the inevitable subject of what-do-you-do, where-do-you-work. But it never happened, until much later. I was surprised when she brought it up in a strange way, kind of making a game of it. She sighed. “Well, I suppose now we have to talk about our jobs, right?”

“Well . . .”

“So we can talk endlessly about what we do during the day, right? I’m in high-tech, okay? And you—wait, I know, don’t tell me.”

My stomach tightened.

“You’re a chicken farmer.”

I laughed. “How’d you guess?”

“Yep. A chicken farmer who drives a Porsche and wears Fendi.”

“Zegna, actually.”

“Whatever. I’m sorry, you’re a guy, so work is probably all you want to talk about.”

“Actually, no.” I modulated my voice into a tone of bashful sincerity. “I really prefer to live in the present moment, to be as mindful as I can. You know, there’s this Vietnamese Buddhist monk who lives in France, named Thich Nhat Nanh, and he says—”

“Oh, my God,” she said, “this is so uncanny! I can’t believe you know Thich Nhat Nanh!”

I hadn’t actually read anything this monk had written, but after I saw how many books of his she’d ordered from Amazon I did look him up on a couple of Buddhist Web sites.

“Sure,” I said as if everyone had read the complete works of Thich Nhat Nanh. “‘The miracle is not to walk on water, the miracle is to walk on the green earth.’” I was pretty sure I had that right, but just then my cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. “Excuse me,” I said, taking it out and glancing at the caller ID.

“One quick second,” I apologized, and answered the phone.

“Adam,” came Antwoine’s deep voice. “You better get over here. It’s your dad.”

41

Our dinners were barely half eaten. I drove her home, apologizing profusely all the while. She could not have been more sympathetic. She even offered to come to the hospital with me, but I couldn’t expose her to my father, not this early on: that would be too gruesome.

Once I’d dropped her off, I took the Porsche up to eighty miles an hour and made it to the hospital in fifteen minutes—luckily, without being pulled over. I raced into the emergency room in an altered state of consciousness: hyper-alert, scared, with tunnel vision. I just wanted to get to Dad and see him before he died. Every damned second I had to wait at the ER desk, I was convinced, might be the moment Dad died, and I’d never get a chance to say good-bye. I pretty much shouted out his name at the triage nurse, and when she told me where he was, I took off running. I remember thinking that if he was already dead she’d have said something to that effect, so he must still be alive.

I saw Antwoine first, standing outside the green curtains. His face was for some reason scratched and bloodied, and he looked scared.

“What’s up?” I called out. “Where is he?”

Antwoine pointed to the green curtains, behind which I could hear voices. “All of a sudden his breathing got all labored. Then he started turning kind of dark in the face, kind of bluish. His fingers started getting blue. That’s when I called the ambulance.” He sounded defensive.

“Is he—?”

“Yeah, he’s alive. Man, for an old cripple he’s got a lot of fight left in him.”

“He did that to you?” I asked, indicating his face.

Antwoine nodded, smiling sheepishly. “He refused to get into the ambulance. He said he was fine. I spent like half an hour fighting with him, when I should have just picked him up and threw him in the car. I hope I didn’t wait too long to call the ambulance.”

A small, dark-skinned young guy in green scrubs came up to me. “Are you his son?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I’m Dr. Patel,” the man said. He was maybe my age, a resident or an intern or whatever.

“Oh. Hi.” I paused. “Um, is he going to make it?”

“Looks like it. Your father has a cold, that’s all. But he doesn’t have any respiratory reserve. So a minor cold, for him, is life-threatening.”

“Can I see him?”

“Of course,” he said, stepping to the curtain and pulling it back. A nurse was hooking up an IV bag to Dad’s arm. He had a clear plastic mask on over his mouth and nose, and he stared at me. He looked basically the same, just smaller, his face paler than normal. He was connected to a bunch of monitors.

He reached down and pulled the mask off his face. “Look at all this fuss,” he said. His voice was weak.

“How’re you doing, Mr. Cassidy?” Dr. Patel said.

“Oh, great,” Dad said, heavy on the sarcasm. “Can’t you tell?”

“I think you’re doing better than your caregiver.”

Antwoine was sidling up to take a look. Dad looked suddenly guilty. “Oh, that. Sorry about your face, there, Antwoine.”

Antwoine, who must have realized this was as elaborate an apology as he was ever going to get from my father, looked relieved. “I learned my lesson. Next time I fight back harder.”

Dad smiled like a heavyweight champ.

“This gentleman saved your life,” Dr. Patel said.

“Did he,” Dad said.

“He sure did.”

Dad shifted his head slightly to stare at Antwoine. “What’d you have to go and do that for?” he said.

“Didn’t want to have to look for another job so quick,” Antwoine said right back.

Dr. Patel spoke softly to me. “His chest X ray was normal, for him, and his white count is eight point five, which is also normal. His blood gasses came back indicating he was in impending respiratory failure, but he appears to be stable now. We’ve got him on a course of IV antibiotics, some oxygen, and IV steroids.”