Spygirl (25 page)

As Mr. Singh led me downstairs and out the gilded doors at the entrance, I thanked him and on my way out added, “Please take care of Mr. Wallinghurst.”

“Yes, Meese Amy, of course. I will indeed.”

Back at the office, I e-mailed Sol my report, and ten minutes later he called me.

“A. Gray?”

“Yep.”

“Excellent work. I just spoke to the client. They're spooked, but I explained that Nars Norrsken might not know about the investigation in Sweden, so they won't be mentioning it.”

“Good. I know Wallinghurst doesn't want to be the one taking Nars down. He wants the information we have to go
just
to the client, and to let the Swedish authorities take care of the rest.”

“Okay, Gray.” Sol smacked his lips together. “You did a great job.”

“Thanks!”

“But don't let it go to your head.”

“Right.”

I went back to my desk to finish writing up the case. The knowledge of KNUT's betrayals felt weighty, cumbersome. I imagined how many thousands of their employees had lost their retirements, a lifetime of promises shattered. The worst part was, most of them didn't even know it yet. My stomach was taut and I wanted to cry. I flipped through my mental Rolodex, wondering who could cheer me up. Dan, maybe. I wrote him and waited to hear back. Then the phone rang.

“Amy Gray!”

“Jeremy! Almost the boy I was just hoping to hear from.”

“So I'm the runner-up to the cute indie-boy rock star you've been seeing. I can live with that. He can do things I can't.”

“Who told you about Dan, anyway?”

“Ben.”

“Ben? He doesn't know
anything.”
I wondered where the hell Ben got off telling my friends who I was dating when Jeremy cut to the chase.

“Aim, I have a huge favor to ask you. And you can totally say no. But I think you might like it. But if you don't want to that's totally cool—”

“Jeremy? Spit it out!” It turned out Jeremy was blowing his load to go to this party that boys could only get into if they were with a girl.

“That sounds like every club in New York.”

“No, this is different. It's a club created to promote women's sexuality, so they have lots of chicks in lingerie or underwear, and vibrators for sale, and men being treated like pieces of meat.”

“Sounds like your wet dream.”

“Exactly.” Jeremy was a living oxymoron, a highly educated denizen of low culture. The sexy soirée was sponsored by Cake; the all-girl club promised to wave the $20-per-person cover charge if you filled out the membership application: “To me, sexy is ———.” “The most erotic place on my body is ———.” “The most outrageous place I ever had sex was ———.”

“Can I answer these questions by saying ‘no comment’?” I asked. “This stuff is kinda personal, and I can't get it up to answer them.”

“No, you have to write something really outrageous, or else they might not accept your application.”

“What? They're
judging
my answer? Forget it.” I got Jeremy to agree to do the nasty deed for me and then I would send it in. But, I protested, wasn't a horny artsy guy going there for chicken-choking fodder spoiling the point of this girlie love-in? Jeremy pointed out that he hadn't gotten laid in months.

“Puuleeease do this for me,” he begged. “I haven't had sex in sixteen months.”

“Stop! This information doesn't fall into the need-to-know category.”

“I'm the guy who joined a lesbian Riot Grrl rally in college because I wanted some threefer action. I'm incorrigible.”

“Hey!” I was indignant. “You took me to one of those meetings. I thought you were a real militant feminist radical! So I guess being secretary of the ISO was just a ruse, too?”

“Ilana Richards, the vice president, had the cutest little rack.”

“Jeremy!”

He sounded sheepish. “What can I say? I'm a pervert.”

“You're sick.”

“I'm desperate.”

“Okay.” Hopefully, this evening of gurl-on-gurl action would have a mollifying effect on Jeremy. Furthermore, I hoped my adventurer's spirit would pay off in the karma department. This might actually be just what I needed. It's so wrong, it's right.

“Hey, the invite says to wear something ‘hot “n’ tasty’ ”

“Jeremy, honey,” I warned. “You're already getting lucky. Stop while you're ahead.”

Dan asked me to go to a show with him on Thursday, but he had to cancel the day before to “Help my Moms move.” His divorced parents both lived in Manhattan, and his mother was moving in with her boyfriend of ten years.

We ended up seeing each other on Saturday. “You wanna see amazing rock? ” he asked me (we were talking only on the phone by this point.) We went to go see a band called Old Prince. They were great, but then we stayed for the second band, which was loud and performance-based. The lead singer sang all the songs like a rabid Goth evangelist on crack. They even had the
accoutrements of religious fanatics and freak shows, including a flaming crucifix and a caged python onstage. “And He's gonna get you, and when He does, you're gonna burn in heeelllll!” he railed. When we walked out of the piss-‘n’-beer-stained Brownie's, I was experiencing my usual post-show syndrome, a kind of shell-shocked dream state I also get after leaving movie theaters. We shuffled our way, dazed, onto Avenue A.

“Actually, that second band used to play a different kind of stuff.”

Dan started skipping and hopping his way down the block. “But dude,” he marveled, “I just can't believe I got to see Old Prince with Jack Press drumming on that last track. That was so awesome.” He continued telling me how this guy used to be the drummer for this other band, and that whole riff they did on that track totally reminded him of that other band, and how “that totally rocked.” As he said this, he was air-drumming heavily. His face contorted in alarming and disfiguring ways as he strained to his imaginary cymbals. “Aww!” He gave a Mick Jaggeresque yelp.

“Ummm.” How could I respond to that? As we ambled down First Avenue to his practice space, Dan was slamming the hell out of his imaginary drums and humming another unidentified tune.

In fact, it sickeningly dawned on me, the whole night I'd been listening to him expound on the musical histories of every member of the band. How the drummer was once on a chain gang in Detroit, how the bassist went to Yale and dropped out to start a mink farm before he joined the band. On our last date, I had winced several times when Dan kept quoting the lyrics to songs on the B sides of limited-release EPs by now-defunct bands. But I'd brushed it off. Chalked it up. Overlooked it. The problem was, I wasn't sure what to talk to him about if it wasn't music.

“I love the sounds of the city,” I offered, immediately realizing I'd ruined my opportunity for a reprieve.

“Dude!” he burst forth, “I was just thinking that. This totally reminds me of this Gene Loves Jezebel Song.” Then he started singing. “Nah, nah, nah, Take it over the bow, Window-dressing sow.” Or something like that. Not that I knew the words or the song. This was probably the fifth time he'd spontaneously broken into song since we had our first Brooklyn Lagers five hours earlier.

“Hey,” I snapped, “my name is not ‘dude’.” Don't be mean, a little voice inside me warned. But at the same time, another voice countered the whisper with a scream: Be mean! I struggled against the urge to lash out. But he was so … annoying.

Dan looked surprised. “Sorry.”

“It's fine. Just don't call me ‘dude.’ ” He looked sullen. We walked silently. Dan sent an empty Red Bull can traversing across the street.

Mr. Indier-Than-Thou was a pristine example of a hobby become an obsession. There are many of these in New York, it seems. New York is not about being well rounded. It's all sharp edges. Like a bumbling Kafkaesque examiner, he was bogged down by the volume of facts, but the crime perpetually evaded him. He would be a terrible investigator, and I, on the other hand, didn't want to be with someone I could sum up in a two-page report.

He invited me back to his place. It was a couple blocks away and I thought, at the very least, I might avoid the long haul back to Brooklyn. Plus I really wanted to be kissed.

At the fifth floor of his walkup, I plopped down in front of his door.

“How … can … you do this…. every day?” I panted. “It's hell.”

“Actually, I'm one more floor up.”

His apartment door opened onto a long, skinny hallway off of which was a tiny kitchen upholstered in yellow linoleum, then his roommate Zac's room. Then there was his other roommate Oliver's room, then a living room that fit a small couch, a TV set, and about
2,000 records and 4,000 CDs, and finally his room. It was a classic railroad tenement. The place smelled like fish and chips.

His bedroom had guitars slung around and the walls were plastered with Devo posters. The Devo thing was part of a back-to-your-rock-roots movement, targeting bands that were previously seen to have little or no intrinsic musical talent. Now they were “fucking geniuses,” in Dan's words. I sat on his bed and he kept jumping up to play music for me. “You've gotta hear this!” and the music was really beautiful. He made us rice and beans—he was designing for a dot-com, after all, not running one—and we drank beers and the music was enchanting. He came back into the room after putting on the Palace Brothers, and instead of giving me the liner notes, he touched my hand. His index finger, which was smooth and callused from playing guitar, slid over my hand. I closed my eyes, smiling, and then I felt him reach over my wrist, my arm, my shoulder. And then the next thing I knew, I felt the warmth of his face near mine, his nose near my neck, and he whispered, “No more talking.” And then there was silence.

On Monday morning, not only weren't there any seats on the F, but I had to wait for two trains to pass me by before I could even get on, never mind actually sitting.

Clinging to the overhead bar, I held my daily fix of the
Post.
I usually skip to Page Six and leave it on the train for the next weary traveler. A headline on page three caught my attention:
EURO PORN BRASS FALLS TO DEATH.
I gasped audibly. “The heir to the Norrsken publishing fortune plunged to his death yesterday in what is believed to be a suicide. His death comes just a week after revelations that several division managers in his family empire had been misappropriating pension funds to offset losses. It is believed that
Norrsken was soon to be indicted for his alleged role masterminding the fraud.” I looked up. Two older women sitting in front of me must have seen me look strange or heard a couple of muted yelps, because they offered me their seats. It wasn't until I got off the train and started walking to work that I realized that the tears falling from my face had turned most of the page into a damp smudge.

I imagined Nars Norrsken, sitting shirtless in his gilded suite in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, feeling crushed by the knowledge of his exposure. A stifling, stiffening dread overtakes him, as numbers and data in the wake of his crimes sickeningly converged, like snowflakes mounting into suffocating drifts. I imagined him, in the final moments, like Newt Ebersol in his snowy sepulchre, relinquishing calmly to the chaos with stillness, falling into the cool open air.

Sol was already in the office, and I walked straight to his desk, dropped the article, and said, “Read it.” He did. “Holy shit” was the only thing that escaped his mouth for a while, and then he stood up and hugged me. “This is not your fault,” he said. “This is not your fault.” Not much was said after, either. He told me to take the morning off, but I didn't want to go all the way back to Brooklyn, so I took a nap on the yellow threadbare brocade couch in the conference room. Sol put a note on the door that said, “If you enter this room and wake Gray up, you're fired.—The Management.”

When I woke up and got back to work, I started to think about Dan more. Our best times together were when he wasn't talking. Or singing. Or dancing.

Thinking about him all last week, I'd felt dreamy. Now I was homicidal. Dan was of a breed, actually. This breed particularly likes to assemble in New York, where there's a plethora of highly specialized record stores catering to the said overeducated
audiophiles, as well as
The Onion
distributed free, and plenty of dot-com jobs to get hired for and then fired from, so they could collect unemployment and spend more time going to rock shows. I like this kind of guy. Still, I was a little miffed that Dan had said he would call me on Sunday, but he didn't, and now it was Monday and there was no sign of him.

I went out for a cigarette and found Renora and Linus in our usual spot out in front.

“Hey, Amy.” Renora seemed a little uncomfortable, as did Linus. I wondered if they didn't know how to talk to me about my subject throwing himself out of a fifteen-story building to his death. I shuddered.

“Not my best day,” I confessed.

“Yeah, I'm off Atkins.”

“Really, why?”

“Because I was so sick of meat and cheese and fat I didn't want to eat anymore, and I was drinking just straight vodka because it's low in sugar and has no carbs, like beer. All of these factors led to a sort of alcoholic haze over the last forty-eight hours.”