and if you came in here during normal shopping hours, it would be possible to mingle with the crowds right up until the moment when you slipped through the discreet door that led to the upper lobby, this tastefully lit room with sound-muffling carpets, two doormen, and a concierge, who nodded to Oskar and said good evening to Vincent.
“Good evening,” she said. Did she have a slight accent? He’d never noticed before. She didn’t sound like she was from New York. In the elevator, Oskar glanced at her—the silence between them was becoming a third presence, like another person who’d elbowed in between them and was taking up space—and saw that her gaze was fixed on the camera above the elevator buttons.
“Is it always this quiet?” Oskar asked when they stepped out onto the thirty-seventh floor. They were in a silent corridor of heavy gray doors and low lighting.
“Always.” She’d stopped before one of the doors and was searching in her wallet. She produced a key card, and the door unlocked with a soft beep. “The building’s mostly empty. People buy these places for investment purposes and then show up once or twice a year, if that.”
“Why did you and your husband buy here?”
She was leading him into an aggressively modern apartment, all clean lines and sharp angles, with a gleaming kitchen in which he suspected no one had ever cooked anything. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over Central Park.
“He’s not my husband.” She took off her shoes and padded into the kitchen in her stockings. “But to answer your question, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why he bought this apartment or anything else.”
“Because he could,” Oskar suggested. He was trying to understand the first thing she’d said, in light of the wedding ring on her finger. She saw him looking at it, twisted it off, and calmly dropped it into the kitchen garbage.
“Probably. Yes, that was probably the reason.” There was a certain flatness in her voice. “All we have to drink is wine. Red, or white?”
“Red. Thank you.” He was standing by the window with his back to her when she appeared at his side with two glasses, but he’d been watching her reflection as she approached.
“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to making it to the end of the day.”
“Was your day as bad as mine?”
“Probably worse.”
“I doubt that.”
She smiled. “Today Jonathan told me he’s a criminal. What was your day like?”
“It was…it was, uh…” It was what? We all know what we do here. Today I realized that I’m going to prison, he wanted to tell her, but of course there was no reason to believe she wasn’t working with the FBI. Maybe Oskar could go work for the FBI, if only so he could stop wondering if everyone around him was working for the FBI, this exhausting paranoia, but of course that would entail confessing and accepting his punishment, and what if there was still a chance, what if he could somehow get lost in the shuffle, maybe the investigators would swoop down on Alkaitis and his top guys, Enrico and Harvey, and leave the rest of us—“You know what,” he said, “how about we talk about anything other than today.”
She smiled. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve heard this evening. This wine’s not great, is it?”
“I thought it was just me,” he said. “I don’t know that much about wine.”
“I know too much about wine, but I can’t say I’ve ever found it all that interesting.” She set her glass on the coffee table. “So. Here we are.”
“Here we are.” He felt a touch of vertigo. She was standing very close, and her perfume was going to his head.
6
“In theory,” Harvey said, after a long period of shredding evidence and not speaking, “couldn’t a person flee the country and take their kids?”
“Uproot them from everyone they know, somehow get your spouse on board so you don’t get charged with abduction, and then drag them where, exactly?” Joelle stopped shredding documents for a moment, to take a sip of scotch.
“Somewhere nice,” Harvey said. “If you’re going to flee the country, you’re headed for a tropical paradise, right?”
“I don’t know,” Joelle said. “What kind of an upbringing would that be?”
“An interesting one. ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I was on the lam with my parents in a tropical paradise.’ You could do a lot worse, childhood-wise.”
“Maybe we could stop talking about children,” Joelle said.
“Listen,” Harvey said, trying to save her from visions