of prison visitation rooms, “I think there’s a very good chance we’ll get off with probation. At worst, maybe an electronic monitoring bracelet, a few months of house arrest.”
* * *
—
“It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience,” Joelle said later, “isn’t it?”
“I’ve never had an out-of-body experience,” Harvey said. He knew what she meant, though. The moment didn’t seem quite real.
“I have,” she said. “I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above…”
* * *
—
Sometime around eleven-thirty, Joelle fed a final page into her paper shredder, dusted off her hands with theatrical flair, and rose carefully. “I’m going down to my office for a minute,” she said, then turned and walked slowly in the direction of the elevators. Harvey found her in her office on Seventeen, curled up under her desk. She was snoring softly. He covered her with her overcoat and returned to Alkaitis’s office. Harvey wasn’t drunk at all, but after all these hours, several regions of his brain seemed to have shut down, and he was having a harder and harder time determining which documents to keep and which to put through the shredder. The words on the pages held less and less meaning, letters and numbers squiggling away from him.
* * *
—
At midnight in the winter city, Harvey was alone in his office with ten file boxes of incriminating evidence. He’d numbered them. Later he’d go through them all to make sure of what he had, he decided, and maybe make footnotes in his confession: See staff memo in box #1, Relevant correspondence in box #2, etc. Although how much time would that take, all that cross-indexing? Probably too much time. Probably more time than he had. He was tired but he felt so light. Maybe he could ask Simone to help. Harvey was thinking about this as he left the building. Simone was a poor idea, he decided, since she was so new and had no firm loyalties. He couldn’t count on her not to call the police before the indexing was done. He hailed a taxi and watched the streets slip past, the lights and the late-night dog walkers, the sheer walls of towers, the delivery people on bicycles with hot food swinging in bags from the handlebars, the young people in packs or paired off and holding hands. He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference. He woke with a start, the cabdriver peering through the partition, “Wake up buddy, wake up, you’re home.”
* * *
—
At two in the morning:
Harvey was pacing the rooms of his house, trying to memorize every detail. He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind.
Simone was drinking wine with her roommates in Brooklyn. There were three of them sharing a two-bedroom, so they had no living room and gathered around the table in the kitchen when they wanted to socialize. They were up late because the youngest, Linette, had been groped by a chef at the restaurant where she waited tables and had come home in tears, and then the conversation had shifted to other jobs and Simone had been getting some mileage out of the shadow hanging over Alkaitis’s office. “Sounds shady as hell,” Linette was saying. “You’re sure that’s exactly what you heard?” “ ‘We all know what we do here,’ ” Simone quoted again, pouring wine for the others. “But I’m telling you, it wasn’t just those words, it was also the atmosphere, like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in…”
In the Gradia Building, Joelle was sleeping under her desk.
Oskar was sleeping too, but naked and lying next to Vincent.
Enrico was on a southbound plane. He was staring at a movie but neither saw nor heard it. He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left.
Jonathan Alkaitis was at his desk in his home office, writing a letter to his daughter. Dear Claire, the letter began, but he wasn’t sure how to continue and had been staring into space for some time.