a startled horse, so no one was able to catch him before he darted away. When had he last run? It had been years. He hadn’t realized how fast he could be. He was already across the lobby. He swiped his card and got through the turnstiles while they stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, staring. He was in terrible shape, though, so now he couldn’t breathe. He’d done something to his ankle—no, both ankles. In prison, Harvey decided, he was going to be one of those men who work out all the time, push-ups in his cell, weights and jogging in the yard. When he arrived on Seventeen, he found that the door to the office suite had been propped open. A police officer was standing by the door. The people in the suite registered, at first, as a mass of undifferentiated shadow: dark suits, dark jackets with FBI or ENFORCEMENT on the back.
There are moments in life that require some courage. Harvey didn’t turn around and walk back to the elevators and take a cab to JFK and leave the country, although at that point he still had possession of his passport. Instead, he walked into the heart of the swarm and introduced himself.
Harvey’s office was populated this morning by agents of both the FBI and the SEC, several of whom were very interested in speaking with him, why don’t you just take a minute to gather yourself and we’ll all take a seat in the conference room.
“I just need to get something out of my desk,” Harvey said.
They offered to get it for him, possibly fearing a hitherto-unnoticed handgun.
“If you look in the top left drawer,” Harvey said, “under the files, you’ll find a legal pad with my handwriting on it. Several pages of writing. I think it’ll be of interest to you.” He floated ahead of them to the conference room.
Oskar passed him on the way in. “What is all this?” he asked, white around the mouth.
“You know what this is,” Harvey said. Oskar looked like he wanted to be sick, but the odd thing was, Harvey didn’t actually feel that bad. None of this felt real to him. Oskar texted Joelle, so she didn’t come in at all. She drove to her kids’ school and signed them out midmorning, took them to F. A. O. Schwarz and told them they could have anything, smiling all the while, but the youngest burst into tears because if they could have anything then obviously something was drastically wrong. Later the children remembered this as a long, uneasy day of trooping around Manhattan in the cold, in and out of toy stores and hot chocolate dispensaries and the Children’s Museum while their mother kept saying “Isn’t this fun?” but also kept tearing up, alternately lavishing them with attention and disappearing into her phone.
“We’ll remember this day always, don’t you think?” she said in the car on their way home to Scarsdale. They were moving very slowly in the late-afternoon traffic. “Yes,” her children said, but later their memories were destabilized by Joelle’s letters from prison: how much fun we had that last day, she wrote, that toy store, that giant stuffed giraffe, those cups of hot chocolate, I am so glad we had that day together, do you remember that wonderful display in the museum, and they wondered if they were misremembering, because what they mostly remembered was the cold, their wet feet, the feeling of wrongness, the gray of Manhattan in the winter rain, the way the giraffe dragged in a puddle on the way back to the car.
By the time Joelle’s children acquired the giraffe, Ron had already left. He slipped out at noon to meet with a lawyer, who advised him not to come back. Harvey was still being interviewed in the conference room. Oskar was playing Solitaire on his computer, which had been backed up and disconnected from both the Internet and the internal network, while investigators went through his filing cabinets. Enrico was at his aunt’s house in Mexico City. He’d spent some hours digging through drawers in search of his dead cousin’s old passport, and now that he had it he was sitting with her on the patio, the two of them smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence, Enrico glancing at his phone from time to time, following the news of Alkaitis’s arrest, reflecting on how strange it was that he’d never felt less free in his life.