Crazy for Cornelia (20 page)

“Corny,” Tucker said. “The way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can do what you say you’re going to do with my help.
Or you can stay locked up in a bedroom at home, sneak out at night, and waste your life. I’ve got information, the equipment,
and the resources and we can stay on top of the situation with the Kois while we’re gone. You decide. Either way, I’m keeping
all the gear for South America right here in this hangar.”

She searched the emptiness around his head again.

An image of Kevin Doyle, and his glorious, sky-blue corona, suddenly popped into her head. She realized that an image of the
real Kevin Doyle, not her dreamy fantasy of Tesla, had crept in as her standard for judging the corona of others.

No, she couldn’t marry Tucker.

She didn’t even know him. And she didn’t trust him, at least not yet. But if she
pretended
to agree, at least she could buy time. She would be on her best behavior, and make the Kois believe that the Lords stood
together indivisible.

“Tucker, do you swear this is all true?”

“I swear on my mother’s life.”

She flinched. Could anyone possibly lie about that?

“How long will it take to beat the Kois?”

“Hard to say,” he said. “They’ll keep buying up shares. When we announce our engagement, that should make them think hard
about it. If we get married on Valentine’s Day, right before the company’s board meeting in Palm Beach, that ought to lock
them out for good.”

“All right,” she told Tucker. “I accept.”

She let him give her a hug of beefy but rather soft muscles in fine-suit fabric and noted an ion or two of cologne.

“I knew you’d make the right decision, Corny.”

Relieved
, she thought. That’s how Tucker sounded. Not charged up emotionally or even sexually. But definitely relieved. His hand went
into his jacket pocket and a dazzling starburst appeared in her face. It almost blinded her.

Tucker held out her mother’s diamond engagement ring. She stared at the sparkling stone in its antique setting, remembered
turning her mother’s finger to study all the facets of the glorious kaleidoscope of a ring.

“My father gave you that?” How he must trust Tucker, she thought with another sudden wave of melancholy. “I want to talk to
Chester about this.”

“Sure.” He stiffened slightly. “But if you’re only doing this for him, don’t let him know, okay? Your father’s kind of fragile
now. I don’t think he could handle that on top of everything else.”

She noticed that Tucker’s face had quickly rearranged itself from the dark, somber hollows of concern to its usual bright
and fleshy confidence. “We can announce our engagement at the Lord & Company Christmas party. A lot of people are going to
be very happy about this.”

“I know,” she thought out loud. “I just hope I’ll be one of them.”

T
his time, she was a painting of physical beauty. He wondered if she still had underneath what he’d seen before, that moral
beauty that Giotto painted.

Kevin watched her walk off the elevator all dazzle and fluid motion, her amazing legs scissoring in high heels with a vital
purpose—snip, snip, snip, right toward him. Her straw-colored hair now seemed to flame like a torch, and her clinging dress
threw off kinetic energy that hit him from forty feet away. She still wore black, but this time a velvet party dress wrapped
artfully to reveal the moves of her body. Her matching velvet coat wouldn’t keep a kitten warm. It was the kind of winter
outfit that said, “I have a limousine and don’t have to worry about getting cold and wet.”

She had Tucker Fisk’s arm.

Tucker smiled, showing her off.
See my butterfly? Isn’t she beautiful?

Kevin forced the same smile he hoisted up for any other resident. Then he held the door for them.

As soon as she saw Kevin, her eyes fixed at the top of his head. A violet constellation twinkled in her eyes where he had
once seen a dingy haze. No more meds. But she looked bittersweet somehow, which made him wonder. When she glided past him,
he also saw
changes in the hair-and-makeup department. Her hair looked cut by an expert, one strand at a time, and diamond earrings shaped
like lightning bolts flashed at her ears. Cosmetics covered a few freckles he had seen across her nose, making her more woman
than girl. And her skin tone had blossomed somehow, even under the blush she wore, to a healthy peach-glow.

She looked like, although he hated to use the word, class.

Tucker propelled her out the door, his hair slicked straight back for the evening. Then he stopped suddenly and Cornelia with
him. Tucker took a long look at Kevin, finally recognizing him behind the uniform.

“The other night,” Tucker asked him, “how do you suppose that photographer knew to hide out in the alley?”

Kevin felt calm even while his sphincter tightened, ready—maybe even eager—to face off with Cornelia Lord’s boyfriend. Then
he saw, in slashes of red across Cornelia Lord’s cheeks and the tips of her ears, her shame over Tucker’s accusation. In that
perturbed face, Kevin recognized the escapee he’d helped. The perfect deb with her diamond earrings could push his bitch-buttons.
The escapee underneath was a lost soul.

To notch back his anger at Tucker Fisk, he looked blankly at a spot over his nose.

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “I suppose he thought he was doing his job.”

“Well,” Tucker flung another spiked glove, “I wonder if you were doing yours.”

Now Kevin couldn’t help but look Tucker in the eye.

“Tucker!” Cornelia spoke sharply.

Kevin saw Cornelia’s gray eyes fill with tiny points of anger.

“If he can’t take the heat…” Tucker shrugged and left it hanging in the air, grinning at him.

“It’s not the heat,” Kevin said. “It’s the humility.”

He picked a large black umbrella out of the stand and held it up so the sharp tip passed not too far from Tucker’s nose. Casually,
he held the door open.

“After you,” Kevin told Cornelia evenly.

The wind almost knocked them down with the winter’s first
snowfall, a heavy one. Tucker led her out the door and Kevin popped the big umbrella open to protect them while he walked
behind. The flakes pelted him, dripping down his forehead, as he walked what was only a few yards but seemed like a football
field from the front door of 840 Fifth Avenue to the back door of their waiting limousine.

“So,” Kevin said, with no particular emotion, “you both have a nice evening.”

“Thank you, Kevin.” She gave him a guilty smile. More than that. Maybe a conspiratorial smile.

“You look hot—uh, nice, Ms. Lord,” Mike their chauffeur blurted as he held the car door for her.

She smiled and folded her slender legs to slip into the back seat.

Kevin watched Cornelia and Tucker take off in the cheesy little limousine. The queen of mixed signals, this one. He wondered
what condition she’d be in the next time they met.

It wouldn’t do to seethe at Tucker with all they had to do tonight.

Cornelia worked to establish a tone of peace and harmony when they popped out of the limousine at Koi Tower. She stood transfixed
by the white dazzle of the snowfall.

“It’s so beautiful,” she breathed.

“It’s beautiful on ski slopes and Christmas cards,” Tucker said. “In Manhattan, it’s just a problem. Everything gets fouled
up and takes three times as long.”

What a pill he could be. But she let Tucker take her arm and escort her through the crooked portals of Koi Tower. Her high
heels clicked across the marble floor to the special elevator guarded by a big, alert Asian man in a blue blazer with a Lord
& Company logo patch on the pocket.

While the elevator lifted them to the forty-second floor in one genteel whoosh, she braced herself to make the best of an
evening, full of fake laughter and the empty calories of social chitchat. She could also count on much whispering behind her
back.

She positioned her mouth in a half-smile. She could wear this expression almost indefinitely, unlike the full
Town & Country
jawbreaker smile that bared all your teeth and gums almost from ear to ear and could wear out facial muscles in a matter
of minutes.

“I think you should let me do most of the talking,” Tucker said. “These people are vicious.”

“Are they?” She made a little O with her mouth, on purpose this time.

He glanced at her. “And I invited the Kois.”

“Will they come?”

“I’m sure of it. When we make our announcement, don’t be surprised if they’re poker-faced. They’re good at that.”

She paused. “How can you be so sure they’ll show up?”

His smile cracked a little. “I just know these things.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He said nothing more until the elevator door opened.

The blast of noise and heat from the party was like an open furnace. Tucker kept a restraining grip on her arm, as if the
Electric Girl might escape. But tonight she had agreed to be demure and deliver her engagement lines.

The executive offices of Lord & Company occupied this entire floor of Koi Tower. Floor-to-ceiling glass exposed a full 360-degree
sweep of Midtown Manhattan, wrapping glitter around the party guests.

Cornelia hadn’t seen the office since she had come to visit her father a year ago. Tonight, the Macho Renaissance of Tucker’s
interior design amused her all over again, and she had to giggle.

A postmodern entryway had been designed so it seemed to crumble in front of them, creating a giant hole. The floor at first
looked like tarpaper, but on closer inspection turned out to be expensive distressed marble. It looked like someone had poured
battery acid over it.

The serpentine video wall that Tucker had installed dominated the center of the entire executive floor. It blinked and beeped
more like some consumer electronics show exhibit than the hallowed halls of a once-stuffy investment banking firm.

“There’s the Winking Wall,” she said to annoy him.

The S-shaped granite monolith with holes punched out for television monitors was programmed to scan stock markets across the
globe. Tonight, only the Hong Kong and Tokyo exchanges ground out numbers. Other monitors glowed with the TV-Web sites of
Lord & Company clients. One screen showed a black-and-white Christmas
film, Jimmy Stewart shaking hands with an evil old man, then looking down at his hand as though it had been coated with slime.

She saw a videographer with a ponytail point his camera at party-goers, throwing their manically festive images onto screens
of the Winking Wall as well.

She remembered well that last visit to the office, the day the Asian stock markets took a whale-sized dive and sent waves
of clammy fear through Lord & Company. Then the granite monolith had looked more like the Wailing Wall, with the fortunes
of Lord & Company tied to the Kois. But now the video images blinked almost reverently.

“This floor is definitely a look,” she told Tucker evenly, determined to be nice.

“We have to make our people comfortable.” He shrugged modestly.

“Hmmm.” She didn’t argue, but knew that except for a few top slice-and-dicers, the real employees of Lord & Company worked
in cramped cubicles downstairs on the forty-first floor.

This floor, Cornelia suspected, was really designed to dazzle visitors with Tucker’s need to buy and then discard things that
lit up and beeped. He boasted spending millions each year to install new technoglitz to impress new clients, companies with
names like CyberSpend and Firewall Blasters. He spoke of his gift for landing twenty-three-year-old tech-sector geniuses who
drank Surge and did interviews for
Wired
, seeming to make up their own language as they went along.

“You have to understand these guys I do business with,” Tucker whispered, and it jolted her that he could have read her thoughts.
“They’re idiot savants, but they’ve got the savant part down as much as the idiot part. And they’ve all got egos like football
stars.” Tucker shook his head. “I get dates for these geeks, take them to Knicks games, that kind of stuff.”

So Tucker did understand some people’s needs. In the waves of party guests, she saw several of the boy businessmen he talked
about with big-framed glasses and funny bowl haircuts. A whole regiment of pouty, giggling models had been hired to fling
themselves into the party throng like confetti.

Tucker had brought new life to the somber, if not quite sober, atmosphere
that prevailed at Lord & Company when Granddad and Chester ran the show.

A blond girl, about seventeen, in a tuxedo jacket longer than her skirt and black plastic helmet, careened toward them on
Rollerblades. She skidded to a stop half an inch from Tucker’s toe.

“Champagne?” the teenager asked, holding out a server tray of flute glasses. Tucker took one, but she did not.

“Merry Christmas.” Cornelia flicked Tucker’s glass with her fingernail and made it chime.

“Merry Christmas, Corny,” he said.

She noted a U-shaped bar where young men and women as generically good-looking as daytime TV actors poured drinks furiously.
Beyond the bar, a magnificent Christmas tree stood in the epicenter of the room. Tiny electrical candles with glass flames
lit the bristly, perfect branches of the tree, this Scotch pine almost too perfect to be bred in nature. Out of habit, the
Electric Girl followed the tangled cords from the tree lights to their energy source. A heavy-duty orange electrical outlet
on the floor bristled with wires, like a porcupine.

Cornelia removed her gloves, and the diamond of her mother’s ring caught the light, reflecting it like a laser show.

As she and Tucker crossed the floor, she felt a giddy rush. Their entrance reverberated, sending ripples. Ice stopped tinkling
in glasses. Guests halted in mid-sentence.

The first to clap his hands was Chester Lord, twice.

Then the applause began softly and grew.

She thought the applause was for Tucker, and started clapping. He quickly seized her wrist. And then she looked into the faces
of the crowd, lighting on a jowly banker, a hungry socialite, a happy young client whose lip vibrated like a rabbit. It shocked
her to her shoes to realize that they were applauding her.