Chen nodded. He was a quick study, after all.
"I need to say big numbers," he explained.
Martz interjected, "Yes, let's give him those."
"With fast-track approval by the Food and Drug Administration, we will have product in the pipeline in eighteen months. We figure the first-year sales at eight hundred million dollars, second year one-point-nine billion, and so on. Remember the target consumer population is getting larger rapidly. Those numbers are domestic only, by the way, so they at least double internationally. With rapid market penetration and what we expect will be eighty percent market-share domination, plus per-unit margins rising on falling unit-production costs, we see pure net profit streams in excess of two billion dollars five years from now—"
"Wait, please," said the translator, "too fast."
"No," said Chen, "no, not too fast. I got it. I understand. My friends in China, they will like this."
She abandoned me.
He called the nurse, but no answer came back. Watching TV, bored with waiting for him to die. He'd have a little talk with his son about this. Ray was due home soon but there was no time to waste. He examined his tubes. One for pain, one for hydration, three for piss—the kidney tubes plus the catheter in his penis.
One by one he pulled them out, except for the left kidney tube. Couldn't get it out. Didn't matter. He pulled the tip of the other end out of the piss bag, would let the tube trail behind him.
He yanked back his covers. Hell, there was the long incision, dried and puckered at the edges, not healed, mostly covered by a bandage. Got to think this through, he told himself. He took his pillows from behind his back and head and dropped them onto the floor. Then he rolled off the bed and fell heavily on them.
Was he hurt? No. He wondered if he could move along on his stomach. He tried to lift himself up on his hands and knees to crawl. Pain shot through his torso and he could feel adhesions and stitches pulling. No, that wouldn't work. He rolled onto his back and pushed himself along the floor, his feet paddling him onward as he used his hands to pull himself, grabbing table legs, the doorjamb, anything to help. My hands are still strong, he realized.
The basement stairs. He peered over them. He certainly knew how many there were—nineteen. He had painted them, repaired the treads,
fixed loose boards. He slowly swung his feet around and set them in front of himself, like a boy getting into a toboggan, and pushed off the first step. The idea was to do a controlled slide down them, surf them one by one, easing his bony rear end down.
He did okay for the first step, then the second and third. But then he slipped sideways and rolled into a ball and couldn't catch himself—so much stomach muscle had been cut!—and tumbled, heels over head down the last ten steps, not even reaching the bottom but falling sideways under the stair rail where the steps were open to the basement, landing atop a cardboard box of furnace vent filters.
There was a boy named Victor . . .
I'm okay, he panted. It hurts but I didn't bang my head. His wound was open now, blood seeping into his pajamas in a line on his chest.
Easing to the cool basement floor, he confronted the wall of filing cabinets, organized by year and then within each drawer by letter. What year? What year had he talked to Victor? What did a sullen, beat-up teenage boy and a detective talk about? The Yankees. The Mets. The boy was a few years older than Ray. This would have been in the late eighties. He located the file drawer marked 1989. He stretched his arm upward experimentally. Too far, too difficult to open. He spied a broom and slipped the handle end upward through the filing cabinet's drawer handle and pulled. The drawer slid out an inch on its rollers. Good. But how could he look through the files?
He had no illusion that he would be able to stand. He'd have to haul himself up somehow. He used the broom to pull the wheeled stool from the workbench toward himself, his eyes watching the slow progress of the swivel wheels as they rolled over every minute crack in the basement floor.
Impossible to climb atop it and yet somehow he did, keeping one hand on the file drawer, kicking his feet at the right moment until he lay over the stool, chest down on the cushion, his head hanging over the side. With his left hand, he pulled his torso up and dropped his head atop the files. There they were, in perfect alphabetical order.
The name. How would he find it? Vic, Victor. That was the boy's
name. But what was the last name? The case would have been filed by the victim's name. Anthony. Did you see them hit Anthony? Anthony Del-something. Depasso, DeVecchio. Del-something.
His head was in the middle of the drawer. The letter tabs on one side were hidden, so he just grabbed a file at a time and worked his way down the alphabet—H, G, F, E, D. He pulled out the D files—Delancy, Dingel. The next file was Charnoff. No Del-something. Had he got the name wrong?
No, probably the year. One year earlier. One file drawer higher.
An impossibility.
He was panting now, a sour sweat soaking his pajamas. Losing energy. I can't get high enough to read the files in the next drawer, he realized.
But he could open the drawer. And he did, reaching blindly above himself and pulling it out.
He knew what would happen. It did. The file cabinet, its two highest drawers extended with their heavy contents, was destabilized and slowly fell forward, toppling him and spilling its contents across the floor.
I'm okay, he thought. The 1988 D files—? He could see them. Depasso. There it was. He pulled the file. He remembered Depasso. Had a sister named Violet. Beautiful girl. Slim. The file looked extensive; he'd done a lot of work, throwing everything in there, including a copy of the murder file of the Russian found under the Coney Island boardwalk. All his notes on Victor, the DD-5 forms. About his house and the sewerage yard his father ran. The building was some kind of old factory. He'd been all through it with the boy, Vic. Checking on the alibi. Seeing if any of the other Russians might be in there. The father hadn't wanted a cop looking around. Some kind of hidden room, some kind of bunker. Described in his notes, location, everything.
He crabbed his way out from under the files and from beneath the cabinet. The left kidney tube was caught behind him, but he kept pushing, feeling the tube yank deep inside him then rip out. He pushed with his feet along the cool basement floor, making progress foot by foot. In his left hand he held the file.
The stairs. He looked up them—nineteen steps. A mountain. He lifted the file as far as he could go, up two or three steps. Called. Hollered. Screamed. No sound came out.
Not in his bed? She saw the dangling tubes, the pillows on the floor. Her first thought was that he'd gotten outside the house somehow.
Then she found the open door to the basement. Mr. Grant lay atop the bottom stairs, a file of papers in his hand.
"Mr. Grant!"
He heard her, but said nothing. Instead he lifted the papers in his hand and waved them, as if they might be important.
He had every number.
In his phone, a directory of the private lines belonging to dozens of big players in China. Elliot's staff transferred the numbers to their communications equipment, so the calls would be un-traceable, and after some consultation, they arrived at a sequence, with the men most easily convinced to be called first. They put a headset on Chen, hooked him into the voice delay device, and the translator listened in and more or less simultaneously repeated Chen's words to Martz, in English.
"Terribly sorry to inconvenience you, sir. Yes, I know this is all in a hurry. But I am over in New York and have received a very good tip about the same American pharmaceutical company we shorted about a month ago. Good Pharma, that was it. See it on your screen there? I've just heard something about a major market move up very soon. Big research project to be announced, entirely new markets. You're the first one I called. Price might have started to move already. It has? Good. I think it's going to go a lot more than that. That shows that I know what I'm talking about. How much? Back the truck up, that's how much. Double the usual bet, I'd say, maybe triple. Yes, yes, I see it moving, too. You might want to help your friends out on this, by the way, let them get a piece."
Chen listened intently on the phone, holding the report Tom Reilly had provided.
Hua, translating quietly, glanced at Martz. "This guy is good," he said.
But Martz already knew that. Elliot was at the other table, sipping his coffee and watching his computers. They'd seen a dramatic upward bump in the Good Pharma price. Four points already, with momentum building, the curve getting sharper as the early European traders woke up.
As for the million dollars and Chen's sister, wherever she was, that problem seemed a long time ago now. Phelps had taken Chen's and Tom Reilly's phones—the ones that the blackmailer had called—and turned them off. Chen, meanwhile, hadn't asked how Martz was handling the blackmailer's request for money. Fine. They'd deal with the blackmailer later. Or, given how fast the price of Good Pharma was rising, maybe never.
The weight
of a father. Terribly light in his arms; he'd carried children who were heavier.
"Thank God you came back when you did," Wendy said.
"Is he hurt?" Ray took each step carefully, turned sideways when he came to the doorway. Settled him in the hospital bed. The nurse first hooked up the hydration IV. Then the Dilaudid. He was panting and almost unconscious.
She felt his father's bones, took his pulse.
"The bleeding around the chest?"
"That's mostly seepage. I don't see any serious bleeding. He's very dry, of course."
"The nephrostomy tubes?"
"One's easy to put back in. The other will be a little bit of work."
"What was he doing down there?"
"You didn't see?" she asked Ray.
"No."
"He got into the file cabinets, all those papers."
"Which papers?"
"His old work files, I think. He had one in his hand when I found him."
"Which one?"
She pointed to a green folder on the table. "This one."
Ray took the folder. But he had already found the notes his father
had written down in his now spidery handwriting:
prison place/shit man building/name means winner.
He glanced through the file. Victorious Sewerage in Marine Park. With a hand-drawn diagram of the building in the back of the lot.
"He was in such a good mood, too, after the visit from your friend."
"Friend, what friend?"
"That drop-dead gorgeous Chinese girl. You do know who she is, don't you?"
"Yes—"
"Well, she was here, hoping to see you, and she ended up seeing him."
"When did she leave?"
"That was hours ago! She said she might go out, then come back, I could be wrong about that. She came to see you and I said you were out."
But Ray was already running toward the truck, police file in hand.
Only later, when he was almost to Marine Park, did he realize that he'd forgotten about the guns hidden under the fertilizer bags in his father's shed. Too late to go back now.
A visitor?
Victor was standing in his lot trying one clonephone after the next and getting no answer when he saw a car pull in. Those fuckers had turned off their phones—he'd make them pay for that. But now he watched the car. He shouldn't have left the gate open. The driver slowed and looked around. Vic stepped back behind one of his trucks. The car drove up to the trailer, then made a slow, investigatory circle around it. It parked, and an old man, tall and lanky, unfolded himself from the driver's door and walked up the trailer steps and knocked. There'd be no answer; the business was closed today, everyone gone.
The man knocked again. Nothing. He pulled something out of his sleeve and slipped it into the door. Ha, thought Vic, that won't work; it's also chained from the inside. The man was able to get the door open just enough to poke his head in for a quick look before he turned and descended the steps. He walked around the huge sewage trucks, stopping to write each license number on a pad of paper. The kind of thing a cop might do, Vic decided, but then again, there were ways to look up license information if you were not in law enforcement; you just had to have a friend who was.
After a few minutes, the man headed toward the warehouse. Vic hurried to the door and unlocked it, and even opened it an inch, not only to entice the man, if he was a cop, but also to help him get past any anxiety about making an unlawful search. If the door was un
locked and open, then the guy would not be able to resist entering; he'd just cautiously push through the door and look around.
And that is what the man did, though now with his gun drawn. Fine, thought Vic. I can do that, too. I wasted a lot of bullets scaring the Chinese girl, but I have two left. Nobody is going to hear anything back here anyway.