“You’re late, Nell,” Cornelius MacDermott barked, as he spun his desk chair around to face her.
“Not according to my watch. Three on the dot.”
“I thought I told you to get here by three.”
“I had a column to turn in, and unfortunately my editor shares your sentiments about punctuality. Now, how about showing me the winning smile that melts the voters’ hearts?”
“Today I haven’t got one. Sit down, Nell.” MacDermott indicated the couch situated beneath the corner window that offered panoramic views of the city east and north. He had chosen that office because it gave him a view of his longtime congressional district.
Nell called it his fiefdom.
As she settled on the couch, she looked at him anxiously. There was an unfamiliar weariness in his blue eyes, clouding his usual keenly observant expression. His erect carriage, even when he was seated, always gave the impression that he was taller than his actual height, but today even that seemed diminished. Even Mac’s famous shock of white hair appeared thinner. As she watched, he clasped his hands together and shrugged his shoulders as though trying to dislodge an invisible burden. With sinking heart, Nell thought for the first time in her memory that her grandfather looked his age.
He stared past her for a long moment, then got up and moved to a comfortable armchair near the couch.
“Nell, we’ve got a crisis, and you’ve got to solve it. After being nominated for a second term, that weasel Bob Gorman has decided not to run. He’s been offered a sweetheart deal to head up a new Internet company. He’ll serve out his term till the election but says he can’t afford to live on a congressman’s salary. I pointed out to him that when I helped him get the nomination two years ago, all he talked about at the time was a commitment to serving the people.”
She waited. She knew that last week her grandfather had heard the first rumors about Gorman not running for a second term. Obviously the rumors had been confirmed.
“Nell, there’s one person—and only one, in my opinion—who could step in and keep that seat in the party.” MacDermott frowned. “You should have done it two years ago when I retired and you know it.” He paused. “Look, it’s in your blood. You wanted to do it from the start, but Adam talked you out of it. Don’t let that happen again.”
“Mac, please don’t start on Adam.”
“I’m not starting on anyone, Nell. I’m telling you that I know you, and you’re a political animal. I’ve been grooming you for my job since you were a teenager. I wasn’t thrilled when you married Adam Cauliff, but don’t forget, I helped him to get his start in New York when I introduced him to Walters and Arsdale, a fine architectural firm and among my most valued supporters.”
Mac’s lips tightened. “It didn’t make me look good when, after less than three years, Adam walked out on them, taking their chief assistant, and opened his own operation. All right, maybe that’s good business. But from the outset, Adam knew my plans for you, your plans for yourself. What made him change his mind? You were supposed to run for my seat when I retired, and he knew it. He had no right to talk you out of it then, and he has no right to try to talk you out of it now.”
“Mac, I enjoy being a columnist. You may not have noticed, but I get mighty good feedback.”
“You write a darn good column. I grant you that. But it’s not enough for you and you know it.”
“Look, my reluctance now isn’t that Adam asked me to give up the idea of running for office.”
“No? Then what do you call it?”
“We both want children. You know that. He suggested I wait until after that happens. In ten years I’ll only be forty-two. That would be a good age to start running for elective office.”
Her grandfather stood impatiently. “Nell, in ten years the parade will have passed you by. Events move too fast to wait. Admit it. You’re aching to throw your hat in the ring. Remember what you said when you informed me you were going to call me Mac?”
Nell leaned forward, clasped her hands together and tucked them under her chin. She remembered; it happened when she was a freshman at Georgetown. At his initial protest, she had held her ground. “Look, you always say I’m your best friend, and your friends call you Mac,” she had told him. “If I keep calling you Grandpa, I’ll always be perceived as a kid. When I’m with you in public I want to be considered your aide-de-camp.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he had responded.
She remembered how she’d held up the dictionary. “Listen to the definition. In brief, an aide-de-camp is ‘a subordinate or confidential assistant.’ God knows for the present I’m both to you.”
“For the present?” he had asked.
“Until you retire and I take over your seat.”
“Remember, Nell?” Cornelius MacDermott said, breaking her reverie. “You were a cocky college kid when you said that, but you meant it.”
“I remember,” she said.
He came and stood right in front of her, leaning forward, his face right in front of hers. “Nell, seize the moment. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. When Gorman confirms that he isn’t running, there’ll be a scramble for the nomination. I want the committee to consider candidates behind you from the get-go.”
“When is the get-go?” she asked cautiously.
“At the annual dinner, on the 30th. You and Adam will be there. Gorman will be announcing his intention to leave when his term is complete; he’ll get teary-eyed and sniffle and say that, while it was a difficult decision for him to make, something has made it much easier. Then he’s going to dry his eyes and blow his nose, point to you and bellow that you, Cornelia MacDermott Cauliff, are going to run for the seat previously occupied by your grandfather for nearly fifty years. It will be Cornelia replacing Cornelius. The wave of the third millennium.”
Obviously pleased with himself and his vision, MacDermott smiled broadly. “Nell, it’ll bring the house down.”
With a pang of regret, Nell remembered that two years ago, when Bob Gorman ran for Mac’s seat, she had had a wild sense of impatience, a compulsion to be there, a need to see herself in his place. Mac was right. She was a political animal. If she didn’t get into the arena now, it could be too late—or at least, too late for a shot at this seat, which was where she wanted to start a political career.
“What’s Adam’s problem, Nell? He didn’t use to pull this stuff on you.”
“I know.”
“Is anything wrong between you two?”
“No.” She managed a dismissive smile to signify the suggestion was absurd.
How long had it been going on? she wondered. At what point had Adam become distracted, even remote? At first her concerned questions, asking him what was wrong, had been brushed off lightly. Now she detected an edge of anger. Only recently she had told him point-blank that if there was a serious problem with their relationship, then she deserved to hear about it. “I mean any kind of problem, Adam. Being in the dark is the worst problem of all,” she had said.
“Where is Adam?” her grandfather asked.
“He’s in Philadelphia.”
“Since when?”
“Yesterday. He’s speaking at a seminar for architects and interior designers. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I want him at the dinner on the 30th, standing by your side, applauding your decision. Okay?”
“I don’t know how much applauding he’ll do,” she said, a hint of dejection in her voice.
“When you were married he was gung-ho to be the spouse of a future politician. What happened to change his mind?”
You did, Nell thought. Adam became jealous of the time you demanded from me.
When she and Adam were first married, he’d been enthusiastic over the idea that she would continue to be active as Mac’s assistant. But that had changed when her grandfather announced his retirement.
“Nell, we now have a chance for a life that doesn’t revolve around the almighty Cornelius MacDermott,” Adam had
said. “I’m sick of your being at his beck and call. Do you think that will get better if you campaign for his old seat? I have news for you. He won’t give you the chance to breathe, unless he’s exhaling for you.”
The children they’d hoped for hadn’t arrived, and they became part of his argument. “You’ve never known anything except politics,” Adam pleaded. “Sit it out, Nell. The Journal wants you to do a regular column. You might like the freedom.”
His entreaties had helped her make the decision not to pursue the nomination. Now, as she considered her grandfather’s arguments, along with his unique combination of ordering and coaxing her, Nell dispassionately admitted something to herself: commenting on the political scene wasn’t enough. She wanted to be in on the action.
Finally she said, “Mac, I’m going to put my cards on the table. Adam is my husband and I love him. You, on the other hand, have never even liked him.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Then let’s put it another way. Ever since Adam opened his own firm, you’ve had the shiv out for him. If I run for this office, it will be like the old days. You and I will be spending a lot more day-to-day time together, and if that’s going to work you’ve got to promise me that you’ll treat Adam the way you’d want to be treated if the positions were reversed.”
“And if I promise to embrace him to my bosom, then you’ll run?”
When she left Cornelius MacDermott’s office an hour later, Nell had given her word that she would seek the congressional seat being vacated by Bob Gorman.
two
IT WAS THE THIRD TIME Jed Kaplan had passed the ground-floor architectural offices of Cauliff and Associates on Twenty-seventh Street off Seventh Avenue. The window of the converted brownstone contained a display that arrested him: the model of a modern forty-story apartment-office-shopping complex dominated by a gold-domed tower. The starkly postmodern building with its minimal ornamentation and white limestone façade was a striking contrast to the warmth of the brick tower, which radiated light as the dome slowly revolved.
Jed jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans as he slouched forward until his face was almost pressed against the window. To a casual observer there was nothing either unusual or impressive about his appearance. He was of average height, thin, with short sandy hair.
His appearance was deceptive, however; under his faded sweatshirt, Jed’s body was hard and muscular, and his thinness belied his remarkable strength. A close look would have revealed that his complexion had coarsened from long exposure to sun and wind. And actual eye contact would have caused most people to experience an instinctively uneasy reaction.
Thirty-eight years old, Jed had spent most of his life as a loner and a drifter. After five years in Australia, he had returned home for one of his infrequent visits to his widowed mother only to learn that she had sold the small parcel of Manhattan property that had been in the family for four generations, a building which had housed a once-thriving but now barely profitable fur business, with rental apartments above the store.
His reaction had been immediate, and they had quarreled violently about it.
“What’d you expect me to do?” his mother had pleaded. “Building falling apart; insurance going up; taxes going up; tenants moving out. The fur business is going down the toilet. In case you haven’t heard, it isn’t good politics to wear fur anymore.”
“Pop intended for me to have that property,” Jed had shouted. “You had no right to sell it!”
“Pop also wanted you to be a good son to me; he wanted you to settle down, to get married, have children, have a decent job. But you didn’t even come when I wrote that he was dying.” She’d begun to weep. “When was the last time you saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth or Hillary Clinton in a fur? Adam Cauliff paid me a fair price for the property. I have money in the bank. For whatever time I have left, I can sleep at night without worrying about bills.”
With increasing bitterness, Jed observed the model of the complex. He sneered at the legend below the tower: A BEACON OF BEAUTY, SETTING THE TONE FOR THE NEWEST, MOST EXCITING RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT IN MANHATTAN.
The tower was going to be erected on the land his mother had sold to Adam Cauliff.
That land was worth a fortune, he thought. And Cauliff had talked her into believing that you could never do anything to develop it because it was next door to that historical wreck, the old Vandermeer mansion. He knew it never would have occurred to his mother to even try to sell it, though, if Cauliff hadn’t buzzed around her.
Yes, he’d given her fair market value. But then the mansion had burned, and a big-shot real estate guy, Peter Lang, snapped up that property, and by putting it together with the Kaplans’ property they created a prime development site, one now much more valuable as a whole than the two separate parcels had been.
Jed had heard some homeless woman was squatting in the Vandermeer and lit a fire to keep warm. Why didn’t that bum burn down the stinking landmark before Cauliff got his hands on my property? Jed silently raged. Anger, profound and bitter, rose in his throat. I’ll get Cauliff, he vowed. I swear to God I’ll get him. If we still had owned that property after they stopped calling that old dump a landmark, we’d have gotten millions for it . . .
Abruptly, he turned away from the window. Looking at the miniature of the complex practically made him physically ill. He walked to Seventh Avenue where he stood hesitantly for a minute, then headed south. At seven o’clock he was standing at the marina of the World Financial Center. With envious eyes he viewed the array of small, sleek yachts that bobbed up and down in the rising tide.
An obviously new forty-foot cabin cruiser was the object of his attention. The name written in Gothic script across the stern was Cornelia II.
Cauliff’s boat, he thought.
Since his return to New York, Jed had been learning everything he could about Adam Cauliff, and he had been at this spot many times with always the same thought in mind: What am I going to do about that jerk and his precious boat?
three
AFTER THE FINAL SESSION of the architectural seminar in Philadelphia, Adam Cauliff had dinner with two of his colleagues, then quietly checked out of the hotel and drove back to New York.
It was ten-thirty when he started out, and the traffic on the turnpike was reasonably light.
At dinner, Ward Battle had confirmed the rumor that Walters and Arsdale, the architectural firm Adam had worked for until he opened his own company, was being investigated for bid rigging and for accepting bribes from contractors.
“From what I hear, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, Adam, which means, of course, that, as a former employee, you’ll probably be asked a lot of questions. Just thought you should know. Maybe MacDermott can make sure they don’t put much on you.”
Mac help out? Adam thought scornfully. Forget it. If he believed I was involved in any funny-money deals, he’d boil the pitch for them to throw on me.
He’d remained calm at dinner.
“I don’t have anything to worry about,” he had told Battle. “I was just one of the little guys at Walters and Arsdale.”
He had not known what tonight would hold, and had planned to stay over in Philadelphia. As a result, Nell did not expect him home until tomorrow. When Adam exited the Lincoln Tunnel, he hesitated for a moment, then turned right instead of going left, which would have taken him to his apartment uptown. Five minutes later he pulled into a garage on Twenty-seventh Street.
His suitcase in one hand, his keys in the other, he walked the half block to the office. The window lights had turned off automatically, but even so the silhouette of the miniature Vandermeer Tower was starkly handsome in the glow from the streetlight.
Adam stood observing it, unconscious of the weight of the suitcase in his left hand, unaware that he was restlessly tugging at the key ring in his right hand.
Shortly after they met, Cornelius MacDermott had laughingly observed, “Adam, you’re a prime example of the difference betwee
n appearance and reality. You’re from a one-horse town in North Dakota, but you look and sound like a preppie from Yale. How do you manage it?”
“I manage it because I don’t try to pretend to be something I’m not. Maybe you think I should wear overalls and carry a rake?” he had said defensively.
“Don’t be so touchy,” Mac had snapped. “I was complimenting you.”
“Sure you were.”
Mac would have liked Nell to end up with a preppie from Yale, Adam thought, a preppie whose father had clawed his way to the top in New York. Well, Mac may have been a hotshot in Congress, but anything he knows about North Dakota he learned from renting a tape of Fargo, he told himself, dismissing all thought of his wife’s grandfather.
Then something at the end of the deserted street caught his attention. He glanced to the side and noticed a guy hanging out in a nearby doorway. With three quick steps, he was at the office door and turning the key. He didn’t need to get mugged tonight.
He did not relax until he was in his office with the door locked. The handsome oak armoire held a television and a bar. He yanked open the doors, reached for the Chivas Regal and poured a generous amount into a glass. He sat on the couch, slowly sipping the scotch, a man who, to the casual observer, might have seemed to be totally at ease, resting after a long day.
And it was a fact that people did observe Adam. He appeared taller than his six feet because he had taught himself to keep his back ramrod straight, even when sitting. Rigorous exercise had kept his body trim and disciplined. Light hazel eyes and a mouth that curved easily into a smile were the dominant features in his lean face. Darts of gray abundantly sprinkled through his dark brown hair was to him a welcome sight. He knew that without the gray he ran the risk of looking too boyish.
He slid off his jacket, loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. His cell phone was in his pocket. He fished it out and laid it on the table next to his glass. He didn’t have to worry that Nell would phone the hotel and be told that he’d checked out. If she tried to reach him at all, she would dial him on this phone, but the odds were that she wouldn’t try tonight. They had spoken this afternoon, just before she went to see her grandfather, and if his guess was right, that meeting was one she would wait for the right moment to discuss with him.