The October List Part 25

'That's all you could come up with?'

'It's all I wanted.'

'And "Boat" wasn't taken?'

'It's not like you have to trademark names. But, no, I've never seen Boat. Most people are more creative.' He described and spelled some. 'Irritable Bow. A Crewed Interest. Charley's Tuition. Nauty Call.'

She groaned.

'Hold on. Here comes the monster's wake.'

Impressive crests of water charged them.

She knelt, gripped more tightly yet, the backs of her hands pressed against his shoulders. It seemed that he settled back firmly against her knuckles. Daniel straightened the craft and expertly tricked the engine and wheel as they met the first wave.

Boat crashed into and over the swell. She felt her breath leave her lungs as they landed hard.

Another dozen collisions, each tamer than the one before.

The boat settled into a gentle rocking.

'Look,' he said with admiration bordering on awe in his voice. If the Chinese sea monster was impressive, the ship they saw to their right was breathtaking.

'It's as big as a city,' she called. 'What's that one?'

'A VLCC. Very large crude carrier. A tanker. And see how high she's riding? She's in ballast no oil on board. She off-loaded in Jersey.'

'Going to the Panama Ca.n.a.l?'

'She's not going to fit either. She's headed to the Mediterranean or all the way around the Horn.'

't.i.tanic.'

He laughed. 't.i.tanic was half her size' nodding at the supertanker.

'How fast is she going?'

'Even full they can do eighteen knots. Empty, twenty-five, I'd guess. If I was alone I'd race her to that buoy.'

'Why?'

Daniel shrugged. 'Because it'd be fun.'

'No, I mean why only if you were alone?' When he hesitated she added, 'Go ahead. Do it.'

'Race?'

'Sure.'

'I don't know.'

She whispered, 'You have me to thank for the Princeton Solution, remember? You owe me.'

Daniel steered toward the buoy and throttled back, as if giving the VLCC, which must've outweighed Boat by a hundred thousand tons, a head start. The speedboat's exhaust bubbled, the wind hissed and behind them gulls shrieked a plea for chum.

'Ready?'

She cried, 'Go!'

Daniel rammed the throttles forward and Boat sprang away, her needle-shaped bow lifting high as they sprinted for the buoy.

Boat and the ma.s.sive tanker were on intersecting forty-five-degree courses. Every second it grew bigger and darker as they wedged toward each other. Soon the VLCC was an otherworldly thing, visible only in outline and running lights and occasional amber dots of windows. An unstoppable shape, absorbing the entire sky, yet still growing, growing.

'It'll be close,' Daniel shouted. They both glanced to their right at the crude carrier, then ahead to the buoy, which was three hundred yards away.

Then two hundred.

One ...

'Close!' Daniel repeated in a ragged shout. 'It'll be close. I can stop. You want me to stop?'

Her heart pounding, a primitive drum, electrified by the speed, by the looming nearness of the ma.s.sive vessel, by the presence of the man at the wheel, inches from her, Gabriela leaned closer and put her head against his. 'Win,' she whispered. 'I want you to win.'

CHAPTER.

5.

5:00 p.m., Friday

1 hour, 30 minutes earlier

Limoncello's was not busy.

Perhaps it would be, probably would, since the restaurant was in the heart of Wall Street and it was Friday. And the place overlooked picturesque New York Harbor, offering a view of boats and endless waves, rising and falling like a metronome. This was just the spot for traders and brokers, who'd toyed with millions of other people's dollars in the last eight hours, to celebrate their good decisions, to forget the bad.

But now, late afternoon, the bar was half empty. Those business folks who'd arrive later were still at their desks or writing up tickets on the floors of the closed exchanges or at health clubs and on jogs through Battery Park.

Here particularly, near the water, you could smell autumn in the air.

Gabriela wove through the bra.s.s- and oak-accented room, returning from the toilet and sat in the high chair at the bar, which she'd occupied for the past half hour. She slipped her black-and-white-checked jacket off, hung it over the back of the stool. A white silk blouse was tucked primly into a knee-length pleated gray skirt. She wore black hose and mottled burgundy-and-black high heels; she would change into her black flats her walking-to-work shoes later; that comfy pair were on the floor, in the faded Tiffany bag she used for footwear transport.

She resumed editing doc.u.ments she'd been poring over since she'd arrived. The top one was headed Open Items for Accountant. Several entries she crossed through completely. Others she marked with precise asterisks, each line of the sunburst an equal length. Beneath these were a half-dozen sheets headed with the names of companies and below that Balance Sheet and P & L. There wasn't a single sheet that listed a.s.sets below $250 million. Another said, CP Personal Accounts.

She then turned to another contract, headed Short-term Commercial Lease. But there was nothing brief about the contents. Twenty pages of dense type. She sighed and started through it again, pausing once to note herself in the mirror. Her hair was pulled back severely and pinned, which made the auburn shade lighter, for some reason.

She edited the lease some then looked out the tall windows, sipped wine and caught a glimpse of City Pier A. The structure wasn't as large as other piers farther north, in Greenwich Village and in Midtown, but this one had more history. The Professor had been particularly interested in the sagas of Downtown Manhattan and would spend hours reeling off stories to her. Built in the 1880s for the Department of Docks and the Harbor Police, Pier A had been witness to the relentless expansion of the city. She noted the seven-story clock tower, which had been built in 1919. The elaborate timepiece was a memorial to the U.S. soldiers killed in the First World War. This was particularly poignant, considering that the original pier had been built by the son of a famous Union general in the Civil War.

She could listen to the Professor for hours.

As Gabriela returned to the lease, the man beside her set his drink down and continued to speak into his mobile phone.

Gabriela stiffened and blurted, 'Oh. Hey.' When he didn't respond she spoke more forcefully. 'Excuse me.'

He finally realized that he was the object of the comment. He turned, frowning.

She was displaying her sleeve, which was stained brown. 'Look.'

His square handsome face, eerily resembling that of a well-known actor, beneath close-cropped, black hair, studied the sleeve and then her face. His eyes followed hers to his gla.s.s of scotch. His brows rose. 'Oh, h.e.l.l.' Into the phone, 'I'll call you back, Andrew.' He disconnected. 'Did I do that? I'm sorry.'

Gabriela said, 'When you put your gla.s.s down, yeah. Just now. On the phone, you were talking, and you turned. It spilled.'

'Sorry,' he repeated. It sounded genuine, not defensive.

His eyes migrated from the stain to her white blouse, all of the blouse, beneath which a trace of bra was visible. It was pale blue. Then his gaze settled back on the stain. 'Silk?'

'Yes, it is.'

'I know what to do,' he explained. And took charge, summoning the bartender, a young man who seemed to be covering tats on his neck with makeup; this was a Wall Street, not an East Village, bar.

'Soda water and a towel, no, not the green one. The white one. The white towel. And salt.'

'Salt?'

'Salt.'

The remedies arrived. He didn't apply the water and seasoning himself but let her do it. She'd heard the trick too from her mother, as he had from his grandmother, he told her.

'Careful with the salt,' he said. 'I don't know how well it works on silk. You might hurt the cloth if you rub too hard.'

The magic trick did a pretty good job. Just the faintest discoloration remained.

She examined him with eyes beneath furrowed brows, then: 'Why don't you drink Martinis like everybody else here?'

'I don't like Martinis. I'd probably have a strawberry Cosmo, and if that was the case, the stain would never come out. I'll pay for the cleaning.'

'If I were a man would you make that offer?'

'I don't make any offers to a man wearing a silk blouse.'

She kept a straight face for a moment then laughed. 'No, thanks. It'd have to go to the laundry anyway.'

'Well, I apologize again.'

She lifted her palms. 'Accepted.'

With detente achieved, she returned to the lease and he to his mobile. But when the last page of the doc.u.ment was marked up and when his call disconnected, the silence prodded them to glance toward each other in the mirror at first and conversation resumed.

'I'm sending you back home stinking of whisky. What's your husband going to say?'

'He probably won't find out. Since he lives thirty miles away from me.'

'Ah, you're in that club too. I'm Daniel Reardon.'

'Gabriela McKenzie.'

They shook hands.

Conversation meandered for a bit, both of them testing the waters, and then found true north, which included the question you can never avoid in New York: What do you do for a living?

Daniel worked as a venture capitalist, private equity, he told her. 'The Norwalk Fund.' He nodded. 'We're a few blocks from here. On Broad.'

Gabriela glanced at the doc.u.ments. 'I'm office manager for a financial adviser. Prescott Investments.'

'Don't think I know them.' He glanced down at the doc.u.ments before her, then away quickly, as if looking at confidential client details was tantamount to glancing through an inadvertently left-open bathroom door.

'It's a small outfit. He was with Merrill years ago but opened his own shop. He's a lot happier.'

'Your office is near here?'

'No, Midtown, east. Turtle Bay.' She sighed. 'My boss he's a great guy but he dumped this in my lap this morning. He wants to lease a warehouse on Bankers' Square near Wall Street and the deal fell through. I got elected to check out some new s.p.a.ce... and go over a forty page lease. We need to sign it up in two weeks.'

'Two weeks?'

'Yep. And you know Banker's Square? It took hours even to get inside and look the place over. All that construction.'

'Oh, the new stock market annex. Supposed to finished by now.'

'Anyway, I came here to jot some notes and unwind.'