Part 1 The Dash to New York #4
Given that Bill is an old man, she was factually correct, but I can’t help it, I love my Hokas. I just don’t wear them when I go to Hooters for my daily lunch. Before I go there, I put on the Converse Chuck Taylor IIs that I once bought with Darla since I don’t want to hurt her feelings.)
Oh, and then there’s my new jacket.
Audrey gave it to me for my birthday.
It’s a dark brown corduroy Levi’s trucker jacket.
Audrey says it ‘fits me like a glove’ and makes me look ‘very handsome’.
(Darla approved of it wholeheartedly.
‘I love it. Now, you listen to me, darlin’. This gal of yours, she’s got taste. She’s also smart, hot, twenty thousand leagues out of your league, and a freakin’ federal agent, so don’t go and fuck this up with her, y’hear.’)
Whether my new jacket makes me look more handsome or not, I don’t know, but it’s comfortable, so I happily wear it.
And if it makes my girlfriend—yes, my girlfriend—happy, then I’ll wear pretty much anything she tells me to.
My newfound fame also had a very good effect on business.
My little detective agency in Houston got far more inquiries and cases than usual—I was lucky I’d added Heidi and Bill to the team because it required all three of us to handle the increased case load.
Having said that, I often felt that many of these new clients really just wanted to say they’d hired me, ‘The Detective’, Sam Speedman.
Which is all to say, in short, fame gets old pretty quickly.
Chiefly because it becomes annoying.
Like the selfies.
(‘The endless goddamn fucking selfies,’ as Heidi put it. ‘Don’t these people have lives?’)
She had a point.
Tourists would stop by our office to take selfies in front of the door, eager to post its now-celebrated logo on their social media pages:
People interrupted me at lunch at Hooters to get a selfie, even if I was chewing on a mouthful of food.
When you become famous, you kind of become public property.
Sometimes, when you refuse someone’s selfie, they get angry. They think they own you.
It can become a little trying.
That said, my fame would ultimately lead to something far worse than annoying selfies.
The summons from the FBI to New York City.
BILLIONAIRES’ ROW,
NEW YORK CITY
New York City
21 December, 1125 hours
With only thirty-five minutes to go until the noon deadline, our Gulfstream landed at Teterboro Airport, a private airport located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan and the closest to the city.
Stepping out of the jet, I felt the chill instantly, even though I was wearing my trucker jacket and ball cap.
It was cold here.
Much colder than in Texas.
Directly across from our plane was an FBI chopper, its rotors already turning, waiting for us.
Heidi and Bill strode directly across to the helicopter.
I lingered back.
I don’t like flying in helicopters.
If the motor of a single-engine plane fails, that plane can still glide to the ground. If a helicopter’s lone engine fails, it can (in theory) use autorotation to arrest its fall, but I’m very doubtful about that concept.
In order to combat this fear, my therapist Dr Lucy suggested I learn how to fly a helicopter, given that when I know how something works, I accept it more readily.
I’d met her halfway and done 37 hours on a helicopter flight simulator, but I’d still never actually piloted a real chopper.
Bill noticed my hesitation.
We’d discussed my helicopter phobia before, since he’d flown Army choppers in the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 (yes, he was that old; and no, he’d never done an autorotation landing).
He came over and clapped my shoulder reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, son, we’ll be okay. I’ve flown in tons of whirlybirds and I’m still here to tell the tale.’
‘Thanks, Bill.’
I figured on this occasion, given our hurry, I had no choice, so I took a deep breath, girded myself, and boarded the FBI helicopter.
The pilot introduced himself as Jim.
‘Have you ever done an emergency autorotation landing, Jim?’ I asked as I strapped on my seatbelt.
‘What? Uh, no, can’t say that I have,’ he replied distractedly, throwing a look to his co-pilot. ‘This’ll be a quick flight, maybe twelve minutes, so I can’t see that being necessary.’
Then we took off and sped over the glittering expanse of the Hudson toward the Manhattan skyline.
(A quick word about New York City.
I’d been there once before, following a cheating husband who had a second family there, but I hadn’t stayed for long.
Some people love New York City, others hate it.
It’s definitely a buzzing place and there’s always something to do or see—Broadway shows, Times Square, the Naked Cowboy, rats, uncollected garbage—but the main reason for people’s polarised views is probably because New York City houses a lot of people in a relatively small space.
The island of Manhattan has a population of 1.6 million while the other four boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island—add another 6.8 million, giving the greater New York metro area a population of an astonishing 8.4 million people.
For local New Yorkers, this makes everyday life a Darwinian death struggle to get where they’re going through all the crowds of other headstrong New Yorkers trying to get where they’re going. They yell at each other often.
For tourists, this makes local New Yorkers look like obnoxi-ous assholes.
For me, it just makes New York City a really fascinating social experiment: can an oversized group of Type A personalities live in close proximity to each other and not tear each other apart?)
The towers of midtown Manhattan whooshed by beneath us—a bit too close for my liking—as the chopper zoomed toward the long open rectangle in the middle of the city that was Central Park.
Winter had taken away the park’s usual green glow.
Today, it was brown and white: leafless trees and dormant grass, all covered in a dusting of snow.
Urban canyons dropped away below us.
Cabs, buses and pedestrians looked tiny from this high up.
Then suddenly our destination rose before us.
A super-high, and super-slender, shining gold tower.
(A single NYPD helicopter hovered near its roof, but there were no news choppers. New York City has strict airspace controls.)
Officially called ‘59West’, the skyscraper we were approaching was an astonishing 98 storeys tall and one of a handful of recently built ‘pencil towers’ or ‘supertalls’ that had sprouted near the southern end of Central Park and become known as Billionaires’ Row.
With residences spanning whole floors and views to every horizon, these super-skinny skyscrapers seemed to defy the laws of physics, but advances in steel and in wind-resistant weighting systems had made them possible.
Looking like chopsticks stabbing up into the sky, the supertalls of Billionaires’ Row had instantly redefined the New York skyline, soaring far above the two iconic buildings that for almost a century had dominated the city: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings.
(Early criticism, of course, had been fierce.
They were literal ivory towers that allowed the super-rich to live above the masses.
Critics were naturally thrilled when faults in the new towers came to light.
Like the garbage chute in 432 Park Avenue: when garbage bags dropped from the upper floors hit the bottom of the vertical shaft, they made booms so loud they sounded like explosions to residents on the lower floors.
Or when it was revealed that one of the towers swayed sickeningly in high winds.
Indeed, wind was the natural enemy of towers such as these. This tower, I saw, like 432 Park, had double-storey open-air ‘blow-through floors’ positioned every twenty-five storeys, so the wind could pass through the building’s body.)
Residences in the supertalls were some of the most expensive not only in New York but in all of America.
Michael Dell bought the top two floors in One57 for over $100 million. A Saudi retail magnate nabbed another in 432 Park for $88 million.
Kenneth Griffin’s purchase of four entire floors in 220 Central Park South for a whopping $238 million was the most expensive price paid for a home in the United States.
And then there was our destination, 59West.
Featuring very distinctive gold-tinted windows, it was situated two blocks north of 57th Street, on 59th Street, which meant it fronted directly onto Central Park.
(This also meant it partially blocked the views of a couple of the supertalls on 57th Street, including the Steinway Tower, where one of Aristo King’s ex-wives had an apartment. The social pages had dined out on that fact.)
59West also came with a unique and much sought-after feature, something that none of the other pencil towers had: a helipad on its roof.
This was one of the last taboos of high-end New York City real estate restrictions: no helipads.
It was rumoured that Aristo King himself had made it happen.
How he’d done it—political donations, bribes, personal favours—no-one knew.
But everyone knew that King delighted in landing his personal chopper on the roof of his tower and walking—walking!—down to his splendid residence.
He had bought his penthouse off the plan for $155 million.
Our helicopter did a slow banking circle around the summit of the skinny tower and as it did, I saw, down on the streets far below, a ring of NYPD police cars parked around the building, their blue-and-red lights flashing, sealing it off.
Closer to me, on the tower’s rooftop, I saw four individuals waiting for us on the helipad: three men in suits and a woman in an FBI windbreaker.
More FBI.
Then, buffeted by the erratic winds of the city, the chopper edged in toward the giant ‘H’ painted in a circle on the helipad and—to my relief—landed softly atop 59West, fourteen hundred feet above the planet.