Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The office was Richard’s before it was mine, and I’ve changed almost nothing in it.
The same dark shelves, heavy with the bound league records no one has opened in twenty years.
The same broad desk, oak the color of strong tea, angled so that whoever sits behind it sees the door a full second before the door sees him.
The same two leather chairs on the supplicant’s side of all that wood, lower than mine by an inch and a half, which is not an accident and was never an accident.
I kept every bit of it on purpose. A man learns more from the room he inherits than from any room he builds for himself, and Richard built this one to be looked up to across a great deal of polished oak.
Right now the oak is the only thing standing between me and Raymond Glasgow, and Raymond is smiling at me across it the way men smile when they’ve already decided they’ve won.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” he says, and lays a slim leather folder on the desk between us. “I’ve always admired that about you, Flint. No taste for ceremony. So.” He flips the cover open with one manicured finger. “Neither will I.”
I don’t reach for the photographs. I’ve negotiated against far better men than Raymond Glasgow, and the first thing they teach you, if anyone bothers teaching you anything at all where I come from, is that the man who lunges for the thing on the table has just told the whole room how badly he wants it.
So I leave the folder where it lies, the edge of one glossy print showing past the leather, and I look at Raymond instead, and I let the silence do to him what silence does to a man who walked in with his lines rehearsed.
He cracks before I do. They always crack before I do. He turns the top photograph a few degrees toward me with that same finger. “Two months,” he says. “And I’ll be candid, that’s only what we gathered in the last two months.”
I look down.
It’s her. Camilla, in the soft grey wool coat I bought her in the spring because she said the cold here was different from California cold, her face turned up toward a man a full head taller than she is, laughing at something he’s just said.
Barrymore. There’s no mistaking him, there has never been any mistaking him, the most photographed jaw in the sport, the golden retired god of the Waymakers, and his hand is resting at the small of my wife’s back as though it has every right in the world to be there.
I turn it over. The next one. The two of them on a park bench, her head tipped to rest against his shoulder, two paper cups of coffee between them on the slats. The next. A café table behind glass, his coat draped over the back of her chair. The next, and the next.
I go through all of them. I make myself do it slowly, one print at a time, my face arranged into the same expensive nothing I’d wear across any table where nine figures were changing hands, because the alternative is to let Raymond Glasgow see what is happening underneath it, and I would sooner take a letter opener to my own hand than give him that.
“You understand,” Raymond says gently, “why I’m showing you these.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Because I want you out.” He says it pleasantly, almost warmly, the way only the truly old money can say the very ugliest things. “And I’m hardly alone, Flint. The whole board wants you out. We’ve only been waiting for a reason that would let us be civil about the doing of it.”
“Civil,” I repeat.
“We’re old-fashioned here. You knew that walking in.
We prefer our own kind, and Barrymore is our own kind, down to the bone.
Good family, good name, the right schools, a grandfather with a wing of the hospital named after him.
” He spreads both manicured hands, taking in the room, the building, the whole gilded world I bought my way into.
“Camilla is Richard’s daughter. Every man at that table watched her learn to walk in these halls.
We are all, each one of us, cut from a single bolt of cloth.
” His gaze travels down my suit, which is worth rather more than his car, and finds it wanting anyway, the way it was always going to find it wanting no matter what I paid.
“And then there is you. The boy from the wrong side of the tracks who married his way to a seat at the table. It was never going to hold. Surely you always knew that.”
I say nothing. I’ve learned over the years that nothing is the most expensive thing I can hand a man like this, because nothing gives him no purchase, no edge, nothing to set his weight against.
“Give up your seat,” Raymond goes on, encouraged by the quiet the way I knew he would be.
“Sell your shares back to the group. We’ll see you paid handsomely, more than handsomely, and you can carry that remarkable talent of yours somewhere it’ll be admired for what it earns instead of resented for what it bought.
” He settles back into the leather, crossing one leg over the other.
“Or stay. Stay, and explain to a table full of men who watched that girl grow up why you mean to go on sitting among them while your wife makes a public fool of you with the franchise’s favorite son.
Do you really want to remain, Flint? Tethered to a woman who’s been meeting the Waymakers’ greatest legend behind your back for months? ”
There it is. The blade he came to slide in, finally drawn out from under all that civility and pushed home clean.
I let it sit between us a moment. I gather the photographs back into a neat stack, square the edges against the desk, and close the leather cover over them with one unhurried motion, and only when my hand is resting on the shut folder do I let myself speak.
“Bills.”
He’s been standing in the doorway since the conversation turned, because reading a room before I’ve finished thinking it is exactly what I pay him for. “Sir.”
“Please escort Mr. Glasgow out of the building.” I keep my eyes on Raymond the whole time. “And let security know he’s no longer welcome anywhere in The Res. Any door, any day. If he turns up at one, I want a call before he’s finished being refused.”
For the first time, the smile slips clean off his face. “Flint?—”
“Mr. Glasgow was just leaving,” I tell Bills.
Raymond rises, buttons his jacket with hands that aren’t quite as smooth as they were ten minutes ago, and finds enough of himself to try once more from the door.
“You can throw me out of your building. You can’t throw the truth out along with me.
” He nods at the folder under my palm. “Keep those, by the way. I had copies made.”
Then Bills walks him out, and the heavy door settles into its frame with a sound like a vault closing, and I am alone with a folder of photographs and the particular ringing silence of a room that was built to be looked up to.
I don’t open the folder again. I don’t need to; the prints are already developing themselves on the inside of my eyelids, and they’ll go on developing there for a long time.
This is the part I’m supposed to be good at.
Not the feeling. The deciding. I have spent my entire life learning to strip a situation down past whatever everyone in the room wants it to be and see only what’s actually left standing when the wanting has been cleared away, and the discipline doesn’t fail me even now.
So I do the thing I do. I take it apart.
Raymond wants me gone. That much is true, and it was true long before any photograph existed; he’d have manufactured his reason out of thin air if a real one hadn’t come to hand.
The board’s contempt is real too, older than my marriage, older than my money, as old as the first time one of them heard the name of the neighborhood I was born in and watched something close behind his eyes.
None of that is news to me. A man doesn’t climb to where I’ve climbed without learning to hear you don’t belong here spoken fluently in a dozen polite dialects.
So I could dismiss the folder. I should, by every rule I have ever lived by. Consider the source, weigh the motive, discard the rest accordingly.
Except that I reach for my phone instead, and I call Chip.
I assigned him to her myself, in the first month of the marriage, a quiet competent former patrol officer whose entire job is to drive my wife wherever she wants to go and to keep the world at a courteous distance while she’s there. He picks up on the second ring.
“Mr. Flint.”
“Where is Mrs. Flint this afternoon?”
A pause. Not a long one. Just a beat longer than the question should have cost him. “The memorial cemetery, sir. She visits her father most weeks.”
“Is she alone?”
The pause is longer this time, and in the length of it I hear the answer before he gives it to me, the way you hear a glass start to tip past its balance at the edge of a table a full second before it ever meets the floor.
“No, sir. Mr. Barrymore’s with her. He was already there when we pulled up.”
I thank him. I’m told afterward that I thanked him quite calmly.
I set the phone down on the closed folder, on the grey coat and the upturned laughing face I can’t see through the leather but no longer need to, and I sit in the room Richard built to be looked up to, forty floors above a city that apparently knew before I did, and I learn that there is a kind of cold that comes from somewhere inside a man and works its way out.
I don’t go home.