Midnight
The elevator doors open on the 50th floor and the smell hits me first.
Bourbon. Mahogany. Rain that has found a way in through fifty stories of glass and steel. And underneath all of it — something else. The particular smell of a room that has been occupied recently. Warm. Present.
I tell myself I am imagining it.
I step out.
The corridor is dark except for the city light bleeding through the glass at the far end — New York at midnight, all amber and neon and the cold blue of tower windows, spread out like something that has never needed to be beautiful and became beautiful anyway. My sneakers make no sound on the marble. I count my steps the way I count things when I'm frightened — automatically, pointlessly, the mind finding something to do while the body does the thing it has decided to do regardless.
Forty-three steps to his office door.
It is open.
Not wide. Six inches. Enough for the light inside — the city light, the ambient glow of a room with glass on three sides — to lay a thin stripe across the marble of the corridor.
I stop.
A door left open in an empty building at midnight is either an oversight or an invitation. I am a journalist. I know the difference. I also know that the difference rarely announces itself.
I go anyway. I go in because Pete Garvey is not answering his phone and the file he gave me is in my bag and the file points here and here is the only place left to point.
The office is enormous in the way of rooms that do not need to prove anything. A mahogany desk at the center — clean, uncluttered, the desk of a man who makes decisions rather than delays them. Two chairs facing it. Floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. The city breathing below.
I go to the desk.
Third drawer. Pete said third drawer, left side, the folder with no label.
I reach for it.
*"Jane Marie Arthur."*
I still go completely.
The voice comes from the right. From the shadow beside the window that I looked at and registered as a shadow and was not a shadow at all.
He is standing there with a glass of bourbon held loosely in one hand and the absolute stillness of a man who has not moved in a long time and does not need to. The city behind him makes him a silhouette — tall, dark-suited, face in shadow — until he takes one step forward and the ambient light finds him.
I have seen his photograph.
The photographs do not prepare you.
His face is the kind of face that has been made rather than born — sharp jaw, darker circles under gray eyes than his public photographs show, the particular look of a man who sleeps four hours a night and has done so for years and has decided it is simply the cost of being what he is. He is looking at me in the way I have never been looked at. Not with anger, not with surprise.
With the calm of a man who has been waiting.
*He has been waiting.*
*"I—"* I start.
*"Don't,"* he says. His voice is low. It doesn't need volume. It fills the room the way water fills a container — completely, without effort, finding every available space. *"Don't explain. Don't apologize."* A pause. *"And don't lie to me. We'll get along much better."*
My hand is still in the open drawer.
I take it out slowly.
He watches me the way a man watches something that belongs to him — not possessively, not hungrily. Simply with the certainty of ownership. It is the most frightening thing I have ever been on the receiving end of.
*"Sit down,"* he says.
I sit. The chair accepts me like it has been waiting too.
He crosses the room — unhurried, each step deliberate — and he goes to the door. I watch him. My pulse counts the seconds the way I count my footsteps. He reaches for the door.
He closes his hand around the handle.
He locks it.
The sound of the deadbolt is the smallest sound in the room and the loudest thing I have ever heard.
He turns back.
He looks at me across the enormous mahogany desk and the amber city light and the fifty floors of air between us and the street below and he says:
*"I've been watching you for four months, Jane."*
I open my mouth.
He speaks before I can.
*"I know your coffee order. I know your source's name. I know your sister lives on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn and I know she calls you every Sunday at eight p.m. and you always answer, even when you're in the middle of something."*
The room suddenly became very cold.
*"I know,"* he says, *"that you found the file three hours ago. I know which sub folders you opened. I know which name stopped you."*
He picks up the bourbon. Take a single slow sip.
*"I know,"* he says, setting it down, *"that you came here tonight not because you are brave but because you are out of options."*
He is right.
He is completely, precisely, humiliatingly right.
*"Sit down, Jane,"* he says again. *"We have a great deal to discuss."*
And I realize — sitting in the chair I did not choose in the office I should not be in, with the door locked behind a man who knew I was coming before I left my apartment — that I have been sitting down for four months.
I just didn't know it yet.
