“He must have been a better con man than most.”
“Oh, he was. Anyway, as for McAdam, that was in terms of Jon Baird and the people at Baird Financial, and to tell you the truth, even if the agreement hadn’t been signed the McAdam thing would have been pretty small potatoes over there anyway. Just before Jon Baird went to prison, Baird Financial started negotiations to merge with Europabanc. Just about the time McAdam died, the negotiations paid off. Baird Financial and Europabanc are set to merge next month, and it’s going to be the biggest thing in international finance since the birth of the first Rothschild. Next to that, McAdam’s twelve and a half million dollars isn’t much.”
“No,” Gregor said, “I can see it isn’t. But then what is? What is going on with the McAdam investigation that makes you want to ask me about Jon Baird? Or about the death of Donald McAdam at all.”
“It’s not just Jon Baird we’re looking at,” Jeremy said, “it’s all of them, because they were the people we know McAdam spoke to on the day he died. You see what I mean?”
“Not exactly. You just said McAdam wasn’t murdered.”
“I said we didn’t think McAdam was murdered.”
“Has Steve gotten this convoluted in his old age? Does he talk in circles about this thing, too?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy Bayles sighed. He looked into his coffee cup, pushed it away from him, and said, “Could I have a glass of milk? I’ve got an ulcer and coffee sort of gets to me sometimes.”
Gregor got up, went to his refrigerator, and hunted around for milk. He found an aluminum-foil covered pan with a pile of yaprak sarma inside it that hadn’t been there when he’d left for old George’s in the morning. He got the milk from the door shelf, smelled it to make sure it hadn’t died, and handed it over.
“Donald McAdam,” Gregor urged Bayles, reaching into the cabinet for a clean glass.
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy agreed. “You know what happened to him? He was this guy liked to mix a little strychnine in his cocaine—if you ask me, all druggies are nuts—and so he came home after signing this agreement with Baird Financial and decided to toot up in celebration except the celebration got out of hand and he got poisoned—”
“You don’t get poisoned by strychnine,” Gregor said. “It’s not that kind of a substance. It’s a drug that magnifies your body’s response to external stimuli. If you could lie absolutely quietly in a room without light or sound—and I mean without, some kind of scientifically engineered environment—if you could do that, you could swallow all the strychnine you want and not die from it. What you die from with strychnine is convulsions caused by stimulus overload.”
“Wonderful,” Jeremy said, “that must be why the druggies took a shine to the stuff. Let me tell you, though, whatever you die from, you definitely do die. When we were doing the paperwork on this, I got the NYPD stats on deaths of this sort and they’re incredible.”
“Donald McAdam.”
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy said. “Right. Well. He goes home, he takes this stuff all stoked with strychnine, he’s out on his balcony, he has a series of convulsions and goes flipping over the rail and falls splat, all because of the strychnine in the cocaine, right?”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Wrong,” Jeremy Bayles said.
“Wrong?”
Jeremy Bayles took a swig of milk as if it were liquor and tapped the bottom of his glass against the kitchen table. The glass hitting the wooden table made a hollow bell-like sound that was oddly pleasant.
“Wrong,” Jeremy Bayles said, “because there were traces of the coke lines he’d done on the table where he’d set them out and there wasn’t any strychnine in them. There wasn’t any strychnine in the food in the refrigerator, either, or in any of the bottles in the medicine cabinet or in any of the rest of the cocaine in his stash. There wasn’t a single grain of strychnine anywhere in that apartment.”
Three
1
JULIE ANDERWAHL GOT SEASICK for the first time standing on the corner of Willow and Wall, five blocks north of the World Trade Center, at four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, November sixteenth. It was one of those bright-cold days in New York. The air was as thin and brittle as glass, and the thick waves of exhaust that rose from the buses and cars that were trying to maneuver through the twisting streets were self-contained, as if they’d been born in bubbles. In spite of the lateness of the hour, Julie had just eaten lunch. She’d gone through a long day of work on the public relations campaign for the Europabanc merger thinking of nothing but shrimp with lobster sauce, and then, when the calls from Brussels and Geneva had all come in and her secretary had retired to the ladies’ room in a storm of tension tears, she’d taken off for Chinatown. It had even felt like a good idea, in the beginning. The walk up had cleared her head. Julie always found it hard to sit for hour after hour in canned air. The food had been good, too. Like a lot of people who worked on Wall Street and in the Trade Center, Julie had a little list of perfect Chinatown restaurants in her head. She knew where to go for Szechuan and Hunan and Cantonese, and which places were “authentic” because they promised pickled chicken feet in Chinese characters on strips of paper hung along the walls. Today, she hadn’t been prepared for chicken feet. She’d gone to Madame Lu’s, which was decked out for Westerners in fake black leather upholstery and paper satin wallpaper of gold. Madame Lu’s served shrimp with lobster sauce on lo mein noodles instead of rice. Julie had eaten a ton of it, so much she began to feel like a balloon blown up to the bursting point, ready to pop.