chime, with a long, echoing sustain, the sound lingering in the air. Tom could feel his heart thumping in his chest. And then he saw the culprit: his new BlackBerry, fresh out of the box just yesterday. He hadn't got around to setting it to silent.
He squinted at his watch. Half past ten in the morning. That was OK: he hadn't got to bed till five, having worked through the night on the Dubai contract. Then he remembered: he hadn't spent all night working.
‘Hey, Miranda. Wakey wakey.’
There was a groan from the pile of brunette hair resting on the pillow next to him, followed by a lift of the head and a grunt. ‘It's Marina.’
‘Sorry.’ Tom swung his legs out of the bed and headed over for the blinds, which he louvred open, flooding the room with light. ‘OK, Marina, I mean it. Rise and shine.’
The woman in the bed sat up, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. She didn't bother to cover herself, affording Tom a daytime view of the generous breasts he had been enjoying just a few hours earlier. Maybe young Upper West Side brunettes had their drawbacks, but right now he wasn't seeing any. Perhaps he could hop back into bed for another half hour …
The BlackBerry sounded again, a single high-volume chime to herald the arrival of a message. Bound to be his clients: he had sent them the first draft of the paperwork in the middle of the night, and here they were, already demanding revisions. You could say what you liked about organized crime, but you had to hand it to them: they worked long hours.
His new clients were what you'd call ‘a family of Italian-American descent with long and historic roots in the New York construction industry’ – that is if you were their lawyer. They were now seeking to expand into property in the Persian Gulf, all legal and legit, but there was a pile of international papers that had to be filed first. A friend of a friend had recommended him and the family were happy to have him – they liked being represented by a big-shot international lawyer, British-born and with several years at the United Nations on his resumé – and he was happy to have them, earning more in a week than he had earned in a year working for the blue-helmets of UN Plaza.
He watched as Marina slunk out of bed, nodding her in the direction of the shower, then looked back down at the BlackBerry. 1 Missed Call. He pressed it to see a single name displayed: Henning.
Now there was a surprise. Henning Munchau, Legal Counsel for the United Nations, hadn't called Tom from his personal cellphone all that often even when Tom worked for him. But that had been more than a year ago.
Tom would listen to the message first, before calling back – a habit picked up at the UN, an institution whose organizing principle could be boiled down to three little words: wait and see. His younger self had always been in such a hurry, but Tom had learned from the best that it paid to take your time, give yourself a moment to think, let the other guy show his hand first, even – especially – when the other guy was your boss. Or former boss. A few seconds' thinking time might make all the difference. Christ, the rule even applied to face-to-face conversations in that place. It was as if Harold Pinter had written the dialogue, the way UN officials would pause to read each other's expressions and divine their motivations.
‘Hi Tom, it's Henning. We need to talk. I know what you said about… Meet me at that coffee shop as fast as you can. Tom, I… don't call me back.’
Not even a ‘long time no speak’, the prick.
So the UN's most senior lawyer needed to discuss a topic so sensitive he didn't dare do it on the telephone or in his own building. That was hardly news: everyone knew there was not a word spoken in UN Plaza that was not monitored, by the Yanks at NSA, by the Brits at GCHQ and by God knows who else. But ‘meet me at the coffee shop’ was especially interesting. That meant Henning didn't even want to give away a specific location. And why on earth, given everything that had happened, had he called Tom? If it had been anyone else from the UN, Tom would have hit delete and not given it another thought. But this was Henning.
He walked into the closet, reviewing the line of suits arranged like conscripts on parade. Big meeting like this would normally call for the Prada or Paul Smith. But Tom didn't want to rub Henning's public sector salary in his face; he'd go for something plainer. Pink shirt and cufflinks? No, the plain blue would do. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: wrong side of forty, but he could still scrub up all right. No time for a shower today though. He shot two bursts of Hugo Boss aftershave onto his neck and mussed up his close-cropped, dirty blond hair.
The BlackBerry was now winking with the arrival of an email. Subject: Dubai. Sure enough, the Fantonis had been reading the small print. They'd noticed the legal obligation to pay compensation to the fishermen whose villages they were about to destroy to make way for a luxury high-rise development. ‘Can't we make this clause go away?’
Tom got ready to draft a reply that would explain the moral obligation on all developers to ensure that anybody rendered homeless would be adequately …
Fuck it. Using his thumbs, he typed: ‘Leave it to me: it's gone.’
He gathered up his things, admiring again the vast, open space of this loft apartment. He wondered about firing up the plasma TV, to check on the news but decided against it: Henning was waiting. Instead he poked his head around the bathroom door and called into the cloud of steam: ‘See yourself out, Miranda.’
The cab driver shook his turbaned head, muttering that he would get as far as he could, but the road had been blocked for the last hour. ‘On the radio, they say something about terror attack. You here on 9/11?’
Tom handed him a ten dollar bill and got out at 39th Street, walking as far as he could. He could see the clutch of police cars, their red lights winking, and behind them the glare of TV bulbs already illuminating a jam of trucks bearing satellite dishes. In itself that was no surprise during General Assembly week. He assumed the Russian tsar was in town – no point calling him anything else – or any one of the usual procession of African, Central Asian and Middle Eastern despots in New York for the glory of a stroll up to the podium of the General Assembly when they were lucky not to be in the dock at the Hague.
But now he could see a city cop, a woman, turning people back from the first entry gate to UN Plaza. Along the railings, stretching for several blocks, apparently encircling the entire compound like a ribbon on a Christmas gift, was a continuous thread of yellow-and-black plastic tape: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.
He walked on, noticing how each successive entrance was blocked off. The gate used by the public was thronged by a pack of reporters, photographers and cameramen. Tom was tall enough to peer over their heads, to see, in the middle of the paved area in front of the security marquee, a small tent constructed from green tarpaulin. Around it fussed police officers, a single photographer and a forensic team in overalls, masks and white latex gloves.
He crossed the road, threading his way through the cars. Facing him was the concrete phallic symbol that was the Trump World Tower and a skyscraper decorated with a damp and limp German flag: Deutschland's mission to the UN. The Nations' Café was just next door.
He saw Henning Munchau immediately, earnestly studying the map-of-the-world pattern that decorated the vinyl table top. Funny how easily men of power could be diminished. Inside the UN, Munchau was a player who could stride through corridors, winning deferential nods of the head from everyone he passed. But take him out of the building and he was just another New York suit with
