One of Our Own Read online

  “Because the people in the luxury apartments are more interested in status than money,” Gregor said.

  “And they don’t want to know that the poor people even exist,” Washington said. “But it’s more complicated than that, at least for me. My father had a three-story stacker out in Lansdowne. We lived in the top floor and rented out the two floors beneath us. We rented to people more or less as poor as we were ourselves. You may not believe this, Mr. Demarkian, but it’s expensive to rent to poor people. Most poor people are fine, you know, but even the good ones have money problems and can’t pay the rent. The others will kill you. They break things. They get hyped up on alcohol and drugs and wreck the place. There are domestic disputes and the cops get called. The rent on those other two apartments paid our mortgage. It got hard sometimes to make that mortgage payment.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “I can see that.”

  “You can see it, but you’ve got to think it through,” Washington said. “It can be hard to make enough money to keep a place running when you’re renting affordable apartments. That’s why the services in those places are so bad. Some cities put up all kinds of regulations demanding that every building have this service or that service, and then it gets to be impossible to run those kinds of buildings and make them pay at all. Then you lose small owner-occupied buildings, which is too bad, because conditions are better for everybody when the owner lives there, too. If you jack up the regulations high enough, you start to lose the corporate-operated ones, too. And every building you lose, every rental unit that disappears from the market, means another guy out on the street in the winter weather. And not just guys.”

  “I take it there isn’t enough public housing to carry them,” Gregor said.

  “No sane person wants to live in public housing if they can help it,” Washington said. “And no sane person wants to bring up children there. But it’s more than that. Undocumented immigrants can’t get into public housing.”

  “At all?”

  “If there’s a member of the family that’s here legally, or a citizen, that person can get into public housing and bring some of the undocumented family with them. That happens sometimes. But this is a city with a big undocumented population. ICE has practically taken up residence downtown. We had a raid in North Philadelphia that cleared out eight hundred people in a single day. And maybe those people shouldn’t be here and we can take up that argument another day, but a lot of those people are children. And I don’t want to see children sleeping in the parks when it’s seventeen below.”

  “So you put up with Cary Alder,” Gregor said.

  “So I won’t say there’s nothing good to say about Cary Alder,” Washington corrected. “He serves a purpose. Until we can find a way to provide better housing to more people, people like him are going to be necessary to keep people off the streets. And I’m not looking at a world where we’re going to find a way to provide better housing any time soon.”

  “Are you sure you want me to find out what the man is doing?”

  Michael Washington sighed. The air came up out of the middle of him in a gigantic wave, so that he inflated and deflated like a bellows.

  “Yes,” he said. “Because I’m with John. There’s something going on there that’s weirder than a grade-B horror movie plot, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”

  FOUR

  1

  It was Tommy Moradanyan who convinced Bennis to take Javier to McDonald’s instead of the Ararat for lunch, and talked her out of taking him to Taco Bell.

  “I think people like you and my mom are way too hinky about Taco Bell,” he said, as they walked Javier through the streets to the restaurant. “I mean, I know, it’s Tex-Mex and not real Mexican, blah blah blah, but a lot of the Latino kids at school like eating there, and there’s even this video by Jennifer Lopez or maybe that woman in Black-Eyed Peas where she and her girlfriends go through the drive-through. But McDonald’s will be good. Under the circumstances.”

  “What are the circumstances?” Bennis asked.

  “You know yesterday when I got to St. Catherine’s first and I had to wait for all the rest of you? Well, I introduced Javier to Pickles, and Javier cracked up and started singing the Big Mac song.”

  “Pickles!” Javier said.

  They had reached the big glass doors of McDonald’s. Javier was looking at the building very solemnly. Bennis wondered if it confused him. It didn’t look like the McDonald’s buildings in commercials. It was wedged into a city street, not freestanding on a highway. The only arches it had were abstract and symbolic.

  “Big Mac,” Javier said, sounding confident.

  Tommy held open the doors and shooed them inside. “Go sit in a booth. There are booths empty. I saw them through the windows. Do you mind if I get Javier a Big Mac on top of his Happy Meal?”

  “Why not just get him a meal with a Big Mac in it?”

  “Grown-up meals don’t have toys in them,” Tommy said. “I almost said ‘adult’ meals. But ‘adult’ means sex, right? Everything that’s adult is about sex.”

  Tommy was right about the booths. Bennis grabbed one next to a window looking out on the street, opened her bag, and pulled out a sheaf of random bills. It had to be fifteen years since she’d been in a McDonald’s. She seemed to remember that she and Gregor had driven down to South Carolina on a vacation, and they’d gone through a drive-through on the way. She felt unbelievably inadequate. Kids ate at McDonald’s. They carried backpacks and watched anime and played in the Little League. Or they didn’t. She just didn’t know. She knew nothing about children or their lives. And here she was, taking responsibility for a child.

  “Spend what you want,” she told Tommy. “Just get me a hamburger and maybe a Diet Coke. Do they have bottled water here?”

  “Probably,” Tommy said. “But there’s no point to it. I’ll get you a Quarter Pounder without cheese with a Diet Coke. I’ll get him a cheeseburger Happy Meal and a Big Mac and just a regular Coke.”

  Javier had slid into the booth bench across the table from Bennis. “Happy Meal,” he repeated. “Excellent!”

  Bennis was startled. “That’s new,” she said.

  “I think it’s my fault,” Tommy said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Tommy disappeared. Bennis shrugged off her black wool jacket. Javier looked solemn, but now Bennis thought he looked a little odd. She really did know nothing about children, and, what was worse, the only ideas she had about them came from the children on Cavanaugh Street, and Tommy when he was younger. She had bought clothes for Javier without thinking, the same kind of clothes Tommy wore, the same kind of clothes she saw on children when she went back to visit on the Main Line. Javier was wearing a Baxter State parka, a pair of new jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a blue cotton Vineyard Vines crewneck sweater with the little pink whale logo on the right shoulder.

  He could have come right from school at Bryn Mawr Country Day.

  Tommy came reeling back, loaded down with bags. He dumped the bags on the table and took off again. Javier’s eyes followed him as he moved through the room.

  Then he said, “Tom,” and nodded.

  “That’s right,” Bennis said. “That’s Tom. And I’ve got to stop calling him Tommy, or I’ll still be doing that twenty years from now when he’s getting a Nobel Prize or something.”

  When Tommy came back, he was carrying two large and one small containers of soda. He put them down on the table and slid in next to Javier. Then he shrugged off his own parka and started tugging at Javier’s.

  “You’ve got to take that off when you’re inside,” he told the boy. “Either that, or you burn up. Now.” He picked up the smallest bag. “This is the Happy Meal.”

  He handed it over. Javier took the bag and opened it. Then he put his hand in the bag and came out with a tiny car in a little plastic bag. He ripped the bag open and looked immensely satisfied.

  Tommy handed Bennis a cardboard box. Bennis opened it to find
a hamburger without any cheese on it. Tommy took out another box and handed it to Javier.

  “Big Mac,” he said.

  Javier opened the box and looked inside. Then he put the box down on the table and took out the thing inside. To Bennis, it looked sort of like a layer cake, except with hamburger. Hamburgers.

  Tommy took out three more boxes. They all contained Big Macs, and they were all for himself.

  “I don’t understand how you two can eat like that,” Bennis said, watching Javier make his way through the Big Mac. “Javier ate enough breakfast to feed the Fourth Army this morning, I’m not kidding. The Melajians sent it over as a favor.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to put some weight on him, aren’t you? He’s been deprived.”

  “We think so,” Bennis said. “Still. I think I’m surprised that he’d be so enthusiastic about unfamiliar food.”

  “Maybe it’s not unfamiliar food,” Tommy said. “This isn’t the Middle Ages. There are McDonald’s places everywhere these days. Especially if Mr. Demarkian is right and he comes from somewhere near the Mexican border. I went to Tijuana once. The only way you know you’re in another country is you have to go through a checkpoint.”

  “I suppose,” Bennis said.

  Javier had retrieved his French fries from the small bag and was playing with the little car, but he was also eating through his Big Mac. There were also apple slices in another little bag, but Javier paid no attention to those.

  “It would be so much better if we knew something about him,” Bennis said. “Where he came from. What he went through to get over the border. What happened to his family? We don’t even know if he came over the border. We don’t know anything. And then sometimes I worry we shouldn’t even try.”

  “With Mr. Demarkian around?”

  “I see what you mean,” Bennis said. “But what if there’s a reason for all this secrecy? What if it protects him in some way we don’t understand? I have this vision of us getting to the bottom of things the way Gregor likes to do, and then when we get there, we’ve put him in terrible danger and can’t get him out. I don’t know. I’m glad he’s here. I am. I like him. But I had no idea what I was getting into when Tibor asked us to do this.”

  “I was just thinking,” Tommy said. “Tijuana, you know? We went there on vacation. Mom and me and the squirt and, of course—”

  “Russ.”

  “I don’t think you should worry too much. From where I sit, it doesn’t look like anybody knows much about anything. It’s got to be awful, the places he used to be. It had to be awful enough to make it worth it to send him here.”

  “I wish I could speak Spanish.”

  “Pickles,” Javier said.

  They both looked over at him and he was holding one in his fingers. He’d taken a bite out of it, and the expression on his face was absolutely clear.

  Yuck.

  2

  The problem with keeping two sets of books is that you have to keep track of both of them, and the one for show is always more trouble than the one you keep out of sight.

  Bob Borden was waiting at her office door when Clare McAfee came back from picking up lunch. He was bouncing around from one foot to the other as if the floor underneath him was electrified. Clare didn’t usually go out to pick up food for lunch. She called for delivery, or had her secretary go. Today she was stressed out and annoyed and claustrophobic. She thought air and exercise would do her good. She walked all the way to the Vilna Deli and picked up a hot pastrami sandwich the size of a bowling ball.

  Bob straightened up when he saw her coming, but he didn’t stop wriggling around. Clare was carrying a large sack in one hand and a tall coffee in the other. She’d bought the coffee at Starbucks. The containers of coffee at the Vilna were too small.

  “Ms. McAfee!” Bob said, sounding anguished and overwrought.

  Clare wondered if the bank was about to collapse beneath both their feet, he was that upset. She brushed by him and went to her desk. It was her secretary’s lunch hour, too. If it hadn’t been, Bob would have been sent packing until he was called for.

  Clare put her coffee and her lunch down on her desktop and then went around her desk to sit down. Bob had come in behind her. He was still half hopping from foot to foot.

  Clare opened the bag and took out her sandwich. It was wrapped in shiny silver paper.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Bob suddenly stopped moving. Then he came right up to the edge of the desk and took a deep breath. “It’s the oddest thing,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “All I can think is that it has to be a system failure,” he said. “The alert system. You know what I mean?”

  “I take it the alert system alerted you to something,” Clare said, trying to be patient. “What was it it alerted you to?”

  “But that’s just it! It alerted me to something that isn’t there. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how it can happen. There has to be a glitch in the system someplace and if there’s one glitch in the system there could be thousands and the whole thing could be going to hell. I don’t know what we’d do.”

  “Try starting from the beginning,” Clare said.

  “Right.” Bob took another deep breath. “It was right before lunch. I was trying to clear up some bookkeeping stuff and the alert system sent me one of those messages that ping, you know what I mean. It pops up on the screen. And this one told me that we had a nonperforming loan. We’d made this loan to Mallard and Mallard, the architects, you know them. They do those houses in colors, little town houses—”

  “I’m familiar with Mallard and Mallard.”

  “Right,” Bob said. “It said Mallard and Mallard had a loan for one point six million dollars and it was now officially nonperforming. Which means, what? No payments for at least ninety days, right? So I clicked on the alert and it took me to a page that said Mallard and Mallard had taken out a loan on May twenty-seventh of last year to buy some property in Merion Township. It was supposed to be phase one of a larger mortgage loan so that they could build eight town houses on the property. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? We do lots of those loans. And in the middle of all this, I looked it up. We’ve done lots of those loans for Mallard and Mallard. The only weird thing this time is that there haven’t been any payments in forever.”

  The books for show are always more trouble than the books you hide. Clare’s throat felt very sore. She took a long sip of coffee and wished she hadn’t.

  “So,” she said. “Did you call Mallard and Mallard?”

  “No,” Bob said. “I thought I’d better talk to you first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I checked it all out,” Bob said, getting agitated again. “I thought I ought to do that before I did anything else. I looked through all the stuff the alert system sent out, but then I went directly to our Mallard and Mallard file and looked at that. We do a lot of business with them. And guess what? They’ve got five separate construction loans out with us right this minute, and every one of them is performing just fine.”

  “All right,” Clare said. “That’s not so impossible, then. There’s some glitch in the system. We should just correct the alert system so that—”

  “No, no. You don’t understand. Mallard and Mallard have five loans, but none of them is the loan the alert system is talking about. They don’t have a construction loan for any project in Merion Township.”

  “Well, then—” Clare said.

  “Nobody has a construction loan out for a project in Merion Township. Well, for that project. I checked. I did global searches all over the place. We haven’t made any such loan to anybody. I thought I was losing my mind. That’s when I did some calling around. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Mallard and Mallard have no such project going in Merion Township, and neither does anybody else. Most of the land described in the file the alert gave me is a parking lot to a big box store and it’s not for sale
and isn’t going to be. There is no such project anywhere, being pursued by anyone.”

  “It must be a mistake.” Clare put her head in her hands. Count to ten in English. Count to ten in Russian. Try to think.

  “The alert system couldn’t have just generated this itself,” Bob said plaintively. “It’s too detailed and complete. Somebody must have put that file in the system deliberately. And gone to a lot of trouble doing it. We must have been hacked. It must be some kind of cyberterrorism.”

  Think. “Cyberterrorism meant to do what?” Clare asked.

  Bob went still. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Think. “It’s not like a data breach,” Clare said. “The only people this could hurt are Mallard and Mallard. Do you think somebody is trying to ruin the credit of Mallard and Mallard?”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said.

  Clare knew that if she had any sense, she would find Cary Alder today and kill him with her bare hands. Instead, she sat still at her desk, working very hard to appear totally and deeply calm. Then she came to the only decision she had left.

  “Get all your stuff and bring it in here,” she said. “Let’s bring all this alert stuff up on this computer and see what we’ve got. I want to see it for myself.”

  3

  Cary Alder’s father had been a frugal and deliberative man. He rented all his best apartments out at the highest price he could get for them. He installed his family in a decent but modest place, with just enough space so that they didn’t feel cramped. In those days, Alder Properties didn’t have buildings with rooftop swimming pools and ground-floor day spas. Cary’s father wouldn’t have known what to do with them anyway.

  Cary was a very different human being, and not just because his father had sent him to all the right places for school. He had learned that having control of high-end places got you things the low-end places never could, even if the low-end places made you lots of money. He liked the rooftop swimming pools and the ground-floor day spas. He especially liked owning things that were both very expensive and of absolutely no use. Well, absolutely no real use. You could say his sterling silver napkin folder had a use; it was just a use most people wouldn’t see the point of.