The Directive Read Free

wasting your time with this guy?”
    No one responded.
    Then he barked a laugh and crushed my hand with his. “Joking! Sit!”
    Larry Clark, actually Sir Lawrence Clark, is an English ex-rugby star who now works in high finance, running a hedge fund. He radiates aggression and good health, and favors the sort of humor that involves putting you on the spot or lying and then laughing at you when you believe him.
    He’d maintained his dense rugger’s build into middle age and shaved his bald head daily into that gleaming pink power orb a lot of chief execs are going for these days. It went well with the scowl he always wore when looking my way.
    I was still so wound up from my close call with the cardsharps that I didn’t mind breaking bread and trading a few jabs with Clark. After the second course, I excused myself and tracked our waiter down in the labyrinth of wine racks. I intercepted the bill before Clark had a chance. It took a bit of coaxing, but I managed to get our server to let me pay.
    The pleasure of outplaying the hustlers that afternoon was nothing compared to seeing Larry’s face at the end of the meal, when the waiter explained, with a look in my direction, that “the gentleman has taken care of it.”
    As we walked back toward the park after dinner, Vanessa said that she was tired and asked Annie to walk her back to the hotel. Clark asked if he could “borrow me for a moment.”
    I smelled a setup. Annie lifted her shoulders.
    “I’ll get him back in one piece,” Clark said, but after my move at dinner and his barely concealed rage, I wasn’t so sure. I went along with it. This wedding was a done deal. Maybe he finally wanted to make peace.
    We strode toward a section of Fifth Avenue that was lined with McKim, Mead and White behemoths, Gilded Age hotels and robber barons’ clubs.
    Clark turned the knob and led us through the heavy wooden door of a town house. I didn’t see a sign. Maybe it was his club, and we would hammer out a peace treaty over brandy and cigars. I didn’t particularly look forward to club talk, though I’d learned to have fun playacting it over the past couple of years—laughing along with guys as they complain about being “horse poor” and what a hassle their sixty-foot steel-hulled yachts are. But if it meant ending my troubles with Lawrence, I was all for it.
    He led me into a library, and we sat down on a pair of leather chesterfields. There was no small talk. He leaned forward on the couch and started in.
    “I know your family, Mike. I know the kind of people you are. It’s out of my hands. Annie has made her decision, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
    This is what I get after those years of hard work: the navy, then putting myself through college and Harvard Law, nights so broke and hungry I just went to bed at eight. It could have been that I was having trouble adjusting to this world, but as I sat and endured Clark’s glare, I realized that some part of it was due to the fact that this decent life was having trouble with me. He thought I was some delinquent, my whole life one long con.
    “Larry,” I said. I knew he hated the familiar tone. “Your daughter and I love each other. We look out for each other. We take care of each other. It’s a sweet thing, and rare. I really wish you and I could start over and find a way to get along. It’d make everything easier and make Annie happy. What do you say?”
    He didn’t respond, just knocked his heavy ring against the marble table beside him twice. The door opened. Two men joined us. “These are my attorneys,” Clark said as he introduced them.
    So much for brandy and cigars. What bothered Clark most was that he and I were so similar. He came from nothing, and started his fortune with some very shady real estate deals in London. When he first tried to scare me away from Annie, I had hinted that I knew about the dirt in his past. That bought me some breathing room, but it also earned me an enemy.