The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Read Free Page B

along the way to buy a slice of pizza, browsing store windows. He alternated between feelings of despair at his financial, relationship, and employment situation, and attempts to convince himself that he now had a new lifetime of opportunities ahead of him in all three areas. Part of him knew it was happy-talk, but another part also knew there was a grain of truth to it. Maybe there was something out there waiting for him that was better than working as a drone in a multinational’s make-believeworld of what they cynically called “news” Maybe there was a woman out there who’d be more loving and less judgmental than Susan. Maybe life could get better now, and would.
    He used his key to open the building’s front door, walked into the lobby, and nodded at Billy, the retired cop the building hired as a combination security and maintenance man. Billy glanced at Paul’s scraped face and hand, and turned his gray eyes to look out the window onto Eighth Avenue. New Yorkers learn not to ask questions.
    During his walk home, a plan had formed in Paul’s mind. A short-term plan, granted, but at least it may stave off the eviction notice and keep his credit cards from being cancelled. With that plan in mind, he’d purposely taken his time getting home to arrive just after five.
    In the apartment next to Paul’s, which shared a partitioned balcony with his apartment looking up Eighth Avenue, lived Rich Whitehead, lawyer extraordinaire. Rich shared Paul’s desire to make it big in the Big Apple, but was hindered by an overabundance of what Paul thought of as lust. Rich, of course, called it his love life, or conquest, or, in his more exuberant (and vodka-soaked) moments, “My contribution to making the world a better and more loving place!’
    What it all meant was that Rich had gone to ColumbiaUniversity’s law school specifically and only to be able to join one of New York’s largest corporate law firms to get enough money and recognition that there would be an unending stream of women clamoring for his attention. He had the very explicit goal of working his way up the firm’s ladder to the point where his income would exceed a million dollars a year, which would support a Hugh Hefner lifestyle. A partnership in the firm would be nice, too, of course, but Rich understood that that was at least twenty years into the future. But doing M & A work-corporate mergers and acquisitions-was incredibly profitable for the attorneys involved, particularly when you could find and publicize dirt on the company to be taken over, thus driving its price through the floor. And sometimes the acquiring companies would even offer the lawyers working on their cases ground-floor opportunities. The success stories Rich told—usually when his mistress-of-the-week was in hearing range—were extraordinary, although Rich was still in the building, so his income clearly hadn’t yet hit his goals.
    In his five years with the firm, Rich’s power had grown to the point where he currently presided over an empire of two junior lawyers, a paralegal, a clerk, and two secretaries. He passed out thousands of dollars a week in paychecks, and had told Paul many times that he was on the cusp of making Big Money himself.
    Maybe, Paul thought, Rich could use a good writer. It could tide him over while he sent out résumés to newspapers around the country and hit Time and Newsweek.
    Paul walked to the elevator, took it up to the twenty-first floor, and knocked on the door next to his own. A moment later the peephole flickered, then Paul heard the sound of the three locks being undone and the door pulled open to reveal Rich, standing in a dark-blue terrycloth bathrobe and holding a glass with ice cubes and a clear liquid. He stood a half-foot taller than Paul at about six foot six, with a large barrel-shaped middle. He wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and his pale blue eyes were exaggerated in the thick