The Lola Quartet Read Free Page B

problem, but that was years ago already."
       The clamor of the newsroom was all around him. Usually this was his favorite place in the world but today the sound jangled his nerves.

    H e  f e l t  that he was slipping, but it wasn't just him. The city of New York had gone dark so quickly, and at times Gavin was dazzled by the speed of the fall. Because it hadn't actually been that long since he'd been walking hand in hand with Karen down Columbus Avenue and they'd come upon a newsstand with a New York Magazine cover that read "The Second Gilded Age" in gold letters, and the headline had seemed perfect to him. This is the second gilded age, he'd tell himself, looking around at his fellow diners at expensive restaurants or studying photographs of $1.3 million one-bedroom apartments in the windows of real estate offices. The phrase fit the era. But within months the stock market had plummeted and banks were collapsing, everyone was losing their jobs and there were food shortages in the soup kitchens, and the second gilded age seemed distant.

    J u l i e  p u t  him on the team covering the Jonathan Alkaitis story. The investment adviser had cheated unsuspecting investors of billions in an elaborate Ponzi scheme until his daughter had turned him in to the authorities. In that time of collapse and dissipation the stories all but wrote themselves— there were charities that had lost everything overnight, former senior executives who'd taken up employment at Starbucks, entire families living in motel rooms— but the Alkaitis story wasn't coming together. Everyone already knew the bare facts, the staggering sums lost and the collapse of charitable foundations, the ruined retirements, the litigations and blame. Gavin needed a quote, a good one, but none of Alkaitis's victims had anything to say that was worth printing or that hadn't already appeared in another paper. Proud old men in business suits averted their eyes and brushed past him on the sidewalk, which made Gavin feel despised and invisible. A twenty-one-year-old recently deprived of his trust fund gave a quote that made Gavin close his notebook and walk out of the room—"I can't believe I have to work for a living now. I mean, who the fuck works ? It is so unfair "—and one or two people all but snarled as they turned away from him. Gavin talked his way into a series of offices and was escorted out of all of them. A woman laughed bitterly and said "Fuck you think my reaction to losing my retirement savings is? Go fuck yourself" before she hung up on him. One man who had lost everything, a retired businessman in his eighties, broke down and began to sob when Gavin called him. "It's okay," Gavin kept saying, "listen, it's going to be okay. . . ." but the man kept crying. Gavin listened until he couldn't take it anymore and gently placed the receiver of his desk phone back on the cradle. He thought all evening about the man weeping into the dial tone and couldn't sleep that night.
       On the morning of a particular deposition he stood for two hours under low gray skies outside the law office where several of Alkaitis's victims were being interviewed, lying in wait, but he kept seeing the same people who'd refused comment on all his other attempts. Until a man came through the doors whom he recognized from his research— Arnold Lander, former COO of a midtown consulting firm, an investor who'd lost a little under two million dollars— but who was the woman by his side? She looked about twenty, extravagantly blond with red lipstick, and he realized he'd seen her earlier. She'd been waiting on the sidewalk for a while too, before she'd gone inside to wait in the lobby. She hadn't been in the deposition hearing, then. It was beginning to rain, the first fat drops before the cloudburst, and she was holding a newspaper over her head. Her heels clicked sharply on the sidewalk.
       "Excuse me, Mr. Lander," Gavin said, "may I have a moment?"
       "No comment," Lander