“It is?”
“Yes. And that’s exactly what I did. Before we met Chelsea, I took one of the dancers from The Flower Girl out for cocktails on the roof of the Met and got the whole story on the family. The wild card here is Max Biggs. Max is sixteen and generally considered to be the family liability. Quite bright by all accounts—he did get into your school, after all. But there have been issues along the way. He is less motivated than his sister, but his mother is convinced he’s a latent genius.”
“So you want me to go to a bad show with him,” Scarlett said. “For what? How does that help?”
“I want you to get a good look at him. You’ll be going to school with him, after all. Just go to the show. Talk to him a little. We need to seem to be everywhere—you at the school, the show. Signing with us will just feel inevitable after a while. It’s just a show, O’Hara. You see shows all the time. Is that asking so much?”
It was, but Scarlett shook her head no. She was trained to obey. It was sad.
The cab approached Mrs. Amberson’s new apartment, which was on Fifth Avenue, on the east side of Central Park. It wasn’t too far from the Hopewell, actually, a five-or ten-minute walk at most. But those few blocks seemed to span several worlds. This was a lush neighborhood of embassies and museums. The park was the front lawn, fifty city blocks of emerald green grass, ponds, and paths. Even by the standards of the neighborhood, this was a nice building, twenty chalk-white stories of parkside elegance, with a long green awning that extended almost to the curb to protect its residents from rain and snow and sun.
“Do me a favor, O’Hara,” Mrs. Amberson said, shaking the nearly empty box of tea tree sticks. “Run down to the health food store and get me more of these? Also, some more umeboshi plums. I’m out.”
Clearly, Scarlett was not released for the day. Not yet. Her boss went through umeboshi plums—small, gray, salty things that came in a tiny plastic container—at an astonishing rate. This was a common and easy enough errand, though. She was there and back in a few minutes.
The lobby of Mrs. Amberson’s new building was cold and beautiful, from the marbled walls and floor to the gleam of the brass mailboxes to the buttery leather sofas off to the side. The man on duty was new to Scarlett. He was shaped roughly like a postbox, but moved with slightly less grace than a postbox might if it freed itself from its moorings and went for a stroll down the street. He was spraying the delicate orchid on the coffee table with water, pumping the bottle hard, as if the orchid had said something offensive about his mom. The orchid shook under the onslaught. He took his time setting down the bottle and coming over to the desk. Things really went wrong when she told him that she was going to 19D. He seemed to take it as a personal affront.
“The freight elevator closes at six,” he said, pulling on his name tag for emphasis. His name was Murray.
“Okay?” Scarlett said.
“At six,” he said again. “When you gonna be done? I got to keep the lobby clear. When you gonna be done?”
Scarlett looked around at the lobby, which was empty.
“I can’t have you moving boxes through here all day. And sofas. And chairs. I gotta keep the lobby clear.”
“It is clear,” she said.
“You have to get your stuff up there by six,” he said. “The freight elevator closes at six. I lock it then.”
“It’s not my stuff,” Scarlett said.
“What? I gotta lock it at six.”
“Yes, but…”
“Hey! I gotta keep it clear!”
“Six,” Scarlett replied. “Got it. Six.”
He picked up his phone. Scarlett could just hear Mrs. Amberson’s voice on the other end, and she didn’t sound happy.
“You can go,” he said, disappearing behind his New York Post, still making noises of general disapproval. “Six o’clock. Remember.”
Scarlett turned the corner, around the bank of gleaming brass mailboxes with the marble shelf, to the elevators. She stabbed the button several times in her annoyance.
“What time was that?” she said, in a low, mocking voice. “Six? Was it six? Did you say six? Oh wait…six?”
“Hey!” Murray called loudly. Scarlett blanched, wondering if he’d heard her. She poked her head back around the corner to see him holding up a bundle of large envelopes bound together with rubber bands. Scarlett walked back to collect it.
“Gets a lot of mail,” the guy muttered. “Always going to get this much mail?”