4
CLEAN AND sober at eleven at night: this was not Jeremy Roth’s customary state. Especially not when coming out of a three-hour dinner in the private dining room of Per Se. The restaurant was arguably the most exclusive in the city—not that Jeremy even so much as glimpsed his fellow diners from the private room, which was just past the entrance.
Dinner had been with the Al-Falasi family from Dubai: Ubayd and his sons, Ahmed and Mattar. As a concession to the Al-Falasis’ religion, Jeremy’s father had instructed that dinner was to be entirely sans alcohol. The Roth family was courting the Al-Falasi family as potential silent partners on the Aurora. As was common, Roth Properties was directly covering only about ten percent of the Aurora’s construction costs. About three hundred million dollars’ worth of short-term, high-interest loans—the mezzanine loans—were coming due on the building. The plan had been to pay off the mezzanine loans as apartment units sold during construction, but suddenly the market had been asphyxiated. Even that wouldn’t normally have been a problem, as banks traditionally extended mezzanine loans as a matter of course. But credit for commercial real estate was drying up fast, everybody was getting nervous, and their skittish financiers were looking for an excuse to bail on the project. The largest source of their short-term financing was a Greenwich hedge fund that wouldn’t hesitate to play hardball if there was a problem with repayment.
Although Roth Properties had a few billion dollars of commercial real estate in its portfolio, it had little liquidity, and coming up with a few hundred million dollars on their own was going to be a problem. They’d probably have to sell a building, and with the market rattled they’d inevitably sell for a loss, which would in turn raise alarm bells about the health of their company.
Unlike their biggest project of the moment, the transformation of a tract of public housing, which was being done in partnership with the city and thus heavily incentivized with tax breaks and conservatively financed by major banks with long-term loans, on the Aurora they were out on a limb. So they were looking for major money: $250 million would make the Aurora a real partnership. They’d settle for a $100 million loan, which would at least cover what they owed the hedge fund. With the dollar in the toilet and oil prices in the stratosphere, it was becoming increasingly common for financing for New York City development deals to come from the Middle East. It wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t something people were vocal about either.
Not that they talked business over the endless dinner. At least not explicitly. As his father had said on the way to the restaurant, doing business with Middle Eastern families was like trying to get into a prim virgin’s pants. You were going to have to spend a lot of quality time together before you made your move.
Family was part of it. Family and business were much more intertwined there than here. The ruling families controlled the money; there was a very limited circle of people to talk to about business and they all shared the same blood. Being a private family-run company was an advantage in dealing with Middle Eastern investors, but it also necessitated evenings like this.
It was the fathers who did most of the talking at dinner. Jeremy and his sister, as well as Ahmed and Mattar, spoke only when spoken to, which was mainly to answer rote background questions about their education and interests. Jeremy drank three bottles’ worth of sparkling water without clearing out the itchy dryness at the back of his throat. His knees kept jamming up against the bottom of the table as his legs bounced.
After dinner he called Alena from the back of the waiting Town Car. “I’m on my way over,” he said.
“Is that your way of asking?” Alena replied.
“I’m not asking.”
ALENA PORTER was living off the books at a Roth Properties building on the far western end of Manhattan, on the outskirts of the Meatpacking District. It had been the model unit used to sell the building: the furniture and decor from the interior designer had all been left in place. Alena was traveling light, had barely left a mark, so the apartment still felt more like a model unit than a lived-in apartment.
Jeremy let himself in. Despite having keys, he’d never once shown up unannounced. He saw no reason to run the risk of an awkward surprise.
They’d met at a nightclub a few months ago, Alena not quite working there, but not quite a customer either, arm candy for the VIPs. She’d come to the city to model at seventeen, recruited by Elite, had a perfectly good run but never really broke out of the pack. Okay, so it wasn’t love, but Jeremy was wild for her waifish body, her perfect lips, the purring sound she made when she came.
Alena was in the shower when he entered the apartment. Despite himself, Jeremy felt a jab of something he was pretty sure was jealousy. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering if she was washing away another man, one who’d been in this apartment when he’d called. He walked into the kitchen, helped himself to a generous glass of the twenty-one-year-old Lagavulin he’d brought over the previous weekend. He noticed the bottle was nearly half-empty. Then again, he’d definitely had a fair amount of it the night he’d brought it over.
He took a gulp, then another, too quickly, so that it burned going down. This was no way to drink an aged single-malt, Jeremy told himself. Part of why he bought the good stuff was so that he would drink it like a grown-up, not guzzle it down like some frat boy, but it didn’t always work. Especially not lately.
He realized the shower had turned off; a moment later he heard the bathroom door open. “Are you here?” Alena called out.
“Somebody is,” Jeremy said, taking another sip of the whiskey, then eyeballing the amount left in the glass. He opened the bottle again, the cork top making a little popping sound that he suspected Alena could hear, and splashed in another finger.
Alena, dressed only in a thin bathrobe that clung to her still-damp frame, was sitting on the couch combing her hair. Jeremy kissed her hello, settling in beside her, taking another sip of the scotch before putting it down on the Noguchi coffee table.
Jeremy picked up an antique silver cigarette case off the coffee table, pulled out a joint and a lighter. He inhaled deeply before offering it to Alena, who leaned forward to take a drag without reaching for it. The humming in Jeremy’s brain was fast fading, the propulsive beat in his body finally lulled. Jeremy took another hit off the joint, ashed it before it spilled onto the white couch, then washed it down with a proper, civilized sip of scotch.
Alena put down her comb, looking at him. She was tall, thin, and tan, her complexion practically matching the brown of her slightly highlighted hair. “Why so tense?” she asked.
“Dinner with my family’s bad enough without throwing in these f*cking Muslim royals. They come over to New York now the same way you go to the Barneys warehouse sale.”
“I’ve never been to Barneys.”
“They’re bargain hunting, scooping up the city because the dollar’s too weak to defend it,” Jeremy continued, feeling on a roll, the pressure of the evening coming out in his contempt. “And we’ve got to go hat in hand to these motherf*ckers. Play by their rules, even though we’re in the middle of Manhattan.”
“Their rules? Oh, meaning you had to stay sober?”
Cleverness wasn’t an asset in a kept woman, something Jeremy had mentioned to Alena on more than one occasion. It inevitably led to more of a fight than he had the energy to deal with at the moment, so he hit the joint instead. Alena took it from him, had another drag.
“What about the other thing?” Alena asked. Jeremy looked over at her, hoping he’d misunderstood what she was getting at, but seeing that he hadn’t. He didn’t remember telling her about his recent problems, had no recollection of any such conversation. He could only hope he hadn’t gone into too much detail.
“That’s being taken care of,” he said flatly, making clear that the subject was a dead end.
“Why do you need the Arabs anyway?” Alena asked. “Why don’t you just borrow the money from one of the big banks? Isn’t that what you usually do?”
Jeremy hadn’t made up his mind how he felt about Alena’s occasional displays of the rudiments of business acumen. He needed to vent about work sometimes, so it was occasionally useful, but at the same time he wasn’t sure how much he really wanted Alena privy to that side of his life. “The credit market’s gone dry,” Jeremy said. “The banks don’t have a spare three hundred million to lend, especially not for real estate. Plus this project is already so leveraged—we’ve only got fifty million of our own money in, which makes them more nervous.”
Alena had clearly grown bored with the topic; she crossed her legs, the robe opening to midthigh as she did so. Jeremy burned his thumb a little hitting the dregs of the joint. He stubbed out the roach in the ashtray, then finished off the scotch in his glass, his gaze lingering on Alena’s exposed inner thigh.
“You find peace over there?” she asked him, her smile more taunting than welcoming.
“I’m actually going to freshen this up,” Jeremy said, reaching for his glass. “But why don’t you meet me in the bedroom?”
“I can do that,” Alena said evenly, her voice lacking either anticipation or hesitation. She stretched as she stood, the nipples of her small breasts visible against the thin fabric. Jeremy reached out and ran his index finger down the middle of her robe, parting it. Alena stood as though posed, looking back at him, her expression unchanged. “You know where to find me,” she said after a moment, moving past him toward the bedroom.
Jeremy watched her go, his dick alive in his pants, the familiar heat in his blood. He walked to the kitchen, opened the bottle, took a long hard swig straight from it before pouring himself a generous double. He winced down a long sip, getting the amount in the glass to a respectable level. He was foggy now, numbed, but also relaxed.
He was ready. He made his way to the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt. Alena lay propped up on the bed, the robe off now, nothing on but a pair of strawberry-colored panties. “Why, hello,” she said.
“Time to pay the rent,” Jeremy said, grinning. Alena’s whole body stiffened, her face breaking like a dropped glass. Before Jeremy fully understood what was happening she had her robe on again, her back to him.
“It was just a joke,” Jeremy said, his words sounding a little thick to his own ears.
“I’m not a f*cking whore,” Alena said with cold fury.
“Of course not,” Jeremy said, reaching out to her shoulder, Alena sensing it and slapping his hand away before he’d even made contact. “I was just kidding around.”
“Calling me your hooker is not kidding around.”
“That’s not what I—I didn’t mean anything.”
“You can stay if you want, but I’m going to sleep,” Alena said, sliding under the covers, still with her back to him.
“Alena—”
“Good night.”
“Don’t go to bed angry.”
“I already have.”
“It was just—”
“You said that already.”
Jeremy sat there helplessly, looking at her stiff body under the blankets, the body he would be about to f*ck if he hadn’t been so stupid. He picked up his glass, finished the dregs of the whiskey—how was it all gone already? Not knowing what else to do, Jeremy stood, glass in hand, and made his way to the kitchen to pour himself another drink.