Limitless

I had Van Loon back onside within ten minutes. We sat in his library, drinking Scotch, and I spun out an elaborate tale for him of an entirely imaginary condition I was supposed to be suffering from. It was easily treatable with light medication, but I had reacted adversely to a certain element in the medication and this had resulted in my erratic behaviour. The medication had been adjusted, I’d completed the course and now I was fine. It was a thin enough story, but I don’t think Van Loon was actually listening very closely to what I was saying – he seemed, rather, to be mesmerized by something in the timbre of my voice, by my physical presence, and I even had the feeling that what he wanted more than anything else was just to reach over and touch me – and be, in a sense, electrified. It was a heightened version of how people had reacted to me before – Paul Baxter, Artie Meltzer, Kevin Doyle, Van Loon himself. I wasn’t complaining, but I had to be careful about how I dealt with this. I didn’t want it to cause any interference, or to unbalance things. I figured the best way to harness it was to keep busy, and to keep whoever I was exerting an influence over busy as well. With this in mind I swiftly moved the conversation on to the MCL-Abraxas deal.

It was all very delicate, Van Loon said, and time was of the essence. Despite a number of hitches, Hank Atwood was anxious to proceed. Having devised a price structure to bring to the table, the next step was to propose who should get the top jobs, and what shape the new company should have. Then it would be on to meetings, negotiations, bull sessions – the MCL-Parnassus people with the Abraxas people – ‘ … and us in the middle.’

Us?

I took a sip from my Scotch. ‘Us?’

‘Me, and if it works out, you. Jim Heche, one of my senior vicepresidents knows what’s going on, my wife knows – and that’s about it. Same thing with the principals. Hank’s just brought in a couple of advisers, he’s being very cautious. That’s why we want this thing wrapped up in a couple of weeks, a month tops.’ He drained the whisky from his glass and looked at me. ‘It’s not easy keeping the lid on something like this, Eddie.’

We chatted for another half hour or so and then Van Loon said he had to go out. We arranged to meet the following morning at his office. We’d have lunch with Hank Atwood and then set the ball rolling in earnest.

Van Loon shook my hand at the door and said, ‘Eddie, I sincerely hope this works out. I really do.’

I nodded.

On the way from the library to the main door of the apartment, I’d glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Ginny …

‘Just don’t let me down, Eddie, OK?’

… if she was at home.

‘I won’t, Carl. I’m on this, believe me.’

But there was no sign of her.

‘Sure. I know that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

The lunch with Hank Atwood went very smoothly. He was impressed by my command of the material relating to the deal, but also by my wide-ranging knowledge of the business world in general. I had no problems answering the questions he asked me, and I even deftly managed to turn a few of them back on Atwood himself. Van Loon’s relief that things were finally working out was palpable, and I could also sense he was pleased that my performance was reflecting well on Van Loon & Associates. We’d gone to the Four Seasons again, and as I sat looking out over the room, fiddling with the stem of my empty wine glass, I tried to recall the details of what had happened the last time I’d been there. But I soon had the weirdest feeling that what I was conjuring up, like a misremembered dream, was unreliable. It even occurred to me that I hadn’t been there before, not really, but had constructed this memory from what someone had told me, or from something I’d read. However, the sense of distance from that other time which this created was welcome – because I was here now, and that was all that counted.

I was enjoying it, too – though I only picked at the food and didn’t have anything to drink. Hank Atwood relaxed quite a bit as the lunch progressed, and I even saw in him a little flicker of that needy reliance on my attention that had become such a feature of earlier, similar relationships. But that was fine. I sat there in the Four Seasons and revelled in the heady atmosphere, reflecting occasionally – when I reminded myself who these men were – that what I was experiencing could well have been the prototype for an extremely sophisticated virtual reality game.