Limitless

As I stood there, with my hand still on the receiver, I began to feel light-headed and dizzy, and everything went dark for a second. Then, without consciously registering that I had moved – and moved to the other side of the room – I suddenly found myself reaching out to the edge of the couch for something to lean against.

It was only then that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything in three days.

[ 12 ]

I ARRIVED AT THE ORPHEUS ROOM before Kevin and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a club soda.

I didn’t know what I expected from this meeting, but it would certainly be interesting. Carl Van Loon was one of those names I’d seen in newspapers and magazines all throughout the 1980s, a name synonymous with that decade and its celebrated devotion to Greed. He might be quiet and retiring these days, but back then the chairman of Van Loon & Associates had been involved in several notorious property deals, including the construction of a gigantic and controversial office building in Manhattan. He had also been involved in some of the highest-profile leveraged buyouts of the period, and in countless mergers and acquisitions.

Back in those days, as well, Van Loon and his second wife, interior-designer Gabby De Paganis, had been denizens of the black tie charity circuit and had had their pictures in the social pages of every issue of New York magazine and Quest and Town and Country. To me, he’d been a member of that gallery of cartoon characters – along with people like Al Sharpton, Leona Helmsley and John Gotti – that had made up the public life of the times, the public life we’d all consumed so voraciously on a daily basis, and then discussed and dissected at the slightest provocation.

I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the proposed Van Loon Building. Van Loon had long wanted to regain the title of World’s Tallest for New York, and was proposing a glass box on the site of the old St Nicholas Hotel on Forty-eighth Street. It had been designed at over fifteen hundred feet, but after endless objections was eventually built at just under a thousand. ‘What is this shit with skyscrapers?’ she’d said, holding up her espresso cup, ‘I mean, haven’t we gotten over it yet?’ OK, the skyscraper had once been the supreme symbol of corporate capitalism, indeed of America itself – what Ayn Rand referring to the Woolworth Building as seen from New York Harbour had called ‘the finger of God’ – but surely we no longer needed it, no longer needed people like Carl Van Loon coming along trying to imprint their adolescent fantasies on the city skyline. For the most part, in any case – she went on – the question of height had been irrelevant, a red herring, as skyscrapers had merely been commercial billboards for the likes of sewing-machine companies and retailers and car manufacturers and newspapers. So what was this one going to be? A billboard for fucking junk bonds? Jesus.

Melissa, on occasions such as this, had wielded her espresso cup with a rare elegance – suitably indignant, but never spilling a drop, and always ready if necessary to flip the axis and start laughing at herself.

‘Eddie.’

She always calmed down in the same way, too – no matter how animated she’d become. She would lean her head slightly forward, maybe swirling whatever coffee was left in the cup, and go still and quiet, diaphanous strands of hair settling gently across her face.

‘Eddie?’

I turned around in my seat, away from the bar. Kevin was standing there, staring at me.

I held out my hand.

‘Kevin.’

‘Eddie.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

As we shook hands, I tried to edge that image of Melissa from my mind. I asked him if he wanted a drink – an Absolut on the rocks – and he did. A few minutes of small talk followed, and then Kevin started priming me for the meeting with Van Loon.

‘He’s … mercurial – one day he’s your best friend and the next he’ll look right through you, so don’t be put off if he’s a little weird.’

I nodded.

‘Oh, and – I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this – but … don’t pause or hesitate when you’re answering him, he hates that.’

I nodded again.

‘You see, he’s really caught up at the moment in this MCL-Parnassus thing with Hank Atwood and … I don’t know.’

One of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with cable, film studio and publishing divisions, MCL-Parnassus was the kind of company that business journalists liked to describe as ‘a megalith’ or ‘a behemoth’.

‘What’s going on with Atwood?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure exactly, it’s all still under wraps.’ Then something occurred to him. ‘And don’t ask him – whatever you do.’