The Company You Keep

CHAPTER ONE

A LOUD WAIL INTERRUPTED Mimi’s whimpering. The mechanical, incessant noise went on…and on. Mimi pressed her forehead down. She wanted to cover her ears, and even though logically she knew that movement was impossible, she reflexively went to raise her arms.

She expected to feel the binding restraints and the shooting pain. Miraculously, there was none. Just the incessant ringing and ringing…

Then the noise stopped.

Mimi rolled over and opened her eyes. And realized she was lying on her own queen-size bed in her own apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and not…not captive in that hellhole in Chechnya—blindfolded, beaten, alternating between bouts of despondency and glimmers of hope.

She turned her head on the downy pillow and gazed out the window toward the light—something she’d been deprived of for months, something that was now so precious. It didn’t disappoint.

It was one of those rare winter mornings in Manhattan when the gray clouds of January had decided to take a holiday. The sun streamed in through the glass like some visionary painting.

It should have warmed her. It didn’t.

Mimi still hadn’t gained any weight back after she’d been kidnapped while on assignment in Chechnya, a forced confinement that had lasted almost six months. Two months had passed since her television news network had secured her release, but she still suffered an almost bone-numbing coldness.

She wriggled deeper under the white duvet cover. The feel of the expensive Egyptian cotton material reassured her without fully erasing the nightmare.

Mimi had never been introspective for a variety of reasons. She freely admitted the obvious one that she simply never had the luxury of time to stop and think. The other reasons she kept private, even from her best friend from college, Lilah Evans. But since…since the kidnapping—there, she’d said it—she was beginning to appreciate just how bizarre time and memory were.

For instance, off the top of her head, she had virtually no idea what she’d done all day yesterday. Yet the exact events of the day she was abducted remained crystalline clear. Not surprising, really, since every night when she sought comfort in sleep, she instead kept reliving that day over and over, each detail more vivid, each smell more penetrating, each sound more ominous, the pain…

She forced herself to focus on the cream-colored walls of her room. They were bare except for a few framed photos of colleagues and friends. Several showed her family: her mother blowing out candles on a birthday cake; her half-brother, Press, who’d graduated from Grantham University last year and was now in Australia; and her little half-sister, Brigid, a bundle of energy who was eight going on sixteen. There were none of her father. The photos showed people laughing, happy. She was in a few, too—laughing, happy. She sniffed, trying to recall the feeling. She couldn’t. That was the thing about memory. It was selective, even when you didn’t want it to be.

Mimi shifted back to the bank of metal-framed windows that looked out from her twelfth-floor apartment on East Seventieth, off Lexington. After years of renting various places around the City, she’d finally bought the condo when the real estate market hit a low a few years ago. And for the Upper East Side, it had been a bargain, all because her building was one of those white brick high rises built with good intentions but a total disregard of aesthetic appeal. Ugly didn’t come close, and no self-respecting equities analyst or art gallery owner wanted to be caught dead in something so gauche. One day, though, she figured, white brick would be the new Art Deco, and she’d be laughing all the way to the bank.

The loud wail of the cell phone started up again.

She rubbed her eyes and turned to find her BlackBerry on the nightstand. Its slim black case jiggled across the glass surface. Mimi peered closely, not at the phone number displayed on the screen but at the table, checking for dust. It was spotless. The cleaning lady she’d hired since returning home came in twice a week. She was considering having her come in three times, but even she admitted that was absurd. This obsession she’d developed to maintain spotless control would pass. Still…

The phone rang on.

Mimi sighed and finally reached over. “Yes?” she said without much interest.

“Is that any way to answer the telephone, Mary Louise?” It was her father, Conrad Lodge III. Only he would use her given names instead of her nickname. “I suppose I should thank the heavens that you even picked up—as opposed to my many emails that you’ve ignored completely.” His upper class, lockjaw manner of speaking sounded even more pronounced over the phone.

Mimi inhaled. “I didn’t answer your emails because I haven’t had time to open them.” It was a lie, but then her family was good at lying. She hadn’t actually bothered about the messages at all.

She shifted her position under the covers and stared at the wall with the photos again, zeroing in on the black-and-white shot of her mother wearing a silly party hat and holding forth a birthday cake adorned with lit candles. It had been Mimi’s ninth birthday. She’d been in third grade at Grantham Country Day School.

Mimi recalled that birthday vividly. More than anything she had wanted to get her ears pierced. Her father had refused. “Who do you think you are? An immigrant child?” he’d asked scornfully. Her mother, only recently a naturalized citizen, had bowed her head and looked away.

As she lay in bed now, Mimi felt the hole in one of her earlobes. Conrad had won the battle that birthday, but as soon as she’d left home for boarding school Mimi had made a beeline for the nearest Piercing Pagoda. Maybe one of these days she’d actually get around to wearing earrings again.

From the other end of the telephone line her father cleared his throat. “I’m delighted you’re keeping so busy during your time off from work.”

Cutting sarcasm had always been one of his strengths, Mimi thought.

“Therefore, rather than wait for you to find the time, I decided to call you instead.”

“Before you begin the lecture, I know I should come down to see the family,” Mimi cut in, anticipating his demands. Grantham, New Jersey, Mimi’s family’s hometown, was an hour’s train ride south of New York City. It was the epitome of a picture-postcard college town—Gothic university buildings and historic colonial houses. Its quaint main street—named Main Street, no less—boasted high-end jewelry shops, stock brokerages and coffee shops that catered to black-clad intellectuals and young moms with yoga mats tucked in the back of expensive jogging strollers.

“So, I promise to visit soon,” she continued, only half meaning it.

“That would be most welcome,” her father replied. “But actually, I am inquiring about something else. I’m on the organizing committee for Reunions this year. Quite an honor, really.” Reunions at Grantham were a giant excuse for alumni from all the previous graduating classes to gather for a long weekend at their old stomping grounds, reminisce about the good old days and make fools of themselves by wearing silly class outfits and drinking excessive amounts of alcohol.

“Reunions? But they’re not until June. If it’s about giving Noreen plenty of notice that I’ll be staying at the house, you don’t have to worry.” Noreen was her father’s third wife. Mimi’s natural predilection was to despise her stepmothers, but even she had to admit Noreen was pretty decent.

“I’m sure Noreen will appreciate hearing from you, but I repeat, that’s not why I called. Really, Mary Louise. If you’d let me get a word in edgewise, you’d realize that fact.”

Chastised but not humbled, Mimi bit her tongue.

A self-satisfied silence permeated the line. “I wanted to speak to you in regards to my position on the Reunions committee. I’m in charge of organizing the panel discussions.”

Despite his chastisement, Mimi couldn’t help but jump in with a comment. “I thought I made it clear to you and everyone else that I don’t want to talk about what happened in Chechnya.” She hated the fact that her voice trembled.

“Yes, you made that loud and clear when you took an extended leave from the network—though I still believe you should talk to the psychiatrist that Noreen found for you, the specialist in matters…in matters related to your particular circumstance.” Conrad cleared his throat uneasily. “What I had in mind was more directly relevant to the Grantham student experience. Intercollegiate athletics, to be precise.”

“What are you talking about? I haven’t participated in any competitive sports since my senior year.” Mimi was baffled.

“Which was the year you served on a panel at Reunions addressing Title IX and its impact on Grantham’s varsity teams. As I recall, your comments were particularly offensive to certain male members of the audience when you advocated the demotion of the wrestling team to a club sport,” Conrad noted.

“That’s because there was no female equivalent,” Mimi pointed out, the arguments still fresh in her mind. That whole memory trick again. “Anyway, I recall that the university administration agreed with me.”

“And I have no doubt you’d be more than willing to defend the same position what…ten or so years after the fact?”

“Twelve, as I’m sure you know perfectly well.” Her father might be an arrogant twit, but as a founding partner and long-standing chairman of a successful private equity firm, one thing Conrad Lodge III knew—and remembered—was numbers, any and all numbers. Except for the date of my birthday, she qualified silently.

But instead of enjoying her self-righteous sulk, Mimi suddenly experienced one of those lightbulb moments. “Wait a minute. You didn’t call to merely reminisce about one of my more dramatic episodes, did you?”

“Since when have I been inclined to reminisce about you?”

At least he was honest. This time, she amended.

“No, I was thinking about reconvening the same panel of administrators, coaches and students from before. A do-over confab, you might say.”

Mimi pinched the skin at her throat. “Well, I suppose the topic might be of general interest—might. As you’re no doubt aware, there’s been a number of recent headlines about colleges manipulating their athletic reporting to fulfill their Title IX obligations. But even if you buy into that premise, from the practical perspective, half the people who were on that panel must be dead.”

“There you go again—jumping to conclusions. As it turns out, only one person has passed away—the former athletic director.

“I remember him,” Mimi grumbled. The moron had refused equal locker room space to the women’s water polo team until their demonstration senior year. She smiled, remembering the photo in the New York Times of her leading her teammates into his office to use it as their changing room. Boy, did they get permission to share the men’s locker rooms adjacent to the pool, but fast.

“But the rest are still active at Grantham or other universities,” Conrad went on. “I even tracked down one of the coaches who’s currently with a professional basketball team in Italy.”

“And you honestly think you can get him and everyone else to come back for a rerun?”

“I already have. Everyone but you and one other person have been confirmed. Not many people say no to me.” He stated it as a simple matter of fact. “Besides, they’re doing it for Grantham.”

“And I’m such a loyal alum—not,” Mimi said. “But who knows, one of these days I might actually donate some money.”

“And give generously. All Lodges are loyal alums.” Her father’s words had a certain déjà vu ring to them.

She’d been ten, and it was right after her parents’ divorce. “All Lodge men go to Grantham,” she remembered him telling her. They’d been on a sailboat in Seal Harbor, Maine. Mimi had had two options—stay in a sweltering apartment in Easton, a far less socially acceptable town just north of Grantham where her mother had moved, or two, enjoy coastal Maine’s balmy breezes and wild blueberries—not to mention an unlimited family tab at the Bar Harbor Club in between tennis lessons. She’d chosen Maine.

Two weeks later, her mother had chosen an overdose of sleeping pills.

Her father cleared his throat, bringing her back to the present. “So do I have your agreement?” he asked.

Mimi recalled her first experience on the panel. “You know, I’m not sure I’m your safest bet. Not only did I tee off some people in the audience, I didn’t exactly see eye to eye with some other members of the panel.”

“One in particular, I believe—the captain of the football team. How could I forget the way you dumped a pitcher of water over his head.” Conrad chuckled.

Actually, Mimi’s mind had raced ahead to her stripping off her clothes in the Allie Hammie fountain.

“If memory serves me correctly, he rose above your antics with great equanimity. A true Grantham man.”

She remembered something else rising. She smiled—at that and the picture of the cops arriving at the fountain. Equanimity had been in short supply. “You know, Father, I’m not all that convinced that a replay would provide the results you’re looking for.”

And that’s when Mimi experienced a second lightbulb moment. Two in one conversation! Which could only mean… “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you’re trying to create some drama?” She hated the fact that her father had so easily manipulated her—for his own purposes, no less.

“These alumni panels can sometimes be rather dry, much too intellectual. Do we really need to be lectured on our overdependence on oil or the future of the space program? Far more entertaining to watch sparks fly, don’t you agree?”

Vic Golinski. Mimi hadn’t thought about him since graduation. What she did remember was they were more than polar opposites. They were matter and antimatter. Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Get them together, and it was total combustion—as that one time had proved.

Not that he’d even remember her, she immediately dismissed. It wasn’t like they’d ever hung around together in college. And hadn’t he gone on to some pro football career? He probably had groupies at his beck and call.

“So what do you think?” her father prompted her.

Mimi wasn’t ready to commit. “Did you say one other person hasn’t gotten back?”

“That’s right.”

Mimi heard a shuffling of papers.

“Yes, it’s the other undergraduate member of the panel…that former football captain…named…let’s see…yes, here it is. Golinski. Witek Golinski. Quite a mouthful.” He chuckled in a condescending way.

What a narrow-minded snob, Mimi thought with irritation. “Vic. He went by Vic,” she corrected him. And impulsively, to thwart his smugness, Mimi blurted out, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“I knew I could count on you.” Again, that conceit.

You want drama? I’ll give you drama, Mimi thought. She could be just as manipulative as her father—for her own ends. “Yes, I’ll participate on the panel—on one condition, no, two actually. First, I’ll do it, but only if Vic Golinski does, too.”

“I’ll call him as soon as I hang up,” her father answered. “And the second proviso?”

“I want you to notify the fire department.”

“The fire department? I don’t understand?”

Mimi smiled for the first time in months. “Forget sparks. I predict a fire of major proportions.”

CHAPTER TWO

“HERE’S YOUR ORDER, THEN—Ubatuba.” Vic Golinski pointed to two enormous slabs of polished granite. They were stacked vertically in a wooden pallet in the brightly lit warehouse the size of a giant airplane hangar. Several 747s could have fit in the space with no problem. Rows and rows of identical pallets held enormous rectangles of different stone, all finished on one flat surface, rough and scored on the reverse. The high-tech space was filled with the mechanical whirring and beeping of a crane maneuvering a slab of pink-flecked granite to a flatbed truck stationed by the open garage doorway.

“Ubatuba is our largest seller and a fairly uniform stone,” Vic explained. His voice was calm, solicitous, betraying none of the awareness that myriad tasks awaited him with a timeline of “yesterday.”

He waved the young couple next to him to come closer. “Have a good look here. See how the flecks are regular and there’s no discernible veining? That’s typical of Ubatuba granite—not a lot of variation from one shipment to the next.” He ran his hand up and down the polished side of the stone. “Still, I’m delighted you came in to check out your order. I always tell customers that it’s best to come to the warehouse to see what they are getting, rather than take the salesman’s word back at the store. It’s your money and your kitchen, after all, and you want what’s best.”

The woman, her hand resting protectively on her rounded baby bump, stood with her mouth open. “It’s beautiful,” she said in awe, reaching out to touch the polished black surface for herself.

Her husband leaned in to get a better look before stepping back to take in the inventory that surrounded him. “Wow. It’s like a museum in here,” he exclaimed. “I had no idea there were so many types of granite.”

“Not just granite. We’ve got all kinds of natural stone—marble, limestone, travertine, onyx, slate—”

“Vic. Vic Golinski.” A loud announcement carried over the speaker system. “You’re wanted on line one.”

Vic looked apologetically at the couple. His football days were long past, but his large shoulders and massive build tended to dwarf those who stood next to him. “I’m sorry, but it seems I’m needed elsewhere. I tell you what. I’ve got your order information here—” he held up the clipboard “—but feel free to go ahead and take a look around. If you see something else you like, we can always change it. And when you’ve made your decision, just check back at the reception desk. That way we can finalize all the delivery arrangements.”

He shook hands and nodded goodbye before heading to the door. As he moved along the cement floor, he winced. His lower back was reminding him of last night’s pick-up game of basketball at Baldwin Gym, the basketball arena at Grantham University. It had been a mistake to play given his knees, but he hadn’t been able to resist.

He pushed open a heavy door and entered the front office space. To the left, behind a decorative wall of marble stone with a cascading fountain, were the showrooms. Mosaic patterns, multi-patterned stone floors and walls displayed a seemingly endless variety of inventory. To the right, on the other side of the long reception desk, was a warren of cubicles and some larger offices along the front wall of the building.

Two women, both talking into headsets, were stationed to greet customers. One, Abby—a middle-aged woman with raven-black hair that Clairol needed to retool—looked up when Vic passed by. As she provided directions over the phone for the warehouse’s location on Route One in central New Jersey, she raised her penciled eyebrows and made a circular motion by the side of her head, indicating that the person on the other end of the line was loco. Abby didn’t believe in subtlety when dramatization was so much more satisfying. True to form, she snapped her fingers and pointed with her manicured acrylic nails—snowflakes adorned each tip—in the direction of his office. Pronto, she mouthed emphatically.

Vic nodded but only marginally picked up his pace. He’d long ago learned that whenever anyone wanted him, somehow it was ostensibly always a crisis. That seemed to be the best job description for his position. In his opinion, there simply weren’t that many crises in the world, let alone at Golinski Stone International. And if it were a real crisis—a cave-in at a mineshaft or flames engulfing an apartment building—the chances that a washed-up football player who was now a natural stone distributor was the man for the job were slim to none.

So with his usual display of understated calm he headed for his office prepared to deal with whomever was having an anxiety attack.

No doubt it would be his brother, Joe—or maybe his father. Though Pop rarely showed at the office these days. Ever since his sister, Basia, had started divorce proceedings against “The Lousy Scumbag” and moved in with Vic’s parents, his mother and father had been drafted for babysitting duty for Basia’s three-year-old Tommy. That way, Basia could juggle waitressing at a diner in Grantham with going back to finish up her degree in accounting. Vic was convinced though that the real reason their parents—more specifically, their mother—had jumped at the idea was because she wanted to keep an eagle eye on her only grandson.

Anyway, his kid sister had had to abandon college when she’d gotten married and had a baby, which was a real shame in Vic’s opinion. Not that he didn’t think his nephew was aces. It’s just that of all Golinski siblings, Vic had always thought Basia was the one most deserving of an Ivy League education. She was scary bright, and he’d never understood why she refused to take advanced placement courses in high school.

“I want to be in classes with my friends,” she’d say with a yawn. “Don’t bug me. I’m not you.”

“No, you’re smarter than me,” he’d reply. Fat lot of good it did him. Only thing she didn’t fight him about was the violin lessons. He even paid for them to make sure she kept at it. Instead, it was his mother who hadn’t seen the point.

“The violin? How’s that going to put food on the table or help her find a husband?” his mother had repeated whenever anyone was in earshot.

“Mom, she’s got a gift. Leave her alone,” he’d responded.

His mother had just shaken her head. “I could understand if it was an instrument that she could play in the band at high school football games.”

Vic would let the matter drop.

When Basia had graduated high school, Vic had taken comfort that she’d enrolled at Rutgers, the state university in New Brunswick. Then she promptly dropped out when she got pregnant, and then got married. Vic had had the decency not to point out to his mother that, see, Basia found a husband anyway—for all the good it did her.

But before Vic could get to his office, his brother accosted him outside his own, one door down from Vic’s. “Vic, some guy from a private equity firm in Manhattan has been trying to get you for the past half hour. He said it was urgent,” Jozef or “Joe” announced, practically treading up the back of Vic’s brown Rockport shoes.

Vic didn’t respond and instead headed through the open glass door to his own modest office. The wall facing the hallway was also glass, but blinds provided partial privacy. He maneuvered past a coat stand with his blue blazer and North Face jacket and headed around to his plain wooden desk. Then he squatted down in the back corner to greet the one member of his family who never failed to live up to expectations. “Hey, beautiful girl, Roxie. How ya doin’? How’s the ear feel, huh?”

Two of the saddest brown eyes in the world looked up at him. A thick white bandage stuck out from one ear. A large white cone circumscribed her head, and in silent protest Roxie lifted her head and banged the hard plastic against his knee. But even that seemed to require too much energy, and she ended up dropping her head to her pillow.

Vic patted the long flank of the eight-year-old white golden retriever. “You’re a good dog, Roxie, and I promise you I’ll get that collar off your neck as soon as the vet gives his okay.”

“Geez, you’re more attached to that dog than any human being,” Joe complained.

Vic looked over his shoulder. “That’s because she’s a better listener and certainly more loyal than just about anybody out there.” He turned back to the dog. “Aren’t ya, sweetheart.”

Joe rolled his eyes. “Please, you’re making me ill. Just because you were taken to the cleaners by Shauna in the divorce is no reason to go all gaga over a dumb dog.”

“My ex was welcome to anything she could get her hands on—anything except you, Roxie, right?” He scratched behind the dog’s good ear. “That’s why you’ve got to look after yourself.”

Joe circled the desk to get closer to his big brother. Roxie immediately inched away on her belly. “Geez, you’d think after all these years she’d be used to me.”

Vic went on petting the dog. “She can’t help it. She had a hard life as a puppy, kicking around all those shelters. You’ve got to give her some slack.”

“So what did the vet say?” Joe asked, making an effort to show some concern.

Vic rested his hand on Roxie’s flank. “He said that the kind of tumor she had is ninety percent cancerous and spreads through the bloodstream. That’s why he also took a large part of her ear in case it had already gone beyond the lump. But we won’t know for sure until he gets the results of the biopsy in a couple of days.”

“Well, until then, you could get Mom to pray for her. Light a candle, do the whole bit. You never know.”

“Mom has her ways of dealing with problems, and I’ve got mine. I keep my nose to the grindstone and just do my job. Whatever happens with Roxie, happens. In the meantime, I’ve got the family to think about—and the hundreds of employees who depend on this company running smoothly.”

“And don’t think we’re not all eternally grateful. It certainly saves me from having to be the responsible son.” Joe commandeered Vic’s desk chair and swiveled it around to face his brother. Then he crossed his legs, the tassels on his Gucci loafers jiggling as he lazily rocked his foot.

Vic gave Roxie a final pat and stood. The dog wearily thumped her tail on the ground. “Do you mind?” Vic indicated his chair.

“Be my guest.” Joe rose and crossed the gray carpeting to the small leather sofa opposite the desk. He plopped down at one end and rapped his knuckles on the wooden arm. “But tell me, oh, wise and great brother, if you’re so responsible, why haven’t you answered your phone for the past half hour?”

Vic settled into his desk chair, slipped off his shoes and let his feet rest atop the carpet. “In answer to your question, I was showing a couple a slab of Ubatuba for their kitchen countertops.”

“One slab? Of Ubatuba? What are they doing? Upgrading their galley kitchen in some track house in Levittown? Excuse me, but what are you—the CEO of the company—doing showing small-time customers their order?” Joe glanced dismissively around the office. “You know, I think it’s about time you upgraded your décor, starting with the carpeting. What is it? Indoor-outdoor from some box store?”

“I like the carpeting.” Indeed, Vic would never tell his family, but at times he really could do without padding around barefoot on cold marble floors. “And Roxie likes it, too.”

“That dog of yours sheds all over this stuff.”

Vic was unfazed. “If it bothers you so much, there’s a vacuum cleaner in the janitor’s closet.”

Joe held up his hands. “No, thanks. Besides, Pop banned me from manual labor around the place after that incident with the forklift.”

How could Vic forget? Forty thousand dollars worth of travertine down the drain. Joe wasn’t much better when it came to driving that ridiculous Porsche 911 of his. At least whenever he wrapped that around a pole it was his insurance, not the company’s.

Vic bit back a sigh. Why was he always the responsible sibling? True, as the oldest, he bore the burden of carrying on the family business and keeping his brother and sister out of harm’s way. But deep down, he was afraid that he was just born old.

He continued in his usual mature, patient fashion. “No one else appeared to be free, and I don’t like customers standing around waiting. As I’ve said before, a CEO wears many hats and pitches in wherever needed, even on the floor dealing with first-time customers. And two, more importantly for this company, that couple placed their order through Home Warehouse, whose contract with us—as you undoubtedly know since you’re senior vice president in charge of sales—is up for renegotiation in the spring. And, seeing as they’re the largest home improvement company in America, we need to continue to be their sole supplier of natural stone. So, if we satisfy their customers with top service, word will get back—trust me—and that will place us in a much better bargaining position.”

Joe rolled his eyes. “Thanks for the lecture, Mr. Miyagi, my personal sensei.”

“Anytime. My ‘Wax On, Wax Off’ lecture is scheduled for tomorrow.” Vic rested his elbows on his blotter. “Now, who’s so anxious to talk to me—” he shuffled through the pink paper slips “—that he keeps calling…what…three…no, four times?”

“The head honcho at Pilgrim Investors. I checked around, and they’ve got their own building on Park Avenue, besides offices in London, Tokyo and Shanghai. Rumor has it that they’re planning a new office in Australia—the economy’s booming there what with their large supply of raw materials going directly to China. They’re players, big time—trust me.” He shot back Vic’s own words.

Vic could do without players. But business was business. “So, if there’s a possibility of new construction, why didn’t they contact you?”

Joe shook his head. “I tried pointing that out to him over the phone, but got nowhere. He’s one of those blue-blood types who only talks to the top dog. If it gets down to the nitty-gritty, then his lackeys will step in and deal with me.”

Vic rubbed his bottom lip thoughtfully. “All right, let’s see what the big man has to say. Little does he know I was born in Trenton and grew up in a row house.”

“Ah, but you’re still the one with the Grantham degree,” Joe needled him.

“See, if only you had stuck with football,” Vic replied, and he could have said, “studied a bit harder,” but he didn’t. Why rub it in? Instead, Vic picked up one of the message slips and started to punch in the number.