After Death(2)

The wealth and power of the firm are implied by the cavernous amount of unproductive space dedicated to the lobby, which at this late hour is revealed only by soft, indirect lighting. Black granite floors. Honey-toned quarter-cut anigre paneling. A domed, scalloped ceiling leafed in white gold. Millions of dollars’ worth of large, dramatic—and, in Michael’s opinion, tedious—paintings by Jackson Pollock present snarls of meaningless color that distract from the lustrous elegance of the piano-finish paneling.

Two elevators feature stainless-steel doors with a subdued Art Deco design. For security reasons, these lifts can be accessed only by entering five digits in a keypad. Each person who works here has a unique pass code. During business hours, clients and guests are escorted into the elevators by one of two receptionists. Although lacking a code, Michael can obtain that of anyone who works here and use an elevator if he wishes, but even if the pneumatic-rail system is quiet, the sound might alert those he’s come here to see.

An emergency stairwell is required in the event of fire. One is detailed in the blueprints that are on file with the city’s building department and readily accessible to him. The stairs are concealed behind paneling on which hangs a large vertical-format Pollock work that convincingly depicts and celebrates the mental chaos of extreme alcoholism. A concealed pressure latch in the frame of the painting releases the lock, and the hidden door swings out.

The switchback stairs are concrete, not metal, and each tread is cushioned with ribbed rubber to minimize the danger of a slip-and-fall lawsuit. The regularly spaced LED wall sconces operate around the clock, seven days a week.

At the fifth-floor landing, Michael listens to his own breath drawn and expelled, which is such a soft sound that what he hears might be entirely internal, the rhythmic billow and abatement of his lungs. To an observer, his stillness could suggest that he is a dead man standing, but he isn’t dead anymore.

From this side, the door is not concealed, and the electronic lock is released with a simple lever handle. He steps into a room paneled in anigre. The floor is shimmering white quartzite laid in six-by-four-foot slabs instead of cheaper tiles. The receptionist’s desk is a marvel of brushed stainless steel formed into curves, as if it is molten and flowing, with a celadon quartzite top. Eight comfortable chairs are available to accommodate those visitors who will be made to wait long enough to establish that they are of less importance than the man whose counsel they have come here to seek.

Currently, illumination is provided by only a pair of alabaster sconces that flank a door on the far side of the room.

To the left, beyond a wall of glass etched with a cityscape, a conference room waits in shadow—twenty empty chairs around a long table. To the right, windows look out on streets impoverished of light and rich with threat.

Michael steps around the desk and goes to the ensconced door. It opens into the office of Carter Woodbine, founder of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman.

Ordinarily, Woodbine schedules appointments only between ten o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. On this occasion, however, he isn’t meeting with ordinary clients, and even the great man will bestir himself before dawn when the matter requiring his attention is sufficiently rewarding.

Like the public spaces in this building, Woodbine’s office is an exacting and fastidious marriage of high drama and good taste. The desk is an uncharacteristically large work by Ruhlmann, circa 1932. The lamp upon it is not from Office Depot, but shines forth from the long-ago studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany; the dragonfly motif is a rare specimen executed largely in gold glass with vivid blue insects and no doubt appeals to Woodbine because it suggests mystery and power, the two cloaks in which he’s wrapped himself throughout his career.

Although the attorney owns a fifteen-thousand-square-foot residence on two acres, a half-hour’s drive from his office, he maintains an apartment here on the fifth floor. In addition to a living room, dining room, chef’s kitchen, bedroom, bath, and gym, there is a concealed panic room that can withstand any assault that might be made against it. His third wife, forty-year-old Vanessa, twenty-two years his junior, lives with him in the mansion, but she has no access to his apartment, which she assumes—or pretends to assume—is of modest size and used solely when he’s so overwhelmed by the demands of the law that he can’t spare the time even for a short commute. This allows Woodbine to have a parallel life of quiet but intense debauchery at odds with his public image.

The apartment entrance is concealed in the office paneling, behind a large and excruciatingly pretentious cubist painting that might be by Picasso or Braque—or by a barber who cut their hair. The lock responds to a signal when an electronic key is held to a blue triangle that symbolizes something in the painting; a code reader behind the canvas confirms the signal and releases the lock.

Michael neither has a key nor needs one to finesse the code reader. The door opens, and he enters a small foyer, proceeding from there into the living room.

The apartment security system tracks all occupants by their heat signatures and pinpoints them on a floor plan displayed on a large screen in the panic room. In a crisis, sheltering behind steel plate and concrete, Woodbine would be aware of where each invader could be found, and he would be able to coordinate with a police SWAT team, by phone, to facilitate their efforts to locate the culprits and secure the premises.

Michael is now represented by a blinking red dot on that panic-room display, where at the moment there is no one to see it. Three other signifiers are also blinking.