Читать книгу The Night Watcher - John Lutz - Страница 14

May 2000

Sitting in her luxuriously appointed office with its grand view of Central Park, Myra Raven thought about when she had been Myra Ravinski. Her gaze fixed on a horse-drawn carriage wending its way through the park, but its image didn’t really register on her mind. She was trying to conjure up the face of her first husband, the cop like Ed Marks and about Ed Marks’s age when he died.

But she found that she couldn’t. Not with any precision. That was the real tragedy, not that we remembered the faces of the dead, but that with time we forgot them. Only now and then, unbidden, did they appear out of time and with memory like pain.

A different life for Myra Ravinski so long ago, a young woman nominally educated, not particularly attractive, and—thank God!—not pregnant. Newly widowed, she’d returned to college at NYU, then left when her money ran out.

She’d thought her life was finally straightening out when she met and married Irwin Seltzer, a man in his fifties but still handsome and vigorous. But there were two problems: she was still in love with her dead husband, and Irwin couldn’t stop ending their increasingly frequent arguments by using his hands on her. Not his fists, which would leave bruises, but his palms, slapping so the red marks and occasional welts would fade quickly. It turned out that Myra was his second wife; the first had accused him of physical abuse and left him. Myra, no fool, left Irwin in the position of searching for piñata number three.

That’s when she learned why Irwin had gently insisted they sign a prenuptial agreement. The money she walked away with after the divorce lasted about six months.

No way to return to school now, and no desire. Myra had studied for her sales license and gone to work at a real estate agency in New Rochelle. Here was something she could do well, concentrating on the woman, if she were selling to a couple; letting the property seemingly sell itself; sometimes deftly steering the conversation so she could sense what the potential buyers really wanted, what they needed, rather than what they said were their wants and needs. Seeing into them. It was the gift everyone working in sales thought they possessed, or they belonged in other occupations. Myra didn’t only think she had the gift—she had it, and converted it into fat commissions.

But the commissions were even fatter in Manhattan, in the high-end residential property in the Upper East Side, Sutton Place, and areas of the Upper West Side, as well as potentially trendy neighborhoods. Myra had a nose for money, and it led her to a position with an agency in Tribeca just when the neighborhood was getting hot.

The track was faster in Manhattan real estate, and she became faster. Myra was cunning, which is better than smart, and she was ruthless, which is better than cunning. Whatever the cost to take a step forward, she paid it. Whatever sacrifice it took to get out ahead of the pack, she made it. Whatever was required to close a sale, she somehow came up with it.

Within two years she’d opened her own agency, and within three more the Myra Raven Group (which sounded so much better than “Ravinski”) was the most successful apartment sales and rental agency in New York City.

Five years, three severe diets, three rounds of cosmetic surgery, and three men later, she was the present and complete Myra Raven, molded by survival of the fittest to persevere and to thrive. Lean and attractive in a way striking if brittle, she was single and independent, knew personally the city’s wealthy and influential, and was successful and rich. And contented as a shark in a stocked pond.

Meeting the Markses had stirred old memories in Myra. Ed the shiny new cop. Amy the naive and love-struck wife, and with an obvious devotion and loyalty Myra recognized. And pregnant with twins. How might that last have been if it had happened long ago to Myra Ravinski? Young Myra would have shown the same determined happiness and burgeoning love that glowed in young Amy.

What a different life Myra Ravinski would have led if things had been only slightly different. How careful she’d been not to become pregnant! How she’d wished, at least for a while after her young husband’s death, that she were pregnant.

Only later did she realize what a pregnancy at that time would have meant. What a millstone and a hardship.

Well, Amy Marks’s husband was alive, and she was pregnant. Not only that, the young couple had a windfall and could afford a nice place to live and bring up twin daughters. Myra would see to it that the co-op contract would go through; she was a genius at putting together deals, at settling differences and arranging financing, at fitting customer to co-op or condo. An absolute genius, or so had said the Times last year in a feature article they did on her.

Smiling, she watched the horse-drawn carriage with its white canopy disappear in the darkening park below. She had it in her power to help the Markses buy some happiness, and she would help them. There was no need to closely examine her motives. It did occur to her that maybe she was trying to prove to herself she wasn’t quite the hard, venal bitch she knew some people said she was. She had overheard that assessment of her more than once, in a restaurant where she used to dine, even in the elevator in her building. It didn’t concern her. Usually.

The hell with that kind of thinking! She was simply doing a good deed and that was the end and all of it. There was no need to question herself. She wasn’t some rich bitch trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle and enter heaven.

Then why would it have occurred to her that she was?

“Fuck it!” she said softly to the lowering night. If there really was a heaven, it was right here on earth, and you made it for yourself and by yourself.

The streetlights had winked on in the park, graceful patterns of curved illumination, like stars in a galaxy with pattern and purpose. She turned away from the window and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter. Then she sipped from the glass of single malt scotch she’d set aside on a marble-topped table, glanced at her Patek Philippe watch, and picked up her cell phone to place a call before it got too late.

Worked on a deal.