The Hazards of Good Fortune Read online

  It would strike an ordinary person as odd, the idea that anyone could forget they had taken off all their clothes on a frigid March morning in suburban New York, but John Eagle was not an ordinary person and had forgotten his nakedness. He had been born in a small Ohio town and enlisted in the Army after high school where he had been a tenacious defensive back on the football team and sung baritone in the choir. Following two tours in Iraq, during which he saw extensive combat in the Anbar Province and reached the rank of corporal, he received an honorable discharge and made his way to New York to pursue a career as a recording artist. After his time in Iraq, John Eagle was proud to live in a country where the various ethnic groups were not constantly tearing at each other’s throats.

  In New York City, he worked as a security guard, a restaurant deliveryman, and a telemarketer. Luck in relationships was spotty. His love of individual women was intense but the ability to focus less so. A souvenir of this tendency two different tattoos rendered on opposite sides of his neck in cursive lettering: Vanessa on one, Donelle on the other. Each had temporarily been the love of his life.

  Although his psychological condition had begun to deteriorate almost from the day of his discharge, he was able to continue to make music with a secondhand laptop he had purchased on Craigslist. A series of rhythm and blues tracks on his SoundCloud page featured an acceptable (if not professional quality) voice warbling over generic music. Flanking these links were inspirational slogans like “Built to Win” and “Never Gonna Give Up My Dream.” John Eagle randomly contacted strangers on social media and sent them links to his music accompanied by notes like “Hope you enjoy it!” His psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital was treating him for bipolar disorder and had recently prescribed both antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs.

  That the metal railing on which his feet rested was cold enough to freeze skin tissue did not register with John Eagle. Nor did the sun, breaking through the clouds now. He could not taste the sourness the drugs caused in his saliva, or smell the exhaust from a passing bus. He could not hear the traffic on Melville Road or the faraway voice of Gustavo Solis calling for him to climb down and put some clothes on. What he did hear or, more accurately, thought he heard, was a distant whooshing sound, threatening and mobile, careening around, first coming from here where it grew loud and more insistent and then from there, quiet and sinister, now inside of his head, inescapable. This sound evoked his time in the desert. The relentless wind that churned sand and debris, getting into his mouth and nostrils, coating his skin. He could handle it with his buddies, but you didn’t want that wind to kick up if you were alone. Safety in numbers. It was drilled into each recruit, never be caught solo. Every soldier had your back. They headed out in pods of twos or threes or fours. No one wanted to be alone in the desert. Between the wind and the locals—and, damn, those folks always looked angry about something—he didn’t want to think about it.

  The drugs prescribed for him by the doctors at the Veterans Affairs hospital were powerful juju. John Eagle had vowed to stop taking them but they helped him forget that he couldn’t hold a job or stay in a relationship, that he’d been making music for nearly three years and wasn’t getting any closer to achieving his elusive dream of a recording career, and that his future appeared as a dreary, decades-long stretch of frustration and disappointment. He wanted to cut a swath through life, for the world to take notice. Maybe he’d get a peacock tattoo across his back. There was a guy in Iraq who had one, all blue, green, yellow, and colors he couldn’t begin to name. And those oval markings that look like eyes. A feathered fan of colored eyes inked into his back staring out at people. That was some awesomely freaky shit! He’d get it done today.

  John Eagle tensed his calf muscles.

  Oh, sweet mother of Christ, Russell Plesko thought as he trudged across the caked snow toward Building #1 in Gladstone Village. The mope is naked. Buck fucking naked. The dispatcher had failed to mention that little detail. At the moment, the guy was balancing on a second-floor balcony railing, treating the frigid suburban morning to a moon shot. At least he wasn’t a jumper. If the man were suicidal he’d be on a higher floor, so that was positive. Russell reached for the radio mic attached to his coat and requested immediate backup. The dispatcher informed him another cruiser was less than three minutes away. Russell signed off and turned his attention to the immediate surroundings. In training, he had learned that a police officer is always onstage. There was a middle-aged Latina watching, and a maintenance worker—Latino, too, from the look of him—and two white workmen probably here to paint an apartment. The citizens all had their eyes locked on him, every one of them. He noticed the male Latino had taken out a smartphone and was recording the scene. Should he ask him to stop? Civilians were doing a lot of that lately. Why was he worried? He’d dealt with far scarier perpetrators than this one.

  In a voice meant to convey authority Russell called out, “Anyone know this gentleman’s name?”

  “He lives in the building,” the Latina answered.

  The painters gazed at Russell with bovine indifference.

  The maintenance worker who was shooting with his phone shrugged and said, “I’ve seen him around.”

  None of this was helpful.

  “Sir,” Russell called to the man on the balcony. “I’m respectfully inviting you to get down from there and put some clothes on.” The choice of words was not improvisatory. Police all over America were being trained in nonconfrontational tactics, to get what they want through the use of unthreatening language. Respectfully, an adjective meant to defuse, Invite a verb of surpassing friendliness. In theory, far superior to the more traditional Get your ass down.

  The man did not respond and remained immobile. A flock of pigeons fluttered across Russell’s line of vision. After a brief pause, he employed the same words and, unsurprisingly, achieved identical results. Polite language usually didn’t work, but Russell was doing his job by the book, and he could now check that item off the list.

  In his training, the young officer had been taught to think about outcomes. Don’t just act but consider the consequence of each action. What were the possible outcomes this morning? Best case, the man stayed where he was and with more forceful words Russell might convince him to abandon his perch. Then he could book him for causing a public nuisance and get on with his day. Worst case, the guy slipped and broke his neck, an unfortunate result for all concerned. Cops saw things they couldn’t forget, and Russell didn’t need to see this guy land on his head. He was already having a bad day. Reflexively, he tugged on his duty belt, weighed down with a police issue Glock 9mm revolver, handcuffs, summons pad, Taser, baton, flashlight, portable radio, and pepper spray. The pain in his knee had sharpened. He was tired. Russell volunteered as a coach for a youth league basketball team and worried he wouldn’t feel well enough to show up at practice that afternoon.

  Watching the man on the balcony, his nakedness an ongoing affront to propriety and worldly order, Russell questioned why he hadn’t called in sick today. Then he remembered: his wife. He had left the apartment like it was on fire.

  More than anything Russell wished this winter nudist was not a black man. In Florida, less than two weeks earlier some shit-for-brains Neighborhood Watch knucklehead had shot an African-American teenager named Trayvon Martin, and the whole country was going berserk. The president himself had weighed in. Gasbags on cable TV were calling for a National Conversation On Race, whatever that was. Russell was no racist. Growing up, he had played sports with black kids. Was as friendly with them as you could be in a high school where whites mostly sat at one set of lunchroom tables and blacks at another. Nothing resembling genuine racism disturbed his conscience unless the feeling that after this recent Florida calamity he needed to be more sensitive when dealing with black people was an even more subtle form of it.

  Russell needed to establish communication, get a bead on the exact level of psycho he was
dealing with this morning. No-clothes-in-March was an indicator, but there were gradations. Was he intoxicated? Certifiable? It was unlikely that he was a health nut, but Russell had seen a YouTube video about the Polar Bear Club in Brooklyn, those extreme fitness enthusiasts who every New Year’s Day jumped into the Atlantic Ocean. So, you never knew. In the time that it took to formulate a direct order something happened that caught the cop off guard. The man dipped his knees like an Olympic diver then flung himself into the morning air, his spine arched, toes over his head, and executed a reverse somersault before landing on his feet in the snow.

  Oh, Jeez, Russell thought. He’s an acrobat! Then: Where’s my backup? They were supposed to be three minutes from here. He looked around. No sign of them. The situation felt more volatile than it had a few seconds earlier. Everyone watching, waiting to see how this representative of government authority would handle the situation, what he, Russell Plesko, the man in whom these powers were vested, would do. The aerialist wheeled, spotted him and blinked as if awakening from a trance. He began moving toward Russell.

  The expression on the man’s face was tough to interpret. His eyes were opened wide, his lips parted—Was that a sardonic grin or a pained grimace?—to reveal teeth whose even brightness stood in sharp contrast to the rest of his physical and psychological dishevelment. It was hard to tell if he was angry or confused but what played on his features seemed like a rendering of the disturbing images that Russell imagined must be unspooling in his fevered brain. Russell had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill, and the one fact he knew was that their behavior could be dangerously unpredictable. If it was impossible to pinpoint what was going on in the man’s head, it no longer mattered now that this vessel of anarchy was bearing down on him.

  The man was seventy-five feet away when Russell shouted for him to halt. He kept coming, lurching over snow and frozen grass. Russell was conscious of the ache in his knee. The swift assessment of whether one man can physically overpower another now occurred in Russell’s mind. Even with his knee acting up he could win a fight but he didn’t want to start grappling and have the man reach for his gun. Things could get out of hand quickly. Colleagues on the force had informed him that weird bursts of strength had been known to accompany people in the throes of psychotic episodes and Russell didn’t want to find out whether or not these reports were apocryphal.

  The man was thirty feet away and despite his uneven gait seemed to be gaining speed. Russell again shouted for him to halt but the man relentlessly advanced. Nothing prepares a police officer for the sensation that accompanies being charged by a deranged naked man, Russell thought as he reached for the Taser hanging on his duty belt, and yanked the device out of its holster. At the same moment, a twinge in his aching knee caused it to buckle. When he threw his arm up to regain his balance and keep from tumbling to the ground, the Taser flew out of his hand and arced through the cold air before landing in the snow somewhere behind him. The man was fifteen feet away and hurtling toward Russell, arms beating like a raptor’s wings and—SHHKREEEEEE!!! SHHKREEEE!!!—emitting unearthly sounds. Panicked, Russell spotted the Taser and mapped its location relative to his own and the velocity of the incoming force and wondered whether he could reach it in time to save himself from the havoc headed his way.

  The bullet caught John Eagle directly in the chest and arrested his forward progress. A look of confusion blotted his features. He collapsed facedown, and the gray snow ran red.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The late winter weather had warmed, and most of the snow covering the riding trails in Bedford had melted so Jay, in a state of semi-wakefulness, decided he would take one of his horses out before going to the office. The bedroom windows betrayed no hint of dawn when he slipped quietly from between Egyptian cotton sheets, trying to not wake Nicole, tiptoed into his walk-in closet (they each had their own), and pulled on a pair of worn Levis and a heavy sweater. His boots were downstairs in the mudroom just off the kitchen.

  Peasants had raised Harold Jay Gladstone to be an aristocrat. Jay’s Bronx born father had learned to ride in Van Cortlandt Park when other boys were playing stoop ball and the elder Gladstone believed these equestrian endeavors were one of the key factors that enabled him to rise above his Walton Avenue origins. This he wanted to pass along to his children. When Jay was ten years old his mother, a woman who in her Brooklyn girlhood had aspired to a more sophisticated life, took him to a local stable where she arranged for riding lessons. Child Jay wanted to learn to ride western-style in the fashion of the cowboys he’d seen in the movies, but his mother had presciently insisted he learn to ride in the English manner. Although he never entered competitions (too stuffy), Jay cantered, galloped, and jumped with the natural ability of a peer of the realm riding to hounds. “You’re turning our boy into a Cossack!” his father jokingly exclaimed in a fake Yiddish accent to his mother whenever the two of them were on their way to a Saturday lesson, but the elder Gladstone secretly relished the potent image of a young Jew astride a horse. Jay didn’t know this at the time but his father’s father, born in Russia at the end of the 19th century, remembered being driven from his shtetl in the Pale of Settlement by mounted Cossacks who gave no mercy to the villagers they cruelly herded down the muddy street. To be the Jew on the horse rather than the Jew running from the horsemen was nothing less than the miraculous promise of America.

  The grand, perfectly maintained house, constructed in the 1920s, was stone and shingle but through the tender ministrations of a celebrity architect (who never did private residences), impeccably updated. When Jay stepped through the French doors to the veranda that overlooked the grounds, the sun was just breaking over the tree line in the distance, painting the sky in pastel streaks of salmon and pink. His boots were knee-high. He wore a field jacket and held a mug of coffee in his hand. A diaphanous mist hung over the rolling property and the sunlight at this early hour caused it to glow, lending the entire place an enchanted quality, an effect Jay never failed to appreciate. He took a sip of the strong coffee and surveyed the lawns, the tennis court, the pool and pool house (converted to a guest cottage), the stables, the twenty-acre meadow that would soon burst with wildflowers, and the woods—elms, maples, birches—that ringed it all. His love for the land was profound, and he felt deeply rooted here, inviolable. He inhaled the crisp, loamy air. The morning was splendid; the coffee warmed his stomach, and—

  “Are you going riding?” Nicole was standing in the doorway, wearing faded jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and a sweater. Her voice was sleepy, and he could tell that she was making an effort to sound agreeable. When Jay told her yes, he was, she asked if he wanted company. Although he had been looking forward to a solitary canter through the woods, that particular pleasure would have to wait.

  A short while later they were ambling on a bridle path astride a pair of Arabians that appeared hewn from marble, Nicole in front on Sugarplum, Jay behind riding Mingus. The stable hand had not yet arrived for work, and the couple had saddled and bridled the animals themselves. They rode quietly. Only the soft percussion of the horses’ hooves on the trail broke the sylvan hush. Jay had wanted to think about the coming day—he was scheduled to appear before the Department of City Planning later in the week to speak in favor of a colossal mixed-use project he intended to build in Brooklyn (public opposition was vigorous and well-organized) and needed to draft remarks—but the sight of his wife’s gently swaying form several yards ahead turned his thoughts inevitably in her direction and how she came to occupy that saddle on this morning.

  Before Nicole, he had been married to Jude Feldman, of Woodmere, Long Island, daughter of a periodontist. The marriage lasted a decade and produced one daughter, Aviva Golda (after Jude’s grandmother). At an East Hampton fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Mort Zuckerman introduced Nicole McGrory to his newly single friend Jay Gladstone. Vivacious where his ex-wife was dour, adventurous where Jude was tent
ative, and unburdened by Jude’s constant thoughts of the Jews and their lachrymose history, Nicole had an appetite for food, art, travel, horses, anything that might allow her to live her life to its furthest extreme. In her twenties, she had bungee jumped from a bridge. She wanted to try skydiving. There was something wild about Nicole and sometimes Jay wondered if that’s why he fell for her.

  The daughter of a Pan Am pilot and a former stewardess, Nicole was ten when her mother and father divorced. There were an older brother and younger sister, but she was not close to them or her parents. Her family name was Pflueger, and growing up in Richmond, Virginia she was known as Nickie Pflueger. A cheerleader in high school, and an A student, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in political science. She married her college boyfriend, but the marriage was volatile and only lasted a year. His one enduring gift was his surname: McGrory, which she happily adopted. On a visit to New York, she was approached by a representative of the Wilhelmina Agency and paid off her college loans modeling. Nicole found the fashion world predictably vapid and, frustrated by her colleagues’ obsessing over diets and relationships when she was more intrigued by trade policy with Japan, eventually got in touch with her college economics professor, now an advisor to the speaker of the House of Representatives. Through his connections, she obtained a staff position on the House Select Committee on Ethics just as the investigation into the Clinton scandals was winding down. Doing research, writing position papers, providing background to journalists, she thrived. If politics is “show business for ugly people,” the physical plainness of its practitioners functioned as a black velvet pillow from which Nicole beamed with gemlike brilliance. Her combination of beauty and smarts caught people off guard. She quickly became a fixture on the D.C. social scene and was a sought-after guest at gatherings of every political stripe. Her co-workers marveled at her ability to appear, sparkling, in press coverage of the Gridiron Club Dinner, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or, memorably, the Second Inaugural Ball of George W. Bush, which she attended as the date of a Republican Congressman from Georgia. Ultimately, she found the culture of Washington too stultifying and it was while in the early stages of casting about for the next thing that she attended the Long Island party where she met Jay Gladstone.