Chapter 13: The Unveiling

The Allegheny Grand looked smaller at ten in the morning, with the chandeliers on and the chairs in rows.

Three hundred seats faced a stage with a blue banner across the back.

HALDEN ROW CAPITAL, it read, and under it, in smaller letters, PITTSBURGH.

I had been walked out of this room nine days ago.

This time I walked in through the front doors with my wife's arm through mine.

"We could stand at the back," Emerson said.

"If I stand at the back, I'll stay there."

"Then we sit where he has to see you."

She steered me down the center aisle to the third row.

"I'm not putting you in a corner so you can feel noble."

We took two seats on the aisle.

Ottilie was already in the fourth row with her thermos between her shoes.

She gave me a nod, the same one she gave a quarterly report she approved of.

The first two rows held the people I had never met.

There were twenty of them in grey suits, men and women who moved other people's money for a living.

In the center of the front row sat a woman of sixty with a leather folio on her knee.

She ran the teachers' pension fund that had given Halden Row its first public dollars.

Her letters had always been addressed to a man who wasn't me.

"That's her," I said quietly.

"The one who signed first?"

"She read forty pages of my numbers and then asked to meet the man."

"And you sent Sullivan."

"I sent Sullivan."

Emerson's hand found mine on the armrest and stayed there.

The lights dipped, and the quartet from the gala struck up a bright, hollow fanfare.

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