Chapter 17: The Ballroom

At eight-fifty on Thursday morning the Tower's ballroom held three hundred chairs and four people.

Nadine stood at the door with a clipboard.

Winslow stood at the back wall.

A bank officer in a gray suit sat at a table by the stage with a leather folder.

Beside her sat a second officer, who had not stopped clearing his throat since we arrived.

I wore the black turtleneck.

At eight fifty-five the double doors opened and sixty people walked in.

They came in their old uniforms.

Housekeepers in gray, cooks in white jackets, and a row of bellmen with their caps in their hands.

The night doorman came last, straightening his coat.

Nobody had told them to wear them.

Nobody sat until I asked them to.

At nine o'clock exactly, Darrell came through the side door in the navy suit.

His lawyer walked behind him, and the board of directors walked behind his lawyer.

He had told me to ask him to bring the staff.

He had brought nobody.

He saw the chairs, filled to the third row, and he stopped walking.

"What is this?" he said.

"You asked me to buy it."

"Not like this."

"Like what?"

His eyes went over the gray uniforms and the white jackets and came back to me.

A pastry cook in the second row folded her arms.

"Ms. Sorrell," the first bank officer said, standing. "The Tower mortgage note, three hundred ten million, is offered to you this morning at par."

"I accept."

"The assignment is a signature on page six."

I signed on page six.

It took only a moment.

I had spent five years wiring money to this building in the dark, and the end of it was a pen scratch.

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