EE/Goldshadow: Goldshadow Starts!

[DtJ Glyphmoney]

DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD UNLESS YOUR NAME IS IN THE TITLE!

Okay! All of these threads have the same OP so don't worry about reading over the other ones. This is a very straightforward concept, you just take turns writing a story. There are a few rules I'd like to set in order to make this as effective as possible.

1. NO OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION. This is a BIG rule. I want to see every little bit of the story's development in this thread. And no, talking about it on AIM and posting a log is not okay.
2. There is no out of context. Everything you put in here becomes part of the story you're telling. That means if you break down and get mad at your partner and cuss him out, one of the two of you will have to find a way to justify that happening.
3. Don't be a ****. Don't go out of your way to ruin other people's stories. In the same fashion, don't be 100% dedicated to only getting what you want done too.
4. Don't write a novel each post. This rule was something I had a hard time with since I am trying to make this as free range as possible. Just don't overwhelm your partner with more story than they can handle is what I'm getting at.

Knowing myself, I've forgotten some rule again. Refrain from posting in this thread until you're planning to start the story.

 

[GoldShadow]

It was a Saturday, and two gibbous moons shone with ghostly pallor—the first glued securely to the sky, the second its reflection, shimmering in the river’s restless current. Beyond the river, myriad skyscrapers erupted from the ground, their windows lit against the night, like massive glowing monoliths. And though not a soul could be seen from this distance, Michael knew it was bustling with activity, an army of two-million-plus inhabitants besieging the dive bars and comedy clubs and topless joints and elite restaurants.

Yet here he was, seated on a bench on the other side of the river—the side where the grass was not so green—in an unmaintained park next to a construction site (perpetually under construction), two blocks down from a ramshackle housing project, three blocks down from a condemned apartment building rife with squatters, and five blocks down from a street corner populated by dope dealers and their loyal clientele.

He glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty. His contact was late.

With a flick of a wrist he discarded a smoldering cigarette, and crushed it under foot. If the old adage was true and practice indeed made perfect, then Michael was an expert at quitting cigarettes—he had already given them up twelve times today, thirteen counting the one currently beneath his boot sole.

Dead grass crackled behind him.

“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” his contact said.

 

[Evil Eye]

Michael craned his neck, looking over the back of the bench. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood there, hands buried deep in his pockets. The flaps of his overcoat stirred around his thighs with the chill of the breeze, and as the jacket tightened it revealed the unavoidable paunch of middle age.

"Bloom?"

"Now why would you do that?" The man immediately shook his head, throwing a disapproving gesture at Michael like a baseball. "No names. Never utter names... they're unnecessary."

Michael hesitated as the man leaned forward onto the bench, the leather at of the sleeves groaning. Michael kept composure by tracing the gray and brown patterning of Bloom's beard. Looking him in the eye was too much.

"I'm sorry," he offered.

"Bahhh!" Bloom made a casual smile and a wink before easing up his posture. "Forget it."

For a while, there was only the whisper of the wind and the glistening of the Hudson to whet the senses. Pursing his lips, Bloom slipped around to the front of the bench and dropped beside him. Just a few inches too close.

Bloom leaned in. "It's kinda funny for me, because I've never been the one that deals with the eggheads. An economist?" He turned to face the river, chuckling. "Never was much for crunching numbers. Crunchin' other things, maybe..."

Michael waited for a continuation. Somehow, even in silence, Bloom had managed to leave his derisive tone hanging over the air. Michael became very aware of the fact that he might die in the next few minutes.

"I know what you're thinking," Bloom glanced over to Michael coolly. "You're thinkin' about the way my coat sags at the middle. Thinking you might outrun me with a good takeoff." He crossed his legs. "Don't."

Michael was done waiting. "I was sent here. That's all there really is to it. Just tell me what I'm here for."

"You're here, Michael, because you have a certain magic with accounting and all those nice little math tricks. Because you know a lobbyist that is veeeery well connected." Bloom turned to Michael and locked eyes. "I'm here to put you on an audition. If you have an idea that can work, a way to get to certain... parties of interest. Then I'm here to offer you a job."

A shiver crept down Michael's back as he anticipated the next words correctly.

"But if I don't like what you have to say..." Bloom grinned, and there was no right kind of joy to be found in it. "This conversation never happened -- and neither did you."

 

[GoldShadow]

“R-right,” Michael said as the shiver briefly spread to his whole body. He shut his eyes for a moment, conjuring an answer and rehearsing it in his head, hoping that when he reopened them he would discover that Bloom was gone and it had all been a hallucination. Unfortunately, it had been just that—hope—and Bloom’s beard was still there, staring him square in the face.

Bloom nodded him on. “Any day now.”

“The Center for Fiscal Policy is an ordinary think tank, right?” Michael said, rocking anxiously back and forth, studying the ground, the skyline, the river—anything but Bloom’s jeering visage.

“That’s fascinating, Michael. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“And it is an ordinary think tank, for the most part. Data comes in, we analyze it, reports go out. But there’s more. There’s…” His fingers were shaking, though he’d had his last nicotine fix mere minutes ago. “Sometimes, Mister Spencer—”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Bloom’s face lit up, but the veneer of mirth didn’t hide his sinister intent for one second. “That’s the man I want to hear about.”

“Right, well, sometimes he drops in and asks me to run the numbers on other batches of data, unrelated to whatever me and my team might be working on. He claims it’s data that one of the other teams is working on.” Michael swallowed hard. “I mean, it’s a general policy of his. Likes to occasionally take some data from one team and drop it in the hands of another, without telling them anything about it—just numbers, nothing else. No identifying information. Sort of a blind double-check to make sure bias isn’t seeping into the teams’ final reports.”

Tapping his wristwatch, Bloom shook his head. “Time is money, Mike—can I call you Mike? I figured you, of all people, would know that.”

“Just hear me out, all right? Let me finish.”

Bloom shrugged.

“But I don’t think,” Michael continued, “I mean, I know for a fact he’s lying. It’s not other teams’ data, and he’s not having the teams simply double-check each others’ work. That data is coming from corporations. Big corporations. Insurance companies. Wall Street giants, hedge funds, investment banks. Oil companies. Defense contractors, for Christ’s sake. This is private, well-protected information. There’s no way someone could have access to that. Not legally.”

“Huh.” Bloom looked up at the sky wearing a mask of insincere contemplation, and stroked his beard. “That’s funny. A second ago, I could’ve sworn you said something about ‘just numbers, no identifying information.’”

For the first time, Michael stared Bloom in the eye. He instantly regretted it. “I’m good with patterns, putting four and four together, and… Look, does it matter?” He mustered every remaining ounce from the scant reserves of courage in his body. “What the hell good would it do me to lie to you?”

“I still haven’t gotten what I came here for.”

“If… If you were to hint to Spencer that you knew, that you could out him, and ruin him… It should coax him into agreeing to meet with you.”

“Ah.” The edges of Bloom’s lips curled into a childishly gleeful smile. He offered Michael an approving slap on the shoulder, and held on to it with a painfully firm grip. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

He stood up and walked around to the back of the bench and leaned in close to Michael’s ear. Michael dared not turn around.

“Get yourself a good night’s sleep,” Bloom said. “You’ve earned it. Go home to your apartment on… what is it, East 33rd Street? Maybe fire up one of those scented candles in the cupboard next to your TV. I’m not a fan of aromatherapy, personally. Always thought it was a little tacky, a little feminine.”

Michael practically heard the man grinning, a devil in human’s clothes.

“We’ll be in touch,” Bloom said. With that, he walked away, his footsteps taking the form of crunching dead grass. Eventually the crunches faded, and Michael was left alone with only the Hudson’s hushed murmurs and the moon’s wan gleam to give him company. He promptly lit a cigarette and sucked on it in terse, shaky drags.

 

[Evil Eye]

Michael lunged forward, managing to crash into his assailant and bring the fight to the floor of his bedroom in spite of his tangled quilts' better efforts. Although his vision remained bleary, but he immediately realized something was wrong; Michael was quite certain that Ernest Bloom was not seven feet tall and made of brass. He wiped his eyes, sluggishly.

The coat rack. Wonderful.

With his heart still throbbing in his ears, Michael put his back to the bed and drew his knees to his chest. He took deep breaths. Then he checked the bedside clock. 5:35 in the morning. More than seventy-two hours after his meeting with the bearded spook, now. The odds of his impending assassination were narrowing.

Michael made a mental note to put a few pillows beside the bed for the next morning.

He yawned, stood, and stretched. His fingers twitched. The paranoia was quite new. This was nothing like the rush of daytrading on the dime of his cafeteria fund in college, or giving a potentially career-making presentation on a promising new firm. This was a feeling the sharpened eyes of a dozen scrutinizing onlookers could not match, and that was a feat indeed.

Michael walked over to the kitchen, savoring the coolness of the hardwood floors. They sapped the panicked heat that was still pulsing through him. His hands drew and lit his first cigarette of the day from the package behind the stove as he peeked through the blinds and scanned the parking lot suspiciously. A. Dennehy's Ferrari. R. Gowry's Corvette. L. Bertram's Buick. Each vehicle had an alibi in the form of its owner; these people were merely other buzzcodes on the front door to Michael, but in this moment, they held the comfort of a warm family. He was glad to live in an apartment.

The newspapers drew his eye, nestled against the door beneath the mailslot, their neatly folded curves just shy of unraveling. Michael started a pot of coffee and then scooped it up, pensively, as he had done for many years. The carried a new meaning for him now, and not merely because the Wall Street Journal had been bumped down in priority. He wasn't certain what it was that he had been watching for, but Michael was beginning to find curiosity and paranoia to be motivators that demand gratification.

He started by flipping to the obituaries.

 

[GoldShadow]

His eyes, unlike his thoughts, were focused, and flitted from name to name. Susan Bell, MD, Chief of Medicine at New York–Presbyterian. Jeff Weinberg, lifelong philanthropist. Rick Edelman, one-time mayoral candidate. Entire lives summarized in half-column jumbles of ink, decades worth of achievements and idiosyncrasies reduced to 150-word synopses. Jagdesh Kumar, former dean of engineering at NYU Polytechnic. James Cabrera, NYPD police officer. Ardita Cale, twenty-seven, fashion model. Ardita Cale, twenty-seven, fashion model. Ardita Cale, twenty-seven, fashion model.

His gaze had moved on but his mind remained fixed. He sloshed it around in his brain. Ardita Cale. Ardita. Where had he heard that name? Perhaps he was confusing it with someone else, but it was a fairly unusual and memorable name. He scanned her biography; she’d died of an overdose, and in life had posed for Elle, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, and GQ. This meant nothing to Michael—he was an occasional reader of The Economist, Business Week, US News, not fluff magazines. Ardita…

The coffeemaker emitted a ding to indicate his morning joe was ready. Between sips, he shaved and washed up. He hastened out the door, bypassing his car in favor of the subway—driving was nice when possible, but imprudent in morning traffic. His commute was the same as usual, yet it was different. What was that coat-clad man on the corner of 33rd and Park Ave doing, stiff and motionless, reading a newspaper? Did he glance up at Michael as he walked past? What about the expressionless woman on the crosswalk who gave him a look as she went by? Bystanders sprouted eyes; bicyclists sprouted eyes; cars with tinted windows sprouted eyes; buildings sprouted eyes; sunglasses sprouted eyes.

At least on the street, he was free to walk away from perceived threats. On the train, however, he was seized by a crushing sensation. He’d never been afraid of small spaces, but apparently, all it took was the right circumstances to evoke his hidden claustrophobic tendencies.

By the time he walked into the Center for Fiscal Policy building, he was on the verge of hyperventilating. He unfurled his ID badge to pass through security and hurried to his office on the third floor. Almost as soon as he settled into his chair, the phone rang.

He answered it.

 

[Evil Eye]

"Get your ass in my office. Now."

The other end of the phone clicked none too gently, and Michael wondered if the mild banging he heard in the ceiling was plumbing or what transferred down from Ellis Spencer presumably breaking his phone in half two floors above.

Hearing his voice again was strange. Spencer hadn't talked to him once after the night he met with Bloom. Not once. And Michael hadn't even seen him after the first day. Although the change in behavior, or lack thereof, had nulled Michael's suspicion that Spencer was going to die, it was an alien experience. Being subjected to Spencer's anger had jolted him, reminded him that Spencer was not dead, and that his voice was not that of a ghost willowing in the wallpaper.

He reflected on this, then on the fact that thinking of Spencer as all but dead -- or about to die -- hadn't bothered him at all. Michael grimaced.

His finger twitched, and he immediately checked his watch. No time for cigarette number five. Spencer would leave for his lunch in twelve and a half minutes, and missing the meeting beforehand would only agitate him further. Michael knew that whatever Spencer was so infuriated about had to relate to Bloom. The coup.

Michael gave himself exactly one minute to gather up the files he wanted for today's work, then after a second of hesitation, fished out his copies of Spencer's off the books numbers as well. It couldn't hurt to be prepared. When he was satisfied, he walked over to the elevator, stiffening to cover for his jittering hands.

He reached the elevator, already open, and slipped inside. Glanced at his watch again -- six minutes and three seconds until Spencer would puff up his chest and storm out of his office. Three seconds was long enough to take a deep breath; Michael did so.

Then he pressed the button for floor number six.

* * * * *​

Michael had never noticed the utter redness of the door to Ellis Spencer's office. He had always been transfixed by the the sloping, curving waves of the wood's patterns. His eyes scanned across every contour, in flitting but indulgent arcs. It calmed him. He drank in the gradient of color present, more than ever before. The way it splashed across the buxom markings, dark at their core, but brighter and inviting at the fringes.

Four minutes and forty seconds. Spencer was probably just closing up his briefcase, on the other side of the door, and Michael could already imagine that peculiar redness he gets in his ears at times. Usually when returning from a meeting in D.C. with the Secretaries of Commerce and the Treasury, not liking what they had to hear. He usually didn't.

Four minutes and pennies, now. Michael was procrastinating, a habit that only emerged in emotional situations. They frightened him -- agitated people in particular. So volatile, so unstable. So unpredictable. Michael had tried to train away his social anxiety for his entire life, but the best he'd been able to manage was locking it in a back closet, and the lock was not a strong one. Angry, fearful, and bemoaning people still put him on the verge of panic.

He expected Spencer to be all three.

 

[GoldShadow]

His feet were cement and his legs jelly, and though he knew he should go in and confront Spencer head on, he was rooted to the floor. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, the choice was made for him.

The door to Spencer’s office swung open three minutes ahead of schedule, nearly clipping Michael’s shoulder. Spencer was a man of habit. He left his office for lunch at the same time each day, on the dot—not ten seconds earlier, not ten seconds later. Until now.

“Michael. Where the hell have you been?” The distaste in his voice was palpable. Michael reasoned that he shouldn’t take it personally; disdain was the man’s default setting. Yet he couldn’t help noticing it was harsher today, like the usual fire had been doused with a great big barrel of gasoline.

“I am not in a good mood,” Spencer said, and Michael briefly wondered if he’d also point out that the sky was blue and that water was wet. “Walk with me.”

Spencer stormed down the hallway. He was neither very tall nor very broad, but it would be inaccurate to say he wasn’t physically intimidating. His presence demanded fear and respect by sheer virtue of the fact that, though of average build, nature had crafted him in the likeness of Satan.

“Sir?” Michael fell in tow. “Where are we going?”

“You’re joining me for lunch,” Spencer said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He had never invited Michael—or anybody—to lunch.

“Lunch?”

“You know. Lunch. Second meal of the day. I’ve got some investment advice for you, Michael. Buy a dictionary.”

Michael’s heartbeat quickened. He followed his employer into the elevator, and then out the first floor exit. He couldn’t shake the notion that he was abreast his executioner, traipsing to his own demise. With each step the noose tightened, and the air got thicker, and the breaths more viscous. Spencer didn’t speak, and Michael wasn’t about to change the status quo.

Spencer ambled onto the street and led Michael several blocks to an upscale steakhouse called simply “Moore’s.” They stepped inside and approached the maitre d’, who permitted them into the dimly lit dining area. It was an elegant affair with ambience to match, and the décor had an aged, Prohibition-era charm. They sat down at a secluded round table in the corner. Michael placed his files and folders on the floor. He felt sorely underdressed.

Ellis Spencer ordered a vintage port and three sirloin steaks; it was only then that Michael noticed the extra napkin and set of utensils at the table. Spencer glanced over Michael’s shoulder and muttered, “The prick’s here. Keep your mouth shut unless you’re directly addressed.”

Michael turned to look at their mystery guest. It was a suited, clean-shaven man with cropped, silver hair. Michael nearly choked on the sip of wine he’d just taken.

“Michael, I’d like you to meet…” Spencer said, but Michael already knew. It was Gerard Cole—the man who’d coerced him into this whole mess to begin with, the man who’d initiated the meeting with Bloom.