proposal, Arbogast—who had popped in to see that none of his minions had been shanghaied the prior night at any of the louche venues they watered at after hours—explained he had taken it upon himself to install an elaborate security system.
“Security?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was more vulnerable in a brownstone than in our old co-op, where affable white-haired doormen were lavishly tipped to take a bullet for the tenants.
“Absotively,” he rejoined, wolfing back his matutinal portion of sturgeon direct from Barney Greengrass’s numbered vaults in Geneva. “Any serial killer can just walk into this place. Maybe you want your throat sliced while you sleep? Or your main squeeze should get her brains scrambled by some drifter with a ball-peen hammer and a grudge against society? And that’s after he’s had his way with her.”
“Do you really think—”
“It’s not what
I
think, pilgrim. This town is awash with diabolical mental tinderboxes.”
With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.
Not wanting to be smirked at by the workers as an easy mark, I insisted that before I could agree to any new costs I would have to peruse the nuances of the risk-reward ratio, a formula that I understood with the same firm grasp I had on quantum mechanics. Since several hot stocks I had invested in recently had vanished without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle, I finally told the work foreman I couldn’t dredge up another penny for a burglar-alarm system, but when night fell I froze in bed hearing what I concluded was a homicidal maniac unscrewing the front door. With my heart pounding like the bombing of Dresden, I got Arbogast on the horn and green-lighted the installation of a set of pricey, high-tech Tibetan motion detectors.
• • •
A S THE MONTHS PASSED, our completion date, already postponed half a dozen times, kept receding like a six-pack in the desert. Alibis abounded to rival the Arabian Nights. Several plasterers went down with mad cow, and then the boat carrying crates of jade and lapis lazuli to line the nanny’s room was sunk off the coast of Auckland by a tsunami; finally, a crucial motorized device needed to elevate the TV from a trunk at the foot of the bed turned out to be hand-fashioned exclusively by elves who worked only by moonlight. The microscopic amount of work that actually took place was shoddy, as I learned in the midst of a sparkling exchange between myself and a Nobel contender in our brand-new study, when the floor buckled, costing the potential laureate his two front teeth and earning me the honor of sponsoring a record settlement.
When I confronted Arbogast with my disenchantment over cost overruns that were challenging the German inflation of the 1920s, he laid it off to my “psychotic demand for change orders.”
“Relax, cousin,” he said. “If you’ll stop your tergiversating, Arbogast and Company will be history in four weeks. My hand to God.”
“And not a moment too soon,” I fumed. “I can’t coexist another second with this infestation from Stonehenge. There’s not a scintilla of privacy. Just yesterday, after finally filching some measure of lebensraum, I was about to consummate the sacred act of love with my one and only profiterole when your workers picked me up and moved me so they could hang a sconce.”
“See these?” Arbogast said, flashing a smile usually employed by men who are about to commit mail fraud. “They’re called Xanax. Dig in—although I wouldn’t take more than thirty a day. The side-effect studies have been inconclusive.”
That midnight, a susurrus triggered the downstairs motion detector, causing me to leap directly upright out of bed and remain there like a hovercraft. Convinced that I could make out the sounds of a salivating lycanthrope vaulting up the stairs, I flailed through
“Security?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was more vulnerable in a brownstone than in our old co-op, where affable white-haired doormen were lavishly tipped to take a bullet for the tenants.
“Absotively,” he rejoined, wolfing back his matutinal portion of sturgeon direct from Barney Greengrass’s numbered vaults in Geneva. “Any serial killer can just walk into this place. Maybe you want your throat sliced while you sleep? Or your main squeeze should get her brains scrambled by some drifter with a ball-peen hammer and a grudge against society? And that’s after he’s had his way with her.”
“Do you really think—”
“It’s not what
I
think, pilgrim. This town is awash with diabolical mental tinderboxes.”
With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.
Not wanting to be smirked at by the workers as an easy mark, I insisted that before I could agree to any new costs I would have to peruse the nuances of the risk-reward ratio, a formula that I understood with the same firm grasp I had on quantum mechanics. Since several hot stocks I had invested in recently had vanished without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle, I finally told the work foreman I couldn’t dredge up another penny for a burglar-alarm system, but when night fell I froze in bed hearing what I concluded was a homicidal maniac unscrewing the front door. With my heart pounding like the bombing of Dresden, I got Arbogast on the horn and green-lighted the installation of a set of pricey, high-tech Tibetan motion detectors.
• • •
A S THE MONTHS PASSED, our completion date, already postponed half a dozen times, kept receding like a six-pack in the desert. Alibis abounded to rival the Arabian Nights. Several plasterers went down with mad cow, and then the boat carrying crates of jade and lapis lazuli to line the nanny’s room was sunk off the coast of Auckland by a tsunami; finally, a crucial motorized device needed to elevate the TV from a trunk at the foot of the bed turned out to be hand-fashioned exclusively by elves who worked only by moonlight. The microscopic amount of work that actually took place was shoddy, as I learned in the midst of a sparkling exchange between myself and a Nobel contender in our brand-new study, when the floor buckled, costing the potential laureate his two front teeth and earning me the honor of sponsoring a record settlement.
When I confronted Arbogast with my disenchantment over cost overruns that were challenging the German inflation of the 1920s, he laid it off to my “psychotic demand for change orders.”
“Relax, cousin,” he said. “If you’ll stop your tergiversating, Arbogast and Company will be history in four weeks. My hand to God.”
“And not a moment too soon,” I fumed. “I can’t coexist another second with this infestation from Stonehenge. There’s not a scintilla of privacy. Just yesterday, after finally filching some measure of lebensraum, I was about to consummate the sacred act of love with my one and only profiterole when your workers picked me up and moved me so they could hang a sconce.”
“See these?” Arbogast said, flashing a smile usually employed by men who are about to commit mail fraud. “They’re called Xanax. Dig in—although I wouldn’t take more than thirty a day. The side-effect studies have been inconclusive.”
That midnight, a susurrus triggered the downstairs motion detector, causing me to leap directly upright out of bed and remain there like a hovercraft. Convinced that I could make out the sounds of a salivating lycanthrope vaulting up the stairs, I flailed through
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