The Ehrengraf Fandango

Начало книги

Ehrengraf, wearing a cocoa brown blazer over a pair of cream-colored flannel trousers, stepped gingerly over the threshold and into the little room reserved for attorney-client meetings. In its center stood a table, bolted to the floor, and on either side of the table was a chair, rendered immobile in the same fashion.

A young woman occupied one of the chairs and looked up at the little lawyer’s approach. She was tall and slender, with nut-brown hair framing an oval face that would have delighted Modigliani. Mentally, Ehrengraf supplied her with the color and sparkle of which recent events had deprived her. He could tell that she’d be a beauty.

“Mr. Ehrengraf,” she said.

“Ms. Plumley.”

“Can we talk here?”

“That’s the room’s purpose,” Ehrengraf said. “It’s supposed to be preferable to meeting in a cell.”

“And I suppose it is. But can what we say be heard?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

Which, he thought, was accurate, if not entirely responsive. Sitting in that room, breathing its stale air, Ehrengraf recalled a very different room, one he’d encountered a few years ago when business had called him to New York. There, a pebble’s throw from Carnegie Hall, he dined in a restaurant with an interior designed by the artist Milton Glaser. He recalled patterned tile rugs set into the tiled floor, but more than that he remembered the motif of super-sized representations of the human anatomy, sculpted and hanging on the walls. Here a disembodied nose, there a pair of sculpted lips. And, most memorably, an enormous ear.

Читать дальше →