The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist.... Carrie Blake

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      ‘What kind of parents name their kid Walker?’

      ‘A photography fan and his bullied wife,’ I said. He watched me deciding not to ask what kind of parents name their son Valentine.

      ‘Guess what lovers’ holiday in February I was born on,’ Val said, answering my unspoken question for me. ‘So what do your friends call you? Walk?’

      ‘Matthew. My middle name. My friends call me Matthew,’ I said.

      ‘Ah, right,’ said Val. ‘The friends. I can see them from here. So let me describe your evening to you … Matthew. You’re going to drink quite a bit more than your friends, and when someone pays, or when they split the bill, you’re not going to be putting your credit card in with the rest. Am I correct? In the ballpark, maybe?’

      ‘More or less in the ballpark.’ Fuck you, I thought.

      ‘More,’ he said. ‘More than less. But that’s not a problem. For me. From my point of view, it’s the opposite of a problem. It’s actually an advantage. I’m looking for someone like you.’

      ‘To do what?’ Somehow I could tell that this was about business, not sex. If it was a sex thing, Heidi would at least have checked me out.

      ‘What do you think I want you to do?’ he said. ‘Blow me? Christ. Don’t flatter yourself. You think you’re hotter than Heidi?’

      At the sound of her name, Heidi looked up, then went back to the cocktail menu.

      ‘To work for me. To do stuff.’

      ‘Stuff?’

      ‘A range of stuff,’ he said. ‘For which you’ll get paid in cash, if I may. No boring tedious social security and tax deductions. No problem. And no record of your having worked for me. At the end of the day, should we decide to part company, no fulsome recommendation letter. No bright spot on your CV. How does that sound?’

      It sounded great, but I kept waiting for more … for some sense of the weird ‘stuff’ he would be paying me to do.

      He said, ‘What I mean is, how does a hundred and fifty grand a year sound?’

      ‘Amazing,’ I said, taken aback. ‘But … why me? You’ve never met me before. You know nothing about me.’

      ‘I saw you and your friends. You’re the hungriest guy at that table.’

      He motioned for his entourage to come back. He told me to give my contact information to a tall, gym-buffed guy in a pale gray suit who typed it, lightning fast, into his phone.

      ‘My office will contact you,’ Morton said. ‘Have a fun evening.’

      I went back to my table.

      The guys said, ‘What was that about?’

      I said, ‘I was just telling him how much I liked his films.’

      My interview with Val Morton was two days away. I spent them on the internet. I read the puff pieces about the good works that the Prairie Foundation was doing, and some shorter pieces, mostly from political sites that weighed the fact that Val Morton was helping to ruin New York City against the fact that he’d built houses in the 9^th ward after Hurricane Katrina.

      I read about his fights with the Landmarks Commission and other city agencies regarding his plans to turn some of Manhattan’s oldest, most beautiful structures—the counting house off the Battery, a hall at Ellis Island—into condos. It was Val Morton’s position that he would preserve these places, which the cash-strapped city was letting decay.

      Of course, I wondered why Val was hiring me. The way he’d said hungry scared me, partly because it was true. What had he meant by stuff? If the job wasn’t about sex, then what was it? To be his hired goon. To go to meetings and threaten the neighborhood associations. To make it clear that the sweet little old lady who said that her river view was being blocked by Val’s condo would come to wish she’d shut up and let Val do whatever he wanted.

      I read the details of how his building on the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights had involved a battle. About how his co-op board was up in arms about Val’s plans to combine two Upper East Side apartments in order to double the size of the prewar Park Avenue palace in which he and Heidi lived. And about the ongoing war over his plans to take over Long Island City.

      At the Prairie Foundation office, on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise in Tribeca, I had to run through a gauntlet of security guards, receptionists and secretaries before one of them finally gave me a form to fill out. There were several dozen questions, mostly having to do with my education, my health, my background, my previous employment.

      It was just the kind of thing that made me conscious of how dismal my resume was. I worked in a fried chicken place! At the end, the form asked if I had a criminal record. I considered lying. Did one mistake I’d made as a teenager mean that I was supposed to spend my whole life asking, ‘Will that be light meat or dark?’ But something about my talk with Val Morton made me think this might be the rare case: a straight job for which a sketchy history would actually count in my favor.

      Val didn’t bother seeing me. A secretary said, ‘Oh, Mr Walker, you’re hired.’

      ‘Matthew,’ I said. ‘Matthew Frazier.’

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can start Monday.’

      The job was never boring, though I didn’t always know what I was doing or why. I got paid enough to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment near Central Park, where I ran either before or after I went to work. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I found out the answers later, if I found out at all. Sometimes I felt like a high level, well-paid errand boy. Once I hand-delivered a laptop to a lawyer’s office in Kansas City. It was assumed that I wouldn’t look at what was on it. I was sort of like Val’s personal assistant, though (at least I told myself) the work was a little more challenging and demanding than that. I never understood the black and white rules for being a ‘good guy.’ I liked working for Val because for Val—everything is grey.

      I managed Val and Heidi’s apartments in Brooklyn Heights and on the Upper East Side, so he and Heidi could stay wherever was closer to where they were spending the evening. I worked with Val’s decorator, Charisse, to fix up the Brooklyn Heights condo.

      Charisse and I trusted each other. When I told her that Val needed a new mattress, even though he already had one, she let me pick it out.

      The real explanation was that I had found Isabel, and she was working in the mattress store.

      But that was a secret between Val and me. Charisse didn’t have to know that.

      One day, not long after I went to work for him, Val Morton called me up to his office. He always sat in front of a vast, explosion-proof picture window so that the Statue of Liberty seemed to float in the air behind him. He always gave everyone a moment to be wowed by the view. Then he got down to business.

      ‘I need you to do something that you may not understand, at least at first. But it has to be done. There’s something I need. You will need a partner. An accomplice, if you will. A woman. A young woman. Pretty but not too pretty. СКАЧАТЬ