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“Dad, can we at the very least use the bathroom?” Trent cried.
“No, no, no,” I said.
“Well, actually, that might be a good idea,” Seamus said, smiling sheepishly beside me.
“Lollygagger Number Three, I presume,” I said, rolling my eyes.
I pinched two fingers together and put them in my mouth and whistled up ahead to halt our rolling army.
“Pit stop!” I yelled.
I stayed by the massive mound of our carry-ons as the sexes split up into the restrooms. As I nervously checked and rechecked the time on my phone, I heard some excited yelling that at first I thought might be a flash mob or something. Then I saw some teenage Asian guy walk by on the concourse with an entourage, followed by a gaggle of screaming girls trying to snap cell phone pictures of him.
Was it the Chinese Justin Bieber? I wondered with a shrug. I had no clue. This LA Asian stuff was way beyond my Bronx Irish Catholic sense and sensibilities. The good news was I wouldn’t have to worry about all things Hollywood once we made our flight.
That is, if we made our flight, I thought, frowning at my phone again. American Airlines had bent over backward to accommodate all thirteen of us on the red-eye on short notice. If we missed our plane, I feared we’d never escape from LA.
I took a quick head count as my family spilled back out onto the concourse.
Eleven, twelve, and lucky number thirteen.
“OK, boys and girls and um…priests, is everybody, um, unhydrated now? Excellent. OK, let’s move, people. Forward march.”
We were all on the plane and somewhere in the night sky, probably over Colorado, an hour and a half later when I finally was able to calm down. Socky, our now-tranquilized cat, was purring peacefully in his travel box between my feet. Mary Catherine, who probably could have used a tranquilizer or two herself after getting everyone ready for our coast-to-coast trip, was sleeping beside me in the window seat.
It felt good when she shifted toward the aisle and rested her head on my shoulder. It felt very good there, just right, in fact. We’d had our ups and downs, but it felt like we were settling in now, finally. At least I hoped so.
Just as I closed my weary eyes and was about to follow Mary Catherine’s lead, we hit the turbulence. The two-footed kind.
As if on cue, I heard some commotion behind me. There was a sweet-voiced yell of “No!” followed by the distinctive loud and wet sound of a child tossing his or her cookies. The retching sound fired three times in quick succession, and then Fiona and Bridget were standing in the aisle beside me.
“Daddy, Bridget threw up in the seat pouch! Bridget threw up all over the magazines!” Fiona called out excitedly.
I sat up and hugged the poor kid as Mary Catherine shot awake and quickly thrust some napkins into my hand.
From somewhere up ahead in
the wall-to-wall-crowded cabin, I heard a male voice moan, “Oh, the stench! Oh, for the love of Pete!”
My sentiments exactly, fella, I thought as I sopped up the mess with one hand and rapidly hit the button for the flight attendant with the other.
For the love of Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles, may we get back to New York in one piece, I prayed.
PART ONE
HARLEM SHUFFLE
CHAPTER 1
HARLEM
3:12 A.M.
THERE WERE ONLY TWO tonight to start off the season in New York. Though there were a total of a dozen in the group, the members, all being at the highest echelons of wealth and power, had busy lives, charities to chair and companies to acquire, so attendance was sporadic and often fluctuated. Four, including the two founding members, were from the US, four were from Europe, and there were two each from Hong Kong and Russia. They were considering two new members, one from India and one from Brazil, but the jury was still out.
The young New York financier who hosted all the NYC events was a founding member. The Brit, whose real estate baron family owned a large chunk of Notting Hill and most of Manchester, had a fortune in the upper hundred millions, but he was a pauper compared with the New York financier. Though the American kept his name off the Forbes list by choice, his hedge fund–acquired wealth was rumored to be mind-boggling.
So it was more than a little ironic that the financier and the well-heeled Brit were riding like a couple of schmucks in an ugly metallic-brown Mazda CX-9 crossover as they cruised up Lenox Avenue in East Harlem.
