The Lola Quartet Read Online Free

said, without looking at him. He was hailing a cab. He was a tall man, imposing in a dark coat.
       "Mr. Lander, please, if I could just—"
       "You want a comment?" The woman's voice was high-pitched. She sounded like a child. "It's a nightmare that we can't wake up from."
       "Don't talk to him," Lander snapped. "What did I tell you about reporters?"
       "Wait," Gavin said, "what's your name?" But the rain had turned to a cold downpour and they were gone, half-running toward a cab that had stopped on the corner. "Excuse me!" he shouted, "please, wait—" The door closed and the car pulled away into a river of taillights.
       He looked up photographs of Arnold Lander later at his desk. Lander's image was everywhere— charity balls, a corporate website, various industry events— but who was the woman? She'd appeared to be a solid thirty years younger than Lander. She certainly wasn't the wife in the most recent charity ball photo, but that had been a year ago already. A daughter, secretary, mistress, fourth wife? He'd helped her into the cab, Gavin remembered, but perhaps an older man might do that for a secretary? Men of a particular era and class were taught to treat certain women like porcelain. Gavin knew it was the era he himself belonged to — fedoras! Mechanical cameras! Good table manners!—but this thought was a digression. What mattered was that the author of the perfect quote had walked away from him and he had no idea who she was.
       "I need the Alkaitis story," Julie said. "You just about done?"

    But for Alkaitis's victims, the disaster continues to unfold. Amy Torren and her husband lost their life savings. "I feel like I'm caught up in a bad dream," she said of Alkaitis's deception. "It's just a night mare that we can't wake up from. I feel like there's maybe less good in the world than I thought there was. It's hard to take in, to be honest with you. I don't know how I'm going to aff ord my mother's medical expenses now."

       "Hell of a quote," Julie said, when he saw her in the staff kitchen the next morning. He was helping himself to his third cup of coffee. He hadn't slept.
       " Thank you," Gavin said. He returned to his desk with a strange feeling of floating. No one could prove that no investor had said those words to him but he still felt sick every time he thought about it. Amy Torren was the name of his eleventh grade English teacher.
       As days passed without incident it seemed that both this and the
    Floridian woman whose name wasn't Chloe had passed under the radar. But the point, Gavin realized, wasn't whether the woman who'd climbed into the cab with Lander was an investor, or even whether he'd gotten away with referring to her as such when he wrote dialogue for her and gave her a name. The point was that Gavin had opened a door, cracked it just slightly, and he could see through to the disgrace and shadows on the other side. If you tell a lie it's easier to tell another. An abyss yawns suddenly at your feet. At night he went home and stared into the flickering blue of the television and felt almost nothing.

    T h e s e c o n d round of layoffs came without fanfare. The first time, Julie told him, when he'd been in Florida, there'd been an anguished speech in the middle of the newsroom by the executive editor, who'd stood on a chair to be better seen but hadn't been able to make eye contact with anyone. Two weeks later the second round was well under way before anyone realized what was happening. The executive editor's assistant called the victims one at a time and asked them to drop by the office, and eleven people didn't come to work the next day. The executive editor sent out a regretful memorandum that began with the words "As you may have noticed . . ." and included the phrases "online content" and "a changing media landscape." The word "rightsizing" was used. There was a regrettable possibility, the memo concluded, of future cuts.
       Gavin read it