One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [153]
“Oh, Paul.” She put her hand on the side of his head and stroked his hair. “I love it. It’s stunning.”
Back in the Gooches’ apartment, Sam rifled through his mother’s underwear drawer and, finding a pair of old leather gloves, tucked them into the waistband of his jeans. From the toolbox in the cramped coat closet, he extracted a small screwdriver, a pair of pliers, an X-Acto knife, wire clippers, and a small spool of electrical tape. He stuck these items in the back pockets of his jeans, making sure the bulges were covered by his shirt. Then he rode the elevator up to Enid and Philip’s floor and, slipping through the hallway, took the stairwell up to the first floor of the penthouse apartment.
The stairwell led to a small foyer outside a service entrance, and there, as Sam had known, was a metal plate. He put on his mother’s gloves, took out the screwdriver, and unscrewed the plate from the wall. Inside was a compartment filled with cables. Every floor had a cable box, and the cables ran from one floor to another. Most boxes contained one or two cables, but on the Rices’ floor, due to all of Paul’s equipment, there were six. Sam tugged the cables out of a hole in the back and, using the X-Acto knife, cut away the white plastic casing. Then he clipped the wires and, mixing them up, spliced the wrong wires together using the pliers. Finally, he wrapped the newly configured wires in the electrical tape. Then he pushed the cables back into the wall. He wasn’t sure what would happen, but it was guaranteed to be big.
16
Under regular circumstances, Paul Rice, the early riser, would have been the first to discover The Internet Debacle, as it would be later referred to by the residents of One Fifth. But on the following morning, James Gooch happened to be up first. Following his triumphant book reading the night before (“Four hundred twenty books sold, it’s practically a record,” Redmond had boasted), James was booked on the first flight from La Guardia to Boston at six A. M.; from Boston, he would go on to Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, and then Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He would be away for two weeks. As a consequence, he had to get up at three A. M. to pack. James was a noisy, nervous packer, so Mindy was up as well. Mindy normally would have been testy about this disturbance to her sleep—considering sleep the most precious of all modern-day commodities—but on this day, she was forgiving. The evening before, James had made her proud. All the years of supporting him were paying off when they easily might not have, and Mindy found herself imagining enormous sums of money coming their way. If the book made a million dollars, they could send Sam to any university—Harvard, or perhaps Cambridge in England, which was even more prestigious—without feeling a pinch. Two million dollars would mean university for Sam, and maybe the luxury of owning a car and housing it in a garage and paying off their mortgage. Three million dollars would get them all that plus a tiny getaway home in Montauk or Amagansett or Litchfield County in Connecticut. Beyond this, Mindy’s imagination could go no further. She was so accustomed to living a life of relative deprivation, she couldn’t picture herself needing or wanting more.
“Do you have toothpaste?” she asked, following James into his bathroom. “Don’t forget your comb. And dental floss.”
“I’m sure they have drugstores in Boston,” James remarked.
Mindy closed the toilet seat and sat down, watching him go through his medicine cabinet. “I don’t want you to have to worry about details,” she said. “You’re going to need all your concentration to handle the readings and interviews.”
“Mindy,” James said, putting a bottle of aspirin into a Ziploc bag. “You’re making me nervous. Don’t you have something to do?”
“At three in the morning?”
“I could use