The Submission - Amy Waldman [18]
Fred was quiet for a few moments. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw Barry Diller peacock into the bar at Diane von Furstenberg’s side. She looked pretty good for her age, those cheekbones protruding like tangerines. Paul crooked a finger, and the waiter refreshed their drinks and the salted almonds, a bowl of which Paul had emptied.
“So how do you rate Bitman’s chances?” Fred asked, and Paul knew, for the time being, he was safe.
5
A year after the attack, news about Muslims arrested or suspected, the constant parsing of Islam’s “true” nature, had become background noise for Mo. Foreground was work, behind which geopolitics, serious romance, even a second chair and a bed frame for his echoing loft receded. All of it could wait until he “made it,” although he was well aware that such success, if it came at all for an architect, came late. “You can’t keep deferring your life,” his mother said. She worried that, as he neared forty, he was no closer to getting married or having children than he had been at twenty. At least now he could tell her that his sacrifices were about to pay off.
The rumor, repeated often enough that it had become an apparent inevitability, was that today Mo would be made one of the firm’s project directors. At four, Emmanuel Roi, the firm’s founder, swept into the office like a leaf blower, scattering everything, everyone in his path. He paused by the desk of an architect working on a model and said, “You know what this looks like? Merde. It looks like a doggy climbed on this desk and took a shit.” He liked to make an impression early in his visits.
An hour later, he summoned Mo to his glassed-in office, meant to “hide nothing, show everything,” in Roi’s famous dictum. See everything, too. Mo had spent the previous half hour rehearsing how he would accept the promotion, so he took a few moments to grasp Roi’s news: not Mo but Percy Storm—the manorexic whom Mo and Thomas Kroll, his best friend at the firm, called Storm Trooper behind his back—was being promoted.
“Storm—?” Mo started to gasp, then stopped himself. He could barely breathe.
Roi’s hands caressed his silver-stubbled head; his eyes were black cloaks. Mo pressed for reasons, without success. Had Roi, he wondered, gotten wind that Mo and Thomas planned, in time, to defect and start their own practice? Thomas, in fact, had already registered its name, K/K Architects. Mo couldn’t ask, for to ask would be to reveal, and so he phrased generic questions about whether Roi was dissatisfied with him, to which Roi offered oleaginous reassurance: “Your turn will come.”
“Any issue with … me? My conduct?”
“Of course not, Mo. I have no problems with you.” This was a lie, of course, since Emmanuel was threatened by anyone with talent and ego, any younger version of himself. But that characteristic had never stopped Emmanuel from giving Mo prime work. As Roi became bigger—an icon, a blimp—he needed better talent around him to cover how thinly his own was spread. He was overseeing sixty-three projects in eleven countries: anyone could do the math—although no one beyond his employees did—and see that his true involvement in any of them must be minimal. Maybe grousing about this had been Mo’s undoing. He couldn’t ask: it was one of those conversations in which words brick over the cons and deceptions taking place.
Emmanuel was droning on about Mo’s bright future and, aggravatingly, Percy’s managerial capabilities, when Mo broke in: “Does this have anything to do with … with me being, you know?”
“No, I do not know,” Emmanuel said, affronted by the interruption, not the insinuation.
“Muslim.”
“To even suggest—” Having judged that fragment of a denial sufficient, Emmanuel sent his ursine hands ranging over the desk in search of distraction. Finding none—the vast glass surface was denuded of papers to shuffle or even a stray paper clip—he began to peck