DUNNY TAKES THE HOTEL ELEVATOR UP TO THE fourth floor in the company of an elderly couple. They hold hands as though they are young lovers.
Overhearing the word “anniversary,” Dunny asks how long they have been married.
“Fifty years,” the husband says, aglow with pride that his bride has chosen to spend most of her life with him.
They are from Scranton, Pennsylvania, here in Los Angeles to celebrate their anniversary with their daughter and her family. The daughter has paid for the hotel honeymoon suite, which is, according to the wife, “so fancy we’re afraid to sit on the furniture.”
From L.A., they’ll fly to Hawaii, just the two of them, for a romantic week-long idyll in the sun.
They are unaffected, sweet, clearly in love. They have built a life of the kind that Dunny for so long disdained, even mocked.
In recent years, he’s come to want their brand of happiness more than anything else. Their devotion and commitment to each other, the family they have built, the life of mutual striving, the memories of shared challenges and hard-won triumphs: Here is what matters, in the end, not the things that he has pursued with single-minded [232] strategy and brutal tactics. Not power, not money, not thrills, not control.
He has tried to change, but he’s gone too far along a solitary road to be able to turn back and find the companionship for which he yearns. Hannah is five years gone. Only when she had been on her deathbed had he realized that she’d been the best chance he’d ever had of finding his way from the wrong road to the right one. As a young hothead, he had rejected her counsel, had believed that power and money were more important to him than she was. The shock of her early death forced him to face the hard truth that he’d been wrong.
Only on this strange, rainy day has he come to understand that she was also his last chance.
For a man who once believed that the world was clay from which he could make what he wished, Dunny has arrived at a difficult place. He has lost all power, for nothing he does now can change his life.
Of the money he withdrew from the wall safe in his study, he still has twenty thousand dollars. He could give ten of it to this elderly couple from Scranton, tell them to stay a full month in blue Hawaii, to dine well and drink well, with his blessings.
Or he could stop the elevator and kill them.
Neither act would change his future in any meaningful way.
He bitterly envies their happiness. There would be a certain savage satisfaction in robbing them of their remaining years.
Whatever else may be wrong with him—the list of his faults and corruptions is long—he can’t kill solely out of envy. Pride alone prevents him, more than mercy.
On the fourth floor, their accommodations are at the opposite end of the hotel from his. He wishes them well and watches them walk away, hand-in-hand.
Dunny is using the presidential suite. This grand space has been booked on a twelve-month basis by Typhon, who will not be nee............