Wrath by Sharon Moalem & Daniel Kraus

Author:Sharon Moalem & Daniel Kraus [Moalem, Shäron & Kraus, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

20

He ought to be in Chinatown. Some roach motel offering bunk beds by the half-day. But he’s no roach. He’s Noah Goff, CEO, and he’ll be damned if he’s staying anywhere but the Crosby. Every time life is too much for him, when the angelic incandescence of the Apple Store is just too much pressure, he heads for the Crosby, snuggled into a street of high-end boutique shops, not an Apple Store in sight.

Before he checks in, he has the compulsion to kneel and press his hand against what the hoity-toity shoppers think is cobblestone. They have no idea of the pain and suffering contained within. It’s “Belgian block,” quarried over a century ago by European prisoners for ballast on ships bound for the New World. When New York needed an alternative to muddy streets, the stone was fished from the Hudson and puzzled together on roads, the texture perfect for the grip of horse hooves. It wasn’t the area’s first growing pain. An 1876 fire incinerated everything. A decade later, Crosby Street was a haven for opium addicts. This road has been reborn multiple times.

What about Noah Goff? Did he have a rebirth left in him? Belgian block wasn’t the only thing brought over on those ships. Squirreled into every moist crevice was Rattus norvegicus. Grammy’s death made Noah fear rats; the Pet Expo catastrophe makes him wish he’d invented a rat poison instead. Yet he can’t help but draw a sliver of inspiration from rats’ Darwinian power. Keep clawing, Noah, keep clawing.

The Crosby staff doesn’t have to ask. They check for the availability of his favorite room, the Meadow Suite. Not every iota of his luck has run dry: just seven days before Christmas and the room is miraculously open. He tells the clerk to enter him under the alias “Davin Dunbar” and he pays in cash, barely a notch in the seventy-five grand he just retrieved from his safety deposit box at the HSBC on Bowery.

Eighteen hours pass. Door triple-locked, chair wedged under the knob. The Meadow Suite has a private garden terrace, but Noah isn’t stupid. Lots of windows face that terrace, behind any one of which might be an underling of Colonel Monroe.

The nice thing about a place like the Crosby, and about fat wads of cash, is that you can get whatever you want. For five hundred, he buys a week’s use of a bellhop’s iPad. He doesn’t dare log in to anything, but scans news feeds for items on the Sammy debacle.

Pet Expo “Sammy” Keynote Mysteriously Yanked

Last-Second Cancellation Leaves EditedPets Investors Jittery

Still No Word from EditedPets CEO

Company shares are crashing. Preorders were triggered to go live during his keynote, and Noah doesn’t need access to sales data to know the numbers are static. He has to remind himself this is the bellhop’s iPad and he can’t destroy it in rage. He is less gracious to the room. He embeds the bedside clock into the TV screen. He uses a chair to shatter each framed artwork.

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