The Fall of Princes Read Online Free PDF

day, and they never leave you bereft.
    Outside his thirty-eighth-floor office, there was a sudden swirl of brilliant birds, brilliant colors, soaring and drifting, so alive, so precious in their gentle beauty, driven, in the early morning light, to fly with joy in unimaginably beautiful patterns. My only wish at that moment, was that I could jump through the window and join them, dazzle with color and swoop, before I fell all thirty-eight floors to land on top of one of the black cars waiting, as they eternally did, on the street.
    Instead, I held out my hand. I actually thrust out my arm to shake his hand in farewell.
    He slapped me in the face.
    I left his office, leaving behind my last shred of dignity, my one triumphant gesture. I left, and I left behind a life that had once been mine and would never be mine again.
    How sad, how beautifully elegant the swoon of birds.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Sweetheart of My Youth

    M y wife Carmela divorced me the day I got fired. Despite the fact that we loved each other with our whole hearts, and had lived together for five years before we got married in a half-million-dollar wedding in East Hampton, only a year before, with both Lee Radziwill and Henry Kissinger in attendance. She was a smart girl, and she could easily see when the last card in the deck had been played.
    At our wedding reception, on the dunes, in front of the house we had been given as a wedding present, klieg lights had been shone on the ocean so the guests could see the breakers rolling in, just for us.
    She wanted everything, loft, furniture, art. I gave it to her with a glad heart. She was used to nice things, and I loved her and I had nice things, so I just let her take it all. When the guy came to serve me the papers, I knew what they said before I opened them, and, still, all I could think of was my love for her, the only real love I had ever known, and I wished her all the best even as I saw that she intended never to see me again.
    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
    And Agamemnon dead
    The details haunted me as I read the document. Never again would we hire a caterer and white-coated waiters to host dinners for twenty-four. We would never tandem water ski in St. Barth’s. Worst of all, we ended without issue, as they say. I would never have the children who would adore me and warm my old age. My youth ended in that moment.
    She gave me twenty-four hours to get my personal
effects—I love that phrase, like something out of a murder crime scene: “to get my personal effects”—out of the apartment. She went to stay at the Plaza, and have lunch at Grenouille with her mother, who was practiced at the art of divorce, having done it three times.
    Fanelli, my raucous but lovable coworker and my best friend, called. “Here’s what we do. Get three rolls of quarters, meet me at some dive bar, and we drink ourselves stupid in the daytime while you call every headhunter and contact you have in town. In the world. London. Geneva. Tokyo. We’ll get you set. Don’t worry.”
    And so we did. All those quarters dropping into the box. The phone ringing and ringing, the polite secretaries who greeted me as though I were a brother home from the war, yet refused to put my calls through to whoever it was I needed to speak to.
    I had gone from BSD to almost a nonperson when The Man slapped my face, a story that racketed through the whole game, so that everybody knew it within an hour. I had been the most valuable bull in the pen. Suddenly I was horsemeat, headed for the slaughterhouse, and nobody would take my calls.
    Ever again. That much was clear. Crystal.
    Carmela had heard about it from her stepfather before the swirling birds came to roost, and he instructed her step by step about how to set out to leave me with nothing. The first thing she did was empty the joint bank accounts, leaving me only a small but secret stash in Grand Cayman, and put our money, once mine, then ours, now hers, securely in her name in