Chapter 2 - NotE TO SELF: LOVE

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Mario Toglioni was taking a walk after having Sunday lunch with his family before heading back uptown to his apartment. The cold air helped clear his mind. Got it ready for the week to come. The mergers. The wheeling and dealing. The late-night negotiations over business dinners. Since his promotion to vice president two years ago at DAG Financial Enterprises, the firm’s revenue had increased 55 percent, for the most part due to Mario’s standing and contacts in the financial and real estate communities. He was the golden boy at DAG, and he loved every moment of it. The guys at the top thought he was entertaining offers from a number of firms pursuing him, but Mario wasn’t planning on leaving. He had DAG right where he wanted. It all came down to leverage. Mario knew how to play his hand—when to bluff and when to come clean. Either way, he always got what he wanted. And what he wanted was the president’s seat at DAG. Not for the money—he had already made enough of that to last a couple of lifetimes. He wanted the power. The thrill of being at the top.

Looking around his childhood neighborhood, Mario chuckled to himself. At thirty-eight years old, he could probably buy any building on the street. He was living a life beyond his wildest dreams. An Italian boy from the East Village who spoke little English until he started school. Who would have thought he would have made it this big? Sure, he had worked hard, got the Harvard MBA, had the looks, and played the game he needed to get ahead, but that didn’t give everyone a ticket to paradise and all the perks that went along with it. And Mario loved the perks, especially those of the female persuasion, who came around like bees to honey.

In a split-second decision, he turned east toward the Bowery, a neighborhood that had been the armpit of New York City twenty years ago. Like the rest of the lower Manhattan communities, the gentrification process had begun, bringing in new investors, upscale business professionals, and chic restaurants. There was a building Mario wanted to check out for a client.

Once he got to the Bowery, he turned the corner onto one of the side streets, taking notice of the stores and buildings. It was definitely a neighborhood in transition—a checkerboard of new and old, dirty and clean, upscale and out-of-date. Of course, Starbucks had already moved in.

As he walked down the street, he saw her legs buckle just before she fell to the ground. The thump of her head sounded like a boulder as it met the unforgiving sidewalk. He wondered why she didn’t try to stop the fall with her arms; maybe she fainted. An old Chinese grocer standing a few feet away from her started yelling in broken English.

“Miss Mogen…you o’ right? Miss Mogen?

Mario rushed toward the woman. A couple of people stopped, but only to gawk. Others walked around Morgan’s inert body, continuing on to wherever they were going, with an air of annoyance at the interruption.

Mario looked at the woman stretched across the sidewalk. She didn’t appear to be a drug addict or a criminal. Well dressed and coiffed, she could even pass for some of the women in his own Upper East Side neighborhood, except there was something more downtown about her. He found himself wondering about it a few seconds too long before he pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911. Responding to the operator’s instructions, he bent down to search for a pulse, pressing his forefinger on the side of her neck under her chin. He felt movement under his finger, although it was faint and slow. She was still alive, but he stressed the urgency to the operator as a red halo of blood started to envelop her head. Looking for an address to give the operator, he gave the number of the apartment building next to the fallen woman. The grocer brought a blanket to cover the woman. As they waited for the ambulance, Mario dug his hand into his pants pocket and retrieved a folded paper napkin with an address scribbled on it. The apartment building was the same one his client was about to buy.