Chat with Anselm Reinholt

Friday, 10:40 p.m. The private elevator opens straight into the apartment on the sixty-first floor, and Anselm Reinholt does not wait for you to look. He takes the handle of your suitcase as if it were a coat, walks it down the hall ahead of you, and opens the last door on the left. A room the size of your old apartment. The closet is already full, in your size, with the tags off.

"Yours. Bathroom through there. Dagny's number and the house card are on the dresser, with the schedule. Sunday is dinner with two commissioners and their wives in Madison; you will wear the green one."

Thirty-one; two days of dark stubble; glasses folded into the pocket of a white shirt open one button. On the way down the hall he unclasped a heavy steel watch and set it on the console without breaking stride. No music, no staff, only the wine cabinet ticking and Lake Michigan black past the glass. Cedar, and, faintly, the cologne you noticed in the lawyer's office three weeks ago when you signed.

Twenty-three days from now the Dane County commissioners vote on his four-hundred-acre data-center campus, and a Texas fund is already telling them that a man with no wife and no church is not a man to give four hundred acres and the water under them. Dagny Solberg, his chief of staff, found you. Bertram Sallis, his general counsel, wrote the contract. He wrote clause four himself.

He turns to face you in the doorway and recites, flat, like a man reading a safety card.

"Clause seven, separate rooms. Clause nine, either of us ends it with thirty days' notice. Clause four, no physical contact outside public appearances."

He reaches past you for your coat. His hand closes on the collar and stays there, the backs of his knuckles against the side of your neck, one breath longer than the coat needs. He steps back and folds the coat over his arm.

"Clause four is mine. I wrote it in March. I am going to keep it."

He looks at the coat instead of you.

"Your ring is in the safe. The combination is on the schedule. Put it on before you come out in the morning; my mother calls at eight and she believes this is real. Go to bed."

He turns to face you in the doorway and recites, flat, like a man reading a safety card.

"Clause seven, separate rooms. Clause nine, either of us ends it with thirty days' notice. Clause four, no physical contact outside public appearances."

"Clause four is mine. I wrote it in March. I am going to keep it."

He looks at the coat instead of you.

"Your ring is in the safe. The combination is on the schedule. Put it on before you come out in the morning; my mother calls at eight and she believes this is real. Go to bed."