Chapter 82: Favors and Compensation
Rose set down her coffee cup and looked at Andrew directly.
"Susan Berman," she said. "That's why I was following you."
Andrew was quiet for a moment. "You said Morris Black was your friend."
"Morris and Susan both." She folded her hands in her lap. "Morris introduced us years ago. The three of us were close." She paused. "When I found out what Durst had been doing — what he'd been threatening Susan with, what he was capable of — I came back from London to understand the full picture. You kept appearing at the edges of it."
"So you surveilled me."
"Yes." No qualification, no softening. "I followed you for about three weeks. I watched your building. I was at McLaren's the night Jean spotted me." She met his eyes steadily. "I also installed listening devices in your apartment hallway — not inside your rooms, in the hallway — and I'm aware that was a serious violation of your privacy. I'm not going to try to explain it as anything other than what it was."
Andrew looked at her for a long moment.
The listening devices were the part that landed hardest. The surveillance on the street was invasive but survivable — people had their reasons, and Rose had demonstrated over the past several weeks that her reasons were real. But the hallway devices were a line, and she wasn't pretending otherwise.
"They've been removed," Corleone said. "My people swept the building two days ago. Everything is gone."
Andrew nodded slowly.
"Why the gun?" he said, to Rose.
"Because I'd watched you train," she said simply. "I'd seen what you could do. If I was going to surveil someone at that level, I needed to be able to protect myself if it went wrong." She paused. "It was licensed. I wasn't there to threaten you."
"I know," Andrew said. He'd established that much from context weeks ago. The gun had been defensive, not offensive — everything about her methodology had been about observation rather than confrontation.
Corleone reached across the table and slid a plain envelope toward Andrew.
"Rose's father has asked me to convey his apologies and offer compensation for the intrusion," he said. "The amount is inside. Whatever you decide to do with it is your choice — accepting or declining won't affect anything else."
Andrew picked up the envelope. He didn't open it.
"Rose is returning to London this week," Corleone continued. "That was already her plan — she had what she needed once she understood what happened in December." He looked at Andrew with the steady gaze he brought to important things. "She won't be a complication going forward."
Rose looked at Andrew with something that was neither the playful composure she usually deployed nor genuine remorse, but something in between — the expression of someone who had done something they understood was wrong and was neither proud nor destroyed by it.
"I handled it badly," she said. "The direct approach would have been better. I should have knocked on your door in week one and told you what I was looking for."
"Yes," Andrew said. "You should have."
She nodded. Accepting this.
"Is Morris actually safe?" she said. "You told me he was. I need to know that's true."
"It's true," Andrew said. "Durst's network has been dismantled. Whatever was threatening Morris is gone."
She exhaled. The kind of exhale that had been building for months.
Andrew looked at Corleone.
"What's the favor?" he said.
Corleone leaned back slightly. "No favor. I said I might need to ask one — as it turns out, I don't. The situation resolved more cleanly than I anticipated." He paused. "What I'd ask instead is that you not hold Rose's actions against her father's relationship with this family. Don Draper is a good man whose daughter made poor decisions. Those are separate things."
"I don't have any issue with anyone's father," Andrew said.
Corleone nodded. "Then we're settled."
Rose stood up, picking up her bag. She looked at Andrew one more time with the direct, assessing quality that was simply how she saw things — not calculating, just thorough.
"For what it's worth," she said, "you're a genuinely interesting person. That's not flattery. It's just true."
"I'll take it," Andrew said.
She left without ceremony. The door closed behind her.
Corleone refilled both their coffee cups without asking.
"Aldrich," he said.
Andrew looked at him.
"My name. Aldrich." He pushed the sugar toward Andrew. "You've been calling me Mr. Corleone for six months. I think we've moved past that."
Andrew considered this. An invitation to first names from Corleone was not a small thing, and he understood it as such — not a casual gesture but a deliberate one, a line being redrawn.
"Aldrich," he said.
The older man nodded with the small satisfaction of something done correctly.
They talked for another hour — about the food truck, about Red Hook on Thursday which Aldrich mentioned with the matter-of-fact acknowledgment of someone who knew about it without being asked, about Christie's enrollment at Hartwell. The conversation had the ease of two people who had been circling each other carefully for months and had finally found a register that worked.
At ten the doorbell rang. Aldrich excused himself and came back followed by Scooter — the boy from the food truck incident, Hazel's friend, who took the stairs without acknowledging Andrew and disappeared to the upper floor.
Andrew stood up. "I should go. I have lunch plans."
Aldrich walked him to the door. "Come back when you have time. Not for business — just to talk."
"I will," Andrew said. And meant it.
"And Mr. San— Andrew." Aldrich paused at the door. "Thursday. Be careful in Red Hook. Not because I doubt your ability. Because careful is always the right posture."
"Understood," Andrew said.
He left, the envelope in his jacket pocket, unopened.
He opened it on the subway.
He looked at the number for a long moment, then folded it back up and put it away.
It was a significant number. The kind that clarified the distance between someone like Don Draper and the rest of the world in a way that no description fully could.
He wasn't going to refuse it. That would be pride over practicality, and he'd made a decision long ago not to let pride cost him things it didn't need to cost him.
He'd call Kessler about it tomorrow.
An hour later. Carol and Susan's apartment, Upper West Side.
Susan answered the door in an apron, which was new information about Susan that Andrew filed under unexpected but fitting.
"You're early," she said, taking the fruit basket he'd brought. "Carol's in the living room. Ten minutes."
Carol was on the couch with the specific settled quality of someone who had been told to sit down and rest and had decided to accept this instruction for once. She looked well — the tiredness he'd noticed at lunch last week still there but underneath something that had more color in it.
"Andrew." She smiled. "Good timing. I was running out of things to say to the television."
He sat across from her. A daytime soap was running on low volume — the mid-afternoon variety, with the heightened lighting and accelerated emotional timelines of the genre. Carol lowered the volume slightly further and shifted toward him.
"I wanted to say something," she said. "About what you told Susan. About talking to Ross directly." She paused, choosing. "It mattered. The way that conversation went — I think it went the way it did because she came in prepared to be honest rather than strategic. That was you."
"Susan would have gotten there," Andrew said.
"Maybe. But she got there faster, and in a hard situation, faster matters." Carol looked at him steadily. "So thank you."
"You're welcome," Andrew said.
Susan came in from the kitchen carrying three glasses of water and the expression of someone who had achieved something with a gas burner and was at peace with the world.
"Fifteen minutes," she said. "Sit down."
She sat. They talked.
Outside the windows of the Upper West Side apartment, New York went about its afternoon.
[Cooking (Expert): 9/100]
The panel moved during lunch — Susan's risotto was genuinely better than last time, and eating something well-executed with attention moved it even when he wasn't the one cooking. He noted this with quiet satisfaction.
He was learning things from everyone around him, whether they knew it or not.
That was probably as it should be.
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