The Doorman: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

What a fucked-up world we live in, Chicky thinks, that people hate each other so much.

Chicky hopes that Canarius won’t turn out to be a guy who uses his origin story as an excuse to be an asshole. But you never know. Evolution isn’t always the same as improvement.

Because being immensely wealthy would make her happy, wouldn’t it? It would make anyone happy, that’s the promise of America, the premise.

The thing about getting into bed with a lunatic is it can be impossible to kick him out, and very difficult to leave. Sometimes the only thing you can do is set the bed on fire.

After a certain age, nothing ever gets better, not really. It’s just different speeds of getting worse and, ultimately, futile. No one gets out alive.

Everyone is always running out of time. As soon as you become aware of the possibility of something ending, it is. High school graduation is just around the corner, college is over almost as soon as it starts, your twenties are slipping away and you still haven’t accomplished anything. By fifty it seems like you’ve been running out of time for decades. And then you do.

“As a matter of fact, yes. Since when does a protest equal rioting?”

I believe in the rule of law. But I also believe that Black men should have the right to not get killed by the police. I also believe that we—all of us—have the right to protest, especially against abuses of power. Not just the right, the obligation.” Ethel rolled her eyes, while Julian felt the momentum of his own argument gathering. “And I believe that as Americans—as humans—we have the obligation to support protesters, and to support their right to protest. Hiring armed security sends the opposite signal. The signal that not only don’t we support the protest, but we don’t trust it. That we’re afraid

You have no idea, when you’re young, what it’s going to be like when you’re not.

Chicky suspected that patriotism was often just an excuse to do fucked-up shit.

The absence of guns and strippers was probably a good measure of a good life.

“Life is risky, okay? You could get hit by a bus, a stray bullet. Some activities are riskier than others. Some people are at greater risk. Risks evolve.

The concept was proven. Billionaires’ Row was born, grew, thrived. The financiers and profiteers and plutocrats and kleptocrats gobbled up condos for twenty, fifty, a hundred million dollars, then barely moved in. These apartments were more like vaults than residences. One sold for two hundred and twenty million dollars, a figure equivalent to spending nearly a thousand dollars per day, every day, for six hundred years. A scale that proved just how much was wrong with the world.

fashion, even the loss leader was immensely profitable. Emily didn’t learn any of this because Whit told her. She learned it because she’d gotten curious, then suspicious, then she’d gone looking.

It was for just a week or two every year when the foliage was like this. Fall was definitely the shortest season. Blink and everything is brown, muddy, cold, shitty. Fall used to be back-to-school and Riverside softball and pennant races and the first hopeful weeks of football before it all fell apart. Fall was street fairs and block parties and Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating. How awesome was trick-or-treating?