Bitter Truth (50 page)

“I didn’t know that’s how he did it.”

“My great-grandfather, singed with a mark similar to mine around his eye, was a fierce alcoholic and Claudius figured it wouldn’t take much to get the teetotaling Elisha off the wagon. A drink here in friendship. A drink there in celebration. A bottle late at night after all the employees had gone home. It wasn’t long before my grandfather was so sodden he couldn’t see what was being ripped from him, from his family, from his legacy. ‘Get it back, Nat,’ I remember my mother telling me from her bed, her eyes steeped with hatred. ‘Get back every cent.’ ”

When his mother’s words come from his lips they have a rasping resonance as if she is still here, the broken old woman holed up in the luxury apartment on Rittenhouse Square, mouthing commands of revenge to her son.

“I think every young person needs inspiration in his life,” continues Nat. “My mother was mine. I like to think I’ve done amazingly well following her wishes, but it wasn’t as hard as it may seem, what with Mrs. Shaw so desperate to make amends for all she had done. Step by step I took it back.

“I was just returned from the war in the Pacific when Mrs. Shaw gave me the letter from my father and told me what she would do for me. Money, she said, she would give me all the money I wanted. A half a million dollars, she said. I took it right off and left. Half a million was something then and I went through it in five years. That was living, yep. Girls in Hollywood, girls in Paris. I rented a villa in Tuscany and threw wild parties. It was right out of Fellini. When I was broke I came back and demanded more. Another half-million pissed away in less time than the first. By the time I came back it was 1952. I was broke again and half a million wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wanted the whole thing. ‘Get it back, Nat.’ I will, Momma, I will. That was when I convinced Mrs. Shaw to set up the Wergeld Trust.

“It started out modestly enough. Just a million at first, but I kept on coming back for more and she kept on giving it. More money, more of the Reddman fortune. I was constantly tempted to leave and live high off what was in the trust but my mother was always there to implore me not to take a portion when I could have it all. So I stayed by Mrs. Shaw’s side, pruning her garden, accompanying her on her walks, telling her I needed more and more and more as recompense. And with the weakness of the redeemed she kept giving in. But it wasn’t enough. Some things can’t be bought with just money.

“There was a maid that worked the house, a sweet thing, innocent, really, until I was through with her. She was sent away when her pregnancy was unmistakable but I ordered Mrs. Shaw to bring the child to the estate and raise him to be my heir. Franklin. I didn’t want him to know I was his father but we worked together on the gardens and though he didn’t know, I knew that he was a Poole and that he would inherit the whole of the Wergeld Trust and become as rich as he would have been had not our fortune been stolen from us. But it wasn’t enough.

“He was still just a bastard, rich now, but not a Reddman. So I told Mrs. Shaw I needed one more thing, the most delicious thing of all. She said no and I insisted and she said no and I demanded and finally she gave in. She set it up for me, like a pimp. It wasn’t so hard to arrange, really. D. H. Lawrence did most of the work.

“Summer nights, sneaking into the Poole house, the two of us. I’d place garlands of flowers atop her head and drop rose petals on her sharp breasts. Now she is a pitiful wreck, Selma Shaw, but then she was different, earnest and beautiful. I loved those nights, our brutal strivings, loud enough so Kingsley could hear it all from his window. That was a gift in itself, but there was more. I loved her. Truly. Imagine that, finding love in the course of revenge. When she found herself pregnant she talked of running off with me, but then our child would have been a bastard and not an heir. I loved her, Victor, but what power does love have next to imperatives of the blood. So I turned her away and instead of running off with me she stayed at Veritas and bore Kingsley’s fourth child, a miracle child considering his operation, and, finally, the Pooles had burrowed their way directly into the Reddman line.”

“Caroline,” I whisper.

“And still it was not enough. ‘Get it back, Nat. Get back every cent.’ I would have stopped there, but my mother was insistent, urging me from her bed, plotting it all with me, telling me just how to do it, so that even after she died I had no doubts. It was simply a matter of pruning, like with any plant. Cut off some of the shoots and more precious sap flows into those that remain. I had to wait for Mrs. Shaw to die so that she wouldn’t upset the trust, which she still controlled, and she proved to be a hardy weed, but once she was gone I was free to prune. How fortunate that Walter Calvi came looking for Edward just when I was looking for someone like him. Jacqueline and then Edward. Paid for Robert too but Calvi disappeared before he could deliver. I am not too disappointed, Robert is such a sexual misfit that he’s sure to die heirless, leaving everything to my daughter. I had hoped we could unite the fortune in one family, in one heir, the final triumph of the Pooles, but somehow Mrs. Shaw discovered the two lovebirds and put an end to the affair. Even she had her limits, I suppose.”

He winks at me just then, he winks at me with the self-satisfaction of a clever boy who has just played a clever trick. “Still I figure we did pretty well, we Pooles, wouldn’t you say?”

Of all the stories I had heard in the dealings with the Reddmans and the Pooles, his is the most pathetic. He wants me to smile at him, to nod and acknowledge his success, but I see nothing more before me than a horribly failed life and I won’t give him what he wants.

“And now it is over?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re pleased with yourself?”

“Absolutely. More tea?”

“I intend to collect on my judgment, Nat.”

“Well then, I am going to disappoint you, because I no longer have one hundred million dollars.”

“The records show that more than that was channeled into the Wergeld Trust by Faith Shaw.”

“Yes, it was. As I said, she was trying to make recompense, poor deluded thing, but the money is not mine anymore. Just after her death, and before either of your so-called wrongful killings, I irrevocably transferred all but a few paltry million into trust for my son. He knew nothing of my plans, knew for certain of my guilt only after I had fled. The boy doesn’t even know that the Wergeld trust is his upon my death. So you see, Victor, I couldn’t pay it to you even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

I stare at him for a moment, wondering whether to believe him or not, and suddenly I do. We had traced money, all right, but not all of what should have been there. The amount that had been transferred from the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Libya and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, had been just about ten million dollars. I had hoped, somehow, in this meeting, to smoke out the rest and that’s what I have done. It is gone. To Harrington. Out of my reach. A despair falls onto my shoulders.

“There’s still ten million in your control,” I say, clutching at anything. “We know that.”

“Yes, that’s about right, maybe less. Enough to support me through my old age. I like it here, Victor. I like Canek and the country and this jungle and this river and my orchids. I like it here very much. It has become a home, but if you force me to move I will. Guatemala or Paraguay or the Seychelles if need be. Do you know the Seychelles?”

“Off the coast of Africa?”

“That’s it. They have offered a nonextraditable citizenship to anyone willing to pay ten million dollars to the government. They have some very exciting orchids in the Seychelles from what I understand, Madagascan epiphytes like the African leopard orchid and the spectacular
Angraecum sesquipedale
. If I must I’ll pay the money to them and live quite peacefully with my orchids under their protection. But then, of course, there’d be nothing left for you.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Stop. That’s what I brought you here to tell you. Stop your efforts to trace my money. Stop your lawyer in Belize City from continuing his suit. Do what you can to stop the investigation by the FBI. Tell no one you have seen me here and stop your efforts to hound me as if I were a common criminal. I like it here. I like the jungle. Go away and let me live here in peace and when I die I will provide that all of what remains of my money will go to satisfy your judgment. The interest the Swiss give is rather paltry, but I spend very little here and the amount will grow over time. Go away and leave me alone and someday you’ll get some money out of me.”

“And you would get away with everything.”

“I’ve already gotten away with everything.”

“It’s a rotten deal.”

“It’s the only deal I’m offering, the only way you’ll ever see a dime.”

I stare at him and think it over for a moment and then I take a long drink of tea.

“Do you know what evil is, Nat?” I ask.

He looks at me for a moment, bemusement gently creasing his face. “Failure?” he suggests.

I make a loud sound like a buzzer going off. “No, I’m sorry. Wrong answer.”

57

On the Macal River, Cayo, Belize

C
ANEK IS PADDLING me back down the river, toward San Ignacio. From there I’ll take one of the ubiquitous taxis to the airport. I’m ready to get the hell out of Belize. My hand hurts from a bite, it is swelling with a frightening rapidity, and I suspect the botfly larva is squirming there beneath my skin. I wonder if I have to declare the beefworm to customs when I land. I scratch it and it burns and I scratch it some more. Maybe they have some glue and some Scotch tape at the hotel. I scratch it and think on Caroline.

I suspected that Nat was Caroline’s father before he ever admitted it to me, the remark by Calvi before our gun-fight on Pier Four was what clued me, but I didn’t tell Caroline about Kingsley’s vasectomy or my suspicions and I won’t tell her of Nat’s admission of paternity either. It is not my place, I think, to tell her that her real father is an evil son of a bitch.

We have ended whatever it was we had, Caroline and I. The love expressed between Emma and Christian too powerfully illuminated what wasn’t between us to allow us to continue as anything but friends. True to her word, after learning from the letter why her grandfather had thrown away his medal, she signed the contingency fee agreement. She found something else in the letter too, the one good thing she had been looking for, the transformation of her grandfather from a coward to a man. She has taken again to wearing her grandfather’s medal and she is working, along with her therapist, to re-create for herself the history of her life, building on the base of Christian Shaw’s transformation and late-found love, as well as on her understanding of the crimes that so deformed her family. This exercise in self-emendation has given her an attractive tranquility. She smokes less, drinks less, has taken some of the hardware out of her body. She doesn’t interrupt me anymore when I speak. She has even adopted Sam the cat. Now that she has learned her family truths, her ailurophobia seems to have receded. She has not become one of those strange cat people, she does not allow Sam to sleep in her bed nor does she talk incessantly about how cute he is, but they have reached an understanding and he seems quite content in his new home in her loft on Market Street. I guess, like his former master, he figures anything beats Florida. Caroline pines still for Harrington, I think, not knowing he is her brother and not understanding why he can’t be with her anymore. I suspect he’ll tell her someday.

Caroline and Beth have become fast friends. I fear they talk about me over coffee when I am not around, though they deny it. Beth left the Church of New Life a while ago, turned off finally by the avarice with which Oleanna envelops her truths, and is now trying out Buddhism. Caroline went with her on her last Zen retreat, to an ashram in New Jersey. I maintain that seeking enlightenment in New Jersey is oxymoronic but they think they are on to something. Both women seemed subtly changed by the weekend, more at peace.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“We didn’t talk.”

“What did you do?”

“We did nothing.”

“What did you think about?”

“We denied ourselves the luxury of thought.”

“I’m not impressed,” I said. “I spent the whole weekend watching golf on television and did the exact same thing.”

The most hopeful aspect of Caroline’s progress is that she is devoid of the bitterness over the past that has plagued the Pooles. There is a great peril to history. As a Jew I have learned to never forget, but some history, I believe, is best left behind. History is a warning to ourselves, and only by remembering where we have been and how low we have fallen can we know to where we aspire, but we lose everything when it is history that drives us completely, as it drove Nat and his mother and her mother and her husband. If we are to be more than pigeons pecking for pellets then we must transcend the bitterest of our histories and strike out on our own. Remembrance without forgiveness is a curse and there is no better proof of that than the Reddmans and the Pooles, fighting through generations over a fortune like two dogs worrying a bone. Caroline is learning of the necessity of forgiveness, as did Christian Shaw and as did, surprisingly, his wife, Faith.

I find it difficult to reconcile the young Faith Reddman Shaw, three-time murderess, with the woman who handed over so much to Nat in vain absolution of her past and her father’s past. It is touching and sad, both, to think of her acceding to Nat’s vile demands one after the other in hopes that, finally, her debts and her father’s debts would be paid. That she was a monster, that her attempts were flawed, that the object of her attempts was evil makes the effort no less noble. This has been a tale of the basest sort, but I think that the most interesting part remains forever hidden, and that is the story of Faith’s conversion from criminal to penitent. It is a story written on the human soul, indecipherable but no less real because of it. It is the true story of redemption in the Reddman history, heroically epic because she had so far up to climb. My guess is that her transformation followed a similar path to her husband’s and is a journey being embarked upon by Caroline now. Good luck to her and I hope to hell she finds whatever it is she is looking for.

As for me, I don’t go in for that spiritual crap, as Nat so tactfully put it. It is just a balm, I think, to conceal the painful truths we’re stuck with, like a flesh-colored zit cream. Sure it is comforting to see oneself as part of the great mystical all, destined to be reborn again and again, like it is comforting to loll about in a tub of warm water, but it strikes me as a false refuge. Maybe my near-death experiences have turned me existential, but I can’t help thinking now that I was born for no reason, I live for no reason, I will die for no reason. My task now is to figure out how to deal with those ugly truths without succumbing to depression and spending the rest of my life shivering with despair beneath the covers of my bed. One thing I do know for sure is that if I’m going to contemplate my place in the universe I’d just as soon do it on a beach in Aruba with an umbrella drink in my hand.

I agreed to Nat’s offer. I promised to leave him alone, to tell no one where I found him, to halt all my attempts to collect on the debt pending his death. If he dies with ten million we’d get a third, half of which goes to my partner, a third of which goes to taxes, leaving me with about a million. So sometime in the future, the far future because he seemed a healthy man despite his age, I’m going to get a million dollars. As long as Nat has told me the truth. It’s not all I was hoping for, but I can live with it, I suppose. Better it goes to me than to some corrupt government on the Seychelles. I don’t like the idea of leaving him alone as if he got away with it but I’m nobody’s instrument of retribution. “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth the Lord, and He can have it. I’m just a lawyer trying to make the best deal I can. Besides, I figure leaving Nat alone with his beastly flowers in that mosquito-infested jungle to face the heat of the dry season and the swarms of the rainy season is as close as I can come to sending him to hell. If I can do that and still end up with a million dollars, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Am I still obsessed with finding a great fortune after all I’ve seen of the Reddmans and the Pooles? Hell yes. Obscene wealth is the great American obsession and I am nothing if not a patriot. It’s just that now I think how I make it and how I spend it is every bit as meaningful as the money itself. Someday, if luck ever finds me, I’ll be graced with a child of my own. The tragedy of the Reddmans has taught me that everything we’ve ever done is passed to our children like an inheritance. I can live with my crimes, I think, but to curse my child with my crimes is criminal and to commit them knowing that later on I’ll have to hide the truth is positively craven. I’m still chasing as hard as the next guy, sure, but from here on in I act as if a child is judging every stride.