Sons (11 page)

“Wow! This is so cool!” Colin said. “It’s just like the ones we have at school. Is it really for me? I mean, can I use it now?”

“Of course.”

Amal looked on from the doorway. As Colin eagerly bent over the keyboard, Amal cleared his throat loudly. “Ahem!”

Colin looked up to see Amal jerk his head toward Jan.

Colin quickly turned.

“Oh! Sorry. Thanks. I guess I got excited and forgot my manners.”

Jan ruffled Colin’s hair saying, “’S okay. It’s from both of us. You can thank Michael when he gets home.”

But it wasn’t okay. Jan suspected Colin’s sweetness was, in reality, teenage guile. He hoped not, for everyone’s sake.

Sixteen

“
D
AMN
you, Louis! What’s the matter with you, Son?” Victor Carew roared at his only child.

Louis Carew stood uneasily on the Persian carpet that covered a highly polished floor in his father’s posh Society Hill study. A gentle light bathed the book-lined walls. Gold-stamped leather volumes reflected red, green, and blue hues around the cozy room, creating a feeling of tranquil thought. Tranquility was the least sensation Louis felt as he fixed his eyes on the rug’s intricate pattern. His heart thumped hard in his chest. Flight from his father’s wrath was his first instinct on hearing the opening salvo of a battle.

Louis kept staring down at the rug and thought,
If only this thing could fly!

The older man circled the oak desk like a man searching for a cufflink lost in midair. In doing so, he was trying very hard to keep from looking at his son, an act he was sure would result in him leaping at Louis’s throat with murder on his mind.

“Louis, you’ve had every advantage I could provide. You have a first-rate education, connections in this town, and the opportunity for any career you could possibly want. You’ve got a townhouse with a fancy address, privacy, more money than God,
and
several bailouts with the law… one that nearly landed you in prison, which I need not mention.”

“Yeah, well then why mention it? And, just for the record, that particular run-in cost
me
four million bucks, not you! Those spic brats took me to the cleaners! It’s taken me years to make up that loss. Not
you
!”

Referring to the out of court settling of a civil suit, alleging that he seduced two twelve-year-old girls, brought back mixed emotions for Louis. On one hand, robbing them of their sweet innocence was, in his mind, worth the risk. On the other hand, the price was way too high. The girls’ status, as two of the city’s underprivileged, meant that without a high-end law firm behind them to tackle the Carew name and wealth, they were unlikely to see a dime from the man who drugged, stripped, and raped them, each in turn, until he tired of the game.

“You just remember who kept the criminal charges from going to trial, mister! Your cash may have paid those brats off, but my influence got you off, and don’t you forget it!”

The younger Carew needed no reminding. The humiliation he felt at the time flushed again in his gut.

“I remember,” he said bitterly. Louis remembered too that it was Jan Phillips and his oh-so-righteous Templars of Law that made possible the enrichment of a couple of Mexican wetbacks. Rather than take Louis on as a client, Jan instead decided to represent Louis’s alleged victims in the civil action. For once, the Carew name was useless. Twelve years had passed, and Louis had hardened into a man of thirty-six. He’d also developed the spine that he lacked when his father rescued him from the clutches of Graterford Prison. He vowed to get even with Jan Phillips one day. The hatred he felt for Jan was as hot as the day he signed the check for those brats.

Victor Carew’s angry voice brought his son back to the present.

“Louis, I’m not interested in hitting you over the head with the past. I’ve got work to do, and one of these days I’m going to be able to do it without having to worry about you ruining your life, and mine as well. Thank God your mother isn’t here to see what you’ve become!”

A slavishly devoted son, Louis was just a boy when his mother died from a sudden aneurism. Afterward, he tried to transfer his love to his aloof and oftentimes forbidding, father. He became resentful of what he felt was his father’s crushing remoteness. Consequently, Louis
felt unwelcome in his father’s home, much like a stray kitten, too pitiful to drive away, yet an unwanted addition to the household all the same. Brushes with school authorities and the law were mere cries for attention. Victor put these down to rebellion and meted out stiff penalties, which only served to widen the gulf between son and father. Over time, their battered relationship morphed into one of neutral adversaries, each hopelessly unaware of the other’s wondering need.

“What I’ve become is what you made me!” Louis snapped. “Now, will you please tell me what you want?”

“What?” Victor said, wondering what his son meant.

Louis rolled his eyes and whined, “What do you want? I still don’t know why I’m here.”

Louis’s father made a sour face, walked behind his desk, and pulled out a drawer.

“Here, explain this,
if
you can,” he said.

Victor slammed a DVD case on the desk. On the cover was what appeared to be the meat department of a supermarket. A man and woman, locked in the throes of pornographic passion, copulated on a butcher’s table. The title read: “Manager’s Special—Ready For the Fire—Bone In!”

Victor Carew flipped the case over and read the production credits.

“It says, ‘LC Enterprises’, Louis. That’s you, isn’t it!”

Louis stared at the leather-clad desktop without looking directly at the hottest DVD product his mini-production company was currently marketing in all of Philadelphia’s porno parlors.

He raised his eyes, trying to look at ease.

“So?” he answered coolly.

“Is that all you have to say? Well, Mr. Hollywood, what about this?”

With that, Victor retrieved a second DVD. This one was far different from the other. Splashed across the glossy cover, a very young boy performed fellatio on a clearly much older male. A large red dot masked the area around the boy’s mouth.

“Is that boy
legal
, Louis?”

Louis shrugged. “He says he is. He has state ID. It’s all on record.”

“Yeah, right. And you know as well as I do a fake ID is as easy to get in Philadelphia as ice cream on a July Sunday!”

Victor regarded his son with a mixture of suspicion and pity. He had reproached himself countless times for his helpless indulgence. Never mind that Louis, from the age of thirteen, had begun to develop into a violent, cruel, power-hungry libertine. Victor shamefully realized that, aside from gluttony, his son wallowed in all the vices attributed to hell, and he enjoyed every one.

“Look, Dad,” Louis said, “the movies make good money. I haven’t dipped into our joint account in weeks. You should be happy!”

“Happy? Well excuse me, Louis, but running a business that could land you in federal prison makes me queasy, so you’ll forgive me if I seem somewhat sangfroid!”

Exasperated, Louis said, “Well, Dad, what do you want me to do?”

“Close down, or at least stop the porn.”

“No.”

Victor shook his head in disbelief.

“But… why not? Louis, you know I’ve got contacts in the film industry—legit, not the stuff you’re mixed up in.”

Louis resumed eyeing the carpet at his feet.

“Look,” Victor said hopefully, “you could make a documentary about Philadelphia, or the town in Scotland where your grandfather came from. Just do something else besides this sick stuff!”

Louis chewed the inside of his cheek.
How many times has this old fart yelled at me? One of these days I’ll show him I can do a hell of a lot more than stand around and take his guff!

Louis wasn’t about to make documentaries or anything else when the porn business got him sex in numbers and varieties that rivaled the twelve Caesars. Still, he needed to quell his father’s anger and avoid the old man’s interference in his profligate lifestyle.

“Look, it’ll take some time, but I’ll think about it, promise. Okay?” Louis said, hoping his insincerity didn’t show.

Victor slumped into his desk chair and thought,
I can’t trust him, but this is as good as I’ll get, for now. I’ll have him watched in the meantime.

He nodded grudgingly and said, “All right, Louie, all right. Wanna stay for dinner?”

“What are you having?”

“Pasta al forno.”

“Dad, you eat too much of that stuff. The carbs are gonna kill you.”

“Do I look like I’m ready for the grave?”

Louis looked at his father. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested man. No beer belly testified to overindulgence in food or drink. He also knew his father was a regular at the Pinnacle Club’s penthouse gymnasium.

“No, you don’t,” Louis admitted. “I’d like to stay. Thanks.”

As the two men made their way to the dining room, Louis’s cell phone emitted a soft burring sound. He stopped, pulled the phone from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and pressed the “read text” button.

“Dad, you go ahead, I’ve got to take this.”

“All right, boy, but don’t be too long. The pasta won’t wait.”

“Be there in a flash,” Louis said with a grin.

The younger Carew read the text message.

Special friend in town. Need entertainment. Call PK.

Seventeen

J
AN
sifted through the day’s mail and stopped when he came to a long pale yellow envelope. He glanced at the return address. The words, “All Souls, Deans Office,” caught his eye. Jan slipped a letter opener along the envelope’s flap. Extracting a precisely creased rectangle of stiff paper, he unfolded it and read Colin’s end-of-the-year grade report. He read and then reread the cold statistics. Numbers and letters that could either make or break a student’s future.

Jan walked into the study he and Michael shared.

Michael sat at one side of their partner’s desk, busily processing invoices. Jan walked over and handed Michael the sheet of paper with its neatly typed rows of data.

“What is this?” Michael asked.

Jan was grinning from ear to ear. He said, “Take a look.”

Michael ran his eyes over the paper.

“Wow! All A’s! And for the whole semester too! That is excellent. I am so happy for you. It is one thing you will not have to worry about. You must be very proud!”

“I would be if I had anything to do with raising him, but Colin’s native intelligence and his mother’s love made him the person he is, not me.”

“Genes count for a lot too. You know that, Jan. You are one smart fortune cookie!”

Jan smiled, slipped the grade report into the envelope, and put it near Colin’s computer.

“Jan, you must reward him. What do you think he would like?”

“A one-way ticket out of here would be my guess.”

“That is very cynical. He seems happy to me. At least he has not said anything to me about wanting to leave.”

Jan sighed. “I don’t think he would take either of us into his confidence if he was planning to run off. I don’t know, maybe I’m just being insecure. You know he’s never called me ‘Dad’, or ‘Pop’, or even ‘Father’. It’s always ‘sir’, and even then, it’s an awkward ‘sir’. And I know he spends more time on his computer than I like. He rarely initiates conversation, and when we do talk, he looks at anything and everything but me. He hasn’t volunteered any more information about how he’s getting on in school, or if he’s made more friends. Do you know if he’s had any phone calls?”

“How I would know a thing like that? He has his own phone.”

“Right. I’m not thinking,” Jan admitted.

“You really believe he would try to run away?” Michael said.

Jan shrugged his answer.

“Why not ask him the questions you want answered? Are you afraid he would feel you are intruding?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Well, perhaps he feels that if you do not ask, then you do not care.”

“You’re right. Michael, you’re so wise.”

“It is an Asian thing,” Michael joked. “As for Colin not calling you Dad, give him time. After all, he has lived almost fifteen years without one. I love you, and in time he will too.”