Schuyler made no bones about his family’s long, slow financial decline. But he had never, she now realized, been forthcoming about the ink on paper, the actual numbers. For that matter, she had kept her own finances equally private. Separate bank accounts and a general refusal to take money seriously had all been part of their mime show of marital independence, their commitment to each other’s inviolable autonomy, their insistence on absolute freedom. (Absolute freedom? And where had it gotten them? Abduction and incarceration in a shed behind fences in rural Mexico? How was that free?)
Some differences had been apparent between them all along. Ariana’s way of asserting her indifference to money had always been to be a bit careless about it. She liked to spend; Schuyler didn’t. That was long established. Otherwise, money was a boring conversation for another time. Surely there would be enough, wouldn’t there? They were successful New Yorkers now resident in a Third World — Second World? — country where some of their contemporaries got by decently on Social Security alone. They had split the proceeds from the apartment, fifty-fifty, and then split the cost of the Patzcuaro place and its improvement. Ariana had a 401K and an additional portfolio of taxable investments that had done nicely. But who knew what they’d have or need 20 years hence? Who could predict whether they’d even live that long — or the fate of world markets. Trying to budget for the unforeseeable was a fool’s errand. It seemed better to trust in fate and enjoy what they had. But how much was that?
And so the question hung in the air as Ariana settled down with Mort to discuss how best to ransom a Schermerhorn, dependent as was the whole family (but never quite so desperately) on Zimmerman’s wise counsel and investment prowess.
“I need to get back to these bastards,” Ariana said. “Time is running out. They’ll lose patience. But I don’t really know where to begin, because I don’t know where this will end up. I need to have the money handy. But what do you think? How much can I offer?
The old money was long gone, but what did that look like. There would be a residuum. Old bonds. Stocks bought so long ago that the capital gains would be confiscatory. The proceeds from selling Bairnwood could not have been insignificant even in a wretched market.
Morris tapped the keyboard on his desk and soon enough, there it was: an inventory of Schermerhorn family holdings, trusts, bequests, documents bestowing power of attorney, living wills forbidding “heroic” interventions to extend ancient, shattered lives for a few more weeks or months. He printed out page after page and asked Ariana to go through them before they made the hard calls.
Do you have any assets held separately, he asked her? For a nanosecond she froze. Should she mention her 401K and the modest stock portfolio that she had accumulated over the years? They had been set up before she met Schuyler. Zimmerman did not manage them, though he probably took for granted that she would have come out of her career with some sort of bounty. Did he really want to hear about them, or was the question more a matter of due diligence as he prepared to present Schuyler’s sisters with reasons why they needed to allow Schuyler a bigger bite into trusts they shared equally?
It occurred to Ariana that she wasn’t just negotiating with Mexican hoodlums; she also needed to be strategic with the surviving Schermerhorns.
“No, I don’t,” she lied, “We used up my money on the house.”
She could always walk that back, tell Zimmerman that she had needed to see how things were going to play out with the family before she drained her own savings. He might get angry, but he’d understand. They were New Yorkers; money was money.
Along with the numbers, Zimmerman printed out something else, a brief text. “Did Schuyler ever show you this?” She took the pages as Zimmerman pulled them from the printer, three of them, double-spaced. She glanced at the first few sentences. They didn’t ring a bell. “He’s been trying to put together a memoir or a family history or something like that,” Zimmerman said. “He asked me to take a look at these pages, a gloss on family finances, kind of a broad-brush approach. Had he got it roughly right? I told him he was doing fine. Has anything come of the book? I think he just got sick of it. Take a minute and give it a read. Nothing you need to know, if you don’t already. But it’s fun stuff and more or less accurate, as far as it goes.
Ariana knew about the late-in-the-game success that Schuyler’s father had enjoyed with his next to last book. After a series of flops, he had hit the jackpot, with a family saga called Thy Will Be Done, a soap-opera-cum-thriller about a family fighting over a “will.” She had read Schuyler’s copy of the novel, with the affectionate inscription scrawled on the frontispiece by the author, his father. Dated stuff, but not bad at all, he said. She had to agree.
Mort said they should take a break because he had to return some calls. Ariana used the time to read the pages he had printed out for her:
It was never clear to me how much my father had made vs. how much he had inherited. We were brought up like paupers, but that was only to be expected, given the Puritans among my forbears and their deep distrust of money as the measure of anything worth doing, well or badly. All right, we were paupers with a big riverfront estate but it was well understood we really couldn’t afford to hang onto it much longer. We were “land poor,” as they used to say of Southern planters that the Civil War had stripped of their slaves.
People who knew us would tell you we were “old money,” which was true, except that, as is often true of old money, not much of it was left. And then, in the late 1950s, Thy Will Be Done had happened. The book, my father’s fourth after three obscure non-sellers, sat on or near the top of the Times list for a good month or more. And then there was the movie deal, no matter that the movie never got made. My father had hit a jackpot, relatively speaking, but whether the payout was in cash as well as glory was unclear. He bought a nifty little Austin Healey in celebration and would tool around town in it. In perfect weather, he’d drive it down to the city, New York, with the top down and me in the catbird seat hollering to be heard over the wind in my face, both of us hollering. Hollering and grinning. Otherwise things were unchanged by his big book. We continued to live with the pieces of worn furniture and the miserable 1950s diet my sisters and brother and I had been brought up on: casseroles of spaghetti, ground beef, cheese and stewed tomatoes from a can. A side dish of sliced green beans, garnished with fried onions, also from a can. A dessert of banana slices or sections of mandarin orange — or both — suspended like fossils in a geological substrate of green Jello.
The Austin brought a little flair into our lives, but, mind you, even with import duties it came to less than it would have cost to replace the car my father got rid of, the ancient Packard that had been passed to him when his father got too old to drive.
Thy Will Be Done includes a murder, and some valuable paintings disappear from the walls of an old mansion looking out over the Hudson. The mansion was clearly Bairnwood, though there had been no family murders, as far as I know. Otherwise, the book was not remotely autobiographical: less a memoir than a story that uncannily prefigured what eventually happened — the squabbling that erupted over the estate when my father passed away more or less on schedule in his early seventies and his late wife’s money was freed from his clutches for distribution to their children. His “will,” the document that figured in the double-entendre of the book’s title, left Bairnwood to the four of us. There was nothing particularly interesting or original in our tussle. I wanted to keep Bairnwood, even though that would have meant sharing ownership and tenancy with my sisters and their husbands. (Between the death of the patriarch and the settlement of the estate, but for reasons apparently unrelated to either of these milestones, our brother sank a bullet into his brain, stumbled out into the parking lot of the professional services building in White Plains where his psychiatrist maintained an office, and dropped to the ground, dead.) To keep the house would have meant forgoing the money we could make selling it, not to mention the accelerating cost of maintenance. In fact,
upkeep had been so long deferred that a lump sum for repairs would have meant selling off more than a small part of the stock portfolio that we also inherited, plus an additional liquidation to cover attorney fees and taxes. In the end, I came to my senses, and Bairnwood passed out of the family that had owned it for more than 150 years. Including the stocks and bonds and a small cottage up in the Adirondacks that my father had once used for hunting trips, my two sisters and I each came away with a bit less than a million. The ’08 crash had cut that inheritance nearly in half and, as Mort saw fit to remind me, my panicky decision to sell near the bottom meant that the market had recovered without me.
Mort finished with his calls in about half an hour and his secretary signaled that Ariana was welcome to come back into the inner office.
“So where are we at,” he began, from which Ariana concluded that he was ready to wrap things up and get her out of there. “You really begin to hurt yourself financially if this goes much above $50,000,” he said. “I’ll be blunt. Whatever the word may be in Mexico, the Schermerhorns are no longer a well-to-do family.”
Ariana is not one to ignore Mort’s investment advice. The high fee he siphons from whatever gains accrue to Schuyler’s account — but only the gains — seems to guarantee that he will always act in a client’s interest, even if the market sometimes tests his wisdom. But the assets under his management are Schuyler’s, not his, she reminds herself. Does she need to remind him, too? Summoning the courage, she tells Mort that she wants a hundred thousand, not forty and that she’ll need it in cash. Hundreds. A thousand of them. She tells him that the larger sum will give her the flexibility and the confidence to negotiate aggressively with the shits who have abducted her husband.
Mort fusses some more on his desktop keyboard, then punches some numbers into a hand-held calculator. He pauses and looks her in the eye: “Be very careful, Ariana. The portfolio isn’t as robust as it once was.”
“Well there’s always the trust, right, Mort?” She refers to a generation-skipping trust that a tax-averse Schermerhorn set up for the benefit of his grandchildren. For as long as Ariana can remember, it has yielded Schuyler and each of his sisters a quarterly check of perhaps $15,000 — $60,000 annually times the three of them: $180,000 a year, drawn down at a rate of, perhaps, 5%. That suggested it was funded north of $3 million.
“You don’t want to go there,” Mort says. “Schuyler couldn’t appropriate the capital for himself even if he were here in the room to do it. He’d have to get his sisters involved, even if he just wanted to do an accelerated draw down of his third and forego future payouts for a while. Let’s try to make do with his personal account.”
Mort: “I’ll wire the money to you.”
Well, no. He wouldn’t be wiring money. Ariana might have made the same suggestion if redoing their house hadn’t already schooled her the rigamarole of Mexican banking, the endlessly repeated visits to an ATM, the low-ball maximums, like pulling the lever on a slot machine.
“No, Mort,” she says. “There’s no wiring money to me in Mexico. I’ll need to be the mule.”
The idea appalls him: Ariana flying into Mexico with a small fortune in her luggage or sewn into a jacket lining. “I can’t stop you, Ariana. But as a licensed fiduciary, I can’t condone it. Let me at least wire it to an affiliate in Mexico City. They can arrange an armed courier to Patzcuaro.”
There isn’t time for all that, Ariana argues.
Zimmerman relents. He picks up the phone and orders the cash. Ariana waits in the anteroom with the secretary. Fifteen minutes later a guard appears with a manila envelope.
She is back at the airport by three p.m. for an early evening flight to Mexico City. She approaches customs with some apprehension. The maggots of airport bureaucracy will be merciless if they detect the wad of bills she’s carrying — $90,000 in excess of the $10,000 maximum that can go unreported.
To mask anxiety, she attempts to feign nonchalance. She measures the moment in milliseconds and wonders if the official at the desk isn’t taking just a bit longer than usual to scan her passport and check her personal data against the immigration form she filled out as the plane circled the airport preparing to land. As she has done scores of times, she routinely checked the “no” box where it asked if she was carrying “cash or monetary instruments” worth more than $10,000. The official soon yields to the irresistible and only thrill his work life allows him: the moment in which he picks up his rubber stamp and thumps it rapidly and royally on the forms spread out on the desk before him.
There may be reasons to comply with Mexican currency controls, but the risk of detection is not one of them, Jorge once observed, smiling wickedly.
day sixteen
Enrique does not know about the trip, and Ariana has not heard from him in more than a week. That there is nothing unusual about this gap in their relationship does not lessen her yearning to see him. She will not tell him about New York. She has yet to tell him about Schuyler. She sends a blank email, and in response: nothing.
On an impulse, she calls Margaret with a spur-of-the-moment idea: how about comida — the mid-afternoon meal — at Rancho de la Mesa, a lovely place on a hillside a few kilometers from the center of town, popular both for the quality of its molé sauces and its sweeping view of the shrinking, twenty-mile lake.
The meal and companionship with Margaret provides Ariana with brief respite from the sense of dismay that is engulfing her, more by the hour. They are settling into their lunch when two men are suddenly casing the joint. They could be called nondescript except that each carries an assault rifle, aligned demurely with their right pant leg and pointed toward the floor. The customers fall briefly silent. The gunmen give the all-clear and in walks what has to be an underworld bigshot, a drug lord, perhaps, and a retinue of his intimates: a woman who is perhaps his wife, three teenagers who are unmistakably his sons, and a couple of adult hangers-on. And who should round out that entourage but the local archbishop in full regalia: no mitre, but a flowing white robe that grazes the floor, get-up that is the evident delight of a prelate notorious both for his love of flowing raiment and his joy in the company of young boys. He is the local pope out for a mid-afternoon meal with a Medici prince.
When the gunmen walked in, Ariana and Margaret looked at each other and debated cutting the meal short and calling for the check. The archbishop’s presence soothes them. They decide to finish their entrées, though they will not linger over coffee. And, only after Margaret’s Land Rover bumps out of the rutted field that serves the restaurant as a parking lot do they break the silence that, until this moment, has fallen over them.
Margaret: “Did you recognize him? Was that La Tuta?”
Ariana is uncertain. La Tuta, or El Profe as he is also known — a former school teacher — is head of the Caballeros Templarios, a murderer who, in 2011, when his brigade was in an earlier incarnation called la Familia de Michoacan put forth a high-minded codigo, a code of revolutionary behavior. It called on right-thinking Mexicans to join him in a battle against the triple scourge of materialism, injustice and tyranny. For anyone who betrayed his brothers and was caught cooperating with authorities, punishment would be swift and sure: death.
Margaret again: “He looks different in the YouTube clips.”
La Tuta fancies himself and his organization to be a latter-day incarnation of the Europe’s Knights Templar who killed for Christ during the Crusades. He enjoys a virtual existence as well as a real one. The Caballeros Templarios post clips of him on the Internet, chatting complicitly with local politicos. It appears that no mayor or police chief in the area dares refuse a summons to a sit-down with La Tuta, and every one of these amiable chats is recorded and archived. An unreleased clip memorializing the occasion is the gun to the head that keeps an official in line, and when it comes time to pull the trigger, La Tuta needs only to upload the clip to YouTube or give it to a local television station and let the federales do his dirty work for him. A tape showing La Tuta
with Patzcuaro’s mayor was recently released. The mayor fled, got caught by federal agents and was in prison awaiting trial when it was announced that she had, conveniently, succumbed to cancer. The malignancy must have spread with astonishing speed, Jorge smirked.
“It drives me crazy to realize we were in the room with a man — one table away — who may know exactly where Schuyler is being held and could order his release on a whim.”
“I wonder if they know you are his wife? Could you hear anything they said?”
In truth, most of what the man said was muttered into a cellphone that vibrated ceaselessly with incoming calls. He spoke in muted tones, and Ariana could make out scarcely a word of it. The bishop’s intonations carried some distance, as when he blessed the meal that waiters quickly set down before them. But the boss — el jefe, if that’s what he was — said little and when he was not speaking into the cellphone, he mumbled sotto voce into the ears of the men who flanked his chair or, when he wriggled his fingers in a come-hither gesture, bent over him to receive his insights and their orders.
Ariana asks Margaret to drop her off in the Plaza Grande. Twilight has fallen over the young couples strolling here and there. Giggly toddlers hold hands and spin each other around until they are dizzy and fall onto the grass, laughing. Ariana checks her email, then checks it again. She climbs the escalera and retreat to the upstairs bedroom. Still no message from Enrique.
day eighteen
Theater etiquette in Mexico calls for announcing the opening curtain or the end of an intermission with a series of three calls or llamadas — a word useful in a variety of contexts, as we have seen. The first llamada comes as the audience mills about in the lobby and then begins to flow down the aisles and find their seats. A segunda llamada will signal that it’s time for even the chattiest members of the audience to quit their hobnobbing and actually drop their rumps onto the upholstery. The third call, tercer llamada, brings down the lights and the curtain rises. The ransom negotiations seemed to be following a similar rhythm.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 11