House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  “That could have ruined your life. You should be grateful I knew who to pay off.”

  “And you hold it over my head? What kind of sick person does that?”

  “Don’t make me do it,” Conrad said.

  “Fuck you, Dad,” Cameron said. A few seconds later he burst out into the hall and stormed out of the house.

  79

  When I returned, the family was arguing about me, about whether I should be allowed into the family meeting.

  Sukie spoke calmly. “If you’re going to have a vote at all today, you’re going to let him in.”

  Conrad was seated again at his place at the head of the table. “I told you already, it’s family only.”

  “You know damned well that, per the articles of incorporation, you can’t hold a meeting with two missing principals. So if you don’t let Nick in, I’m going to bail, and you won’t have a meeting. Take your choice.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t expect to be allowed into the family meeting in the map room, so I’d made other arrangements.

  With Natalya, who believed Megan was leading a cabal to oust Conrad and keep Natalya’s hands off of Conrad’s fortune.

  I’d asked Natalya to put a book on the shelves. It was a leather-bound edition of The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand. I’d selected the book from an antiquarian bookstore in downtown Boston, based entirely on the color of its binding. Which was based on reviewing the Architectural Digest piece on Kimball Hall.

  The thing about rich men’s libraries is, the books are rarely opened.

  Inside the book George Devlin had cleverly inserted a miniature video bug.

  But as it turned out, I didn’t need it.

  The meeting started promptly at ten. I sat next to Sukie at the round table. Minutes of the last meeting were read by a stenographer I hadn’t seen before, a mousy woman of around forty with thick glasses and short brown hair who showed up just before the meeting began.

  Then Conrad Kimball cleared his throat. He began to speak in a hoarse but loud baritone, his West Texas accent as leathery as a worn rodeo saddle.

  “We have a decision to make today,” he began. “Whether or not to be acquired by Tova Pharmaceuticals of Haifa. Which I think is a no-brainer. This way we’ll get to escape all these crazy lawsuits.”

  Hayden interrupted. “You want to give away your legacy, Dad? You started Kimball Pharma. It’s your baby. You want it to just . . . disappear into some corporate behemoth?”

  “If we do nothing, we’re going to get sued into oblivion,” Conrad said. “There’ll be nothing left. Now we have this Israeli pharmaceutical company that wants to acquire our portfolio of drugs. And they’re willing to assume our legal liabilities? To me, it’s an easy decision to make.”

  An Israeli pharmaceutical company, I thought. That’s who would hire Black Parallel, an Israeli private intelligence firm. Of course they were interested in me, in what I was investigating, what I had. Because I represented a huge potential threat to their deal.

  I was a threat to Tova Pharmaceuticals.

  They knew who I was—or they’d found out—and they knew that as an investigator I was relentless. If there was something to be found out about Kimball, some kind of dirt, they wanted it. There were probably all sorts of clauses in their offer that would allow them to withdraw if they discovered anything bad, any illegality, any false information.

  Hayden said acidly, “A division of a giant Israeli pharma company. Our name will disappear. We’ll be ordered around by some megalomaniac in Haifa. I for one think it’s a serious mistake. A really bad move.”

  “Let me remind you,” her father said, “that you’ll have plenty of dough to blow on your all-Japanese production of Raisin in the Sun.”

  “And what happens to me in your little scenario?” said Megan. “If and when Tova takes us over? I don’t see my name anywhere on this.”

  “Megan, my dear,” Conrad said, “we know all about your schemes. Trying to have me declared incompetent. Yes, we know all about them.”

  “That’s not true,” she protested indignantly.

  “Fritz has some recordings to refresh your memory. Girl, I started this company before you were born, and I intend to run it until I can’t anymore, and I’ll be the judge of when that is.”

  “Are you actually firing me?” she said.

  “As the mother of four lovely children—my heirs, let us not forget—who doesn’t want for money, you have nothing to worry about. I’m sure you’re highly employable.”

  “Untouchable, more like! You think anyone’s going to hire a Kimball these days? Paul, say something! This is an outrage!”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Conrad said. “I think you’ll find Paul did some valuable work on the valuation of the Tova deal.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sign this—I don’t see why I should.”

  “Let me make your decision easy for you. If you don’t, I’m going to cut you out of the goddamned will. You too, Hayden. Your distribution will be a nice round number: zero. You people are a sport of nature, I tell you. It never ceases to mystify me how two human beings could have given birth to a brood of scorpions. What about you, Sukie? Any questions?”

  Sukie nodded and looked around. “Yeah, I got one,” she finally said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  She drew herself up. “Are you going to give interviews from your prison cell, Dad?” she said.

  A long, stunned silence, and then Conrad laughed. Everyone else was watching them, their eyes moving from Sukie to Conrad and back.

  She opened her laptop on the table in front of her. “This is the famous Tallinn study and all of the correspondence surrounding it—hold on, right here—”

  “That’s an invention out of whole—” Conrad began.

  “All the documentation, right here,” she said. “Proof.”

  “What— How the hell did you get that?” Conrad said. “Who gave it to you?”

  Sukie was looking at her laptop, tapping a few keys. The folder wasn’t opening. Her laptop looked frozen. She looked at me, then looked back at the keyboard, faltering for a moment. “As soon—as soon as this is released, Dad, you will face criminal charges for providing the government with false and misleading information about Oxydone. You lied and covered up and you had the study buried, and this folder of documents nails down every last damned detail. You will go to prison for the rest of your life.” Her face was flushed, her eyes glittering.

  “What the hell do you want all of a sudden, Susan?” Conrad said flatly.

  “I want the keys to the car.”

  A long pause. “The what?”

  From a leather portfolio she pulled out a sheet of paper and slid it across the table toward her father.

  “I want you all to sign this piece of paper, turning over the management of the company to me and the professional team of managers I’m going to bring in.”

  “What?” Conrad nearly shouted.

  “She’s got to be kidding,” Megan said. “Sukie, you have got—”

  “And if you don’t,” Sukie went on, “the Tallinn file will be front-page news in the Times.”

  Hayden said, “You would do that to us, Sukie?”

  But Sukie continued, ignoring the question. “This right here is a legal instrument that transfers all executive rights and responsibilities in your name over to SKG Enterprises. And that includes ownership of the hundred billion dollars in cash you’ve squirreled away offshore. That’s right. I know about that too.”

  “What cash is she talking about?” Hayden said to the others.

  Sukie looked at Hayden now. “For the last eleven years, Kimball Pharmaceuticals has been secretly siphoning out its cash. All the cash we could afford. Transferred to shell companies in offshore locations around the
world that are supposed to look like R-and-D companies. Totaling over a hundred billion in cash, right, Paul?”

  “A hundred and eleven point five billion, if memory serves,” said Paul. “Wait a sec—let me double-check. Yes, I remembered right. What a relief.”

  “And what if we don’t all sign this ‘legal instrument’?” Megan said.

  “Then the Tallinn study gets released,” Sukie said, “and Dad goes to prison.”

  Megan shouted, “You’d be tearing down our own house, you idiot!”

  Hayden said, “And if we do all sign it, it stays buried, is that what you’re saying?”

  “And then what?” said Megan.

  “Oh, it’s going to be a beautiful narrative,” Sukie said. “The reformer daughter takes over the company. Undoes the sins of the father. Wall Street’s going to love it.”

  “This is absurd,” Conrad said, folding his arms across his chest.

  Megan said, “And how does the reformer daughter undo these . . . sins?”

  “We’re going to transform Kimball Pharma into a company that makes anti-opiate drugs,” Sukie said.

  I tried to suppress a smile.

  “Where’s the profit in that?” Megan said.

  “Where’s the profit?” Sukie said. “Look at Vivitrol—on its way to being a billion-dollar drug. Same with Narcan. And generic naloxone nasal spray. You don’t know how big the market is? The CDC is calling for millions of new anti-opiate prescriptions. The US government has allocated billions and billions to fight the opioid epidemic. So are countries all over the world. The potential is mind-boggling.”

  She paused, and for a moment no one else spoke.

  “That’s insane,” Megan said.

  “Actually, it’s kind of brilliant,” Hayden said.

  “I think it’s genius,” Paul said.

  “You see,” Sukie went on, “the only way to save the company is to change it. Look, Motorola used to make car radios, right? Now they make cell phones and computer chips. There’s a great metaphor I read once. If you leave a white fence post alone it becomes a black fence post. So if you want it to stay white, you have to keep painting it white. You want something to stay the same, you’ve got to constantly change it.”

  I felt cold. A tingle began at the base of my neck.

  If you leave a white post alone . . . Victor, my father, had said that exact thing to me a week ago.

  But when had Sukie met with Victor?

  And then I remembered: Victor was the reason she came to me in the first place. He’d told her about me. She’d met him while she was doing research for her documentary about white-collar criminals.

  Was this whole thing his idea in the first place?

  But Sukie wasn’t done talking.

  “So those billions in cash are going to found a corporation called Kimball Wellness Worldwide, Inc. And I’m going to be the CEO. A pharmaceutical firm that’s developing a new line of drugs that save people from opiates. Help people break through addictions.”

  Conrad, who’d been staring at Sukie, finally spoke. “Anti-opiate? What the hell do you know about that?”

  “Let’s cut the bullshit,” Sukie said. “The opioid market is stagnant. The anti-opioid industry? Surging. Daddy, your day is over. You made a fortune selling knives. I’m going to make an even bigger fortune selling Band-Aids.”

  “You—you know nothing about the pharmaceutical business,” Conrad sputtered. “What do you know about running a multibillion-dollar corporation? The biggest thing you’ve run is a shabby little film company with three employees and seven part-timers. Smaller than most hometown accounting firms.”

  “You’ve always underestimated me, Dad. You all have. But now you don’t have a lot of options. You give me the keys to the car or I blow it all sky high, with you in it.”

  “I don’t believe you’d do that,” Megan said.

  “Try me and see,” Sukie said. “We’ll go bankrupt.”

  “You’d really let that happen?” Megan said. “Why are you trying to destroy Daddy?”

  “Destroy? I don’t need to destroy him. Daddy’s done. Time to retire to your yacht, Dad.”

  “So you don’t give a damn about all the victims you’re always talking about?” said Megan.

  “Of course I do,” Sukie replied. “But these lawsuits? Please. Most of the money goes to those greedy legal eagles anyway. And what do you think the families intend to do with their winnings? Buy a couple of double-wides? You think lawsuits are the answer? Forget it.”

  Sukie had lied to me all along. She wanted the Tallinn file as leverage, yes. But really as blackmail to force her father to turn the company over to her.

  As I listened, I realized that I smelled smoke. I’d been aware of it for the last few moments, while Sukie was talking, but now it was unmistakable. I noticed a slight haze in the air.

  “There’s a fire,” I said, standing. “We have to move.”

  Paul got up from his seat, as did Fritz.

  “Fire!” Fritz shouted.

  I rushed over to the door and felt it.

  It was hot. The doorknob was scalding.

  I knew immediately what had happened. Cameron and gasoline, two combustible substances.

  By now everyone in the room had leapt up from the table. “Get down!” I shouted.

  Black smoke was seeping under the door.

  It seemed counterintuitive to get down, to sit on the floor, I knew, with the smoke coming in at floor level. But hot smoke rises, and the good, cooler, breathable air settles down.

  “Oh, my God!” Megan cried.

  Now a fire alarm upstairs began to clang. I thought of the century-old wood, dry as tinder, going right up in flames. And I knew the Ponderosa pine floor of the map room would go up soon, maybe in seconds; it was highly flammable.

  “Megan, get down,” I said.

  “I am not going to get trapped in here,” Megan said, racing to the door.

  I saw what she was trying to do. She wanted to get the hell out of there, so she was going to open the door to run into the hallway and down the stairs. It was nearly an involuntary reaction.

  And it would be a serious mistake.

  “No!” I shouted. “Stop. Don’t open that door. The only safe way out is through the window.”

  Natalya was waving her hands around. “My puppy! She’s in my bedroom! Somebody get her!”

  “I will not get trapped in here!” Megan repeated.

  “Don’t open the door!” I told her. I found it hard to stop coughing.

  Fritz was helping Conrad out of his chair. The old man looked sick, sleepy. I shouted to Fritz, “Get him down on the ground!” Most people who die in fires are overcome by smoke, deprived of oxygen.

  I was watching the Kimball family go into panic mode. I knew what was about to happen. I knew what the family was going to do.

  Most people would react the same way.

  When they’re surrounded by a fire, most people get tunnel vision. The ancient fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. They rely on muscle memory all of a sudden—they’re driven to follow old familiar pathways. In house fires, children will hide under a bed or in a closet. When people panic on airplanes, they inevitably run toward the front of the plane, where they entered. People become irrationally fixated on going out the way they came in.

  So Megan and Sukie and the others wanted to open the door to the hallway, which would be a great mistake. That would pull the fire into the room. Then they would try to rush into the hall, toward the stairway, which had probably become a chimney by now.

  Absolutely the wrong way to run. This fire was too fast-moving.

  Instead, I ran to the window. It looked out over the rear terrace. Directly below were paving stones. A drop of approximately twenty-five feet onto stone would break bones. I thought of Anguilla
and reassured myself that I’d done it before.

  But then I remembered that in Anguilla the drop had been far less.

  I unlocked the window and pulled it open, and immediately I felt an inrush of air. I heard a shout.

  I yelled, “Over here!”

  Then the door to the room came open and a pillar of black smoke billowed into the room. Now the thick, dark fog was everywhere. I gasped for breath and could feel the heat scorching my lungs, my throat. Everyone was coughing now, bent over.

  I shoved a standing globe aside and clambered out the window, holding on to the frame. Directly below me was the patio stone, but maybe ten feet away from the house was a patch of evergreen shrubs, what looked like boxwood or arborvitae. My eyes were watering from the smoke; I could barely make out the shapes. I knew that if I was able to leap out of the window to a distance of ten feet from the house, my fall would be broken by the shrubbery. If I fell short of that, my neck would be broken.

  “Over here!” I shouted again.

  Finally I could hear distant sirens. The driveway was half a mile long; it would take a few minutes before the firemen were able to get out the ladders. And longer till they found us.

  I decided to jump.

  I lowered myself out the window, grasping on to the windowsill, down an arm’s length, and pushed off against the exterior wall of the house.

  Then I let go.

  Kept my feet down, my legs and feet pressed tightly together.

  My knees slightly bent for the impact.

  Feet down.

  I crashed into the thicker branches of the taller shrub, which jabbed painfully, like knives, into my ankles and thighs. I let out a yell. I was hurt. But I had landed, and without any broken bones, as far as I could tell.

  I took a few uncertain steps. Then, limping a little, I forced myself to run across the patio past another ornamental shrub, over to the garden shed. There I found a ladder, as I’d hoped I would. I lifted it off its hooks, ran with it back to the window to the map room.

  Fully extended, it was a little too long, but that was better than too short.