The Knowland Retribution

by Richard Greener

  “Mr. Pitts, I’m sure you are recognized more often than not,” Walter said. “It was always a pleasure to watch you. I’ve long considered tight end an underappreciated position, and especially the way you played it.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Sherman. It’s always nice to be remembered, and please call me Wes.” Pitts kept a bright smile alive at the center of his moonlike face. He projected an earnest manner and shook hands firmly, but with care. He had what Walter knew must be widely celebrated as a winning personality, no particle of which did Walter suppose to be authentic. Wes let go of Walter’s hand. “That’s some gate you’ve got there. Security?”

  “Keeps the goats out,” Walter told him. “The island’s full of them. Cows too. The damn goats ate my flowers so I had to put up the gate.”

  They sat at the marble table: Walter, Nathan, Maloney, Wes. Comfortable and shaded. Wes set his case under the table. The old woman had brought cold drinks and food on a square silver platter. Walter nodded appreciatively at the artfully arranged meat, cheese, fruit, and crackers. “Mr. Stein,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  “I need to find somebody.”

  “Yes, I see. Who?”

  “I’m not sure. How the hell am I supposed to know?” Stein turned angrily, awkwardly on Tom, jabbing a finger toward Walter, barking like a Chihuahua, “Goddamnit, Tom. That’s supposed to be his end.”

  Tom leaned forward to settle a gentle hand on Stein’s child-size shoulder. It seemed a practiced gesture. Walter took it to fall within the job description. Wesley plainly regarded it as routine. Tom kept his hand in place as he spoke. “What Nathan means to say is that we need to find someone and we’re not absolutely sure of his identity. We need to find out who he is. Then we need to find him, and then come to a resolution of our problem. We’ve got a problem here, Mr. Sherman, and we’re all a bit stressed. Given your experience with difficult matters I’m sure you’ll agree that that is normal enough.”

  “The stress I can see,” said Walter sternly, “but I know nothing about your situation. I can’t agree or disagree until I know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you describe your problem.”

  “He’s trying to fucking kill us!” yelled Stein in a voice like troubled gears, his mouth a ragged thing beneath his sharp, vein-crossed nose. “Is that enough of a fucking problem?”

  If it was a performance, it was a good one. Walter was inclined to think otherwise, to believe that the little sac of testosterone was genuinely off-stride. Walter let his eyebrows jump and cocked his head to show interest. Then he tried an ironic note, mimicking discovery. “And you’re not sure who this person is? Have I got that right, Mr. Stein?” A muttering sneer came back.

  “You got it,” said Pitts unexpectedly, from another county, mouth full of ham and cracker. “But he damn sure knows who we are and the murderous cocksucker’s already—”

  Tom cut him short with a twitch of his head, then said, “Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, maybe just a little.”

  At least twenty painfully prolonged seconds followed. Nathan Stein turned peevishly toward the water, wrestling no doubt with whatever tiny demons labored to unglue him. Wesley Pitts nodded aimlessly, removed his glasses, wiped his eyes with the backs of his powerful hands, and backpedaled to his appropriate place in the order of things. Walter felt for Tom. As point man he was supposed to keep things together, especially at moments like this. Now, he needed help. Walter reached for a chunk of apple. He chewed it, released a sigh, and applied a mild, mournful tone to his next observation. “Guys,” he said, “This doesn’t really sound like my kind of work.”

  Atlanta

  After their second or third closing, all these decades ago, Harvey decided to have a photo taken. He had a secretary use a camera he had brought from home. The buyer and seller each got an 8x10 glossy, suitable for framing. It showed happy folks shaking hands on a life-changing deal. This became an extremely popular perk, and soon they had so many closings that Nicholas suggested they hire his gifted nephew for the work. Young Harold cut school when needed and did a fine job for three years, until he left for college. Then they worked out a deal with a large Atlanta studio. The relationship was still in force.

  The story of Leonard’s life played out in those thousands of pictures. Over the years they told a graceful tale. The years had transformed this vigorous, handsome, fit young lawyer into a broader, more imposing figure, paunchier to be sure, but never more commanding, never projecting more life and assurance.

  Now everything in his life belonged to before or after.

  And there were only a handful of after shots, because Leonard soon gave up going to closings. The few pictures that were there were hard to look at. They showed a fat and slovenly man; an unfortunate man who belonged in some other picture. His inner disturbance transformed, disfigured his face. And his weight had ballooned to the point where his suits no longer fit and he could not button his shirts at the top.

  Once, trying to make the button work, trying to put himself together for a closing, Leonard thought he heard Scott whisper that grandpa’s belly was fat. He looked around the room and then trembled for several minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed and holding his stomach.

  He came by the office once a week, not to work, or socialize—not, it seemed, for any reason that anyone could see. Otherwise, he stayed home and kept the blinds closed. On some hot Georgia days he left the air conditioning off. He told the cleaning people not to come back, and handed each of them three one-hundred-dollar bills. Leonard ate and drank and fell asleep on the couch in the den in front of the TV. Carter came by two or three times a week to reassure himself that Lenny was sane. He’d stay for an hour, tell Lenny to hang in there, go home, and call Nick Stevenson with his report.

  The partners were profoundly distressed, as were the associates, paralegals, and office staff whose affection Leonard’s consistent kindness had earned over the years. One afternoon, Nicholas Stevenson, with Harvey Daniels in tow, strode into Leonard’s office overlooking I-285. He had been there for over an hour, quietly stinking of alcohol.

  “Time’s up, Lenny.” Nicholas said. “Get yourself professional help. Go every day of the week if that’s what it takes. Take a leave of absence. Take as much time as you need. Harvey and I talked it over. Your share goes in the bank every month, whatever you decide. Spend some time in Paris or Rome. Hilton Head maybe, or Mississippi. Go sit in a cafe in Amsterdam. Fuck your brains out. But don’t keep doing what you’re doing. It’s killing you and it’s killing us, my friend.”

  Leonard Martin took his leave of absence.

  But he didn’t go to Biloxi, to the beach, or to Europe. And he didn’t go for help. He stayed in his house and kept drinking and eating. He screened his calls and returned very few. Barbara called him. She left messages. As quickly as he recognized her voice, he stopped the tape. He erased them all without listening. If not for her where would he be? The answer made him sick. Still, she called. And after the last few messages from Dahlonaga, he got Carter to buy him a phone without an answering machine. Eventually it stopped ringing.

  One weekday morning in February, eight months after the death of his family, Leonard awoke on the couch in the den after a fitful night of sleep. He turned off the TV and stumbled into the kitchen to find there was nothing there. No soda or beer, no coffee, no crumbs or even sour milk. Eating was now his vocation, and Leonard favored junk: doughnuts, cookies, chocolate cake, greasy take-out chicken, ribs, cheeseburgers, fries, blizzard shakes, pizza. He’d been strikingly fat when he made his last closing. Now he was seriously obese. He got into his car and drove to a shabby diner on Alpharetta Highway. He hated eating in public but this place was almost always empty—for excellent good reason. Along the way he bought a New York Times from a vending box.

  “Could you bring me some coffee please?” he asked, “and eggs and bacon,
and ham, and toast . . . whatever you’ve got is fine.” He glanced at the headlines, skimmed the first section, turned to the sports, checked the hockey and basketball scores, didn’t recognize some of the teams: Wizards, Avalanche, Thrashers.

  When he got his hands on a paper now, he always read the obituaries. Before he never looked at that page. But after, it seemed to matter. He started with McKinley James Houston, seventy-eight. After lengthy illness. Architect of some renown in England. Pronounced How-ston. Lester Shapiro, fifty-three. Heart attack last night at a charity dinner. Owned office buildings in New York City. Survived by his wife Sylvia, five children, three grandkids. Dr. Ganga Roy, forty-one. Noted research scientist/teacher. No survivors. Apparent suicide. Suicide. The word stopped his eye. He read the piece twice. Found by cleaning woman. Died by taking poison. Born in India. Colleagues praised her work at the Rockefeller Institute. Well-regarded at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Victim of unsolved hate crime seven months earlier. Apartment burglarized and burned. Anti-terrorist slogans painted on walls. Leonard stirred his coffee till it was cold. Suicide.

  Two days later Leonard squinted into the bright Georgia morning, and set a course for the end of his driveway. He picked up a batch of local papers lying there and opened his overstuffed mailbox. He hadn’t done that since . . . sometime last week? He brought the mail inside and tossed it all, unopened, onto a kitchen counter, knocking several other envelopes onto the floor. One of these caught his attention: a brown six-by-nine with a Postal Express label on it. In the upper left-hand corner, gracefully scripted in blue ink above a New York address, was a name he thought he recognized.

  The envelope contained a single computer disc. A paisley-patterned notepad page fluttered out of it, to the floor. He picked it up. Across it were written the words “Forgive me,” and at the top Leonard read: “From the desk of Dr. Ganga Roy.”

  St. John

  Nathan’s outburst and the tension it uncorked had distracted all but Walter from the single dark cloud approaching them out of a bright sky at an altitude not much above the house. Conversation stopped abruptly as a very local, very surprising tropical downpour threw warm sheets of water onto the deck. The roof was so constructed that Walter had stayed put in precisely that spot during three hurricanes. He looked forward to rain in the closing moments of a hot Virgin Islands afternoon. It was a perfectly wonderful thing. Tom, Nathan, and Wesley apparently disagreed. The three of them maneuvered their legs prissily under the table to keep their silk trousers safe from water bouncing off the glistening planks.

  “Won’t last long,” smiled Walter, mightily amused.

  Tom checked his companions, as though to be sure that neither was going under. He resumed in his calm, rehearsed tone:

  “This is your kind of work and we need your help. I know many of your clients are celebrity types, show business people. I’ve heard about some politicians. Maybe our needs are somewhat different from the ordinary run . . .”

  Walter raised his hand, palm out. Tom stopped.

  Walter’s hard look took them all in and he spoke with calibrated impatience that sharpened as he continued, “The first thing most people give me is a name. The first thing. Then I get a photograph and a description. They give me a story. Usually, they tell me a lot more than I want to know. They parade their hopes and dreams and the names of their pets. I see love and hate they keep from their shrinks. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m the only person they ever leveled with. And you know the people I’m talking about. If you think this is

  my kind of work, the first thing you better do is tell me is what the work is.”

  “Fair enough,” Maloney said. Now he reached to cover much of Nathan Stein’s short forearm with a thick, rosy hand, anchoring that bird-faced bundle of nerves, hoping, no doubt, to keep him seated during whatever was to come. Then Tom spoke, uninterrupted, for forty-five minutes. When he was done he looked at the others, his suddenly forceful expression telling them, “If you have anything to say, say it now.” Neither uttered a sound. Nathan Stein’s face had gone from deranged to pathetic. He seemed to have aged and weakened during the speech, as though—forced to hear them all—the endless, disturbing details had worn him down. His narrow chest heaved silently. Wesley’s big, shrewd eyes had stayed with Maloney throughout. Now they returned to the glories of nature.

  The rain had ended twenty minutes before, and the air was a good deal cooler. A breeze blew in off the water and the small boats had returned to the open sea. The sunlight was now a richer yellow, anticipating the reddening sun and the advent of the evening sky. Walter rose, walked around the table, and then, slowly, toward the grill and the tub. He stretched, took a deep breath, turned quickly, returned to the table, and resumed his seat. Tom had concluded by stating, and repeating forcefully, that they had no way to know what might happen. They had, he insisted again, done their due diligence. Dr. Roy had given them a green light, and now their lives were in danger because of “a terrible, a grossly unfortunate misunderstanding” that they sought desperately to correct. To do so they had to find someone only Walter could locate. When Tom used the word “locate,” the look in his eyes told Walter the depth of their research.

  Walter looked at them all, more kindly now, and tilted his head. The gesture conceded that possibilities might exist. Then he said, “This will take much more of my time than I’m used to giving. We’re talking about weeks, possibly months. That’s a long time to devote to a single client.”

  “Money is not a factor,” said Maloney.

  “There’s more to it than money,” Walter replied. “It’s also about how I prefer to work.”

  Tom’s eyes sparkled almost merrily, giving his angelic face a surprisingly racy cast. “We know you take eight or ten clients a year and rarely spend more than a few weeks on any one of them—sometimes a few days. We know of one client who didn’t come to you till a full month after his wife disappeared. You handled that in twenty-four hours, which was more than he expected, and much more than he hoped. We’re not expecting miracles, Walter. But we have a problem and we need fast action.”

  Walter shook his head, preparing another objection.

  Maloney went on, “Please let me finish. You didn’t file a tax return last year. It looks like you haven’t filed one since you were twenty-five. You’re independent. You’re a free man. Not easy to find. We heard someone call you a phantom. You’ve been in this line of work for a long time and you’ve done especially well in the last ten years. You took good care of your mother before she passed. We like that. It shows character. You have an ex-wife in Chicago who’s never remarried, although she could have. You’re very generous to her. You have a daughter in Kansas City with a less-than-successful husband and you’re helping them. You have trusts for three grandchildren. There has never been a mortgage on this house. You rent a desirable apartment on the Near North Side of Chicago. You don’t owe anyone anything and you spend as you wish. But you are by no means a wealthy man. Your checking account pays your bills. Your special account in the Caymans contains $774,526.” Maloney stopped to savor and punctuate the moment. He took a sip of iced tea and said, “You are earning slightly more than three hundred thousand dollars a year. There are cops and teachers and building inspectors with more equity in their pensions. Walter, we get what we want because we know what other people want. We think we know what you want. We’re not looking for drunken sailors or doped-up sixteen-year-olds. We face a challenge and we’re confident that you will help us deal with it.”

  “Really,” Walter said, because, for once, nothing else came to mind.

  Tom leaned across the table and grabbed a large handful of grapes from the silver platter. His eyes were sparkling furiously now. “A few years ago my mom had to go into a nursing home. She was a churchgoer, a devout Catholic, a member of St. Ann’s parish for many years. She wanted to go to the Catholic Home near where we lived. The home is
connected to St. Ann’s church. For many years she did volunteer work there. She told me if she ever needed to go to a home, that was the only one for her. I went there. The nun in charge of admitting new residents told me there was an eighteen month wait. Walter, my Mom didn’t have eighteen months. I asked this nun what sort of contribution I could make to speed things up. I asked flat out how much money it would take. She said to me, ‘Mr. Maloney, if your dear mother was already on our list and we passed her over because a man, like yourself, gave the church fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars you would be extremely upset, wouldn’t you?’ Then she stopped. Just stopped talking. And Walter, you know what she did next? She looked into her soul and had a wrestling match with Satan. It took five seconds, maybe six. When it was over she said to me, ‘But Mr. Maloney, if the contribution was of a certain amount, whatever that amount might be, I imagine that you and even your dear mother might very well understand.’ Then this nun looks me in the eye and says, ‘One million dollars, Mr. Maloney.’”

  Tom paused for another, smaller drink of his iced tea. “You know what I said, Walter? You know what I said? I said, ‘How do I make the check out, Sister?’ ”

  Maloney motioned to Wesley Pitts, who produced his attaché case from under the table. It was a big one, the kind that opens with a double flap at the top. He gave it to Maloney, whose body registered the weight. “If you work for us,” he said, “you’ll get four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Add another fifty for expenses and you’ve got half a million.” He opened the case to let Walter see. “You are looking at half a million dollars right here. And underneath it, another half million. It’s yours.”