The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  “In that case,” I answered, “I don’t see how I can help you.”

  To his credit, he didn’t flinch or bluster or, as I expected he would, bring the blackmail element into play. Not yet, that is. Instead he fell silent—for the first and only time that morning—until on a green light we’d inched a few blocks farther south, through a kind of no man’s land which made me glance to be sure the car doors were locked. Then, smiling as though at some inner thought, he said:

  “There’s one thing I could put up, of very definite value. Only I’d have to swear you to secrecy, Tommy. Someone we both know would cut my throat from ear to ear if she ever found out.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “My share in Enterprises,” he answered. “Katherine Goldmark Enterprises.”

  He watched me with the same conspiratorial smile, enjoying, I suppose, my dumbfounded reaction.

  “You mean she never told you about it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s true,” he said, laughing. “I own fifty percent of it. Drives her absolutely bananas—not that it should. Who do you think financed it? Raised the capital for it? She’s always tried to buy me out, but I’ve never let her. It’s too good an investment. Hell, why do you think she lent me money, Tommy? Out of the goodness of her heart? She thinks maybe I’ll default, and if I default, there goes my fifty percent of Enterprises!”

  And if that were true, I thought, why would she have pushed me to bail you out? But I’d been doing another mental calculation, as always with Goldmark: How old could he have been at the time, if he’d actually financed Kitty?

  “I always understood it was her husband who’d floated her company,” I said.

  “Who? Sprague? You gotta be kidding. Oh, maybe in the beginning, when she was working out of her kitchen. But when she really got it going? With an office? Employees? Hell, he turned her down flat! That’s when I stepped in, with every cent I could scrape together. I knew it was going to fly. But that was the dumbest thing Sprague ever did, and she never forgave him. She destroyed the fucker.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I said, feeling myself tense.

  “Just what I said,” he answered noncommittally. “She’s a real ballbuster, my sister. Though why she ever married him to begin with I’ll never understand.”

  “People do a lot of funny things when they’re on the rebound.”

  “What rebound?” His eyebrows raised in a question.

  I hesitated.

  “I’d gathered she lived with someone for a long time,” I said. “Before Sprague.”

  “Oh, that? The piano player? The one she likes to say walked out on her?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you believe that bullshit, Tommy?”

  “I didn’t know it was bullshit.”

  “No? Well, who do you think threw who out? The guy moved in with her, they lived together three months, six months max. Then one day, everything of his out on the street, including the piano. She even changed the locks on the doors. I know because—”

  He stopped midsentence, as though he’d said more than he’d wanted to. He reached idly for the phone, which hadn’t rung, then gazed out the window a moment, thinking, then back to me, grinning that boyish grin again.

  “Well, I helped her. She asked me to. He wasn’t such a bad guy, either. Better than Sprague. Said she didn’t want to pay his bills anymore. Well, hell, that’s my sister for you. Don’t say I never told you, Tommy: she eats guys alive.”

  Laughing again.

  The first time he’d said it, it had been me. Then, I think, me and himself. Now it was men in general whom Kitty ate alive—me, Goldmark, Sprague, the piano player. That was a hell of a way, I thought, to talk about someone who had been trying to save him, even if she had something to gain by it.

  I felt a sudden claustrophobia in the limousine, an urge to get out and walk. But our business was unfinished, and, trying to look at it as objectively as I could then, maybe I’d rather have had the Funds own half of Kitty’s company, if it came to that, than somebody else Goldmark might peddle it to.

  “There’s something you’ve left out,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “From what Kitty said, it sounded like blackmail.”

  “Kitty could make anything sound like blackmail. What do you mean?”

  “What will happen if I say no to you? What will happen if you don’t raise the money?”

  “Oh, that,” he said offhandedly. “Let’s leave that out of it.”

  “Let’s not leave anything out,” I said sharply.

  “Oh, come on, Tommy, maybe you want to call it blackmail, or she does. Call it what you want. All I said was that under pressure—I mean under oath, under interrogation … Hell, you’re an attorney, you know what I’m talking about …”

  “You mean, if you had a chance to plea-bargain?”

  “That’s not what I said.” Then, smoothly: “Look, Tommy, let’s be honest about it. I’m not saying it’d even come up, ever. Maybe it’ll never have to. But I happen to know a lot about you and Kitty, your activities. And I’m not just talking about Safari, either.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Thorne, for one.”

  I had to at least give him credit for his chutzpah, if nothing else.

  The last part of the conversation had taken place in the street in front of my building, where the driver had double-parked, Goldmark’s side toward the curb. We stared at each other. There was no menace in his expression, no desperation, just the steady gaze from under thick dark eyebrows.

  “What about Thorne?” I said.

  “Shit, Tommy,” he said scornfully, “who do you think ordered her to kill him?”

  He opened the door then, holding it for me as he stepped into the street. I got out after him. We stood face to face for a moment while horns honked. I’d forgotten I was a good five or six inches taller.

  “Either way,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m very, very grateful. But do we have a deal?”

  I thought about it for a second even though I’d made up my mind in the car. I didn’t take his hand.

  “I want to see the papers first,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll have them on your desk this afternoon.”

  I turned away, but he called after me.

  “With or without Enterprises?” he said. “But you’ll promise to keep it secret?”

  “With,” I answered.

  23

  The papers arrived that afternoon, brought by Henry Angeletti. I returned them the next morning, signed, by messenger. I saw Kitty very briefly, late that evening, told her only that I’d worked out a deal with Goldmark that I thought I could live with.

  No questions asked; no answers given.

  For all I knew, she’d already gotten the details from her brother.

  His version.

  In point of fact, I no longer had any idea whose version to believe. Like the Marxists, they took turns rewriting history until your head spun like a fortune wheel, and if I remembered, a long time before, Kitty exploding at me for believing her brother over herself (the question of the hundred-dollar bet), there were things he’d said in the limousine that I couldn’t walk away from. Half truths maybe, exaggerations certainly, but had he invented them out of whole cloth?

  I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d “ordered” her to kill Thome. Who could order her to do anything? But they might well have talked about it—which was bad enough—since Thome, whom Kitty said she’d recruited and who had then been taken over by Goldmark, knew enough to bring them both down. (If anything, I’d have guessed Goldmark had argued against murdering him. Thorne owed him money. With Thome dead, his chances of ever collecting were nil.) What counted, though, was that Goldmark clearly knew about it! Maybe the investigations into Thorne’s finances had led the police nowhere (or so the Suffolk County detective had indicated), but what would happen if Goldmark were
ever put to the wall and the Thorne link discovered? How far might he go to save his own skin?

  I already knew Kitty’s answer—very far, indeed—and I was inclined to agree with her. Stark-Thompson’s loan to the Braxton account, however risky, looked to me like the only insurance I could buy.

  Then there was the question of Katherine Goldmark Enterprises. That he owned fifty percent of my wife’s business—and it would have been the same had it been twenty percent, or one percent—may have stuck in my craw, but it went a long way to explaining why Kitty, despite her son-of-a-bitch-what-else-is-new line, was locked into him in her business dealings. Whatever they thought of each other personally, they’d used each other constantly, and, I saw clearly, the common denominator was always money. Over and over again: money. I could even explain to myself why Kitty had never told me about it. In this respect, I bought entirely what Goldmark had said: it must have driven her absolutely bananas.

  But what I couldn’t swallow, or explain away, or in any sense come to grips with, was the way he’d demolished her story about the pianist. And you believe that bullshit, Tommy? Vividly I remembered the night after Wanda Russell’s party when Kitty had disappeared. I’d hit the roof, and then, while I sat on the Récamier couch in the bedroom, she’d told me the story. I remembered every detail of it, down to how, visibly exhausted, she’d sent me home afterward. And ever since, whenever I’d encountered that imperviousness, that impenetrability, that hard granitic shell which formed such an important part of her personality, I’d thought, well, at least I know where it comes from.

  So much for Kitty’s baring of her soul.

  So much for my amateur psychologizing.

  And you believe that bullshit, Tommy?

  Yes, I believed that bullshit. Or: I had.

  Unless Goldmark himself were lying?

  But why would he? Just to belittle his sister?

  And you will say: Any reasonable husband, upon hearing his wife so accused, would have gone home and asked her about it.

  I didn’t.

  Which, you will say, only goes to show how estranged I had already become from her.

  To which I can only reply: Yes, and no.

  I know we spent that weekend together, at home, but I’ve no recollection whatsoever of what we did or said, or didn’t do or say. A total blank. Maybe we had guests. Maybe the Buddy Spodes drove over from Scarsdale. Maybe we reviewed the contracts for the licensing of Kitty Goldmark products—I remember her asking my opinion at some point. Maybe we played tennis, listened to Mozart. Possibly we even made love. Undoubtedly I continued my postmortems on this strange creature whose roof I shared, and bed, and table, and whose hand I had indeed taken in holy matrimony on our lawn, even realizing—as I surely must have by that weekend—that I no longer had any idea who she was.

  No idea whatsoever.

  But it doesn’t matter. Not at all.

  The postmortems, anything.

  For that Monday—you will remember the date of October nineteenth—the stock market definitively fell apart, collapsed, and we were all in the water, every one of us.

  PART FOUR

  24

  Sometime that Monday afternoon, I simply got up from my desk and walked out of the office. I couldn’t deal with it another minute. My phones hadn’t stopped ringing. On the one hand, my blue-haired ladies, Wanda Russell in the vanguard—three, four, five times, hysterical, what were we doing, what did I mean we couldn’t sell, we were going to be wiped out if we didn’t sell, she ordered me to sell, raging, weeping, keening—like a bunch of Irish biddies at the wake of some great martyr of the Republican army, and Wanda, I remember, my great bosomy friend, Wanda, already threatening me with a lawsuit for “willful mismanagement.” And on the other, the Thatchers I dealt with, abject, helpless—there was no market, no buying at any price, the ticker itself was all fucked up, nothing to do except wait for the bottom, ride it out, you have no idea what it’s like, Tommy old man, it’s a stampede, an avalanche, a tidal wave …

  I even heard, just before I walked out, from my Chairman, Arthur Hallandale Thompson. Had I heard the news? Yes. What were we doing? We were riding out the storm. Good, he said, that sounds like a good idea to me.

  Little did he know.

  Little did Wanda Russell know.

  Little did any of them know.

  The truth was: while all of them had been hurt, I had been wiped out. As far as my blue-haired ladies were concerned, I was way overdrawn and the amount grew every fifteen minutes. For some time by then, I had been pulling my prospective share of the estates’ profits out, pending their resolution and final accounting. Only now these profits, if there were any at all, had been vastly diminished. In every case, therefore, I owed them money, in some cases a hell of a lot of money.

  Nor could I look to Stark-Thompson for help, even though it dwarfed them all. The value of our assets on the day I took over as Trustee, that is, the day of Corky Stark’s funeral, had become the benchmark for my first year’s operations. By the time the market closed that Monday, in a great rage, a cliff-jumping riot, of selling, in which the Dow dropped over twenty percent, it was clear that I could never hope to bring us back to a point at which the Trustee’s percentages would come into play. And while, when the time came, I was sure I could browbeat my fellow Council members into awarding me an honorable stipend for my year’s services, say a spare million or so, for I’d barely had time to survey all our existing assets before the crash, I already needed a great deal more than I could ever expect—honorably, that is—from my major source.

  Through it all, there was one call I didn’t get. I’m referring to my brother-in-law, the eminent Senior Managing Director of Braxton’s, Mr. Theodore Goldmark. I’d had occasion to talk to Braxton’s, to my resident “Thatcher” who managed one of my accounts, but all he could tell me was that the place was a zoo, people running every which way, and that it was a good thing the windows in the building didn’t open. By any logic, Goldmark would have been the first one out if they did, and for my sake it was too bad they didn’t. He could, I judged, never survive this, and the implications for me, for Kitty, were so vast and varied I couldn’t begin to think about them. Except for one implication: for some reason, out of some odd reflex of gallows humor, I kept thinking that now Stark-Thompson was going to end up equal partners in Katherine Goldmark Enterprises.

  In the space of a few short hours that Monday, therefore, I was wiped out. Cleaned. Like the poker player who had nothing to sign but IOUs, and zero in the bank to back them up. My pockets pulled free, and inside out, and empty.

  And therefore, in the midst of the biggest financial catastrophe in over fifty years, I walked out.

  I remember our receptionist saying to me:

  “Are you leaving, Mr. Thompson?”

  “I guess that’s what it looks like, Millie.”

  “But what should I tell everybody? When will you be back?”

  “Tell them never,” I said. “Unless it’s my wife. If she calls, say I’ll catch up with her later.”

  From this day of dire and, for most of us, unprecedented events, I retain this other weirdness: never before, at least as an adult, had I felt so lightheaded as when I reached the streets that afternoon. I don’t know what I’d expected to encounter: people running, cars crashing, towers toppling, the sky on fire? None of the above. The midtown scene seemed pretty much as usual: crowded, noisy, exhaust-filled. Peddlers, panhandlers, taxis, trucks, tourists, shoppers, people on important missions. Black, brown, yellow, white. Two legs, two wheels, four. The pencil peddler on Fifth Avenue with no legs at all. But where were all my fellow victims of the crash? Already defunct? Or still upstairs in their shirt sleeves, sweating out their final hours? Why weren’t they tripping their own light fantastic as I was?

  For the first time in my life, I went into stores and browsed and bought and charged up a storm. Gifts for me, gifts for Kitty, for Starkie and Mary Laura, from Saks, from Double-day and Mark Cross,
from Tiffany’s, all sent on their way by UPS. Eventually I drifted over to the club, usually empty in that trough between the lunch crowd and the five o’clock crowd except for stray jocks, but now there was one group hovering by a computer screen and another, larger and noisier, in the bar. I wondered if the Senator had ever paid his bill—no stray thought, for my resemblance to him, at least for that one afternoon, seemed both clear and hilarious. Broke, in debt to his eyeballs, bankrupt or near, with four ex-wives and how many mistresses strewn behind him, he still tap-danced his way through life gaily, stepping on toes now and then but always with that marvelous, and exasperating, insouciance. The Most Illustrious Member of Our Family. Perhaps tomorrow, certainly within a month, I would have become the Most Notorious Member of Our Family, but that was tomorrow or next month, and meanwhile—here was his secret!—I, too, could dodge the piper, let him catch me if he could. So I set up the bar I don’t know how many times, toasting them all in pure Scotch malt, my peers and friends, and let them send me the bill!

  The Senator’s son indeed. By and by, I began to feel that other feeling, that tickle, that itch, that yen to preen my feathers before a damsel of my choosing, that throaty urge for the sweet words of love, and the gestures, and the touches. But there, in the club bar, the connection broke. Good-bye, Senator! For I wanted not just a damsel, any damsel. No pallid imitation for me. Even then, I confess it freely, that late in the day, in our day, with our world already standing on its head and the bells tolling, I wanted still her wondrous bosom, her devouring lips and her eyes half closed and rapturous and her thighs crushing down on me, her sweet heat, her musk, my Kitten.

  There was one logistical problem, though.

  I couldn’t find her.

  Not at her office; they thought she’d gone to her trainer’s. Not at her trainer’s; she’d been there and left. No message at Stark Thompson, P.C. The answering machine at the apartment. Not at the house, and no message. No, still not at her office; she’d called in, had said she wouldn’t be back.