by Roman Klee
“Yep, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I got a seat on Budd Wright’s plane. I’m not his favorite banker yet, but I’m working on it.”
Knowing Takeshita, Nathan never doubted it for one minute. He also correctly anticipated the next question, the one he had been hoping to dodge.
“Who are you with these days? You kinda fell off the radar.”
Nathan paused before replying, “The Banderbilt Trust.”
And just as he suspected, the name didn’t appear to make any impact on Takeshita. “Hand holding for millionaires’ kids, mistresses, wives and …”
“Oh yes, I know, your boss Salzman—he had a bad accident in Davos on the first day.”
In all his years as the Banderbilt Trust’s senior partner, Myron Salzman never once skipped his annual pilgrimage to the Swiss enclave, where he mingled with the world’s ultra rich and powerful.
But his dedication to duty had nothing to do with sampling the latest seaweed slimming body-wrap or having liver cells from lamb fetuses injected into his amply proportioned butt. His purpose was entirely mercenary.
He smooched and hovered attentively at the elbows of bejeweled, designer draped hostesses. Wealthy young ladies were his favorite prey, beneficiaries of multi-million dollar estates, bequeathed by doting fathers to their grown up little princesses.
Like a special variety of hideous humming bird with a probing, trough-like tongue, he tasted one exotic flower after another, getting high on the addictive nectar only thick wedges of one hundred dollar bills produce.
Nathan was now anticipating Takeshita’s second question: How’s your bonus shaping up?
And once again, he wanted to dodge it.
The annual bonus was the traditional way they kept score on the Street, a kind of shorthand for gauging a person’s value; its size set the pecking order inside a firm.
But luckily for Nathan, his former colleague didn’t want to talk about money. He wanted to tell a joke instead.
“A guy from our London office asked me if Salzman was skiing off-piste … or was he on the pissed?”
Takeshita’s secondhand attempt at humor was not original and appeared to have missed the mark as far as Nathan was concerned. Even though he’d spent a year studying at Oxford, he found the British sense of humor difficult.
He self-consciously adjusted the knot of his black necktie and managed a thin smile.
Takeshita realized he’d overstepped the mark. “I’m sorry, this must be hard for you.”
“No, it’s okay. I mean, I’m new at Banderbilt. Myron and I were never squash buddies. They asked me to come over and fetch the body. The Swiss handled everything with their usual efficiency.”
Then to Nathan’s relief, Takeshita got the call to join Budd Wright and was gone. Nathan moved closer to the observation window and watched a Gulfstream jet draw up in front. The light was fading fast, but he could just make out the silhouette of a man, leaping up the plane’s boarding steps.
And that was when he remembered he should catch up on his ritual of reading emails.
One in particular needed his immediate attention.
Jade’s Christmas Letter
From the desk of Budd and Jade Wright:
Villa Esmeralda
Camino de la Doncella
Isla de Ballenas
Georgia, GA 120229
United States
Our Christmas & New Year Letter Combo
Season’s Greetings to you all!
It’s that time again and I’m gonna start by breaking a tradition. I want to give you my New Year book choice straight out of the gate. So here goes … deep breath … drum roll … you simply have to buy: ‘Sexy Sixties, Seventies and Beyond’, by Dr. E. Esperanza.
You read it right the first time and I sure like the beyond part! There’ll be no letting up in the Wright bedroom (even if Budd keeps reminding me, he’s not yet about to take all night long, to do what he likes to do—all night long!).
I know some of you are well below the book’s age limit, so I’m delighted to say Dr. Esperanza has a range of books, for every sexually active (and inactive) age group.
Check her out at Amazon.
Talking of Budd, I still can’t get him to move off the island—twenty-nine years and counting. He says the remoteness helps him to think.
But here’s the good news! He agreed to a new indoor swimming pool and solarium and we’re remodeling our Throne Room, as Budd calls it. (I ordered a tub in white rock crystal, it’s so big I can totally submerse myself and the guest suites will be redone.)
There’ll also be a new infinity pool, which Budd really liked—my, was I surprised!
Another good thing—none of those nosy spotter planes from the IRS will see the changes, so everything will look as unspoiled as the day we moved in here—but our guests will notice a difference.
Rest assured the Isla de Ballenas will keep her virgin state, a haven of untouched beauty—even if we could have turned our six thousand square miles into a fantastic resort island with condos and spa hotels. (This dumb-ass suggestion was made by one of Ron Loeb’s colleagues, who looks after the real estate portfolio at Solomon.)
Well, as most of you know, Budd refuses to take up his bragging rights, so I do it for him. Here’s what our Next-Gens are up to:
Pam’s work on the farm has paid off handsomely. Her soybeans were awarded first prize in the Best Arable Crop category at the Kansas City agricultural show (another fine trophy for the cabinet!).
What she’s done is a big achievement, when you think that other parts of the country were struck down by a plague of grasshoppers—the locusts Budd assures me are not set to strike for another seven years. (Remember kids, it pays to learn your ABCs and Ds!)
Jimmy had a top ten hit in the summer with his album ‘Caribbean Sunset’ and his new single ‘Save our Souls’ came out just after Thanksgiving.
Some people say country and western is dead with all the reality music shows like Pop Idol etc, but Jimmy showed them how it’s done. (You can download his single from iTunes and Amazon—avoid the file sharing sites please!)
The critics say he’s in with a shot for a Grammy nomination (I think he should win one easy). He’s also helping out with the homeless communities in California and fighting back against the big bad banks. (Jimmy calls them the triple ‘Bs’.)
Carla just received the ‘Doing God’s Work’ award from Our Sisters of Mercy Convent, for her aid work with children in Swaziland; we have a lot to thank Will Porters for.
She’s also getting kids adopted from the four corners of the earth faster than a game of Happy Families and it’s putting Jo Croft to shame.
And Mary Beth got married in the fall to Ed Franklin, heir to the Franklin retail empire. The couple spent their honeymoon in the Turks and Caicos, and we have copies of the wedding video for anyone we accidentally left off the list. (Just let me know how many you need.)
Budd is making odds on when our next grandchild will be born—he keeps shortening them as each day passes. (Contact him if you want to place a bet!) In the New Year, Budd will be attending his first World International Forum event at Davos. He always gets an invite but then turns it down. Except this year he had a change of mind.
He asked me to go along, but I said no because of our last flight together. We were in our new Boeing, the ‘Lady Liberty’ (don’t ask the model number) heading up to NYC to be in good time for Davenport’s annual meeting at the Yankee Stadium.
Budd’s favorite banker, Ron Loeb from Solomon was with us, and out of the blue, we went through some real bad turbulence and then my stomach literally hit the ceiling as the plane hit an air pocket and plunged several thousand feet.
Loeb cracked his head on the overhead locker, leaving a large dent in the nubuck leather, I spilled my glass of Roederer Cristal, stained my new Donna K
aren dress and Toto left a couple unwanted deposits inside my brand-new red, silver and gold Hermès Birkin—God bless him, he always was a nervous flier!
So you can imagine, the experience put me off flying forever, which is kind of a problem because we are surrounded by sea, the nearest land is one hundred miles to the West.
Anyhow, Switzerland seems so far away and uninviting this time of year—fondue and cuckoo clocks were never my thing.
By the way, if you’re wondering how Budd handled our turbulent ride, you may not be surprised to hear he spent the whole flight sleeping (our plane has a separate cabin with a California king, fitted out in leather and shagreen panels with the company initials BD embroidered on the eight hundred thread bed linen). When he finally emerged from his slumbers, he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about!
Debbie gave her grandpa a cute little Saint Bernard dog to take with him on his trip to Davos. (It’s a stuffed one from Macy’s, in case you’re wondering about quarantine.) Debbie christened him Bonaparte and he has a nice red brandy barrel strapped around his neck, full of the real McCoy—I’ve tasted it!
You all know, I prefer giving practical gifts and I found Budd a ‘personal beacon’—it’s an emergency electronic signaling device, just the thing for feeding Budd’s gadget fetish.
In Europe, anyone skiing off-piste must carry one. It was really a panic buy, because I had trouble forgetting about Amy Vanderlip’s recent experience.
Last December, her husband was waiting in line for the final ski lift of the day, at St. Anton in Austria, when a drunken Brit smashed into him at full speed and knocked him out.
Amy tells me the Brits drink Jagerbombs (Jagermeister a German herbal liqueur plus Red Bull) until they can barely stand up straight and then in the fading Alpine light, they ski down the slopes. Total madness.
Amy spent the best part of a year sitting by her husband’s bedside at the St. Vinzenz Hospital. He only came round from his coma a few days ago. Amy assures me he’ll be back home in time for Christmas. Let’s all hope so and wish him a speedy recovery.
Well, I know what you’re thinking, Budd can’t ski, so he surely won’t be going off the beaten track. And that’s true, but at least I can keep tabs on him if, God forbid, an earthquake or avalanche strikes.
On a brighter subject, Budd paid for the Christmas tree out of his own pocket again. He wanted an artificial one, figuring out its useful life expectancy and factoring in the lost opportunity cost if we kept buying a real one every year (Budd’s explanation not mine!).
I put my foot down and now we have a very nice twenty-foot Douglas fir in the living room, which smells like we live in a real Nordic forest.
Sure, it’s not as tall as the one Alva Grenelund’s neighbor installs every year.
As well as running Solomon, Alva divides her time between her stables in the Hamptons, and her new Upper East Side apartment, the ultra-modern Eight70.
She was forced to move out of her old place after a row with a neighbor who didn’t ask permission, but still erected a rig on Alva’s roof space, and hoisted her Christmas tree all the way up to the family’s duplex.
(The tree was an impressive twenty-six-feet, way too tall for the building’s elevator or stairs.)
Every year this family removed the library window and somehow swung the tree in. And every year, no one asked Alva. There was a court case, but sadly my friend lost.
I guess it’s at times like these when you find out the true meaning of Christmas. Just goes to show how hard it is for some folks to remain good friends. So in keeping with the spirit of the season, let’s hope we can all settle our differences and learn to get along.
Here’s to an even better year ahead!
Jade & Budd
P.S. If you plan on coming over to Esmeralda for our famous ‘First Name Only Duck Hunt’, Budd asked me to remind you all to book travel arrangements with those nice people at American Express. So don’t leave home without ‘The Card’. I feel I more than keep my side of the bargain—whenever Budd sees me checking my monthly statements, he takes a sneak peek at the stock price!
Δ = T –28,659,600
Nathan only read the first couple of lines of Jade Wright’s letter, before his own flight was called. His bosses at the Trust had specially chartered a Gulfstream for him and Salzman’s widow. She was supposed to meet him at the Zürich VIP lounge and they would fly back home together.
But at the last minute she had second thoughts. So it was just him and the flight crew, with the firm’s senior partner flying in the cargo hold for the first and last time.
Nathan switched off his cell phone and finished Jade’s Christmas letter somewhere over French air space. He felt both amused and slightly awkward, as if he’d been allowed to look behind the curtain, when he knew he shouldn’t. He imagined it was especially difficult to get to know a guy like Budd Wright, and yet someone had given him a seat on the inside, even if it was by mistake.
He closed the lid of his laptop, catching his reflection in the glossy screen just before it snapped shut.
It reminded him of how he used to look in the mirror each morning before shaving and ask: If this is my last day on earth, do I want to go to work and con someone into buying something I don’t believe in?
For too long, the answer had been no. Yet Nathan ignored his inner voice and continued the same routine. He crawled out of bed at half-past five in the morning, showered, dressed, swallowed a bottle of Florida orange juice and a fist full of vitamins.
And he was at his desk less than half an hour later, ready for the morning meeting. Ready with a list of questions to blitz the analysts with, while they detailed the mechanics of their newest, most elegant creation—a mathematically perfect mortgage derivative. With the deal done and each client satisfied with their allocation (they never were), it started all over again.
And again. And again.
When they handed Nathan his pink slip, why hadn’t he felt the incredible lightness that came from being on his own time and not the company’s?
Instead he felt a weight pressing down on both his shoulders, a heaviness that on some days was so unbearable he wanted to spend the rest of his life in bed and talk to no one.
It was odd, because during Thanksgiving a few years earlier, he recalled how his wife’s sister Melanie, had labeled their lifestyle as beyond fabulous, beyond the American Dream. But then what did she really know?
She only saw the his and hers Mercedes in the driveway, their seven bedroom Long Island home, the summer house in Maine, Jovelyn, their Filipino maid. And since Melanie was a worthy but underpaid public school teacher and single mom, no doubt everything appeared like some shiny new El Dorado.
Nathan used to remind his wife to be careful about how much she spent on birthday and Christmas presents for Melanie’s kids. It was awkward if they gave something much more expensive than his sister-in-law could afford.
But Nathan’s generous helping of the American Dream had cooled a long time ago, and he was at a loss to understand why this had happened. Hadn’t he done everything expected of him? His parents didn’t have the money to send him to a private school like Groton. So he became a model, straight A student at Hoboken High, spending evenings alone doing homework instead of smoking dope with friends.
He’d lost count of the all-nighters he sat through to complete deadline sensitive papers. He finished near the top of his senior class, got great SAT scores and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in economics. Later, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford.
But he never joined a Harvard fraternity and later he felt that it had somehow counted against him.
He hadn’t expected it, but when the hard times came and his wife insisted on a divorce, she had one hell of a shock—though it had nothing to do with the way the couple conducted their personal lives. (Conceived in the sum
mer of ‘69 at Woodstock during three days of love and peace, his wife blamed her healthy sexual appetite on the genetic lottery of life.)
No, the slice of the American Dream Nathan shared with his wife and kids, came with a huge dollop of calorie rich debt. His sister-in-law only ever looked in from the outside, assuming the DeAngelis family was doing so much better than most of its fellow Americans, because it owned all the toys that proved it was a success.
But you could never argue with the math. After all the adding and subtracting, Nathan had a negative net worth. He was the very opposite of the clients who came into his office seeking financial advice. They had real money to play with.
Then his debt financed lifestyle imploded and all the toys had to be returned. Nathan’s wife ended up with an attachment of earnings order and homes with negative equity.
Nathan didn’t expect his flirtation with the high life to last much longer. And he could see no good reason why things would get any better for him.
When the private jet landed in Teterboro, Nathan instinctively went through the motions, and accessed his voicemails.
His broker had left a message to say that his crude oil put options had expired worthless—he was back to losing money again. His lawyer told him that his ex-wife wanted to arrange another meeting—more heartache in store.
And Dolores, his secretary at the Banderbilt Trust, called to say that the vote to appoint two new partners had been moved forward three weeks, because of a totally unexpected event.
Shortly after taking off from Zürich, Budd Wright’s plane had crashed.
There were no reports of any survivors.
Δ = T –28,054,800
They had changed the date for the partners’ monthly meeting. This was odd, very odd indeed, thought Nathan. The news about Budd Wright came as a shock too, and it would be especially tragic for his family.
Talk about a string of coincidences—Jade’s Christmas letter, seeing Wright board his private jet at Zürich. And now the news that it had crashed. Nathan’s first visit to Switzerland, to a fabled land of chocolate and banking secrecy, had not turned out the way he expected.