by Roman Klee
“They’re offering assistance in this matter, out of respect for your husband and the dealings they had with him over the years.”
Jade appeared satisfied with that answer. And Cunningham gave Glickman a nod by way of thanks. When it came to protecting their own income streams, lawyers knew they were in it together.
Cunningham then thought it was a good time to touch on the most delicate issue. “If the worst happens, there will be further complications. So we need your help Mrs. Wright … to contact Liz.”
Cunningham explained that her lawyers could not divide up the estate between the remaining members of the family unless they had taken all reasonable steps to trace Budd’s eldest daughter. And Nathan’s visit to Thailand had produced nothing of value.
The mention of Liz’s name was initially met with silence, as if Cunningham had uttered a curse in church. Then he realized why; he’d struck a taboo subject.
Jimmy looked down at the table. Carla glanced at her mom and appeared to want to say something. But Jade gave her a black look, and she got the message to hold her tongue. This was a personal matter. No one talked about it outside the family and especially not to strangers.
“I’m not saying anything about that.”
“But Mrs. Wright, I understand you are reluctant, but as trustees acting for Budd’s daughter, we are obligated to try and locate her, following your husband’s accident.”
“There’ll be no worst outcome. I don’t care what you think. I won’t consider it, period.”
Once again Cunningham had come up against an immovable object. He realized he had to back off because this was not the place to have a full-scale confrontation. There was still time, though not as much as he would have liked.
Cliff Dixon, who up until that point had said nothing, then began to speak. Cunningham was surprised by the guy’s conciliatory tone.
While he was talking, Cunningham’s personal assistant came into the room and handed him the latest communication from Rega’s Zürich HQ. He scanned the bullet-points, his face registering no emotion, even though what he just read came as a total surprise.
“Please ladies and gentlemen, I have something you all need to hear.”
Δ = T –27,518,400
“The Swiss say they detected a signal from Budd Wright’s emergency beacon at Küsnacht, a village a few miles south of Zürich.”
Jade smiled. “See fellas, what did I tell you? My husband is alive and well. Now I guess we can all go home.”
She sounded triumphant and started to gather up her things, indicating to her children to follow. Once again Cunningham needed to intervene. “Mrs. Wright, I think you should sit down again and hear the rest of what I have to say.”
Jade took one look at his somber expression and realized he had something unpleasant to tell her.
“I want to make clear, we don’t have official confirmation on this. But Budd is currently a patient at a clinic called Alpha-Omega.”
“Oh my God! Surely not?” whispered Carla under her breath.
“Sorry, I don’t get it, so what?” said Jade.
“It’s an assisted suicide clinic,” replied Cunningham, using his serious voice for telling clients bad news.
“I thought that stuff was illegal. Sure is where I come from,” added Jimmy.
“Don’t they use sodium pentothal?” asked Carla.
“No dummy,” said her brother, “that’s a truth serum—only the CIA use the stuff.”
“To answer Jimmy, these clinics are legal in Switzerland. And Carla is half right. Actually they use a chemical cocktail of prescription drugs containing barbiturates like sodium pentobarbital or sodium pentothal. So long as the person does not have a high level of drug tolerance, death is achieved in less than twenty minutes. It’s a painless way to go.”
“Gee, thanks for sharing,” said Carla.
“We were hoping not to bring this to your attention until after we had one hundred percent confirmation from the clinic itself.”
“What, you mean you don’t know for sure?” Jade sounded as defiant as ever.
“You understand that Budd is not using his real name.”
Nathan was beginning to sense that Jade and Cunningham were heading for a fight, so he took the initiative.
“We have to do further checks. Only then can we give you a definite answer. I’m sorry, but the latest news from the Swiss kind of forced our hand.”
“I can see that,” said a relieved looking Jade. But signs that a partial truce would hold, did not last very long.
Jade stated without the faintest trace of self-doubt that hell would freeze over before Budd even contemplated taking his own life. It simply was not in his nature, and more than that he had everything to live for.
Once again, Cunningham looked at Jade with cool detachment. He wanted to say how her reaction was normal in the circumstances, but he had to avoid the impression he was talking down to her.
“I’m sure you’re right about all those things,” said Nathan suddenly, “but sometimes when a person receives news about their health, they don’t feel strong enough to share it with the whole family. They prefer to seek a different route. They may have issues about the sanctity of their body.”
Nathan had no idea what possessed him to say that, it sounded totally out of character, but he had said it anyway.
“Okay, sonny boy, I know you did your best. Look, I’ll tell you what, cut the BS. Budd may be a health nut, but he never sanctified his body. Bruce are you coming?”
Glickman got up to accompany his client out of Cunningham’s office. Jade looked around the room, as much as to say, and what about the rest of you?
Her two children decided to remain behind for a small drinks reception on the west-side terrace overlooking Central Park. Jade appeared to think that consuming anything pleasurable in the circumstances seemed inappropriate. Cunningham had hoped as many of the Wright family as possible would mingle with a select few of the Trust’s other partners. He was disappointed that Jade left early.
Nathan introduced himself to Jimmy for the first time, and emphasized how eager he was to help.
“Thanks,” replied Jimmy, who wasted no time in getting to the point, “the thing is, Mom tries to hide it, but she’s upset. You know they never spent more than a few days apart in their entire marriage. This is the longest. It’s the first time she let him take a full week away. And look what happened.”
Nathan tried to imagine what it was like living constantly under the same roof with another person—and couldn’t.
“And let’s not forget Liz. She’s a permanent source of worry, especially for Dad.”
“Yes, I can imagine,” said Nathan.
“I heard they chuck dead people’s ashes in Lake Geneva. Do you know if that’s true? Because if it is, I want Pop outta there pronto.”
Nathan hadn’t heard the rumor and it didn’t sound right to him anyway. He thought about correcting Jimmy’s sense of Swiss geography, because Küsnacht was closer to Lake Zürich than Geneva, but he didn’t want to come across as too smart.
“The best thing is to wait for confirmation. Nothing’s gained by letting your imagination work overtime.”
Cunningham came across to talk to Jimmy. Nathan looked toward the far end of the terrace and saw Carla sobbing quietly into a handkerchief. He assumed she was upset by all the talk of Budd’s disappearance and the business about the assisted suicide clinic. He went over to her and was surprised to discover she was crying for an entirely different reason.
“It’s Megan, she was calling from London. She just moved into a new hall of residence—and it’s in a red-light district.”
Carla dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and continued, “She can hear the girls fixing their prices with the punters, right outside her bedroom window.”
Nathan wasn’t sure ex
actly how to respond. He didn’t know whether Carla’s problem was coming to terms with being apart from Megan, or whether it was the bargaining tactics of the hookers that really upset her. But then he remembered the Trust’s induction course. This was an opportunity to get himself in Carla’s good books.
“Well, that’s a coincidence, my son’s planning to study in London. He has a place at the LSE.”
“Wow, this must be karma, Megan’s at the LSE too!”
They both laughed and Nathan saw some of the tension visibly drain from Carla’s face. What were the odds? They both had children of the same age, and they had both chosen to study in London—although not at the same time.
Nathan suggested he could get a colleague in the London office to check things out and maybe find somewhere more suitable. Carla thanked him. She had finally found someone to share her troubles with (because her husband never listened) and she intended to take advantage.
“Now Sophia won’t talk to me. I’m doing everything I can for her Super Sweet Sixteen, and she says I must get her a performer and it must be a surprise. I mean … I’ve no idea who she likes.”
Nathan quickly discovered that Carla had a stepdaughter from her husband’s first marriage. By some kind of automatic law of unhappy families, Carla was cast as the wicked stepmother, a role she seemed to be playing to the letter.
“Sophia thinks I don’t approve and in more ways than one, she’s right about that.”
It was a sensitive time for the Wright family, and Carla didn’t agree with her husband’s decision to go ahead with the party after Budd’s plane accident. Nathan understood.
He had at least been lucky in one respect, because his ex-wife also agreed with him on the subject of how to bring up their children. They never indulged them with over the top, spoiled brat celebration birthday parties.
“We had a similar problem once with our kids. But we just said no.”
Carla appeared impressed.
“No one understands—the problems of the Next-Gens, they never cease. I don’t want to sound needy, but do you know anyone who could help?”
Before Nathan had time to think through what he was getting himself into, he replied, “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.”
Nathan thought great, you can be as needy as you want.
Carla smiled broadly and gave her new friend a big hug, which immediately caught Cunningham’s attention.
“Give me your card and I’ll send you the outline of what our party planner’s come up with.”
Nathan could not remember what it was like being sixteen again. And there was no point in him even trying to imagine how a young girl felt at that age.
Neither did he have any idea what was hot on the Billboard 100. (Did that even exist anymore? Did he really know how to organize a kick-ass birthday partee?) But he figured that if he got closer to Carla, then before long, she would lead him to Liz.
Later, on leaving the office, Nathan quickly scanned his incoming emails, and noticed another statement from his commodities broker and a message from his ex-wife, reminding him about their Friday afternoon appointment with her lawyer.
He headed toward Liberty Street, suddenly acquiring an appetite for a Big Mac and Cherry Coke.
Δ = T –27,432,000
Nathan wanted to skip the meeting with his ex-wife. As far as he was concerned, what happened was in the past and it was best left that way. Only he was a little curious to find out whether she would dare to invite her boyfriend along to hold her hand.
She had picked up Leandro, a Cuban guy twenty-three years her junior, while doing the set design for a friend’s New Wave film about the Moulin Rouge.
Leandro had no idea who she was, but he more than enjoyed the way she lavished money on him.
They got the usual reaction whenever they went out in public, because people thought Leandro was her son. This was guaranteed to make Nathan’s ex see red. If anyone dared to ask about the age difference or utter the dreaded word creepy, she told them exactly where they could go.
And that was before they even started on the cougar jibes and explicit descriptions of why she needed to do five hundred Kegal exercises a day.
When Nathan turned up at the mid-town offices of Concoran & Block, part of him was disappointed that Leandro was a no-show. Because with her new boyfriend by her side, he would never agree to anything his ex demanded.
Nathan had been the last to discover the truth. His wife spent so much time remodeling their summerhouse in Maine that he should have become suspicious. But work was the ultimate distraction.
Friends told him there were many others, and even though at times he doubted his wife’s fidelity, he wanted to keep things together until the kids were settled. As part of the divorce agreement, Nathan insisted the house in Maine was sold and the mortgage repaid. In the end, they compromised. His wife said she would take over the mortgage and use the money she made from her interior design business to repay it.
The idea that Nathan had been slaving away at Solomon’s, doing twenty-hour shifts, so some young punk could live off the proceeds of his labors, was more than just hard to deal with. On bad days, he wanted to shoot the guy.
Nathan talked the issue through many times with his therapist. And she recommended a course in anger management.
But Nathan’s ex was disappointed in the end. She thought there was enough money to live in all their properties free and clear. Nathan bet she dreamed of a life financed entirely by alimony payments.
Except he had also badly miscalculated. He should have downscaled his own salary (with a little help from Cunningham) but he wanted his wife to think he was on course to earn almost as much as when he worked at Solomon. Making partner so soon after getting the new job, only inflated her expectations.
For him to get close to his old salary and bonus package, he needed many more good years, and a list of fabulously wealthy clients.
Nathan knew of couples who didn’t just hide relationships from one another, they also hid assets. Like a husband, who owned a secret apartment in a downtown location that his wife knew nothing about.
Or a wife, who kept a secret safe-deposit box at J.P. Morgan on Park, where she stashed the cash found in her husband’s suit pockets. By carefully managing her allowance, she treated herself to vintage pieces of jewelry whenever she felt down.
His wife though, never displayed any signs of holding back—quite the opposite in fact. He expected her to use the line: You turned out just like Dad said you would!
He guessed the purpose of the meeting was to wring even more money out of him. Thanks to his new status as a partner at the Trust, his ex assumed he was back to earning like the golden years.
And then he had an even worse thought; they must have found his Maserati! Nathan’s own lawyer was late, but he let the other side speak first, relieved that no one was talking about his car. Not yet at least.
He expected his ex to accuse him of hiding assets (probably through an offshore trust) and then demand they go back to court to have the whole alimony business reopened.
So Nathan was surprised when his ex’s lawyer proposed that Loretta and Steven do a gap year, instead of heading off to Paris and London in the fall.
And his ex wanted Nathan to pick up all the additional costs.
Nathan blamed his wife for the failure of their marriage. On so many levels, she always demanded more. And in trying to please her, Nathan took on ever increasing amounts of risk. She wanted to consume all the good things his risk taking brought, but failed to accept the consequences when his risky bets turned sour.
On bad days, Nathan was secretly pleased to be barely solvent. His credit card bills may have been paid off, but that didn’t mean he was debt free. There were still the mortgage repayments to keep up on the Long Island house. State taxes, insurance, security charges, utility bills, maintenance and gardening
expenses, they all had to be paid by someone—and he was the someone.
And he hadn’t even started to count what the dismal scientists called sunk costs. For Nathan these were the very real costs of raising his children. Fortunately, the heaviest years of expenditure were behind him—that was something to be grateful for.
Nathan had thought through the obvious risks in accepting Orofino’s offer of financial assistance. If he didn’t perform as expected, what was the worst outcome for his family?
They could go after his former wife.
And why would he object, after what had gone on between them? As far as he was concerned, they could do whatever they liked. What would Orofino do?
Shave her cat and boil it alive on the back burner of the kitchen stove? After all, he didn’t believe Orofino was an axe murderer.
They could go after his children.
Growing up in Hoboken, Nathan heard stories of how the mafia did it; they entered the family home when it was empty and stole framed pictures of the kids celebrating their first birthdays, having fun in the backyard, swimming at the beach or smiling at graduation ceremonies.
It was a subtle warning sign not to defy them or else the consequences were obvious.
By the time Nathan’s lawyer turned up, they had finished. Thanks to an unexpected intervention by his ex, Nathan felt more confident that both his children would soon be out of harm’s way—working for missionaries in the forests of Borneo perhaps.
Now he had a real chance to rebuild his family’s fortunes. Maybe even resolve past issues with his ex—on second thought that was never going to happen.
But his strategy to offset the risks of dealing with Orofino, had been enhanced by his ex-wife of all people!
Nathan’s therapist told him, “The unconscious hides the truth.” And while he often had no idea what the woman was talking about (only her bills landed with predictable regularity in his mailbox) he did remember that whenever he awoke in the early hours of the morning, it was because he could hear the phone ringing.