House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  Jeffrey and Phyllis had both known that would be the answer, which is why Jeffrey hadn’t asked and hoped Phyllis wouldn’t ask either. He didn’t want to hear her say it, and when she did, the words went through him with the sharpness of a physical pain. He was, in a way, almost as innocent of death as his daughter, certainly of death like this, without disease, without accident, without any of those mindless workings of fate that were the hallmark of every form of death he knew. There was intention here, not accident. Intention on Amy’s part, of course. But her father, too, had willed her death, and before that Fiore, and even Jeffrey himself. The chain stretched back through a handful of choices and abdications of choice, reaching back to the night of Jessica’s party and forward to—where?

  The end of the chain wasn’t in sight, but as Jeffrey sat with his wife and daughter in the silence of the night kitchen, and again now as he stood on a sidewalk outside the ancient stone church, he saw with devastating clarity that if tiny Amy Laidlaw’s death was the first fatality to grow out of his connection to Chet Fiore, it wasn’t going to be the last. And he saw, as clearly as one sees one’s own reflection in a mirror, that once he accepted this fact—and there was no choice in the matter, accepting or not accepting—then any alteration of the course he had chosen for himself became irrelevant.

  Jessica knew already, without even having to think about it, the kinds of things she wanted to say. We all loved Amy, she wanted to say. We just didn’t love her enough. She was hurt so badly these last few months. She called me, and by the time I called her back she was gone. Maybe if I was less caught up in my own life, maybe if I loved her more…Maybe if her father eased up on her a little, if he let go of his own indignation and held her up and gave her strength when she needed it…Maybe if her mother just said, “Amy, stay with me, lean on me, we’ll fight this thing…” None of us did any of the things that had to be done to save her. So let’s not make this pretty and gentle, let’s not let ourselves off with sad thoughts about a beautiful flower that wilted early, because that’s just a load of crap and we all know it. Everybody says we’re here to think about Amy, but let’s not think about Amy. As though she was in this thing all by herself. Let’s think about ourselves. Because we’re the reason we’re all here now.

  She took her place in the church, sitting with her friends, filled with bitterness, her eyes locked on the casket in front of the pulpit. Her parents slipped into a pew a few rows back. Carla Laidlaw sat with her own family, two brothers it seemed, judging from the resemblance, and their wives. The minister ascended to the pulpit and commenced to deliver one of those awful eulogies compiled out of carelessly gathered notes. Not of word of it sounded like it had anything to do with Amy. The restlessness in the congregation spread like fog, and then like water, visible and then audible as his voice droned on, a slither of dresses, a slither of suits, a slither of shoes sliding on the worn wood floor.

  “I think at this time,” he said at last, gathering all the wandered attention back to him, “it would be appropriate to hear something from Amy’s friends. Because friendship was so important a part of Amy’s life.” He looked down at his notes and said, “Jessica Blaine was close to Amy and she’d like to share some thoughts with us. Jessica.”

  As Jeffrey watched his daughter rise from her seat and move into the aisle, he was filled with an immense pride that she, of all those here, had been chosen to say what needed saying. She had no patience with pretense or abstraction, with china coffee cups in the back seat of a car, no patience for things that weren’t true or didn’t matter. She would scandalize everyone here if she was moved to do so, and he could see in the set of her shoulders as she started toward the pulpit that she was moved to do exactly that. Whatever her faults—rebellion and self-absorption and willful blindness when it suited her—compromise wasn’t one of them. For Jeffrey, on the other hand, compromise was both his strength and his weakness as well as the center of his being, and he thought with a feeling almost like joy how good it was that his daughter wasn’t like him in that.

  His eyes were fixed so intently on his daughter that he didn’t see Winston Laidlaw get up from his seat, didn’t see him moving toward her until he was practically in front of her only a foot or two to the right of the gleaming casket. The man’s face was a shocking scarlet, so lurid it seemed for a moment that a seizure wouldn’t be out of the question. He hissed some words at Jessica through tightly clenched teeth, his voice so low that Jeffrey, only a few rows back, didn’t hear a thing even in the stillness of the church. But those in the first and second rows obviously heard because they turned and looked at one another, and they were troubled looks.

  Jeffrey rose and felt Phyllis’s hand on his arm. He looked down at her. “Please,” she said, an inaudible but intense whisper.

  He glanced back at Jessica and saw Carla Laidlaw hurrying toward her ex-husband. “I asked her to speak,” she said, and her voice carried through the church with remarkable urgency.

  Laidlaw said, “Go sit down. Both of you.”

  Jeffrey didn’t hear what Jessica said, but when Laidlaw put a hand on her, Phyllis’s plea didn’t matter anymore. He strode quickly down the aisle while Phyllis clasped both hands over her face, dreading the scene that she knew was inevitable now.

  Even before Jeffrey reached the three of them, Laidlaw whirled toward him. “Get out of here, Blaine, and take her with you,” he roared, no longer interested in preserving even a semblance of propriety.

  Jessica turned to look at her father, with Laidlaw’s fingers biting painfully into her upper arm. How, she actually wondered, was her father capable of summoning such glacial calm at a time like this?

  In fact, for Jeffrey it wasn’t like that at all. His calmness required no effort on his part, seemed almost literally to descend on him in response to the tension of those around him. “Please take your hand off her,” he said.

  Laidlaw tightened his grip. Jessica winced and raised her arm to relieve the pressure, and for a moment she was certain that in another second the two men would be fighting right there in the church. Carla Laidlaw said, “For god’s sake, Winston.”

  “Just get her out of here, get out of here,” Laidlaw growled. “A little decency, Blaine. This is a family thing.”

  “Your wife asked her to speak,” Jeffrey said. “And I asked you to take your hand off my daughter.”

  The minister took a few steps toward them from the height of the pulpit and then a few steps back, confused and indecisive.

  With sudden and unexpected violence, Laidlaw flung Jessica toward her father as though she were a small thing. The heel of his hand rammed into the small of her back, shoving her forward as she lurched awkwardly in the space between them. Jeffrey caught her, unnecessarily, as she righted herself.

  “She’d be alive if it wasn’t for you,” Laidlaw screamed, “you and your tramp daughter.”

  The words hit Jeffrey like a blow and Jessica like something worse than a blow, as though something wet and lifeless and disgusting had been slung in her face. But where Jeffrey’s expression didn’t change in the slightest, Jessica turned pale and her whole body trembled like someone in a high and dangerous fever.

  “That’s not true,” she gasped. “It isn’t true.” In an instant so brief and so intense it barely registered in her consciousness at all, registered only as a moment of sickening confusion, she felt as though she were Amy plunging toward the cold, hard wetness of the rocks and ocean far below, lucid, almost serene in her awareness of the perfection of her escape from this man. “She was afraid of you, afraid of going to you,” she said, remembering her last intimate conversation with her friend, the two of them sitting on the bed in the low-ceilinged bedroom on the Cape.

  Laidlaw lurched forward a stride and his hand flashed out, open-palmed, but Jeffrey, reacting almost before it actually happened, reached up and caught the man’s wrist. His mind ratcheted back a few months, as though this were a scene he was seeing for the second time, except that in t
he earlier time it was his own hand being caught, not exactly like this, from behind.

  Jessica turned and bolted away from them, the hard soles of her shoes ringing on the hard wood floor as she raced up the aisle. She slung open the doors, letting in a wave of sunlight, and disappeared into it.

  All through the church people were crying as bitterly as though they had just learned at this moment that Amy was dead, crying and wailing, something almost biblical in the ostentation of their grief and confusion. And the minister was babbling ineffectually into his microphone, his words voiceless and unnatural, floating down to them from speakers mounted high above the pulpit, something about reconciliation and forgiveness and god’s mercy.

  Jeffrey realized that at some point while Jessica was still racing through the church, he had released Laidlaw’s hand.

  “She’s telling you the truth,” he said, because he knew with as clear a certainty as if he had spoken with Amy himself that his daughter couldn’t possibly be wrong about something like this. “If you can’t live with it, god knows I wouldn’t blame you.”

  The minister talked about hope and compassion and the healing of god’s hand as Jeffrey turned and followed his daughter’s path up the aisle, calm in the knowledge that he was ready to bear his own part of this particular burden.

  Phyllis joined him in the aisle and walked with him out of the church, followed by more words from the minister about the wisdom and forgiveness and inscrutable ways of a god who, in the final analysis, had had nothing to do with any of this.

  Jeffrey was lying when he told Clint Bolling there would be other investors in the scheme. He said it because it would help secure the Oklahoman’s cooperation but he had no intention of involving anyone else in his plan. The more people who knew what was going on, the more dangerous it would be, and Jeffrey had no intention of running any more than the absolute minimum of personal risk. Indeed, once the working plans were all in place, he wouldn’t need even Bolling’s cooperation. But for the time being, until he was sure the system would perform the way he meant it to, until all the bugs were worked out, he needed a silent partner who could be counted on to keep quiet if any irregularities appeared in his investment accounts.

  The first order of business after returning from Oklahoma was to find someone inside Layne Bentley to do the computer work that needed to be done. Finding the right man involved a search through the firm’s personnel files. He couldn’t examine them during business hours without raising questions about whom he was recruiting and for what purpose. But he had already established the practice of going in late, so no one would ask questions if he continued to do so.

  He spent the hours until the traders left for the night meticulously charting the movements of prices from one night’s closing to the next. He sorted and resorted them until he had the optimum arrangement for his purposes. He felt like a man who can suddenly see through walls, look into people’s minds, visit the future at will, and come back at will. He knew, of course, that these powers were an illusion. He could see into the future because he had discovered a trick that allowed him to transform the past into the present whenever he needed to do so. The thrill, he realized, was in the illegality itself, in the magnitude of the crime he was committing. Anything less brazen would have been merely clever. It still would have been what management classes at school called “thinking inside the box.” Jeffrey was out of the box. He had soared clear of the gravitational pull of all planets and systems. He was weightless and free.

  When the office was finally empty, he would make his way to the records room and pull out an armful of personnel files. He took them back to his office and lit a cigar as he began to study them. Sometimes, when he had done as much of this research as he cared to do for the night, he went to Elaine’s instead of going home. There was no night doorman. He rang the bell and she buzzed him in without even asking who was there. Upstairs, her door was open and she had gone back to bed. He joined her there. There was a desperate intensity to her lovemaking that he had never experienced with any woman. And he hadn’t failed to notice that having a lover in the U.S. Attorney’s Office might come in handy if his involvement with Fiore ever began to unravel. He had heard once that a good burglar always locates the back door before he begins his search of an apartment so that he knows how to get out in case anyone comes home. He doubted it would come to that, but if it did, he would give them the gangster.

  When Elaine’s alarm went off in the morning, she found the bed empty. He always made it home before Phyllis woke. If she knew what time he came in, she never said anything about it.

  The routine continued night after night as he searched the personnel files. He was looking for someone who knew the software system inside and out. More than that, he wanted to be able to read greed and ambition in the man’s file.

  The file of a young man named Gabriel Enriquez fascinated him from the moment he started reading it and he kept coming back to it night after night. Enriquez was the son of formerly wealthy Cuban refugees. His father had been an eminent surgeon in Havana, his mother an interior decorator whose client list included the best families on the island. The couple stayed on in Cuba after Castro took power. It wasn’t until after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960 that they fled to Florida in a sixteen-foot fishing boat. Apparently they had had children in Cuba and apparently these children, if they were still alive in 1960, remained behind. According to an autobiographical memorandum included in the file, Gabriel Enriquez himself didn’t know the fate of these brothers or sisters, didn’t know even how many of them there had been. In Miami Enriquez’s father found work as a limo driver. If his mother worked at all, there was no record of it. Dr. Enriquez was over fifty, his wife forty-five, when they embarked on a second family, first a girl and then, a year and a half later, Gabriel.

  It wasn’t merely the family history, with its legacy of expropriation and resentment, that interested Jeffrey. At seventeen Gabriel left his mother, father, and sister in Miami to attend Columbia College on a scholarship. He graduated near the top of his class and then earned an MBA from Wharton before going to work on the trading floor at First Boston. He stayed there less than a year, went back to school for a second master’s degree, this one from NYU with a concentration in advanced mathematics and computer sciences. What especially piqued Jeffrey’s curiosity was the timing of the young man’s departure from First Boston. He left in March although he didn’t begin his studies at NYU until the following September, which suggested that he hadn’t quit to go back to school. One would have to guess he was fired, and one would also have to guess that the reason for the firing had been expunged from the First Boston records or Layne Bentley never would have hired him.

  When Jeffrey went to look for Enriquez in the small suite of offices where the firm’s internal computer programs were written, he found a dramatically handsome young man an inch or two over six feet tall, with ink-black eyes and ink-black hair that fell well below the soft collar of his open shirt. He was the only member of the software division in pressed slacks rather than jeans. Jeffrey introduced himself and invited Enriquez to be his guest for dinner at the Yale Club that evening. “That is, if you’re free tonight,” he added.

  Enriquez pondered the invitation a moment, as though there were some aspect of the proposition he didn’t quite understand or trust. His voice was surprisingly soft, unaccented but with the faintest trace of Spanish in the gentle rhythm of his speech when he said, “No, I am free, quite free. What time?”

  “Seven,” Jeffrey said.

  Enriquez nodded his approval. He didn’t ask any questions about the purpose of this meeting, although it was clear that his lack of curiosity wasn’t due to shyness. On the contrary, there was an almost impudent directness in the way he looked straight into Jeffrey’s eyes.

  “I’ll see you at seven,” Jeffrey said, and then added, “They require jackets and ties.”

  Gaetano Falcone was not a patient man but it was a hard-and-fast rule with him tha
t he never under any circumstances let his impatience show. He tended to smile when he was angry and to appear calm when he was agitated, and so now he leaned back on the soft, overstuffed couch and put his stockinged feet up on the coffee table, crossing his ankles. His hands were folded almost beatifically across his gut, but Chet Fiore knew the old man well enough to recognize the signs. He had no illusions about his standing with Mr. Falcone because he knew how dangerous illusions can be. He was like a son to Mr. Falcone, but in fact the old man had a son with whom he hadn’t spoken in years.

  Fiore let his fingers curl around the dark, heavy ceramic of his coffee mug, so thick he could scarcely feel the warmth, and waited for Mr. Falcone to speak.

  “You’re going to have to tell me, Charles,” Falcone said softly, in the tone of a man speaking on matters of no consequence, “why is this taking so long?”

  “Is it?” Fiore asked with his most boyish smile. “Considering what we’re asking for, I don’t think it’s taking long at all.”

  “It’s proceeding? This is what you’re telling me?”

  “Of course it’s proceeding,” Fiore said.

  Falcone studied his fingernails a moment. He had been working in his garden. It always seemed strange to him that the earth should be called dirt because, in fact, there were few things cleaner than the soil. Everything came from the soil.

  “This banker is cooperating with you?”

  “He is.”

  “You put a little pressure on him? Through his family? That’s my understanding.”