Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  He led me into a drawing room decorated with classical printsand ornate furniture. There was a massive floor-to-ceiling cabinet that I took to be the in-room entertainment system. Unless opera or choral music was on offer, the doors of the cabinet were likely to remain firmly shut for the duration of Mendip’s visit.

  On the glass table in front of the couch was a tray loaded with the paraphernalia of afternoon tea.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Charles said, moving the tray onto a side table nearby. “I had guests.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He poured and handed me a glass of mineral water, motioning me to sit down on the couch.

  He looked at me. Anger? Sympathy? Anxiety? I detected traces of all three in his complex face.

  He sat down opposite me, resting his elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers, rapping the knuckles of his thumbs against his top teeth.

  Point of entry, I thought. He’s groping for a point of entry, the opening shot.

  “I could never fathom whether your father loved or hated India.” The first volley.

  Mendip paused. I would keep my powder dry for the moment.

  “But you,” he continued, “your perspective: I would have expected that to be clear-cut. After what happened to your father, what it did to your mother.”

  Itwasclear-cut. Mendip must’ve lost the plot if he was confused on that score. I began to wonder if we had the same subject in mind.

  He unclasped his fingers and gave his chin a series of flicks with his index finger. “So why have you painted yourself and, more important, me, into a corner in this way? I’d tried to keep the whole thing away from you and in one afternoon you’ve managed to wrap your arms around it. Bloody breathtaking.”

  “You’ve lost me, Charles. I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  Mendip scowled, a lip-chewing scowl. “Less of the innocent schoolboy act. I’m not a bloody fool.”

  He wasn’t a bloody fool. I knew that. My father had said he wasone of the cleverest men of his generation. Ernie Monks had said the same. And I’d seen nothing to make me disagree, but Mendip was talking in another language and I didn’t have a basic phrase book.

  He sighed. “Well, you’ve got your way.” He was behaving as if he’d lost a fight with me, a fight I never knew we’d fought.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Carol Amen was very eloquent on your behalf; she’s made a lot of senior people in Jefferson Trust eloquent on your behalf. Now the Indians think it’s a good idea, positively insisting on you handling the deal. Can’t change their minds about it. Of course, I haven’t said anything about your spot of bother. Maybe I should have, they’re bound to find out anyway. Too late now.”

  A deal. An Indian deal. The deal she’d mentioned at the cemetery. Shit, no. Hell’s bloody bells, no.

  “I don’t know about any deal, Charles. Still less about one in India.”

  Charles affected incredulity. “Did you think it would be easier if you were out of the country? That the JJ thing wouldn’t follow you? Bloody naïve if youdidthink that, Fin. Bloody naïve. I don’t even know if we can get you out of the country.” He took a small scrap of paper and stub of pencil from his jacket pocket and jotted something down. “I’d better get Terry Wardman onto that one,” he said.

  This was madness. India. If it were the only place in the world with oxygen, I’d still fly in the opposite direction.

  “Humor me, Charles. Just pretend for a moment that I don’t know what the hell you are talking about. Incredible as that might seem. Humor me.”

  “The stockbrokerage. The one that Jefferson Trust wants to buy. For fifty million dollars. The Bombay one: Ketan Securities. That one, Fin. Humored you enough, have I? You may be my godson, but that’s as far as it goes, laddie.”

  So that was the deal. Jefferson Trust was to buy a Bombay stockbrokerage with me as the attorney on the transaction. Carol must’ve thought she was doing me a favor getting me on the list of parties. I hadn’t told her about my father, the Fall. If I had, she would’ve moved heaven and earth to keep me off the file. If she really liked me, that is.

  “I don’t know how to say this in a way that will make you believe me,” I said. “I know nothing of this.”

  Mendip reddened. “I think the last few days have unhinged you. It’s the only explanation for your bizarre behavior. You’ve abandoned rational thought and will do anything to escape, even if it means going to Bombay. Frankly, you baffle me.”

  I shook my head. “Of course I don’t want to go to Bombay. Take me off the damn thing. Blame me. Say that I’m in shock. Do you whatever you want, but take me off the bloody thing.” I was starting to panic. On top of my visions of death on the FDR and my looming emasculation at the hands of bloodied victims and slavering insurance and loan companies, the video of Bombay was beginning to play in my head. But this wasn’t a cozy tour around a vibrant city, pointing out the landmarks and making vacuous observations on the legendary hospitality of Bombay’s inhabitants, its kaleidoscope of cultures, its exotic cuisine, and how it was the destination of choice for the discerning and sophisticated traveler. This was a video of the worst week of my life, the epilogue to the Fall.

  “The die is cast,” said Mendip flatly. “It can’t be uncast. Whether or not you were the author of your involvement, you’re now involved and can’t be uninvolved.”

  “I can’t go. Surely you of all people understand that?”

  I listened to myself and then listened for the ghostly laughter of my father, the post-Fall father, the one I couldn’t call Dad anymore, the one I could barely speak to when he had called from Bombay, drunk, stoned, whatever. Rambling. He’d compromised, he’d said. He’d choked on the half-eaten file, poisoned himself on a Bombay breakfast of scam and eggs. And something else, something he couldn’t say. He needed me, right then, by all the millions of gods that crowded the millions of Indians, he needed me. I’d said nothing. He’d wept, implored. I’d hung up. I told myself he’d fallen too far; he’d exiled himself before he had even left for Bombay. For me, the Fall had happened in a neat house in Hampton Court, not in the heat and confusion of Bombay.

  “Youwillbe going,” Mendip sighed. “Because I say so.” His voice was both languid and menacing. “You’re on a space walk, Fin. And Icontrol the life support systems. If you don’t go to Bombay I’ll switch them off, every last one. And cast you adrift.”

  “I didn’t know making threats was your style.”

  “It’s a fait accompli, one engineered by you.” He shook his head. “My God, if only I’d known what you were doing.”

  This was mad. “But Charles . . .”

  He held up his hand. “McIntyre agrees that there is no going back. So do the others.”

  The others? The client?

  Mendip leaned forward, near enough to hear the gentle wheeze of lungs that would need Ventalin if they were overtaxed. “You will have to do it, Fin. You must be seen to cooperate, to act in the collective best interests of the firm. I’m sorry, but do you think the partnership will allow the continued underwriting of your mother’s entire existence: the house, the annuity, the thousand little courtesies and services rendered that you never hear about and she takes for granted? Do you think they will tolerate our continued attempts to prevent the world from finding out what really happened to your father? Do you think they will support my support of you if you behave like a spoiled child?”

  The partnership would let Mendip do what he liked. He’d made them rich; he was about to make them richer. He could make me partner here and now or he could stick a grenade up my ass and pull the pin and, either way, they would say, huzzah, for he’s a jolly good fellow. He could buy my mother a Caribbean island and they’d say bloody good idea, if Mendip told them that it was a bloody good idea. It was Mendip who had disseminated the story that my father had died of typhoid. They had all bought it; nobody questioned it, at least not out loud. They’d buy the true story, if he
told them to.

  “I don’t know what it would do to your mother. It’s realpolitik, not a threat.” He allowed himself a sip of water.

  Wasn’t it? It would kill her if they pulled the rug from under me.

  “Look, Fin,” Mendip said, his face furrowed by concern, fake or real, I didn’t care. I knew what was coming: the hand-wringing, the date-rapist’s remorse, the grin-and-bear-it. “You’ll be in and out of there in no time. A quick deal. A pissy little stockbrokerage, for God’ssake. Standing on your head stuff. Then there’s your future ahead of you. A great future.”

  Just transact. Nothing wrong in that, perhaps. Jefferson Trust wants to buy a stockbrokerage. So what? Perfectly reasonable and legitimate. Fifty Gordon’s and tonics on the plane, keep myself topped up after landing, and I might never know I’d been to Bombay. It wasn’t even a half-eaten file; no reason to think it was scam and eggs.

  But the afterward, the real afterward. What about that?

  “And what about the JJ business, Charles? When that becomes too fraught, will you ditch me?”

  “Of course not, I’ve already told you,” he said. “Just do as you’re told and let the professionals get on with their work. It’s about trust.”

  “I’m not convinced that Pablo Tochera has my best interests at heart.”

  “Don’t be bloody stupid. You don’t seriously think you’re the one with most to lose, do you?”

  Whatever happens, you won’t be on the scrap heap, Charles Mendip. My place there already had a “reserved” flag stuck in it.

  “That’s my worry, Charles,” I said, the chart at the forefront of my mind. “There are so many others with so much to lose, I might get lost in the crowd.”

  “Stop fussing. You have Pablo Tochera and you should consider yourself fortunate. This thing could go on for years and any skirmish over your dining table and cuff links will be a sideshow, over in the blink of an eye. Just let us deal with it.”

  “You’ve expressed my concern better than I could have.”

  I’d been reduced to the blink of an eye. It made me think. My father had been rich once. He had been in the top ten of Clay & Westminster and, in his prime, their top biller. But he had pissed it all away in two short crazy months. When he’d gone for the Fall, he’d traveled first class.

  Charles reached inside his pocket and pulled out the inhaler. Leaning back, he put the snorkel-like end in his mouth and gave a firm jab on the cartridge.

  “I have enough to contend with as it is,” he said when he found his breath. “Let Mr. Tochera deal with the Carlson matter and youhandle the Bombay transaction. McIntyre isn’t happy with this turn of events but I have interceded on your behalf. If you don’t like the arrangement, then I can do no more for you.”

  “So when do I start?” I said.

  Mendip shut his eyes. Thanking God, was he?

  His eyes flicked open. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Nine sharp, round at Jefferson Trust. Ask to see your standard bearer, Carol Amen.”

  “What about local counsel in Bombay?” I asked as if I didn’t already know the answer.

  “Askari & Co.,” Mendip said.

  Downstairs I’d seen the back of a head. Five years before I’d seen the front. It belonged to Sunil Askari, principal of Askari & Co., Bombay. There were bigger firms in India, more prestigious firms, but in Charles’s lexicon of Indian lawyers, Askari reallydidbegin withAand he didn’t bother with firms starting with any other letter of the alphabet.

  “You know what Sunil Askari thinks of me.” Askari had worn his contempt for me like a badge. “You know what he felt about my father. Can’t we use somebody else?” I recalled the imperious Askari lolling in a high-backed chair, a copper-colored Churchill, lecturing me—in precise Oxford tones—that my father’s behavior had come within an ace of causing an international incident, that he had nearly ruined the reputation of Clay & Westminster and Askari and that I should be grateful for both his and Mendip’s intervention, which had saved everyone from calamity. The fact that my father was dead was a relief, as far as Askari was concerned.

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Mendip crossly. “Of course we can’t use someone else. Only Askari & Co. can navigate this transaction in the timetable set by the client, which, by the way, is bloody short. And, anyway, Sunil would never forgive me if we switched horses. You won’t have much contact with him in all probability.”

  Mendip stood up. I thought he was signaling an end to the audience and I started to get up, but he motioned me to stay seated. “I appreciate what you must think of me right now, but believe me, the future—yourfuture—doesn’t lie in Bombay, it lies with Schuster Mannheim.”

  He picked up that day’sWall Street Journalfrom the table. He came around the back of me, dropped the paper on my lap, and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  I scanned the front page. There was a largish piece on the JJ affair with recriminations from Miranda Carlson about how the culture at Jefferson Trust impelled JJ onto the FDR. The article made brief reference to an editorial deeper in the paper that begged to differ. There was a much larger piece on the Schuster Mannheim merger with Clay & Westminster. A eulogy for the deal and the vision of the firms’ respective senior partners.

  Charles straightened his jacket. He was preening himself.

  “We’ve got it right,” he said, beaming. I could appreciate why, by and large, he should be pleased.

  But had JJ put a bomb under the whole thing?

  Charles evidently didn’t think so. “This is the perception, Fin,” he said, “this is what people really think of the merger. And it’s the reality as well. You know that I’m not usually prone to hyperbole, but this combination is unquestionably the most important in legal history. In our own little world, it’s the War of Independence, it’s the October Revolution. And it’s the likes of you that will benefit immeasurably from it.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said gloomily. “Schuster knows the trouble I’m in, after all, they’re acting for me. I shouldn’t think they hold me in particularly high esteem.”

  Mendip took the paper from me and folded it neatly before placing it back on the table. “You’re right, they don’t,” he said. “They think you’re a perfect pest. But they’ve also seen your track record and, in time, they will admire you for the great lawyer I know you to be. I’m sure Jim McIntyre will alter his current somewhat jaundiced view.”

  Jim McIntyre was a man whose reputation suggested he rarely changed his mind about anything. And for the first time it really struck me that Mendip was scared of McIntyre—taking away my clients, knocking me off the merger was more likely prompted by him than by Keenes. Only someone as powerful as McIntyre could have forced the issue.

  “And after Bombay,” I ventured hesitantly. “Will I be able to return to the New York fold?”

  I wanted to come back to New York. However vague its draw upon me was, it was real. Maybe I hadn’t scaled the Empire State Building or joined a social conga line of actors, dentists, therapists, and lawyers. But I’d looked through the rear window of a cab at night and seen the Met Life Building bestride Park Avenue. I’d seen a man dressed as a tomato on Fifth Avenue. I’d rummaged through the antiques and bric-a-brac in a thousand stalls around West 25th on Sunday morning. I’d eaten in a hundred SoHo restaurants. Noodles in Chinatown, pasta in Little Italy, steak at Peter Luger, fish at Docks. Baseball with fucking JJ.

  And, of course, Carol Amen.

  Mendip wandered over to the door and opened it. “Let’s get Bombay over with first, shall we?” He gently propelled me into the hallway. “I must get on now. I’ll speak to you later. Remember I’m behind you. We both have jobs to do, so let’s do them.”

  I tried to read his expression: There was a smile, but the eyes were as hard and gray as ballbearings.

  FIFTEEN

  You look terrible.” Carol drew me into her apartment. I watched her face, fed on it.

  She wasn�
��t aware that her best efforts on my behalf had been a curse.

  She poured some wine and curled around me on the couch. T-shirt and drawstring shorts again, a welcome reprise. I could smell her, a chemistry of soap and shampoo working with her own fragrance. I could see her muscular strength, the slight ripple of forearm as she stroked her hands down her legs. And the passion: her brimming eyes, the pink-tinged cheeks, maybe the work of wine. No; something deeper.

  “I got you some work,” she said. “It isn’t big but it’s interesting and we’ll be working together on it. It took all afternoon to swing it. There are some people at Clay & Westminster who seem pretty pissed with you.” She wasn’t triumphant, there was no high-five—too much had happened for that kind of display. Her voice was quietly satisfied, as if she had delivered something important, understated, that wouldspeak for itself and find its own place in the hierarchy of the good and bad stuff.

  She put her hand to my cheek and gentled my face toward her. “I wasn’t expecting an eruption of joy, but . . . Bad meeting, huh?”

  I nodded. “Bad meeting.”

  “Well, it’s over now.”

  I don’t think so, Carol.

  “Anyway.” Her voice brightened, still strained but gamely trying to break out of the gloom I’d brought in with me. “Shall I tell you about the deal?”

  “I know about it already.”

  She looked a little hurt, as if she’d wanted to watch me unwrap my present.

  “A stockbrokerage in Bombay.” She wasn’t going to let me spoil her moment. “Ketan Securities. It’s been in the hopper for a while and I don’t know any real details. You know how it happens, the soup simmering on the back burner just boils over. The bankers are producing a deal pack as we speak.” Her eyes scanned my face for some sign of reaction, something encouraging maybe. “Clay & Westminster had already been iced to act if called on. So it was just a matter of getting them to name you as lead guy. And they have.”