Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  I affected a look of shock—it wasn’t difficult: All I had to do was to conjure the image of Ernie’s face as he hung suspended from the sink.

  “What? That’s terrible,” I said. “What happened? I can’t believe it.” I supposed that this was what I’d say if the news were hitherto unknown to me.

  “A heart attack,” said Charles. “We’d been warning Ernie for years: the drink, the smoking, the candle-burning. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Still, he was one of a kind, a big person in every way.” He stopped for a moment and looked away from me and I thought I heard him mutter, “Bloody fool.” He turned his back to me.

  “But I want to know about last night.”

  “What about it, Charles?”

  “You were with him. What happened?”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  Charles gave an impatient wave of his hand. “I know what you said. I want to know if there was anything else. Did he say anything peculiar? Did he seem ill? Did he behave oddly?”

  “Ernie always behaved oddly,” I said. “But no more oddly than usual. I suppose he seemed tense, the jokes were less thick and fast, and a bit more gallows than usual, but not dramatically so.”

  Charles sat back in his seat and flicked his fingers against his cheek. They rasped more than normal and I realized he hadn’t shaved. That was a first, in my experience.

  A heart attack. Ernie’s memory would be better served with a heart attack, just like my father’s had been better served with typhoid.

  “Nothing else?” Charles probed.

  I shook my head.

  “You didn’t see him again last night?”

  He wasn’t going to get anything more out of me unless he confronted me with a photograph of me retching on a Plaza suite carpet. “No, I did not,” I responded emphatically. “What are you driving at?”

  “You are in a great deal of trouble, Fin, and I’m trying to help you. You and I know what an old rogue Ernie was and I am simply making sure that there is nothing else that involves you, or that you know about.”

  “I thought you said he had a heart attack. What could possibly involve me?”

  Charles eyed me sternly. “Just checking.”

  I asked some questions normally associated with the passing of a human being, like were relatives coming over, was the body to be flown home, when would the funeral be held?

  “Ernie’s body was only discovered about two hours ago,” Charles said. “It’s a little premature for arrangements to have been made in such a short space of time, don’t you think?”

  They’d gotten JJ underground pretty damn quick. But I let the point go.

  Mendip tapped his pen on a piece of paper with a few lines of handwriting on it. “A communication to all staff will be made later today. In the meantime, I would be grateful if you made no mention of your liaisons with him.”

  “They weren’tliaisons,” I said angrily and then, sarcastically: “Will I be able to attend the funeral?”

  “No,” Charles said flatly. “Not after your performance at Carlson’s.”

  Apparently being shouted at by a widow for no better reason than my mere presence disqualified me from one-third of life’s great religious ceremonies. That left weddings and christenings to look forward to.

  “Is there anything else?” I felt an overwhelming need for Charles Mendip to be out of my room.

  “Is Project Badla on track?” The pissy little stockbrokerage, he was worrying about a pissy little stockbrokerage.

  “Yes,” I said, without disguising my contempt.

  He glanced at the newspaper again. “I think you’ll find you’ll be going to Bombay sooner than expected. The clients are in a hurry. And with your name now in the papers, it may be better for you to be out of the country for a while. Although, as you know, Bombay would not have been my destination of choice.”

  Nor mine.

  Mendip stood up and remained motionless for a moment.

  “Charles. What’s going on?”

  His breathing came with difficulty; his eyes seemed suddenly glassy.

  “Don’t dissolve into a jibbering wreck like your father,” he said. “If you do, I can’t help you.”

  He seemed to loosen himself.

  “This is difficult for all of us,” he muttered as he left the room.

  I called Carol’s number and got through.

  “Everything all right?” I said. “I was worried about you when I got your message at Cellar Americana last night. You didn’t call.”

  “I had to go up to my mom in Scarsdale.” She sounded distant. “My father had pulled some shit on her and she was upset.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She gave me a brief and distracted tour of her parents’ divorce. She made it sound like a natural component in her rite of passage: measles, adolescence, losing virginity, parents’ divorce.

  “I saw the piece in the papers about you,” she said. I sensed her need to shift away from her own life. She had to be crazy to want to go near mine.

  “I expect you’re relieved they made no mention about the car being in your name,” she said.

  “They will.”

  “I guess.” She drew a deep breath. “What else is happening? How you doing on the Badla documents?”

  Fuck the documents.

  “One of our most senior partners died last night,” I said.

  “Oh my God. What happened?”

  “A heart attack.” The Mendip version, even for Carol. For now, at any rate. “He was a good friend,” I added.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Some people have a bullet with their name on it. With Ernie Monks, it was more of a howitzer shell.” I could see his body lying in its organic fallout.

  “Ernie Monks?” Her voice was brittle.

  “You’ve heard of him? I’m surprised; he never worked with Jefferson Trust. To be frank, he wasn’t that fond of Americans.” He hated them. He often said so—along with women, cheap wine, and anchovies.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of him,” she said. “You know the Cloisters?” The question seemed to come from nowhere.

  I knew of the Cloisters, though I had never been there. It was an obscure corner of the tourist map and my sightseeing itinerary had been rather in abeyance lately. “Up at Fort Tryon?” I said.

  “I’ll see you there at three this afternoon.” It was an instruction, not an invitation. “Go to the Cuxa Cloister, it’s near the middle of the complex. Cuxa—got it?”

  “What’s the matter, Carol?”

  “Just be there,” she said and hung up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ernie Monks and his death had spooked Carol.

  Why?

  At three, maybe I’d find out.

  I took a clean sheet of paper and one of those pens with an extrafine point. Maybe the chart would fit if I wrote microfiche style.

  It didn’t take long to reconstruct the contents of the ball of paper now lying on my apartment floor.

  I then added Miranda Carlson as a plaintiff. Would the children have a separate cause of action? I wondered. One for Pablo.

  I made supplementary notes to the entry for Jefferson Trust. If JJ wasn’t an employee then maybe they could wriggle out of any liability based on his actions. What did his business card say? Most players had some version ofpresidenton them, others a variant ofdirector,a few carriedchairmanfor the ego trip.

  I remembered now. JJ’s had nothing. Just a name and some telephone numbers. Not even a reference to Jefferson Trust. Maybe, in invisible ink,Master of the Universe. JJ didn’t really need a title; hisbrain, his physique, his boundless confidence; all of these were his calling card. Titles were for little people.

  Delaware Loan, my alleged lenders, were slotted between the plaintiff and defendant columns. Where did they fit in? I’d heard nothing from them. Strange. They had supposedly lent me nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Either they didn’t watch the news or this sort of thing happened to them all the
time. Maybe they assumed that my Chase Manhattan account was overflowing.

  Shit. Chase Manhattan. They deserved a mention. They could go in the defendant’s column, with me as plaintiff. Good God, here was a suit where I was on the right side, except that it had cost me fifty thousand for the privilege.

  I slipped the revised chart into my pocket and left the room.

  Time to visit Terry Wardman.

  Terry’s door was open and he was in; I could see the back of his head as he sat poker-straight at his desk in front of a window looking out on a view of other offices looking in on him. I watched him for a moment. He wasn’t moving at all, as if he were a Victorian gentleman waiting for the camera to finish a long exposure for a starchy portrait. His phone rang but he didn’t react. After a few rings, the call switched to voicemail.

  I patted the breast pocket of my jacket to check that the letter from Ernie’s hotel room was still there. I knuckled the side of the door.

  He didn’t respond.

  For only the second time in five years I went into his room. It was just as I remembered it, pristine and serious, like a laboratory. The entire wall was a library of black lever arch files with white labels neatly noting their contents in a delicate italic type. It was a geography lesson in the world’s securities regulation: files on the SEC in the US, the FSA in the UK, the COB in France, the CNV in Spain.

  I coughed and Terry turned around.

  His tight gray features betrayed nothing—neither knowledge nor ignorance of Ernie’s death, neither joy nor despair, just the penetrative powers of little blue eyes that could suck the legal nourishment out ofturgid mounds of material that the world’s regulators had an unquenchable capacity to produce.

  “Oh, it’s you.” His voice was featureless north London, uninfluenced by his years in the States. He turned back to his desk and minutely rearranged a blotter pad. For most attorneys, a desk was a childhood sandpit where they could abandon themselves with their toys and make an unholy mess. But Terry’s desk was a field of open space: a computer monitor, a keyboard, a telephone, and a blotter inhabited only by what he happened to be working on that moment. All other papers would be sorted and stored in the Clay & Westminster blue files and hung in the credenza that skirted the wall.

  “Have you heard the news?” I asked.

  Terry seemed to be inspecting his fingernails, his spotlight eyes searching for flecks of dirt in their well-manicured curves. “Yes,” he said simply.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that you and he were close. He was a good friend to me as well.”

  Terry drew breath audibly and turned his attention from the actual nails and started a quality check on the cuticles, rubbing each one until he seemed satisfied that there was no immediate threat to their health. When he’d finished, he laid both hands flat on the desk.

  “Good friends are hard to come by,” he said at last.

  Ain’t that the truth.

  “I gather you have problems of your own,” Terry continued. I couldn’t see a newspaper in the room. “Ernie mentioned something. Not by way of gossip, mind. I know what people thought about Ernie, but he was trustworthy, didn’t let his tongue wag. Anyway, he said something about you having a cross to bear, but he didn’t go into detail. If that’s right, I’m sorry for it, though there was a time I would have rejoiced in the fact.”

  I couldn’t imagine Terry rejoicing about anything, still less anything to do with me.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” I pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “You know that I’m not a qualified lawyer, don’t you,” said Terry. I nodded. We all knew it—Terry’s Chip, it was called, a legal executive among fully-fledged attorneys. He was paid a ton ofmoney, but he wasn’t officer class, wasn’t a true member of the club.

  “When your father was still alive,” he said, “I asked Charles Mendip for a year’s leave to get myself qualified. I needed enough time to bring myself up to speed with the main body of law.” He waved his hand at the row of files along the wall. “My niche is too specialized, you see. This is all I know. I needed to cover the basics, real law.”

  “Didn’t he give it to you?” I asked.

  “He said that he had no problem with it, but that there was another senior partner who wouldn’t budge, said I was too important to let go for that length of time.”

  “Flattering, but rather unfair,” I said.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. I understood it was your father who wished to stifle my career development.”

  I was astonished. To my knowledge, my father had never particularly concerned himself with the aspirations of employees. He was like Charles; the development of the client base and doing deals were his overriding motivations. It wasn’t that I thought my father would be incapable of insensitivity to staff member who wanted to get on; it was just that I didn’t think he would care one way or another.

  “I’m sorry.” It was all that I could think to say. I didn’t feel any urge to defend the memory of my father.

  “Which is why I haven’t sought your company for the last five years.”

  Perhaps that explained the mild animosity I’d sensed coming from him; although he seemed to avoid most company, and I just figured that I was perhaps slightly more out of his field of vision than the rest of the office.

  “Why didn’t you simply ask Mendip if you could have time off after my father died?”

  “When I was refused permission, they sweetened the pill with a great deal of money, which I took. It didn’t seem right to ask again. Anyway, your father’s death wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know now that it wasn’t your father who vetoed my leave, after all.”

  A part of me felt a relief at this news. “Who was it then?” I asked.

  “Mendip probably. Ernie wasn’t sure.” It didn’t sound like Mendip’s style either.

  “So Ernie told you,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “He told me last night, actually. He rang me shortly after he’d got back to his hotel, still fresh from his altercation at the Schuster Mannheim reception. Said he was listening to angels and swigging malt, you know Ernie. He spoke warmly about you, how you’d escorted him when he couldn’t find me. He told me that it wasn’t your father, and said I should speak to you. And that’s what I’m doing. Apparently I’m fulfilling a dying man’s last wish.”

  The vision of Ernie flooded my head. I rather doubted that speaking to me was his last wish.

  Terry turned away from me. “I wish I’d been with him,” he said. For the first time in the conversation there was a trace of emotion in his voice.

  I pulled the envelope from my pocket. “This is for you, I think.”

  Terry reached out his hand without looking at me. I heard him fastidiously unfold the letter on his desk, keeping the piece of paper close to him, as if he were guarding a test paper from the roving eyes of cheats in an exam.

  “It would appear that your secretary, Paula, has handed in her notice,” he said. “Most unfortunate, but hardly my concern, I think.”

  Shit. I took hers back and gave Terry the one from Ernie. To my surprise, Terry found my error amusing. There was a gentle smile on his face.

  He studied the letter. “Where did you get this?”

  “I’d rather not say for now,” I said.

  Terry frowned, seemed that he was about to pursue the point, then relaxed. He was more interested in the letter’s content than the history of its delivery. “Do you know what it says?” Terry waved his hand over a page of Ernie’s scrawl that looked even more impenetrable than usual.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ithinkit’s a reference, bless him,” he said, handing me the letter. “Take a look for yourself.”

  I scanned it quickly. In the main it was gibberish, sentences didn’tstart or finish with anything like an approximation of English grammar, words were mispelled and misused, much of it was nearly illegible. But, at it
s core, there was a sense to it and I agreed with Terry that it looked very much like the attempt of a man trying to recommend, to whom it might concern, the virtues of another man—his work, his integrity, his intellect, his dedication.

  “Christ, I wouldn’t like to be going for a job on the back of this,” I muttered.

  I turned the letter over. “What’s this stuff, do you suppose?” Hundreds of numbers were scrawled on the reverse. They looked like arithmetical calculations, but with no total, no solution.

  Terry looked briefly. “Don’t know,” he said.

  “Maybe he was doing his final accounts,” I suggested. “Or maybe this was just a scrap he’d picked up to use. You know how he was, how he used to slice up old envelopes and draft letters on the back for his secretary to type.”

  “Perhaps,” said Terry, taking back the letter and looking at the text again. “He believed he was trying to save me,” he said.

  I gave him a quizzical look.

  “You see,” said Terry, “Ernie knew that the merger with Schuster Mannheim would be bad for me. He was very worried about it and told me that he had even written to Mendip on the subject, put it in black and white. He was right to be worried: I’m not qualified and I don’t try to ingratiate myself with the right people. In short I’m in no position to play the politics required to have real prospects in the enlarged firm.”

  I wasn’t about to argue with him. His future was pretty bleak under the Schuster Mannheim banner. When they cottoned on to what he was and what we paid him, they would want him out and quick.

  “So this was his way of trying to help me.” The emotion was back in Terry’s voice and for a moment I thought he might even cry, but he coughed slightly and straightened up. “Of course, it’s no earthly use to me, silly old fool. But a beautiful gesture. He must have been terribly ill when he wrote this.”

  He folded up the letter carefully and replaced it in its envelope and stuck it in the top drawer of his desk. “I shall treasure it,” he said.

  “Will you look for another job?” I asked.

  “Perhaps. I haven’t really thought about it. I do the work and that’s all. No plan. The last time I planned anything I wasn’t allowed to pursue the matter. Planning’s not my forte. At the moment I seem to be spending a large part of my time arguing with the US immigration authorities for Green Cards, visas, and whatnot for the other ever-mobile members of this firm. After the merger I expect they won’t need my rather subtle skills. They’ll just ring up, say what they want, and it shall be given.”