There was a moment of awkward silence after I ended my rant. Then Ames and Fletcher exchanged a glance before Ames spoke.
“Be that as it may, Miss Howard—and my instinct tells me you’re being straight with us—the fact remains that the money you sent your father allowed a wanted criminal to vanish. My superiors in the Bureau will need a full accounting of your financial position, to see whether this is a one-off or a pattern of pay-offs.”
“I have never, ever given him money before.”
“Then this assertion will be borne out by a thorough inspection of your bank records and all other financial transactions over the past five years.”
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a legal form.
“We could, naturally, get a court order to run a thorough investigation on your accounts,” he said. “But I’m certain you’d prefer it if your record showed that you fully cooperated with the Bureau and the SEC in their investigations.”
“I have nothing to hide,” I said.
“Then you will not object to signing this form, which authorizes us complete access to all your accounts.”
He pushed the document toward me, laying a Bic pen on top of the page. I stole a fast glance at Brad. He gave me a very discreet but rapid nod. I picked up the pen and read quickly through the document, which essentially gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation and “any other government agency” the right to poke everywhere in my financial affairs. I picked up the pen and signed it, then pushed the document back to Agent Ames. He accepted it with a severe nod, then said: “Do you have a passport, Miss Howard?”
“Of course,” I said, thinking: He probably knows that already.
“We’d like you to surrender it to us,” he said, “just until our investigation is terminated.”
“How long will that be?” I asked.
“Three to four weeks . . . as long as there are no further queries about your involvement in the case. You weren’t planning to travel overseas in the coming weeks, were you?”
“Hardly.”
“Then I’m certain you wouldn’t mind—as another act of goodwill—turning your passport over to us. If your boss doesn’t mind, one of our agents will drive you to your apartment in Somerville to retrieve it now.”
They know where I live.
“I have no problem with that,” Brad said.
“Glad to hear it.”
Ames reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone, and dialed a number, then talked quickly for a few seconds before closing it with a decisive snap.
“An Agent Maduro is waiting outside in a blue unmarked Pontiac. He will bring you home and back here within an hour, traffic permitting. He’ll also give you a receipt for the passport. Once we’ve finished our investigations we’ll be in touch and will return the document to you.”
Ames stood up, followed by Fletcher. They proferred their hands. I took them, hating the fact that I had to engage in such politesse. But I had no choice here, and I knew it. Brad, meanwhile, stayed seated, staring at his fingernails, refusing to look over at me.
I went downstairs. Agent Maduro was standing by the car.
“Miss Howard?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Thirty-two Beverly Road in Somerville?”
“You’ve done your homework,” I said.
He smiled a tight smile and opened the back door for me. Once I was settled inside he climbed into the driver’s seat and we were off. He said nothing to me all the way into Cambridge. Not that I minded—as I was now seething with unadulterated rage at the monster that was my father. I’d read somewhere once that embezzlers operated in a parallel universe where they justified their malfeasance by never considering the harm they were doing to others. My dad obviously cloaked himself in a similar sort of amorality. Everything to do with that man had been predicated on falsehoods and dirty dealings. Though I had been trying to tell myself otherwise for years, I now knew what I’d never dare admit: he never loved me and I’d grown up knowing that I could count on him for nothing. My welfare, my well-being, had never interested him and I could no longer pretend otherwise. Any more than I could turn to Mom for the unconditional love I always craved. Hell, she was still telling herself that, one fine day, Dad would come back to her. Just as she would also let me know—when I revealed all that the FBI and the SEC just told me—that my father was incapable of such wrongdoing; that she knew he was the honest person she had deluded herself into believing him to be.
Out of nowhere I slammed a fist into the upholstered backseat and found myself gulping down the scream that so wanted to leap out of my mouth. In the front seat Agent Maduro studied me in the rearview mirror.
“You all right, ma’am?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, my teeth gritted.
When we reached my apartment, Agent Maduro got out and opened the car door for me, then said: “If you don’t mind I’ll come upstairs with you.”
“No problem.”
Upstairs I found my passport and handed it over to him. Maduro acknowledged its receipt with a nod and spent several minutes copying details from it onto a form. Then he handed it to me and asked me to fill in my home address, phone and work numbers, and sign below the printed declaration that I was giving this passport up without coercion; that I granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation the right to hold it “for an indefinite period”; and that I waived my rights to demand it back before the Bureau saw fit to return it to me. I pursed my lips as I read this.
Agent Maduro saw this and said: “Generally, if everything checks out, you should have the passport returned within a few weeks but, of course, that depends on whether . . .”
He let the sentence die there—because he knew he didn’t need to finish it. I took the pen and scribbled my signature. He pulled off a duplicate copy and handed it to me.
“Here’s your receipt,” he said. Then we returned to the car and said nothing to each other all the way back to Boston.
When I entered the foyer of Freedom Mutual, the temporary receptionist stopped me dead with: “Mr. Pullman wants to see you immediately.”
I’m sure he does.
“Please wait here until I call him,” she said.
She picked up the phone and whispered something into it, then looked up at me and said: “He’s waiting for you in his office.”
I had never been in Brad’s office before. As I was walked down the corridor to the big wood-paneled doors, I sensed this might be my one and only glimpse of his sanctum sanctorum. I was strangely calm as my heels rapped percussively on the parquet floor—the sort of calmness that arrives in the face of the stoic acceptance of one’s fate.
I knocked on the door. I heard Brad shout: “Come in.”
I opened the door and entered a room that had been done up to look like something out of a London gentlemen’s club—all heavy mahogany and oversized distressed burgundy armchairs, and Federalist art, and a massive fireplace currently ablaze with logs, and a huge nineteenth-century globe, and Brad sitting behind the sort of vast wooden desk that looked like the place where Admiral Nelson once plotted naval strategy. Knowing Brad’s ability to buy anything he wanted, it probably was Nelson’s original damn desk.
Brad was staring into a computer monitor as I came in, a pair of glasses (never seen in public) on the edge of his nose.
“Sit down, please,” he said, not turning away from the computer monitor.
I did as ordered, sinking into the armchair in front of his desk and doing my best to sit up straight in it. He turned away from the computer, pulled off his glasses, drummed his fingers on the desk, and said: “There is dumb and there is stupid—and you are guilty of the latter. I don’t care if the guy was your father and you’ve been spending your entire damn life trying to impress the son of a bitch. You never, never, hand over any sum over five thousand dollars to anybody if there is the slightest doubt in your mind about the probity of the individual. Courtesy of the SEC and Homeland Security, all foreign
wire transactions over five grand are immediately scrutinized by assorted spooks and financial regulators. The fact that you transferred money over to a shyster—”
“I never knew.”
“In our game—and at the level we play our game—that is not a satisfactory answer. The problem here is—”
“I know what the problem is,” I said, cutting him off. “I’ve brought heat to this company and you don’t want—or need—that sort of heat. So I’m very willing to take responsibility for my actions and resign on the spot.”
“Your resignation is accepted. Your future here is finished. In fact, your future in any financial-sector industry is finished because no other company will ever touch you after this business—and also because you will now trigger a red flag whenever the SEC or the Feds are running one of their standard security sweeps of the business.
“As far as the world of money goes, you’re dead.”
I stared down into my hands and thought: My father has gotten his wish. I’ve finally followed in his footsteps and failed at something.
Brad continued talking.
“There will be a termination payment. Our lawyers will be in touch with you in the next few days to discuss this.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Don’t be noble about this,” he said, turning back to his computer. “People get fired all the time in our world. If they are as junior as you they rarely get sent off with a golden parachute.”
“Then why are you giving me one?”
“That big deal you scored for us. It was a lucrative piece of work and it showed you had smarts. You made us money. We now have to let you go. But you will still get some compensation for that one piece of good work. End of story. Take the money or don’t take the money. The choice is yours.”
There was much I wanted to say right now. But I knew that I had betrayed an unspoken corporate code of conduct by bringing unwanted heat across the office threshold. It didn’t matter that I had been duped. According to the Brad Pullman Rules of Engagement I had screwed up royally and now had to pay the price of banishment—albeit one with a golden parachute to keep me afloat.
So I did what was expected of me. I stood up and left. As I reached the door I said two words: “Thank you.”
Brad Pullman looked up from his figures and replied with two final words: “You’re welcome.”
As soon as I was outside Brad’s office, I was greeted by Reuben Julia. He was Freedom Mutual’s “office manager”—though everyone in the firm knew that he was the de facto head of security and the man whom Brad counted on to keep all shit at bay. As I was now in the “shit” category, Reuben was here to sweep me away. He was a man in his midfifties, small, dapper.
“Miss Howard,” he said, with not a hint of menace to his voice, “I’m going to escort you out of the building now.”
“Fine,” I answered.
We said nothing to each other as he tapped a few numbers into a keypad next to a side door. It clicked open and I followed Mr. Julia down a series of long corridors to a back elevator. As we rode downstairs he said: “I’ll get someone to clear your desk today.”
“There’s not much there anyway.”
We reached the first floor. A Lincoln Town Car was waiting outside.
“Max here will be taking you home,” Mr. Julia said. “As Mr. Pullman told you, our lawyers will be in touch in a couple of days.”
With a quick nod of the head he said goodbye. The car took me home. A few minutes after I crossed the threshold the phone rang. A gentleman named Dwight Hale was on the line, informing me that he was from the firm of Bevan, Franklin and Huntington and acted as Freedom Mutual’s legal counsel. He asked me to drop by his office near Government Center tomorrow to discuss “the settlement.”
I did as ordered, showing up at ten the next morning. Dwight Hale was in his late thirties—slightly chubby, very “time is money.”
“Freedom Mutual is planning to offer you three hundred thousand dollars as part of a termination agreement,” he said.
This information took a moment or two to register.
“I see,” I finally said.
“Is that acceptable?”
“Absolutely.”
“There is one small condition to the settlement—that you sign a confidentiality agreement, stating you will never talk to anyone about your time at Freedom Mutual.”
You mean, just in case the Securities and Exchange Commission begins to nose around their books and decides to interview all employees past and present?
“I know so very little about the inner workings of the company.”
“I’m sure that’s true. This is a mere formality.”
Better known as an oath of omertà . . . yet one which was worth a cool three hundred thousand dollars.
“I need to have my own attorney look over the agreement before I sign it.”
“We have no problem with that. But if we don’t have an answer from you in forty-eight hours the settlement offer will be rescinded.”
“You’re not trying to pressure me in any way, are you?”
“We just want to get the matter settled as quickly as possible.”
“Of course you do.”
I didn’t have a lawyer but I did know how to use a phone book. And when I got home to Somerville an hour later, I picked the first name under “Attorneys” in the local Yellow Pages. It was a guy named Milton Alkan. He answered the phone himself with the voice of an aging and inveterate chain-smoker. When I explained what I needed done—and preferably before the end of the day—he informed me that he charged $200 per hour (a bargain by Boston standards) and if I could get the documents to him in the next fifteen minutes . . .
Milton Alkan was in his late sixties—diminutive, gnarly, with thick Coke-bottle glasses and an emphysemic cough. His office was a storefront off of Davis Square. Though he sounded as if he’d been working his way through two packs of cigarettes a day for the past fifty years, his manners were courtly and avuncular.
“So you worked for Freedom Mutual,” he said, scanning the first page of the confidentiality agreement. “I’m surprised you didn’t go to some white-shoe law firm downtown.”
“I’m certain you can tell me what I need to know for around a quarter of the cost.”
“That, young lady, I can do. So why don’t you go get yourself a cup of coffee somewhere and I’ll have this all done for you within an hour tops.”
Mr. Alkan kept his word. When I returned sixty minutes later he favored me with a wry smile and said: “If I’d known the size of the payoff you were getting I’d have charged you double. But feel free to go ahead and sign the papers. There’s nothing tricky or sinister contained herein. They are just covering their tukkas, like all business types. But if you don’t mind me asking you something: Why did they let you go?”
It’s curious, isn’t it, how we sometimes unburden ourselves to strangers. But Mr. Alkan had the demeanor of a Jewish Father Confessor and the story came tumbling out of me in a matter of minutes. He listened impassively, shaking his head a few times when I told him about my conversation with my dad and the revelations I learned about him from the FBI. When I finished he went silent for a few moments, then said: “Under the circumstances I think three hundred thousand dollars is the very minimum you should have received. What you did for your father by giving him the money was a mitzvah. And though he may have hated you for it, he must also feel a deep, abiding shame. You did something honorable—and even though it backfired on you, you still behaved ethically. In my book, that counts for a lot.”
Christy told me the same thing when I called her late that night in Oregon and brought her up to date on everything.
“You were conned by a con man—who also happened to be your father. And that, my friend, is awful.”
“The thing is, I helped fund his con. I looked stupid as a result of his con. But naïveté is just that: naïveté.”
“Stop berating yourself—even though I know you
are genetically programmed to do so. When you’ve been duped by your own father, you have to start pondering the larger question: is anyone ever really worthy of trust?”
“And the answer to that is . . .”
“Hey, I write poetry. I have no answers, just a lot of unsolvable questions. Meanwhile, take their money and do something interesting for a while. A new perspective or two wouldn’t hurt you.”
The only perspective I had right now was the belief that life was so often a series of major and minor betrayals. Dad had been betraying everyone close to him for years. Just as my beloved David had betrayed his wife for years—and I had played a key role in this betrayal. And though the payoff from Freedom Mutual could be considered a termination agreement, I also knew that it was a way of buying my silence.
But Christy was right: I should still take their cash. After all, life so rarely pays you for actually trying to do the right thing. So I called Dwight Hale the next day and said that the signed documents were ready for collection. He informed me that he would send a courier for them straightaway and I could expect the money in my account within a week. He also asked me to phone him should the FBI be in touch with me “about any further matters.”
“I have nothing to tell them,” I said.
“That’s good to hear.”
I found myself becoming guilty about my immediate lack of occupation or industry. So I set myself up at a desk in the Wiedner Library at Harvard and forced myself to start working. My project was a straightforward one: to turn my thesis into a book which, if published, might just help me land a teaching job somewhere. I put in fourteen-hour days for a full month. The writing all came easier than I expected—perhaps because I was simply reshaping an existing manuscript and also because work, for me, was always a form of escape; a way of subsuming the furies within.
Halfway through the month-long writing marathon, I took two days off and headed to my mother’s house in Connecticut. Did I want to be doing this? Hardly. But after not paying her a visit in four months it was a duty I could no longer dodge. So I showed up with champagne and expensive truffles and insisted on taking her out to an expensive restaurant in Greenwich for dinner. Mom repeatedly worried out loud about all the money I was spending. Though I kept trying to reassure her that I was making serious money—for all sorts of obvious reasons I couldn’t tell her I had lost my job at Freedom Mutual—she kept saying that I shouldn’t be making a fuss of her, that she was doing “just fine” on the librarian’s salary she was holding down.
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