The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

He’d held another meeting that afternoon to inform them it wouldn’t happen again, but they’d all laughed, old business men wishing they were young again, admirers of such youth and spunk, wishing in spite of themselves for the opportunity to revise the past that an unknown daughter of their own, crashing through the door, might have created. They laughed and slapped his back—all but one: the boy-genius Jacob Smart, twenty-six and already head of the trading department and new CFO. Jacob Smart was sharp as a tack but that day he’d been distracted, unable to concentrate, unconcerned with any of the decorative dilemmas regarding the air taxi. He’d waited until after the meeting and then approached Ben with the intense gaze typically trained toward financial figures.

  “Who was she?” he asked.

  She’d moved in at the horse ranch and established a certain corridor and set of rooms on the east wing as her domain, had commandeered and then shut them off, permitting Big Ben to come only close enough to hear the rhythms of the bass-driven music pumping at all times from her speakers, making the horses whine in their stables. For someone supposedly on a quest of self-exploration, she never seemed to go anywhere, unless it was to pester him at work, where she’d hang out on the concrete steps of the courthouse-style entrance, sunning herself, rubbing lotion on her tanned body, walking across the street for a pack of smokes or a candy bar or an energy drink, occasionally coming through the doors and taking the elevator directly to the top floor, where she’d recline on one of the couches, complaining about the heat or boredom. She’d interrupt him in the middle of important meetings, phone calls to his cell that he’d asked her please to avoid using except for emergencies, had called to get his credit card number to order pizza, to buy shoes.

  It was the one time that he fought his urge to answer her call that it turned out to be a true emergency. A call came in to his secretary, who forwarded it on to Big Ben, who turned on the speaker phone to hear her, in tears, on the side of the interstate where she’d rolled the Audi Quattro in which she’d arrived and, miraculously—though the vehicle had been reduced to a twisted hunk of aluminum—escaped unscathed. It was on this day, after she’d gotten a taxi to his office, that she had come face-to-face for the first time with Jacob Smart, hers smudged with tears and a little scrape on one cheek, his captivated, intent, lost.

  It was embarrassing. He was goofy around her. It was her mother’s bored face and mischievous grin that did it, Big Ben knew, but that didn’t make it any better, didn’t make it any more acceptable to see his CFO in his silk shirts and ten-thousand-dollar cowboy boots sitting on the front steps with her eating burritos and ice cream cones and licking the drips off her chin.

  He’d received phone calls from various high-ranking officials in the weeks that followed. “He’s out there again! You need to do something! She’s your daughter. Figure out a way to keep her away from here.” But Big Ben simply couldn’t. She could manipulate him in ways he’d never thought possible, especially from a daughter he’d just met—though in many ways that was the key. The fact that she’d lived without him for eighteen years, the guilt that he’d never have felt on his own had she not encouraged it with occasional uncorroborated stories of her childhood, unsupervised and out of control. Big Ben had known from the beginning that the whole sordid affair would not contribute positively to Jacob’s performance, though he’d never guessed that it would go this far, the two of them taking two-hour breaks to sit on the steps of corporate HQ necking. At the same time, there was no denying the relief he’d felt at not having her constantly around, at her being no longer entirely his problem. It was while they were finishing their upholstery selections—another meeting Jacob had absconded from to join Amelia on the front steps, a day when they’d set off the smoke alarm by ducking into a back corridor to smoke “cigarettes”—that he’d come up with his idea to get them out of his hair. “Why don’t the two of you go on a trip?” he’d suggested. “Take the new jet and go wherever you feel like going. Come back in a week with your heads screwed on straight.”

  They’d gone to Las Vegas, had come back with their heads screwed on no straighter but with rings on their fingers and tattoos on their ass cheeks that they’d insisted on showing everyone, the girl now calling herself Amelia June Simonton-Smart and waving around a little pregnancy test that said blue.

  That was how he’d gotten a grandson to spoil. And it was amazing how quickly Amelia had been changed by her pregnancy. She became the role of mother-to-be as completely as she’d become the rebellious globe-trekking child of wanderlust, the two (and then three) of them living at that far end of the second floor of the mansion on the horse ranch, Jacob having given up his condominium in favor of staying with Amelia, who claimed to love horses though Big Ben had never seen her come within a hundred yards of one, had never even seen her so much as set foot in any of his three hundred acres other than the path leading from the front door to the garage where she kept her new BMW.

  He’d seen the change in Jacob Smart as well, had witnessed the way the young man had turned the corner from promising to productive. They’d recruited him directly from Ansley and Surtain, the blue-chip consulting firm, which he’d joined directly out of Harvard Business School, which he’d attended directly after graduating from Princeton with highest honors. What Big Ben had liked about him was that he wasn’t just smart. He had the other skills as well, the skills to make people believe what he had to say and take stock in the plans he came up with. He’d hired him first as a consultant, had worked out a contract with the boys at A&S to get him to work exclusively on E-Star matters, had been unconcerned with the cost—anything to get this young star at work for his company, for amidst all the bravado of the interview, all the banter between the two of them like generals sharing war stories, Jacob Smart had also given Big Ben some interesting things to consider during his interview.

  “Question,” the young genius had said. “What’s the single most important interaction in the gas industry? Answer: It’s the interaction between buyers and sellers. Everybody wants a deal. Everybody wants to save money. But what is it that prevents this from happening? Risk. Uncertainty. A change in the weather causes prices to fluctuate unpredictably. Even though there’s plenty to go around, industrial customers can never be sure they can lock up enough. Meanwhile, the deliverers don’t want to get stuck holding the bag. It’s the excess that causes the uncertainty. Problem is: there’s nowhere to put all the gas you don’t want to take with you.”

  Big Ben had listened to this with his fingers steepled in front of his face. He lowered them and leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. “So you’re suggesting …”

  “I’m suggesting,” said Jacob Smart, leaning forward—still months from the afternoon he would meet Amelia—“that the gas industry could become more profitable if it became more like the financial services industry. And I’m suggesting E-Star could become the richest company in history if it became the first bankers.”

  They’d lived like kings on this concept, had taken advantage of every new requirement that came along with deregulation, had stirred their fingers in the pot of every energy and commodities industry in the country. Big Ben had gloried in walking the floors of the company—his company—visiting with his employees, all of them with smiles on their faces because it truly was fun. They were the cream of the crop, had recognized an industry about to become tremendously lucrative and had been there at the right time to collect the royalties. At the same time, it hadn’t been without effort—though it was difficult to call it work when you were rewriting all the rules. They were creative people with a culture built on making money no matter what. He’d talked to hundreds of young men like himself and had seen the look in their eyes that told Big Ben just what they thought of him, the look that said they had their eyes on the prize and were willing to do anything to get there, that if getting ahead meant meeting whatever quotas the company gave them—no matter what, every time—then they would do whatever was necessary, not out of love for their boss
or pride in their work—those things, Alaska had taught him, were no longer viable motivational factors—but out of a sheer, unyielding desire to become the next monthly bestseller, the next quarterly star, the next mid-year high roller, the next CEO. Ben had encouraged it, had known what it was like to be in their place, could still remember his own days driving the grease truck, riding in unsafe planes over the Alaska Range back and forth from Anchorage to Fairbanks, knew that many of these men had families just like he’d had, people who might have vied with the company for their attention, and any time he saw somebody staying late, working on a weekend, sleeping at his desk, he’d taken pride and a strange comfort at the sight of someone else choosing the same path he’d stubbornly adhered to all these years.

  It was for this reason that he’d been shocked to watch the change in Jacob Smart. From the instant the young man had laid eyes on Amelia, he’d been a different person: had stopped dominating every meeting with intensely explained methods of surpassing quarterly goals, of smashing annual plans. At home, at the horse ranch, Big Ben’s knocks on the doors of their separate wing went increasingly unheeded. The Sunday dinners upon which he’d once insisted—the table in the main dining room looking out on the south lawn heaped with casseroles and meats and three kinds of potatoes, a full wait staff filling their glasses and taking away plates—had become lonely. Evenings he sat alone in front of the ten-foot projection screen in his basement movie theater, watching old westerns and wishing Jacob were around to hear him reciting the lines verbatim. By the time Big Ben’s grandson was born, he’d begun to develop a rotten feeling about what was going on, about what exactly it was that Jacob did in his office two stories down from Big Ben’s. They had less and less contact—no more did they sit together for long periods of time during the group vacations the company took after quarterly audits: skiing in Colorado, sailing in Palm Beach, weekending in Hawai’i. In fact, Jacob had begun opting out of the vacations, citing the birth of their son, saying Amelia needed him around the house, saying that he was a father now—always looking askance at Big Ben when he did so. Ben had found the trips less enjoyable as well. He knew fewer and fewer of his employees. And he’d never realized until it was too late just how much he’d come to appreciate the presence of Jacob—the way they could speak so much with so few words, such was their connection and aligned viewpoint on the world. He should’ve seen it coming. Should’ve known all along that he was being hoodwinked. That a man who’d gotten to where he’d gotten by refusing to make his job secondary to his family had been turned into a schmoe by the son he’d never had.

  It was so complicated. He still could not comprehend how it had all transpired. Even now—watching the bluffs above the river give way to the rolling countryside from the passenger seat of his daughter’s BMW, having come off the highway and made their way to the dark two-lane road through trees that led to his three-hundred-acre horse ranch—even now he could not say where it had all begun, when the paper trail they’d constructed to hide all his company was up to behind the scenes had begun to reveal itself, when all the shady dealings and fabricated paperwork and phony audits and peculiar budgets forced through the accountants by means of a burgeoning portfolio of kickbacks had become too top-heavy to sustain. By the end they’d had their hands in everything, had gamed the California energy market and built immense power plants in India and Nigeria, had sold securities and traded futures on livestock and freight contracts, on wealth derivatives and even wind and water. They had done things so outrageous and beyond the scope of monitored business that it had been like a videogame itself, just like the little handheld machine his three-year-old grandson was so entranced with, empty figures from nonexistent partners rolling into their accounts like scores on a pinball machine. How could he question it? What could he have done even if he had harbored suspicion? It was the result of a company so large it was without limits. Employees had cut personal deals with lenders that made everyone rich but the company; partners had sold stock options and cashed it out of the general pension fund; finance officials had created over a thousand special purpose entities in order to legally launder money, had used structured finance to create the illusion of growth, had used any accounting trick they knew to book profits that didn’t exist, or wouldn’t exist for thirty years, had done it all right under Big Ben’s nose, had accomplished it all in the lower floors while he’d trusted them from the top.

  Now it had all come crashing down, the polished walls collapsing to reveal the tarnished core of his company and his life. Just six months ago, he’d been handing the business over to his son-in-law, the young man whose genius it was that had gotten them started on this trajectory, the young man who’d fallen head over heels for his daughter Amelia June and brought him a grandson. Big Ben had not stopped coming to work—how could he, after having built this company into the juggernaut it had become?—but he’d entered into a sort of retirement, attending the meetings now only for fun, stopping by with the caterers to bring the boys filet mignon for lunch. He’d not even had time to see the numbers falling off the deep end, had been surprised one Friday morning just two weeks ago in his old office, kept furnished according to his standards so he could drop in whenever he wished, when an email turned up in his box telling him to take a look at their stock projections. It was a curiosity—that’s what he’d felt that Friday morning. It was strange, but everyone seemed to be selling. They must’ve gotten some bad information.

  But then he’d arrived early the following Monday to find the place like a tomb, people gathered in groups looking at New York Stock Exchange figures. Jacob’s office was empty, stayed empty all day long—Big Ben hadn’t seen him all weekend and, as it turned out, would never see him again, would sit waiting for the boy he trusted most in the world to return and put his mind at ease while the numbers out of New York continued to plummet. A news story broke on CNN that a scandal had been revealed within the nation’s wealthiest company—a numbers game, a house of cards set to collapse, taking half the banks and financial institutions in America with it. A live report showed the front steps of corporate HQ, and Big Ben raced over to the window, looked down to find the tiny television trucks with camera crews in the street, reporters standing on the front steps so they could have it in the background of the shot.

  No one was saying much. No one had too many details, which was a problem, because Big Ben still had no idea what was going on. Answers were not forthcoming. There were shrugs. There were grown men crying in their offices, cars laying tire out of the parking garage. By Friday afternoon of that worst week of his life, the late summer sun pouring through the glass walls and into the conference room where he sat with his COO, E-Star’s stock had plummeted. Accountants and auditors were at the doors. The shred bins were full with boxes of documents piled up next to them, people doing all they could do and then hightailing it out of there. Phones were ringing off the hook with partners and clients and investors beginning to understand that their world was going up in flames.

  What had caused it? There were a million reasons, but what it really boiled down to was that it had never been real to begin with. The company on which he’d built his reputation, the company that had finally made him feel successful, that had finally made him think he’d made it in this world, was nothing but a fake, hadn’t turned an honest profit in over a decade, hadn’t made a legit deal in as long as anyone could remember. Even one year ago, when they’d been featured in Forbes and Fortune and Big Ben himself had graced the cover of People magazine (beneath a heading reading “Why Is This Man Smiling?”), even when they’d been reporting profits in the billions, they’d actually been losing money. The debt was astronomical. Nobody even expected them to try to pay it back. It wasn’t a matter of a company making amends for a mistake—it was a question of an entire country, an entire economy, trying to get back on its feet after what one analyst called “the most irresponsible set of actions by the most insidious group of people the world has ever known.”


  This was what it had come to, the seventy-year-old billionaire may or may not have been thinking that afternoon of the final attempt on his life, alone at the top of an empty building no longer his, confronting his own reflection and that of his only grandson, knowing there had to be something worth passing along, that in a life as eventful and influential as his there had to be something he could give the boy, who’d been a good sport and come all the way up to the top floor though his mother had seemed reluctant to wait in the hall. And what was the boy thinking as he stood attentively while his grandfather marched around the office, led the boy over to the glass wall behind his great ark of a desk, gesturing for him to look out over the city and the river? Did the boy think, as his grandfather may have, that there had to be some knowledge worth bestowing, an anecdote to arm the boy with some arsenal of the past? Was the boy surprised at all when, instead of sharing his wisdom, the old man looked around for something to throw? On the desk was a gold-inlayed globe, textured with topography, angled on the Earth’s axis. He lifted it up and hurled it at the window, at their reflections, ready for it to crash through the glass, a change in air pressure and a chaos of wind. But the globe was light and the glass was reinforced. It bounced off and rolled hollowly toward the corner of the room, while the boy raised his handheld videogame and resumed his play.

  THE HORSE RANCH WAS NAMED after his mother, her grandmother, though so distanced from that woman was Amelia June Simonton-Smart that she felt no sense of kinship, had felt none four days ago when she’d set out to pick up her father and her son from a hospital room three hundred miles away in Tulsa, Oklahoma, felt none as she returned late on this Saturday afternoon to find the road leading back to the ranch empty. Absent now were the media vans that had until recently been gathered on the dirt roads along the perimeter of the property, giant vans with the numbers of the local networks on the side and later the more recognizable acronyms of the corporate news conglomerates, trying to catch a glimpse of evil personified, trying to attach a human face to the scandal. Amelia June Simonton-Smart had tried not to give them the satisfaction, had eventually had her picture taken with middle finger extended as she drove past. It had taken them less than a week to discover that the electrical safety system on the twelve-foot-high brick fence was not functional. Then the vans were on their land, parked around the stables and on the south lawn, cameras trained through their windows twenty-four hours a day, knocks on the front door and the back doors and the patio doors, men appearing in the apple grove along the hillside with telephoto lenses, flashes flashing as she raced to sweep the curtains closed. An irate phone call to the security company had informed her that they hadn’t paid the bill in over a year—that despite all the money her father and her husband were pulling in, despite the private jet and the vacations and the expensive lunches on silver platters, they had not even enough cash to pay the bills, not even enough to pay the mortgage on this outrageous piece of property and the massive empty statement of a home that rested on it, that the horses were starving and neglected, that half the staff had quit: had not been, as her father had told her—one of the final things he’d said to her—fired for suspected stealing.