Walls of Silence Read online

  He put the cap back on his pen when I’d listed them all. “Impressive,” he said. “Quite a portfolio.”

  “And now you want to sell it off, don’t you?”

  Sheldon finished his Perrier, letting an ice cube slide into his mouth.

  Crunch.

  “Just lighten your load for a while.”

  “Why?”

  Sheldon sighed. “Do I really have to spell it out?”

  “JJ,” I said. “I was in the wrong place. You’re worried about my mental equilibrium—or lack of it. I might frighten the fee-paying horses. What else, Sheldon? Or have I grasped the essential point?”

  “In broad terms, yes, although I wouldn’t have expressed it that way.”

  “I see.” It had been so quick. This morning I had a client list and now . . .

  “So you don’t think I can hack it, that I can’t judge for myself if I’m well enough to do my job?”

  “It’s not like that.” There was a slight stammer over thelinlike.“Charles thinks that . . .”

  I slapped my hand on the arm of the couch. “And who gets the list, Sheldon?”

  “Paul, Alf, and Terry.”

  Lamberhurst, Silverman, and Wardman. Who else? The three dysfunctional musketeers: each for himself and not one for the others. Sheldon was credited with much that was good about the New York office, but establishing an esprit de corps wasn’t part of it.

  Christ, no. I moaned out loud. “They’ll trample all over my files.”

  Sheldon bridled. “They’re good lawyers. And they aren’tyourfiles, they belong to Clay & Westminster.” He paused. “Anyway, they will be terrific stewards until—”

  “Until, until. Until when?”

  “Until you’re better.”

  “I was overlooking the FDR, Sheldon, not crashing into it. I was only a bystander, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Please, Fin. Fifteen people—”

  “This isn’t about the smash, though, is it? This is an opportunity you’ve been waiting for.”

  Sheldon froze. “I think you ought to stop right there.”

  “Charles foisted me on you and you’ve wanted to shake me off ever since.”

  “I’m warning you, Fin—”

  “For five years I’ve delivered the goods, swelled your profit share. But your lip still curls, doesn’t it? Not cut from quite the right cloth, am I?” No nanny, no Oxbridge degree.

  “This isn’t about the chip on your shoulder,” Sheldon said.

  “When will Charles be here?” I asked. Charles Mendip liked me, was almost family, had made a speech at my parents’ wedding. He was my godfather, for Christ’s sake. My protector, my mother’s too,in loco parentisto us both. Sheldon had beguiled him for a moment, but Mendip would protect me again. That was the godfather’s role when the father wasn’t around anymore.

  “He’ll be here tomorrow.” Sheldon leaned forward. “The handover of files washisdecision, Fin.”

  No. Mendip wouldn’t do that. Sheldon was using the big man as his shield. Anyway, it would offend Mendip’s dictum about finishing what you begin, something he used to lecture my father about. What had my father said? Don’t take half-eaten files and don’t give them—heartburn will follow. Maybe the musketeers would choke on the damn things. But I didn’t want that, I just wanted what was mine, what I’d built.

  Sheldon looked exhausted. “It’s settled, Fin. Go home.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s still work to be done on the platinumclients for tomorrow’s meeting with Walsh.”Mendip will be here tomorrow. Hang in there.

  Sheldon shook his head. “You’re off the merger as well.” He slipped his pen into a little leather holster and glanced furtively at his computer screen.

  “You can’t,” I murmured.

  But they could. They had. It was a done deal. The molten Lucite was bubbling in the saucepan ready to pour into the mould for the tombstone.

  “One more thing,” Sheldon said. “We’ll need some handover notes.” He waved at his own notes. “These won’t be sufficient. They need fleshing out.”

  I nodded absently.

  “I suggest you do them at home and e-mail them in.” He stood up. He was blushing. “Then think of somewhere to go. A holiday. England, maybe. Or wherever takes your fancy. Sun or snow. On the house, as it were. Within reason, of course.”

  Outside Sheldon’s office I had another flash of memory. A woman, standing in the midst of the wreckage on the FDR. I realized now what was odd about her: not the blood, nor the summer dress stuck to her like something out of a grotesque wet T-shirt competition. Nor the eyeglasses bent and twisted but still on her face.

  She was holding a dog leash. The remains of her dog hung from the end of it. She hadn’t buckled him up properly.

  The woman just stood there, as if she was waiting for Pooch to take a pee and then trot off alongside her.

  SEVEN

  Ernie was already settled in the ersatz salty sea dog atmosphere of the Lubber’s Club at South Street Seaport when I arrived just before six. A gaunt dome seated alone at a table for six with a prime view overlooking the dockside, he was watching the tourists peer in through the netting, lanterns, and wax fish, as one massive hand tilted a tumbler of gin and the other toyed with a cigarette smoldering illegally in a saucer alongside him.

  “Unreal City,” he said as I sat down. T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land.Eliot had been describing London, but the line suited New York better. Ernie summoned a waiter with a regal wave.

  “You poor thing.” He squeezed my hand. Inclining his head slightly, he brought his face up close to mine. Sad, rheumy spaniel eyes. “Silly bankers getting sulky and offing themselves in front of one of my lavender-scented innocents. The world is a darkish domain, much in need of compassion and sound ministry.”

  He glanced up at the waiter, now standing at attention next to him looking like a crossbreed of butler and Captain Ahab. “A Barracuda’s Colon with a twist of fennel, if you please,” he said solemnly.

  “Excuse me, sir?” the waiter said impassively.

  “Large Gordon’s and tonic.” He turned and grinned at me. “Home of the cocktail and they don’t even know of the Barracuda’s Colon. Bloody disgrace.”

  He studied my face again. “Hmm,” he said, mopping his massive forehead with the crisp linen napkin before tossing it onto an empty table nearby.

  “Seen Mendip yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Just come off the phone with him,” Ernie said, patting his vest. I could make out a cell phone peeking from the folds of his enormous midriff. “He rang me on this thing. They issued me with one so they could keep tabs on me—they assume I will never find the off button. Bloody right, the bastards.”

  Ernie took a mouthful of gin. I guessed it wasn’t his first; he had that lubricated look.

  “Haven’t the foggiest notion where he is. Didn’t ask—he could be on the ninth fairway at Wentworth for all I know. But he’s pretty cross with you, I’m afraid.”

  “Why? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  My drink arrived and Ernie allowed me to consume about half of it before elaborating. “You werethere,”he said. “Wrong place, wrong time. Rotten luck, of course. Not your fault that you got caught up in the Jefferson Trust laundry basket, but Mendip finds himself in a delicate position. While he’s busy negotiating the merger that will get him his knighthood and fill our pockets with loot, our biggest client has one of its uberwankers slaughter fifteen good citizens—with you looking on with your opera glasses and popcorn.”

  But was it necessary to strip me of my client base?

  “Vicious and totally unnecessary.” Ernie took hold of my hand again, rolling it on the generous mattress of his palm. “I remonstrated with Charles about that, but he responded with an agonized more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger speech about how the partnership constrained him.” Pain boiled in his eyes. “It breaks my heart. More likely one partner, rather than the whole letterhead: Apparently th
e Hitler Youth is spitting bullets and insisting upon it.”

  Sheldon Keenes—the Hitler Youth—kept the office dagger well whetted for Ernie’s back. Sheldon saw Ernie as the hulking obstacle in his path to the pinnacle of the Clay & Westminster mountain.

  Ernie was one of the old guard, though, and Mendip had always made sure that Sheldon’s cutlery did no real harm. But now it seemed that Sheldon had Mendip’s ear and was whispering poison into it. Had I lost my protector?

  “Nil desperandum,Eyelash,” Ernie whispered, pushing my glass of gin toward me. “Remember: you’re still a favorite. Just like your Dad, the silly plonker. If he were here, I’m sure he would say: Keep your head down, let Mendip give you a bit of a spanking, sing the Firm song, and boldly march forth toward your allotted pedestal in the great pantheon of Clay & Westminster.”

  My father wouldn’t have said anything of the sort and, anyway, he wasn’t a role model that I was remotely tempted to follow. I needed a living, breathing intercessor. Ernie was as close as I was going to get until Charles arrived.

  “They’ve taken me off the merger as well,” I said. “Surely you can do something, get through to Charles. He’ll listen to you.”

  Ernie sighed. I noticed an olive flush staining his face, aging it. He’d grown old since we’d last met. “I’m an irrelevance now,” he said. “Or irreverence, as Charles dubbed me the other day. My station on the letterhead is a fig leaf, Fin. Of course, I have too much capital and too many friends for them to ignore me entirely. But I don’t bill very much anymore and my rather colorful behavior excludes me from drumming up new clients. They want me to help see them through the merger with the Shyster Guggenheims and then bugger off into the sunset. And I’m inclined to go along with their spastic little plan.”

  He dipped his finger in his gin, sucking on it sensuously. He looked out at the ships and hummed.

  “No room for an old poof like me in the new regime,” he mused. My father once said that Ernie’s camp exterior was mere chintz, veiling something complex and delicate: a web surprisingly un-English and tragic. Ernie sighed. “But I can’t quibble that it’s the right thing to do. Anyway, even if it wasn’t, arguing with ten thousand management consultants would bring me out in spots.” Suddenly he brightened.“Still, I shall have my pretty friends to visit me and pay homage. I expect you to sit at my feet and receive counseling—after all, you are an orphan and need a father figure.”

  “My mother’s still alive,” I observed.

  “She’s a woman. Doesn’t count.”

  “You must’ve had a mother, Ernie.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, but didn’t seem to want to pursue his normal line of misogynist banter.

  “We were talking about Saracen Securities at the merger client committee today.” I knew I shouldn’t be telling Ernie this.

  He didn’t seem very interested anyway. “Metals, dull or shiny, although predictably gold’s their favorite. Turks, you know. But they smoke a lot and have a healthy regard for sodomy, so we mustn’t be too harsh. Who was at the meeting?”

  “Ellis Walsh.”

  “Walsh is a cunt.”

  I raised my glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

  “What else were you working on?” Ernie said. “Before the Hitler Youth raided your client base, that is.”

  I told him.

  He looked troubled. “That’s quite a net-full, Fin. Did Sheldon say he would handle them himself?”

  “He’s going to divvy them out between Lamberhurst, Silverman, and Terry Wardman. That’s my fear, Ernie. I may get my clients back soon enough, but what shape will they be in after the trio have hacked them up?”

  “Hmm. Terry will tend the plants well enough,” Ernie said. I knew that he and Terry went back a long way, but to the rest of us Terry was a mystery: a quiet, fastidious man who dealt with regulatory matters with a ruthlessness and success that was totally at odds with his shy, gentle grayness. I always felt that I had even less rapport with Terry than the others—he was always polite but there seemed to be an edge of animosity directed toward me that I couldn’t fathom.

  “As for Silverman and Lamberhurst,” continued Ernie, “you’re right to be concerned. Competition lawyers: buried in Brussels and Hart Scott Rodino, counting out washing machines and hatchbacks.That’s not law, it’s kindergarten arithmetic. They shouldn’t be let loose on grown-up deals. I’ll have another word with Charles, if you like. Not that I think it will do any good.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  “I don’t know why he did it,” I said.

  Ernie lit a cigarette. “Carlson, you mean?”

  “He had everything. Only three weeks ago he was on the front cover ofMergers and Acquisitions Monthly.”They’d taken an airbrush to his teeth and hair, but it was a pretty accurate likeness. “A wife and two kids as well.”

  Ernie smiled grimly.

  “Okay, Ernie,” I said. “We all know your views on family life.”

  JJ hardly ever mentioned his family; in fact, I may have learned that he had children from someone else. But, even when drunk, his eyes didn’t trace the trajectory of a cute ass or return the twinkle of a dolled-up loner along the bar top.

  “Probably teed off at his bonus,” Ernie said. “Twenty million hardly goes anywhere these days.”

  No, not that. He loved money, sure. But he used to say he would swap it all for freedom. He felt constricted by Wall Street. No space and silence, he’d say. Give it up, I’d reply, you can afford to. Buy your own island and lie on it. No, he’d say, there’s a guard at the door. Then he’d order another drink.

  “And why me? Why ask me along to watch?”

  Ernie shrugged. “Perhaps he loved you, Eyelash. Did you brush his hand away from your crotch one evening? Hell hath no fury like a banker scorned.”

  Ernie was smashed; he was getting stupid.

  “I think he was lonely,” I said. But why? People would have paid to spend an evening with him. And why hang out with me? I had kidded myself that it was the chemistry of respect, the alchemy of turning fine legal work into friendship. But it hadn’t been real friendship, had it? He talked; I listened. I prattled and he got drunker and drunker, his vigorous, clean-shaven features melting, his stolid head sinking onto the backs of his perfect hands, his dark, swollen eyes roving, from their glass-level vantage point, along the ranks of bottles. Perhaps hewas looking into the mirror behind the bottles. Seeing something that I couldn’t see for myself.

  “And angry,” I said. You had to be angry to kill fifteen people. It had been a deliberate act with near certain consequences.

  To whom would the police turn to get a foothold on JJ’s loneliness and anger? Miranda, his wife. Fellow bankers. Carol Amen, chief investment banking counsel for Jefferson Trust, JJ’s favorite legal architect for his deals. Cofavorite, with me, the outside counsel.

  The rest of his family? What family? I didn’t know if his parents were dead or alive, if he had brothers or sisters. Was there a cousin in Baltimore? I knew nothing about him.

  Ernie shifted himself in his seat and called the waiter over.

  “Same again.” There was no energy in the voice, his multiple chins spreading over his upper chest like a glutinous slick, partially obscuring the knot of his tie.

  He picked up the pepper shaker and absently sprinkled some of the gray powder over the end of his lighted cigarette. A few fizzes and sparks, then a return to the lazy blue column of smoke.

  “You have to know where to look,” he said. “Follow the fear. It gathers in the unseen crevices, like dust.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” He carried on tipping pepper on the cigarette until it was asphyxiated.

  He straightened himself, lifting his chins off his chest. “T. S. Eliot.”

  Who else?

  Ernie liked to drift in and out of poetry, out of the garrulous and into the morbid.

  Fear. What did fear have to
do with anything? “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”

  Ernie scowled. “The climate of fear. Your fear for your career. Sheldon Keenes and his fear of me. Mr. Charles Mendip and his fear for the merger, his knighthood. Jefferson Trust and their fear of the fallout from Mr. Carlson’s auto aerobatics. Schuster Mannheim will feel it too. It gets into everything. Maybe Mr. Carlson was afraid.”

  He lit another cigarette and laughed, his face reanimated, thechins inflated. “But bugger fear, a pox on it. The important issue isyouranger. Keep it in check, Fin. Lie low. Don’t panic. Your Papa panicked, God rest him. Don’t get stuck in the same crevice as him.”

  He tousled my hair. “And what about your loneliness? Isn’t some siren stroking the gorgeous cock that undoubtedly slinks beneath your rather indifferent suit?”

  It was some time since anyone had stroked any part of me, let alone my cock. In the office by eight, out at eleven, often later. Sleep in between. The exhausting road to partnership was narrow and featureless. True, there was the odd movie with Silverman or Lamberhurst or the frantic whistle-stop around Manhattan for the periodic wide-eyed visitor from London. Most of them knew New York, though, and didn’t need a guide. Work and get sloshed. Then more work.

  Relationships, I realized now, didn’t feature. A few stolen lunches, guilt over my truancy making it hard to swallow the food. Six fumbling, heavily condommed fucks in six different apartments, seen for dinner but never for breakfast. I doubted if my trysts would fill a single commercial break in an episode ofSex and the City.

  Only Carol Amen came close. So close. If the gap had only narrowed more, allowing my hand to run through the swathe of caramel-colored hair, letting me feel the heat from her blazing chestnut eyes. Such a paltry distance, less than the length of her powerful forearm. Near, nearer, like a wave on the beach foaming whipped cream over my feet, but no farther.

  Ernie heaved himself out of his seat and flung a hundred-dollar bill on the table.