Walls of Silence Read online

  “Find yourself a stroker, Fin. Blow off the dust and douse yourself and your chosen belle with almond oil and stroke yourselves into oblivion.” He closed his eyes. “Ah, me,” he murmured.

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  He took a last puff from his cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer, letting the smoke jet from his nose, like twin exhausts. I noticed he didn’t have any nasal hair.

  “There’s been enough sensation for one day,” he announced. “It’s time for you to rest your eyelashes and I will safeguard the firm’s interests over a large T-bone and a prodigious intake of Stag’s Leap Cabernet.”

  As we left the Club, he put his arm around my shoulder. “Dante’sInferno,”he said. “I always find that when I’ve witnessed someone kill fifteen people and my client base has been torn from my teats, reading theInfernohelps put things in their proper perspective. That and a bottle of 1980 cask-strength Dailuaine malt whiskey. Now piss off back to your little box in your horrid tower block.” He patted my behind and gave me a push in the direction of my Battery Park apartment while he peeled off in the direction of our office.

  EIGHT

  The images in the papers the next morning were pretty much freeze frames of the previous night’s footage on TV, footage that had stalked me into an exhausted sleep; shots from the steel barrier, shots from the air, pendulous film taken from a boat on the East River, grainy telephoto intrusions into the gory nucleus of JJ’s finale.

  When I arrived at the office, it seemed quiet, subdued. As I walked through reception, I sensed that my connection with JJ was a poisonous vapor trail, paralyzing anyone who caught a whiff of it.

  Lamberhurst muttered something about how his commute took twice as long that morning.

  They knew I was there. But, as yet, the media didn’t. For the moment, I had a breathing space, a welcome and probably short-lived refuge from the clamor.

  Paula was kneeling on the floor by my desk, surrounded by blue files. Keenes must have gotten in early, told her to start sorting things for the handover to the musketeers. Christ, he’d been quick off the mark.

  She looked up, surprised. “Keenes said you wouldn’t be in. You should be at home resting.”

  I toed one of the files. Bellamy Stores. Three billion dollars; there would be a fat tombstone at the end of that one.

  “I didn’t like the homework Keenes set for me.”

  Paula stared guiltily at my desk. “I wouldn’t have left the newspapers lying around if I’d known you were coming in.”

  A tablecloth of theDaily News, Wall Street Journal,and theNew York Times.

  “You’ve seen them already, I guess,” Paula said.

  “Some of them.” I traced a finger along the picture of a poignant hand dangling from a dense tangle of twisted metal. I sniffed at the printer’s ink smearing my fingertip. Sweet, dusty.

  Paula stood up, splaying both hands across the small of her back and thrusting forward her pelvis.

  “Getting old,” she said.

  “You’re only forty,” I replied.

  “What do you know, you baby?”

  About her? Precious little. About as much as I knew of JJ.

  I noticed a plastic thermos on the table; blue, opaque, the kind used for picnics.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Soup. I was going to bring it over to you later.”

  “That was sweet of you. What are you doing, as if I didn’t know already?”

  “Spring cleaning, was how Keenes put it,” Paula said.

  Rearranging the dust, recalibrating the fear.

  “How very Keenes,” I said. “Charles Mendip showed up yet?”

  “I heard Keenes talking to his secretary—later today sometime, I think. I also heard him say that JJ Carlson’s funeral was this afternoon.”

  I picked up theDaily News.“Star Banker in FDR Carnage.”

  “That’s quick,” I said. “I’m surprised the police would allow the body to be released so soon. Not that there would be much to release.”

  The relatives would want him under the turf pronto, I guessed,less chance of being mobbed by the families of the other victims at the graveside. Still, it was hardly twenty-four hours since the smash. A burial so soon must have taken some string-pulling. Some Jefferson Trust string-pulling, and a postmortem performed with the speed of a Japanese chef preparing sashimi.

  And thus far, Jefferson Trust had, understandably, kept a low profile—a lone statement from an anonymous communications guy, expressing condolences to the bereaved and injured, and that was it. No comments from colleagues, fellow bankers. Jefferson Trust had comprehensively zipped up their staff and it was left to the journalists to piece together JJ’s career from already published sources: Most were accolades, bolstered by catalogs of breathtaking deals done in countries a geography teacher wouldn’t know. No talk of his family, though. Nothing of his upbringing. His life started at Harvard Business School, it seemed. He was born in a lecture hall.

  What had gone wrong? The newspapers asked: What had unhinged him? The Wall Street hotshot life, the twenty-four-hour days, the travel, the computer screens, the meetings, the unrelenting pressure to make money, the scrap heap if you didn’t? Why didn’t the banks, the law firms, the accountants, have clinical psychologists and organizational behaviorists dogging the employee’s every step? We do, protested the institutions. Well, you don’t have enough of them, blustered the editorials.

  Then they turned their attention to the protection afforded to drivers on the FDR: Were the parapet walls high enough, sturdy enough? Weren’t the traveling public manifestly at risk from aerial bombardment? Hadn’t anyone noticed? Someone was to blame. There had to be somebody to take the heat.

  I had a terrible feeling I knew who that somebody would be. They would paint a target on my forehead and start shooting.

  “Myers Myerling,” I whispered.

  “What you say?” Paula asked.

  “Clay & Westminster’s PR people for the merger. I wonder if Keenes has told them that I was with JJ . . . They should be briefed. When it gets out, we’ll need them. I’ll need them.”

  “Do you want me to get them on the phone?”

  “I’d better speak to Keenes first. The way he is, he might fire me for not consulting him.”

  I called his office. His secretary said he was busy. I couldn’t leave a voicemail—Sheldon didn’t believe in voicemail, as if it was a moral issue. So I relayed my respectful suggestion that Myers Myerling should be contacted, adding that I was sure that Sheldon had thought of it already.

  “I’m sure he has,” his secretary oiled. If he had, she should know, I thought.

  I spent the next couple of hours typing up my notes as Paula knelt on the floor, making sure that the files were sorted properly between correspondence, drafts, and final documentation. I looked at her from time to time, back hunched over the piles of paperwork, her elegant hands sifting and selecting pieces of paper as if they were priceless papyrus just unearthed from the darkest corner of a pharaoh’s tomb. I found the scene strangely calming, and felt myself relax.

  Paula must’ve sensed that I had stopped typing. “I got eyes in the back of my head. Get on with your work,” she said without turning around.

  “Do you think I should go to JJ’s funeral?” I asked.

  “Hell do I know?”

  “I mean hewasa friend and a client.”

  “Funny kind of friend that asks you to a killing.”

  At that moment I decided to go. I realized I wanted to. Perhaps I couldn’t fully accept what had happened without witnessing something tangible of its aftermath. I didn’t want to see JJ’s body in a glass-top casket and weep over it asking why, why, why? But maybe seeing his wife, Miranda, and the other relatives would give the whole thing a much-needed human dimension.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Two o’clock,” Paula said. “You’ll be quicker if you grab a cab outside rather than order
a car.”

  The cab was a sullen knot in the rope of traffic that slithered slowly across Long Island, finally making good its escape from the misnamedExpressway at Exit 40, thereupon losing itself in the roads threading through the seemingly endless acreage of cemetery that dominated this part of the Island. It was like a national park for the dead.

  The driver had professed to know the precise location of Pinelawn Memorial Park. He didn’t. And by the time he dropped me at the estate offices just beyond the entrance, I was well and truly late.

  A clerk in the office directed me to the Garden of Freedom and handed over a map. I should have kept the cab: The place was huge, a city of the dead with its own stop on the Long Island Railroad, which ran alongside.

  I started the jog through the thin drizzle to the Garden of Freedom, down Lillian M. Locke Drive, past Fountain Garden, the Garden of Remembrance, to a T-junction into Holly Drive, past angels, headstones, mausolea, modest squares and circles of slate and stone, like manhole covers in the immaculate lawn.

  Onto Vista Road, a curve right into Adams Drive, and then a left into Freedom Drive, clogged by a parked convoy of ubiquitous funeral cars abutting a rampart leading up to the raised central area of the Garden of Freedom.

  Ahead of me, beyond the cars and on the slope, a dreary clump of blackness stained the gray green, forlorn under a gazebo on wheels, protected from the elements by white canvas.

  A sad gathering appeared like a rain cloud over the brow of the central knoll. JJ’s party, it had to be. I’d have missed the interment itself, but I could pay my respects anyway.

  A small woman shuffled, the walk of old age performed by a youthful body. She was supported by a man in his mid-fifties. His brittle gray hair was tied back in a small ponytail, face a wrinkled wreck, but familiar, bearing recognizable traces of Carlson. Father? It didn’t feel right. Brother, perhaps. His expression displayed no emotion, but his step seemed to harbor an impious energy that didn’t respect funerals.

  Behind the pair strolled a dysfunctional group; singletons in close proximity rather than a unified body welded by shared grief. Carol Amen and Sheldon Keenes. Three others, all men. And a fourth, already yards away from the train, a cop maybe, assigned to scout for clues among the mourners.

  The man with the ponytail kept turning back to survey the group, appearing to keep his gaze on Carol longer than the others.

  I approached. The small woman looked up at me. Her eyes were masked by a pair of enormous sunglasses.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  Miranda Carlson didn’t look anything like I’d expected. She wasn’t unattractive and had a firm intelligent mouth, but she was mousy: mousy face, mousy hair. And the baby mice weren’t in tow.

  I told her who I was.

  “You saw it happen,” she said flatly. How did she know? The police must have told her. She took a small handkerchief from her sleeve, but it wasn’t to deal with tears. She wiped the front of her glasses, which were covered in a thin film of rain. The man with the ponytail took the glasses from her, finished the job, and handed them back. He never moved his eyes off me.

  “Yes, I saw it happen. JJ asked me to come and see his new car,” I said.

  “Now why would he do that?” she asked. There was a twang in the voice that came from someplace a long way south of New York.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Didn’tshehave the answer? My job had been to accompany JJ to meetings and draft his documents or share a few Jack Daniels with him in a bar or sit next to him at a ball game. She lived with the guy. She ought to havesomeidea of why he killed himself.

  “You were his friend,” she said, traces of emotion beginning to show through the funereal veneer.

  “I didn’t know him that well, Mrs. Carlson,” I said gently. “He was a great person and I admired him enormously, but he didn’t confide in me. I’m sorry.”

  “No one knows him anymore.” She sounded scornful. “Two days ago he was a hero, people loved him, they all told me what a great guy he was, how they had a ball when he was around. How he gave to good causes, the scholarships he endowed, hospital bills he paid for strangers. Now no one knows him, no one will say they were his friend, and no one knows why he killed himself and fifteen others, leaving me and two kids wondering what in Christ’s name went wrong.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I mumbled.

  She moved toward me and took off her glasses again. Her eyes were as dark as berries and their rims puffy with weeping. “You were an adviser, weren’t you? His attorney? Well, Mr. Attorney, advise me, tell me what happened. I expect you pocketed enough dollars during his lifetime. Said you were his friend. Now you don’t know a single goddamned thing and you crawl back to the sewer saying sorry.”

  She turned around and addressed the gathering. “The friends of the great JJ Carlson,” she screamed. “Three attorneys and some deadbeat bankers. Did you come to help me and support me? You’re no help or support unless you can tell me what happened.” She buried her head in her hands and the ponytailed man closed around her. Was there the ghost of a smile on his face?

  Suddenly she lifted her head and freed herself from the embrace, surveying us all with undisguised contempt. “None of you can tell me. I don’t know what you’re doing here.” Her voice was quiet, featureless.

  She turned to her chaperon and took his hand. “Let’s go. I don’t know any of these people.”

  The two of them walked away from us, and no one seemed willing to follow in their angry wake.

  Sheldon emerged out of the following phalanx. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said. He looked irritated, as if Miranda’s outburst was my fault. “Have you finished getting your files straight for a handover?” he asked. I nodded, disgusted but unsurprised that he’d raised the question in this particular setting. “Good,” he said. “Charles has arrived and he’ll want to know it’s been done.” He paused. “By the way, we had already contacted Myers Myerling. Don’t call them yourself. I’ll let you know when we have the script, andwhenit comes, stick to it. Extempore efforts on your part will be unwelcome.”

  There was a rumble of thunder in the distance and Sheldon patted the small folding umbrella that stuck out of his jacket pocket. “Graveyards and thunder. How bloody fitting.” He eyed Miranda Carlson disappearing into the mist. He seemed lost in thought. “Think about where you want to go on holiday,” he said at last, and wandered off in the direction of the line of cars. The bastard hadn’t even offered me a ride back.

  The three bankers were talking with Carol and I heard one of them ask her if she wanted to share their car back to Wall Street. She told them that she’d be with them in a moment. She walked over to me.

  “It was nice of you come,” she said. She looked as emotionally wrecked as Miranda, but the small round dark glasses and the damp silken mass of hair made her exotic and mysterious. She wore a bracelet, an Eastern filigree of dull silver. A black skirt and blouse completed the effect, as if she was ready to film a rock video among the gravestones.

  “JJ would have given you hell for being late,” she said. I took this to be a funereal joke, but Carol didn’t betray any signs of humor, her rich lips fixed in a sad droop. “You know how he was with people turning up late for meetings.” JJ had been a hypocrite on that score; often he hadn’t turned up for meetings at all.

  “You got hurt,” she said, looking up at Paula’s bandage. I had forgotten my injury. The bandage would be looking like a flattened piece of gum by now.

  “A splinter. It’s okay.”

  Carol nodded. I didn’t get the impression that she wanted any more details of my injury, such as it was.

  “I’m sorry you got caught up in this,” she said and started walking. “I’m not sure what I’m caught up in, if anything. Do you have any idea why he did it?”

  As she walked, Carol stared ahead of her. “I’m glad the kids aren’t here,” she said.

  I muttered my agreement. The last funeral I’d attended had been my father
’s. But the memory was dim: I was on tranquilizers, my mother was on tranquilizers, and it was a bedraggled little band that had watched him lowered into the next world.

  “He often said you were a very good attorney,” Carol said.

  The words my father never said to me.

  Carol stepped off the turf and onto the road. She scraped damp shards of grass from her plain black flat shoes against the brick edge.

  “He was a good banker,” I said.

  She just whispered, “Yes,” and carried on walking, looking up at the soupy sky as a wave of thunder burbled over the cemetery.

  “You want a ride?” she offered.

  With Carol on her own, it was a no-brainer. Along with three Jefferson bankers . . .

  I said no thanks.

  “I think we’re in for some heavy rain. You’ll get soaked.” Her concern touched me, surprised me even.

  “I’ve got my cell phone and can call for an office account car,” I said. “Thanks all the same.” I didn’t actually know if a car could be arranged to pick me up from this far out, but I would figure something out—I needed to test my resourcefulness, even in the smallest matters.

  We reached the line of cars. A black stretch was waiting with its engine running and one of the bankers standing beside it, holding a door open. He asked whether Carol was coming or not, as they had to get back for a meeting and needed to leave right away.

  The rain started to get heavy. “You sure you don’t want a ride?” Carol asked. Inside I was hesitating, but my body language had already declined.

  She looked up again at the gray sky. “Shitty weather. Maybe I’ll go somewhere hot and dry.” She turned to me. “The next deal may be in India. India’s hot, isn’t it?”

  “But not necessarily dry,” I said.

  “You been there?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. If I were looking for somewhere hot, it wouldn’t be India. It wasn’t on my map anymore.

  She seemed uncertain about her next move. “See you soon,” she said finally, and turned away.

  As I dialed the car company, my shoes scuffed the asphalt in annoyance at my decision. A lazy voice on the end of the phone told me that the car would be with me in an impressive fifteen minutes.