Leaving the World (16 page)

‘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 mid-fifties, 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.’

‘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 phonebook. 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 ageing 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 pay-off 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 naivety is just that: naivety.’

‘Stop berating yourself – even though I know you are genetically programed 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 pay-off 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 straight away 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.

‘So that’s why you’re driving a fifteen-year-old car and haven’t had the furnace overhauled since Reagan was president.’

‘I get by.’

‘“Getting by” isn’t good enough. “Getting by” is half a life.’

‘I’m fine, Jane. Just hunky-dory.’

‘And I’m buying you a new car tomorrow.’

‘You’re not to go squandering your money on me, young lady.’

‘And you’re to stop sounding like a Thornton Wilder character and let me indulge you a little.’

‘I’ve never been indulged in my life and I’m not going to start now.’

I didn’t point up the sad irony of that comment to her, but on the day after Thanksgiving I did drive her arthritic Toyota Corolla to a VW dealership on the Old Post Road and spent $8,000 on a new Rabbit for her. She put up a huge fuss but the salesman – a total smoothie, like all car dealers – immediately grasped the dynamic of the situation and played to her anxiety about having her only child buy her a car.

‘Now when I am your age, ma’am,’ he said, his Chicklet-like teeth fixed in a game-show-host grin, ‘I will hope two things: the first is that I am as young and lovely as you are. The second is that my daughter will think so much of me as your lovely daughter so evidently does of you – that she too will want to buy me a spanking new VW Rabbit.’

Mom, starved of overt male flattery, bought right into his shtick. Within half an hour, he’d convinced her to choose a Rabbit ‘in patriotic Liberty Red’ (Is there such a color – and do Germans manufacture it?) and to treat herself to air conditioning as well.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Mom told me as we drove away in her new vehicle.

‘Say nothing. You need – deserve – a good reliable car.’

‘You’re really making that much money in this financial job?’

‘I wouldn’t be spending it like this if I didn’t have it, Mom.’

‘Your father would be so proud of you.’

I said nothing.

‘Anything wrong, dear?’ she asked me.

‘No, nothing at all.’

‘Heard from Dad recently?’ she asked, trying to make this question sound as nonchalant as possible and not pulling it off.

I shook my head.

‘He must be working very hard then.’

‘No doubt about it,’ I said and the matter was dropped.

Later that day I called a local heating contractor. He was having a slow afternoon and dropped by the house. Again my mother made a big fuss about having perfectly adequate heating. Again she was silenced by a man of commerce, as the heating contractor told her (after an hour-long inspection of her home’s furnace) that her system was on the brink of implosion and if she didn’t replace the furnace next week he could guarantee her burst pipes and assorted other horrors.

‘How much do you think this will all cost?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t give you anything more than a ballpark figure,’ he said.

‘So what’s the ballpark?’

‘Around ten thousand.’

‘That’s obscene,’ my mother said.

‘No,’ said the heating contractor, ‘that’s what it costs.’

I told him to call me on my cellphone after the weekend to give me a precise figure – and said I would pay eight grand if he could guarantee that he could start work on Tuesday. When he rang me promptly on Monday morning, he said he’d do it for nine grand, tax included, if I could pay him half of it by the next day.

‘No problem,’ I said and got my bank to transfer $4,500 that afternoon to his account. At the same time I also dispatched an additional $10,000 to Mom’s checking account. On the day it reached her I was back in Cambridge. Mom called me, sounding deeply distressed.