Mortal Bonds (4 page)

T
he Kid was finally asleep. There were nights when he shut down at eight o’clock with no more resistance than a halfhearted breathy moan, and there were nights when he exploded with fears, tantrums, and furious stimming. Remaining flexible, creative, and patient helped. A little. After eight months or so of single parenthood, I was becoming almost sympathetic of my ex-wife’s failure to cope.

I had mummy-wrapped my son in a spare sheet—the pressure helped him relax—and read to him from the only nontechnical car book that he allowed,
The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars
. While he did not often laugh—in fact, he was usually startled and frightened by others’ laughter—he did giggle. It sounded like squirrels fighting, but it was the free expression of pure delight, for him and for me. So, though I could repeat all the words of the book by memory—and after the initial reading, so could he—I would have read it every night, if he had let me.

Most nights it was car books.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Automobiles
;
The A to Z of Cars
;
The Car: A History of the Automobile
;
Muscle Cars, Detroit Rising
;
Ford: The Car and the Dynasty
;
How Cars Work
;
Classic Cars
;
Antique Cars
;
Detroit’s 50 Biggest Losers
. Some nights I read to him; other nights he read. He didn’t read, of course. He memorized. When he read aloud, he mimicked the delivery of whoever had first read the page to him. Not the exact voice, but a simulacrum, with identical pace, inflection, and tone. Sometimes it was the half-Cajun, half-southern-syrup drawl of his grandmother; other times the sound of his mother, his uncle, my father, his babysitter, or his teacher at school. And sometimes it sounded like me.

I wrote a to-do list for Carolina, our Costa Rican part-time housekeeper, mentioning for the umpteenth time that his SpongeBob sheets should not be bleached because that made the colors fade, and my son liked his colors always to be the same. Exactly the same. Her English, however, was no better than my Spanish—what little I had was mostly expletives, learned in prison, or references to food and drink, the only trophy from a deep-sea fishing trip out of Cabo before I was married.

My laptop was open, recharging on the table while softly playing the
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . the Grateful Dead
live album. The twenty-two-minute jam on “Lovelight” deserved to be blasted from my KEF speakers in the other room, but I had deferred that bit of self-indulgence until my son went away to college.

I swung the screen around and typed a quick search for the Spanish word for bleach.
Lejía.
The pronunciation guide was no help.
Quitar color. Blanquear.
I tried out
“No quitar color, por favor”
until it flowed as easily as my best Spanish sentence,
“Una más cerveza, por favor.”

Then I remembered—he would need T-shirts for camp. I felt like I was always remembering something I should never have forgotten. School was almost out, and the Kid was enrolled in a special-needs day camp, though I was sure he would have been much happier spending the summer at an automotive school, or working at a car wash. He would need shorts, too. And sweatpants for the cool days. And bathing suits for the pool. Did they make kids’ bathing suits in flat black? Beige? My son had strict rules about what colors could be worn on which days. And none of the clothes could have writing on them. He hated clothes with writing. Did the camp have a uniform? Impossible. Well, if they did, let’s hope that it was colorful, so that he could attend at least twice a week! And then it occurred to me that his favorite black pants were now short enough to show his ankles. Could he get through the whole summer without them, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the tantrum of trying to get him to wear a different pair—at least until fall, by which time almost anything could happen? I put my head on the table for a moment and closed my eyes. It wasn’t the tantrums that wore me down, it was the day-to-day minutiae filtered through my son’s unique perspective. Nothing was simple.

The obvious conclusion was that I was a terrible parent. I wasn’t bad as a father. I read to my son, I took him on fun outings, I made him “Dad” kind of food—scrambled eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches. I bought him ice cream. But without his entourage of shadow, housekeeper, teachers, doctors, and occasional volunteer duty from my father, the Kid and I would have been at each other’s throats. And the smart money would be on him.

But I had chosen this challenge and never regretted it. My ex-wife, Angie, had done her alcoholic, narcissistic best, but by the time I got out of prison and found them, she had abandoned the boy to her mother, who kept him locked in a spare bedroom. She wasn’t being deliberately cruel; she just couldn’t cope with a child who communicated mostly in grunts, growls, and quotes from commercials. A child who bit whenever threatened; would not be held, hugged, or kissed; flew into violent rages or deep depressions when his clothes were the wrong color; banged into furniture until he bled; and regularly threw himself down sets of stairs in an attempt to fly. He had other quirks, too. Those were just the highlights.

It took a small army of specialists to get him there, but the Kid was talking, his balance and coordination were much improved, and he was learning how to control his rages and fears. He hadn’t bitten anyone in weeks. But every night, after he was asleep, I sat staring down Broadway from my eighth-floor window, reminding myself of all I had not done for him that day. The list got longer every night.

My cell phone rang.

“Hey, how’d it go?”

“Ah,
mia batata
.” It was Skeli, in my unbiased opinion the most completely perfect woman on the planet. When we first met she was working as the decorative foil in Roger’s clown act and finishing her doctorate. She was powerful, beautiful, and intensely independent—I did mention that I was unbiased—and a New York survivor. Despite having been doused in ketchup and bitten during her first dinner with the Kid, she kept coming back. She liked him. I liked her. Sometimes, she even deigned to share my bed.

“What did I hear you say?”

I turned the music off. Skeli’s only imperfection was her taste in music, which tended to run toward Faith Hill and Dwight Yoakam. “I’m practicing my Spanish, so I can tell Carolina not to bleach the Kid’s sheets.”

“And you need to call her your ‘sweet potato’ to get her to understand?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes, Skeli,” I said. Skeli—a Greek pun on “legs.” My nickname for her.

“Martyr. So answer my question. How did it go?”

“I’m hired. It’s a treasure hunt. The old man misplaced some of the money he stole, and the family wants me to find it.”

“Will you?”

“For five grand a day and a performance bonus, I will try really, really hard.”

“When do you start?”

“Tomorrow. As soon as they send over the documents I need.”

“You have a date tomorrow.” As in, you have a date tomorrow, and
don’t forget
!

Skeli was graduating from a three-year doctoral program in physical therapy from Columbia University. I was not going to miss it.

“I will be there. They’d have to pay me at least ten grand before I’d skip that ceremony.”

“You’d skip my graduation for ten thousand dollars?”

“Wouldn’t you?” I said, still thinking we were both having fun.

“Actually, no.” She let me squirm for a moment before continuing. “But if you get an offer up around fifty, take two and I’ll go with you.”

For once I let wisdom win out over exercising my sometimes lame sense of humor. “Forgive me for making a bad joke. I will be there without fail.”

“And one request? I know you’d like to buy me flowers. Everybody there will be getting flowers. But just for me? No flowers. Okay? Promise?”

Skeli associated bouquets of flowers with her ex-husband’s repeated infidelities. Someday, I vowed, I would cure her of this affliction and cover her in rose petals.

“How about a potted palm?”

She chuckled. “How about a buzzed begonia?”

“A looped lily?”

“Bad. A schnockered nasturtium?”

“Say that three times fast.”

She did.

“You win. Are you coming over?”

She gave a sigh. “You know the Kid hates it when I’m there in the morning.”

“No, he just never sees me smile in the morning, except when you’re here. It confuses him.”

“And if I leave before you get him up, it’s like I’m sneaking out. That panties-in-the-pocket feeling. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a lady.”

“I’ve noticed. That’s why I want you to come over.”

“See you tomorrow. Pick me up at two? We’ll walk up together.”

“Dulces sueños, mia batata,”
I said.

“Oh, god. Carolina’s going to bust a gut. Have you ever heard yourself speak Spanish? You make it sound almost Russian. See you at two.”

And she was gone. But so was the blue cloud of guilt that had been pressing me down into the chair. I got up and went to bed.

The phone rang again fifteen minutes later. I had just dropped off.

“Change your mind?” A man is essentially an optimist where his libido is concerned.

“Jason?”

It was Angie. My ex. All libidinous thoughts vanished.

“The Kid’s asleep, Angie. As a matter of fact, so was I. What do you want?”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too,” she said.

“Sorry.” I pulled myself together and fought the impulse to check to see that my wallet was on the end table. My money tended to disappear around Angie. “How are you? How’s your mother? Tino?” I could do polite when challenged.

“Thank you. All just fine, thank you. I am calling to talk to you, not my son.”

“My son”—this was about territory, possession. I discovered that I had a headache. Five seconds earlier, I did not have a headache.

“Angie,” I said with a resigned sigh. “It’s late. Is this an emergency? Can’t we do this during normal hours?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tomorrow? Midday?”

She ignored me. “I am coming to New York. Mamma and Tino are coming, too.” Her brother. “I will spend some time with my son. Reconnecting. And I want to see you. There are things that need to be said. Things that need to be set right. I need you to hear me out. You owe me that much.”

When I went to prison, Angie and I had worked out a plan. We got a divorce, and I transferred half my assets over to her—the Feds and my lawyers took the rest. The second half of the plan was that we would reunite once I was out. Instead, Angie had taken off for home—Beauville, Louisiana—taking our boy and the money. When things got hard, she dumped the Kid and kept the money. Then it got worse. A lot worse. I really didn’t think I owed her a damn thing.

“Great. You know where to find us. When are you planning this for? No one but German tourists comes to New York in summer, but don’t wait for Thanksgiving. I won’t be able to get your mother good theater tickets, and the Kid absolutely hated the parade last year. Total meltdown when the Captain America balloon crashed into the Ethical Culture building.” I was babbling. If I kept talking long enough, maybe she would just hang up and never come to New York.

“I’ve sublet an apartment for next month on Central Park West. Tino will call you with our flights.”

“Next month?”

“Well, next week, actually. They let us have the place a little early.”

“Angie. Next week? I’m working. The Kid has school. We can’t just drop everything and—”

“We will work around all that,” she interrupted. “I do not need your permission to see my son or to come to New York.”

Technically, this was true. She had signed over sole custody to me six months earlier, and we had verbally agreed that she should keep her distance until the Kid rebounded from the treatment he had received while in her care. But if I tried to keep her away, she might easily demand a court review. I did not trust the courts to judge what was best for my son.

It was late. My head was splitting. “This is not what we agreed.” I had a headache. When I was trading I never got headaches. Then, when I began the fraud that eventually brought me down, I had them all the time. But from the time I heard my sentence in court, through two years of incarceration, followed by eight months of learning to live with and love a very difficult boy, I could count on one hand the number of times that I had suffered a headache. I had one now.

She heard my unspoken acquiescence. “Oh, now, don’t go all
nerval
on me, Jason. I am a changed person. I have turned my life over to a higher authority. I think I will surprise you.”

Angie was always full of surprises.

“The Kid does not do high drama well, Angie. I’m going to set some boundaries, and I expect you to respect them.”

“You make it sound so warm and inviting.”

“No joke, Angie.”

“I’ll have Tino call you.”

I got up, swallowed three ibuprofen, and sank back into my chair, staring down at Broadway.

G
ood morning, Kid,” I called from the door to his room. I had once made the mistake of creeping in and giving my beautiful six-year-old son a soft kiss on the forehead as a way of waking him. It woke him. He sat up screaming, almost colliding with me in the process, and rubbing at the spot with his pajama sleeve so hard that he still had a bright red mark there when I dropped him off at school.

I waited the agreed-upon ten seconds and called again. “Good morning, Kid.” It was a ritual—or a formula. A slow count to ten following the first and second greetings, and he would answer on the third. It had taken me three months of trial and error—which translates as fights and screaming fits—to come up with a way of getting him out of bed that was both gentle and effective.

“Good morning, Kid.”

“Good morning, Jason.” He sat up and checked the alignment of his cars on the shelf over the bed. None had moved overnight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and bent forward to look down. The floor had not disintegrated while he slept. He hopped down and shuffled past me and out to the table.

It was Thursday. Cheerios and milk. A thimbleful of no-pulp orange juice, a large glass of water, and a chewable vitamin—artificial banana–flavored.

On the advice of his tutor/minder/shadow—the usually infallible Heather—we had spent a week that winter experimenting with a gluten-free, dairy-free, casein-free diet. As far as I could tell, the Kid had not actually swallowed anything other than water and his vitamin pills all week. He didn’t rant, or cry, or spit things out. He just opened his mouth and let the soy milk, nondairy cheese, and wheatless bread spill out onto the table. Then he would take a second bite, chew a few times, and repeat the openmouthed drool. I don’t know how either of us lasted the week.

While he finished the Cheerios, I laid out his clothes. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday were the easy days. Colors were allowed. They didn’t even have to match. Blue pants and a red shirt. Or a yellow shirt. Or green. Monday was blue. Wednesday and Saturday were beige or khaki. Fridays were black—all black and only black.

“Do you know what I did yesterday?” I said, coming back into the room.

The Kid looked thoughtful for a minute. “No,” he finally answered.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, speaking more to myself than to him. Of course he didn’t know what I had done yesterday. “I got to ride in a helicopter.” Which had left me feeling nauseated, weak-kneed, and feverish. “It was cool.”

The Kid had learned that this kind of vocalization from another person was called conversation and that some response was expected.

“Why?” he said after a long pause.

Heather had taught him a few stock phrases—“That’s nice,” “Sounds good,” and others—but he was still uncomfortable with them. “Why?” was his old reliable.

“I had to go to Newport. On business. They picked me up in the helicopter.”

He thought about this for another long time. “That’s nice,” he said.

Too bad it wasn’t a twenty-year-old Ford Pinto or an old Gremlin, I thought. Then we’d have something to talk about. The Kid lit up only for cars.

“Okay, get yourself washed and dressed, my man. Then we’ll do flash cards.”

“Stupid,” he said. But he padded off to the bathroom.

Despite his comment, the Kid was ready and back in record time. I got the flash cards, and we sat down across from each other.

The cards had photographs on one side—of people interacting, or of faces in differing emotional states. On the back was a one- or two-word description of each. The subtleties of emotional communication, which most children pick up almost osmotically, were a mystery to my son. His school recommended the cards—maybe they helped. Some days the Kid scored one hundred percent; other days he was lucky to get one out of three.

“Happy.” The Kid was supporting his head with one hand on his cheek, the elbow on the table, and his whole body slumped at a thirty-degree angle. If there had been a picture for it, the word on the back would have been “Bored.”

“Very good.” I always gave him “Happy” first. He never got it wrong, and I thought it helped for him to get an easy one to start. I flipped up the next card—a snarling, red-haired little girl.

His eyes flicked to the card and then rolled up to the ceiling. “Angry.”

“Very good. Why would she be angry? Can you think of any reason?”

He thought for a moment and then tapped his free hand to his cheek in imitation of a slap. The Kid had been slapped once by my ex-wife’s second husband. Once.

“Okay. Maybe she got slapped. I guess that would make her angry.”

He gave one emphatic nod. We were making great progress.

“Okay. Next.” I held up the next card. It said “Worried” on the back.

The Kid blew air out through tight lips.

“Come on. You remember.”

He mumbled.

“No fair. No mumbling.” Mumbling led to humming, which led to stimming and thence to a trance and so on. The key was to keep him engaged.

“Jared.”

“What?”

“Jared,” he repeated, and pointed at the picture.

I flipped it around and looked at it. There was a Jared in his class, but he looked nothing like the picture. Jared was white, for one thing, and the picture showed a very concerned black boy.

“No, Kid. This is not Jared. Try again.”

He rolled his eyes back to the ceiling again. “Stupid.”

“What’s stupid? The game?”

He pointed at me.

“I’m stupid. Maybe so, but this is not Jared. Come on, you can do it.”

He blew air out again. He pointed to the picture. “Jared.”

And it hit me. He was right. Jared was the most timid, anxious child in the class. He was near the top of the class in communication and was obviously very bright, but he wore a constant mask of worry. The Kid saw what I had missed in the picture. He was doing better than I was. I saw a black kid first and a frowning one second. The Kid saw it as a frowning kid, no matter the skin color.

“Kid, I’m sorry. I see what you’re saying, and you’re right. I’m stupid. You teach me something every day.”

I put away the cards.

“Let’s hit the road.” His look of confusion stopped me. “Sorry. Let’s get on our way to school. Shoes on.” I pulled on my running shoes and tied the laces. He worked his Velcro straps. I noticed that his feet were outgrowing his shoes. Again. One more thing for my to-do list. “I’ll give you today’s big news on the way.”

He ran and stood by the door. If he’d had a tail, it would have wagged. While I locked up, he ran ahead and called for the elevator.

I waited until he had pressed the button for the lobby and we were on our way down. “I spoke to your Mamma last night.”

The Kid’s eyes stayed focused on the elevator doors.

“She wants to come visit us. You. She’s coming to New York.”

He may have grunted.

“Mamma and Tino are coming, too.” Angie’s mother was also “Mamma.” The Kid refused to be called by his name, Jason, because, he insisted,
I
was Jason, so there couldn’t be two. On the other hand, he had no trouble keeping track of which Mamma was being referred to at any given time. Tino was Angie’s brother, Antoine. He ran Lafayette’s most upscale beauty salon, with his own line of products—L’Affaire pour Elle. Angie had stayed with him after her accident and all through her rehab. The guy topped my list for Most Deserving of Sainthood.

The doors opened and the Kid jumped out onto a white tile. We walked on only the white tiles.

“Help me out here, son. How do you feel about your Mamma coming to visit?”

He made a face just like the angry girl in the cards.

“Great,” I said. “That makes two of us.”

•   •   •

I TOOK
the long way home after dropping the Kid at school, cutting over and running through Central Park, once around the reservoir, then down the drive past Belvedere Castle and out on Seventy-seventh Street. Pounding along at an even eight-minute mile allowed me to work up a sweat and still think about the Kid.

The Kid hadn’t said another word to me the whole twenty blocks up to school. I hadn’t pressed the issue, even when he refused to sniff hands with me—the usual conclusion of our morning ritual when I dropped him off at school. I was a bit surprised that he was taking the news about his mother’s visit this way. He had not seen her since December, and before that, October—and things had certainly been bad at those times—but they spoke on the phone every Sunday morning. He answered her in monosyllables, but that was a big step up from the grunts or growls he used on most of the human race. Something would break. Patience was my gold standard. Eventually, he would talk to Heather or Skeli, or my Pop, when he was ready. Maybe he would even speak to me.

“Package fuh you at the desk, Mr. Staffud.” Raoul, the day-shift doorman at the Ansonia, was never one to waste his breath on any unnecessary
r
’s.

The information from Everett Payne. Time to put away my concerns for the Kid and my fears about his mother coming to visit. Time to solve the puzzle that had confounded hundreds of trained financial forensic investigators over the past ten months. Then I’d think about getting lunch.

The plain cardboard box held various loose papers, and a six-inch-thick manuscript, bound in plastic, with a nondescript gray cover. Emblazoned on the front in bold font were the words
REPORT OF THE JOINT TASK FORCE FBI/SEC TO SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK, U.S. ATTORNEY PETERSON—ONGOING INVESTIGATION “HOUSE OF CARDS”—NOT FOR CIRCULATION.
Below this was a line in much smaller type:
Document #6 of 12. Return to Document Library, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 26 Federal Plaza, New York, NY.
It was a nice touch of bureaucratic optimism.

I scanned the loose pages—lists of friends, employees, and contacts at other firms and the various subsidiary companies in the Von Becker empire. I put them aside and started on the government report.

In my experience, the federal Justice Department was plodding, verbose, and lacking in finesse or subtlety. But very thorough. If they had been landscapers, they’d have used steamrollers. The report had all of those attributes.

There was a twenty-three-page introduction, which held only three vital pieces of information. First, William Von Becker had been running a classic Ponzi scheme for at least the past ten years, and likely for many years before. This was not news, but the case was clearly laid out. Von Becker reported consistent paper profits to his investors without ever actually investing the money they entrusted to him. When a client asked for a payout, he got it. The payouts came from new investor money. Meanwhile, Von Becker used the funds on hand to maintain a lavish lifestyle and to provide philanthropy to a range of causes.

Carlo Ponzi had not bothered with the philanthropy.

Second, the number of transactions within the funds—money moving in and out, sometimes for as quickly as a day or two—was circumstantial evidence of money laundering. Millions, sometimes fifty or a hundred at a clip, would come in from one account. A day or so later, a similar amount, less a small haircut, would be wired out—to an entirely different account. Most of the transfers were for foreign clients, but they still fell under the reporting umbrella. Some official body should have taken notice—the Fed, the SEC, or Homeland Security. But no one had shown any interest until after the fact. The report, having been produced by the FBI and the SEC, blamed everyone else for this failure to oversee.

I scanned the pages detailing these transactions. It was the smallest evidentiary section, but the amounts involved dwarfed everything else by billions. And it was here that the third and final important point was revealed. As Virgil had said, when you crunched all the numbers, there was about three billion unaccounted for. It would take me days to run through it all on my own, but I saw the pattern right away.

There was someone I knew who could help. I dialed the number in Vermont.

“Spud, what are you up to?” Fred “Spud” Krebs had been a lowly trading assistant on Wall Street until he was laid off last year after helping me with an investigation. When it came to wading through mountains of trade reports, he was the go-to guy.

“Hello, Jason. I’m leaving the end of the month. Two months backpacking around Europe. Then it’s back here to start law school in the fall. So what’s up?”

“Do you have time for a small project before you go? Usual rates?” Last time I had paid him a thousand dollars and a bonus for what had turned out to be a few minutes’ work.

“What have you got?” He was hooked.

I explained what I wanted and arranged to overnight the materials to him.

“You’ll have it by ten. Call me with any questions.”

I copied the pages I wanted him to see, boxed them up, and ran them down to the mailroom. I had just got back when my cell phone buzzed and began to hop around the table. The caller ID read “Pops.” My father.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I said, enormously glad as ever to talk with him.

“I’m talking to my son, I think. What are you doing?”

“Looking for a missing three billion dollars.”

“I’ll check all my old suit pockets.”

“Still taking the Kid on Sunday?”

“Yeah, I was thinking we take a ride out to Riverhead, out on the Island. They’ve got a nice aquarium. I think he’ll love it.”

“Do the fish drive cars?”

“They’ve got sharks. All kids love sharks.”

“My boy is one in a million,” I said. “But best of luck.”

“I’ll pick him up at nine.”

“That’s a long drive to go to an aquarium. Isn’t there one in Brooklyn?”

“Well, I thought we could go to the outlet mall while we’re out there.”

“Pop. Why would you want to go to an outlet mall?” He worked behind a bar. He wore a white shirt and black pants six days a week.

“Not me. I’m bringing a friend.”

“You have a friend who likes to hit the outlet malls?”

“A female friend.”

My father had a girlfriend. Holy crap. I mean, why not? But still. Holy crap.

“Pop. Is this a serious friend?”

“Define ‘serious.’”