Stealing Flowers (33 page)

I thought this was both completely true, and
inspirational. That night after I was in my bed, I fell asleep
dreaming of being a person as great and humble as Stan.

Chapter
Eleven

Some months later, in January in fact, I
received a phone call from Sally. She secured a promise from me to
put aside the next Sunday to be with the Tappets at the mansion; I
checked it off on the calendar and was about to ring off, when she
said; “Are you still single?”

“Why?”

“I’ve broken off with Lloyd.”

She immediately hung up. I swore to myself,
but when Sunday came, I was good to my word. Una had made a special
Jamaican dish for Isaac. Everybody wanted some as soon as it was
cooked, but we had to wait until three o’clock when he arrived. He
came wearing a crisp, almost silvery, gray suit, but with a
multicolored paisley denim-shirt underneath. With his short blond
hair gelled to a nice wave and black running shoes with no socks on
his feet, he had struck a perfect balance between formal and
casual, but in a striking manner.

As always, he managed to look like a model,
and as always, I was jealous. As well, he wore a cologne-fragrance
vaguely familiar with the odd combination of the scents of
sea-salt, berry, and caramel, but I couldn’t name it. We gathered
in the kitchen and Una made places for us at the table. Large white
and red chrysanthemums sat on the window sills.

“I never thanked you enough for looking
after the arrangements after Clara died,” Una said to Isaac. “All
our friends saw how you were, wonderful, and the folks back home,
they thought you were kind and patient, they’ve written me and want
to give you their teenage daughters.”

Everyone laughed. “The people at the
airlines were terrific,” Isaac said. I noticed that it was his
style to never accept a direct compliment. “Without Mary and Stan,”
he said, “I wouldn’t have been allowed the time.”

“You were just marvelous,” Una insisted. She
put a clear crystal plate before us with two hot meat patties on
each. “There’s some jerk sauce,” she continued, “watch, the plate
is scalding.” She passed us frothing mugs of beer. “You have to
have this with cold suds. There’s no rush. Ms. Zucker hasn’t
arrived and I’ve to air the Rose Room yet. We don’t use it often.
It’s kept just as a war room.”

“These are fantastic, Una,” I said after a
few bites.

For a few moments, we ate in silence. Sally
was pensive and Mary was worried about something. I was afraid
she’d heard the rumors from Hiro’s office. I’d discovered Una had
friends everywhere in Tappets. One of Mary’s secretaries was a
black woman from Jamaica. Una accepted most of Mary’s official
invitations to bridal events, baby showers, weddings, and other
social events on behalf of Tappets, even, or should I say,
especially, of what was called the rank and file ones. She had
gotten many of her Jamaican female friends from back home
secretarial jobs with the company and she championed many
individual causes, such as managerial mistreatment, disputes,
grievances, and other matters. She had a reputation as Tappets’
ombudsman.

Whenever she intervened on behalf of a
worker, management immediately changed its tactics. It seemed, from
manager to shipping clerk, everyone grasped the situation. Una knew
when there were whispers of unionizing and who was organizing it.
She kept her disapproval of unions a secret, but Mary and Stan were
the beneficiaries of her intelligence operation. She knew when a
manager was on a drinking binge, which young women were being
sexually harassed, and even when things went missing, but the
conspiracy which Bill Stanton had uncovered, the huge amounts of
money over periods of decades, she knew nothing about, and
probably, like Mary and Stan, wouldn’t have believed it. “More?”
she asked us.

We took second helpings. New phones and
monitors had recently been installed for the doorways and garages
as part of Peter Burgess’ recent upgrade, but Una still looked out
a narrow curtained side-window for company. Una had been dieting
for some time, but as far as I was concerned, had shed little
weight after the initial loss of thirty pounds, but still, in my
eyes, she looked swell. She wore a light red and white summer
dress. Her black hair was pinned up today with small four-pronged
combs. It was finally starting to show strains of grey.

“She’s here,” she announced excitedly before
the bell rang.

I laughed to myself. It was the thing I
liked most about Una. She was like a kid. A visit from a lawyer was
an opportunity for adventure and she was genuinely charged up about
it. A stunning blond-haired woman with a slender figure in a grey
business suit and a long open overcoat came in with Una. She held a
black leather briefcase and she wore her clothes tight, giving the
overall impression of simplicity and efficiency. Her body was
excellent, but the way her long hair fell along her back, put it
over the top.

“Almost as long as Sally’s,” I said to
myself. “Interesting.”

Introductions were made all around by Una
who served coffee and tea in the Rose Room where we all gathered.
Mary dressed in a green and white sweater with a tan pair of pants,
while Stan wore a beige shirt with dark brown slacks. I’d on a
plain white t-shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans. Sally dressed
in a long grey dress. She was the only one besides Susan and Isaac
dressed in anything which could be called formal. Although Isaac
looked better than me, especially today, I didn’t really mind him
being there. He was no competition for Susan even if he did
outclass me. He wasn’t interested in women sexually, I on the other
hand was desperately looking for a distraction away from my
enchantress.

When Una had looked after everyone, she sat
beside Mary on the couch and watched to see if this perplexed
Susan. I knew that it was one of her favorite things, watching the
reaction to people who didn’t know her relationship to the family.
“We’re ready to begin,” she said.

“Sally and I have met now four times,” Susan
said. I realized the lawyer had already been told by Sally that Una
and Isaac were part of the family and that Stan and Mary made few
important decisions without them. This ruined Una’s fun, but
perhaps Sally had been wise. Lawyers could be particular. “This
meeting is for the family to get to know me,” Ms. Zucker continued,
“and to ask questions, and plan a strategy. You are a notable
family and this litigation procedure will be public. It could
become nasty.”

Una and Mary exchanged glances. “Even in our
initial discovery with the Elders of Ashbury Farms,” she said, “my
associates referred to what they said seemed like intimidation. Our
office since, has received several threats which we take seriously,
not only because they don’t even know yet who our clients are, but
because these threats showed that they knew our home addresses and
other personal information. We’ve contacted the authorities and
they’ve put us in touch with ADF in the hope that The Family of
Truth broke some gun ordinances, so, you can see, we’re hoping for
the best, but the people there said it might even be a problem
getting a search warrant.”

I felt the dread rising in everyone. “These
people are dangerous,” Una said and looked at Sally. “They have to
be stopped.”

“They’re as touchy as killer bees,” Susan
said, “and they have important friends in New Jersey and elsewhere.
They financially support the right to bear arms and freedom of
religious organizations. They’ve aligned themselves with groups on
the extreme right and call themselves Christians Under Siege. These
are politically connected groups. They scream harassment every time
anyone goes near them. However, more importantly, the Family has
many enemies. Sally’s friends at Focus, Free of Cults in United
States, have provided tremendous help with names and addresses of
ex-members and we’re off to a good start. Provided there are no
objections, we’re going to go public by the end of the week or at
least sometime soon. We’ll file with the state court offices in
Philadelphia. We have obtained the birth names of the five men who
assaulted Sally. We have so far collected three similar stories
from ex-members who will testify.”

“Do you mean against the same men?” Una
asked.

“In some cases, yes. We’ve numerous
testimonies of the Family’s practices on recruits from ex-members.
We have done some preliminary work on tracing the Family’s money
from America to Swiss accounts. We have found nine witnesses who
will testify about the Family’s general abusive treatment of
women.”

Una clapped her hands together. “Well Sally,
you’ve done well. It sounds like Ms. Zucker’s off to a great
start.”

Sally nodded. “Yes, I’m excited.”

“Sally mentioned earlier to Mary and I,”
Stan said, “that we shouldn’t expect the authorities to ever charge
these five men?”

“That’s a guess, Mr. Tappet,” Susan said.
“If this has happened before and no charges came of it, then it’s
natural to conclude the same for this case. We can’t ever give up,
but if we can’t even find any complaints in police records, then I
think Sally shouldn’t get her hopes up on that count.”

“How can that be?” Una asked.

“The physical evidence of rape is
nonexistent, and the state will be reluctant to get involved with a
complaint against a church.”

“A church?” Una interrupted.

“I think the system recognizes it as a
church,” Susan said.

“I could never understand,” Una said, “why
the American Government allows any organization out of the blue to
call itself a church?”

“You would be quite surprised what they
allow to be defined as a church,” Susan said. “Virtually any form
of worship of anything. They’re just quite jumpy of even opening
that box, the separation of state and church stuff.”

She looked over at Una. So far she had not
made eye-contact with me once. “Sally told me you’re originally
from Jamaica,” she continued. “You can imagine how much trouble
would be caused if they started investigating the
Rastifarians.”

“They should have been stopped right at the
beginning,” Una retorted, “now they’re armed and dangerous.”

Isaac laughed. “Una, then there would have
been no Bob Marley.”

“Mr. Marley converted after he had been
singing for some years.”

“The problem with defining religions,” Susan
said, “is that almost any set of beliefs in divinity and any claim
of connection with the Divine, is considered legitimate.”

Una rose. “Look at what they’ve done. These
are people who preach about Jesus. This will be hard, but I say,
let us stand together. I think The Family of Truth killed Rick
Edwards and he was a fine human being.”

Sally rose and hugged her. “They raped
Sally,” I said softly, “and called it the Lord’s will. Let’s help
Sally win.”

“We are proud of you both,” Stan said to
Sally and me.

“I’ll get the champagne,” Una said, “and
we’ll pop some cork.”

Several times I made an effort to talk to
Susan that afternoon. She’d no rings on her fingers and Una had
said she was single, but she avoided any remark that could be
interpreted as inappropriate; however, with her eyes, she clearly
seemed interested .

At the end of September, I saw her again at
the offices which Tappets rented in the Vanderbilt Plaza, New York
City. She announced to us the launch of the litigation against the
Family of Truth and wanted us to read it before it was made public.
I received the exact same reaction from her when I talked to her a
second time. She was good to go, but under the circumstances would
she? So I turned my mind to other things to distract me from
Sally.

Bill Stanton and I used a different strategy
for our second company-wide audit, and although it was proving to
be effective, it was going slower than we had hoped. I noticed now,
lots of management folks were getting the jitters. When we arrived
at Constant Batteries to start the second wave, we met with our
first full-blown incident. We were refused access and I marched
directly to Graham Roberts’ office. “What’s going on?” I asked
after the barest social preliminaries.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” he
retorted bluntly.

I could see he was livid and wanted to give
me a piece of his mind. I also noticed his red eyes and the way his
fingers trembled slightly. “You’re destroying the morale of the
company,” he shouted, “and poisoning the atmosphere. I have to ask
you and your team to leave.” His cold bitter eyes were filled with
resentment. “If you’re taking your lead from Bill Stanton, he has
an agenda. As for Hiroyuki, I can assure you, an embarrassment to
the Stanroids would suit Mary’s and his cause fine.”

We left and Stan had to intervene on my
behalf. The audit was delayed for a week and Bill’s auditors in the
following weeks were treated shabbily by Graham Roberts’ management
team. I met secretly with Peter Burgess and sicced him on Graham. I
needed to know more. I told Hiroyuki about it, and he didn’t
contradict me.

One day in November, when I was finishing up
the report on Mutual Real Estate, we’d done Constant Batteries,
Modal Oil, Factory-Bright, and Poss Fast-Discs so far, Isaac Lamar
visited me at Hiro’s offices. He had streaked his short wavy hair
with lighter blond areas and tanned his face so much that his
bright blue eyes almost radiated. He truly looked fit and healthy,
although small stress lines had recently appeared around his eyes.
I’d become friends with him. I was pretty sure he wasn’t attracted
to me and I had grown comfortable with his presence. Besides, Una
trusted him implicitly and that was good enough for me. Like her,
he was always willing to speak his mind on topics concerning
Tappets, no matter what the cost. I’d heard Sally had tried to
steal him from Stan, but that had proved to be futile. Stan just
laughed at her.