“Kate?” Peter leveled a hand. “Obviously, she knew about the Wunderkind account. But she didn’t know where the initial money came from. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” said Stern, mostly to himself.
Peter removed two more bottles of soda from the refrigerator, and plunked one, uncapped, in front of his father. It was French mineral water, a brand Stern had never heard of, savored with a rose-petal aroma. Stern asked for a glass.
“I take it John lost the $300,000?”
“Right. He did a little better, but eventually it was gone.”
“And so he stole again.”
“If that’s what you call it.”
“That is what I call it,” said Stern. “That is what a prosecutor would call it. And that is what a judge would call it when he or she committed John to the penitentiary.”
Peter, in front of the white cabinets, turned about.
“Look, Dad, I spent summers down there. I’m not making excuses for him, but it’s like nothing really exists. It’s all numbers on a scoreboard. That’s all. You trade ahead of customers, in ten or twenty lots, you don’t hurt a soul. Not really. It’s against the rules because if everybody did it the customers would get maimed. But one guy? No harm. It was found money. And it’s money that a lot of people down there have found. You think Dixon never traded ahead of a customer?”
“No one has ever cited Dixon as a moral exemplar.”
“That’s for sure,” said Peter with a flash of the same hard light he had shown when he said he wasn’t sorry.
Stern told his son to go on.
It was at this point, Peter said, that Kate found out. There was a confession, said Peter, lots of tears.
“She makes him promise that he won’t do it again. He’s ripped off another 275 K by now, and he reassures her. No way. No chance. He’ll never have to do it again. And promptly goes right into the dumper in the market. So he’s down to his last twenty, thirty thousand, and he makes The Big Mistake. He hears all these rumors about left-handed sugar. You know about that?”
“Enough,” said Stern.
“John thinks he’s got inside dope—he bets the ranch that the world sugar market is going to collapse. And he gets creamed. Destroyed. The market goes up so fast he can’t even get out. When the smoke clears, not only has he lost every penny in the Wunderkind account, he now owes MD $250,000 to pay for the losses in the value of the positions over and above his equity.”
“Enter Dixon?” asked Stern.
“Almost,” said Peter. “First, John panics. You can say anything you want to about what he did, but it was low risk. Different Exchanges? And the best bean counter in America couldn’t follow the paper trail between the error account and the Wunderkind account without someone to help him. But now, with a quarter-million-dollar deficit, he’s in deep. Obviously, they have no money. And he can’t like come to the family for a loan. So he takes what seems to be the only alternative. He starts trashing all the records that show who owns the account—you know, the idea is that way they can’t find him. He zaps the computer system, he cleans out the files here. He fries up the microfiche. Unfortunately, the duplicate fiche is in Chicago. John had actually called a clerk there with some bullshit and had him ready to send the dupes, but the clerk asked what’s-her-name first. Who’s in charge there?”
“Margy Allison.”
“That’s it.” Margy, Peter said, called Dixon, who by then had heard from MD’s accounting department about the Wunderkind account and its sizable deficit balance. Dixon told Margy to send him the records John had requested. When he summoned John to his office two days later, Dixon had the pages he’d printed out off the fiche and the account statements spread across his desk.
“He had John sit down in one of those Corbusier chairs he’s got, the deep square ones with the stainless-steel frames? Then he gets hold of John by the tie, puts his knee in his chest, and beats the living crap out of him. Quite a scene, apparently. Dixon’s big, but he’s not John’s size. But John lies there like a lump, bleeding and crying, just sort of begging.”
Peter grabbed a bit at his rumpled hair. Dixon by then had written his own check for the deficit in the Wunderkind account. He preferred that to admitting to his best customers, the ones who had placed the large orders John had traded ahead of, that no one noticed while an employee—worse yet, a relation—had stolen them blind. And he couldn’t simply write off the debit without drawing a great deal of attention from his in-house accountants. It was all one pocket or the other, anyway, and to cover himself with the customers, Dixon preferred to keep this quiet.
“But, of course,” said Peter, “Uncle Dixon was tear-ass. John’s fouled his nest, put the whole business in jeopardy, and Uncle Dixon announces that John’s going to pay for it, Dixon-style. Big speech. ‘You are now my fucking slave.’” Peter thrust his elbows out in imitation of Dixon and rumbled on; he was an able mimic. “‘You’ve seen your last raise or bonus in this century, and you’ll do anything I decide you’ll do, whenever I want. You’ll be a floor runner or a window washer or the guy who cleans the latrines, if that’s what I say. And if you ever think about leaving, or so much as crap crooked, I’ll ruin you. I’ll take the hit with the customers, and I’ll call the CFTC, the FBI, George Bush, anybody I can think of, and I’ll tell them this has been laying heavy on my soul, and I’ll beg them to fry your ass.’ And to back it up, Dixon makes a big show of taking all the account records and throwing them in his personal safe and telling John that they’re always going to be there.”
“John believed Dixon would carry through?”
“You bet your life.”
Stern thought about Margy’s story and the legend of Dixon’s wrath murmured among his employees. Dixon, no doubt, was convincing when he bragged about his own cruelty.
“In fact, Uncle Dixon says, on second thought, he will turn John in. He’s going to turn him in tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and he says it’ll be the day after that. Then he’s back on the fence. And so this is John’s life. He works on the order desk. Then, when everybody’s gone, Dixon finds something humiliating for him to do, like sort the trash. And then every other day Dixon says he’s thought it over, the best course for him is just to drop the dime on John. One day he calls John to his office, while he phones the CFTC Enforcement Division and has this long chat about error accounts. He gets hold of a photo of John and draws bars across it. He even gives John the draft of a letter that Dixon says he’s sent to the U.S. Attorney. Every day, it’s something else. My beloved uncle is practicing extreme mental cruelty. Hard to believe of him, of course.”
Stern, tempted to comment, said nothing at all.
“So that’s where this thing is when Kate comes to see me. John is in Uncle Dixon’s prison, which by now, he figures, is ten times worse than the real thing. At this point, Kate and he have decided the only thing John can do is bite the bullet: John will call the FBI and confess and go to prison, and Kate will terminate her pregnancy. This is their life plan. And nobody’s kidding. All right?”
Peter finished his soda and burped again. He nodded to his father.
“Did you think perhaps,” said Stern after a moment, “that I might be helpful in an arena in which I have worked for most of my life?”
“First of all, Dixon was your client, which means he was an object of religious worship. And second, what the hell would you do?”
“Obviously, I would speak with Dixon.”
“And how would you prevent him from going to the FBI? That’s what he said he’d do. That would leave John without even the benny of having turned himself in.”
“I would ask Dixon not to do so.”
“And he’s always done just what you wanted, right?” His son had lifted his face to a haughty angle. Peter was an angry young man, no doubt about that. Life deeply dissatisfied him—people failed him in all respects. He was not gay, Stern suddenly thought. He was, rather, oddly misanthropic. He rendered help out of some sense of superiority or
noble duty, but he expected—perhaps even enjoyed—disappointment, time and again. He had full faith in no one. In this, Stern realized, to a greater measure than he wished, Peter was his son.
“I thought about this for a long time. I went to dinner out there and I talked to Kate and John all night. I took Dixon’s little letter to the U.S. Attorney home with me, where he’d laid out the whole scam. I kept going over the details. And then, of course, I figured out the answer. The obvious fucking answer: John should go to the FBI. But…” Peter, maestro-like, had lifted both hands.
“Yes?”
“But blame Dixon. Say it was all Dixon’s show. John was minorly involved, just the flunky.”
They looked intently at one another.
“Very clever,” said his father at last.
“I thought so.” Peter smiled stiffly, for effect. “Of course, there were a few problems. For one thing, John could never carry this off. Not on his own. He didn’t have the nerve left to walk down the street by himself, let alone bullshit the FBI.”
“So you volunteered?”
“Yes.”
“You became his representative.”
“Right.”
“His defense lawyer,” said Stern.
Peter did not answer; it was clear, however, that he had never thought of it this way.
“Is that truly, Peter, how you imagine this business is conducted?”
“Oh, spare me,” he said. “I sat at your dinner table too long. How many people have you gotten immunity for who were lying their asses off and blaming whoever the government wanted to hear about?”
“Far fewer than you apparently imagine, Peter. And in any event, whatever fictions were spoken I had not created.”
“No? Were they ‘fictions’ you really believed? I know. You’re just the lawyer. If the client has the balls—or the brains—not to tell you he’s lying, you pass him along without comment. And how many of those little fairy tales have you helped shape?”
Peter was the son. He knew his father’s life well.
“There are distinctions, Peter. I think as little of your presumption in this matter as you would, were I to perform open-heart surgery.”
“Look,” said Peter. “It was my sister.” He resumed once more his aspect of inspired anger. The challenge was there: my sister. Your child. They stared again at each other.
“So you called the FBI,” said Stern.
Peter met Kyle Horn in the lobby of a downtown hotel. They adjourned to the men’s room and searched one another for electronic devices. Then Peter made his proposal. He was uninvolved himself, but he knew a man. The man had a boss who was one of the biggest names at the KCFE. There was a scam. The man was involved—at the bottom, not the top—and he was scared. He would tell all—but only for immunity and a promise that Peter’s part in arranging this would never be revealed. Take it or leave it, Peter told him.
“And the government agreed?”
“Not at first. I had to meet Sennett. They made me go over the whole thing about four times. Finally, I let them interview John in person. All hush-hush, since they wanted John to be able to stay undercover. But I could see they would go for it from the day I gave them Dixon’s name. They actually made jokes about RICO’ing the place and calling it Maison Stan.”
Maison Stan, thought Stern.
“Did they know you were my son?”
“I told them.”
“They must have been very amused.”
“I suppose. Mostly, they were concerned. None of us knew for sure who Dixon would use as his lawyer, but once you showed up I got all kinds of bulletins and memos and guidelines arid crap about never discussing the case with you. Which I’ve followed. For the last three weeks they’ve been telling me I’ve got to stay away from Marta, too, and I have.
“We all sort of panicked when what’s-her-name, Margy, sent out that memo saying you were going to talk to the people on the order desk. But Sennett had figured for a while that they were going to have to subpoena John to keep his cover, so they did it then and told you that you couldn’t represent him. Pretty cute, huh?” Peter smiled faintly. Stern did as well. All deserved. They had run rings around him.
“I take it that Mr. Tooley was another player in your farce?”
“More or less. I suggested him and Sennett thought that was great. I think at one point Stan told Mel not to ask too many questions, which was fine with him. He’s not your biggest fan.”
“Indeed not,” said Stern. Peter had located all his father’s foremost antagonists and joined league with them. In the midst of everything else, Stern was stung by the thought, and he stood, walking across the tiny kitchen to the counter. For some reason he found himself recalling the early years, when the children were piled with pillows and blankets into the back of the current sedan and the entire family went to the drive-in for a movie. Only Peter of the three children remained awake. Even at the age of six or seven, he would watch the entire show, entertaining his parents with his curiosity about the world of adults, while the girls pressed their tiny hands to their faces and slept.
“You know you have inflicted terrible misery on your uncle.”
Peter’s eyes lighted on him briefly, holding the same hard gleam.
“I told you I wasn’t sorry.”
“You believe Dixon deserved this? For what—his treatment of John?”
“For lots of things. He’s lived a piggish life.”
“I see,” said Stern. “For what other grave sins of Dixon’s were you attempting to deliver retribution?”
Peter was silent. Eventually, he looked away.
“Help me with the chronology, Peter. When, exactly, did Nate Cawley tell you about your mother’s condition? Clearly, it was near the time of these events.”
Peter, using his thumb, peeled the paper wrapper off his soda bottle. He was worrying his head somewhat, disappointed about something.
“Nate told me last week he talked to you about Mom. He swore he kept me out of it.”
“He did not mention your name,” said Stern. “As I said when I arrived, I have been mulling over the circumstances.”
Peter shrugged indifferently. He was not certain he believed his father, but that was beside the point.
“He felt someone in the family had to know, because of the state she was in. He figured I was another doctor, you know. He wanted me to keep an eye out and my mouth shut. Needless to mention,” said Peter, glancing fleetingly at his father, “he thinks he made a rather serious error.”
“Nate has been hardest on himself, Peter. He even believed that I might sue him. Did you know that?”
“I knew.” Peter nodded. “I thought it was possible, frankly. If you got the whole story. I figured you’d regard it as the height of irresponsibility that he involved me rather than you.”
Stern meditated an instant on Peter’s dim hopes for him. They expected, inalterably, the worst of each other.
“On the contrary, I believe it was prudent. I am certain you did your utmost. You were a devoted son, Peter, to your mother.”
Peter puckered his lips a bit at the final words, but said no more.
“And how had you divined what Dixon’s role was in your mother’s illness?”
Peter looked up. “I’d taken a medical history from him. Remember? I was his doctor. After I talked to Nate, I checked my notes. The dates matched. He had gonorrhea, too, in Korea, did you know that?”
It had not come up in discussion, said Stern.
“He thinks it made him sterile,” Peter said. It was a thought, a professional observation. With it, he walked into the other room and sat down on the blue foam sofa. His bravery, his moral certitude seemed to be flagging. His look was turning abject.
“So, when you heard about John’s dilemma, it was not entirely accidental that you began to consider how this might be turned back against Dixon.” Peter did not answer. Stern approached from the kitchen. “It was gallant of you, Peter, to fight your mother’s battles
. Not to mention mine.” Stern, standing, took a moment to turn a dark countenance on his son, then moved to the window. Evening was coming through a great rosy sky. The last of the near-town commuters were in the street now, a stream of isolated persons carrying home, from various fancy shops, dinners which they would eat in silence, alone. “And may I now demand the last piece, Peter?”
“Which is?”
“How was it that your mother came to learn of this scheme to accuse Dixon?”
In his surprise, Peter let forth a brief sound—part laughter, part groan.
“You’re smart,” Peter said to him. “I’ll always give you that.”
Stern dipped his head in appreciation. “And the answer?”
“She could see how distraught Kate was. She knew something was wrong. Finally, she pried some of it out of her. Kate told her what John had done at MD. And that I was trying to work it out. No details.”
“And of her pregnancy Kate said what?”
“Nothing. Not a word. She still wasn’t positive she wouldn’t have to terminate.”
Slowly, Stern nodded. That would fit.
“Anyway, so Mom came to see me, to find out what was going on. I told her she shouldn’t worry about it. But naturally that didn’t satisfy her.”
“And so you informed her what you had done?”
“Yeah. Eventually.”
“Thinking what? That she would be delighted? That she, of all people, would share your desire for vengeance on Dixon?”
“You don’t have to try to make it sound so ludicrous.”
“Oh, I see your logic, Peter. You carried in Dixon like a cat out mousing and laid him at your mother’s feet. And her reaction—shall I guess?—was horror.”
“Horror,” said Peter. “I tried to explain it to her. You know. That it was the best thing for everybody in the end, but she wouldn’t hear it.”
“And how far along had your plan proceeded by then?”
“Pretty far. Sennett’d met John. It was just about a done deal. I’d refused to let him take a lie detector, but we’d agreed that he’d stay undercover at MD and wear a hidden tape recorder—what do they call it? Wear a wire.”