In the four months that had dragged by since he’d first received the letter, his expenses had mounted to the point at which he’d begun to question the whole business. That little voice again. It nagged him, told him he was a fool, being taken, and yet every time he protested, Graham—or sometimes Chevette—telephoned to mollify him. Yes, there was graft, and yes, part of the problem was Graham’s health, which had kept him out of the office at crucial junctures in the negotiations with Mr. Hyde-Jeffers of the Royal Fiduciary Bureau, but he needed to have faith, not simply in the Yorkshire Bank PLC, but in Graham Shovelin’s word, which was his honor, as his honor was his word. Still, Mason had posted funds for fees, bribes, something Chevette called “vigorish,” and beyond that to help defray Graham’s medical expenses and even, once, to underwrite a graduation party for Chevette’s niece, Evangeline, whose father had been run over by a bus and tragically killed the very week of his daughter’s graduation (Mason had been presented with an itemized bill for the gown, corsage, limousine and dinner at a Moroccan restaurant that had cost a staggering $1,500). All to be reimbursed, of course, once the funds were released.
It was Graham who’d suggested he come to London to see for himself “how the land lies,” as he put it. “After all this time, to tell me that you don’t have absolute faith in me, my friend—my friend and partner—is to wound me deeply,” Graham had said, pouring himself into the phone one late night in a conversation that must have gone on for an hour or more. “You hurt my reputation,” he said in a wounded voice, “and worse than that, Mason, worse than that, you hurt my pride. And really, for a man in my condition, facing an uncertain future and the final accounting up above, what else is there for me to hold on to? Beyond love. Love and friendship, Mason.” He’d let out a deep sigh. “I am sending you an airline ticket by overnight mail,” he said. “You want your eyes opened? I will open them for you.”
TWO DAYS IN LONDON
If the walls just stood there back at home, he didn’t know it. His life, the life of the widower, of the griever, of the terminally bored, had changed, and changed radically. Graham Shovelin himself took time off from work—and his chemo—to pick him up at the airport in a shining maroon Mercedes and bring him to his hotel, all expenses paid. Of course, there was a little contretemps at the airport, Mason, exhausted from a cramped and sleepless night and at eighty no steadier on his feet than he’d been at seventy-nine or expected to be at eighty-one, had mistaken this heavyset fortyish man with the shaved head and hands the size of baseball mitts for a porter and not the Operations & IT Director of the Yorkshire Bank PLC. But then he hadn’t expected him to be black. Not that he had any prejudices whatsoever—over the years he’d seen and worked with all types of students at the college and made a point of giving as much of himself as he could to each of them, no matter where they came from or what they looked like—but he just hadn’t pictured Graham Shovelin this way. And that was his failing, of course. And maybe, he thought, that had to do with Masterpiece Theatre too, with the lords and ladies and the proper English butler and under-butler and all the rest. So Graham was black, that was all. Nothing wrong with that.
The hotel Graham took him to wasn’t more than a twenty-minute drive from the airport, and it wasn’t really a hotel, as far as Mason could see, but more one of these bed-and-breakfast sort of places, and the staff there was black too—and so were most of the people on the streets. But he was tired. Exhausted. Defeated before he even began. He found his bed in a back room and slept a full twelve hours, longer than he could ever remember having slept since he was a boy at home with his parents. In fact, when he finally did wake, he couldn’t believe it was still dark outside and he had to tap the crystal of his watch to make sure it hadn’t stopped.
He lay there for a long while after waking, in a big bed in a small room all the way on the other side of the world, feeling pleased with himself, proud of himself, having an adventure. He pushed himself up, fished through his suitcase for a pair of clean underwear and socks. Just then, an ambrosial smell, something exotic, spicy, began seeping in under the door and seemed to take possession of the room, and he realized he was hungry, ravenous actually. Vaguely wondering if he was too late for breakfast—or too early—he eased open the door and found himself in a dim hallway that gave onto a brightly lit room from which the odor of food was emanating, a room he took to be the kitchen.
He heard a murmur of voices. His knees hurt. He could barely seem to lift his feet. But he made his way down the hall and paused at the door, not knowing what the protocol was in a bed-and-breakfast (he and Jan had always stayed in hotels or motor courts). He gave a light knock on the doorframe in the same instant that the room jumped to life: a gas stove, spotless, with a big aluminum pot set atop it; a table and chairs, oilcloth top, half a dozen beer bottles; and someone sitting at the table, a big man, black, in a white sleeveless T-shirt: Graham. It was Graham Shovelin himself, a newspaper spread before him and a beer clutched in one big hand.
THE EXPLANATION
“Really, Mason, you must forgive me for any misunderstanding or inconvenience regarding the accommodations, but I am only acting in your best interest—our best interest—in putting you here, in this quite reasonable bed-and-breakfast hotel rather than one of those drafty anonymous five-star places in the heart of the city, which is where Mr. Oliphant, President of the Yorkshire Bank PLC, had urged me to put you up. And why? To save our partnership any further out-of-pocket expense—unnecessary expense—until we are able to have the funds released in full. Tell me, have I done right?”
Mason was seated now at the table across from Shovelin, a bowl of stew that wasn’t all that much different from what he ate at home steaming at his elbow while a woman who’d appeared out of nowhere provided bread and butter and poured him a glass of beer. She was black too, thin as a long-distance runner and dressed in a colorful wraparound garment of some sort. Her hair was piled atop her head in a massive bouffant and her feet were bare. She was very pretty and for a moment Mason was so distracted by her he wasn’t able to respond.
“Just tell me, Mason,” Shovelin repeated. “If I’ve done wrong, let me know and I’ll get in the car this minute and take you to the Savoy—or perhaps you prefer the Hilton?”
He wasn’t tired, that wasn’t it at all—just the opposite, he was excited. A new place, new people, new walls! And yet he couldn’t quite focus on what Shovelin was saying, so he just shrugged.
“I take that to be accord, then?” Shovelin boomed. “Happily, happily!” he cried. “Let’s toast to it!” and he raised his glass, tapped it against Mason’s, and downed the contents in a gulp. His eyes reddened and he touched one massive fist to his breastbone, as if fighting down indigestion, then turned back to Mason. “Now,” he said, so abruptly it almost sounded like the sudden startled bark of a dog, “let’s get down to business. This lovely lady here, in the event you haven’t already divined her identity, is none other than my executive secretary, Miss Afunu-Jones, who is taking time out of her hectic schedule to devote herself to your comfort during your brief stay. She has my full confidence, and anything you feel you must say to me you can say to her and she can handle any and all inquiries . . .” His voice trailed off. “In the event . . . well, in the event I am, how shall I put it?, indisposed.”
Mason felt his heart clench. He could see the pain etched in the younger man’s face and he felt the sadness there, felt the shadow of the mortality that had claimed Jan and would one day claim everyone alive, his daughter, his grandson, this man who’d reached out across the ocean to him and become not only his friend but his confidant.
Shovelin produced a handkerchief, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Forgive me for injecting an element of what, pathos, into this little party meant to welcome you to our land, and I know it’s not professional”—here he employed the handkerchief again—“but I am only human.” He looked up at the woman, who hovered behind them. “Chevette, perhaps you will take over for me, and give
Mr. Alimonti—Mason—the explanation he’s come for—”
Chevette, her eyes full too, pulled up a chair and sat beside Mason, so close their elbows were touching. She took her time, buttering a slice of bread and handing it to him before taking a sip of beer herself and looking him right in the eye. “We will see this business through to the end, believe me, Mason,” she said, her voice soft and hesitant. “We will not desert you. You have my word on that.”
“About tomorrow,” Shovelin prompted.
Her eyes jumped to his and then back to Mason’s. “Yes,” she said, “tomorrow. Tomorrow we will take you to the central office, where you will meet with our president, Mr. Oliphant, and iron out the final details to your satisfaction.” She paused, touched a finger to her lips. “I don’t know that all this is necessary, but as you seem to have lost faith in us—”
“Oh, no, no,” he said, fastening on her eyes, beautiful eyes, really, eyes the color of the birch beer he used to relish as a boy on family jaunts to Vermont.
“But the explanation is simple, it truly is. What I mean is, just look at us. We are not wealthy, we are not even accepted by many in white society, and I’m sorry to have to repeat it like a mantra, but we are diligent, Mr. Alimonti, diligent and faithful. The fact is, as my—as Mr. Shovelin—has told you, we are dealing with corruption, with thieves, and all the unconscionable holdup in this matter is to be laid at their feet, not ours, Mason, not ours.” And here, whether conscious of it or not, she dropped a hand to his thigh and gave him the faintest squeeze of reassurance.
UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES
The next day, his last day, and not even a full day at that, as his plane was scheduled to depart at 6:45 in the evening, he was awakened from a dreamless sleep by Chevette, who stood at the foot of his bed, softly calling his name. She was dressed in the sort of business attire he’d envisioned when he’d first heard her voice over the phone, she was wearing lipstick and eye shadow and her hair had been brushed out over her shoulders. “Mr. Alimonti,” she said, “Mason, wake up. I have some bad news.”
He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking at her. His knee throbbed. He seemed to have a headache. For a minute he didn’t know where he was.
“Unfortunate circumstances have arisen,” she was saying. “Graham has had a seizure and they’ve taken him to hospital—”
He fumbled to find the words. “Hospital? Is he—will he?—”
She made a wide sweeping gesture with one hand. “That is not for me to say. That”—her eyes hardened—“is in the hands of the insurers, who keep denying him the lifesaving treatment he so desperately needs. And we, we are but humble bank employees and we are by no means rich, Mason, by no means. We’ve exhausted our savings . . . yes, we, because now I must confess to you what you must already have suspected—Graham is my husband. We didn’t want to have to tell you for fear you might think us unprofessional, but the cat is out of the bag now.” She caught her breath. Her eyes filled. “And I love him, I love him more than I could ever put into words—”
He was in his pajamas in a strange bed in a strange place, a strange woman was standing over him and his heart was breaking.
“Please help us,” she whispered. “Please?”
THE FLIGHT BACK
He’d given her all he had on him—some eight hundred dollars in cash he’d brought along for emergencies—and written her a check he’d be hard-pressed to cover when he got home. As the expenses had mounted, he’d taken out a second mortgage and depleted his retirement account so that things were going to get very difficult financially if the funds didn’t come through soon. But they would, he was sure they would, every minute of every day pushing him closer to his goal. Chevette had tearfully assured him that Mr. Oliphant would see things through, whether her husband survived his emergency operation or not. “Truly,” she told him, “he lies between this life and the next.”
It wasn’t until he’d buckled himself in and the plane was in the air that it occurred to him that he never had gotten to meet Mr. Oliphant, see what an English bank looked like from the inside or even sign the agreement Graham had kept forgetting to produce, and now—he felt his heart seize again—might never be able to. He had two drinks on the plane, watched bits of three or four jumpy color-smeared movies, and fell off into a sleep that was a kind of waking and waking again, endlessly, till the wheels touched down and he was home at last.
ANGELICA STEPS IN
Three months later, after having missed four consecutive mortgage payments and receiving increasingly threatening letters from the bank, letters so depressing he could barely bring himself to open them, he telephoned his daughter to ask if she might be able to help him out with a small loan. He didn’t mention Graham Shovelin, the Yorkshire Bank PLC or the windfall he was expecting, because he didn’t want to upset her, and, more than that, he didn’t want her interfering. And, truthfully, he wasn’t so sure of himself anymore, the little voice back in his head now and telling him he was a fool, that he’d been defrauded, that Graham Shovelin, whom he hadn’t heard from in all this time, wasn’t what he appeared to be. He had hope still, of course he did—he had to have hope—and he made up excuses to explain the silence, excuses for Graham, who for all he knew might be lying there in a coma. Or worse. He could be dead. But why then didn’t anyone pick up the phone at the Yorkshire Bank PLC? Chevette, though she may have been grief-stricken, would certainly have had to be there, working, no matter what had befallen her husband, and then there was Mr. Oliphant and whatever secretaries and assistants he might have had.
At one point, despairing, after he’d called twenty times without response, he went online and found a homepage for the Yorkshire Bank PLC, which didn’t seem to list the names of the bank officers at any of their branches. He did find a general purpose number and after having been put on hold for ten minutes spoke to a woman who claimed she’d never heard of a Mr. Oliphant, and, of course, he was unable to supply any specifics, not with regard to which branch Oliphant was affiliated with or even what his given name might be. He felt baffled, frustrated, hopeless. He called his daughter.
“Dad? Is that you? How are you? We’ve been worried about you—”
“Worried, why?”
“I’ve called and called, but you never seem to be home—what are you doing, spending all your time at dance clubs or what, the racetrack?” She let out a laugh. “Robbie’s starting college in a month, did you know that? He got into his first-choice college, SUNY Potsdam, for music? The Crane School?”
He didn’t respond. After a minute, when she paused for breath, he said flatly, “I need a loan.”
“A loan? What on earth for? Don’t you have everything you need?”
“For the mortgage. I—well, I got a little behind in my payments . . .”
It took a while, another five minutes of wrangling, but finally she got it out of him. When he’d told her the whole story, everything, the thirty million dollars, the disbursement, the bribe money, Graham’s treatments, even the two-day debacle in London, she was speechless. For a long moment he could hear her breathing over the phone and he could picture the expression she was wearing, her features compressed and her lips bunched in anger and disbelief, no different from the way Jan had looked when she was after him for one thing and another.
“I can’t believe you,” she said finally. “How could you be so stupid? You, of all people, a former professor, Dad, a math whiz, good with figures?”
He said nothing. He felt as if she’d stabbed him, as if she was twisting the knife inside him.
“It’s a scam, Dad, it’s all over the papers, the internet, everywhere—the AARP newsletter Mom used to get. Don’t you ever read it? Or listen to the news? The crooks even have a name for it, 419, after the Nigerian anti-fraud statute, as if it’s all a big joke.”
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“How much did you lose?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Jesus! You don’t e
ven know?” There was a clatter of pans or silverware. He could picture her stalking round her kitchen, her face clamped tight. “All right,” she said. “Jesus! How much do you need?”
“I don’t know: ten?”
“Ten what—thousand? Don’t tell me ten thousand.”
He was staring out the window on the back lawn and the burgundy leaves of the flowering plum he and Jan had planted when their daughter was born. It seemed far away. Miles. It was there, but it was shrinking before his eyes.
“I’m coming out there,” she said.
“No,” he said, “no, don’t do that.”
“You’re eighty years old, Dad! Eighty!”
“No,” he said, and he no longer knew what he was objecting to, whether it was his age or the money or his daughter coming here to discipline him and humble him and rearrange his life.
ONE MORE PHONE CALL
The house belonged to the bank now, all of it, everything, and his daughter and Robbie were there helping him pack up. He was leaving California whether he liked it or not and he was going to be living, at least temporarily, in Robbie’s soon-to-be-vacated bedroom in Rye, New York. Everything was chaos. Everything was black. He was sitting in his armchair, waiting for the moving van to take what hadn’t been sold off in a succession of what Angelica called “estate sales” and haul it across the country to rot in her garage. In Rye, New York. For the moment, all was quiet, the walls just stood there, no dog barked, no auto passed by on the street. He was thinking nothing. He couldn’t even remember what Jan looked like anymore. He got to his feet because he had an urgent need to go fetch a particular thing before the movers got hold of it, but in the interval of rising, he’d already forgotten just what that particular thing was.
So he was standing there in the ruins of his former life, a high desperate sun poking through the blinds to ricochet off the barren floorboards, when the phone rang. Once, twice, and then he picked it up.