Bitter Truth

55

On the Macal River, Cayo, Belize

WE PUT INTO THE MACAL RIVER from a dirt landing a few miles south of San Ignacio. We are in a wooden canoe, rough-hewn from a single tree trunk, that Canek rented from a Belizean who lives on the river and who made the canoe himself. “Did he burn it out with coals like the American Indians?” I asked when I first saw it sitting in the water, stark and dark and primitive. Canek shook his head and said simply, “Chain saw.”

The canoe is thick-sided and shallow-bottomed. I sit in front on a rough wooden plank. I am wearing my blue suit with a white shirt, red tie, heavy black shoes. When I step out of the jungle to see my quarry I want to look as if I have just stepped out of court, no matter the discomfort in the heat, and make no mistake, it is uncomfortable, uncomfortable as hell. My collar is undone, my tie is loose, my shirt is already soaked with sweat. As we travel upriver we move through pockets of shade but, with the humidity at eighty-five percent, even the shade is no respite. At my feet is my briefcase and over the briefcase is my suit jacket. A paddle sits across my legs but I’m not doing any of the work. Canek Panti is standing in the back of the canoe, a woven cowboy hat on his head, a long wooden pole in his hands. He presses the end of the pole into the river bottom and pushes us forward against the slight current. He is an imposing figure standing there, poling the canoe ever south, majestic as a gondolier, his ornate machete hanging from a loop in his belt.

Every once in a while the river quickens and Canek is forced to jump out of the canoe and take hold of the front rope and drag the canoe through swift water, the rope digging into his shoulder as he struggles forward. I offer half-heartedly to help but Canek waves me off and shoulders me upstream until the river calms enough for him to jump back in and pick up once again his pole. In those moments, with my suit and dry shoes, with Canek dragging me upriver, I feel every inch the ugly colonialist. Call me Bwana. We have passed women washing clothes on rocks and children swimming. A boy riding bareback on a great black horse crossed the river in front of us a mile or so back, but now we are alone with the water.

The jungle rises about us in walls of dense green, punctuated by the yellow-tipped crimson of lobster claws or star-shaped white blossoms, and the world behind those walls is alive with the sounds of animals scurrying and birds cawing. The trees overhead are thick with hairlike growths in their crooks, which Canek tells me are wild orchids. Little yellow fish leap out of the tropical waters and flat-headed kingfishers, dark blue with bright white collars, skim across the water’s surface. Something oblong and heavy slips into the river before us. Mosquitoes hum around us, as well as other bugs, thicker, hunchbacked, and black. Botlass flies, Canek tells me. One of them tears into my neck, drawing blood. The bite swells immediately.

In my briefcase, wrapped in plastic to protect it from any water that might seep into the case during the course of our journey, is the original of the letter to his child written three quarters of a century ago by Christian Shaw. As I travel through this ancient Mayan jungle I can’t help but wonder if the strange sense of revelation I felt atop El Castillo in the ruins of Xunantunich was somehow similar to what Christian Shaw first experienced at the bedside of the terribly wounded Corporal Magee. Beth, who has lately made a study of these things, said that in Shaw’s letter she saw the beginnings of a spiritual ideology reminiscent of the Vedanta, one of the classic systems of Indian philosophy, which teaches that the multiplicity of objects in the universe is merely illusory and that spiritual liberation comes from stripping the illusion and attaining a knowledge of the self as simply another manifestation of the whole. Beth told me the ideas in the Vedanta are not too far removed from what Jacqueline Shaw was learning from Oleanna at the Church of the New Life. I don’t know Vedanta from Valhalla from Valium but I think it more than a coincidence that Christian Shaw and his granddaughter were both suicidal before finding in a nascent spirituality something to save them. They were both trapped by the materiality and wealth and crimes of the Reddmans and longed for an understanding richer and deeper than that which surrounded them as members of that ill-fated clan. One can’t help but feel that they were on the edge of some sort of solution and Beth continues to pursue a similar path for her answer, though I still can’t figure out what it is an answer to.

But it wasn’t the change effected on Christian Shaw in that hospital in France that was most revelatory about the letter, nor was it his confession of his knowledge and acquiescence in the death of Charity Reddman at the hands of her sister Faith, though that confession answered many question about the fate of the Reddmans. No, the most interesting aspect of the letter was a name, the name of Shaw’s fellow patient at that hospital in France, the name that was to be given to the bastard child of Christian Shaw and Emma Poole, the name that pointed with clean precision to the man who had perpetrated the latter-day massacre of Reddmans. It is this man whom I am hunting, against whom my default judgment was issued, and who is the sole beneficiary of the Wergeld Trust from which I intend to wrest my fortune. Morris found out the meaning of Wergeld for me. We had thought it was a family name, but it was something else entirely, discernible from any dictionary. In feudal times, when a man was killed, a payment was made as recompense to avoid a blood feud that would result only in more killing. This payment was called a Wergeld. Faith Reddman Shaw’s attempt to pay for the crimes of her father and satisfy the blood yearnings of the sole grandson of Elisha Poole had obviously failed.

The river is peaceful now and full of beauty. We pass a tree with bright red and black berries hanging down in loops, like fine coral necklaces. Two white egrets float by; a black vulture sits above us, hunchbacked and deprived. Something like an ungainly arrow, yellow and blue, shoots across the gap in the canopy above us and I realize I have just seen a toucan. The trees here are infested with the parasitic orchids, thick as moss, a few hungry red blooms spilling down, and as I look up at them something drops loudly into the quiet of the river. I turn around, startled.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Iguana,” says Canek Panti.

Above me I notice a pack of thick-bodied lizards crawling along the outstretched branch of a tree. They are playing, scampering one around the other, and suddenly another falls off, splashing into the river. As I sit in the canoe, watching the iguanas and heading ever closer to the murderous lizard I am chasing, I can’t help but see the parallels in the death struggle over the Reddman fortune and the war between Raffaello and Calvi for control of the Philly mob and its river of illegal money. How much all have sacrificed to Mammon is stunning. For now the mob is at peace, the deadly battle for control fought and decided on Pier Four of the Naval Shipyard. What was surprising was that, with all the missing soldiers, there wasn’t much fuss in South Philly. Oh, there was some talk about a war, and the Inquirer’s mob correspondent raised some questions in an article, but it all subsided rather quickly and life went on as if the dead had never been born. I am out of it now, just as I wanted to be out of it, and am grateful as hell for that.

There was a final meeting with Earl Dante at Tosca’s in which the rules of my separation were made clear. Files were handed over, vows of secrecy were established. We looked at each other warily. He didn’t trust that I wouldn’t betray him if I had a chance to make a nickel out of it and I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t kill me just for the sport when came his ascendance to absolute power.

“One other thing,” I said, after my obligations under the separation arrangement had been made clear. “I promised Peckworth that you would reduce his street tax.”

“Why did you promise such a thing to that pervert?” Dante asked.

“It was the only way to find out what I needed to find out.”

“We already knew what it was you were finding out.”

“But I didn’t know that. Why did you get him to switch his story in the first place?”

“This was a problem for us, not for some headline-happy prosecutor. We knew how to handle it on our own.”

“I promised him you’d lower his street tax.”

He stared at me for a long moment. Then he dropped his eyes and shook his head. “Stay out of our business,” he warned before he agreed.

My last job for the mob was an appearance as Peter Cressi’s counsel at his trial for the attempted purchase of all those guns, the crime that started this story for me in the first place.

“Where is your client, Mr. Carl?” the judge asked

“I don’t know, Judge,” I answered and, as befits an officer of the court, my answer was perfectly truthful because as far as I knew he could be in a landfill in New Jersey or in a landfill in Chester County or on a garbage barge floating slowly south looking for a place to dump. I didn’t know where he was but I did know that no matter how many bench warrants were issued in his name he wasn’t going to be found. So ended my last case as a mob lawyer. In the defense bar it is considered a victory if your client is not convicted and so I guess I went out a winner.

There is a bend in the river coming up. A huge black bird with a cape of white feathers around its red face swirls above and alights on a branch overhanging the water. The branch bends from the creature’s substantial weight. Canek tells me it is a king vulture and I don’t like the idea of it following us like that. I yell, but it holds its place on the branch, not interested in anything I have to offer until I am dead. We are close now, I can feel it. At each spot when the river turns I look anxiously for the pile of rocks and the tall cottonwood that will tell me we have arrived. I expect I’ll recognize it right off, I have imagined it in my mind ever since I heard Rudi tell of it over a Belikin in Eva’s, but even if I miss it I know that my trusty guide, Canek Panti, will find it for me. He is still standing behind me, stalwart and strong and able. The carved machete rests valiantly in the loop of his pants.

“Tell me something, Canek,” I say as I feel us getting ever closer. “When I was mugged in the streets of Belize City was that the real thing or had you just set that up for my benefit?”

He is quiet for a long moment. His pole in the water gives off an ominous swish as he pushes us forward.

“It was the real thing,” he says, finally. “Belize City can be a dangerous place for foreigners, though if those two had not come along I would have set it up much like that the next day.”

“Well, then thank you again for saving me,” I say.

“It was nothing,” says Canek Panti.

I’m not sure exactly when I knew about Canek. I suspected him when he seemed too perfect to be true, precisely the man I had hoped to meet in my quest through Belize. The idea grew when he stayed outside while I went into the Belize Bank branch in San Ignacio, as if he were afraid that the tellers would recognize him as the man making the withdrawals from the account I was so interested in, and it grew even more when he volunteered to be somewhere else while I made my foray into the market at San Ignacio. And when Rudi, the Mayan, spoke of the man who was not a foreigner, with the intricately carved machete, who took supplies to the distant jungle camp, I was certain. I don’t mind it actually, it is comforting that I am on the right track, that I won’t get lost, and that, no matter what happens, Canek will be by my side.

“He’s a murderer,” I say.

“What he did in a foreign land is not my concern.”

“Do you know what he wants with me?”

“No, Victor.”

“You’re not going to let him kill me, are you, Canek?”

“Not if I can help it,” he says.

Just then we round the curve of the bend and I see it, plain as a street sign, the pile of large rocks and the huge cottonwood, its thick walls of roots reaching down to the water. There is a place on the bank that appears a bit worn and Canek heads right toward it. He steps into the water and secures the canoe with the rope around a sapling and then I step out onto solid ground with my heavy black shoes. Despite the heat, I take my suit jacket out of the canoe and put it on. I button the top button of my shirt. The collar rubs against the swelling where the humpbacked botlass fly bit me, but still I tighten my tie. I intend to look as officially benign as an accountant. Is it only wishful thinking that I imagine it harder to kill a man in a suit? I lift out the briefcase and nod to Canek and then follow him as he slashes us a path up from the river and into the jungle.

Branches brush my legs and face as I climb behind Canek Panti. Birds are hooting, bugs are circling my face. Beneath our feet is a path, but the thick green leaves of the rain forest have encroached upon the space we need to move through and we have to swing the leaves away, as if we were swinging away the shutter doors of a Wild West saloon. On and on we go, forward, through the jungle. Canek hacks at vines, I protect my face. Something brutal bites my cheek. I see a small frog leap away, splay-footed, its face and torso daubed with an oxygen-rich red. Then, above the normal calls of the jungle, I hear the humming of a motor, a generator, and then another sound, rhythmic and familiar, shivery and dangerous.

Suddenly, we are at a clearing. There is a long patch of closely mowed grass and atop a slight rise is a cottage, old and wooden and not unlike the Poole house, except that the porch of this cottage is swathed in mosquito netting. It is an incongruous sight in the jungle, this lawn like in any American suburb, this house, gray and weathered, surrounded by perfectly maintained bushes bright with flowers of all different colors.

And there he is, in overalls, a straw hat, with long yellow gloves on his hands, standing in a cloud of tiny yellow butterflies as he holds a pair of clippers from which the rhythmic sound emanates, shivery and silvery, the opening and closing of his metal shears as he clips at a tall thorny bush.

He stops clipping and turns from his task and the eye within the angry red ring squints at me, but not in anger. There is on his face what appears to be a genuine smile.

“Victor,” says Nat, grandson of Elisha Poole and slayer of Reddmans. “Welcome to Belize. I’ve been expecting you.”

56

Somewhere in the jungle, Cayo, Belize

“IT’S THE FUNGUS IN THE AIR that does it,” says Nat, as we walk slowly side by side in an ornamental flower garden around the rear of the cottage. There are potted flowers and flowers growing in between piles of rocks and flowers hanging down from rotting tree limbs placed strategically in the ground. “The specialized fungus that feeds the germinating seeds. It’s everywhere in this jungle, in every breath. It’s the life blood of the orchid. Of course, like everything else, my sweethearts need careful pruning to maintain their splendor, but I’ve never been afraid to prune.”

Nat is showing off his collection of exotic orchids. He had grown some on the Reddman estate, he says, in the garden room, where only the most hardy hybrids prospered. But here, in this tropical fungal-infested garden, he can grow anything. His orchids are the true light of his life now, he says, his children. “My collection is priceless,” he says. I don’t comment on the evident ironies. As I take the tour I continue holding onto my briefcase and sweating into my suit. Canek, still with his cowboy hat and machete, trails ten feet behind us.

“The slipper orchid,” Nat says, pointing to a fragile blossom with three pink drooping petals surrounding what looks to be a white lip.

“Very nice,” I say.

“Masdevallia,” he says, indicating a bright red flower with three pointed petals.

“Beautiful.”

“Rossioglossum,” he says, brushing his fingers lightly along tiger-striped petals surrounding a bright yellow middle, “and Cattleya,” he says, stroking gently a flower with spotted pink petals surrounding a florid burst of purple, “and Dendrobium nobile,” he says, leaning his long frame down to smell the obscenely dark center of a perfect violet bloom.

“They’re all amazing,” I say flatly.

“Yes, they are. Here is one of the finest. Disa uniflora, the pride of Table Mountain in South Africa.” He caresses a large scarlet flower with a pale yellowish organ in the middle that more than vaguely resembles a penis, complete with hanging testicles.

I murmur something indicating my admiration but I am horrified by his collection. I have seen an orchid before, sure, I was as miserable as any high school kid at my prom, blowing too much money on the tickets and the limo and the plaid tux and, of course, the corsage, all without any hope of getting laid, but the orchid in my prom corsage was as prim as my date and as far removed from Nat’s blooms as a kitty cat from a saber-toothed tiger. The flowers Nat is growing are beastly things rising out of wild unkempt bushes. Gaudy petals, spotted and furry, drooping arrogant postures, pouty lips, sex organs explicit enough for Larry Flynt, the whole garden is pornographic.

“Acid, Victor. They thrive on acid. Look here.” He points to a tender white and pink flower pushing up from a separate plot in the ground. “This is my absolute favorite. Imported from Australia. Notice, Victor, there are no leaves. This plant stays underground, in secret, feeding only on that marvelous fungus, biding its time until the flower bursts into the open for its own reproductive purposes.”

“I think it’s time we got down to business,” I say.

Nat stops his tour and turns to stare at me, as if I interrupted the most important thing in his world, and then he smiles. “Right you are, Victor. Time for business. I’ll have tea set out for us on the veranda. Excuse me, but I should change.” He abruptly turns away from me and heads into the house through a rear door.

As I start to follow, Canek comes up beside me and gently takes hold of my arm. “I’ll take you around to the veranda,” he says and then he guides me back around the house to the front porch. He pulls away the mosquito netting, creating a gap for us to push through. Beneath a slowly spinning fan there is a table set with plates and cookies. Two seats face each other on opposite sides of the table. Canek pulls out one of the seats for me to sit upon and then he goes into the house, leaving me alone on the porch. The breeze from the fan is refreshing. Down the manicured slope of the lawn I see a long and crowded chicken coop.

Ten minutes later, out to the porch comes Nat, looking almost dashing in white pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “The tea will be out shortly. Iced tea. While the generator’s going we can enjoy the comforts of ice and fans.”

“I have some things for you,” I say, opening the lock and reaching into my briefcase.

“I can barely wait,” he cackles, almost joyfully.

“This is a certified copy of the default judgment I gained against you for the wrongful deaths of Jacqueline and Edward Shaw. You’ll notice the amount of the judgment is one hundred million dollars.”

“Well,” he says, taking it and looking it over with mild interest. “What’s a hundred million dollars among friends?”

“And this is a notice of deposition for the ongoing collection action. You should show up in my offices next month on the date listed at ten o’clock.”

“Will you have doughnuts for me, Victor? I like doughnuts.”

“And this is a summons and complaint for the collection action my lawyer in Belize City filed yesterday afternoon. If you’ll notice, in the complaint we’re seeking to levy on all your holdings in Belize, including all real estate and improvements, which would include this property and the house and your orchid garden. I was glad to hear that the collection was priceless.”

“Because it is priceless does not mean it can fetch any price, young man. Just so you know. The land we are on is rented from the Panti family, the house is worth the price of the wood, and the orchids I will of course take with me when I slip over the border, which is just a few kilometers that way, where I have rented another piece of land and have another house.”

“Then we’ll do it all again in Guatemala. I have also notified the FBI of your whereabouts and extradition proceedings are already beginning.”

He stares at me for a moment, the ring around his eye darkening. “Are you after me or my money?”

“Your money,” I say, quickly.

“Glad to hear it’s not personal.”

“Not at all,” I say. “It is only business.”

He cackles in appreciation. “That old bastard Claudius Reddman would be proud as hell of you, Victor.”

Canek Panti comes onto the veranda with a tray holding a bucket of ice, two tall glasses, and a big glass pitcher of tea. He puts a glass before each of us and fills it with tea and ice. As Canek works he has the same considerate manner as when he was guiding. I thank him and he nods and leaves. I lift up the glass and take a long drink. It is minty and marvelous. Nat reaches over and lifts up the pitcher and refills my glass.

“Nothing better than a glass of tea on a hot day,” he says.

“I have something else.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the letter from Christian Shaw, still covered in plastic, and hand it to him. “It was addressed to you.”

He takes it and looks at it for a moment and then tears apart the plastic and opens the envelope and reads the letter inside. He reads it slowly, as if for the first time, and after many quiet minutes I see a tear well. When he finishes reading he carefully puts it back in the envelope and unabashedly wipes the line of wet running down his cheek.

“Thank you, Victor. I am touched. Truly touched. Didn’t have time to take everything with me when I left. I was in an awful hurry. Knew you’d figure it all out soon enough and wanted to be gone before the police came looking. Didn’t even have time to stay for Edward’s funeral, no matter how pleasant that must have been. I would have taken the time, of course, to dig up my box, but you had already beaten me to that.”

“The bank numbers in it were helpful in tracing your funds.”

“I hoped my friend Walter Calvi would have retrieved it for me, but he seems to have disappeared.”

“Things didn’t quite go his way,” I say. “Why did you bury it?”

“It was appropriate for it to rest in the ground there. It contained my most precious things. My legacy really.”

“I figured out who was in the pictures. What was the postcard from Yankee Stadium all about?”

“A little private joke. April 19, 1923, the birth of two great institutions, Yankee Stadium and me.” He laughs his high-pitched laugh.

“Both institutions seemed to have fallen on hard times,” I said. From my briefcase I pull out a photocopy of the diary pages we found in the box. “You might want these too.”

He looks them over and grows pensive once again. “Yes, thank you. You’ve been more than considerate, Victor, for someone hounding me like a wolf. Mrs. Shaw, she ordered me to burn her diary when she felt death approach, to burn everything, but I excised the portions that concerned my father. That, and the letters, were all I really had of him. And, of course, his blood.”

“I found your father’s letter very moving. He seemed to have found an inner peace after all his trials. I would have thought his example of love and spiritual understanding would have convinced you to give up your dreams of revenge.”

“Well, you would have thought wrong. He wasn’t a Poole, was he? And he wrote that letter before he was murdered by a Reddman.”

“Kingsley was his son. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Not Kingsley, that worthless piece of scrap. He pulled the trigger, yes, but it was Mrs. Shaw that did the killing. She was spying on my mother that night and she saw my mother and my father together and she couldn’t help but scream. It was such an inhuman scream that my idiot half-brother mistook it for a cougar that was loose in the countryside. He took out my father’s gun and when Mrs. Shaw saw my father climb the hill she told her son to fire and he did and for the first and last time in his miserable life Kingsley actually hit what he was aiming at.”

I had wondered what that wild scream was that Kingsley had heard the night he killed his father and now I know, it was Faith Reddman Shaw’s agonized cry as she saw her husband embrace the pregnant Poole daughter and realize that it was he who was the girl’s secret lover, the father of her child. How lost she must have been to withhold that fact from her diary, how pathetic to be unable to admit the truths of her life even in her most private world. I wonder if she learned the tools of self-deception from her father just as she learned from him to pursue any and all means to satisfy her ends.

“So your father’s letter didn’t mute your hatred at all?” I ask.

“Not a yard, not an inch. I don’t go in for that spiritual crap. And it is not as if his paeans to love would turn me around. I found my true love and still it paled next to the ecstasies of my family’s revenge. But do you know who those letters actually affected? Mrs. Shaw.”

“Faith Shaw?”

“None other. Changed her life, she said. Took her years to get the courage to go into her husband’s room after his death. Years. But when she finally did, there she discovered the key. Eventually she thought to fit the key into the locked breakfront drawer at the Poole house, where she found the letters. The love letters from my mother and the letter addressed to me from my father. They had an enormous effect on her. They turned her heart inside out. I can’t imagine, Victor, that mere words could have such an effect on a soul. She said she saw the emptiness in all her prior yearnings and crimes and sought to live from then on a life of repentance. I suppose she was ripe for something, still mourning all she had done and all her father had done before her.

“They were a pair, the two of them, two peas in a pod. You know, it wasn’t just the one sister she killed, she killed the other, too. Poisoned her, to be sure that her son would be the only heir to the Reddman fortune. She called him Kingsley, which was a joke in itself, and before his birth made sure to destroy all possible pretenders to his throne. She put the poison in the broth she cooked her dying sister each morning. She had learned her father’s lessons well and so, when it was time for repentance, she had much to be forgiven for. She pursued repentance as devotedly as she pursued her husband and her son’s inheritance. Conciliation, expiation, redemption: that’s what she was after. How unfortunate for her that the only path to what she sought with such desperation led through me.”

“I had wondered how you got onto the estate.”

“Yes, it was Mrs. Shaw who brought me home to Veritas. My mother had a difficult delivery from which she never recovered. She tried to raise me but had no money and no strength and so she sent me off for adoption. She didn’t know where I was when Mrs. Shaw came looking for me shortly after finding the letters. It took her detectives nine years to find me. My adoptive parents were fine people. It was as happy a home as could be expected, but their fortunes had declined and they couldn’t afford to turn down Mrs. Shaw’s blandishments. So I was brought to Veritas to become her ward, her gardener, her servant. That was how she made it up to me, the stealing of my birthright and the killing of my father; she made me her gardener. She thought she was doing good, and I would have thought so too, I suppose, except she made a singular mistake. She also brought back my mother and put her in that apartment on Rittenhouse Square so that I could visit her and learn the truth of what had been done to me and my family.”

“I thought your mother was beyond the hatred.”

“Maybe once, but not after they killed my father. When we were reunited, God bless her, there was nothing left of the woman who had loved Christian Shaw, there was only the pain in her broken body and the bitterness. She was a wicked little thing and I loved her for it. She was the one who told me exactly how to decorate my half-brother’s room. He would have nothing to do with his mother and so it was left to me to be his friend and companion. I was the one who moved in that wonderful painting of his mother. He didn’t have the strength to say no and so she has stared down at him every day of his life. No wonder he jumped. But that wasn’t all my mother wanted; toying with Kingsley was mere sport. She told me over and over how the Poole fortune was stolen, repeating all the stories her mother had told her. About how Claudius Reddman had doctored the books to steal his fortune. About how he had turned his friend Elisha Poole into a drunkard so his treachery would go unnoticed.”

“I didn’t know that’s how he did it.”

“My great-grandfather, singed with a mark similar to mine around his eye, was a fierce alcoholic and Claudius figured it wouldn’t take much to get the teetotaling Elisha off the wagon. A drink here in friendship. A drink there in celebration. A bottle late at night after all the employees had gone home. It wasn’t long before my grandfather was so sodden he couldn’t see what was being ripped from him, from his family, from his legacy. ‘Get it back, Nat,’ I remember my mother telling me from her bed, her eyes steeped with hatred. ‘Get back every cent.’ ”

When his mother’s words come from his lips they have a rasping resonance as if she is still here, the broken old woman holed up in the luxury apartment on Rittenhouse Square, mouthing commands of revenge to her son.

“I think every young person needs inspiration in his life,” continues Nat. “My mother was mine. I like to think I’ve done amazingly well following her wishes, but it wasn’t as hard as it may seem, what with Mrs. Shaw so desperate to make amends for all she had done. Step by step I took it back.

“I was just returned from the war in the Pacific when Mrs. Shaw gave me the letter from my father and told me what she would do for me. Money, she said, she would give me all the money I wanted. A half a million dollars, she said. I took it right off and left. Half a million was something then and I went through it in five years. That was living, yep. Girls in Hollywood, girls in Paris. I rented a villa in Tuscany and threw wild parties. It was right out of Fellini. When I was broke I came back and demanded more. Another half-million pissed away in less time than the first. By the time I came back it was 1952. I was broke again and half a million wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wanted the whole thing. ‘Get it back, Nat.’ I will, Momma, I will. That was when I convinced Mrs. Shaw to set up the Wergeld Trust.

“It started out modestly enough. Just a million at first, but I kept on coming back for more and she kept on giving it. More money, more of the Reddman fortune. I was constantly tempted to leave and live high off what was in the trust but my mother was always there to implore me not to take a portion when I could have it all. So I stayed by Mrs. Shaw’s side, pruning her garden, accompanying her on her walks, telling her I needed more and more and more as recompense. And with the weakness of the redeemed she kept giving in. But it wasn’t enough. Some things can’t be bought with just money.

“There was a maid that worked the house, a sweet thing, innocent, really, until I was through with her. She was sent away when her pregnancy was unmistakable but I ordered Mrs. Shaw to bring the child to the estate and raise him to be my heir. Franklin. I didn’t want him to know I was his father but we worked together on the gardens and though he didn’t know, I knew that he was a Poole and that he would inherit the whole of the Wergeld Trust and become as rich as he would have been had not our fortune been stolen from us. But it wasn’t enough.

“He was still just a bastard, rich now, but not a Reddman. So I told Mrs. Shaw I needed one more thing, the most delicious thing of all. She said no and I insisted and she said no and I demanded and finally she gave in. She set it up for me, like a pimp. It wasn’t so hard to arrange, really. D. H. Lawrence did most of the work.

“Summer nights, sneaking into the Poole house, the two of us. I’d place garlands of flowers atop her head and drop rose petals on her sharp breasts. Now she is a pitiful wreck, Selma Shaw, but then she was different, earnest and beautiful. I loved those nights, our brutal strivings, loud enough so Kingsley could hear it all from his window. That was a gift in itself, but there was more. I loved her. Truly. Imagine that, finding love in the course of revenge. When she found herself pregnant she talked of running off with me, but then our child would have been a bastard and not an heir. I loved her, Victor, but what power does love have next to imperatives of the blood. So I turned her away and instead of running off with me she stayed at Veritas and bore Kingsley’s fourth child, a miracle child considering his operation, and, finally, the Pooles had burrowed their way directly into the Reddman line.”

“Caroline,” I whisper.

“And still it was not enough. ‘Get it back, Nat. Get back every cent.’ I would have stopped there, but my mother was insistent, urging me from her bed, plotting it all with me, telling me just how to do it, so that even after she died I had no doubts. It was simply a matter of pruning, like with any plant. Cut off some of the shoots and more precious sap flows into those that remain. I had to wait for Mrs. Shaw to die so that she wouldn’t upset the trust, which she still controlled, and she proved to be a hardy weed, but once she was gone I was free to prune. How fortunate that Walter Calvi came looking for Edward just when I was looking for someone like him. Jacqueline and then Edward. Paid for Robert too but Calvi disappeared before he could deliver. I am not too disappointed, Robert is such a sexual misfit that he’s sure to die heirless, leaving everything to my daughter. I had hoped we could unite the fortune in one family, in one heir, the final triumph of the Pooles, but somehow Mrs. Shaw discovered the two lovebirds and put an end to the affair. Even she had her limits, I suppose.”

He winks at me just then, he winks at me with the self-satisfaction of a clever boy who has just played a clever trick. “Still I figure we did pretty well, we Pooles, wouldn’t you say?”

Of all the stories I had heard in the dealings with the Reddmans and the Pooles, his is the most pathetic. He wants me to smile at him, to nod and acknowledge his success, but I see nothing more before me than a horribly failed life and I won’t give him what he wants.

“And now it is over?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re pleased with yourself?”

“Absolutely. More tea?”

“I intend to collect on my judgment, Nat.”

“Well then, I am going to disappoint you, because I no longer have one hundred million dollars.”

“The records show that more than that was channeled into the Wergeld Trust by Faith Shaw.”

“Yes, it was. As I said, she was trying to make recompense, poor deluded thing, but the money is not mine anymore. Just after her death, and before either of your so-called wrongful killings, I irrevocably transferred all but a few paltry million into trust for my son. He knew nothing of my plans, knew for certain of my guilt only after I had fled. The boy doesn’t even know that the Wergeld trust is his upon my death. So you see, Victor, I couldn’t pay it to you even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

I stare at him for a moment, wondering whether to believe him or not, and suddenly I do. We had traced money, all right, but not all of what should have been there. The amount that had been transferred from the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Libya and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, had been just about ten million dollars. I had hoped, somehow, in this meeting, to smoke out the rest and that’s what I have done. It is gone. To Harrington. Out of my reach. A despair falls onto my shoulders.

“There’s still ten million in your control,” I say, clutching at anything. “We know that.”

“Yes, that’s about right, maybe less. Enough to support me through my old age. I like it here, Victor. I like Canek and the country and this jungle and this river and my orchids. I like it here very much. It has become a home, but if you force me to move I will. Guatemala or Paraguay or the Seychelles if need be. Do you know the Seychelles?”

“Off the coast of Africa?”

“That’s it. They have offered a nonextraditable citizenship to anyone willing to pay ten million dollars to the government. They have some very exciting orchids in the Seychelles from what I understand, Madagascan epiphytes like the African leopard orchid and the spectacular Angraecum sesquipedale. If I must I’ll pay the money to them and live quite peacefully with my orchids under their protection. But then, of course, there’d be nothing left for you.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Stop. That’s what I brought you here to tell you. Stop your efforts to trace my money. Stop your lawyer in Belize City from continuing his suit. Do what you can to stop the investigation by the FBI. Tell no one you have seen me here and stop your efforts to hound me as if I were a common criminal. I like it here. I like the jungle. Go away and let me live here in peace and when I die I will provide that all of what remains of my money will go to satisfy your judgment. The interest the Swiss give is rather paltry, but I spend very little here and the amount will grow over time. Go away and leave me alone and someday you’ll get some money out of me.”

“And you would get away with everything.”

“I’ve already gotten away with everything.”

“It’s a rotten deal.”

“It’s the only deal I’m offering, the only way you’ll ever see a dime.”

I stare at him and think it over for a moment and then I take a long drink of tea.

“Do you know what evil is, Nat?” I ask.

He looks at me for a moment, bemusement gently creasing his face. “Failure?” he suggests.

I make a loud sound like a buzzer going off. “No, I’m sorry. Wrong answer.”

57

On the Macal River, Cayo, Belize

CANEK IS PADDLING ME BACK DOWN the river, toward San Ignacio. From there I’ll take one of the ubiquitous taxis to the airport. I’m ready to get the hell out of Belize. My hand hurts from a bite, it is swelling with a frightening rapidity, and I suspect the botfly larva is squirming there beneath my skin. I wonder if I have to declare the beefworm to customs when I land. I scratch it and it burns and I scratch it some more. Maybe they have some glue and some Scotch tape at the hotel. I scratch it and think on Caroline.

I suspected that Nat was Caroline’s father before he ever admitted it to me, the remark by Calvi before our gun-fight on Pier Four was what clued me, but I didn’t tell Caroline about Kingsley’s vasectomy or my suspicions and I won’t tell her of Nat’s admission of paternity either. It is not my place, I think, to tell her that her real father is an evil son of a bitch.

We have ended whatever it was we had, Caroline and I. The love expressed between Emma and Christian too powerfully illuminated what wasn’t between us to allow us to continue as anything but friends. True to her word, after learning from the letter why her grandfather had thrown away his medal, she signed the contingency fee agreement. She found something else in the letter too, the one good thing she had been looking for, the transformation of her grandfather from a coward to a man. She has taken again to wearing her grandfather’s medal and she is working, along with her therapist, to re-create for herself the history of her life, building on the base of Christian Shaw’s transformation and late-found love, as well as on her understanding of the crimes that so deformed her family. This exercise in self-emendation has given her an attractive tranquility. She smokes less, drinks less, has taken some of the hardware out of her body. She doesn’t interrupt me anymore when I speak. She has even adopted Sam the cat. Now that she has learned her family truths, her ailurophobia seems to have receded. She has not become one of those strange cat people, she does not allow Sam to sleep in her bed nor does she talk incessantly about how cute he is, but they have reached an understanding and he seems quite content in his new home in her loft on Market Street. I guess, like his former master, he figures anything beats Florida. Caroline pines still for Harrington, I think, not knowing he is her brother and not understanding why he can’t be with her anymore. I suspect he’ll tell her someday.

Caroline and Beth have become fast friends. I fear they talk about me over coffee when I am not around, though they deny it. Beth left the Church of New Life a while ago, turned off finally by the avarice with which Oleanna envelops her truths, and is now trying out Buddhism. Caroline went with her on her last Zen retreat, to an ashram in New Jersey. I maintain that seeking enlightenment in New Jersey is oxymoronic but they think they are on to something. Both women seemed subtly changed by the weekend, more at peace.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“We didn’t talk.”

“What did you do?”

“We did nothing.”

“What did you think about?”

“We denied ourselves the luxury of thought.”

“I’m not impressed,” I said. “I spent the whole weekend watching golf on television and did the exact same thing.”

The most hopeful aspect of Caroline’s progress is that she is devoid of the bitterness over the past that has plagued the Pooles. There is a great peril to history. As a Jew I have learned to never forget, but some history, I believe, is best left behind. History is a warning to ourselves, and only by remembering where we have been and how low we have fallen can we know to where we aspire, but we lose everything when it is history that drives us completely, as it drove Nat and his mother and her mother and her husband. If we are to be more than pigeons pecking for pellets then we must transcend the bitterest of our histories and strike out on our own. Remembrance without forgiveness is a curse and there is no better proof of that than the Reddmans and the Pooles, fighting through generations over a fortune like two dogs worrying a bone. Caroline is learning of the necessity of forgiveness, as did Christian Shaw and as did, surprisingly, his wife, Faith.

I find it difficult to reconcile the young Faith Reddman Shaw, three-time murderess, with the woman who handed over so much to Nat in vain absolution of her past and her father’s past. It is touching and sad, both, to think of her acceding to Nat’s vile demands one after the other in hopes that, finally, her debts and her father’s debts would be paid. That she was a monster, that her attempts were flawed, that the object of her attempts was evil makes the effort no less noble. This has been a tale of the basest sort, but I think that the most interesting part remains forever hidden, and that is the story of Faith’s conversion from criminal to penitent. It is a story written on the human soul, indecipherable but no less real because of it. It is the true story of redemption in the Reddman history, heroically epic because she had so far up to climb. My guess is that her transformation followed a similar path to her husband’s and is a journey being embarked upon by Caroline now. Good luck to her and I hope to hell she finds whatever it is she is looking for.

As for me, I don’t go in for that spiritual crap, as Nat so tactfully put it. It is just a balm, I think, to conceal the painful truths we’re stuck with, like a flesh-colored zit cream. Sure it is comforting to see oneself as part of the great mystical all, destined to be reborn again and again, like it is comforting to loll about in a tub of warm water, but it strikes me as a false refuge. Maybe my near-death experiences have turned me existential, but I can’t help thinking now that I was born for no reason, I live for no reason, I will die for no reason. My task now is to figure out how to deal with those ugly truths without succumbing to depression and spending the rest of my life shivering with despair beneath the covers of my bed. One thing I do know for sure is that if I’m going to contemplate my place in the universe I’d just as soon do it on a beach in Aruba with an umbrella drink in my hand.

I agreed to Nat’s offer. I promised to leave him alone, to tell no one where I found him, to halt all my attempts to collect on the debt pending his death. If he dies with ten million we’d get a third, half of which goes to my partner, a third of which goes to taxes, leaving me with about a million. So sometime in the future, the far future because he seemed a healthy man despite his age, I’m going to get a million dollars. As long as Nat has told me the truth. It’s not all I was hoping for, but I can live with it, I suppose. Better it goes to me than to some corrupt government on the Seychelles. I don’t like the idea of leaving him alone as if he got away with it but I’m nobody’s instrument of retribution. “Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth the Lord, and He can have it. I’m just a lawyer trying to make the best deal I can. Besides, I figure leaving Nat alone with his beastly flowers in that mosquito-infested jungle to face the heat of the dry season and the swarms of the rainy season is as close as I can come to sending him to hell. If I can do that and still end up with a million dollars, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Am I still obsessed with finding a great fortune after all I’ve seen of the Reddmans and the Pooles? Hell yes. Obscene wealth is the great American obsession and I am nothing if not a patriot. It’s just that now I think how I make it and how I spend it is every bit as meaningful as the money itself. Someday, if luck ever finds me, I’ll be graced with a child of my own. The tragedy of the Reddmans has taught me that everything we’ve ever done is passed to our children like an inheritance. I can live with my crimes, I think, but to curse my child with my crimes is criminal and to commit them knowing that later on I’ll have to hide the truth is positively craven. I’m still chasing as hard as the next guy, sure, but from here on in I act as if a child is judging every stride.