House on Fire

11

“Going like that?” Sukie Kimball said with a tart smile.

She meant my tattered jeans and sneakers.

“Think your father will mind if I change at his house?”

“There’s thirty-seven rooms in my father’s house. I’m sure we can find one to use.”

She had on a pair of black leather pants and a lacy white top. She raised her voice. “Hey, Keith, why don’t you take a smoke break,” she called to the driver.

“Yes, ma’am.”

As soon as the driver had left the car, she pulled out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it. It was a photocopy of an architectural drawing. She’d already emailed me the drawings the day before.

“Mind if we go over this again?” she said. “This is the first floor of the house. I’ve marked the study.”

“The files are in his study?”

“Somewhere in there.”

“What does that mean, ‘somewhere’? You don’t know where he keeps his files?”

“It’s more complicated than that. He has file drawers for family and personal matters. But then he keeps the most sensitive, secret files... somewhere. He won’t talk about it. I just know they’re somewhere in his home office.”

“So you’re not even sure the file in question is in there somewhere?”

“Oh, it’s in there somewhere. That I’m sure of. Something that explosive, that secret — he’s going to hide a copy in his personal files. I know him.”

“And I’m supposed to wander off to use the bathroom and end up in his study?”

“During the party or after.”

We’d arranged for me to stay in the house, in a separate guest bedroom — Sukie said she was just being respectful to her dad, who insisted that unmarried couples could not cohabitate under his roof — but we hadn’t made any specific plans beyond that. The when and the how of it were up to me.

“He gives some big parties, for an eighty-year-old man.”

“It’s not like he’s rolling out the phyllo dough for the appetizers himself.”

“Who’s the social arbiter in the marriage — him or his Russian fiancée? Or is she wife by now?”

“Natalya’s not his wife. Not yet. But it’ll happen soon enough. She’s been glued to him practically since the day they met on Russian Beauties Dot Com.”

“Is that how they met, for real?”

“Or one of those websites.” She attempted a mock Russian accent: “‘Do you vant real love, romance, or marriage with stunning Russian lady?’” She wasn’t bad.

“Where’d we meet, you and I?” I said.

“A party in TriBeCa.”

“I can make that work. I live in Boston, work for McKinsey and Company as a consultant, and beyond that you stopped asking. That’s all you know.”

“That’s enough.”

“Is there security I should be aware of?”

“People or electronic?”

“Either. Both.”

“There’s always someone. Like Dad’s security chief, Fritz Heston. He might be there.”

“What about electronic security? I’m thinking specifically of his office.”

“Only when he’s out of the house. Other times, he usually keeps it turned off.”

I nodded, poring over the architectural drawings.

“Where are the bedrooms?”

She handed me another folded drawing. The second floor of the house. I saw a room labeled map room and a bunch of bedrooms.

“Where am I staying?”

“The one nearest my bedroom, and yes, my father’s bedroom is in the same wing. And he’s a light sleeper.”

We pulled up beside a guard booth, slowed to a brief stop, just a few seconds, long enough to lower the window on the left side of the passenger’s compartment. The guard took a quick look and waved us through. I wasn’t impressed by the security protocol. The guard barely looked at me. Sloppy.

“That was too easy,” I said.

“Fair enough,” she said. “So far no one has tried to target Daddy’s house. But there have been protests against us. Like the one at MoMA.”

I remembered hearing about that — on a busy Saturday afternoon, a large group came into the Museum of Modern Art and went up to the Kimball Gallery and lay down on the floor. It was a “die-in.” They had scattered empty prescription spray bottles of Oxydone all over the place.

“Only a matter of time before people start protesting outside the gates of the house,” I said. “I’d get a lot more serious about the security.”

We approached a brick Georgian house, handsome but surprisingly modest. For a moment I marveled at how simple and unpretentious the Kimball family house turned out to be.

Until I realized that it was a gatehouse we’d just passed. Where the gardeners or the gatekeepers were probably lodged. The main house was another half mile down a silky-smooth paved road banked by mature oaks.

This house was impressive. It was built in a Tudor Revival style, and it reminded me of the neo-Gothic mansion I grew up in, before my father disappeared and we were broke. It too was immense and rambling. Most of the rooms were furnished but never used, dusted regularly by the housekeeping staff.

This one was originally built in 1924 as a summer home by one of the so-called robber barons, a shipping magnate whose ancestors had gotten rich off the importation of Chinese opium a century earlier, I kid you not. I wondered if Conrad Kimball knew that when he bought the estate decades earlier.

It was surrounded by 250 acres, which included a large natural forest. We passed the tennis courts and a pool and pool house and manicured gardens, as we approached the house. On the other side of the house were gardens and acres of pristine forestland.

“Welcome to Kimball Hall,” she said with a twist of a smile.

Of course it had a name.