House on Fire

14

Time had not bent Conrad Kimball. He had a bristly white mustache and sparse white hair, but he was mostly bald on top. A dark, heavy brow. A long, sharp nose. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and, over it, a navy cardigan sweater, unbuttoned. He looked like he’d just gotten up from his afternoon nap. Tufts of stray white hairs stuck out on either side of his head like wires.

Back in the day, Kimball was known for his plainspoken manner, I’d read, but as he aged, he grew more intimidating. Now he was short with business associates, always blunt.

The woman on his arm was wasp-waisted and elegant and blond and looked to be about forty. At a distance she could have been Grace Kelly. An Hermès scarf was tied around her neck. That had to be Natalya, the fiancée. She looked like she was arriving at an awards ceremony where she was the featured nominee. She also looked like she’d recently had her lips filled.

“Happy birthday, Daddy!” Megan called out, and the rest of the crowd responded in kind, wishing him happy birthday in a ragged torrent of voices.

“Where the hell are my sons?” Conrad said. “I see my sweet girls are here, but what the hell happened to Paul and Cameron, those lousy bums?”

Sukie said, “Paul’s on his way, and Cameron — Cameron is Cameron.”

A couple of people chuckled knowingly. Someone’s cell phone rang. One of the moppet-headed kids said, “Can we eat?” and Conrad said, “Hell yeah, we can eat!”

He put out his arms as he walked toward the younger kids and then enfolded both of them at once. I wondered if they were fraternal twins. One was taller and thinner than the other, but they looked otherwise alike. Meanwhile, the teenage boys appeared to be tussling over ownership of a phone.

Alone, at the edge of the crowd, stood Natalya, smiling cryptically. No one was greeting her. She was the proverbial skunk at the garden party. A frightened-looking waitress came by with a glass of red wine on a tray, and as she stepped forward to hand it to Natalya, the waitress must have tripped on the carpet, because she lost her balance and upended the wineglass. The spill missed Natalya, but dark red wine splashed onto the arm of the pale yellow sofa, staining it at once.

The waitress’s face crumpled, and she began to weep as she righted the wineglass. Natalya swiftly untied her scarf from her neck and let it flutter over the wine stain on the arm of the sofa. The scarf covered the stain entirely.

She smiled at the waitress and winked. “Conrad does not have to know,” she murmured.

Meanwhile, Conrad, busy with the kids, was braying, “Someday that kid is going to get himself killed.” I assumed he was talking about his youngest, Cameron, twenty-two, who was known to be a hard-core party dude.

His daughters were lining up to hug him. None of them currently had a husband, I noted. Conrad probably wasn’t a good male role model. Megan had an ex who didn’t seem to be here. There was a big gap in age between her teenage sons and the moppet-headed terrorists, who looked to be around eight.

After she hugged her father, Sukie introduced me as her friend Nick.

Conrad turned to me with squinty, suspicious eyes. He gave me his hand, which was as cool and dry as an old broken-in leather baseball mitt. With his left hand he was holding on to the edge of a table. He was probably in need of a walker or at least a cane, but he was too vain to use one. Didn’t want to appear infirm.

“Nick Brown,” I said.

“You an artist too, Mr. Brown?” he said pleasantly. “A filmmaker, like Sukie?”

“No, sorry, I’m boring. Just a businessman. A consultant for McKinsey.”

“Oh, is that right?” Conrad said with a slight tilt of his head and a glinting smile. His teeth were either bad veneers or dentures. “I was expecting another one of those strange weedy anarchists. You don’t seem Sukie’s type.”

“You’d be surprised,” Sukie cut in flatly.

He looked at his daughter. His eyes twinkled, became playful for an instant. “So you’re no longer with... Gregg?” he said. You could see he was toying with her and taking pleasure in her annoyance.

“That’s been over for months.”

He turned back to me. “So is there any consulting wisdom you can give me, Mr. Brown? How’s the world looking to you?”

“I don’t know about wisdom,” I said, “but if I were running Kimball Pharma, I’d shut down my Budapest operation immediately, before that Hungarian autocrat seizes it on behalf of the government. Which he’s about to do. Any day now.” I’d come prepared.

His genial smile faded. “That right?”

I gazed at the old man directly. “Maybe he’ll leave Kimball Pharma alone, but I know for a fact he’s targeting Merck.”

His eyes lasered in on mine, all fierce concentration. “You know this how?”

“I travel a lot.”

He put a hand on Sukie’s right shoulder. “You got hold of an interesting one this time, Susan,” he said.

Then he turned back to me, and I saw he wasn’t smiling. His slate-gray eyes had gone hard. In a low voice, he said, “But I don’t think you’re the man you pretend to be.”

My stomach did a flip, and I saw the color drain from Sukie’s face. I held her gaze a moment, partly to compose myself before responding to Conrad. But when I turned to face him, he’d turned away.

“Not sure I understand,” I replied blandly.

He turned back. “You’re far too interesting to be one of those stamped-from-a-mold McKinsey kids.”

A butler approached the old man.

“Oh, it takes all types,” I said, relieved.

“Will you excuse me, sir,” the butler said to Kimball, “but we’re ready to serve whenever you’d like.”

“Well, hell, let’s eat now,” Kimball announced. “To be continued,” he said to me with a wag of a finger.