House on Fire

36

At the JetBlue counter at the Westchester Airport, I bought a ticket to Albany, New York. Then I called my father’s lawyer and arranged to visit him in prison.

“He has a condition,” the lawyer told me.

“You mean senile dementia? That again?”

At one time he was pretending to have some kind of unspecified senility and was asking for compassionate release. But he couldn’t keep up the ruse. He got tired of acting demented.

“That’s not what I mean,” the lawyer said.

“What kind of condition?”

“He’ll tell you. He may not talk to you unless you agree to his condition.”

The lawyer wouldn’t explain beyond that, and I didn’t push it. I got on my flight, and by the afternoon I had arrived, in a rented car, at the grimy Victorian Gothic redbrick prison, the medium-security Altamont Correctional Facility.

It had once been a hospital for the criminally insane, the Altamont Lunatic Asylum, and it was still a forbidding place. I went through the security procedures, the metal detector and the ion scan and two metal cages, until I got to the visitors’ room, which smelled, as always, of ammonia and sweat. Its floor was green linoleum, its walls beige, a large mural painted on the visitors’ side.

Victor Heller, the Dark Prince of Wall Street, was serving thirty years. He had thirteen years left. I often wondered whether he would die in prison. It wouldn’t bother me if he did.

Victor was waiting for me. He was the only one sitting at the long counter on the prisoners’ side. I was the only visitor.

I rarely visited my father, but every time I saw him, he got smaller. He wore a dark green shirt and pants and had a great white beard, like some Old Testament prophet, and eyebrows like fat white caterpillars. His cheeks and forehead were peeling, shedding flakes of skin. His psoriasis had gotten bad. They say it’s exacerbated by stress.

He gave me a rheumy stare and did not smile. I sat down on the molded plastic chair. “I think we have a little business to transact first,” he said.

“Your condition.”

He nodded. “Very simple and quite reasonable. For some reason my daughter-in-law will not permit her son to visit me in prison. I want to see him. He’s my only grandchild.”

My nephew, Gabe, lived in Cambridge, across the river from my office. He’d graduated from high school and had decided he wasn’t going to college. Which mortified his parents, my brother, Roger, and his wife, Lauren. But Roger was in prison himself and therefore in no position to pass judgment. Gabe was working at a record store in Central Square, and living with a lot of roommates, with whom he didn’t get along.

Lauren, who hated Victor, refused to let Gabe visit him. Theoretically, Gabe could do what he wanted, but he disliked going against his mother’s wishes. So he had never been to Altamont, and that rankled Victor.

“I’m not his dad,” I said. “He’s not going to listen to me.”

“He listens to you plenty. He idolizes you. He’ll do what you tell him. And what I want you to tell him is that he needs to visit his grandfather in prison. That I want him to come as soon as possible. If we agree on that, Nicholas, I’m willing to spend time with you today.”

I almost burst out laughing. The man was in prison, probably desperate for visitors, yet he’d be “willing to spend time” with me. How comically arrogant. But he had me over a barrel. I needed to talk to him.

I pursed my lips and said, “Agreed.”

“You’ll tell Gabe to visit me?”

“I can’t order him to, but I’ll suggest it. It’s not going to be easy for him to get here. He’s too young to rent a car in Massachusetts. I think you have to be twenty-five. Plus, he has a job.”

“I’m sure you can figure out a way for him to get here. I want to see my only grandchild.”

“Deal.”

“I want his mobile phone number.”

“Deal.” I gave it to him. I was surprised when Victor took out a regular roller-ball pen from the pocket of his trousers and took a note. “They let you have stuff like that in prison?” I asked.

“Haven’t you learned yet, Nicholas? You have to know the right people. Now, for you to come all the way here from Boston, you must want something pretty badly.”

“You were a friend of Conrad Kimball, isn’t that right?”

“The Oxydone king? I wouldn’t call him a friend. Though at one point I took a private equity position in Kimball Pharma. So I got to know him and his company well. Well enough, anyway. Why?”

I told him what had happened. I was rarely this candid with him, but I needed him to know the details.

“Oh, it’s delicious, is it not?” my father said.

“What is?”

“All the sensitive artistes protesting Conrad Kimball’s ‘tainted’ money, as if there was any other kind. Where do you think the Medici fortune came from? In part, at least, from their poisoning their rivals.”

“I think the point is that Kimball has become a billion-dollar company by profiting on human weakness.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Victor said. “Human weakness is the greatest business opportunity there ever was. Always has been. People have a sweet tooth, and entrepreneurs make a fortune producing sugar and feeding the addiction. The Delano dynasty — as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt — was in the opium trade. Merck got huge off heroin. Mallinckrodt began in the cocaine business. Smart suppliers create their own demand. People say I was greedy? Wrong. I made money off other people’s greed.”

I shrugged. He was not an easy man to argue with.

“And let me tell you something about Kimball Pharma. If Conrad is smart, he’s in the process of changing the company’s mission dramatically. He won’t be alive to see it, but in ten years, Kimball will be an entirely different company.”

“Why do you say that?”

“‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ Since you’re not particularly well read, that’s a line from Lampedusa’s The Leopard.”

“Wasn’t on the reading list in college.”

“Motorola used to make car radios. Now they make phones and computer chips. IBM used to make supercomputers. Now they’re a service company. In order to survive, companies must evolve. Chesterton has a wonderful metaphor. If you leave a white fence post alone, it will soon be a black post. So if you want to keep it white, you always have to be painting it again. If you want the old white post, you have to have a new white post.”

“I see.”

“If I know Conrad, he’s in the process of making some big changes.”

“All right,” I said. “The fact is, a woman was killed.”

He looked at me for a long time. He had been making a point, and I had cut him off. Then he said, “Killed by whom?”

“Maybe a contractor working for Kimball Pharma’s security department. Or the security director himself.”

“Why?”

“Because of what she took. An envelope of documents. Some of which I need, but they’re all gone now.”

“You want this murder solved, I take it.”

“You take it right.”

“Which documents did she find?”

“His latest will, for one. Whereas I was looking for proof they buried a human subject trial.”

“Who did the trial in question?”

“A company called Phoenicia Health Sciences.”

“And you don’t think they have a copy of their own work somewhere?”

“The trick would be getting inside.”

“I’m sure you can figure that out. Being the gumshoe that you are.” He said it with a twist of his mouth, a kind of sneer of contempt. Like I was a noir cliché. Everything about the direction of my career — dropping out of Yale to join the army Special Forces, working as a civilian in the Pentagon, then quitting to become a private spy — mystified him. To him, I was a man who had made one disastrous career move after another.

Then again, he was the one sitting in prison. Not me.

I nodded. “There’s always a way.”

“Find out what happened to it. Falsifying drug trials opens up a company to legal liability that can bring it to bankruptcy. You can bankrupt Kimball single-handedly by proving they falsified a drug trial. So go get that weapon. Once you have that weapon, you have the power. Do you remember The Thirty-Six Stratagems?”

“Vaguely.” He was referring to a book he had read in prison and become fond of. It was an ancient Chinese work that discussed a series of schemes to be used in war and politics.

“Loot a burning house,” he said. “When a country is plagued by internal conflicts and crime and famine and disease — when the house is burning — this is the optimal time to attack. To loot. And Kimball Pharma is a company besieged from without. This is the time to attack from within.”

“What am I looting?”

“Get the damned proof that Kimball lied about a drug trial. Get that, and you get motive.”

I nodded. “But how?”

“No man is a hero to his own valet.”

“Companies don’t have valets.”

“They have vendors. Your valet does the stuff you don’t want to do. Vendors do the stuff a company doesn’t want to do or can’t manage. And it’s harder to erase their memories.”

“Contractors,” I said.

“Outsiders. Exactly.” He blinked steadily, lizard-like.

“All right,” I said. “Lovely to see you as always.”

“I expect to see Gabe within a week.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.