House on Fire

61

But where?

It wasn’t in Boston that I’d seen the guy with the eyebrow. It had been recent, in the last couple of days. Then I called to mind the image of that same guy — close-shaved black hair, swarthy complexion, scarred right eyebrow — looking at Detective Goldman and me and ordering something at the Dunkin’ Donuts, a mile or so from the Bedford police station yesterday. A fit man in his thirties who moved with athletic confidence.

He looked like private security to me. Ex-military, probably. There’s a look the private security guys have — the watchful, distrustful eyes, visibly fit, short hair or a shaved head, clothing that attracts no attention. I assumed he worked for Fritz, but if he did, why was he in the middle of a crowd of anti-Kimball protesters? It didn’t quite make sense.

Or maybe it did. Maybe Fritz planted his security people in the middle of protests against the company, as moles. Gathering intelligence on the protesters. But that wouldn’t explain how his people had found me with Detective Goldman. I was being followed, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Or how.

Had Detective Goldman leaked my real identity to him? I doubted it. He said he wouldn’t, and I trusted him.

That left a more disturbing explanation — that Fritz had checked out my cover and found a hole. That was possible.

Nothing’s ever perfect.

I had to get back to Boston. I wanted to talk to the eldest brother, Paul, who lived in Cambridge. I said goodbye to Sukie, which was a lot less awkward than I expected, and grabbed a cab to the parking garage south of Central Park where I’d left the Toyota. I did a quick check for GPS trackers, didn’t find any. I’d do a more exhaustive search later.

From New York to Boston the drive is around five hours. I wasn’t followed, that I was certain of. I arrived in Boston in the early evening and checked in with Dorothy. No news.

Back at my loft, I disassembled the GPS tracker from Natalya’s Bentley and took pictures of it with my phone and sent them to Merlin.

He called me that evening from his boat in Chesapeake Bay. “This is an interesting one,” he said. “It’s not domestic. Not US. It’s made by Azur in Israel, for the Israeli army, the IDF, and Mossad and Aman, the Military Intelligence Directorate. Not for export.”

“Why would someone use an Israeli device when you can have good old American, made-in-China products? You can buy whatever you want on the internet. Why Israeli?”

“Because it’s what they’re used to working with. And it’s what they have.”

“So we’re talking Israelis who might have planted this?”

“Possibly. Are you doing something that would attract the interest of the Israeli government?”

“Not at all.”

“There’s always Israeli private security. One of their private intelligence firms.”

But if that’s what it was, who had hired them? To me, the most obvious culprit here was Fritz Heston, Conrad’s protector. I could imagine Conrad pulling his security director aside and saying, “I want to know everywhere she goes. Is she cheating on me? Is she up to something?”

And in response the Israelis would put a tracker on her car. And maybe question the driver. Conrad would keep a close watch on the woman he was about to marry, because that was his way.

But why would Fritz outsource security to an Israeli firm? He had his own team. I didn’t get it.

In the morning I called Paul Kimball, using the number Sukie had given me.

He sounded preoccupied when he answered the phone. “Nick Brown,” I said. Then, to remind him, “Friend of Sukie’s.”

“Oh, God. She told me what happened. The arsonist. Like someone out of Princess Casamassima. She said you wrestled the guy to the ground. Thank you for doing that.”

“I’m worried about Sukie and thought maybe we could have a chat.”

“Of course,” he said.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the home of a couple of great universities, Harvard and MIT. It’s a city in its own right that happens to be next to Boston, a much larger city. It has its own character. Very fair-trade coffee, very quinoa grain bowl, and a wide range of wealth. It’s a city of large, rambling houses off Brattle Street occupied by Harvard professors with trust funds, but also seedier places like Cambridgeport, where Gabe lived, and Central Square, where he worked.

I actually passed Paul’s house several times, because I thought I’d somehow gotten the street number wrong. It was a modest brown shingled house on Franklin Street, just a few blocks from the main drag, Mass. Ave., which took you back to Boston. This house was a step up from the triple-decker where Gabe lived, a few blocks away — but not a big step.

It was not the house of a billionaire’s son. But people with a lot of money don’t always flaunt it. The founder of IKEA lives frugally and takes the bus everywhere and brings home salt and pepper packets from the store. Some who were raised in wealth sometimes prefer to live modestly. To not stick out from the crowd.

Still, for a very rich man who was raised in a mansion to live like a graduate student was... Well, something about it appealed to the contrarian in me. It made me like the man a little more.

Paul Kimball was Conrad’s oldest child, the son of his first wife, Barb, a squat fireplug of a woman whom he divorced as soon as he started making real money. She had no interest in the family business and never remarried. But she was well taken care of by a generous settlement.

I checked the number again and rang the bell, and sure enough, Paul Kimball came to the door.

He had on horn-rimmed glasses and wore a loose-fitting gray cardigan sweater over a green polo shirt and ill-fitting ragged jeans and battered, unstylish sneakers. He could have been an adjunct professor at some local college. “Come on in,” he said. “And thank you again for being so helpful to my sister.”

Inside the house was dark and not just cluttered but jammed with books and magazines and papers. Sloppy piles of the New York Review of Books. In the center of the first room we came to was a long, beat-up, splintering wood dining table that was being used as a desk, covered with tall stacks of books interspersed with several laptops. I wondered if his brilliant MIT professor girlfriend lived here too. Some of the books appeared to be on something or someone called Adorno.

I reminded myself that I was Nick Brown to him, I worked for McKinsey, and all that. If he thought it was strange that a relatively new boyfriend of Sukie’s was worried about her mental health, he didn’t let on. He was probably worried himself about what might happen to him — all the Kimball kids had to be — so his safety was surely a subject that was very much at the front of his mind.

“I was about to make a pot of Lapsang souchong — can I pour you some?”

I accepted just to be agreeable. I followed him into the kitchen, which was low-ceilinged and had an old linoleum floor, spiderwebbed with cracks, and appliances that looked thirty or forty years old. The kitchen smelled faintly of cooking gas.

He poured water into a kettle and lit a gas burner by turning the knob. “It’s terrible what happened to Sukie,” he said, his back to me. “It could happen to any of us, I suppose. Though the protesters have left me alone so far, thank God.”

“You’ve all got to be careful. The whole family.” The kitchen window looked out onto a dark, small backyard surrounded by clapboard houses.

“Yeah, I take precautions,” he said. “And after what happened to Maggie — I mean, Hildy. I’m so bad with names.” He turned around.

I felt a little jolt. He knew Maggie’s real name, somehow. I wondered who’d told him. Had Megan told him she’d hired a private investigator? Was that how he knew her name? Maybe Megan and Cameron and Paul all hired Maggie, together. Maybe Paul was in on it with his two siblings.

“Have they gotten any closer to finding out how she was killed?” I asked.

“Not that I know of. The police mostly wanted to talk to Layla and me about our whereabouts that evening. Our alibis.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Let’s sit in the other room.”

We passed through an alcove where a large flat-screen was mounted to the wall. Nine panels on the screen showed different views of the exterior of the house, including the front porch and the backyard. It was a fairly sophisticated setup, especially for such a modest house as this. He saw me glance at the screen and said, “Given the protesters, I have to be a little careful, you know.”

I followed him into another small, dark, low-ceilinged room that was furnished with a few unmatched upholstered armchairs. He switched on a torchiere lamp, which shone a circle of light on the ceiling and gave the room a yellowish cast.

Then he sat in the high-backed chair, which looked like his favorite. I sat in a low-backed one near it.

“Dad was all about making money,” he said. “I’m about making meaning. Maybe that’s an old story. It’s that line by Walter Benjamin” — he gave the name a German pronunciation — “about how every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. The son wants to redeem the sins of the father but at the same time he’s necessarily implicated in them, right? Not by choice but by the way we’re subjects in, and of, history.”

I suddenly remembered why I dropped out of Yale. “I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“We all struggle with that. Sukie too, in her way.”

“She’s been through a lot,” I said.

“She’s very special,” he said. “I think you know that.”

“I do.”

“I think life is hard for her. I just think she’s still finding herself.”

“Is she?”

He nodded, pushed up the bridge of his spectacles. “Make no mistake, I’m proud of her. I think her little documentaries are sweet. That one about the immigrants? I liked that a lot. It’s such a great hobby for her.”

“I think she considers it more than a hobby,” I said.

Paul went on, ignoring me. “Did I say she was complicated?” He smiled. “She’s so smart, you know that. She’ll probably never tell you she got double eight hundreds on her SATs, but she did, and she chose to go to Oberlin because she really wanted the program in the arts. The visual and environmental studies programs here — at Harvard, I mean — just aren’t very strong.”

This made me like him a little less.

He continued. “Where did you say you went to college? Tufts, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I was thinking Tufts. What a relief.”

I hadn’t said anything about Tufts University to Paul or anyone else. It appeared on the phony LinkedIn page for Nick Brown. So he had obviously Googled me.

“I’ve got friends in the comp lit department there.”

“I was an econ major,” I said.

“Of course you were. Sukie’s very much her own person, though I think she’s still figuring out who that person is. And I for one am eager to meet that person.” He chuckled to himself. “She was so close to my father when she was a child. He was so proud of her then. He never missed one of her piano recitals.”

“Nice.”

“I gotta say, he never went to any of my debate-team tournaments, but he always made it to her piano recitals, and Father hates music.”

“He must be proud of what she’s accomplished.”

“He couldn’t be less interested. He finds her documentaries tedious, which really isn’t fair.”

“So that’s a big change in their relationship.”

“Something happened between them. I think they both disappointed each other in some way, but was there a moment? I don’t remember.”

“Huh.”

“She’s really Conrad’s daughter. There’s more Conrad in her than in any of the rest of us. On some level I’ve always felt they were two birds of a feather. The ones most alike.”

The kettle whistled in the kitchen. He got up and excused himself. He came back a couple of minutes later with two mugs, with teabag strings hanging over the lip of each. He set them down on the table next to me. “So, I don’t know,” he said. “If something happened. This is not someone who lets go of things easily.”

“You mean Sukie?”

He nodded. “Or Father. Me, insults are like water off a duck’s back. I don’t remember insults, and I don’t scar. Whereas you have Sukie, who remembers everything. She really does have an amazing memory. And she’s a super-talented woman. But then, you know what the great Theodor Adorno said about talent, right?”

So Adorno was a person. “No,” I said.

“‘Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.’ Do you take milk in your tea?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“I think that’s how he put it. Come, let’s Google the exact quote.” He got up, waved me to accompany him, and went into the dining room, where all the books and laptops were set up on the table. He tapped a key on the nearest laptop, and the screen came to life. I glanced at it quickly and casually. It was dense with numbers, pulsing with charts and data. I realized I was looking at a stock trading screen. “Oh, that’s IEX,” he said. “Doesn’t have the high exchange fees that the New York Stock Exchange does.”

“Are you a trader?”

“I do a little forex trading, here and there.” He tapped the keyboard, and Google appeared. He tapped some more, and now we were on some website dedicated to this Adorno guy. “Yep, I got it right,” he said. “What a relief. Begabung ist vielleicht überhaupt nichts anderes als glücklich sublimierte Wut...”

I followed him back to the sitting room. He said with a big smile, “Could you tell how relieved Dad was that Sukie brought you? You must have seen it. I gotta tell you, some of the guys she’s been with before — I mean, they’re all interesting people, but not Conrad’s type. You know, sometimes I look at her, and she’s got that Samson-in-the-temple look.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“Didn’t Samson bring down the temple of the Philistines?”

“You may be right.”

“Yeah, he was like the first suicide bomber. Brought down the temple and himself with it. Is it hot in here?” He pulled off his cardigan, revealing his polo shirt and both arms covered with scratches.

He must have seen me glancing at his arms, because he said, “Damned rosebushes,” gesturing outside.

“You were talking about Sukie,” I reminded him, not sure what he was trying to say.

“Sometimes I wonder whether she’s in the tent or outside it and about to torch it.”

“Torch... what?”

“The house of Kimball,” he said. “Kimball Pharma. You know, I look at these protesters, and believe me, I have so much sympathy. But with Sukie, it’s like, she goes to all of these funerals, and I have to wonder whether she’s crossed over. Whether she’s playing for the other team. Oh, I don’t mean that way. At Oberlin she had girlfriends and boyfriends both, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean whether she’s crossed the line between sympathy and revolt. Do you have a sense of that?”

“She’s loyal to the family, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “But she’s under a lot of pressure. You all are. What with the protests and now with Natalya.”

He barked a bitter laugh. “Well, I’m not in the swing of things. My own path is very different from the others’. I’m not really a money person. But however uninterested in his world I may be, he’s still my father and I’m loyal to him. You know, Father and I have a complicated relationship. I’m sure I’m a disappointment to him. I’m not the Lachlan Murdoch type he was hoping for.” He chuckled.

“He’s not really bookish, I take it.”

“‘Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality,’” he said, pushing again at the bridge of his glasses. “Adorno. I think you could fairly say that about my dad.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I don’t know, Nick, you’re a man of the world — what do you make of Natalya?”

“She’s smart. A sly one.”

“Indeed.”

Smiling, I said, “Think she’s signed a prenup?”

“You get right to the point. Oh, yes. Oh my, yes. Dad tells me it’s bulletproof, and she knows it. I don’t know why my siblings are so agitated about her. If they’re thinking she’ll divorce him and take half the money, no, that’s not going to happen.”

“How old is he again?”

“Eighty. But longevity runs in the family. My only concern is mental — when he’s going to develop signs of dementia. That will happen to him too. Happened to both his parents, they got some kind of dementia in their nineties. By the time they died, they were gaga. Anyway, me, I just want to do my own thing. Publish my book, and publish it well.”

“And when he dies?”

“Ah, that’s the billion-dollar question, right? Well, you’ve met Megan, right?”

“I have.”

“She needs to shoulder Father aside. You know, Megan, to her credit, I think she wants to make something. To help build a future. Again, that’s totally not my path, but one thing I’ll say about Megan, she is not a hobbyist. Unlike Hayden and Sukie. As they say, she’s in it to win it.”

“I got that sense too. And your brother?”

“Cameron is the most vulnerable of us all,” Paul said. “You know, like Henry James’s golden bowl with that invisible crack in it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So we’ll see. I just hope Megan remembers that old line — when you strike at the king, you must kill him.”