Nothing to Declare Page 3

  The shouting had gone on for twenty minutes, shouting so loud and abusive, the receptionist was forced to offer apologies. Jesse told her not to worry—lawyers were like generals. They took pleasure by reducing you in advance to a state of fearful and needy fatigue.

  The office windows opened onto the Public Garden. The panes were stamped with flakes—the earlier sprinkling had ripened into a sizable presence, and Jesse traced the crawl of vehicles through the blizzard, the blur of taillights, the caterwaul of horns that rose two stories. At the corner, a traffic cop was curled into the wind as though in prayer.

  Jesse’s neck was killing him—every mile he’d flown and driven charted along the spine—and when the receptionist went off to Xerox, he knelt to the floor for a round of push-ups. He looked up and smiled as she returned to tell him Lieb was ready, but there were fifteen to go and he wanted to finish. The sleek colors of the woman’s outfit gave her a youthful flourish, yet Jesse felt her soft regard as motherly.

  Lieb waited for him in his office doorway. He wore a suit of fine-spun gray flannel and new Nike trainers, and he bounced on his feet like a bantam fighter coming out of his corner. He spread his arms and hauled Jesse into an embrace and muttered fierce syllables of condolence. Jesse found his arms dangling against the lawyer’s back.

  “Tall motherfucker, aren’t you?” Lieb said by way of introduction. His teeth were small and faultlessly white.

  They took seats at opposing sides of a reproduction Chippendale desk, and Lieb held up a palm for silence in order to snatch up his buzzing telephone receiver and launch a barrage of invective and legal arcana. You had to hand it to the man, he knew how to lay on the pressure. His way of moving displayed a touch of ballet—how he thrust his fist in the air as he talked, the arc of his sleeve in its thousand-dollar wool.

  Jesse reached out and depressed the telephone’s hang-up switch. “I’m easily distracted,” he said. “Let’s get on to our business before I lose track of why I came.”

  The lawyer’s eyes bulged momentarily. He lit a cigar and sat back to give Jesse the benefit of his sober regard. “Take a little advice from me,” he said. “Business I’m in, I have experience with this death and dying circumstance. Some people, it brings out the worst. Others, the opposite. How does it go? The better angels of our nature. Whichever way you slice and dice, it’s a crap shoot, so you want to ease up, Big Guy. You want to be open to the upside on this. Take it from me, there’s always an upside.”

  “That’s what Marty liked to say, but I was hard to convince. I haven’t changed.”

  Lieb rubbed a crust of ash into a crystal ashtray he had moved into place. “You believe in God, Jesse? Cause I do. Don’t ask me why, the scum I see day in, day out. Something in you gets hungry for it, a belief like that. At night I can almost hear it, like there’s a heart beating somewhere. The beating doesn’t stop, that’s what’s so amazing. In a hard world, you can take comfort.” The lawyer paused. The buttons on his phone were alight and he gazed longingly in their direction.

  Jesse brought out his checkbook. “Thanks for the guidance,” he said. “The universal heartbeat. I’ll make sure to note it down so I won’t forget. But now, tell me what’s needed here and I’ll write the number. That shouldn’t be so difficult.”

  “Fuck. A man in a hurry.”

  The lawyer set down his cigar and pulled a file from the stack before him, peeling a shred of tobacco from his tongue. “I can’t be completely accurate yet, but give or take a half a percent, eight point three.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “$8.3 million. It depends on the bond rate at the time you redeem, but like I said, give or take, you’ll cash out at $8.3 mil after taxes, more if you float the stocks a while and the market holds.” Lieb smiled his pointy smile. “It’s all yours, every dime. That’s why I asked if you believe in God. Cause he fucking believes in you.”

  A bead of sweat dripped along Jesse’s rib cage. “You’re joking. Have you seen how Marty lived?”

  “Never had the pleasure. We maintained a relationship of purely business—lunch once a quarter when he walked me through the tally. Sometimes we played squash before. He had a backhand like a fucking cruise missile.”

  “Tally?”

  Lieb revolved the folder so Jesse might see. Bound inside were computer spreadsheets representing several years of accounting. “InfoCon—Marty’s business.” Lieb explained. “You don’t know diddly, do you?”

  Jesse skipped his hand down the columns. Numbers overran the pages.

  “Your pal, Big Guy, was a fucking genius. He was creator and sole owner of the largest term paper mill in the known universe. Ran the whole thing through computers. Modems, uplinks, don’t ask me what the fuck it means, downloads. He served an international clientele. No faces, that was key. Deniability all around, not that it was needed. Thing was a hundred percent legal.”

  “Term papers?” The size of Jesse’s ignorance felt immense.

  “You got any idea how many students want the degree but don’t want to crack a book? How much they’ll pay for the privilege of subcontracting out? Marty sold them term papers and called it research. Twelve bucks a page. Eighteen custom work—twenty-four with footnotes and indexing. Something like a hundred writers on call, half with Ph.D.’s, Harvard, Yale, all the Ivies. Your pal was particular.”

  Lieb drew on his cigar and produced a smoke ring that hovered between them. “Want one? Not every day you hit the jackpot.” He nudged aside a file and came up with a fresh corona, which Jesse held clumsily. There was a ritual, he remembered it dimly from the movies, you turned the thing by your ear before lighting up. Listening for what?

  “Don’t wait all day, pal. That’s a Davidoff, the finest Cuban they got. A guy I know makes the trip to Toronto twice a month.”

  Jesse slipped the pointier end in his mouth and allowed the man to light him. Smooth and harsh at the same time, the cigar watered his vision and he tasted salt with the smoke. To clear his thinking, he closed his eyes. He saw rows and rows of dusty books. Each loss came with its own shape and smell.

  In benediction, Lieb described his last encounter with Marty on the Harvard Club squash court, complete with forehand displays. Jesse listened and nodded and smoked. Computer ink and ash soiled his fingertips, and he wiped them clean on his pants the best he could.

  Money. Some people say it’s a drug, but they never say what drug, do they? A tang at the back of the mouth, lips and temples pumping with metallic glee. Let me set the record straight: commerce is like meth. Good crystal—not that crank they give you nowadays. Stuff that opens the doors of paradise.

  Here’s the joke—I lost my facility for spending. Limp-dicked for consumption, I admit to a weakness there. The desire for things just dropped away—hence my dusty floors and faded walls and grimy clothes, hence the Somerville locale. Judge me by what I accomplished, Jesse, not by my debris.

  Can I tell you how much it got me off—the making of money, watching it grow like a garden, watching it spread like a disease? I felt it in my body like a crawling in the blood. A simple game with a simple way of keeping score—more is better and most is better still.

  Genius, Lieb called my setup, and maybe it was, once I identified what I was selling, once I clarified my attack, once I figured out my market. You look a trifle green, Little Brother, is it the cigar? You don’t inhale, it’s dangerous, nobody give you the word?

  My business, do you see it yet—electrons jingling on the public wire, all that information zipping back and forth? Ones and zeros passing by my pocket and dumping dollars. Computer code—it had simplicity and cleanliness, a quality of being basic, strings of numbers like a rock or a tree. I’d be kidding if I didn’t cop to being proud.

  You seem freaked out, though, and who could blame you, hardly watching the road, the Lincoln weaving through the storm. All that money’s locked your mind up tight. Come on, it’s a nor’easter you’re cruising through. Both eyes on the road, hands at ten and tw
o—one car crash per family is plenty to satisfy the gods.

  You’re going to have to take some time to soak it in, get accustomed to a new order of being. I just hopscotched you a couple dozen pay grades, Little Brother—moved you as far away from where we got our start as you can be. It’s a pretty universe you’ve landed in, though by my counting you were on that road before you got the call to come back East: car phones and beach houses, art on the walls somebody else tells you to buy, designer clothes, designer digs, designer friends. Invest my dough with smarts, and you’ll never have to work another day unless you want to. Or you could clone your restaurant and multiply my holdings ten times over, sail off farther than I ever could. I can picture a whole chain of places with your name, crowds of well-dressed and happy citizens nibbling at your wood-grilled tuna, your puttanesca, your roasted duck with garlic confit. We made confit together, remember when? You and me and Isabel, our first year in Santa Cruz. Two pounds of garlic, I showed you how to clean the skins. They were airborne, feather-light, like papery ash on our hair and flesh and beards, ash on the nape of Isabel’s neck. I kissed her spotless.

  Rain played on the kitchen window, remember? The earliest rain of October, I can hear it, hard as fists. We put Dylan on multiple repeat, Blonde on Blonde, and danced, and you tripped over your shoelaces drunk on cabernet and fellow feeling. We danced and the garlic hummed in the pan, caramel in the air, a smell thick enough to swallow. We danced in the gray light and shat garlic for a week. Do you remember?

  Ah, Jesse, your left eyelid has a tremor that wasn’t there this morning. Grief’s a burden but it can be borne. Time will do its job, I have no doubt. But money, money stirs up trouble, doesn’t it, money muddies the soup. Eight-point-three million—the figure has heft, wouldn’t you agree, round and large and confusing? I wonder if you do—if you’ll keep together or fall apart. Trust old Marty. I won’t desert you in your hour.

  Success. That’s what I sold, Jesse. Success without effort. Success by the pound. InfoCon was how I wanted it, legally clean and morally complex. The world’s a market and everything finds its price. Love even. Ask Jesus.

  The police had ordered drivers off the road. Ice glazed over the lane divisions on the roadway, and the Lincoln bucked against Jesse’s control in lurching shudders. He carried himself through the storm with the taste of tobacco filming his breath.

  He did not want to stop—not at the hotel room with its over-bright lighting and faux marble and pecan furniture, not at the dim, book-filled apartment on Dooley Street. Keeping in motion was the idea—driving until he ran out of gas or out of storm, driving until his thinking conformed to the world of white outside his windshield.

  For a while he crisscrossed Back Bay without a thought of where he was, but then he pictured the offices of InfoCon—he could drive there. Lieb had given him a set of keys and an address in a factory district near MIT. At InfoCon there would be a chair, a telephone, a terrain of objects with recognizable dimensions and sizes and forms. Maybe someone would be working still and tell him about Marty and his recent days. Jesse found the turn for Mass. Ave., and he passed the Institute cutting grooves through mounding snow. He was the only moving thing on a four-lane street.

  The neighborhood appeared in the first blush of economic revival: its brick factory buildings housed cafes and offices in designs that buttressed the durable utility of the past to a promise of tasteful acquisition. At the center of the block, InfoCon’s flapping awning threatened to tear itself to shreds. Jesse wrestled with the crank until his fingers went numb, but he managed only to bring the thing halfway down.

  Marty’s vestibule was buttery with furnace heat, and as Jesse mounted the stairs, running now, his ear quickened to the sound of a string quartet descending from the office level. Beethoven—Marty loved the moody later stuff when syphilis, he claimed, had cast its imprint on the music. Opening the door shot days of mail across the planking floor. Jesse slipped on envelopes and circulars; some of them stuck to his wet shoes.

  The room was a disappointment, a cheat, a looming cavern lacking furniture and staff, lacking everything except the expensive radio that rested on a dusty window ledge. The place smelled of damp wood and the exhalations of the heating system, and along the floor, the shadows of rusting bolts and stanchions kept company with the blackened outlines of the machines that once had dominated the room. InfoCon’s office was nothing more than a mail drop, a false front to deflect interest in the man himself. The music was hooked onto a timer—Marty’s consummate touch.

  Jesse collected as many envelopes as would fit into his pockets—two or three trips and he’d have them all. He decided to leave the radio playing. Opus 131—the adagio was one of his favorite melodies. He drove back to his hotel humming the tune and wondering if the snow would fall all night.

  FIVE

  JESSE ORDERED A ROOM SERVICE DINNER and wasted the afternoon in bed watching TV, flipping from channel to channel. Shows swooped on and off the screen with an energetic pop as though violence were necessary to the transition. On ABC, a somber Oprah Winfrey had her arms around a weeping girl.

  By 6:30, it was time to phone his restaurant, and while he waited for the connection, Jesse muted the TV and switched to a channel playing wrestling. The tumble of flesh played in dumb-show as the telephone chimed in California.

  He imagined Helena leaning against the wall by the eight-burner Viking, her blond ponytail drooping after the midday crush, her chef’s linen stained generously, her temper frayed. By now, she would have flung her apron into the hamper, unsnapped the top button of her pants, and bundled her white T-shirt above her waist. She would smell of olives and almond soap and onions. On the TV, a wrestler in red was screaming at the ref.

  Helena was eating lunch and she adorned her talk with mumbles and sighs. She missed him, everybody missed him, Copain was a disaster without him, who said he could take time off? The new waitress quit mid-shift, the red-haired one, Terry something, and the wine distributor blew it for the gazillionth time, they were still laying on the chardonnay when everybody knows chardonnay’s over. But the osso buco flew out the door two days running. The new sauce of orange gremolata and simmered marrow killed.

  “Not literally, I hope,” Jesse said.

  Helena snorted. “Are you having fun? You’re not allowed.”

  “I think I’m OK. I’m tired. It’s snowing.”

  “Snowing? Where are you? You said personal business, I thought you were staying home with the ‘89 P&L and eating Doritos.”

  “I went to Boston.”

  “Please don’t say you’re checking out what’s-her-name at the Four Seasons, Amelia Benton. I don’t want another body on the line. I’m all the maniac you can possibly afford.”

  Jesse heard the squeak of Helena’s clogs against the kitchen floor. After service, she paced like a well-run animal, an Irish setter perhaps, sloe-eyed and shaggy and high-strung. He shifted the receiver to his other ear.

  “The trip has nothing to do with Copain. Old history. Times gone by.”

  Onscreen, a man in tights sat on another’s head. The loser held a transparent gaze of comfortable resolve; Jesse thought of the cattle ranches up on Highway 5, docile beasts oblivious to their eventual destruction.

  “A guy told me today he thought God was a heartbeat,” Jesse said. “What do you think?”

  “I think you need to hurry home to those who love you. Bad weather is messing with your mind. Tomorrow’s the Hillerman anniversary, a hundred and twenty-seven of their most fabulous friends. You remember Alexis Hillerman? We’re doing clean food—that’s what she wants. No sauces, no spices, no skin, oil, fat, dairy, or nuts. What’s left, tell me, please. The woman weighs ninety-five pounds and goes to Puerto Vallarta every year to recycle her blood. They take it out and wash away the toxins, then pump it back in. Erases a decade off the dermis, she says. If you want, I can ask her.”

  “Ask her what?”

  “If God is a heartbeat. The woman’s son took
Michael Milken’s daughter to the junior prom. She’s probably tight with God, too, bubby.”

  Jesse fixed on the TV screen: the man on the ground performed a flip and now sat on the first guy’s head. Jesse hit the off button and the image receded. “Helena, about my trip,” he said, wondering where to begin, how far back.

  Helena cut him off at once. “No. Stop and think for a second, sweetie. I don’t have mental space for whatever you want to dump. I’ll lose my edge, which I cannot afford, and neither can you. I’m exhausted and I stink up to my elbows of lobster nage. I need a shower and a twenty-minute nap and then there’s dinner. Rack of lamb’s on special, and the wood oven has a case of hot spots. I don’t have room for anything but the work at hand.”

  Once Jesse had seen Helena plate nine separate dinners in less than a minute, then swing to the Viking to flip a pair of omelets in absolute synchrony—all the while berating a tardy dishwasher in gutter Spanish. Sometimes, at the end of a difficult night, she shut herself inside the walk-in and vented deep howls. She emerged and wiped her tears and tipped her baseball hat to the kitchen crew, smiling a challenge no one cared to pick up.

  He told her their talk could wait until he returned. The blizzard was beating against the windows so that the entire room appeared to throb. “I’m wondering, though,” Jesse said. “Where exactly in Puerto Vallarta? I want the address. I want names. I want instructions.”

  Helena’s telephone laughter twisted into the receiver, a soft and tiny thing. She sent kisses goodbye. Tomorrow morning, Jesse decided, he would go to Marty’s apartment and shovel the walk for Mrs. Folari. It had been years since he’d had a shovel in his hands. He could play the good boy, too.

  Clearing the walk absorbed half an hour of steady effort. Jesse devoted himself to the felicities of bend and lift, the stripe of dark pavement brought to light, the bitter cold numbing his fingertips and ears, bracing his lungs. He was wearing Marty’s boots. They were an especially fine pair of black Luccheses whose lizard scales rippled as he walked. Jesse couldn’t recall the man in anything else—no, not even for basketball, though how could that be true? Boots gave rigor to the step. They pointed the toes like the muzzle of a gun.