“I can barely wait,” he cackles, almost joyfully.
“This is a certified copy of the default judgment I gained against you for the wrongful deaths of Jacqueline and Edward Shaw. You’ll notice the amount of the judgment is one hundred million dollars.”
“Well,” he says, taking it and looking it over with mild interest. “What’s a hundred million dollars among friends?”
“And this is a notice of deposition for the ongoing collection action. You should show up in my offices next month on the date listed at ten o’clock.”
“Will you have doughnuts for me, Victor? I like doughnuts.”
“And this is a summons and complaint for the collection action my lawyer in Belize City filed yesterday afternoon. If you’ll notice, in the complaint we’re seeking to levy on all your holdings in Belize, including all real estate and improvements, which would include this property and the house and your orchid garden. I was glad to hear that the collection was priceless.”
“Because it is priceless does not mean it can fetch any price, young man. Just so you know. The land we are on is rented from the Panti family, the house is worth the price of the wood, and the orchids I will of course take with me when I slip over the border, which is just a few kilometers that way, where I have rented another piece of land and have another house.”
“Then we’ll do it all again in Guatemala. I have also notified the FBI of your whereabouts and extradition proceedings are already beginning.”
He stares at me for a moment, the ring around his eye darkening. “Are you after me or my money?”
“Your money,” I say, quickly.
“Glad to hear it’s not personal.”
“Not at all,” I say. “It is only business.”
He cackles in appreciation. “That old bastard Claudius Reddman would be proud as hell of you, Victor.”
Canek Panti comes onto the veranda with a tray holding a bucket of ice, two tall glasses, and a big glass pitcher of tea. He puts a glass before each of us and fills it with tea and ice. As Canek works he has the same considerate manner as when he was guiding. I thank him and he nods and leaves. I lift up the glass and take a long drink. It is minty and marvelous. Nat reaches over and lifts up the pitcher and refills my glass.
“Nothing better than a glass of tea on a hot day,” he says.
“I have something else.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the letter from Christian Shaw, still covered in plastic, and hand it to him. “It was addressed to you.”
He takes it and looks at it for a moment and then tears apart the plastic and opens the envelope and reads the letter inside. He reads it slowly, as if for the first time, and after many quiet minutes I see a tear well. When he finishes reading he carefully puts it back in the envelope and unabashedly wipes the line of wet running down his cheek.
“Thank you, Victor. I am touched. Truly touched. Didn’t have time to take everything with me when I left. I was in an awful hurry. Knew you’d figure it all out soon enough and wanted to be gone before the police came looking. Didn’t even have time to stay for Edward’s funeral, no matter how pleasant that must have been. I would have taken the time, of course, to dig up my box, but you had already beaten me to that.”
“The bank numbers in it were helpful in tracing your funds.”
“I hoped my friend Walter Calvi would have retrieved it for me, but he seems to have disappeared.”
“Things didn’t quite go his way,” I say. “Why did you bury it?”
“It was appropriate for it to rest in the ground there. It contained my most precious things. My legacy really.”
“I figured out who was in the pictures. What was the postcard from Yankee Stadium all about?”
“A little private joke. April 19, 1923, the birth of two great institutions, Yankee Stadium and me.” He laughs his high-pitched laugh.
“Both institutions seemed to have fallen on hard times,” I said. From my briefcase I pull out a photocopy of the diary pages we found in the box. “You might want these too.”
He looks them over and grows pensive once again. “Yes, thank you. You’ve been more than considerate, Victor, for someone hounding me like a wolf. Mrs. Shaw, she ordered me to burn her diary when she felt death approach, to burn everything, but I excised the portions that concerned my father. That, and the letters, were all I really had of him. And, of course, his blood.”
“I found your father’s letter very moving. He seemed to have found an inner peace after all his trials. I would have thought his example of love and spiritual understanding would have convinced you to give up your dreams of revenge.”
“Well, you would have thought wrong. He wasn’t a Poole, was he? And he wrote that letter before he was murdered by a Reddman.”
“Kingsley was his son. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Not Kingsley, that worthless piece of scrap. He pulled the trigger, yes, but it was Mrs. Shaw that did the killing. She was spying on my mother that night and she saw my mother and my father together and she couldn’t help but scream. It was such an inhuman scream that my idiot half-brother mistook it for a cougar that was loose in the countryside. He took out my father’s gun and when Mrs. Shaw saw my father climb the hill she told her son to fire and he did and for the first and last time in his miserable life Kingsley actually hit what he was aiming at.”
I had wondered what that wild scream was that Kingsley had heard the night he killed his father and now I know, it was Faith Reddman Shaw’s agonized cry as she saw her husband embrace the pregnant Poole daughter and realize that it was he who was the girl’s secret lover, the father of her child. How lost she must have been to withhold that fact from her diary, how pathetic to be unable to admit the truths of her life even in her most private world. I wonder if she learned the tools of self-deception from her father just as she learned from him to pursue any and all means to satisfy her ends.
“So your father’s letter didn’t mute your hatred at all?” I ask.
“Not a yard, not an inch. I don’t go in for that spiritual crap. And it is not as if his paeans to love would turn me around. I found my true love and still it paled next to the ecstasies of my family’s revenge. But do you know who those letters actually affected? Mrs. Shaw.”
“Faith Shaw?”
“None other. Changed her life, she said. Took her years to get the courage to go into her husband’s room after his death. Years. But when she finally did, there she discovered the key. Eventually she thought to fit the key into the locked breakfront drawer at the Poole house, where she found the letters. The love letters from my mother and the letter addressed to me from my father. They had an enormous effect on her. They turned her heart inside out. I can’t imagine, Victor, that mere words could have such an effect on a soul. She said she saw the emptiness in all her prior yearnings and crimes and sought to live from then on a life of repentance. I suppose she was ripe for something, still mourning all she had done and all her father had done before her.
“They were a pair, the two of them, two peas in a pod. You know, it wasn’t just the one sister she killed, she killed the other, too. Poisoned her, to be sure that her son would be the only heir to the Reddman fortune. She called him Kingsley, which was a joke in itself, and before his birth made sure to destroy all possible pretenders to his throne. She put the poison in the broth she cooked her dying sister each morning. She had learned her father’s lessons well and so, when it was time for repentance, she had much to be forgiven for. She pursued repentance as devotedly as she pursued her husband and her son’s inheritance. Conciliation, expiation, redemption: that’s what she was after. How unfortunate for her that the only path to what she sought with such desperation led through me.”
“I had wondered how you got onto the estate.”
“Yes, it was Mrs. Shaw who brought me home to Veritas. My mother had a difficult delivery from which she never recovered. She tried to raise me but had no money and no strength and so she sent me of
f for adoption. She didn’t know where I was when Mrs. Shaw came looking for me shortly after finding the letters. It took her detectives nine years to find me. My adoptive parents were fine people. It was as happy a home as could be expected, but their fortunes had declined and they couldn’t afford to turn down Mrs. Shaw’s blandishments. So I was brought to Veritas to become her ward, her gardener, her servant. That was how she made it up to me, the stealing of my birthright and the killing of my father; she made me her gardener. She thought she was doing good, and I would have thought so too, I suppose, except she made a singular mistake. She also brought back my mother and put her in that apartment on Rittenhouse Square so that I could visit her and learn the truth of what had been done to me and my family.”
“I thought your mother was beyond the hatred.”
“Maybe once, but not after they killed my father. When we were reunited, God bless her, there was nothing left of the woman who had loved Christian Shaw, there was only the pain in her broken body and the bitterness. She was a wicked little thing and I loved her for it. She was the one who told me exactly how to decorate my half-brother’s room. He would have nothing to do with his mother and so it was left to me to be his friend and companion. I was the one who moved in that wonderful painting of his mother. He didn’t have the strength to say no and so she has stared down at him every day of his life. No wonder he jumped. But that wasn’t all my mother wanted; toying with Kingsley was mere sport. She told me over and over how the Poole fortune was stolen, repeating all the stories her mother had told her. About how Claudius Reddman had doctored the books to steal his fortune. About how he had turned his friend Elisha Poole into a drunkard so his treachery would go unnoticed.”
“I didn’t know that’s how he did it.”
“My great-grandfather, singed with a mark similar to mine around his eye, was a fierce alcoholic and Claudius figured it wouldn’t take much to get the teetotaling Elisha off the wagon. A drink here in friendship. A drink there in celebration. A bottle late at night after all the employees had gone home. It wasn’t long before my grandfather was so sodden he couldn’t see what was being ripped from him, from his family, from his legacy. ‘Get it back, Nat,’ I remember my mother telling me from her bed, her eyes steeped with hatred. ‘Get back every cent.’ ”
When his mother’s words come from his lips they have a rasping resonance as if she is still here, the broken old woman holed up in the luxury apartment on Rittenhouse Square, mouthing commands of revenge to her son.
“I think every young person needs inspiration in his life,” continues Nat. “My mother was mine. I like to think I’ve done amazingly well following her wishes, but it wasn’t as hard as it may seem, what with Mrs. Shaw so desperate to make amends for all she had done. Step by step I took it back.
“I was just returned from the war in the Pacific when Mrs. Shaw gave me the letter from my father and told me what she would do for me. Money, she said, she would give me all the money I wanted. A half a million dollars, she said. I took it right off and left. Half a million was something then and I went through it in five years. That was living, yep. Girls in Hollywood, girls in Paris. I rented a villa in Tuscany and threw wild parties. It was right out of Fellini. When I was broke I came back and demanded more. Another half-million pissed away in less time than the first. By the time I came back it was 1952. I was broke again and half a million wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wanted the whole thing. ‘Get it back, Nat.’ I will, Momma, I will. That was when I convinced Mrs. Shaw to set up the Wergeld Trust.
“It started out modestly enough. Just a million at first, but I kept on coming back for more and she kept on giving it. More money, more of the Reddman fortune. I was constantly tempted to leave and live high off what was in the trust but my mother was always there to implore me not to take a portion when I could have it all. So I stayed by Mrs. Shaw’s side, pruning her garden, accompanying her on her walks, telling her I needed more and more and more as recompense. And with the weakness of the redeemed she kept giving in. But it wasn’t enough. Some things can’t be bought with just money.
“There was a maid that worked the house, a sweet thing, innocent, really, until I was through with her. She was sent away when her pregnancy was unmistakable but I ordered Mrs. Shaw to bring the child to the estate and raise him to be my heir. Franklin. I didn’t want him to know I was his father but we worked together on the gardens and though he didn’t know, I knew that he was a Poole and that he would inherit the whole of the Wergeld Trust and become as rich as he would have been had not our fortune been stolen from us. But it wasn’t enough.
“He was still just a bastard, rich now, but not a Reddman. So I told Mrs. Shaw I needed one more thing, the most delicious thing of all. She said no and I insisted and she said no and I demanded and finally she gave in. She set it up for me, like a pimp. It wasn’t so hard to arrange, really. D. H. Lawrence did most of the work.
“Summer nights, sneaking into the Poole house, the two of us. I’d place garlands of flowers atop her head and drop rose petals on her sharp breasts. Now she is a pitiful wreck, Selma Shaw, but then she was different, earnest and beautiful. I loved those nights, our brutal strivings, loud enough so Kingsley could hear it all from his window. That was a gift in itself, but there was more. I loved her. Truly. Imagine that, finding love in the course of revenge. When she found herself pregnant she talked of running off with me, but then our child would have been a bastard and not an heir. I loved her, Victor, but what power does love have next to imperatives of the blood. So I turned her away and instead of running off with me she stayed at Veritas and bore Kingsley’s fourth child, a miracle child considering his operation, and, finally, the Pooles had burrowed their way directly into the Reddman line.”
“Caroline,” I whisper.
“And still it was not enough. ‘Get it back, Nat. Get back every cent.’ I would have stopped there, but my mother was insistent, urging me from her bed, plotting it all with me, telling me just how to do it, so that even after she died I had no doubts. It was simply a matter of pruning, like with any plant. Cut off some of the shoots and more precious sap flows into those that remain. I had to wait for Mrs. Shaw to die so that she wouldn’t upset the trust, which she still controlled, and she proved to be a hardy weed, but once she was gone I was free to prune. How fortunate that Walter Calvi came looking for Edward just when I was looking for someone like him. Jacqueline and then Edward. Paid for Robert too but Calvi disappeared before he could deliver. I am not too disappointed, Robert is such a sexual misfit that he’s sure to die heirless, leaving everything to my daughter. I had hoped we could unite the fortune in one family, in one heir, the final triumph of the Pooles, but somehow Mrs. Shaw discovered the two lovebirds and put an end to the affair. Even she had her limits, I suppose.”
He winks at me just then, he winks at me with the self-satisfaction of a clever boy who has just played a clever trick. “Still I figure we did pretty well, we Pooles, wouldn’t you say?”
Of all the stories I had heard in the dealings with the Reddmans and the Pooles, his is the most pathetic. He wants me to smile at him, to nod and acknowledge his success, but I see nothing more before me than a horribly failed life and I won’t give him what he wants.
“And now it is over?” I ask.
“Absolutely.”
“And you’re pleased with yourself?”
“Absolutely. More tea?”
“I intend to collect on my judgment, Nat.”
“Well then, I am going to disappoint you, because I no longer have one hundred million dollars.”
“The records show that more than that was channeled into the Wergeld Trust by Faith Shaw.”
“Yes, it was. As I said, she was trying to make recompense, poor deluded thing, but the money is not mine anymore. Just after her death, and before either of your so-called wrongful killings, I irrevocably transferred all but a few paltry million into trust for my son. He knew nothing of my plans, knew for certain
of my guilt only after I had fled. The boy doesn’t even know that the Wergeld trust is his upon my death. So you see, Victor, I couldn’t pay it to you even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
I stare at him for a moment, wondering whether to believe him or not, and suddenly I do. We had traced money, all right, but not all of what should have been there. The amount that had been transferred from the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Libya and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, had been just about ten million dollars. I had hoped, somehow, in this meeting, to smoke out the rest and that’s what I have done. It is gone. To Harrington. Out of my reach. A despair falls onto my shoulders.
“There’s still ten million in your control,” I say, clutching at anything. “We know that.”
“Yes, that’s about right, maybe less. Enough to support me through my old age. I like it here, Victor. I like Canek and the country and this jungle and this river and my orchids. I like it here very much. It has become a home, but if you force me to move I will. Guatemala or Paraguay or the Seychelles if need be. Do you know the Seychelles?”
“Off the coast of Africa?”
“That’s it. They have offered a nonextraditable citizenship to anyone willing to pay ten million dollars to the government. They have some very exciting orchids in the Seychelles from what I understand, Madagascan epiphytes like the African leopard orchid and the spectacular Angraecum sesquipedale. If I must I’ll pay the money to them and live quite peacefully with my orchids under their protection. But then, of course, there’d be nothing left for you.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Stop. That’s what I brought you here to tell you. Stop your efforts to trace my money. Stop your lawyer in Belize City from continuing his suit. Do what you can to stop the investigation by the FBI. Tell no one you have seen me here and stop your efforts to hound me as if I were a common criminal. I like it here. I like the jungle. Go away and let me live here in peace and when I die I will provide that all of what remains of my money will go to satisfy your judgment. The interest the Swiss give is rather paltry, but I spend very little here and the amount will grow over time. Go away and leave me alone and someday you’ll get some money out of me.”
Bitter Truth Page 51
