Mortal Bonds

by Michael Sears

  “Come,” she said, taking my hand.

  We lay side by side, her arm roped around mine, and stared at the ceiling as I told her about the dream. She listened all the way through, then stroked my cheek with her finger.

  “Close your eyes. Go back there. Into the water.”

  I did. It was too easy.

  “Now imagine an ending where you both live. Relax and let your mind play it out. Watch it happen, like it’s a movie.”

  I imagined the water warmer. It rose over us and we both relaxed into it. The Kid stopped fighting and let himself become the water. And as he relaxed, he became less heavy. I could no longer feel the sand beneath my feet; we rose up on one breath all the way to the top of the wall. And when we looked over, there was a world of color on the other side. I helped him over and we were free.

  I took a long, shuddering breath. “Thank you.” It had helped.

  Skeli nuzzled my neck. “You’re welcome.”

  I kissed her forehead.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Now go make the coffee.”

  The dream had returned three times since, and each time I swallowed my bile, lay down, and rewrote the ending. Then I started the day. I got up and reminded myself to talk to Carolina about bleaching the Kid’s sheets again. I checked to see if we were running out of Cheerios. White bread. How could we always be low on ghastly white bread? I never ate it. Did Heather? The dream sank back into the unconscious. The fear and anger faded, but the shame remained. The guilt. It clung like a parasite, sapping my energy, feasting on my spirit. I could walk and talk and make the coffee and get the Kid his breakfast and take him to school and read to him and play games and wrap him in a sheet that night, but through it all I carried the knowledge that some part of me, some deep part of my psyche, some aspect that I never wanted to see again, was capable of something unforgivable.

  | 11 |

  There’s no money. You’re all dreaming.”

  Rose-Marie Welk had agreed to let me come interview her, but she made no bones about it—there was nothing to say.

  She was one of two clerks who had worked directly for Von Becker—fabricating the customer documents that maintained the smoke screen of his scam. The other clerk, Ben Tucker, had refused to talk to me at all. “I know nothing,” he had said before hanging up the phone. I couldn’t blame him—either of them—as they’d each served six months in federal prison.

  We were sitting in the screened-in back porch of Rose-Marie’s house in East Rockaway, a block off Atlantic Avenue on a street of once-identical homes, now differentiated with fifty years of added colors, porches, stoops, dormers, and lawn statuary ranging from pink flamingos to the Blessed Mother. The devastation of Hurricane Sandy had not reached this far. Mr. Welk brought lemonade in a pitcher, making an awkward attempt at playing the good host. Then he sat in stony silence while his wife and I talked.

  “The lawyers asked me this over and over. It’s just not possible. For the love of Mike, the man only got caught because he ran out of money. If he’d had money stashed away, wouldn’t he have used it? I mean, to keep the thing going?”

  Mrs. Welk looked more than a few years older than her husband, but otherwise they could have been sister and brother in their early fifties, both a few pounds overweight, with big hands and large features on small frames. The house showed no signs of ever having been inhabited by children, and I didn’t ask.

  “Maybe he saw the end coming,” I said.

  “Oh, he saw it all right. Benny and I heard him in his office talking to himself, crying, slamming things around. He knew for months.”

  “But he never said anything?”

  “You’re as bad as those SEC people. Benny and I weren’t his friends. He didn’t confide in us. He told us to prepare reports and we did it.”

  “But you also made wire transfers. Offshore. Couldn’t there be some stash somewhere?”

  She looked up to heaven for patience. “I’ve been home six days. And this is the third time I get to answer the same questions. Sure, it’s possible. Any fantasy you want to come up with is possible. Mr. Von Becker was moody, paranoid, and very secretive. But is it likely? I don’t think so. You’re all wasting your time.”

  “Who else has been here?”

  “That creepy guy from the SEC. I forget his name. He left his card.”

  She made a move to stand up and look for it, but I waved her back down.

  “Please, please, don’t go to any trouble. I’m sure I wouldn’t know him anyway. I’m just curious. The other person?”

  “Oh, well, he was very nice. Mr. Castillo, I think.”

  Mr. Welk nodded.

  “He was Spanish,” she said.

  “Puerto Rican,” her husband spoke.

  She shrugged. “I guess. He said if I needed any help getting resettled, I should just give him a call.” She looked to her husband. “Help,” she said with a disgusted sigh. “I had all of my money in Mr. Von Becker’s fund.” Then she gave a sad laugh. “He offered matched contributions to me and Benny. Every dollar I put into his fund, the company matched it. Ha! We thought we were lucky. Walter spent all of his savings on my lawyer. We now have two mortgages, no pensions, not a dime in the bank, and I’m an ex-con with the kind of clerical skills that aren’t worth much outside of Wall Street.”

  Walter took her hand. “But we don’t need help,” he said simply.

  She looked him in the eyes and nodded firmly. “That’s what we told him.”

  “Did he say what his connection was to Von Becker?”

  “Oh, he was a client,” she said. “Mr. Von Becker always took his calls, and if he was out and missed a call, he’d get right back. A very big client, I would guess. He was very polite.”

  This was intriguing. I didn’t remember a Castillo on the lists I had received from Everett.

  “Did he happen to leave a card?” I said.

  Rose-Marie looked to her husband again, as though to jog her memory. He shook his head.

  “No. I think I’d remember,” she said.

  No leads, merely a hint of mystery. A polite Puerto Rican. Or Spaniard.

  “If you think of anything else . . .” I let the request hang in the air between us.

  She shook her head vigorously, as though trying to clear the cobwebs once and for all. “I spent six months up in Danbury and it put ten years on me, Mr. Stafford. I don’t know where Mr. Von Becker stashed anything, and I would have a hard time believing it if you stuck my nose in it.”

  Mr. Welk showed me out.

  | 12 |

  Saturday morning—yoga.

  As with anything new, or out of the normal routine, the Kid had expressed extreme reluctance to try yoga. According to his very expensive Park Avenue doctor, he needed to develop core strength and improve his balance and coordination. Heather and I had then explained to the Kid why yoga would be good for him—a remarkably dumb waste of time on our part and a violation of my father’s first rule of parenting—“It tastes like bacon” always beats “It’s good for you.” But his resistance evaporated at the first class. He was good at it, and he had fun. Two months later, he had graduated out of the special-needs class and was now the star pupil—in my unbiased opinion—of the fours-fives. Mainstream fours-fives.

  Tino drew appraising sidelong stares from the group of mothers gathered in the waiting room outside the small gym. Those women with more acute gaydar turned their attention from Tino to me—in questioning reappraisal.

  “I think a couple of the women over there are ready to volunteer to help you with your reparation therapy.”

  Tino looked over at them and smiled. “It’s been tried before,” he murmured. “It didn’t take.”

  We were the only males present—Angie and her mother were having a lie-in before heading out to catch a matinee. Most of the mothers, upon releasing their children to the
care of the yogi’s assistants, had immediately broken into groups of two or three and begun exchanging information and opinions on schools, doctors, and after-school arts, sports, and music programs—D-day was planned with less information. It was all a world that the Kid would experience only on the periphery, like an aberrant comet that circles the same sun but rarely crosses the path of any other heavenly body. Nevertheless, I took mental notes—just in case. They managed to conduct these conversations while simultaneously text-messaging nonstop so that I wondered about the future crash of the medical insurance industry, done in, sometime in the next decade, by the tsunami of cases involving crippling tendinitis of the thumbs.

  The instructor called the class to order, and everyone’s attention shifted to the wide observation window. Cell phones disappeared, and conversations were cut short, or continued in a hushed, reverent whisper.

  Sometime later, Tino leaned to me and said, “You think anybody would notice if I went over and slapped that boy silly?”

  The boy in question insisted on making fart noises every time the class went into Stretching Puppy.

  “I like the redhead,” I answered. A strawberry-haired girl in pink unitard meandered around the room, following some random route. She had a blissful smile on her face that transformed into evil-looking anger when one of the two assistants approached her. They each tried twice to get her to settle down and do the exercises, but she was obviously much happier when they left her alone.

  “Too cute. And I’ve got a dozen clients back home who would name me in their wills if I could give them hair like that.”

  “I think that’s her mother.” I gestured with a flick of the eye to a silky-haired redhead across the room. She was wearing jeans just a tad too tight for what Skeli would have called her “Kardashian hips.”

  “Ooooh.” Tino winced. “Brazilian. That is so bad for you. I won’t do them.”

  Brazilian? “How can you tell?”

  Tino looked at me questioningly for a moment, then burst into laughter. The women looked over briefly, then went back to adoring their progeny.

  “Not a bikini wax. A blowout.”

  “Ah,” I said, feeling proud of my deductive powers. “A hair treatment.”

  “You slap enough chemicals on a head of hair and you can just about make it do anything. Stand up, lay down, roll over, or sing Christmas carols in July.” He gave the month the Deep South accent on the first syllable. “But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good for you.”

  “The price of fashion?”

  “I have a friend in L.A. I visit sometimes. He’s an orthopedic surgeon out there. Anyway, we were walking along Rodeo one afternoon, and as we’re passing Jimmy Choo’s, Laurence stops to stare at the shoes. Well, Laurence is not like that, if you know what I mean. So I teased him about it, saying wouldn’t he rather be looking at the new line at Timberland.”

  I chuckled politely.

  “Laurence just smiled and said, ‘Tino, it’s shoes like these that paid for the house in Provence and the first-class tickets to get me there and back every summer.’ Shut my mouth.”

  The instructor, a children’s nurse from Roosevelt Hospital with a ready smile, stopped next to the Kid, bent down and spoke to him quietly. He grinned. What could she have said?

  Tino followed my eyes and looked out toward the Kid.

  “He looks just like a cat, doing that.”

  The Kid’s animal poses were his best—of course. “They call it Halloween Cat. I think he’s proud of himself. If you’re lucky, you might get to see his Cobra.”

  The class ended with the Fallen-Down Tree. The Kid lay flat on his back, totally relaxed—without having to be bound in a tightly wrapped sheet. I didn’t have the words to explain to Tino how proud I felt.

  “My yoga teacher tells us that’s the hardest pose of all,” Tino said.

  “You have no idea how hard it is for him to relax—anytime. It’s like his whole body is constantly on guard—waiting for something bad to happen.”

  Tino sighed. “Too bad Angie couldn’t come.”

  Part of me—the part that suffered through cringe-worthy morning dreams—wanted to point out that Angie could very easily have come, but that she chose to sleep late instead. But another voice told me to listen to Tino and learn. It was too bad. For Angie. She was the loser for not having come. The Kid wouldn’t have noticed or cared. My opinion didn’t much matter to anyone but me. But Angie had missed the chance to see her son do something wonderful—and I found that I could spare a touch of sympathy for my ex.

  | 13 |

  The façade of the Merchants and Traders Club on Fifth Avenue was as shy and understated as the Metropolitan, two blocks south, was ornate and built to impress. There was a simple awning out front, facing the side street, covering an oak-paneled entryway leading to double-hung dark oak doors. Through the doors, there was a cloakroom to the left, a concierge post on the right, and a dark and comfortable bar beyond. It might have been the entrance of an older steak house.

  I gave the concierge my name and the name of the member I was visiting, Tulio Castillo.

  The invitation had been waiting for me at the desk at the Ansonia that morning. Just a handwritten note on club letterhead. I would finally get to meet the Welks’ mystery man. Von Becker’s “big client.”

  “May I ask if you are carrying a cell phone, sir?” The concierge wore a starched wing collar and tails. “Cell phones and laptops are not allowed in the main rooms of the club.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I turned it off and handed it to him. He displayed a white linen envelope and, taking out a black Montblanc fountain pen, wrote my name in perfect Catholic grade-school cursive. Then he carefully tucked the phone in and sealed the envelope.

  “If you would care to have a drink while you wait,” he gestured, “I will announce you.”

  I sat down at the bar and ordered a club soda. The bartender looked like he had never told a joke—and didn’t want to hear one.

  There were still one or two bubbles in my glass when an ancient waiter in a dark red jacket whispered my name and gestured for me to follow him. We passed through a curtained archway beside the bar and stepped into a marbled, two-storied hallway. Directly in front of us was a curving staircase that could have held the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with room left over for Scarlett O’Hara to sweep down and make her entrance to the ball. Golden light glowed from a pair of giant chandeliers.

  “This way, Mr. Stafford,” my guide whispered. Our steps echoed through the hall as he led me past the staircase to a small wooden door. He held the door for me, and I stepped into an elevator. He joined me, pushed a button, and the elevator slowly rose. Brass plaques on the panel listed the floors—Dining Hall, Conference Center, Library, Gymnasium, Dormitory A, Dormitory B, and Penthouse.

  “Dormitory?” I whispered. Whispering seemed to be the preferred method of communication in those environs.

  The old man smiled and gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “A euphemism. The rooms are all mini-suites. Quite nice.”

  “And the Penthouse?”

  “The members’ bar. It looks out over the park. Very popular at sunset.”

  We lurched to a stop and the door slid open.

  The Library.

  Bookshelves climbed three walls twenty feet or more into the air, where a narrow balcony ran around the room and a second set of shelves soared up another ten feet. The fourth wall had a row of windows facing Central Park, which were heavily draped in gauze. Forty watts or so of natural light made its way through. The rest of the room was lit only with low, green-shaded lamps that sat on the desks and small tables around the room or floor lamps that threw a cone of light on dark leather armchairs. Somewhere up in the dim stratosphere was a mural that, as near as I could tell, depicted the history of world trade from pre-Roman Silk Road travelers to the New York Stock Exchange. On the wa
ll above the windows were portraits of prosperous-looking men in suits who all stared down on us with mildly disapproving looks.

  A few of the armchairs were occupied by third-generation descendants of the men in the portraits. Gray-haired men in gray suits who examined us over their newspapers as the old man led me down the long room. The room was so big it probably had its own zip code.

  The carpet, the drapes, the furniture, and probably the books as well, all sucked up sound. I thought that if I yelled at the top of my lungs I’d have a hard time hearing myself. Sets of eight-foot-tall bookshelves, strategically placed, created a warren of semi-private alcoves.

  Tulio Botero Castillo was sitting in one of those alcoves.

  The man was in his mid-thirties, impeccably dressed in a fawn-colored suit, white long-collared shirt and handkerchief, and a solid red tie, the color of fresh blood. You could have sliced sashimi with the crease in his pants. He was startlingly handsome, with dark, wavy hair, cheekbones like ax blades, black eyes with lashes so long they were almost feminine, and a nose too long to be pretty but large enough to give character.

  “Mr. Stafford?” He rose with an actor’s grace and shook my hand. “Please.” He gestured to a neighboring armchair. “Eamon,” he said to the waiter. “Can we get something for Mr. Stafford?” He addressed me again. “Coffee? A drink?”

  “Water would be nice,” I said. “Thank you, Eamon.”

  “And coffee for me, if you please,” Castillo said.

  Eamon smiled again and disappeared.

  We sat, and he gave me a long appraising look. It wasn’t rude; he wasn’t judging. He was just gathering information.

  “Does anyone ever come here to read a book?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I don’t think so. They probably bought them by the yard. Is this your first time here?” The voice was accentless, the result of much practice, I was willing to bet, but his rhythms and pitch betrayed his Latin roots.

  I had been introduced to a senator at a black-tie affair at the Metropolitan Club, and been trounced at backgammon at the Harvard Club. But New York has more private clubs than elementary schools. Despite the name, Merchants and Traders, I had never known a trader who belonged.