Long Way Down

by Michael Sears

  My house was at the end of a twisting lane that threatened at times to turn into a tunnel with the kudzu and out-of-control wisteria arcing overhead. It was dead of winter and the tendrils of vine looked as wispy and fragile as the last strands of hair on an old man’s head. The town would send a crew through in the spring and they would chop it all back, allowing in the light and making room for the cycle to begin again.

  The house was dark, with plywood shutters hung on the outsides of the south-facing windows. I pulled into the short driveway, almost bottoming out on the same old spot. When I lived there, I had filled it with fresh sand every winter, and by the Fourth of July, the geologic forces would have hollowed out a hole again. It was comforting that the new owners had not been able to come up with a more permanent solution.

  There were sparse weeds poking up through the gaps in the slate around the pool, two and three feet tall with feathered tops. The pool cover was weighted in the center with a small swamp of dead leaves, tannic rainwater, and a patina of green algae stubbornly resisting the onset of winter. The patio furniture—chairs, tables, and four chaise longues—were all piled together and wrapped with motorcycle chain. A carved sandstone ashtray sat, almost hidden, in a nook of the river-stone wall, black scorch marks ground into the rock, waiting for the first cigar of another season.

  I imagined my current family gathered there. My father grilling steaks, wearing long black pants and black oxfords in July because that is what he always wore. Heather and possibly her partner, lounging in dashikis and baseball caps and drinking from quart-sized containers of iced green tea with honey and ginger. Where was Wanda in my daydream? My Skeli? Working, no doubt. Back in the city, because weekends would be prime time for her services. Maybe not. We would have to see how many of her clientele would actually be in Manhattan on summer weekends. Maybe she could get Sundays off. I imagined her there on a Sunday. Multiple copies of the Times spread over the glass-topped tables, the scent of fresh-brewed Zabar’s coffee, and a bag of jelly-filled croissants from the Montauk Bake Shoppe.

  A far cry from the days when Angie was there.

  Despite Angie’s disdain for the house—or the neighborhood, at any rate—she entertained there all summer long, bringing out limos full of old friends from her modeling days. Few of these friends were men, and as both body hair and tan lines were verboten in the industry, my backyard on a Saturday afternoon in July was guaranteed to be filled with traders and securities salesmen who found, or manufactured, a good excuse to drop in, even though the twenty-mile drive from East Hampton or Water Mill could take a good two hours in summer traffic. I cannot claim to have become entirely inured to the sight of three or four stunningly beautiful women wearing nothing but straw hats and sunglasses, but I did learn to stop staring. And they did draw a crowd.

  Greg was part of my team back at Case. He traded a basket of Asian currencies. He was also a frequent visitor out in Montauk before he got married. He was at the house so often one summer that I thought we would have to name one of the bedrooms in his honor. Greg had a share in a big house a block off the beach in Amagansett, but every other Saturday he would load his Chevy Tahoe with surfboards, three or four other weekend surfers, and a cooler filled with iced Bud Light and head east. They typically spent the morning surfing at Ditch Plains, arriving at my house in time for a late lunch—just as the girls began waking up and venturing out to the pool. Greg was the perfect gentleman—he filled glasses, kept the conversation going, and was always ready to volunteer to apply sunscreen. To the best of my knowledge, Greg never once got lucky at my house, nor did any of his pals, but that didn’t stop them from returning. Late Saturday night, as Angie and posse were on their way out to another round of parties and personal appearances at the restaurants and clubs down the road, Greg’s friends would pour him into the backseat of the Tahoe, sunburned, exhausted, and awash with a case or two of St. Louis’ finest, and carry him back to Amagansett.

  There are few secrets on a trading floor—there are no walls, no partitions, and every conversation is public, no matter the subject matter. Early on, Greg realized that I was using very creative accounting and hadn’t said anything about it. We drifted apart, neither of us quite able to meet the other’s eyes. He stopped coming by the house.

  Somehow, while I’d been focused on the stumbles of my own life, Greg had acquired a wife and three kids and become a deacon in his church. He was still trading, still at Case. I had given him a call when I first got out of prison. He was polite, but distant. We hadn’t spoken since.

  I checked my watch. It was time. I had a billionaire to talk to.

  I left my memories in the yard and retreated to the car.

  —

  Gosman’s, like most of the businesses east of Main Street, East Hampton, was closed for the season and wouldn’t open again until well into the spring, but that’s where Charles “Chuck” Penn had asked me to meet him. And when the eighth wealthiest man in the world (according to Forbes and a cover article in Fortune) gives a harmless and idiosyncratic reply to a request for an interview, it is only politic to accede.

  Penn had made his money in metals, first as a wildcatter in South America, later as a pure speculator, buying and selling mines, stocks, and commodities, using as much leverage as the world was willing to grant him with futures contracts, options, and promises of future deliveries. He was now on the boards of a major U.S. bank and another in Mexico, the world’s preeminent copper mining and distribution firm, an Australian newspaper and radio conglomerate, a Brazilian lumber company with licensing rights to three-quarters of the privately owned forests on the continent, a fair-trade Colombian coffee company dedicated to sustainability, and a Southeast Asian motor scooter company called Whoosh that had leading market shares in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Bangladesh, and soon expected to expand into Bhutan and Nepal. Penn was a British subject, though he had lived in the U.S. for the last twenty years. He had turned down an Order of the British Empire because of his Welsh ancestry, announcing that he would not accept it until Wales was declared a separate nation. Penn was also listed on the mastheads of the Boy Scouts, Outward Bound, and the NRA.

  Along the way, he had managed to pick up a wide range of enemies. South American far-left guerrillas, Russian Bratva gang leaders, Afghani warlords, and Chinese bureaucrats all had major grudges against the man. At times, his word had been called into question. At other times—at least three discovered by MI5 and revealed by the Guardian—there had been assassination attempts. There could have been more; Penn refused to discuss it.

  He arrived exactly on time. A Town Car and a black stretch limo glided into the parking lot. A man wearing a black overcoat and dark sunglasses—despite the gray sky—got out of the first car and came to meet me.

  “Mr. Stafford?” He looked at my face and compared it to an image on his cell phone.

  “I look better in profile,” I said.

  He stepped forward and waved a wand over my arms, legs, and torso. I passed.

  “This way, sir.” He held open the rear door of the limo and I slid inside. A blast of warm air hit me—the temperature must have been in the high seventies. Charles Penn was tapping on an iPad, dressed in an open-neck button-down white shirt and dark blue pinstripe pants. He put away the iPad while I got settled.

  “Jason.” He put out a hand. “Call me Chuck. Nice to meet you.”

  He was a big man, big-gutted, thick-necked, but he gave the impression of power rather than obesity. His thick black hair looked like someone may have done some minor color touch-ups, but otherwise there was no sign of physical vanity about him. He wore no rings or watch. The reading glasses he tucked into his breast pocket looked like the ones you can buy next to the checkout counter at Duane Reade.

  “I know it’s a bother that I dragged you all the way out here,” he said. His voice reverberated around his forehead and came out sounding like a church organ. A We
lsh church organ. “Accept my apologies. There is a method to my madness. I want you to see something.”

  “No bother, Chuck,” I lied politely. “I used to have a house out here. It’s nice coming back.”

  He gave me a smile that said he didn’t believe me but appreciated my gesture. “They’ll be along any minute.”

  I wanted to ask the question Who? but there was no point if I was going to find out any minute. Instead, I pushed ahead with my agenda. “Then do you mind if we get started while we wait?” I said. “Your secretary told me I had twenty minutes, no more, and I can feel the clock running.”

  He held up a single index finger and stared fixedly out at the harbor. I withheld a sigh of frustration.

  When he indicated that something was to happen “any minute,” he had neglected to say which minute, and I was very aware of how many of my precious twenty minutes were ticking away, but eventually he relaxed, smiled, and pointed at the harbor. Coming up from the Star Island Marina, chugging along at a sedate pace, was a big powerboat of some kind. It looked like a luxury version of a working boat, without the sleek lines of the cruisers or deep-sea fishing boats I was used to seeing in that harbor.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll salute them as they go.” He opened the door, and still dressed only in his shirtsleeves, stepped out into the cold mist.

  I followed reluctantly.

  “That’s what I wanted you to see.” He began waving his hand wildly. A young man stepped out of the cabin door on the bridge and waved back—a bit more controlled in his enthusiasm. “My son. You see? Family. That’s who I am, what I am about. It’s all about family or it’s worth nothing.”

  I knew from my research that Penn was thrice divorced, but I didn’t think that was the time to point this out.

  “He’s going out to sea in December? Is that wise?” The boat looked to be eighty feet long or more and was very solid-looking—if you had to be on the water in winter, I supposed that was the way to do it, but I could not imagine what emergency would cause me to make the attempt.

  Penn was still waving, his face alive with almost tearful pride. “He and three buddies are taking the boat to Belize. They were all in his marine biology program at university, and they’ll be doing research down there on the coral reefs.” He gave a short bark of a laugh that might have been scornful or not. “Saving the world.”

  Two other young men came out on deck and waved to us. This time I joined in waving back.

  “Four kids fresh out of college are taking that boat all the way down the East Coast and across the Caribbean in winter?” I thought I was allowed some incredulity.

  “There’s a full crew on board. And they can do big chunks of the trip inside—the Intracoastal Waterway. They’re not babies. At their age I was running a copper mine in the mountains of Peru and fighting off Shining Path terrorists.”

  I had read the accounts. If they were not exaggerated by time and publicists, he had been a very brave young man, and very handy with an M16. At that age I had been starting grad school and my biggest fear was being called on in Professor Dietch’s Advanced Accounting Seminar.

  “So, is this scientific expedition connected with school?”

  He gave me a look that held just a flash of anger. “No. You’re missing the point. It’s my gift to my son. The boat, the trip, the whole thing. The boat alone cost me eight mil. It’ll cruise at nine knots and has a range of about two thousand miles. Of course, it burns twenty gallons of fuel an hour. Marine diesel. It’s like burning a twenty-dollar bill every quarter of an hour. But it doesn’t matter. It’s family. I take care of my family. Do you have family, Jason?”

  “I have a six-year-old son.” And he had enough challenges in his life to face every day—he wouldn’t need an eight-million-dollar boat.

  “Then you understand. You can read all the stories about me and my wealth and how I got it and what I do with it, but if you don’t see that I’m all about family, you don’t know me. Clear?”

  The boat continued past us and out between the jetties. Another young man joined the others and they all gave one final wave. There was a shift in the breeze, and the boat disappeared into the mist. Gray upon gray upon gray.

  What was clear to me was that Charles Penn had enough money to buy his boy anything he wanted. I wasn’t jealous or appalled. Or impressed. It was also clear to me that other messages had been delivered. That though this man was powerful enough to move metals markets around the world with not much more than a raised eyebrow, he had to prove to me that he could make me waste five hours driving the length of Long Island twice for an all-too-brief opportunity for him to flash his wealth at me.

  “You have two other sons, don’t you? What are they up to? Backpacking in Antarctica? Biking across the Sahara?”

  Penn gave me a hard stare, giving nothing away, and then broke into a big grin. “I like you, Jason. We see life much the same way. We’ve both been on top and had to fight our way back up there after getting knocked down. We’re going to get along.” With that little speech he turned and walked quickly back to the car. He called back over his shoulder. “Set something up with my secretary for dinner sometime soon.” He paused before closing the door. “We’ll make it a long night. You ask me anything you want. We’ll talk.” He slammed the door and was gone, into the fog.

  17

  Wet snow mixed with rain—a wintry mix—was falling. The Kid had no hat, no gloves, and his black puffy jacket was open.

  “Cold,” he said.

  “So can I zip you up?”

  “No.”

  He took my hand and we crossed Broadway. He ran to the subway entrance. I thought about white sandy beaches and being so hot that I sweated while lying down.

  We walked up to the head of the platform—I walked, he skipped—so that we could get the first car. The Kid liked riding in the first car with his face pressed up against the window of the door at the end, next to the engineer. He loved the exhilaration of watching the stations fly toward us and the sudden glimpses of the inside of the tunnels as we passed worklights. Sometimes we saw people down there. Track inspectors in their fluorescent vests or repair crews working under brilliant white lights.

  “Still cold?”

  He thought about it. “Yes.”

  “Express or local?”

  “’Spress!”

  The express got up to higher speeds, bypassing the Seventy-ninth and Eighty-sixth Street stations.

  “So if you’re cold, why don’t we go someplace warm?”

  He sensed a trap. “Why?”

  “I’m thinking of nice warm sand under our feet, a blue cloudless sky overhead, the sun shining on our backs as we look out over turquoise waters.”

  A local train came out of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. The Kid covered his ears and opened his mouth in a silent scream. The train came to a stop and a young couple—German or Eastern European tourists, I judged by their bad haircuts—came out onto the platform. The Kid scurried over to my side. He did not trust having strangers close on the subway platform.

  The young woman approached me, her companion hanging back with an expression of disdain on his face.

  “Excuse me. We want to go to museum.” Her accent was very pronounced.

  The Kid kept behind my leg while gripping my pants in an iron grasp.

  “Which museum do you want?”

  She spoke rapidly to the young man, who answered in a mumbled whisper before handing her a small colorful brochure. She opened it and pointed.

  I recognized the picture. The Museum of the American Indian. They were Germans.

  “Ah,” I said. “You are heading uptown. You need to go downtown.” All the way downtown. As this information was met with blank stares, I tried demonstrating with big gestures accompanied by overly loud simple words. “Over. There. Down. Town.”

 
The man was clueless. The woman got the gist of it, but pointed at the intervening sets of express tracks between the two platforms.

  “Yes,” I said. I felt like I was playing charades—and losing. I pointed up the stairs and then walked my two fingers across the space between us.

  There was a map upstairs by the turnstiles. I could show them the stairs to the downtown tracks.

  “Oh shit,” I said, waving. “Follow me. Come on, Kid.”

  The Kid did not want to leave. “’Spress!” he shouted at me.

  “Yes, I know. We’ll be right back. Let’s go.”

  “’Spress!” he wailed.

  He was right. I could hear it. If we went upstairs and showed the tourists how to get down to Bowling Green, we would miss our uptown train.

  The woman caught on. “Is okay. Is okay. Thank you, mister.” She turned to leave.

  The young man was staring down the tracks, watching the flickering light of the approaching train reflect off the station walls. The Kid peeked out around him and for a moment they were less than two feet apart. I was two steps away.

  The man turned to follow his partner, and as he did he reached over and patted the Kid on the head. It was the kind of thoughtless but well-meant gesture that makes any parent’s blood boil. It turned the Kid into a demon. He swung around and leaped forward—teeth-first.

  Luck kept the man from a trip to the hospital. He was still turning when the Kid struck, and the Kid missed his target—the offending hand. I covered the two steps between us and lifted him up by the waist. He hated it. He kicked at me and scratched the back of my hand.

  The young man turned and ran to the stairs where his companion was already mounting to the station above. She had missed the incident entirely.

  I put the Kid back down as our train pulled in. He forgot his anger with me immediately and covered his ears.

  “Let’s go, my little tiger cub.” I would not reprimand my son for attempting to bite someone who had no business touching him in the first place. Let them sue.