The Fixer
Page 26
He didn’t understand what she was getting at. A thought glimmered and vanished, like one of those transparent fish you can see only when it catches the light.
She said, “I’ve never heard of a nonprofit going under the radar like that. Someone’s got something to hide and they’re serious about it. What about this guy Alex Pappas?”
“Pappas?” he said thickly, and he tried hard to focus.
“He knows who’s calling the shots.”
“Pappas isn’t . . . he won’t . . .”
“There must be some way to get it out of him. Or to find out from him. He’s our best way in.”
He noticed that our but said nothing. His tentative grasp on what she was saying was slackening, and she began to speak nonsense. “Alex Pappas” and “meeting” and something else.
“Rick?”
He opened his eyes. “I’m here.”
But when he opened his eyes again, she was gone.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them once again, he looked at his watch. It took him some time to understand what time it was—his watch said nearly three o’clock, but was that in the afternoon? The shades in his room had been drawn, but he could see the darkness around their edges and he realized it was the middle of the night.
With some effort he managed to sit up in bed, and he reached over to the bedside table for his phone. It showed 19 percent battery life remaining. Slowly and deliberately he opened the Uber application and set the pickup location.
Fifteen minutes later he was in a cab, and on the way he got the phone call he’d long been dreading.
52
Change of plans,” Rick told the cab driver. “I’d like to go to the Alfred Becker nursing home in Brookline.”
“Where?” The driver pulled over to the side and entered the Becker home in his smartphone’s GPS.
Rick felt his heartbeat slow as he watched the traffic, the buildings they passed, and everything seemed remote and miniature. He was lost in thought. Twenty minutes later, though it seemed to be two or three, the cab pulled up to the circular drive in front of the Alfred Becker.
He got out gingerly and limped to the entrance, pushed the glass doors open with his right hand. The woman sitting at the front desk ignored him, as she ignored everybody. He signed in and walked down the broad main corridor, past the elevator, everything slower and unreal, as if in a dream.
When he reached his father’s wing, he passed one of the nurses, Carolyn, who just looked at him with surprise as he passed. For a moment he forgot why, then he remembered what his face must look like. The beautiful Saint Lucian nurse, Jewel, with the fawnlike eyes, was lingering in front of the closed door to Lenny’s room. “What happened to you, Mr. Rick?”
“I was in an accident, but I’m okay.”
“It looks—very bad.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
She touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
She opened the door. He was lying on his back. When Rick saw him, his stomach took a deep dive. He couldn’t stop himself from exclaiming, in a small strangled voice, “Oh.”
He hadn’t expected Lenny’s expression to be so serene, but it was. That angry expression seemed to have dissolved in death. His mouth gaped, just a little. His cataract-clouded eyes looked at nothing. Rick reached up with his good hand and pulled Lenny’s eyelids closed. The skin was pale and waxy, translucent, and it felt slightly cool to the touch.
“Dad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“He die in his sleep, your father,” Jewel said. “I come by and see him when my shift start, at midnight, and he was watching the TV. I come by again and ask him if he want to turn off the TV because it’s so late and he didn’t say nothin’ but he was alive. I turn off the TV and his lamp and tuck him in and everything. When I look in at three tirty, he gone.”
“He died in his sleep,” Rick echoed, just to say something. “That’s nice.”
“I pronounce and tell doctor by phone. But we wait till you get here to call funeral home. Do you have funeral home to call?”
“Funeral home? Oh. Yeah, no. What’s that big one, Orlonsky and Sons?” The big funeral home on Beacon Street in Brookline. He remembered driving past the Grecian columns, ORLONSKY & SONS MEMORIAL CHAPEL in black letters.
She nodded. “Orlonsky, yes, we call them. Your father—he was a very nice man, your father was.”
“He was. What was—the cause of death?”
“I think the doctor will say cardiac failure. Maybe he was leaving here too much.” It took him a while to understand what she meant. Finally he understood: Lenny’s traveling to Charlestown and back as often as he did must have been stressful for him.
* * *
When Jewel left, Rick sat in the chair beside the bed and thought for a moment. He felt heavy-limbed and achy. The pain had come back. It was time for another pain pill, but he needed to stay alert a while longer.
Then he took out his phone and stepped into the hallway. On the West Coast it was three hours earlier: one in the morning. She might still be awake, but more likely she was asleep.
The phone rang six times before she answered.
“Wendy,” he said. “How soon can you get back to Boston?”
* * *
Half an hour later—surprisingly quickly—someone from the funeral home came, a young guy in a dark crewneck sweater. He went to work at once, lowering the bed expertly, transferring the body to a rolling cot, covering the body with a quilt he had brought.
Rick didn’t cry.
He’d been meaning to tell his dad how much he admired him, but it was too late.
53
By the time he was finished signing forms and doing paperwork for the death certificate and composing the death notice for the newspapers, it was five thirty in the morning. Lenny wasn’t an organ donor. He believed that if the doctors found an organ donor card in your wallet, they didn’t try as hard to save you. There was not much to sign.
Rick got a cab and went back to the DoubleTree. He was hobbling slowly. His pain had come roaring back. But he couldn’t take a pill, not until he was settled someplace else.
He had one suitcase and a few clothes to pack, some toiletries in the bathroom, not much else.
He thought about his father’s funeral. Who were Lenny’s friends anymore? For almost twenty years he’d lived in a nursing home, unable to communicate. Most of his friends stopped coming by after a few months. There was Mr. Clarke/Herbert Antholis, but he couldn’t appear in public. Lenny’s secretary, Joan, whom his father had reason to distrust. Who else was there?
At a few minutes after six in the morning, his phone rang.
It was Andrea. “Rick, are you all right? Where’d you go? Was it something I said?”
He’d rehearsed a few answers but nothing seemed right. I didn’t want to trouble you made him sound like a martyr. I’m all recovered sounded delusional.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I thought it was better for you and Evan if I wasn’t there.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re going to stay at some hotel—?”
“My father died.”
“Ohh, Rick, I’m sorry. When did this—?”
“I got a call in the middle of the night. Heart failure.”
“So that’s why . . . What can I do?”
He didn’t correct her. No reason for her to know he’d left before getting the call from the nursing home. “Nothing. Apologize to Evan for me. He was going to show me how to play Minecraft. Tell him another time.”
* * *
Rick wanted to change hotels, because that had become his routine, but he couldn’t. Since his wallet had been taken, he had no credit cards, no driver’s license. The DoubleTree had his card on file, so he was okay until he checked out. By tomorrow he’d have replacement credit cards he coul
d use.
He had around ten thousand dollars in cash left and was in no condition to go back to the storage unit for more, not until he felt stronger. Fortunately, he’d paid off all his credit cards, so after a few hours on the phone he had new credit card numbers he could use once they arrived.
He took a pain pill and slept for five hours.
By the time he’d awakened, the funeral home was open. He surveyed himself in the bathroom mirror as he washed up. The bruises on his face were starting to look less acute, less well defined, with green and yellow tints seeping around the edges. His left eye was still swollen, but much less than it had been. He no longer had a constant headache. He was starting to heal. But every time he moved, even to lift a cup of coffee, he felt the pain. It hurt when he coughed, grunted, or laughed. It was as if he were made of broken glass in a bag.
He took a cab to the funeral home and picked out a plain wooden casket, and still he didn’t cry. The funeral director offered to bring in a rabbi to conduct the service the following day. Neither Rick nor his father was observant, but in the end, Rick decided that was what his father would have wanted. Better safe than sorry.
He went back to the hotel and slept some more until his cell phone ringing woke him up. He looked at the time on the phone. He’d been asleep for seven hours.
It was Wendy. She’d just arrived in Boston. She’d caught an Alaska Airlines flight from Bellingham—her least favorite airline, she made a point of saying—with a brief layover in Seattle. Rick told her he’d had a car accident a few days ago, was fine now, but needed his rest. He’d see her at the funeral tomorrow.
“Is Sarah with you?”
“No. She can’t leave the restaurant.” Rick had met Sarah exactly once, a couple of years ago, at their wedding.
“Hey, Rick? How’d he die?”
“They’re saying cardiac failure.”
“Maybe it’s just as well. Ever since his stroke, his quality of life was pretty lousy.”
“I guess.”
He gave her the address of the funeral home and told her to be there at ten o’clock. The funeral started at eleven.
“Hey, Rick?”
“Yeah?”
“Know something weird?” Wendy said. “We’re orphans now.”
54
Jesus, Rick, what the hell happened to you?” Wendy said.
“I told you, I was in an accident.”
“Yeah, but . . . you look like you were in a fistfight and you lost, bad.”
Rick shrugged, then winced as his ribs shrieked with pain.
“I’d give you a hug, but I have a feeling that would hurt you.”
“Yeah, please don’t.”
They were in the lobby of Orlonsky & Sons Memorial Chapel, which, with its green wall-to-wall carpeting and framed paintings of fruit, looked like a suburban living room, the formal room no one ever uses.
Wendy was small and pretty but she was becoming stout, with a large, almost maternal bosom. She had the same build as their mother, but in her early thirties she already looked like their mother did in her fifties. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
“I think I cried the whole way here,” she said. “The guy in the seat next to me was getting nervous.”
Rick nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her he hadn’t cried.
“So much easier for you living near him,” she said. “At least you got to see him once a week. Me, I had to suffer the guilt of not seeing him for months at a time. I almost asked you if you knew what his last words were, but then I remembered his last words were eighteen years ago.”
The rabbi was young, too young to have the gravitas and authority his job required. He arrived a few minutes after they did, in a gust of cold wind. After introducing himself and saying he was sorry for their loss, he took them into a small anteroom next to where the service was being held—Rick could see the pine casket on a bier next to a floral arrangement—and talked them through the ceremony. “I didn’t know your father, of course, but he sounds like he was a wonderful man.”
“Yes,” Wendy said.
I didn’t know him either, Rick thought, but he said only, “He was.”
The rabbi tore a small black ribbon and pinned it on to Wendy’s lapel. Then he did the same with Rick. He said a prayer in Hebrew that Rick didn’t understand. The rabbi said the torn black ribbon was meant to symbolize their loss, a tear in the fabric of the family’s life.
They filed into the funeral chapel, where a smattering of people had gathered. He was surprised that anyone had shown up. Jeff Hollenbeck was there, in an awkwardly fitting gray suit he obviously didn’t wear very often. Andrea Messina, which surprised him. (Holly was in Miami, though she wouldn’t have appeared if she were in town.) Joan Breslin and her husband. The rest were people of around Lenny’s age, friends of his, a few of whom looked vaguely familiar.
And, just entering the chapel, Alex Pappas.
55
Instead of taking his place in one of the two reserved seats in the front of the room next to Wendy, Rick immediately circled around to the back of the room, limping quickly, painfully. Pappas saw him approach and remained standing in place. He was wearing a black suit with a crisp white shirt and a silver tie.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Pappas said.
You goddamned son of a bitch, Rick thought. What the hell are you doing here? Is this your victory lap?
“Thank you for coming,” Rick said.
The man had apparently arranged for the payment of eighteen years’ worth of nursing home expenses. Yet was he responsible for the very injury that made that care necessary? Rick couldn’t prove it.
Alex Pappas had known Lenny for decades, and Rick hadn’t exactly been a great son. He had no right to throw the man out of the funeral home, no matter how much he wanted to. He had no right to chew the man out. Not yet, at least. His anger at seeing Pappas was built almost entirely on supposition.
“I’m here to pay my respects to a fellow member of the brotherhood,” said Pappas. His eyes, magnified by his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, gazed steadily at Rick’s.
“What, a fellow fixer?” Rick said contemptuously.
“You say that like you’ve just tasted shit,” Pappas replied. “Well, let me tell you something: Nothing would happen in this world without men like your father. Because our world is too damn broken. Things fall apart, Rick. That’s the way of the world. I don’t care if it’s the White House or the Kremlin or the Vatican or the goddamned Élysée Palace; nothing in this world happens without the guy behind the guy, the guy with the Rolodex, the guy who knows the secret password, the guy who gets the job done after the handshakes are over. Because the machinery’s always breaking down and the gears need to be oiled and nothing moves without the guy in the engine room.”
“And that’s you,” Rick said dubiously.
“What do you think Saint Paul was if not a goddamned fixer? He makes a few timely introductions to the Roman emperor Constantine, and next thing you know, a small-time first-century cult is a global religion. The only reason this goddamned broken world spins on its crooked axis is because fixers get up every morning and do what they do. And now let’s see if we can’t fix this situation of yours.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need any more fixing from you.”
“Hear me out first, Rick. I’d like to make you an offer.”
“An offer.” He could smell Pappas’s peppery cologne.
“Yes. When we can speak in private, I have an offer that I think will interest you.”
“We can speak right now.”
“All right. I’ll keep this brief. What happened to you”—he indicated with a spread hand—“should never have happened.”
Rick couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “Your thugs did a pretty good job on me. But you made the mistake of leaving me alive. And I don’t give up.”
“That right?” Rick gave a chilly smile. He could hear the muted buzz of Pappas’s BlackBerry.
“Absolutely. You may have heard all sorts of things about me, but one thing you’ll never hear is that I break my word. My word is my bond. You have my personal guarantee that you will be left alone.”
Rick knew there had to be a condition. He was convinced of it. “If what?”
“All I ask is that you step back.”
“Step . . . back?”
“Your father left you a rather nice inheritance. Keep it. It’s yours. Just halt your crusade, and I can assure you no further harm will come to you.” He paused. “Are we clear?”
Rick glanced at him, then away. He didn’t know how to reply.
“This is what your father would have wanted, Rick. He left you money so you and your sister could live comfortably. Not so that you would get hurt. This is why I’m making you this offer, and let us be clear, it’s a one-time offer. In honor of your father. You’ve gotten what you wanted. You’ve won. Now, let’s move on. Walk the path of peace, and others will, too.”
Pappas stuck out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Rick thought: Pappas is offering to buy me off, and why the hell not?
His father was dead. There was no point to continuing. The battle was over.
It was, truth to tell, a relief.
“You know what the right thing is,” Pappas said. “Just live your life.”
After a few seconds, Rick nodded, then shook his hand. “Deal,” he said.
56
He was safe now, he was pretty sure of it. As sure as he could be, anyway.
Despite Alex Pappas’s pretense—that he was an innocent, an honest broker instead of a ringleader—Rick actually believed Pappas’s assurances. They’d been attacking Rick because he persisted in digging up something they wanted to stay buried. If he stopped digging, he was no longer a threat.