The Hazards of Good Fortune

by Seth Greenland

  Franklin had subsequently called the DA and asked for the name of the man who could tease secrets from computers and smart phones. “My marriage is fine,” he hastened to add. “It’s business.” Franklin contacted the PI, and this man passed along the name Arun Prakash. Franklin reached out to Prakash and, upon learning the computer specialist would not come to the Gladstone offices, agreed to meet at his Queens apartment. He had considered bringing Ari and Ezra along since this would be a valuable lesson, but thought better of it. The twins did not know what plausible deniability meant. Better to keep it that way.

  Ten minutes later the limousine parked in front of a tan brick apartment building in Jackson Heights. Franklin told “Acky” to wait for him in front and scrambled out of the backseat. A cold drizzle was falling. As he turned up the collar of his topcoat, a Korean woman pushing a cart filled with shopping bags eyed the limousine and stared at Franklin. He ignored her and strutted into the building. In the vestibule, he located the name “Prakash”—below “Odigwe” and above “Rabindranath”—and pressed the buzzer.

  “Yeah?” said a wary voice emanating from the intercom. Franklin identified himself, and the door clicked open. The deserted lobby was in need of a facelift. The kind of place a crime might be committed. Franklin glanced around nervously while he waited for the elevator and wondered if he should have asked “Acky” to accompany him. The elevator arrived, and an older white woman who smelled of talcum powder got out, a holdover from when a different group of immigrants populated this neighborhood. Grim-faced, she pushed past Franklin, ignoring his presence. Franklin got in and pressed the scuffed button. The elevator chugged to the fourth floor. He got out, and the smell of spicy cooking immediately hit him. It was a cuisine he did not recognize and this added to his general discomfort. He knocked on the dented metal door of apartment 4H.

  Arun Prakash was about thirty. Dark skin and a luxuriant head of jet-black hair. Rangy and athletic, he wore jeans and a gray hoodie over a white T-shirt. Blue and gold sneakers on his feet. He did not resemble the gnomish geek Franklin had expected.

  “Mr. Gladstone?” His accent was American.

  “Guilty.”

  Arun stepped aside and gestured toward the apartment. “Sweet coat.”

  “Cashmere, from Barney’s.”

  “Yeah, I got the same one. Mine’s at the dry cleaner.”

  Whether this was meant honestly or not, Franklin didn’t react. “Where are you from?” he asked, as Arun closed the door behind him.

  “New Jersey.”

  Franklin acted as if this was interesting. He had yet to digest that the Indian immigration had begun four decades earlier and Arun’s generation was born here. While contemplating how someone who looked to him like a worker manning a call center in Bangalore could somehow have been born just across the Hudson River, Franklin took in the apartment with the practiced eye of a lifelong real estate man. The unit was a one bedroom that looked out at the apartment building directly behind it. A fixed wheel bicycle leaned against the wall in the otherwise barren entryway. The living room was sparsely furnished and anchored by a table constructed from a piece of wood the size of a door resting on construction horses, its surface littered with several laptops, two of which were running, one displaying a chart, the other a soccer game. There was a large screen television with an imitation leather lounge chair directly in front of it and several expensive gaming consoles Franklin recognized from the collections of his sons. On the walls were framed posters of obscure martial arts movies, the titles rendered in bold Hindi letters. Several houseplants were displayed, none of them reflecting an owner with horticultural aptitude. “High All the Time” by 50 Cent insinuated at low volume from one of the computers.

  “What about your parents? Where are they from?”

  “Tamil Nadu,” Arun said. “You know where that is?”

  “Should I?”

  “If you don’t want to be ignorant.” Arun paused, as if to gauge Franklin’s reaction to his effrontery. Franklin said nothing, not because he was offended but because he did not give a shit what someone like this thought of his geographical expertise. “It’s in southern India.” Arun took a swig from the quart bottle of Mountain Dew he was holding. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “How come you wouldn’t come to my office?”

  “I don’t like to attract attention. So.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Franklin said, not wanting to be hurried. “But you let a complete stranger come to your apartment.”

  “I checked you out, dude. While we were talking on the phone. I’m not worried unless you’re here to evict me and I’m pretty sure this is one of the buildings you don’t own.”

  Franklin was flattered by Arun’s acknowledgment of his status, something to which he was unusually susceptible.

  “Yeah, but I could have been someone pretending to be me.”

  The host regarded his visitor like he was a slow child. “Caller ID?”

  “I’m just fooling around.”

  “You’re hilarious,” Arun said, drily.

  Franklin glanced toward the bedroom door where a beaded curtain hung. “Anybody in there?”

  “No.”

  “Mind if I look?”

  “Shouldn’t I be the one who’s paranoid, Mr. Gladstone? You’re the one in my crib.”

  “Why would you be paranoid?”

  Arun let his eyes drift to the ceiling.

  “Check the bedroom.”

  Franklin parted the beaded curtain and peeked in. An unmade bed, clothes strewn on the floor, a bureau with a half-opened drawer. He listened intently, but the only sound was the murmur of the song playing in the other room. Satisfied they were alone, he took off his coat, folded it over the back of a chair, then plopped himself on the living room couch ready to gab.

  Arun spun his desk chair around and sat. “Talk to me.”

  Franklin put his hands behind his head and leaned back to give the impression that nerves did not consume him. What was about to occur represented the crossing of an invisible boundary and while he liked to believe he had the stones required for this kind of warfare, in quiet moments of self-reflection—because of the pain they engendered, these were exceedingly rare—it was not clear he was so endowed. His stomach gurgled, and he wondered if it was audible. Arun patiently waited, feet together, knees parted, hands on his thighs. He looked Franklin directly in the eyes.

  “Okay, okay,” Franklin inauspiciously began. Why did this kid make him nervous? “There’s someone I’m—ahhh—” (You schmuck, he razzed himself, Enough with the hesitating, get to the goddamn point). “There’s a person I’m in business with, and I need to get some information.”

  “A person?”

  “Yes.” Still wavering.

  “Are you going to tell me who that person is?”

  An indiscernible sound trickled out of Franklin’s mouth.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “A relative.”

  “Which one?”

  “Jay Gladstone,” Franklin blurted.

  Arun nodded, impressed. People knew that name. Jay’s membership in the family reflected well on all of the relatives, but once again, his less well-known cousin suffered this as belittlement. He suppressed the urge to inquire whether Arun was familiar with the name Franklin Gladstone before their interaction.

  “Okay, what about Jay Gladstone?”

  “I, umm—”

  Could he go through with this? Franklin was tempted just to get up, throw his coat on, and leave without another word. But he remained rooted to the couch.

  “You want me to mess with him?”

  Franklin did not want to “mess” with Jay. He would have preferred just going about his business. For all of his pugnacity, he did not consider himself underhanded and regarded his current circumstances with ambivalence. But Jay ha
d cornered him. There was no choice.

  “I don’t know if I’d put it that way,” Franklin said.

  “But you want me to hack him which, to be clear, is not something that I have agreed to do.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Please take out your phone and let me see you turn it off.”

  Franklin complied with the request.

  “Now, I’m going to ask you to remove your shirt.”

  Franklin reacted as if he were being asked to perform calisthenics. “What?”

  “Take your shirt off,” Arun said. “I need to know you’re not wired up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “With a microphone. It’s protocol. If you don’t want to do it, there’s the door.”

  Arun leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. He was not going to do anything until his visitor granted the request. Franklin had not counted on this. He had no intention of disrobing. Arun waited.

  Mustering all his available hauteur, Franklin said, “You do know who I am, right?”

  “I don’t give a fuck if you’re the Queen of England.”

  No one had spoken to Franklin this way in decades. Was Arun going to make him remove his clothes? He wished he could have asked the office IT person to help, but that was not an option.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “I’m busy, so if you don’t want to strip down, I get it, but then you should leave ’cause I got stuff to do for paying clients.”

  “You’re really going to make me do this?”

  “I already said you could go.”

  Reluctantly, Franklin heaved off the couch. He removed his suit jacket and placed it next to where he had been sitting. He loosened his tie then unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a white T-shirt beneath it.

  “Okay?” This striptease was all he was going to do.

  “You’ve seen this in the movies, right? Where one guy makes another guy prove he’s not wearing a wire.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you know this is the part where you’re supposed to take the shirt all the way off and lose the T-shirt, too.” Franklin looked at him, incredulous. At least his sons were not here to witness this indignity. “Sorry, man. Gotta do it.”

  Franklin reluctantly displayed himself to Arun, naked from the waist up. Pale and flabby, upper body carpeted with hair, breasts nearly female.

  “Satisfied?”

  Not wanting to meet Arun’s impassive gaze, he looked toward the window. The rain rushed down the panes like it was late to a meeting.

  “You should work out more,” Arun observed. Franklin chose not to respond. If this is what it took to get what he wanted, it was a fair price. “Turn around.”

  As Franklin pirouetted, the image of a dancing bear popped into his head, further discomfiting him. He completed the circle and said, “Okay?” not bothering to hide his annoyance.

  “You’re clean.”

  Shaking his head at the humiliation he had been made to endure, Franklin quickly put himself back together. Rather than knotting his tie again, he rolled it up and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. He lowered himself back on to the couch and hoped the preliminaries were over.

  “We had to do that?”

  “Look, Mr. Gladstone, according to the laws of New York State some of the services I perform are a little sketchy, so I take precautions.”

  “Didn’t you do work for the DA up in Westchester?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Franklin had not expected this degree of caginess on the part of someone being offered a temporary spot on the Gladstone payroll, even if it was off the books. Why wasn’t this Arun Prakash person just glad to have the opportunity? Franklin felt the need to reassert his primacy.

  “Before we get started, why don’t you tell me some of the things you’ve done?”

  Arun exhaled. Franklin was trying his patience. “Look, I could say I’ve penetrated the servers of major corporations, or looked at nude pictures in the private Instagram accounts of half the actresses in Hollywood, or I could claim I hacked the Defense Department for shits and giggles, but I would never admit to any of it. Maybe I did all that; maybe I didn’t. Hacking isn’t a business where a guy has a website. It’s trust-based.”

  Franklin thought about this. It occurred to him again that he could just get up and go. The rain had gathered in intensity, and the storm increased his sense of isolation. If he did nothing, Jay would eventually discover everything. Franklin had to take advantage of whatever avenues were available. He knew this was a long shot and the path he was contemplating was not a righteous one. Jay led a life above reproach. Whatever he had done to D’Angelo Maxwell, Franklin suspected his cousin would ultimately swat it away. He told himself to leave. This plan was reckless and foolish. What was he doing in the apartment of some Tamil hacker in Queens?

  Even without his topcoat on, the room felt hot. The rain had turned to hail and struck the windows like buckshot. But what was Franklin supposed to do, let the Maxwell situation play out in Jay’s favor (as he feared it invariably would), and then wait for the walls to close in, squeezing him until his nemesis invoked the Gladstone family contract that all of them signed upon entry into the business? The one that formally legislated upright behavior? He would be out on the sidewalk. The prospect was a loss of face he could not bear. He would never have been in this position if he had resisted the temptation to pilfer the accounts. Yes, he needed more than a hundred million to execute the purchase of the hockey franchise, but had he tried to obtain bank financing, he likely could have cobbled it together. Why, then, had he done it? To demonstrate that Franklin Gladstone was free-range, his own man, beholden to no one. Particularly his cousins. And he intended to pay it back. If only Jay hadn’t threatened him, he wouldn’t be in this degrading situation.

  “Okay, I get it,” Franklin said. “Let’s do this.”

  “Now, your cousin, he’s a public figure.”

  “How does that figure in?”

  “The price goes, like, way up.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what you’re looking for?”

  “His correspondence. Emails, texts, everything. Where he’s been on the Internet, who he’s communicating with. The whole cyber footprint.” Franklin was pleased with his use of the phrase “cyber footprint,” recently encountered in a business journal, and believed it suggested computer literacy. Having already turned him into a dancing bear, Arun was starting to make Franklin feel unintelligent.

  “Typically, those kinds of businesses have pretty tight security packages in place.”

  “I’m going to give you the passwords,” Franklin said. “Where do you look?”

  “More places than you can name.”

  That sounded impressive. For a moment, Franklin considered asking Arun for additional details but he stopped himself. If in his sweaty desolation he chose to unleash a malevolent force, it was probably best not to think too much about what was being done on his behalf.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  An African-American man behind the wheel of an expensive car must hew to the speed limit or raise the risk of being pulled over for “driving while black.” It does not matter how accomplished or famous or educated the black man is, the cognitive dissonance this sight causes across a swath of American law enforcement has created a phenomenon with which virtually all black males are familiar. For this reason, Lourawls maintained a steady sixty miles per hour on the Palisades Parkway behind the wheel of the Escalade. It was early evening. He and Babatunde had been at the hospital all day and were drained. They were going home to shower and get some rest before returning for the night shift. The ride uptown and over the bridge was devoid of their typical to and fro. They usually listened to hip-hop in the car, but this evening felt distin
ctly unmusical.

  Running through both of their minds was the future and what it might look like without Dag in the picture. The pair shared an optimistic outlook, so neither wanted to mention it, but they were not comforted by the doctor’s palaver. Coma was a dangerous word. When they were all still living in Houston, a high school friend took a bullet in the head. He was in a coma for two weeks and then expired. If Dag somehow miraculously defied the odds and recovered, what were the chances he would play again? A guy with the chronic physical problems likely to result from this kind of trauma required a staff of nurses, not sidekicks. Where did that leave them? They were both around Dag’s age. Too old for life on the perimeter of someone else’s life.

  Lourawls said, “They got hunting season for deer.”

  Babatunde’s head swung from right to left. “You see a deer?”

  “Naw, man.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t need a hunting season for black men.”

  Babatunde slumped in the seat. “I’m too tired to talk about this shit now.”

  “Always open season on the black man.”

  “Come on, Lou. Just drive, okay?”

  “They’re not gonna put that cop up in Westchester on trial,” Lourawls said.

  “If you say so.”

  “I’m not predicting, man. Already happened. You gotta keep up with the news.”

  “I follow sports,” Babatunde reminded him.

  “The cracker motherfucker capped that kid down in Florida, Trayvon? Same thing. He’s gonna walk.”

  “That happen already?”

  “No, that’s a prediction,” Lourawls said. “But I’ll bet you.”

  “I ain’t betting you.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “I told you,” Babatunde said. “I’m too tired to talk about this shit now.”