Kill Me (13 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

He’d been sitting at a table near the entrance to the lounge while he waited for me. He was nursing a snifter of something amber. When I arrived he stood up to say hello and then I followed him to a distant table that fronted 57th from a mezzanine above the sidewalk. I waved off the cocktail waitress.

“Once you’re sick or hurt, you’re in. If Adam suddenly decides he’s your best pal, or if he doesn’t, it won’t change anything,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

Maybe not for you,
I thought. But for me? I knew that if Adam suddenly showed any interest in moving to Colorado or letting me further into his life it would change everything for me. Everything. But I said, “I understand that.”

“What I’m saying is that once the second payment is made and you have an activating event, you can’t change your mind.”

“I understand the commitment. Your associate has made the policy’s lack of flexibility crystal clear.” I almost said her name — Lizzie — before I remembered that it probably wasn’t really her name.

“Don’t be glib about this. We aren’t.” He tried to catch my eyes. I eluded him for a moment, just to show him I could. When I relented and locked onto his gaze he said, “Don’t light this fuse unless you’re absolutely willing to have the bomb go off. At some point, there will be no way to defuse it.”

“I said I understood.”

“Good.” He swirled his cognac or Armagnac or Drambuie or whatever it was. But he didn’t drink any.

“I’m curious about something, though,” I said. “What if I simply chicken out? I mean before I get sick or injured. What if I just tell you to keep all the money I paid and leave me alone. Let you off the hook.”

“It has never happened. Theoretically, it’s possible, but realistically? You won’t be able to find us to give us the instructions. We’ll have no further contact with you after your final fees are received and the client-derived parameters are specified. Discretion serves our clients well, and it serves us well. To protect our promises we need to protect ourselves. Invisibility at all stages. All stages. Always.”

“How will you know if I’m —”

“All monitoring of your health status will be done remotely, and invisibly. It’s part of the comprehensive nature of our service.”

I shrugged. “I have resources,” I said.

And attitude.

“We work only for people with resources. Believe me when I say you won’t be able to find us, so don’t bother to try. If you don’t like the rules, don’t play the game. There are nursing homes filled with people who ultimately chose not to play. You can be one of them if you would like. Unless, and until, you are a client, it makes no difference to me.”

“Jimmy reached you to let you know I was interested.”

“If you complete your enrollment, and you’re so inclined, we’ll provide you with a way to make referrals. That will be up to you.”

“Jimmy’s enrolled?”
He said he wasn’t.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But enrollees can make referrals.”

“If they wish.”

“So then I can reach you. See?”

“We use a series of intermediaries. Always. Your friend Jimmy became aware of our organization during his wife’s … decline. When you expressed interest in controlling the circumstances at the end of your own life, Jimmy Lee reached an intermediary. Each intermediary is under instructions not to forward any information but the contact information for the referral. Don’t be childish about this. If you need a way to beat our system, our services aren’t designed for you. No one’s coercing you to enroll.”

“I don’t like to be told what to do. I’m spending a lot of money.”

He sat back. His voice turned dismissive. “When you buy a Bentley, you can’t tell them you want one that drives on three wheels. When you choose your next Gulfstream, you won’t be given the option of insisting that it fly with one wing. Money has its limits. Get real.”

Did this guy just tell me to “get real”? Was he trying to provoke me?

“This is a service, not a thing. Your analogy is flawed.”

As are your manners.

“A specific service. Bentley-type service. Gulfstream-like service. Four wheels. Two wings.”

“I like to do things my way.”

“We know. It’s why we’ve ultimately decided to accept you, and it’s what will ultimately make you a good client. Our services are designed for people who don’t like to be dictated to by fate. Sign on with your eyes wide open and you’ll ensure that your life will end your way. Or walk away now and leave yourself vulnerable to fate. The choice is yours.”

He had a point. He knew he had a point.

More important, I knew he had a point.

“We don’t need the work,” he said. “Go to one of our competitors.”

“I don’t know your competitors.”

“We don’t have any,” he said.

It was his first joke of the evening. I hoped it would be his last.

It also marked the moment that I realized that he and I had moved, figuratively, into the little room at the car dealership. The bland room where the real negotiations take place. The room where the sales games are played.

He was trying to convince me that he could walk away from the deal we were negotiating. He was wondering if I could.

I didn’t like my bargaining position.

He reached into his coat pocket and dropped a photograph on the table. A man, or a reasonable facsimile, in a bed hooked up to enough tubes and monitors to fill a ward at the Mayo Clinic.

“Recognize him?”

Antonio?
I thought.
Is that Antonio?

“Of course you don’t. How could you? His mother wouldn’t recognize him. That’s Toby Bonds one month after — after — his limo was broadsided by that cement truck in Miami. You heard about that, I assume. The cement truck? Toby’s side airbag didn’t inflate for some reason. But Toby’s head did.” He paused for a moment. “You know Toby, right?”

Was the “But Toby’s head did” one of this guy’s jokes?

“Yes,” I said. “I know him.” Prior to his accident, Toby was a bigwig in the venture-capital world. We’d crossed paths a number of times in our professional lives. I’d indeed heard about his tragedy. It was one of those things that was
tsk-tsked
about at cocktail parties.

I’d always thought Toby was a pompous prick.

“Thought so. Then you probably know the story about the cement truck. Toby was ambivalent about us, not unlike you. He never made the second payment. He was still thinking about it when fate dealt him the low card.” He touched the photo. “Not making the second payment? It’s kind of like drawing on an inside straight. Risky. You lose sometimes.”

“Some people take risks.”

Like me.

“Antonio?” he asked. The way he said my friend’s name made it sound like a profanity.

I said a silent prayer that the funny man didn’t have a photo of Antonio. I watched his hands.

He went on. “He took a risk in that cave in Belize, didn’t he? You’ve been known to take a few yourself. Is the outcome that Antonio suffered a consequence of risk that you’re willing to endure?”

“I get your point.”

He threw down another horrifying picture and I began to wonder how thick his deck of disaster was. “Margo Johannsen.”

I knew about Margo. She was a colleague. She’d been COO of one of the big players in biotech, and she had suffered a stroke at age forty-seven. We usually saw each other a few times a year, and I enjoyed her company when we ran into each other at industry meetings. The photograph on the table was of her in a rehab facility. She was being supported by two physical therapists. She didn’t look much like a COO. She looked like a train wreck.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ve seen enough. I don’t need to be told most things twice.”

His dark lips flattened out as though he were putting some effort into hiding a smile. “Do you know that ‘gork,’ that terrible word that’s so full of meaning, is actually an acronym?”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I was going to add “For what?” but I already knew he was planning to tell me.

“God … only … really … knows. Before it became part of the vernacular, it was originally medical slang. A description for conditions that are unfathomable to medical caregivers.” He lifted his eyebrows and gestured toward the photo of Margo. She was the current GORK in question.

I sighed.

I was the future GORK in question.

He flipped another picture onto the table. I recognized this hospitalized zombie right away and I swallowed and fought a swell of pressure behind my eyes. I said, “Oh my God. That’s Will Durrell, isn’t it? What the hell —”

“Aortic aneurysm. Three days ago. An astonishing surgical achievement saved his life, but … he had bled a lot, and the doctors didn’t quite save enough of his brain. You know him, too, don’t you? You know Will?”

He knew that I knew Will. I could tell.

The photo of Will had not been chosen at random. I wondered how the funny man had gotten hold of it.

“Yes. I consider him a friend.” The picture of Will Durrell hit me harder than the others. I hadn’t even known he was sick. The previous summer Will had invited me to be his guest in a small camp at the annual Bohemian Grove gathering on the Russian River in California. I’d learned a lot about him, and from him, during our week together. He played an alto sax that could make the redwoods weep and he could sketch a dead-on caricature of anyone he wanted in about three minutes flat.

I said, “Let me guess. Will never made the second payment?”

“Mr. Durrell withdrew his application prior to acceptance. But I’m so glad we’re beginning to understand each other. It makes the final negotiation so much more straightforward.”

I spent some more time lost in the photograph of Will. The last time I’d seen him he’d been smoking a fat Monte Cristo and drinking an ‘82 La Lagune while trying to get a group together to form an impromptu marching jazz band through the Russian River redwoods. He had already recruited one of the Marsalis brothers — I don’t recall which one — and he was pretty sure Eric Clapton was going to join in, too.

I’d offered to carry spare instruments just to be in the vicinity when they started to play.

It had been ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was just finding its way through the majestic trees to the camp. The marching band never materialized. Will got distracted by an opportunity to do a canopy tour with Richard Branson.

“I don’t get it,” I said to the dull man across from me. “Your associate spends the day trying to convince me to back out of our arrangement. Yet, you come to my hotel to try to convince me to ante in. What gives?”

“Our paying clients are in the top one-one hundredth of one percent of the population in wealth. We don’t market our services, yet we reject two potential clients for every one we accept. If we had a door, people would be beating it down. If we had a Web site, our servers would be jammed. We’ve identified a true need. Consider yourself one of the fortunate few.”

Was he congratulating me, or himself? Time would tell, I decided.

“What distinguishes the rejects from the enrollees?” I asked.

“That’s … proprietary.”

I expected no less. I reminded myself I didn’t have to like the guy. Any antipathy I had for him was more than compensated for by my affection — if you want to call it that — for Lizzie.

“My associates and I have reached a determination that you’re an acceptable risk. My role this evening is merely to ascertain that you understand the irrevocable nature of our agreement. Irrevocable, regardless of what happens between you and your son. Since we’re unable to put anything in writing we go to great lengths to be certain we’ve covered all bases. All bases.”

I’m in? Hurray.

I didn’t feel all that excited. I was still trying to get over my disappointment that I wasn’t having this drink with Lizzie.

“I understand,” I said. “How do we proceed?”

He mentioned the name of one of the big national mobile-phone carriers, a different one than the one I’d used the time before. “Get a new line when you get home. We’ll be in touch.”

His tongue caught on the roof of his mouth as he formed the
t
in “touch.” The childhood stutterer briefly revealed, once more.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Be frugal. Get a basic phone. It will be used only once. Shortly thereafter, you’ll get directions on how to make the second round of contributions, and we’ll review the client-derived parameters. After that, you won’t hear from us again. We function in the background, like any good security system.”

He drained the contents of his snifter in one long swallow, shivered at the shock to the back of his throat, and stood up.

“I have one more question,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I wasn’t frisked this time. Why?”

“Review our conversation. I didn’t say anything this time. That’s why. We could have been talking about irrevocable life insurance, couldn’t we? Or disability insurance, even. A new kind. A special kind. The kind that says you never, ever, have to worry about being permanently disabled.”