Life Among Giants (36 page)

“What!” Etienne shouted, bang into the next trough.

Kate struggled below, handed up orange life jackets, handed up a fleece for me, Jack's wool sweater, a towel for Etienne. We fought our way into the life jackets even as we shot up into the sky, alive.

J
ACK EASED INTO
a sandy cove on a very small island somewhere off Long Island, a beach well configured for wading. Jack had been right—you don't get seasick when you're part of the ocean. Etienne was fine. We had about an hour and a half of tide by Jack's calculation, long enough for a leisurely lunch.

We spread blankets on the fine sand, and deftly Etienne laid out a middle-eastern feast on good paper plates: fol mudamas and kerba-kum, hummus and spiced baked nuts, baby house-pitas and eggplant tapenade, sweet tea, shocking little pickles, candied squash blossoms stuffed with curried rice and onions, pink linen napkins from the restaurant. I'd contributed tiny, spicy mushroom pastries filled with a cranberry chutney. “Eat counterclockwise for fertility,” E.T. said. “Clockwise for wealth.”

“What does random get you?” my sister said.

“Random for eternal life,” our chef said.

Of course we all chose that, just dove in. When we were beyond stuffed he laid out sweets: sticky pistachio squares, chocolate and chilies, a chilled mango soup served in fresh little wooden bowls: nice.

Jack and Kate went off to explore the island, not much to see, a lot of rocks, a lot of trees, the pilings from an old fishing weir.
Th
ey disappeared over the height of land, a faint path. Kate just looked good: healthy and happy and strong and wise.

“You got your speech?” E.T. said.

“I'll keep it short,” I said, and reviewed it in my head: Perdhomme and Kaiser—the actual Kaiser—had dined at Restaurant Firfisle. Kaiser, the killer, a man I'd seen up close but who'd never been sought by the police (the poor court-appointed guard, badly wounded, reported that Dad had said “Hi, sir” to the shooter and not “Kaiser,” and the guard's word, being professional, was strongly valued over mine, all his testimony deposed bedside at the hospital in Danbury).
Th
ere was no physical evidence to connect Perdhomme to any crime, was the D.A.'s lament, no eyewitness to anything but a contract killing that might have been paid by anyone, and professional murderers very hard to trace. My mother? She was merely collateral damage in a war among criminals. I'd played this particular loop of tape in my head a million times, difficult to find the
OFF
button. But now we had Kaiser. And we had Perdhomme. And we had Kaiser and Perdhomme as a unit: same room together, same table at my restaurant, same car, same destination, High Side.

Etienne took my two hands, looked into my eye. “Remember, no mention of Sylphide. You concentrate on what we
know.
We don't let Kate distract you. We don't let Jackie shut you down.”

“And don't call him Jackie, not to his face.”

“He call me Cookie, mon! He gonna be Jackie.”

Lying back on the blanket in the nice hot sand, trying to relax, I went over it yet again despite myself. Kaiser and Perdhomme, Perdhomme and Kaiser: in court, the defense had taken me apart, played me as the pitiable teenage kid. Dad's phone calls with Perdhomme, my best shot, had been dismissed before I could recount them: hearsay.
Th
e tape recordings I'd seen him make were nowhere to be found. Nothing about the High Side was deemed allowable; there was no connection to be made between the High Side and our side. Dad's shoes were just shoes.

Th
e mâitre d' from Les Jardins was asked by the defense counsel to describe the shooter. “
Très
tall,” he said. “Zhoulders
énorme.
Hands,
énorme!
Ze hair?
Très
long.
Comme
les dieux mythologique!
” Not the shooter I had seen, not Kaiser, not the shooter I myself had just described to the court, not by a mile. Silence in the gallery.

Perdhomme's attorney pointed at me: “Is this our man?”

Th
e look on the mâitre d's face—whoa—he'd gotten confused somewhere deep in his traumatized psyche, had plugged
me
into the shooter's role.
Th
e gallery, heavily stocked with Dolus ringers, broke into derisive laughter. Everyone knew the tenuous case against Perdhomme had just been blown. And there I was, not saying half of what I knew, represented and closely advised by the same lawyer Dad had been assigned, the corpulent McBee, who we should have known was on the take, rumpled guy like that driving a vintage XKE, laughing privately with the opposition at every recess. It only occurred to me many years later that someone in Dad's legal inner circle had to have told someone in the killer's circle the name of the restaurant Dad had picked for his freedom meal. Who else but McBee? He'd had no questions for Kate, who took the stand for all of three minutes and ranted about Dabney's death, how it was all connected, how innocent civilians were dying in Vietnam, how Dabney had stood against all that, sad heads shaking all around the room: No more questions, Your Honor. She had to be hushed by the judge as she launched into Nixon, and then Sylphide
.

Kate liked to say she'd had a feeling of foreboding that day as she took her seat on the team bus to Ithaca. But in fact our parents were dead by the time she boarded. Jack heard late, too—I believe Detective Turkle himself called him, relayed the news businesslike. It wasn't till after five that afternoon that Jack got in his Volvo to bring the disaster to Kate in person. She'd played her first match methodically, picking the top Cornell seed apart in two quick sets. Jack found her at the hotel on campus, where there were dorms for visiting teams, found her in the cafeteria. He took her outside by the arm, relayed the news. And in her confusion she slapped him across the face.
Th
at was the story she always told. She slapped Jack with half the team watching out the leaded-glass basement windows of cafeteria in Willard Straight Hall. She got in the car with him to return to Connecticut, but they only made it as far as Binghamton, found a hotel and made love the whole night through, only got back in the car the next noon. And me home cleaning the house, cleaning every little corner, Mrs. Paum washing my clothes, cycle after cycle, trying to get the gore out.

Th
e murder counts against Perdhomme were dismissed. And that effectively ended my role in the proceedings. Officially illusory, Kaiser was never seen or heard from again, though I looked, checking faces wherever I went, right up to the moment he appeared at Firfisle.
Th
e forensic audit of Dolus's tangled books and papers and internal memos—two more months—turned up absurdly unambiguous evidence that three people and three people alone had conspired to steal from the company and from its richest customers, that these three had falsified documents of all kinds, bribed judges, congressmen, federal agents, bursars, treasurers, all while trading on angelic Perdhomme's good name, a fancy embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars (these would be billions today), which they then sought to cover up with murders. No one cared to ask what would make three bad guys keep such detailed records of their crimes, or store their nefarious memos in their top desk drawers at Dolus headquarters, nor why every little memo was scrupulously typed with fresh ribbon on the same brand of bonded paper, nothing whatsoever recorded in plain handwriting.

Dad, needless to say, was one of the bad guys in this narrative, which the media picked up and ran as the final word on the case, though he himself was dead. As were the others, two equally hapless men, freak accidents. Whatever had really gone on at Dolus, top management was so perfectly insulated that the case stopped cold and the company went on functioning, functioned right up to the great financial collapse of 2009, good riddance.

J
ACK AND
K
ATE
were back. A cool breeze seemed to have followed them down from the height of the little island. “Nothing to see,” Kate said. “A very nice rock covered with moss.” Her hair was mussed and her neck mottled. No one ever looked more laid than Jack, his hair and backside spangled with moss, eyes all but crossed. We huddled on the blanket, not much time before the tide would turn. I gathered my words, cleared my throat.

But Jack started in before I could, confident of our interest: he'd been writing, he announced, about the poet William Wordsworth's brother John, a sea captain who'd gone down with his ship, family tragedy.
Th
e subject required Jack to give a recital of several stanzas of sea poems by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, very entertaining except for the lack of an opening for my own hot subject, and then a disquisition: “
Th
e Wordsworths had invested everything in the voyage. It was to be John's great moment. Witnesses onboard said he seized up, didn't order the longboats out, almost as if he had made the choice to die.”

“He uses this in class,” Kate said, uncharacteristically languorous. “Don't worry, he's working his way to some big question or another.”

Jack ignored her, continued: “One of his sailors reported later that he'd seen Captain Wordsworth alive among the other few survivors bobbing in the sea, but captain to the end, he held onto the anchor chain so as to be pulled under. Of course his life would have been worth nothing, losing his ship at that time. All that chivalrous stuff was law of the sea.”

“
Th
e boat's turning,” Kate said.

“We've time,” Jack said. And then, “So just to finish.” And he started back in with John Wordsworth, audibly hastening.

Etienne began to pack up the remains of our cold feast.

But I hadn't said my piece. And so I grabbed the anchor chain of Jack's parable, held tight, plunged into the depths, interrupting him: “If Captain Wordsworth had been responsible, I mean, I'm not saying he was, not in the way of naval law or anything, but let's say he'd been responsible for the deaths of many of his crew and loss of the boat, what would you think should be his fate?”

“Oh, no question they would have executed him,” said Jack, standing, looking out to the mooring, visibly gauging our time. Distracted, he said, “
Th
ere was a posthumous trial, very involved, ended in a hung jury. And he'd lost the family fortune, if not the family name, which was well buoyed by William the famous poet.”

Kate folded the blanket thoughtfully—she knew I was up to something. I stood, said, “But more abstractly. Forgetting Captain John, who is a special case. Let's say some other kind of boat, a more successful kind of boat. We're the family of a crewman who's been commanded to do something everyone knows he just can't manage, and so of course he makes some small error, puts a fatal tear in a sail, something like that, and the captain of the ship, the guy who's really to blame, says to the first mate, Flog him lifeless!—about our family member, I mean—and the first mate just calmly gets out the cat-o-nine-tails and goes to work till the crewman is dead.”

“What are we getting at?” Jack said suddenly. “Just spit it out, David, all right?”

“Captain Perdhomme came into my restaurant.”

“Holy fuck,” Kate said.

“David,” Jack said, quick look to his bride. “Please don't.”

“Just listen,” said Etienne. “It gets better.”

“Worse,” I said. “Kaiser was with him. Not a shadow of a doubt. It was Kaiser, all right. And so that's my question. What should family members do?”

“David,” Jack said.

Kate said, “
Th
ey just came into the restaurant?” And then in order to preempt what she knew Jack was going to say: “
Th
at couldn't be a coincidence.”

Etienne clapped his hands in excitement.

Jack gripped Kate's hand, looked more than displeased, stared out at
Deep Song,
no doubt seeing the family ship sinking in whirlpools of blame, vast reputations to be lost. Reining in his contempt, he said, “What do we suppose they're after, coming into your restaurant? I mean beyond a great meal? And how do you suppose they knew you were there?”

“You're not saying you don't
believe
me,” I said.

“I'll tell you how they knew,” said Kate. And she did her imitation of Sylphide, a devastating twirl of the hands above the head ending with splayed fingers around the face.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Jack said.

B
ACK ON THE
boat we sailed with the wind, spinnaker flying, a smooth, rolling reach directly homeward, the sun falling fast, none of the usual triumphal feeling. It seemed up to Jack to say something, and near Goat Island, he did, quietly, evenly, the rainbow sail bellied out in front of us, wind at our backs, late sun hot in our faces, words he'd said many times: “In the eyes of a court, even in the most sympathetic atmosphere, all we've got to link Perdhomme and the putative Kaiser remains circumstantial. So what if your father's old boss is hanging out with your father's alleged assassin?
Th
at's no crime. Guilt by association, they call it. And it won't hold up in court. And neither will an identification twenty-five years down the road, which takes care of the putative Kaiser.”