The Darlings (39 page)

Merrill woke in the middle of the night, heart racing. Her breath caught in her throat, jolting her eyes open. She turned onto her side: Paul was there. His lips were slightly parted and his hand, now limp, rested on the pillow just above her head.

He looked so peaceful when he slept. Just the sight of him there calmed her. After a time, his eyes flickered open and he smiled. “Those were some dreams you were having,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” she murmured.

He pulled her close to him. “Come here,” he said gently.

She settled in against his chest. For a while, she lay awake, feeling the warm rhythm of his breath against her neck. Eventually, a trace of new light began to creep in across the windowsills. It was tomorrow. In an hour or two, the phone would begin to ring, and her e-mail in-box would fill up, and there would be reporters gathering outside her building. Neighbors would whisper in the elevator; strangers would stare; friends would ask her nervous questions when she came upon them on the street. The world would be clamoring for her. It would seep into her home through every crack, every phone line, every television screen . . . and eventually, she would have to go out and face them. But for now, she would lie in her husband's arms, her eyes closed and her body still against his, thinking that if this was all she ever had, it would be enough.

EPILOGUE

A
t first, he stayed away from
Litoral Norte
. The north coast of the broader state of São Paulo was what had drawn him to Brazil twenty years ago. His memories of those hazy, sun-filled afternoons were still fresh; Sophie had taken him there. She had friends with a beach house in Barra do Una, a simple white structure with high ceilings and a large wooden deck that overlooked the sea. He liked to remember her the way she was then: napping on a chaise longue, a book open in her hand, its pages fluttering in the late afternoon air. The straps of her bikini unfastened, revealing her toasted-almond shoulders to the sun. Her hair was streaked gold, and it was long. She would stir from her nap and see him watching her; she would smile. They were happy.

Though the living would be easier for him on the coast—all fresh fish and emerald-green water—he felt more comfortable in São Paulo itself. The city was perfect: huge, gritty, too crime ridden for most tourists. Living in a dangerous city, he found, suited him. In São Paulo, everyone kept to himself, living behind guarded apartment walls, driving cars with tinted windows, departing from rooftop helipads. Even the elite wore nondescript clothing and cheap watches in public, so as not to attract the attention of thieves. Privacy was at a premium. There were no nosy small-town neighbors in São Paulo, no casual pedestrian traffic. It was a city where people slipped in and out of the shadows unnoticed.

São Paulo did, however, attract business travelers, and those were a very real threat. Business travelers read the
Wall Street Journal
. They watched CNBC. They were the ones most likely to recognize him. In the first six months, anyone could have recognized him; his picture was everywhere. He looked different, of course. Leaner nose, higher cheekbones, the distinctive jowls stripped away from his jawbone. Still, he felt a jolt through his body every time he saw himself on television or on the front page of a newspaper. More than once, it would send him into hibernation, holing up in the modest apartment he had rented for himself under the name of Pierre Lefèvre.

Some days, he would monitor his laptop for hours at a time, scouring the Internet for news about himself. He created an intricate ranking system (a front-page story that featured him and showed a photo was a 10, for example, while a small blurb about Ines Darling in a gossip rag rated only a 1 or a 2) in an attempt to gauge whether the media coverage surrounding him and the trial was rising or falling. The higher the score, the more time he would spend inside. It reminded him of New York after 9/11. Every day, the threat level had to be gauged and measured, and his behavior adjusted accordingly. If it got too high, it was time to move again, to a different apartment or to a hotel just outside town.

It was a fugitive's life: highly mobile, survival based. The point of each day was to make it to the next. But two and a half years went by without any real scares. The Darling trial was settled out of court. The news about the whole RCM debacle faded, replaced by other schemes and scandals. Morty Reis slipped out of daily consciousness, even for Morty Reis. He began to grow restless.

He started missing the deals.

He had money, lots of it, but it was stashed away in the Caymans and Switzerland. Accessing it in anything other than small bites posed an obvious security risk. Still, he couldn't help but to think about how to deploy it. The opportunities in Brazil were phenomenal. An investment in the Brazilian stock market over the last decade would have yielded him a return of 276 percent, versus a loss of 13 percent in the United States during the same period. If he had gone all in with this strategy ten years ago, not only could he have avoided the whole debacle with RCM entirely, but he would have been hailed the greatest investor of all time. He knew this was an illogical train of thought—after all, no one would invest in a fund that had a 100 percent investment in Brazil of all places—but it still dogged him. He couldn't continue to sit idly by while the Brazilian economy flew past him like a freight train.

Morty began to troll the slums, thinking, evaluating, running the numbers. He was tempting fate, he knew, like an alcoholic in a bar. But he had nothing else to do, and what difference would a few small real estate deals make anyway? All local, all in cash. If the numbers were small enough, the deals could go unrecorded. There were deals to be had in the coastal towns, too; as the economy stabilized, small beach properties were increasingly in demand.

He needed a break from the city, where booming real estate possibilities called to him like a siren's song. He decided to rent a house in Juquehy, the slightly less ritzy town just next to Barra do Una, where he would lie low and decide how to proceed. He would get a tan, at least, and keep himself away from the bigger, riskier, more tempting deals in São Paulo.

It was the end of May, the beginning of the off-season. The tourists were gone and the crowds on the beaches had begun to thin. He had been in Juquehy for three weeks or so. It was early morning, and it had rained the night before, a moist slickness coating the roads. The mountains loomed up behind his house, dark and beautiful and foreboding. The roads through them were terrifying, filled with hairpin turns that made him long for one of his race cars, preferably the Aston Martin.

He went for a stroll, his pant legs rolled so he could feel the ocean on his feet. As was often the case at the beginning or end of the day, his thoughts were of Sophie. In the distance he saw a couple walking, their hands linked. The woman's hair gleamed in the morning light. The rising sun set her figure in relief, obscuring the details of her face.

The couple stopped at the end of the beach. The man put his fingers beneath her chin and drew her in for a kiss. She stood on her toes to reach his lips.

Then the man twirled her beneath his arm like a ballroom dancer and dipped her. The edges of her hair brushed the sand.

That's when he saw her face.

She looked younger than he remembered. The morning was so bright that Morty winced and shaded his eyes with his hand; perhaps it was a trick of the light.

No. It was her. He was sure of it. Sweet Merrill Darling.

When her husband drew her back up, she stared directly at Morty. For a moment, time stood still and she froze with it, like a deer in a hunter's sight. He knew he should turn away. But for the first time since he had reached Brazil, maybe for the first time in his life, he found himself unable to act on instinct.

Then the sun slipped behind a cloud, casting a shadow on the beach. The spell was broken. The woman looked up at her husband, lifting her face to him for another kiss. She looked different now, shorter or blonder or squarer than Morty remembered Merrill to be. He shook his head; it had lasted only a second.

Not her
, he thought.
Don't be crazy
. But his heart, pounding so hard that he could feel its pulse against his shirt, told him otherwise.

He watched them for a moment longer and then turned back to the house. His lungs pumped again; his blood flowed. His feet carried him quietly off the hard-packed sand at the water's edge to the softer sand, then up the wooden steps and into his house. Above his head, the fan's blades rotated with the same insistent whir as his heart. By afternoon he had departed, a short note of explanation left on the kitchen counter for the housekeeper: He would be gone for a while and would return, he wasn't sure when.