The Fixer (26 page)

J
esus, 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.

I
nstead 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.”

“I’m sorry you think I had something to do with what happened to you. I did not. But I can guarantee this sort of thing will never happen again. I will see to it.”

“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.

H
e 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.

Though who “they” were was still a mystery. “They” were whomever Pappas was working for. As long as they weren’t coming after Rick, he didn’t need to know who they were.

No longer did he need to keep moving from hotel to hotel. Then again, he had no home anyway. A hotel was the best he was going to do for a while. Maybe someday he’d get back together with Andrea, this time as two equals who’d each been through some hard times and emerged in the light. Maybe they’d buy a big-boned, rambling house together on Francis Ave in Cambridge.

Maybe not.

The point was, he had money now. No doubt three-million-plus dollars was pocket change to a rich person, to some hedge fund titan, but by Rick’s lights it was a lot. If he shared it with his sister, which seemed only fair, that was still 1.7 million dollars. Maybe not a fortune, but it was enough to buy a future. And it took some of the sting out of that handshake with Pappas.

Anyway, it was all in how you looked at it, right? Maybe Pappas was right and Rick
had
won. The money was his to hold on to now, whosever it originally was, whether it was clean or dirty or clean
and
dirty. The war was over. Lenny was dead, and there was no more reason to fight on.

Rick was feeling better, physically. It still hurt when he moved, or when he coughed, but not as acutely. His bruises were purpling. He did some errands. His replacement credit cards arrived. He went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a replacement driver’s license. He thought briefly about checking out of the DoubleTree and into the Mandarin, or the Four Seasons, in the Back Bay. After all, he had more than three million bucks in storage. Why not live it up?

But that felt wasteful. The DoubleTree was perfectly fine.

He drove over to the storage unit. He was sure he was no longer being followed, but he couldn’t give up the ingrained habit of scoping out the parking garage, looking in the rearview. No one, as far as he could tell, was following him. He unlocked the unit and took a few wads of cash, then he drove over to the old house. He had some debts to pay.

No one grabbed him, no one followed him. No one was there.

He was safe.

*   *   *

He took Marlon and Santiago aside, one by one, and handed each of them a thousand dollars in DoubleTree envelopes. “Thank you,” he said. Was a thousand dollars too little? They’d saved his life after all. He owed them a lot more than that. True, they’d saved his life by accident; they were really intending to grab his money. But no matter how they came to it, they’d saved his life. That was the important thing.

Staring him up and down, Marlon said, “Somebody beat the shit out you. They finally catch up with you?”

“It had to happen eventually,” Rick said.

“Yeah? Tell us who did it.”

Rick shook his head. “It’s over,” he said.

They were hanging drywall. Marlon was measuring eight-by-four-foot sheets of drywall with a T-square, scoring them with a utility knife. Jeff was fastening the large cut squares of Sheetrock to the bare studs using a screw gun.

Rick waited for Jeff to finish screw-gunning a cut of Sheetrock. “You guys are really making progress.”

“We should be wrapped up within the week,” Jeff said. “There’s this and some skim coating and painting and then the floors, and that’s all she wrote.”

“That’s excellent,” Rick said. He had no plans to ever move back in. As soon as it was finished, it would go on the market.

Before it sold, though, he’d have to go through it and remove any personal objects, anything of value. By now there couldn’t be much left. Wendy had come with a moving van some years ago. He’d taken whatever was important to him, mostly some books from childhood and school. But Lenny’s stuff remained. That was the most of it. There was clothing to give away, a couple of file cabinets to go through and mostly discard. He had a lot of old LPs, mostly sixties folk singers like Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Judy Collins. Hipsters collected LPs these days. He could probably unload some boxes at the
Back Bay
office in a matter of minutes. Though he’d probably hold on to the Judy Collins. Then there were his father’s books, from his study, all of which had been moved down to the basement in boxes.

“Hey, Jeff, got a second?” Rick said.

“What’s up?” Jeff said. “You okay?”

“Not as bad as it looks.”

“You know who did it, don’t you?”

Rick nodded. “Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to tell you—forget what I told you about asking questions.”

Jeff looked puzzled.

“About the Big Dig. I asked you to see if you might know someone . . . I’m just saying, don’t.”

“Okay, whatever you say,” Jeff said. “Let me ask you something. How much you have this place insured for?”

Rick shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe three hundred thousand?”

“It’s already worth a lot more. You should boost the insurance to a million five.”

“That much, huh? Wow.”

“Do it right away, man.”

“Okay, Jeff, thanks—I will.”

He went downstairs to do a quick survey of possessions. On the way he passed through the kitchen. All the old pots and pans were still hanging on their hooks on the pegboard, coated with plaster dust like snow. He ran a finger over the cast-iron skillet. The plaster dust was stuck to the oil residue. That was the pan Lenny used to make salami and eggs for Rick’s breakfast, several times a week, after Mom had died. Rick didn’t particularly like salami and eggs, but he’d once made the mistake of praising it and Lenny kept making it for him.

The basement was filled with crap, with old toys Rick had once begged Lenny to buy for him, he just
had
to have. Things that were once of paramount importance, used once or twice, then discarded. Castaways of abandoned passions. Snowshoes. A mountain bike. The electric guitar, the drum set, the oil paints, the chemistry set. Rick didn’t remember whether he ever thanked him.

He found the boxes labeled
STUDY
. Most of them contained law books. He had no idea whether they were dross or might have value. In one of the boxes he found a familiar-looking book:
Walden and Other Writings
by Henry David Thoreau, with a very sixties dust jacket, a curvy, groovy Peter Max–like font. Rick had often seen that book on his father’s desk, open to one of Thoreau’s little essays. Sometimes Lenny would read from it at night. He had loved Thoreau. He liked to quote one of Thoreau’s maxims: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Rick wondered whether his father had lived a life of quiet desperation. Probably so. At least he heard the beat of a different drummer, that was for sure.

Rick had once said something snotty, some kind of hurtful thing to Lenny, he didn’t remember what he’d said, and he waited to see how his father would respond. Instead, Lenny seemed to will himself into silence. There was the intake of breath, then the pursed lips. The small shake of the head. Dad disliked conflict.

The weight of things unsaid: At first, it was light, like a dusting of snowflakes. In time, it grew heavy, like six feet of hard pack.

That Thoreau book Rick would hold on to, even though he never shared his father’s enthusiasm for Thoreau. It was important to Lenny, so it was important to Rick.

He noticed his father’s old computer and removed its cover. This he’d have to throw away. He plugged it in and started it up. It crunched and grunted and eventually the green letters appeared on the screen. He took one of the 5 1/4-inch floppies from a box and inserted it into the disk drive and waited for the directory to load up.

CORRESPO
NDENCE/BUSINESS
one folder was labeled.

CORR
ESPONDENCE/PERSONAL
was another.

He opened Correspondence/Personal. He felt strange doing this. He was rifling through his father’s private letters. Did his death make that okay? Did you lose the right to privacy when you died?

Maybe. But still it felt like a violation. There were all sorts of letters to friends, from the days when people still wrote letters instead of dashing off e-mails. Most of the names he didn’t know, or knew only vaguely.

Then his eye was drawn to one file name: Warren_Hinckley_letter .doc.

Warren Hinckley was the headmaster of the Linwood Academy. Why in the world had his father written to Headmaster Hinckley? Rick couldn’t resist opening the file.

A document came up, green letters against the gray-black monitor.

Dear Mr. Hinckley:

I was dismayed to learn from our telephone conversation today that you are considering expelling my son from the Linwood Academy.

Rick stared in disbelief. He was almost expelled? That he’d never heard before. His father must have fought this battle without telling him. Heart pounding, he kept reading:

I am enormously proud of my son. What he did in publishing that article about Dr. Kirby’s plagiarism took genuine courage. He didn’t “play by the rules,” as most people would have done. That much is true. Yes, he is required to submit each issue of the school newspaper to your office for pro forma approval. By not doing so—by publishing an article that exposed an egregious instance of plagiarism by a member of your faculty without running it by you first—he knowingly broke a minor school regulation and thereby put his future at risk. Publishing this article would get him in trouble and he knew it. But instead of being expelled, he should be commended for his adroit scholarship and his bravery.

Violating school protocol pales in importance next to the plagiarism carried out by an esteemed member of your faculty—who also happens to be your friend. In a school whose mission is to teach its students the right way to live, plagiarism is by far the graver offense.

My son broke the rules to achieve a greater good. He demonstrated a courage most people lack. He is a braver man than either of us. If the Linwood Academy expels my son, you can expect a lawsuit and all the attendant publicity that will not put the school in a flattering light.

Please do not teach your students to play by the rules when there are important principles at stake.

Sincerely,

Leonard J. Hoffman

Attorney at Law

Rick read the letter three times through, astonished. His father had gone to battle for him. Rick could feel a wetness on his face, and he tried to blink away the tears. How he’d misunderstood his father!

And as he thought about the father he never really knew, something inside him gave way, and finally he wept.

He wept for the man he’d lost. For the man he was only now beginning to know.

*   *   *

Rick went over to the Charles Hotel and retrieved his BMW from the parking garage. On his way back to the house something came over him and he deliberately made a wrong turn and soon he was on Mass Ave heading south through Boston. He drove aimlessly. He just wanted to drive. He found himself drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, to Geometry Partners, in Dorchester. The subconscious mind has aims of its own.

He was in front of the old brick warehouse that housed the Geometry Partners offices. A young Latino-looking teenage girl was coming down the front stairs of the main entrance.

The girl had pigtails and was talking excitedly to a boy around her age, which was probably fourteen. She grinned and he could see her big gap-toothed smile, and for an instant he thought she was Graciela Cabrera, the pianist in that old videotape.

The dead girl.

She looked just like Graciela.

Graciela, who had been killed along with her parents in that terrible accident in the Ted Williams Tunnel eighteen years ago. Graciela, whose death was the fault of sloppy construction and was covered up. Graciela, whose tragic, altogether unnecessary death had haunted Lenny Hoffman and caused him finally to rebel, to refuse to make a payoff. Lenny had refused to sell out. He couldn’t do it.

Unlike Rick.

Of course, this young girl wasn’t Graciela. Graciela would have now been thirty-two. A woman. Maybe a mother herself.

He felt his stomach turn to ice.

He wanted to keep all that money and just live his life.
I just want to live my life,
he thought, that glorious cliché.

But part of him was a mule-headed goddamn fool.

Stand down:
That was the smart move.
Live your life. Move on.
He knew what the smart move was.

Suddenly, though, Rick wasn’t feeling very smart.