The Last of the Savages (35 page)

“Hey, man,” he asked. “Is it true that he’s the father of Aretha’s kids?”

“Tom,” I said. “I heard he’s the father of your kids.”

I kept meaning to call, but with each passing month it became harder, particularly after I heard, through Lollie, that Taleesha had suffered a
second miscarriage. I imagined Will hiding out, licking his wounds. Sometimes I would think of him as a bearded guerrilla chieftain—resting in the hills between battles, planning his next campaign. When, a year after Taleesha’s note, I finally dialed, a functionary said that Will was in London on business and that Taleesha was away on holiday. I had my secretary make a note on the calendar to phone three weeks later, when they were scheduled to return, but I was called out of town the day before.

The days disappear like newspapers, seasons like the leaves and snow. I was working harder than ever, devoting what was left of my time and concern to my new family. In the middle years, time can seem to stand still even as it relentlessly carries us away. And then one day the secret clock of our life tolls, and time starts up again.

Early one morning Savage
père
called me at my office. “How’s the great white hunter,” he asked, with what sounded like forced jauntiness. “I don’t guess I’ll ever forget the surprise on your face when your first duck fell out of the sky.”

“I was even more surprised than he was,” I said. “How’s Cheryl,” I asked, inadvertently touching his sore spot.

“Well, it’s funny you should ask, Patrick.” There was a long, transatlantic pause. “Is there any chance this line is secure?” he whispered. Once I would have considered this an absurd question, but since our firm had begun to get involved in mergers and acquisitions, some of them hostile, we had our lines swept regularly for bugs. “Can you be on the Concord this morning,” he asked. “Of course I’ll pay your retainer and expenses.”

It was out of the question; I had meetings and clients … but six hours later I was sitting in the library of the house in Eaton Square. Looking at Cordell, I calculated the time that had passed since I had seen him, so much had he seemed to age. His temples had gone gray and his neck was shrunken and wattled. I’d never thought of him as having a particular age, but I realized then that he was well over sixty.

The butler brought me tea. Cordell was drinking scotch, and looked
as if he’d been at it for days. “Please close the doors on your way out,” he ordered. After the butler had sealed us in, he sighed and leaned back in his chair. “All my life I’ve tried to control my environment and the people around me. I don’t believe that we were put on this earth to emulate the anarchy of nature, but to tame it. Will and his friends were always talking about liberation. But you and I—we know that control is what matters.”

This wild conjunction of the personal and the metaphysical reminded me of no one so much as Will. Rather than point this out, however, I waited for Cordell to cut to the chase.

“A week ago,” he began, “I sent Cheryl off to Saint-Tropez in the company of her hairdresser, who’s her best friend and more or less a paid companion. Paid by me,” he added. “In fact, I paid her to keep an eye on Cheryl, if you know what I mean. Cheryl wasn’t very good at making friends here. You know the English, not exactly the warmest race on the planet. And Cheryl, with her background, was always self-conscious. If there has been a blot on our happiness … well, anyway, I hired a friend for her.” He seemed to be pleading for a generous interpretation of this domestic espionage. “When I saw that she responded to Dora, the hairdresser, I put her on the payroll. To keep Cheryl company, and to keep me abreast. You’re shocked, I can see—”

I shook my head in defense of my own worldliness, and my broad allowances for Savage behavior.

“An older man married to a younger woman, his own eyes aren’t what they used to be—so he pays someone else to watch. And you trust her to protect your interests, goddamnit. Foolish of me. It’s the inherent dilemma of espionage—the suspicious mind needs to trust its spies. I suppose Will told you I was OSS during the war? No? At any rate, someone turned my agent, my Cockney hairdresser. Obviously someone else was paying her more than I was. Not knowing this, I sent them off to Saint-Tropez together. I was planning to join them once I’d attended to some business here in London.”

Usually, he told me, one or the other phoned in every day from the hotel. Cordell wasn’t alarmed when a day went by, but after two days without word he called and discovered they’d checked out. The next day he received an anonymous call and then, twenty-four hours later, a
package of photographs and an audiocassette graphically documenting Cheryl’s dalliance with a sailing instructor.

“Whatever you may think of my May-December marriage,” he said, once he’d collected himself, “I love my wife and I am deeply wounded by this. I know Will and his mother have demonized me. They think I ran away with Cheryl out of some monstrous perversity, as if I’d always dreamed of stealing off with my dead son’s girlfriend. But I fell in love with Cheryl in spite of that fact, not because of it.” He looked stricken, as if he had suddenly allowed himself to imagine that this wasn’t true, that in fact there might have been some monstrous and perverse aspect to his attraction. “God forgive me if that’s not the truth.”

He drained his scotch in a single gulp. I could see his inward gaze swivel outward, as if he had turned away from whatever black truth he may have seen in his soul and was searching for others to blame for his present unhappiness. “If they imagine it was easy or pleasant to give up everything of value in my life and begin again, well, they are gravely mistaken. I wasn’t happy about ripping apart what was left of my family. But I’d lost … lost two sons. I suffered, too.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said, more out of polite reflex than conviction. Though there was a chance he was completely sincere, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d noticed his suffering before Cheryl bailed out.

He saw this in my face and it seemed to steel him. “Leaving my feelings aside, there is the question of what has to be done. That’s why you’re here,” he said, in a tone that reasserted command and reminded me that I was, after all, an employee. “I don’t know how familiar you are with Fleet Street tabloids, Patrick, but they’re shameless sons of bitches. And these blackmailing scum have threatened to distribute the pictures to the press. Along with some speculation about my business dealings—which is their real interest. I don’t flatter myself that my private affairs are of burning interest to the public, but in conjunction with the names of some of my associates I’m afraid it would be a great three-day sensation and it would ruin me and many others. The repercussions would be … let’s just say,
extensive.
”

“Who are they,” I asked, “these blackmailers?” I was trying not to sound skeptical. “What is it they want?”

“
Who
is the sixty-thousand-dollar question. What they want is for
me to refrain from a certain transaction. They’re also demanding hush money of a million cash. But the deal is worth much more than that and it’s part of a very complicated web of transactions. Not to be too cryptic about it, I’m supplying merchandise to one party in a dispute. The other party doesn’t want me to.” He paused. “Do you know how to reach Will?”

“What does Will have to do with this,” I asked nervously.

“I have reason to believe that Will’s in touch with the other side, the other party as it were. Or if he isn’t, he could be. I need to know if the blackmail’s coming from his friends. If it is, I’ll have to do what they want, or possibly he can help me negotiate. If it’s not coming from that quarter, then I’ll know who else has a stake in this and I’ll know what to do about it.”

All this international intrigue, these sinister forces, sounded ludicrous to me. What seemed more likely was that Will might actually be behind this whole scheme—the opportunity to thwart one of his father’s arms deals, if that’s what we were talking about, being a perceived bonus on top of the destruction of his marriage. Certainly Will was resourceful enough to pull it off, and he’d threatened something like this many times over the years.

“I’d have to know more about what I would be getting involved in, Cordell.” This was probably the first time I’d addressed him by that name. “Surely you understand that.”

He considered this. “Right now all I’m asking for is that you help me find Will.”

“As a friend of the family—that I could do.”

“Thank you, Patrick.” He stood up and grasped my hand. Then he lifted a book out of the shelf; a panel of the library wall opened out to reveal a hidden staircase that led down to an elaborately equipped basement office. Within an hour I had tracked Will to a recording studio in Miami. I had to insist that it was a family emergency.

“Who’s dead?” Will said, when he finally came to the phone.

He listened while I brush-stroked the story, which sounded even more implausible in my telling. “Does this make any sense to you,” I asked.

“Let’s say I’m familiar with the terrain.”

“Can you do anything to help?”

“Tell him to call me,” he said. “I want to hear it from His Royal Selfness.”

I delivered this message, lightly edited, to Cordell, who was waiting upstairs in the library.

Ten minutes later he returned, handing me an envelope. “I’m deeply grateful to you, Patrick,” he said, his demeanor that of a man who had received the last rites of his church and was ready to accept his fate.

“You talked to him?”

He nodded. “He’s coming in tomorrow morning.”

He walked me to the hallway. I felt for some reason that I might never see him again, and the thought emboldened me even as it made me sad. “May I ask you a question?”

He shrugged. “I’m in your debt.”

“I heard a rumor—” I began.

“That I killed my father.”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“And you want me to tell you whether it’s true? Well, I’ll tell you if you want. But why should you believe me?”

“At this moment, I think I would.”

“My father lost his money and his self-esteem with it, and he turned into a drunk. He used to beat my mother, and one day he came after me. And that was the day she picked up the shotgun. She didn’t mean to kill him, I don’t think. I think she was as surprised as he was when it went off. But I’ll tell you what …”

He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye. “If she hadn’t, I would have. Does that answer your question?”

I held his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“Ah, you see?” He smiled, evidently delighted with my inability to fully trust him—as if it confirmed his view of human nature. Or perhaps he was merely pleased to preserve the mystery.

We shook hands and said goodbye. His chauffeur took me to Claridge’s and I left early the next morning. The envelope contained a signed blank check.

I had several years to wonder about the outcome of this father and-son reunion. In the meantime, when I spoke to Will, it was all business. Just when I thought he was down for the count, his business manager approached me about selling his second label, which turned out to be far more valuable than we imagined. Eventually it fetched over forty million, almost half of which Will immediately poured into a free clinic and hospital in the Mississippi Delta. Millions more went to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees as well as less worthy causes—friends and hangers-on. He seemed to be trying to get rid of the money as fast as possible, and his accountant asked me to impress on him the wisdom of preserving his capital. But when I reached him at his office in Los Angeles, Will said of the money—“It’s not mine, Patrick.”

“Of course it’s yours.”

“I’m just a temporary custodian. My job is to distribute it. Don’t worry—it all comes back to you in the end. Bread upon the waters, Patrick.”

“I can’t believe you’re giving me this hippie shit after I busted my capitalist ass to make you rich again.”

The conversation deteriorated from there. Somehow, after all these years of cherishing our differences, we seemed at that point in time to have hardened against each other. What, after all, did we have in common anymore, if ever?

My other life resumed, and another year went by. Until one day in August, when my family was in Nantucket, Taleesha called to say she was in town. I canceled a meeting so we could have lunch. It was an eerie day in the city: a hurricane was coming up the coast; the streets were unusually clear and windows all around town were crisscrossed with masking tape, in anticipation of flying glass. She took me to the Russian Tea Room, where she was greeted as a favorite. Other diners glanced up, trying to place her; this towering black woman so regal and elegant that she
had
to be a star of some kind.

When we’d settled in our booth, she admitted that she had come to town on and off, but that after the events of my wedding, she was reluctant
to call. “I just thought—we thought—maybe you needed to get on with your new life.”

“Maybe you were right. I haven’t been very good about keeping up either.”

She shook her head, absolving me. “Will called a few months ago and got your wife. She didn’t sound too happy.” Taleesha saw that this was news to me. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”