Lee Vance: The Garden of Betrayal

More than an hour had passed, and the man in the camel-hair coat fidgeted restlessly behind the wheel of the BMW. The weather worked in their favor, limiting the number of pedestrians who might get a good look at him, but it was well past time for them to be gone. He yearned for a cigarette. Whoever owned the car was a smoker, and the smell was driving him to distraction. He’d had to quit after Desert Storm, when weeks spent in the burning oil fields had permanently damaged his lungs. But nothing eased a long wait like a smoke. A hundred yards north, his companions were equally impatient. Only two people had come out of the apartment building on the opposite corner: an older Hispanic woman with a scarf tied over her hair and a black man with a German shepherd on a leash. The man with the burn looked at his watch again. She hadn’t ever been this late before. He’d checked her performance schedule-curtain-up was in less than half an hour. He wondered if she might have left early because of the weather. “Ten more minutes,” he said. The second man stamped his feet against the cold and swore. Bad beginnings made bad endings, and the woman was only the first of two jobs they had that evening.

“No,” Kate and Kyle screamed together, heaving couch pillows at the TV while Claire laughed. They’d finished dinner and snuggled up on the couch to watch Titanic, but the opening credits had barely finished rolling when the picture changed to a Latin man in a white tuxedo, lip-syncing a song in Spanish as he danced on top of a taxicab in Times Square. Much as they’d begged Yolanda not to change the channel on the cable box when the VCR was recording, she frequently forgot. “I’ll run to the store and rent it,” Claire said, setting aside the blanket on her lap. Kyle glanced outside. The wind was blowing harder, raising long plumes of spindrift from the snow-laden window ledges. “Let me,” he said, getting to his feet. Claire looked over her shoulder to check the time on the kitchen clock. Kyle had started moving around the neighborhood by himself only in the last year. “I could use the fresh air,” she said. “Liar,” he teased. “You hate the cold. And you said it yourself-I’m not a baby anymore.” Claire bit her lip and nodded. “Take your phone.” “I’ll be right back.”

An iron-and-glass door swung open on Riverside Drive, and Kyle emerged from his apartment building. He was wearing a green knit school hat that rode high on his head and a Gore-Tex parka that belonged to his father. The sleeves were bunched behind the elastic cuffs and the shoulders drooped, but he liked wearing it. Digging his hands into the pockets, he touched a folded piece of paper and removed it. A list was jotted in his father’s hand: Rashid, Azikiwo, Statoil, Petronuevo. Some of the words he recognized, and some he didn’t. Rashid was an old friend of his dad’s who worked for OPEC, and Statoil was the Norwegian state oil company. Azikiwo and Petronuevo were unfamiliar to him. He mouthed the words, liking the sounds. Everything about his dad’s job was cool. He wanted to be just like his father when he grew up. He put the paper back into the pocket, stepped out from beneath the building’s awning, and headed south. Two men were standing on the corner of Eighty-seventh Street. The streetlight overhead illuminated the side of his face as he hustled past, head down against the wind. One of the men turned, staring at Kyle as he walked away. “That’s the boy,” the man with the burn said. “What boy?” the second man asked. “The son, you fucking idiot. I thought you memorized the picture.” “Her,” the man protested. “Not the kid. You never said anything about a kid.” “But she didn’t show. Now we have to improvise.”

The man with the burn took the walkie-talkie from his pocket, whispered into it urgently, and hurried after Kyle. His companion hesitated a moment and then followed. He was in too deep to object. The driver of the BMW lowered his passenger window as Kyle approached. Woman or kid, he didn’t see any difference. “Excuse me,” he called politely. Kyle took a step toward the car and bent forward uncertainly. “Yes?” The man with the burn closed in from behind and tapped Kyle behind the ear with a sap. The second man caught him as he sagged, his green hat falling to the ground. When the BMW drove away a moment later, the boy was wedged between the two men in the rear. The wind caught the hat and sent it tumbling down the mouth of a storm drain. It reached the river an hour later, where the tide was running toward the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Come daybreak, the hat was miles offshore, never to be seen again.

I woke early and listened to Claire breathe. She had her back to me, but she didn’t sound like she was sleeping, so I rolled onto my side and used one hand to gently massage her neck and shoulders. Some mornings she ignored me, some mornings we made love, and some mornings she wept. After a few minutes of no response, I got up and got ready for work.

The kitchen was dark and cold. I flipped on the under-counter lights, opened the valve on the softly clanking radiator, and then set out the usual weekday breakfast for Claire and Kate-fruit, cereal, and yogurt. On Fridays I add a chocolate croissant, cutting it in half for the two of them to share.

Frank, the night doorman, had a taxi waiting by the time I got downstairs. He said good morning and solemnly handed me a few pieces of mail addressed to my son. It was a shock when I first received mail for Kyle about a year after he disappeared-a solicitation from some preteen magazine. I spent the day thinking about it and then knocked on the door of the building super, Mr. Dimitrios. Tears in his eyes, he admitted that he’d been intercepting junk mail addressed to Kyle for the past twelve months and turned over a shoe box full. I made myself go through it-Reggie Kinnard, the detective working with us, had mentioned that the psychopaths who kidnap children will occasionally amuse themselves by sending mail to the victim’s family. There wasn’t anything unusual in the box. A friendly representative of the Direct Marketing Association, who I spoke to on the phone, suggested I simply scrawl the word “deceased” on everything and return it to the post office. Instead, I had Mr. Dimitrios continue intercepting it, so Claire and Kate wouldn’t see it, and arranged for Frank to pass it along. These days, it’s all solicitations for acne products and CD clubs and summer-job programs and magazines like Maxim and Outside. The kind of stuff any nineteen-year-old might receive. The kind of stuff Kyle might actually be interested in, if he’s still alive somewhere.

I stopped to pick up the papers at an all-night newsstand on Seventy-second Street and then went to work. There’s always someone at the office when I arrive, no matter the time-the hedge fund I rent space from trades twenty-four hours a day. There are only about sixty employees, but they occupy an entire floor of a Midtown office building, the northern half of which is a single large unpartitioned trading room. One corner of the room is taken up by the fund’s namesake, a midnight blue 1966 Ford Shelby AC Cobra that sits on a low dais, halogen spotlights reflecting off its mirrorlike finish. The car had proved too large for the elevators, so Walter Coleman, the fund’s founder, had arranged to have it hoisted by a crane after workers cut a garage door-sized opening into the side of the building.

When Walter’s son, Alex, first suggested setting me up as an independent energy analyst a year and a half after Kyle vanished, I was hesitant. I needed the money, but I didn’t know if I was capable of committing to a job the way I had before, or if I could be successful as a freelance pundit even if I did. My entire career had been on the sell side, peddling research on oil companies to clients of the investment bank I worked for. Eighteen months out of the market, and lacking the institutional connections that had made people want to talk to me, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to deliver anything of value. Save one or two old friends, I was right to think that my former sources would abandon me but wrong to worry that it would matter. Cobra was the granddaddy of the hedge-fund community, progenitor of multiple generations of firms that gossiped and fought and generally behaved like an extended family. Alex and his father made a few calls on my behalf, and suddenly I had a dozen clients, all funds that Wall Street was clamoring to do business with. Pretty soon there wasn’t a sell-side guy on the Street who wouldn’t drop everything for me, anxious for a favorable mention to my clientele. And as I grew more influential, my old sources started reaching out to me again. Business prospered. Even the recent market crash had been a blessing in disguise, the clients who went under replaced by newly de-levered and deeply chastened survivors desperate for genuine ideas and analysis to supplant their soured credit strategies.