Lee Vance - The Garden of Betrayal

“Kyle’s old baseball coach,” I said, placing the man’s face. “Jon something. He owned a shoe store on Broadway.” I made eye contact and waved him over. “The younger guy must be his son.”

Father and son came to an awkward halt at the edge of conversational range.

“Jon Rosenthal,” the older man stammered. “This is my boy, Steve. You might not remember us. Steve and Kyle played ball together.”

“In the West Side League,” Claire responded gently. “You coached. Of course we remember.”

“I wasn’t sure it was right for us to come. It’s been a long time.”

“We’re grateful,” Claire assured him. “It means a lot to us.”

“I just wanted to let you know how terrible I felt for you all these years. It was something I could never stop thinking about. I’m so unbelievably sorry about what happened, but I’m glad you finally found him. Kyle was a really good kid. Everybody on the team always really liked him…”

He broke down mid-sentence and began sobbing. His son threw an arm around him and hugged him fiercely. It was an experience I’d had before, bumping into Kyle’s old friends and their parents in our neighborhood. The encounters had all been charged with bitterness for me. No matter how sincere the grief expressed, I knew the innermost emotion of any parent in my presence had to be joy that their own child was well and with them. Today was different somehow. I looked at Steve. He’d grown tall, with his father’s shoulders and an athletic build.

“You still play ball?” I asked quietly.

“At Maryland,” he mumbled, his gaze fixed on the ground between us.

“That’s Division One, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

I took a step toward him and reached out to touch his arm.

“Thanks for being here today. And good luck to you-to both of you. You take care of your father now, okay?”

He looked up and nodded. I watched as they walked away together, glad they’d come. They disappeared behind a stand of pines shielding the parking area, and my eyes drifted south, toward the sound. A flock of wild turkeys was grazing along the tree line below, and the sun was glinting off the distant water. There was only one thing left that I had to do for my son-one thing that Claire and Kate and I were determined to do together.

“You ready?” I asked.

They both nodded. We turned as one and headed toward the parking lot.

“October eleventh,” Claire said, reading from one of my old appointment books. “You had breakfast with a guy named Jens Solheim.”

I hunted through the S boxes stacked on one of the trestle tables lining the perimeter of the large workroom, looking for Solheim’s file. We’d stopped by the hotel after the funeral to change clothes and then continued on to the Queens warehouse where Amy stored my old records. The top floor of the former factory was partitioned into lofts that were usually rented out to law firms dredging through discovery material. High-speed wireless Internet, a Nespresso machine, a Bloomberg terminal, and an Xbox 360 hooked up to a fifty-inch plasma display were all part of the standard package. Being there reminded me of the long hours I’d spent proofreading prospectuses at the printers when I was a young investment banking associate. Like the warehouse, the printers kept hotel-quality facilities on the premises as a competitive lure. Video games got old fast in the small hours, and the tedium had made me agitate for a switch to research. I found the file I was looking for and flipped it open.

“Solheim was CEO of a Norwegian company named Axion. He wanted my European guys to initiate coverage. Said Axion was planning to acquire a bunch of refinery assets with financing from a syndicate of Scandi banks. I forwarded a summary of the conversation and his request to our downstream guy in London. No follow-up indicated.”

“Axion,” Kate said, tapping away at her laptop’s keyboard as Claire watched over her shoulder. They were both seated at a round conference table in the middle of the room. “Was trading at twenty-five on the Oslo exchange when you had breakfast with Solheim. Got as high as thirty-six the following year, and then faded back down to the low twenties.”

“Market cap?”

“Around four hundred million krone.”

Roughly fifty million dollars at the former exchange rate, making them a bit player in the industry.

“Mergers or acquisitions?”

“Bought a condensate splitter in Rotterdam in 2002 and were acquired by Norsk Hydro in 2006 for thirty-three krone per share.” She looked up with a curious expression. “What’s a condensate splitter?”

“Low-tech distillation tower. Heats up superlight oil recovered from natural-gas fields and separates out naphtha and kerosene. The naphtha gets used as a feedstock for plastic, and the kerosene becomes jet fuel. What about Solheim?”

She pecked away for another minute.

“On the advisory board of the Norwegian School of Economics and a director of the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo. Daughter got married a couple of years ago. Nothing else that jumps out.”

I glanced at Claire, who nodded in confirmation. I vaguely remembered Solheim. Scandinavian businessmen tend to come in two flavors-intellectual Euro prissy and bluff Viking conqueror. The former are easier to sell to international capital markets, but the latter are more likely to hit the ball out of the park-or to pitch the herring in the barrel, or whatever the equivalent Scandi saying is. Solheim had been the prissy type.

“Mark down Axion and Solheim as unlikelies,” I said. “What next?”

“Umaru Kutigi,” Claire read, struggling with the pronunciation. “A call at nine-fifteen.”

“Hard g,” I said, heading toward the K table. “Kutigi’s a Nigerian. Used to work for one of the industry rags.”

The disposable cell phone I’d bought rang as I was pulling his folder. I checked the display and saw my office number. I’d asked Amy to pass along messages before she went home.

“Give me a couple of seconds here.” I tucked the file under my arm and put the phone to my ear. “Amy?”

“Hi. Everything okay?”

Amy sounded forlorn. She’d been keen to help out at the warehouse, but I’d insisted she not get involved in anything that might make her a target.

“Fine, thanks. And you?”

“Busy. You got a lot of calls today. Everyone wants to know how you are, and why Walter’s angry at you, and what really happened with Rashid. There are a lot of crazy rumors flying around.”

I didn’t give a damn about rumors.

“What else?”

“Narimanov phoned. He’d like you to get back to him whenever you feel up to it. And Susan stopped by.”

“Let me guess,” I said, interpreting Amy’s tone. “Walter’s not feeling any friendlier toward me.”

“No. Walter wants you to know that you’re not welcome at Alex’s funeral on Wednesday, or at the chapel beforehand. I’m sorry.”

I sighed. Not just because I wanted to say good-bye to Alex-I’d hoped hearing the news about Kyle might soften Walter toward me. I was anxious to know whether he’d discovered anything about Senator Simpson’s link to the Saudi data, and-by extension-to Theresa Roxas.

“Susan tell you anything else?” I ventured.

“Like what?”

“Like what Walter’s been up to the last couple of days.”

Amy didn’t respond. The good and bad news about her as an assistant was that she almost never gossiped. Good, because I could count on her to be discreet, and bad, because she rarely passed along tidbits from the secretarial grapevine.

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“He was in Washington over the weekend,” she confided reluctantly.