William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“A leveraged buyout,” said Rabbinowitz. “Like something out of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties. This Reddman he was a thief, yes, but a thief ahead of his time.”

“And listen to this, Victor,” said Morris. “Right after Reddman, he bought all the stock, the sale of pickles it went meshugge, more than tripling in one year. Almost as if someone was keeping production low to maintain unprofitability until the entire stock of the company could be bought at a bargain price.”

“So that’s it,” I said. “Poole was right all along. Reddman stole the company right out from under him.”

“So it would seem,” said Morris.

“If it was so easy for us to see it, how come Poole didn’t figure it out?”

“That’s a mystery,” said Morris. “To solve such a mystery it will take more than looking in books.”

We sat for a moment in silence, the three of us. There were still questions to be answered, of course, and there was nothing in the books that would convince a jury of anything beyond a reasonable doubt, but it was pretty clear to me. Everything about the Reddmans was based on a crime and it was as if that crime, instead of disappearing into the mists of history, had remained alive and virulent and had infected the Reddman house and the Reddman family and the Reddman legacy with a crippling rot.

“Two more things you should know, Victor,” said Morris. “First, I tried, as soon as Yitzhak started growing suspicious, I tried to find out if there might be records from this farmer Anderson for us to look at. A farm he owned, in New Jersey, in Cumberland County. Through old newspapers I had Sheldon look until he found it. Very disturbing.”

“What?” I asked.

“The farmhouse it burned down in 1907, with three dead, including this Anderson.”

“My God,” I said.

“And something else, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz. “We are not the first to go through these records and discover what it is we have discovered. I could see traces of another’s journey through the same books, old pencil marks, old notations, old notes stuck in the pages. Someone else, they took the very same route we took through the numbers. Your friend Morris, he thinks he knows,” said Rabbinowitz.

I turned and looked at Morris.

“One of the notes,” he said. “The writing it matches.”

“Matches what?”

“I’m no handwriting expert,” said Morris, “but the letters ‘s’ and ‘t,’ they are very close and the ‘g,’ it is identical.”

“Matches what?”

“The pages of the diary we found in the box,” said Morris. “She who wrote the diary, she too knew about what this Reddman had done. He was her father, no? What it must have been like for her to find out that everything she had was purchased by a crime. I shudder, Victor, shudder to even think about it.”

AFTER RABBINOWITZ LEFTfor the hospital to visit his good friend Herman Hopfenschmidt, I decided to take a spin around Eakins Oval and along Kelly Drive, past Boathouse Row, to one of the sculpture gardens planted along the banks of the Schuylkill. It was now late afternoon and I sat on a stone bench, just in front of a statue of a massively muscled man groaning forward, a representation of the Spirit of Enterprise, and watched the scullers bend with their oars as their shells skimmed across the river’s surface like the water boatmen I had seen on the pond at Veritas. I had needed to get away from the office, to sit among the silent sculptures on the river’s edge and watch the sun dip into the west and think about what I had learned that day. Morris had offered to trail along and I hadn’t minded. I found having Morris around made me feel better, though I couldn’t really say why. But Morris knew enough to stroll quietly among the statuary for a while and let me be.

I had been told that beneath every great fortune lies a great crime but it was still a shock to be confronted with the truth of that maxim so vividly. If I had wondered before what it was that had turned the Reddman family so brutally wrong I needed only to learn the origin of its wealth and power. I didn’t yet understand the instrument of the family’s undoing but I had little doubt that the tragedies that erupted in its history had their root in Claudius Reddman’s deception of and thievery from Elisha Poole. And the question that inevitably sprung to mind was, in light of the fortune gained and the tragedies incurred, whether or not it was worth it.

I was hip-deep now in Reddman excretion and I couldn’t help but imagine myself bobbing for my own little coins. I had been promised the five percent from Oleanna if I could clear her and her people of the murder and get the insurance death benefit paid. I had been promised a kickback from Peckworth, the used undergarment procurer, for any reduction I could wile from his street tax. Then there was the wrongful death suit I would file on behalf of Caroline Shaw against whoever it was who had ordered the murder of her sister and probably her brother too, a suit I would bring just as soon as I determined who had hired Cressi, and as soon as Caroline signed the fee agreement I so desperately wanted her to sign. And of course, it was undeniable that I was sleeping with an heiress, even if Kingsley’s vasectomy made her only an ostensible heiress. It didn’t take a practiced gigolo to know where that could lead. Yes, there was a lot of coin adrift in the Reddman muck to be snatched between my teeth.

“Do you know what his last words were before he died?” I asked Morris after he wandered over to the stone bench and sat beside me.

“Who now are we talking about?” said Morris.

“Claudius Reddman. His dying words were, ‘It was only business.’ ”

Morris sat there for a moment, shaking his head. “Such words have justified more crime than even religion.”

“Did you ever want to be rich, Morris?”

“Who is rich? As the scholar Ben Zoma once said, ‘He who is content with his lot.’ ”

I looked up at him, at the calm expression on his face, the expression of a man who seemed truly content with his life and at peace with his place in the world.

“So you never wanted to be rich?” I asked.

“What, you think I’m meshuggener, ” said Morris. “Of course I wanted to be rich. I still do. Give me a million dollars, Victor, and see if I turn it down. Give me two, maybe. Give me thirty over six years with a signing bonus like a baseball pitcher and see if I push it away. Believe you me, Victor, I won’t push it away.”

“That’s good to know,” I said, and turned back to the water. “I was getting worried. What would you buy?”

He thought on that for a moment. “There was a man in Pinsk,” he said finally, “who used to make the most perfect shoes in the world. I never saw a pair mind you, but I heard of them from someone whose cousin had actually held a pair in his very hands. Soft like a woman’s skin, he said, and as comfortable as a warm bath. I always wanted a pair of shoes from the man in Pinsk. Of course this was before the war. I don’t know now what happened to him, he is probably dead. Pinsk was not a good place to be a Jew during the war. But I have heard rumors now of a man in Morocco whose shoes, they say, are close to those of the man in Pinsk.”

“You could buy anything you want and what you’d buy is shoes?”

“Not just any shoes, Victor, not the scraps of leather you wear on your feet. These shoes are a mechaieh, they are the shoes of a king.”

“So you want to be rich so you can buy a pair of shoes,” I said, nodding to myself. “I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. At least you know.”

“Yes and no. With such shoes, Victor, when could I wear them? Not every day, they are too precious for everyday. I would wear them only on the Shabbos maybe, and not even every Shabbos, because even then they would wear out too soon. I would spend more time taking care of them than wearing them, I think, waxing the leather, polishing, keeping them stretched and warm. Such shoes would be more burden than anything else. As Hillel said, ‘The more flesh, the more worms. The more property, the more anxiety. The more wives, the more witchcraft.’ ”