Andrew Gross - The Blue Zone

“ Howard .” Kate reached for his flabby, cold hand. “You don’t understand. Whoever you’re protecting, they tried to kill me, too! ”

“Whoever I’m protecting…” Howard glanced toward his wife, then shut his eyes.

“Right after I met with you,” Kate said, “on the Harlem River, where I row. Was someone watching us, Howard? Did anyone know I was asking about him? I know things now about my father. I know he wasn’t exactly who I thought he was. But, please-my mother was trying to tell me something when she was killed. Why are you hiding things from me?”

“Because you don’t want to know, Kate!” The accountant stared back at her. “Because it was never, ever about a bunch of painted gold paperweights or Paz Exports. We always sold them the gold. You don’t understand-that was what your father did!”

Kate stared back at him. “What…?”

Howard took off his glasses. He dabbed at his brow, his complexion pasty white.

“You have to believe me,” he said. “I never, ever thought anyone would get hurt in this. Certainly not Sharon.” He sank into a chair. “Or, God forbid, you .”

“Someone did pressure you, didn’t they, Howard?” Kate went over and knelt in front of him. “I promise you’ll never hear from me again. But, please, you have to give me the truth.”

“The truth”-the accountant smiled hollowly-“it’s not at all what you think, Kate.”

“Then tell me. I just buried my mother, Howard.” Kate was more determined than she’d ever been. “This has to end, now.”

“I told you to stay out of it, didn’t I? I told you it was something you didn’t want to know. This was what we did! We moved money for Colombians, Kate, your father’s friends. That’s how you got your house, the fancy cars. You think I was disloyal? I loved your father, Kate. I would have done anything for your father.” He pressed his lips and nodded. “ And I did .”

“What do you mean, you did, Howard? Who paid you to turn him in? You need to tell me, Howard? Who?”

When he replied, it was like some meteor slamming into her at an unimaginable speed, one world ending in a flash and another rising from the devastation, exploding in her eyes.

“ Ben. ” The accountant looked up, his eyes runny and wide. “Ben instructed me to go to the FBI. I was paid- by your father, Kate .”

The scene came back to Kate on the long train ride back to the city. Through the steady clattering of the Long Island Rail Road car, the blur of faceless passengers, Howard’s words burned like flaming wreckage in her head.

I was paid. By your father, Kate.

Paid to leak information to the FBI. To turn him in. Why? Why would her father want to destroy his own life, the lives of those he loved? Why would he want to be put in jail, to testify? To have to hide? How could Kate resurrect who he was, why he did this, what he was capable of, from the whole confounding puzzle of her life?

The voice came from deep inside her memory. A faraway scene she had not revisited since she was a child. Her mother’s voice-desperate and confused-over the rattle of the train, making Kate shudder and flinch, even now.

“You have to choose, Ben. Now!”

Why was it coming back to her here? All she wanted to do was make sense of what Howard had told her.

Why now?

Kate saw herself in the flashback. She was maybe four or five. It was back in the old house in Harrison. She had awakened during the night. She’d heard voices. Angry voices. She crept out of bed to the landing at the top of the stairs.

It was her parents. They were arguing, and it made her jump at every word. She was a little afraid. Her parents didn’t argue. Why were they so mad?

Kate sat down. She could make out their voices distinctly now. It all came back to her through the haze of years. Her parents were in the family room. Her mother was upset, fighting back tears. Her father was shouting. She’d never heard him like this before. She moved closer to the railing. It was clear now, in the train.

“Stay out of it!” her father shouted. “It doesn’t concern you. It’s none of your business, Sharon.”

“Then whose business is it, Ben?” Kate could hear the tears in her mother’s voice. “Tell me, whose ?”

What were they talking about? Had she done something wrong?

Kate held on to the banister. She quietly slid down the stairs, one at a time. Their voices grew louder. And there was bitterness in them. She could see glimpses of them in the family room. Her father was in a white dress shirt with his tie undone. His face was younger. Her mother was pregnant. With Emily, of course. Kate didn’t know what was going on. Only that she’d never heard her parents argue like this before.

“You don’t tell me, Sharon. You don’t get to tell me that!”

Her mother, sniffling, reached for him. “Please, Ben, you’ll wake up Kate!”

He threw her off. “I don’t really care.”

Kate sat on the staircase, trembling. She couldn’t remember any more words. Only pieces, coming to her like images in a photographic flicker book. There was something totally different and foreign about him, about his eyes. This wasn’t her father. Her father wasn’t like this. He was soft and kind.

Her mother, standing up in front of him. “ We’re your family, Ben, not them .” She shook her head, just inches away from him. “You have to choose, Ben. Now!”

Then her father did something, something Kate never saw him do again. Why was it coming back to her now? She turned her face away, just as she had done on the staircase maybe twenty years before. Before she buried it-the violence in his eyes, what he did-in the lifetime of happier memories that she thought were real.

He hit her mother in the face.

He wanted this.

That’s what Kate suddenly understood. Stepping off the train. Climbing up through Penn Station and onto the street. In a complete daze.

Her father wanted this.

That’s what Howard told her. He wanted to be exposed-his longtime dealings with the Mercados brought into the light. To testify against his friend. To go to jail. To put the family he supposedly loved above everything else at risk. Why? He’d engineered his comfortable, picture-perfect life to self-destruct.

And he was capable of it. That’s what scared Kate the most. That’s why the flashback on the train was so chilling. However buried this memory was, she had seen it in him before.

Kate walked against the crowd down to Fourteenth Street. She headed east, all the way to the Lower East Side.

Did the WITSEC people know any of this? About the photo she’d found, his past connection to Mercado? Did they know who he really was? What he was capable of? Those awful photos of Margaret Seymour. Had Mercado’s people ever really wanted to kill him after all?

Do they know he brought his own life crashing down?

Her cell phone rang. Kate saw that it was Greg calling. She didn’t answer. She just kept walking. She didn’t know what she could say.

All of a sudden, the whole of her life had to be rethought. Why would her father have wanted to harm Margaret Seymour? What information could he possibly have needed from her? Why would her father want to bring this on himself? How could he have wanted to hurt them all? Sharon, Emily, Justin. Kate herself.

It was like the coda from some discordant, symphonic finale crashing in Kate’s head.

All along, this was his plan.

Greg was on the couch watching a soccer match when she arrived back at the apartment.