Andrew Gross - The Blue Zone

Kate bought a ticket from the conductor, then leaned her head against the window, trying to catch her breath.

Reputation was everything to her dad, he always said. His business was based on it. He didn’t have salesmen or some fancy arbitrage program or a back room filled with hustling traders. He had himself. He had his contacts, his years in business. He had his reputation. What else was there beyond his word?

Once, Kate recalled, he had refused to handle a large estate sale-it was well into seven figures-just because the executor had shopped it to a friendly competitor on the street and Dad didn’t like the appearance that he’d been bidding for the job against his friend.

And another time he’d taken back an eight-carat diamond he’d brokered in a private sale after two years. Just because some shyster appraiser the buyer had found later insisted that the stone was a little hazy. A six-figure sale. Hazy? Even Em and Justin told him he was nuts to do it. The stone hadn’t changed! The woman just didn’t want it anymore.

The Metro-North train rattled past the housing projects in the Bronx. Kate sank back in her seat. She was worried for him, what he must be feeling. She closed her eyes.

She was the oldest-by six years. How many times had her father told her what a special bond that created between them? It’s our little secret, pumpkin. They even had their own little private greeting. They had seen it in some movie and it just stuck: a one-fingered wave.

She looked a bit different from the rest of them. She was wide-eyed and pretty, kind of like Natalie Portman, everybody always said. Her hair was shoulder-length and light brown. Everyone else’s was thicker and darker. And those sharp green eyes-where did those come from? Flipped chromosomes, Kate always explained. You know, the dominant-recessive Y…how it skips a generation.

“Pretty,” her dad would tease her. “I just can’t figure out how she got to be so smart.”

Leaning against the glass, Kate thought of how many times he had come through for her.

For all of them.

How he’d leave work early to come home and catch her soccer games in high school, once even hopping a plane a day early from the Orient when her team had made the district finals. Or drive all over the Northeast to Emily’s squash tournaments-she was one of the top-ranked juniors in Westchester County-and coax her back to earth when that famous temper got the best of her after she lost a tough match.

Or how at Brown, after Kate had gotten sick, when she took up crew, he’d drive up on weekends and sit there on the shore and watch her row.

Kate always figured that her dad was such a committed family guy because, truth was, growing up, he’d never had much of one of his own. His mother, Rosa, had come over from Spain when he was a boy. His father had died there, a streetcar accident or something. Kate actually never knew that much about him. And his mother had died young as well, while he was putting himself through NYU. Everyone admired her father. At the club, in his business, their friends-that’s why this didn’t make any sense.

What the hell did you do, Daddy?

Suddenly Kate’s head started to throb. She felt the familiar pressure digging into her eyes, the dryness in her throat, followed by the wave of fatigue.

Shit…

She knew that this might happen. It always came on with stress. It didn’t take but a second to recognize the signs.

She dug through her bag and found her Accu-Chek-her blood monitor. She’d been diagnosed when she was seventeen, her senior year.

Diabetes. Type 1. The real deal.

Kate had gotten a little depressed at first. Her life underwent a radical change. She’d had to drop soccer. She didn’t take her SATs. She had to watch her diet strictly when everyone else was going out for pizza or partying on Saturday nights.

And once she had even fallen into a hypoglycemic coma. She was cramming for a test in the school cafeteria when her fingers began to grow numb and the pen slipped out of her hand. Kate didn’t know what was happening. The dizziness took over. Her body wouldn’t respond. Faces started to look a little gauzy. She tried to scream- What the hell is going on!

Next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital two days later, attached to about a dozen monitors and tubes. It had been six years now. In that time she had learned to manage things. She still had to give herself two shots a day.

Kate pressed the Accu-Chek needle into her forefinger. The digital meter read up to 282. Her norm was around 90. Jesus, she was off the charts.

She dug into her purse and came out with her kit. She always kept a spare in the fridge at the lab. She took out a syringe and the bottle of Humulin. The train car was not crowded; no reason she couldn’t do this right here. She lifted the syringe and pressed it into the insulin, forcing out the air: 18 units. Kate lifted her sweater. It was routine for her. Twice a day for the past six years.

She pressed the needle into the soft part of her belly underneath her rib cage. She gently squeezed.

Those initial worries about what it meant to live with diabetes all seemed like a long time ago now. She had gotten into Brown. She had changed her focus, started thinking about biology. And she started rowing there. Just for exercise at first. Then it created a new sense of discipline in her life. In her junior year-though she was only five feet four and barely 115 pounds-she had placed second in the All-Ivy single-sculls.

That’s what their little wave was about. The sign between them. Em’s got that temper, her Dad would always wink and tell her, but you’re the one with the real fight inside .

Kate took a swig of water from a bottle and felt her strength start to return.

The train was approaching Larchmont. It started to slow into the redbrick station.

Kate stuffed her kit back in her bag. She pulled herself up, looped her satchel around her shoulder, and waited at the doors.

She never forgot. Not a single day. Not for an instant:

When she opened her eyes in the hospital after two days in the coma, her father’s had been the first face she saw.

Ben will fix this, Kate knew. Like he always did. He’d handle it. Whatever the hell he had done. She was sure.

Now, her mother…She sighed, spotting the silver Lexus waiting in the turnabout as the train pulled into the station.

That was a totally different deal.

It was a long, difficult drive back to Westchester that afternoon for Raab, in the back of the black Lincoln limo his lawyer, Mel Kipstein, had arranged.

An hour before, he’d been brought in front of Judge Muriel Saperstein in the United States courthouse at Foley Square for arraignment, the most humiliating moment of his life.

The frosty government lawyer who’d been in on his interrogation referred to him as a “criminal kingpin” who was the architect of an illicit scheme by which Colombian drug lords were able to divert money out of the country. That he had knowingly profited from this enterprise for years. That he had ties to known drug traffickers.

No, Raab had to hold himself back from shouting, that’s not how it was at all.

Every time he heard the judge read off a charge, it cut through him like a serrated blade.

Money laundering. Aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise. Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

After some negotiation, during which Raab grew alarmed he might not even be freed, bail was set at $2 million.

“I see you own a fancy home in Westchester, Mr. Raab?” The judged peered over her glasses.