Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“You’ve all got to be careful. The whole family.” The kitchen window looked out onto a dark, small backyard surrounded by clapboard houses.

“Yeah, I take precautions,” he said. “And after what happened to Maggie — I mean, Hildy. I’m so bad with names.” He turned around.

I felt a little jolt. He knew Maggie’s real name, somehow. I wondered who’d told him. Had Megan told him she’d hired a private investigator? Was that how he knew her name? Maybe Megan and Cameron and Paul all hired Maggie, together. Maybe Paul was in on it with his two siblings.

“Have they gotten any closer to finding out how she was killed?” I asked.

“Not that I know of. The police mostly wanted to talk to Layla and me about our whereabouts that evening. Our alibis.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Let’s sit in the other room.”

We passed through an alcove where a large flat-screen was mounted to the wall. Nine panels on the screen showed different views of the exterior of the house, including the front porch and the backyard. It was a fairly sophisticated setup, especially for such a modest house as this. He saw me glance at the screen and said, “Given the protesters, I have to be a little careful, you know.”

I followed him into another small, dark, low-ceilinged room that was furnished with a few unmatched upholstered armchairs. He switched on a torchiere lamp, which shone a circle of light on the ceiling and gave the room a yellowish cast.

Then he sat in the high-backed chair, which looked like his favorite. I sat in a low-backed one near it.

“Dad was all about making money,” he said. “I’m about making meaning . Maybe that’s an old story. It’s that line by Walter Benjamin” — he gave the name a German pronunciation — “about how every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. The son wants to redeem the sins of the father but at the same time he’s necessarily implicated in them, right? Not by choice but by the way we’re subjects in, and of, history.”

I suddenly remembered why I dropped out of Yale. “I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“We all struggle with that. Sukie too, in her way.”

“She’s been through a lot,” I said.

“She’s very special,” he said. “I think you know that.”

“I do.”

“I think life is hard for her. I just think she’s still finding herself.”

“Is she?”

He nodded, pushed up the bridge of his spectacles. “Make no mistake, I’m proud of her. I think her little documentaries are sweet. That one about the immigrants? I liked that a lot. It’s such a great hobby for her.”

“I think she considers it more than a hobby,” I said.

Paul went on, ignoring me. “Did I say she was complicated?” He smiled. “She’s so smart, you know that. She’ll probably never tell you she got double eight hundreds on her SATs, but she did, and she chose to go to Oberlin because she really wanted the program in the arts. The visual and environmental studies programs here — at Harvard, I mean — just aren’t very strong.”

This made me like him a little less.

He continued. “Where did you say you went to college? Tufts, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I was thinking Tufts. What a relief.”

I hadn’t said anything about Tufts University to Paul or anyone else. It appeared on the phony LinkedIn page for Nick Brown. So he had obviously Googled me.

“I’ve got friends in the comp lit department there.”

“I was an econ major,” I said.

“Of course you were. Sukie’s very much her own person, though I think she’s still figuring out who that person is. And I for one am eager to meet that person.” He chuckled to himself. “She was so close to my father when she was a child. He was so proud of her then. He never missed one of her piano recitals.”

“Nice.”

“I gotta say, he never went to any of my debate-team tournaments, but he always made it to her piano recitals, and Father hates music.”

“He must be proud of what she’s accomplished.”

“He couldn’t be less interested. He finds her documentaries tedious, which really isn’t fair.”

“So that’s a big change in their relationship.”

“Something happened between them. I think they both disappointed each other in some way, but was there a moment? I don’t remember.”

“Huh.”

“She’s really Conrad’s daughter. There’s more Conrad in her than in any of the rest of us. On some level I’ve always felt they were two birds of a feather. The ones most alike.”

The kettle whistled in the kitchen. He got up and excused himself. He came back a couple of minutes later with two mugs, with teabag strings hanging over the lip of each. He set them down on the table next to me. “So, I don’t know,” he said. “If something happened. This is not someone who lets go of things easily.”

“You mean Sukie?”

He nodded. “Or Father. Me, insults are like water off a duck’s back. I don’t remember insults, and I don’t scar. Whereas you have Sukie, who remembers everything. She really does have an amazing memory. And she’s a super-talented woman. But then, you know what the great Theodor Adorno said about talent, right?”

So Adorno was a person. “No,” I said.

“‘Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.’ Do you take milk in your tea?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“I think that’s how he put it. Come, let’s Google the exact quote.” He got up, waved me to accompany him, and went into the dining room, where all the books and laptops were set up on the table. He tapped a key on the nearest laptop, and the screen came to life. I glanced at it quickly and casually. It was dense with numbers, pulsing with charts and data. I realized I was looking at a stock trading screen. “Oh, that’s IEX,” he said. “Doesn’t have the high exchange fees that the New York Stock Exchange does.”

“Are you a trader?”

“I do a little forex trading, here and there.” He tapped the keyboard, and Google appeared. He tapped some more, and now we were on some website dedicated to this Adorno guy. “Yep, I got it right,” he said. “What a relief . Begabung ist vielleicht überhaupt nichts anderes als glücklich sublimierte Wut ...”

I followed him back to the sitting room. He said with a big smile, “Could you tell how relieved Dad was that Sukie brought you? You must have seen it. I gotta tell you, some of the guys she’s been with before — I mean, they’re all interesting people, but not Conrad’s type. You know, sometimes I look at her, and she’s got that Samson-in-the-temple look.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“Didn’t Samson bring down the temple of the Philistines?”

“You may be right.”

“Yeah, he was like the first suicide bomber. Brought down the temple and himself with it. Is it hot in here?” He pulled off his cardigan, revealing his polo shirt and both arms covered with scratches.

He must have seen me glancing at his arms, because he said, “Damned rosebushes,” gesturing outside.

“You were talking about Sukie,” I reminded him, not sure what he was trying to say.

“Sometimes I wonder whether she’s in the tent or outside it and about to torch it.”

“Torch... what?”

“The house of Kimball,” he said. “Kimball Pharma. You know, I look at these protesters, and believe me, I have so much sympathy. But with Sukie, it’s like, she goes to all of these funerals, and I have to wonder whether she’s crossed over. Whether she’s playing for the other team. Oh, I don’t mean that way. At Oberlin she had girlfriends and boyfriends both, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean whether she’s crossed the line between sympathy and revolt. Do you have a sense of that?”