Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Dad was a remote, unfathomable, larger-than-life character to both of us. He seemed to laugh louder than most people, got more angry, was smarter, more intense, more everything.

We loved going to his office in Manhattan. His firm occupied the entire top floor of the Graystone Building, an art deco ziggurat near Grand Central that had been built to resemble a Babylonian temple. In the lobby was a huge mural by some famous artist of Prometheus stealing fire. The elevator doors were ornate brass. His office always smelled like pipe smoke and old wood and leather and brass cleaner, and it was suffused with the ozone of power. It had a breathtaking view of the city. Silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, Victor Heller stood mightier than any of the spindly skyscrapers in the distance, a colossus astride the globe.

We were terrified of him. When he got angry, you didn’t want to be within a mile. One day he was looking for something in our bathroom, the one Roger and I shared – who knows what he was looking for, maybe a roll of toilet paper – when he found a half-used pouch of chewing tobacco. It said RED MAN on the label.

He stormed into the game room, where we were playing Risk, and he demanded to know which one of us was using chewing tobacco.

We both denied it. I didn’t even know what chewing tobacco was.

Furious, Dad whipped us both with his crocodile-leather belt. I don’t think he really cared about whether we were using tobacco. He just didn’t like having his authority undermined.

Afterward, Roger and I consoled each other. We both knew we’d been unfairly punished, which hurt even more than our backsides. Roger slid down the waistband of his Jockey shorts a few inches and showed me the damage Dad had done. His buttocks were crimson. Mine were, too.

“Hey, Red Man,” he said, and we both burst out laughing.

It turned out that the chewing tobacco had been left under the sink by Sal, one of the caretakers, who’d been fixing a leak. But the incident also left us with a nickname for each other, a secret code: “Red Man.” Never in front of others. Only between us.

“Hey, Red Man,” we’d say to each other on the phone, and it was like a nudge, a wink. It instantly evoked a whole world – of archeological digs on the far reaches of the property that enraged Yoshi, the elderly Japanese gardener; of pranks that made our favorite cook, Mrs. Thomasson, giggle; of getting into trouble and covering for each other.

It made us feel like fellow conspirators. Which was nice. It brought us even closer.

Until we turned against each other.

By some strange spin of the genetic roulette wheel, I grew up big and broad-shouldered and muscular, while Roger became stringy and gawky. He needed glasses; I didn’t. He became defiantly bookish while I was the athlete who pretended not to care about school. He was the smart one; I was the strong one. He was a bully magnet, and even though he was older, I became his defender. He didn’t like that.

By the time we entered our teens, it became clear that Roger wanted to be just like Dad. He told everyone he was going to work “in finance.”

One day, when I was thirteen and Roger was almost fifteen, we got home from school to find Mom waiting for us in the gloomy library, sitting in a big leather chair in the circle of light cast by a reading lamp. She said she wanted to talk to us.

She got up, gave us both hugs, and told us that Dad had been arrested at work that morning. Right in front of his employees. They’d handcuffed him and led him out through the trading floor.

“Why?” Roger said.

“The Justice Department wanted to embarrass him.”

“No, I mean, why did they arrest him?”

She explained, but it didn’t all sink in. Something about securities fraud and insider trading. Something about an SEC investigation that had been going on for months. Since I barely understood what Dad did for a living, I had no idea what he’d been arrested for.

We didn’t see Dad until the next day. He was at home when we returned from school, which was strange. Normally, he didn’t get home until after dinner.

He took us into his study and told us that he’d spent the night in jail, locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center with a bunch of drug dealers. That morning he’d been taken before a magistrate and arraigned and released on bail.

He told us not to worry. That the charges were trumped up. He’d made some powerful enemies, and they were trying to drag him through the mud. But he had great lawyers, and he’d fight this thing, and we’d all get through it, and we’d all be fine.

“But I want you boys to know one thing,” he said fiercely. “I’m innocent. Never forget it.”

“I don’t understand,” Roger said. “How could they arrest someone who’s innocent?”

Dad leaned back in his chair and laughed raucously. “Oh, good Lord, kiddo, you’ve got a lot to learn about the world.”

THE NEXT morning, when Roger and I were on our way to school, our car stopped at the end of the long driveway. The driver – yes, we had a driver – cursed aloud, and we looked out the front windshield.

There was a mob in front of the gates – cameras, reporters with bulbous microphones, people swarming the car, screaming at us.

The driver backed up and took us out the back way.

School wasn’t much fun that day. Everyone had heard about the arrest of Victor Heller. A rich-kid school like that, you can believe everyone’s parents were talking about it at the breakfast table, and with undisguised glee. There was a lot of pent-up resentment over our father. A lot of jealousy.

Our friends were sympathetic, but there were plenty of kids who hurled insults.

And that was when I learned to fight.

Anyone who dared say anything nasty about my father had to deal with me. Anyone who said anything to my brother had to face me, too.

We were a family under siege. Both parents were around far too much, except for the times when Dad’s lawyers came to the house and met with him in his study for hours on end. The phone kept ringing, but my parents wouldn’t answer it. They stopped going out.

Mom, who until that moment had always seemed a recessive gene, swung into action, helping the lawyers coordinate a legal defense. Suddenly, she felt useful. She knew nothing about Wall Street or white-collar crime, but she was smart and determined to stand by her husband.

She saw the cuts and scrapes on my face when I came home from school, and she said nothing. She knew. She just bandaged me up and told us we’d all get through it.

When Dad emerged from his strategy sessions with his lawyers, he’d rattle around the house or practice his serve with the tennis pro, and he talked to us a lot, assured us that he was innocent, that all the charges would be overturned, and this nightmare would be over. Soon.

About a week later I was awakened by a car starting up in the middle of the night. I sat up, went over to my window. Saw the distinctive beehive taillights of Dad’s 1955 Porsche Speedster. Went back to sleep.

In the morning, Dad was gone. Never said good-bye. Mom’s eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy, and we could tell she’d been crying. She said only that Dad had had to leave suddenly to take care of some business.

He wasn’t back when we returned from school.

Nor the next day.

It took three days before Mom told us that Dad wasn’t coming back anytime soon. He’d left the country. She didn’t know where he’d gone.

All she knew, she said, was that he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But innocence didn’t always mean you could get a fair trial.

The indictment was handed down four days after he fled. Victor Heller had been charged with wire fraud and income-tax evasion and securities fraud, even racketeering. The newspapers began referring to him as the “fugitive financier.”