City of Strangers (8 page)

It was the sort of place you find anywhere in Brooklyn or Queens: the emigrant salon. In Brighton Beach it's the Russians, in Astoria it's the Greeks. In Jackson Heights the Indians, Williamsburg the Dominicans and the Italians, Midwood the Pakistanis. The men at the restaurant in Greenpoint were Polish, and Frank was born to Germans, but Frank was never excluded, or never seemed to be. Not all the men were his age. Many were only in their forties. They were immigrants, jobless, overweight, in debt, often unmarried, and they cloistered themselves in a shoddily appointed restaurant whose chunky walls bulged with panels of ancient, blood-dark mahogany and whose light was a jaundiced chintzy yellow. They sat all day. It was the kind of restaurant one passes without entering. The tablecloths were made of slick heavy polyester, as were the napkins, which meant that they were almost impossible to use. Paul hated it there. But as he began his own inevitable filial drift, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and was no longer bound to accompany his father, he found himself surprised by another filial inevitability – guilt. It wasn't that he felt nostalgia for the restaurant, yet he could think of no better term for what fell upon him when, at college in Boston, he would overhear a snatch of talk from the tables of old men who played chess all day at one of the outdoor cafes.

In the last years before Paul left for college, Frank gradually stopped going to his restaurant. He bought groceries – an even sadder thing to contemplate, Frank in his hat and coat, toting a shopping basket up and down the fluorescent aisles – and began eating at home. He never explained this change of routine.

Patches of ground are still hoary from yesterday's snowfall. Paul turns in the direction of the exit. Late-afternoon light fills the bushes near the stone gate and their gray branches burn and glisten with individual intricacy. He steps from the quiet of the park into the quiet of the avenue. A car rolls by, and then another, but, at an hour before people have begun to return from work, there is no one. Innocent, pastoral silence flows down the street. The signs of life are distant: the drone of the nearest expressway; the chthonic moaning of trains rising from the grates. In the present silence Paul hears again the jagged explosion of the bottle against the ground. His fingers flex around an imagined shard of glass. He looks at the fading cuts on his hand, and recalls with shock that less than a day has gone by.

Like the rest, his own street is deserted. His footsteps slow almost to a halt. No one is there, but no one was supposed to be there last night, either. He recalls the primitive enthusiasm of the two men for their task, especially that of the one called Terence, and their patient enjoyment of it, the recreational tempo. Now his street is back to normal – he is relieved to find that no one is on his block – but it has been made strange, and the silence, which might usually be a comfort, a confirmation that nothing is happening, instead feels like an ominous preamble. Even reaching for his keys reminds him of last night's events.

He notices it when he is still a few doors away, although at first it could be anything, its shape and color indistinct. It is just a thing. He is now one building away. The thing is short and dark and certainly was not there when Paul left the apartment this morning. Only at the foot of the stairs can he be sure that it is the squat round bottom half of a glass bottle – its splintered peaks filled with an oddly soft, buttery light – and that its top half lies around in a sparkling ring of bits and pieces.

The price of gas has an effect – too great an effect – on Ben Wald's sense of well-being. In the past week natural gas has fallen eighteen points and as a result the spread has collapsed. When the market moves against him Ben feels inadequate as a man. Those eighteen points are a lack, a physical deterioration. A pound of flesh carved right out of his side. And yet this does not translate into real despair. Not quite that. He hasn't become so myopic that he forgets entirely what really matters: his wife and son. Men exist who do, of course – some are good friends of his. They cut off their families, abandon themselves in the work; they perceive the world as a tangle of ascending and descending lines on a chart, peaks and valleys of luminous significance. They simply lose sight. Of? Of life. Of the miracles with which God has stocked the planet: the pleasures of the natural world, of family, of music and art. Not Ben. He swore long ago, when he was still a young trader and witnessed the ease with which the inner lives of others caved in, never to become like that. Beth and Jake are the foundation of his happiness; the money he earns belongs to them. His present trouble with the government, if nothing else, has reminded him of this – they're threatening to take it all away. Tomorrow begins a premature penance, when, to pull heat off the company and to avoid becoming a distraction, Ben will step down for an indefinite leave of absence. It's a precaution. Already he dreads the aimlessness of days without purpose, a mere counting of hours, no task at hand, no chance for quantifiable gain. There's still a good chance, or so his lawyer tells him, of emerging unscathed. He can't think about the consequences if he doesn't. Prison has been mentioned. What he's accused of doing, which involves a sequence of transactions in a certain futures market, is no different from what men in his position do every day. If it goes away he will count it as a blessing, a test. He'll be a stronger man, a man more devoted to the people he loves, the values he cherishes. But even then he won't be able salve the ache that comes when the numbers don't cooperate; the suffering is built into him. Not even the touch of his wife's hand eases it. That it cannot is what pains him the most.

It is Monday afternoon: the markets are winding down. He waits for the end of the day in his office. A few people have stopped in to say goodbye, but most avoid him, and he understands. The younger analysts don't know how to talk to him, and don't know how he will respond; he has in recent weeks become a difficult thing. He glances once more at the latest article. Slipped into the scrutiny of his supposed crime, nothing more than a handful of business decisions –
For God's sake!
he thinks, umbrage coiling in his throat – they have printed it: the identity of his father, what his father did. Of everything they have come after him with, this is the most unpardonable, as shameful and disproportionate as a stoning. Those were Frank's choices, not Ben's; the only relevant choice Ben made in that regard was to reject the man. While he bristles at what they want to make of him, a symbol of the gluttony and venality of the new Gilded Age, at least he understands it – the public has a thirst for this, it caws to see wealthy men deplumed. But to affix the name Metzger to him is a more odious punishment, a tarring he doesn't deserve. He's embarrassed. It is his fault. He drew this cloud upon himself and – far, far worse – upon his family. He instructed Jake not to read the papers, but who can guess what a friend will tell him? Ben knows that he, too, should stop reading about it, and just throw out the paper, but something halts him: his eye is drawn again and again to the words there, the conspicuous inky ugliness of them: 'Ben Metzger.'

But he's not that. He's Wald. Wald began life at seventeen, on the day he told Frank Metzger that he was done with him, the family, the name, everything. Wald went into the world, graduated from college, discovered a talent for numbers and predictions, earned all he has,
made
all he has. Self-made. Ben loves the phrase, the mental warmth it gives him, all that it suggests. The best men are those who invent themselves: who fit the world around them, tailor it like a suit.

A figure hovers at the door. The knock comes, and Kevin, one of the young analysts, flies in on his heels, bursting with the exasperation and heat of something gone wrong. Ben's been expecting this. Late trading has lit an emergency among the analysts; the newest rumors are dark currents radiating from Russia, China, Brazil. But until now the noise has registered only distantly, as if from miles beyond the front. He understands why: his legal troubles have given him an aura of fragility, no one knows quite what to do with him, and so they are all treating him with special caution. At the end of today he leaves. It makes him feel old and irrelevant, a lost cause. Persona non grata is not too strong a term.

'Natural gas again,' Kevin reports. 'We're getting pounded out there.'

The agitation of his hands makes it apparent how hard his heart is running: he looks as if he's just walked away from a car accident. Kevin graduated less than a year ago. The money's shaking inside him. Ben remembers that feeling, the juice of adrenaline everywhere in you at once, and seeing it in this young man makes him feel suddenly apart from whatever's happening, free of it. As much as he's been waiting for this – for something to do – he now locks up with reluctance.

'Go talk to Grant.' Grant runs the energy desk. When Ben started the hedge fund, Grant, who came up with him at Goldman Sachs, was the first man he hired. Tomorrow he'll be in charge. He's stood by Ben even as the trouble with the S.E.C. has gone from threat to reality, as many of his other friends have stopped calling. Kevin leaves, shutting the door behind him, but Ben remains alert, as if someone's still in the room, an unfamiliar anxiety buzzing below his thoughts. He's accustomed to a low boil of anger at work – it keeps him hungry. To make as much as he does requires him to think of his job as a zero-sum game: he wants to take money from the next guy, dig in his pockets for loose change. A little competitive burning is good, a touch of brutality. But today there's a parallel poison in the blood, this one distracting rather than concentrating the mind. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the job or the government's investigation. It's been there all day, yet only now can he name its source: his brother.

Paul's appearance yesterday magnified tenfold the bullshit the newspapers are printing. Ben still can't identify what softness made him agree to it. When he was still in his thirties and Paul was no more than a child, he'd see his brother from time to time – always on the condition that Frank wasn't present, and in part because his mother encouraged it, although it was never clear to him why – but already the relationship was spoiled. Theirs would never be the normal experience of brotherhood. As Paul aged it became even more difficult to look at him and see anything other than an appendage of Frank's. He had no real sense of who their father was, of what he had done – he still doesn't. From the start Ben couldn't tolerate the insult of his younger sibling's innocence.

In the years since, he's been able to consider Paul, when he considers him at all, from a comfortable remove; he has grown to feel mere indifference toward him. Casually, he's kept up with the events of his brother's life – graduation, marriage, a string of professional successes, although that seems to have tapered off, and now the divorce – but does so as if reading the news from another country. For the past three years he hasn't seen him at all. The interval was, for Ben, a product of fatigue. He and his brother have had so many arguments, almost always about their father, and they occur at instances of practical need since Ben has remained, legally, a part of the story. Frank's death is set to become one more such occasion.

Money, Ben knows, is the one universal language. Money is a declaration. When you speak aloud you can retract it, claim a Freudian slip, an errant tongue, but money never misspeaks. Politicians know it, journalists know it, lawyers know it. Frank knew that when he put his in a suitcase and took it to Germany.

And that money, Frank's inheritance, ought to have gone toward raising a family – had he used it wisely Ben's childhood might have been less difficult, his mother might have been happier, had new clothes, a firmer sense of her place in the world. She might not have left Frank. Ben could have known what it was like to have a family, a real one, a warm house, Sunday dinners. All the things he makes sure to provide Jake and Beth, and which the government now wants to strip him of. Frank spent his family's money to kill Jews.

Now, as he dies, Frank will give back to the world a modest sum which – Ben supposes, though he hasn't done the calculations – is comparable to what three thousand dollars was worth in 1937. Paul wants it. What he doesn't understand is that it isn't about him; Ben has no interest in punishing him. It means nothing to him what money his brother does or does not have. Except this money. This money, this blood money, cannot stay in Metzger hands. Ben hasn't decided exactly what he plans to do with it – donate it to the Anti-Defamation League or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he guesses, use it to turn back the second-rate Hitlers who govern Iran and Syria, who dream of a second Holocaust, a nuclear winter over Tel Aviv. He could even pack the cash into a briefcase and hand-deliver it, in homage.

His wife, who hasn't been trained to abhor compromise, has told him he's being unfair – that he should at least consent to split the will down the middle with his brother. Ben long ago silenced the part of himself that might have agreed with her. Inner doubt constitutes a dangerous weakness, a malfunction in need of repair. He isn't being unreasonable. Unreasonable was their father – he got out beyond unreasonable, at the far edge of moral sickness, as an accomplice to the most advanced case of evil the world has ever known. That man owes more than is possible to give, but his repentance must begin with the sacrifice of all he owns; at the end of such a life he must be stripped of everything. Of this Ben is certain; nothing can dislodge this belief. The sentiment manifests itself as a physical conviction – in the back of his jaw, between his teeth. An article of purest faith.

* * *

Self-delusion is a process marked by tiny, inner steps of gradual logic, like inching under a blanket. Paul returned to the apartment more than two hours ago and since then night has fallen, but he hasn't reacted to what he found at his doorstep. He has done little but sit in a cushiony slump on the sofa, and hasn't given much thought to Terence, although certainly it was he who smashed that bottle on the step. Of course, Paul ought to be thinking about Terence, and about the intelligent next move, but in his fear, or apprehension – he is not sure which it is, which expresses the appropriate degree of severity – he misplaces his concerns. Claire has been a constant thought. She at least offers him the retreat of self-pity. With no obvious change in temperature, he finds himself sweating and deeply thirsty. He feels a headache bunching up behind his eyes. He stands abruptly.

At the kitchen sink he opens the tap and swallows glass after glass of whitish lukewarm water. He can drink no more. The tap, still running full-blast, is the only noise in the apartment, and like many domestic sounds in an empty home it comes with a contradictory set of connotations: comfort, anxiety, loneliness. He feels a little better.

It is high time, in any case, to call the police. There's probably little they can do, but a report at least ought to be filed. The buttons of the phone respond to his fingers with a satisfying rubbery tension, and the feeling that fills him is a reassuring one, a sense of resolve that has gone missing lately.

He has called the emergency line, and a woman summarily transfers him to the local precinct, where another officer, a man with a young-sounding voice, answers. He speaks in a tone bleached with indifference. It is late. Paul says, 'I want to report a crime.'

'What is the nature of the crime?'

'A man left a broken bottle at the door of my building – a threat.'

'A bottle? You saw him break it? He say anything?'

'No, he was gone.'

'What is your name, sir?'

Paul tells him.

'Can you explain why you're so sure a bottle on your doorstep is a threat?'

'This man, he – actually, he and his friend – they were beating up this kid. I stopped them. This was last night. They got me pretty bad too.'

'What is the victim's name?'

'I don't know. I think he was Arab. Muslim.'

'Where was this?'

Paul gives the name of his street.

'Hold on.' The man is gone; Paul hears the snickering of computer keys. 'Sir, we have no report of an assault in that area in the past two weeks.'

'Maybe the kid didn't report it.'

'Why didn't you report it, sir?'

'I don't know. I'm reporting it now. But this bottle – this threat.'

'Sir, this is New York. We got a lot of broken bottles lying around.'

'But it wasn't just lying around. It was standing upright. Somebody
placed
it there, very consciously, like a little monument of broken glass. He meant for me to find it.'

'A monument?'

Exhaustion and irritation pump through him. He sighs. 'Like a monument, yes.' As the man said, this is New York. They must get many callers with unserious claims. This man is accustomed to interpreting things in their most ordinary and innocuous light.

'Is this man – is he there right now?'

'No.'

'I'm sorry, sir, but it doesn't sound like there's much we can do, except maybe give him a fine for littering. If it is a threat, it's a pretty weird one. If you want to bring it down to the station, the bottle or whatever, and fill out the necessary paperwork—'

'It seems like he might come back.'

'Sir, if you're in immediate danger you should call nine-one-one.'

Only after Paul collapses into a chair does he recall the figure at the end of Claire's street, who by now he is certain was Terence, and he wishes he had mentioned that. But he's too tired to call again, and he doubts it would change much, anyway; perhaps the man with whom he spoke has the proper outlook. If Terence were serious, he would have done more than leave – indeed – a little monument of broken glass at his doorstep.