Winter Kills (11 page)

MONDAY, JANUARY 1, 1900—SAN FRANCISCO

Thomas Xavier Kegan was a professional Irishman and a professional American—each kept separate from the other. The operative word “professional” is, as a noun: (a) one who professes to be skilled in and to follow assiduously the calling or occupation by which he habitually earns a living; (b) one who trains himself in the skills required for theoretic and scientific exploitation of an occupation, as distinct from its merely mechanical parts, which raises the occupation to the dignity of a learned profession.

Annually, for thirty-one years, Pa had been Honorary Grand Master of a St. Patrick’s Day parade, which he attended in one American city or another. He kept a card file of eleven thousand, four hundred Pat-and-Mike jokes which he told, with a “brogue” that was a mixture of Polish, Japanese and Italian accents, at Holy Name Society breakfasts, at banquets given by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Knights of Columbus, at alumni dinners at Notre Dame and Holy Cross universities; and he had been known to tell Irish dialect stories to Eamon de Valera in The Park.

He was a member of nineteen Irish fraternal societies in Boston, New York, Liverpool, Capetown and Manchester. He had been granted the Freedom of Bodmor Truth in Rathfarnham, sponsored by Lord Butterfield himself, aged ninety-nine years. He had been awarded the Daithi Hanly Medal for Gaelgoiri twice, with its accompanying certificate made out to his Gaelic name, Tomaltac X. MacAogain. He owned offshore
Irish oil leases. He wore green neckties and buttonhole shamrocks for the week preceding and the week following the anniversary of the death of Cromwell. He had disciplined himself to be able to tolerate Irish instrumental folk music, a talent that is almost impossible for the nonnative to acquire. Four times he had been offered the ambassadorship to Ireland by four importuning American Presidents (including his son), but each time he had, agonizingly, to refuse. He owned an Irish copper mine, an assembly plant for joining together the parts of a certain popular automobile, and an Irish road-building company of some prominence among politicians in Dublin. He had barmbrack flown to him twice a week, to Palm Springs, from O’Keefe’s own bakery in Schull on Roaringwater Bay in West Cork—and boxes of carrageen.

These partisan manifestations were droll. If he had known the truth, he might have needed to be restrained with wet winding sheets and might (almost) have returned his many papal honors and his Irish marching society medals. Ethically and ethnically Tim’s Presidency would have had to be declared unconstitutional. Significant electoral votes, as ethnic as soda bread, such as those of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, would need to have been bestowed retroactively upon his opponent.

Thomas Xavier Kegan had no Irish ancestry. His father’s name had not been Kegan nor had that of any of his progenitors. Further, his ancestral family had all been Lutherans. The family name was Kiegelberg.

In 1849, at age twenty-six, Thomas Kegan’s grandfather, Jakob Kiegelberg, a peasant from Scheraldgrün, a small Alpine village in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, had emigrated to join the California gold rush. The Kiegelbergs had always been cursed with arrogance, feeling themselves as people apart from and above the world because of their uniqueness in the mountain-and-snow-locked valley. Of the 606 people living there, 310 were named Marton, 126 were called
Ketcham, 170 were known as Lear, and for 234 years, until Jakob Kiegelberg left the valley, only one family was called Kiegelberg.

When Jakob had made his fortune in the northern gold fields (the Ornstein Nugget) he moved to southern California, where he married Gertrude Garfunkel. In 1868 their son, Heini, absconded with his father’s principal savings, which caused his father’s death. Heini fled to San Francisco, where (using the name Hank Kegan despite his heavy Scheraldgrün accent, conferred by his father) he built a large saloon in the Barbary Coast district of the city and named it Kegan’s. As Hank Kegan, Heini married an Italian girl from the Lugano area of Switzerland (Maerose Carnaghi).

On New Year’s Day 1900, Heini and Maerose Kiegelberg-Kegan had a son born. His name was Thomas, then pronounced Toe-mahss. The infant’s parents and all records of his true family name at baptism, Kiegelberg, were destroyed in the great San Francisco earthquake, which began on April 18, 1906. The authorities entered the boy’s name as Thomas Kegan, taking the name from the child’s father’s saloon. Little Tom was raised by the Little Sisters of the Poor in a sound San Mateo boarding school for the children of the rich. The Little Sisters gave him the name Xavier at his confirmation. His father’s considerable estate appreciated at the Crocker Bank.

Ever endowed with the mystical gift of piercing the heart of any matter instantly if the heart of the matter concerned money, Thomas Kegan sought and was granted a court order that forced the Little Sisters of the Poor (how he hated that designation!) to release him into the guardianship of the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Swaine, O’Connell, Cravath & O’Connell. He wanted his money put to work. At fourteen he qualified to enter the University of Notre Dame, and was graduated from that institution with honors for sports, religion and Irish studies. At eighteen he enrolled at the Wharton School of Business at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he won two graduate degrees in accountancy and advanced finance in three years.

In 1923, at twenty-three, he was ready for the expanding bull market and for Prohibition. He was also readier than most when the slide began in 1929 to transmogrify himself into a ruthless bear. By 1934, at thirty-four, he had increased his father’s pleasant eight-hundred-thousand-dollar legacy to a far pleasanter five million, six hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash and shrewdly bought (meaning entirely with bank loans) Chinese boxes of real-estate parcels in eleven American cities worth thirty-one million, one hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars (a 1934 evaluation). He realized a net profit of two hundred and seventy-three million dollars from even shrewder investments in liquor stocks and liquor production, using them to circumvent the Prohibition law. He sold his liquor interests to eastern Mafia families whom he had helped to establish and who had worked for him in the mid-thirties, and reinvested the funds in founding personal loan-financing companies in twenty-eight states to provide welcome short-term small loans for his fellow Americans at 39 percent annual interest, and in three competing pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, which were to grow and expand (in the sixties) to produce 9,400 kilograms (2.5 billion pills) of amphetamines and 5,382 kilograms of methamphetamines, which was 61 percent of the total (U.S.) market, as well as 23 percent of the tranquilizer and sleeping-pill market, with marketing problems greatly diminished through the help of the same grateful Mafia families. He balanced his cash investment in these home products and home banking with heavy buying into weapons-producing firms so that he could later feel he was backing up the Vietnam war effort when that effort cried out for help. He had done most of his major investing well before the wondrous 1960 decade.

Fourteen years after Tim’s mother’s death, Pa married his new, beautiful and in every way splendid wife,
who became the mother of Nicholas one year after that. She divorced Pa two and a half years after that when, to her chagrin, Pa had infected her with a contagious catarrhal inflammation of the genital mucous membrane due to
Neisseria gonorrhoeae
. For this affront Pa paid Nicholas’ mother ten million dollars and the custody of Nicholas.

In her modulated farewell Mrs. Kegan called Pa a guttersnipe, and for whatever reason far, far back in his extraordinary snobbism, which concealed his lack of belief in his own worth, Pa accepted this description as true. Therefore, after Mrs. Kegan became Mrs. Thirkield (and was later killed) he was forced to feel deep ambivalence toward her son.

Nicholas knew well that his mother had been negatively moved by his father. She had not withheld her opinions of Pa during their son’s plastic years. By the time Nicholas was nine and his mother was dead, Nicholas had been formed by her opinions and was unable to feel other than infinitely superior to his father and to his half brother.

This was not Pa’s fault. More likely it was the fault of the necessity that had made Heini Kiegelberg-Kegan steal from
his
father, thus affecting his conscience and making him seek punishment by accepting snarls and humiliations from other older men whose advice helped make him rich. This cringing attitude in his father may have signaled the basic family inferiority to little Thomas, a six-year-old boy, so that even after a succession of brilliant accomplishments, when a beautiful woman of the world for whom he had the most respect was impelled by her shame to call him a guttersnipe, he had accepted that as truth, and in so doing had confirmed the belief in this of his wife and son.

As the years took Nick and his father wider and wider apart, this confirmation gave authority to her teachings to her son. His half brother, Nicholas observed, was merely a satellite of his father and was therefore of the same common substance. Nicholas had
been given reason for his undeniable arrogance by the towering nature of the superiority he felt for (a) the President of the United States and (b) a self-made multibillionaire—together the two most imposing American institutions.

Tim never knew this, because Tim had skin thicker by far than the blood that is thicker than water. Tim loved his silly little brother, who he thought was silly because he worked so hard to alienate the source whence all good things flowed—Pa. Nick was “little” to Tim because Tim was six feet three inches tall and Nick was about five feet nine. Like all tall men, Tim figured everyone else’s hostile acts in terms of the number of inches of height the offender lacked.

Only Pa thought he knew what the deep displacement between himself and Nick was all about. His son obviously thought he, Thomas Kegan, was a guttersnipe. Nick saw it somewhat differently but in effect just as clearly: his father held him in contempt because he would not let his father run him as he had run Tim, because although his father was of a caste to give orders to Tim, it would be altogether unseemly for him to attempt to give orders to Nick—circular frustrations circularly arrived at.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 1974—PALM SPRINGS

When Nick awoke in Palm Springs the next morning it was half past ten. He was still exhausted from so many airplanes. He remembered the Philadelphia police commissioner and scrambled out of bed, was showered and dressed in twelve minutes, then called the kitchen to ask them to send him a pot of tea to his father’s office.

Pa looked like a heap of ashes tied up in golfing clothes. As Nick came in he shook his head sadly. “I talked to Philadelphia. Miles Gander has disappeared.”

“Miles is always traveling. That’s the kind of business he’s in.”

Pa nodded blankly. “Yeah. But the Engelson Building manager and John Kullers of 603 are dead.”

“
Dead?
”

“Suicides, Frey said. But he doesn’t believe it.”

“No,” Nick said.

“I told Frey I’d pay for an all-points on Miles. And I put my own people out to find him.”

“And Heller didn’t die of any heart attack.”

“Three out of five people who saw that rifle are dead. In twenty-six hours.”

“And the rifle is gone,” Nick said. “And no depositions could be taken. Did the package come in from Keifetz this morning?”

“Not yet. But you gotta give it another day. This isn’t 1955. They walk the mail in now.”

“I can’t explain it—but John Kullers knew he was going to be killed when he saw us find that rifle.”

“We must find Miles.” Pa stared at him with great concern. “And suppose Miles is dead? We’ll still have Fletcher’s deposition. But that isn’t enough without the rifle. We can’t go to the President with just that deposition. But what would we be going to the President for? To persuade him to reopen an investigation. Until we find the rifle or find Miles we could start our own investigation.”

Nick looked away from his father. He was in the oil business. He wasn’t a policeman. He didn’t think that the fact that three other people had died because they had seen the rifle meant that he might be killed himself. He just thought of the time it would take and the time he would have to spend with Pa that he could be spending with Yvette Malone. Then he thought of Kullers and Mr. Coney. They certainly hadn’t asked to be declared into this thing. They were dead because they happened to be standing in the wrong place, and, to a large extent, they were dead because of him.

“People would talk to you because you’re Tim’s brother. They’d talk to you because of me in other cases. You and me and Tim are a powerful combination, Nick, and I’d give you as many trained men as you need.”

The light on the switchboard turned on. Pa picked up the phone. He listened, then handed the phone to Nick. “It’s for you. A call from Brunei.”

Nick took the phone. “Hello? Yes, Daisy.” He listened. His face changed into a twist of grief. “No!” His legs seemed to give way. He leaned on the desk. “This is terrible. This is the worst. Daisy—Daisy, please—try to pull yourself together. Daisy, I know, I know—he was a fine man. But there was something he was trying to do and I have to know. What happened to the deposition and the fingerprints?” He listened. At last he hung up.

“Keifetz is dead,” he told Pa. “The lawyer who took the deposition is dead. The stenographer is dead.”

“Is the deposition in the mail?” Pa asked harshly.

“No. It was with Keifetz. We are supposed to believe he fell off a rig and drowned.”

“Then that’s the end of that.”

“No,” Nick said grimly. “The deposition is only lost, Pa. Like the rifle. Somebody has them, and we have to get them back.”

***

Keifetz was dead. Keifetz had been more of a father to him than Pa had ever been. Kullers was a total stranger, but he had been a valiant man, and his death somehow meant more to Nick than Tim’s murder had. Life was all a thing of trying to make contact. He had made it with Keifetz and Kullers. It had eluded him with Pa and Tim, and no interminable talk about families could change that. He felt a need to avenge Keifetz. The same man had bought the deaths of all those people. He had bought a blood lust for Nick at last.