Winter Kills (2 page)

***

Nick worked for his own oil company, Jemnito International, of which Pa owned 18 percent of the profits. Pa had fought for 50 percent of the profits, but Nick had dug in, and they had fought it out face-to-face and by telephone for one entire winter, Nick cutting him down and down and down. Nick had finally had to sign away an equal percentage of what Pa said he would inherit in Pa’s will (which was nothing but blackmail, Nick told him), but Nick didn’t want a dime of Pa’s money anyway (it would be like being a receiver of stolen goods, he said).

“You are a real cold-ass kid,” Pa told him admiringly.

“And you are a real crooked, greedy negotiator,” Nick said.

“What the hell is this? That’s how it’s done. You wanna win, you play to win. Start handing out breaks to the other guy and it only means you wanna lose. You don’t give away millions, like you just did, to make thousands, for what you think—for about five minutes—is some fucking principle. You must be some kind of a nut or a Jesus-freak.”

“Just figure it that I’m against free rides,” Nick said. “For me and anybody else.”

“You gotta take care of your
self
, Nick. Nobody else will. Look at me. I don’t know how I made it this far all in one piece. Shit, you’d think I have the best security
in the world, but I’m telling you if I started to look around me at the people closest to me, I wouldn’t sleep nights. Take Nolan, an army General, my roommate at Notre Dame. I made that son-of-a-bitch, just because he happened to get assigned to room with me in a jerkwater Midwestern college. But let anybody come to him from Texas with a hard-luck story and he’d cut off my balls to help him out. All right. Take Cerutti. Cerutti is not only the best research-and-development mind in the world outside of two Japs and a Swede who can’t speak English, he is a full professor I bought right out of Yale, the big time. All right. He’s sick. He can’t stand people around him. So I made it possible that he didn’t have to earn a living like every other rope-puller in the world. Sure, he’s a very smart, imaginative man with the best analytic mind except three guys I couldn’t communicate with. I pay that reclusive little prick two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to handle all investigations for me and make them come out right, and I bought him a whole fucking island to himself so he wouldn’t have to look at people. So what happens? He thinks I’m just a little Mick on the make. He thinks he’s
superior
to me. And I’m telling you this. If he
did
deign to talk to people, this egomaniac egghead, the first thing he would do would be to pull me down just to make himself look superior.”

“Pa, for Christ’s sake,” Nick said. “You’re seventy years old or something and you look great. Also, you’re getting a more than fair salesman’s commission for a couple of telephone calls, and next year that’ll bring you in about four hundred thousand dollars and help your own son to get started in business besides.”

“Nick—you’re going to be out on oil rigs working with your hands with no shirt on, and you’re going to be taking home sixty-four percent
more
than I get for actually bringing in the business.”

“Right. Because it’s my company. I’ll make the company—nobody else—while I stagger around with it,
paying out eighteen percent to a salesman. And that’s why I don’t have to wait around until they read the will on
your
money.”

“You’re a hard kid, Nick. It nearly breaks my heart.”

They looked at each other right at that second and they both began to laugh. They fell about laughing together, and it was the first and last time they ever did.

Nick had a buffer against Pa and the oil business, a man named Keifetz. Keifetz wasn’t as old as Pa by easily fifteen years, but he had been more of a father than Pa had ever wanted to be. Keifetz was on his side, not on Pa’s or anybody else’s. He was a powerful, hairy man with a comic-strip moustache like Stalin’s mother’s and a right hand that could maybe punch holes in the average office safe. Keifetz could hold liquor, pacify women and explain politics. That was the shaman side of him for Nick: he could explain politics to Nick the way Lionel Barrymore had been able to explain the common cold to Dr. Kildare. Nick used to think that there was the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It had taken Keifetz a long time to explain why this wasn’t so, but after that, after Nick had been able to comprehend that there was only
one
political party, formed by the two pretend parties wearing their labels like party hats and joining their hands in a circle around their prey, all the rest of it came much easier. Pa said Keifetz was a fucking radical. Nick felt much safer with Keifetz than he ever had with Pa.

Keifetz got 3 percent of the Jemnito profits on a ramp basis that would get him up to 7 percent if the profits kept increasing. He didn’t get the percentage because he was Nick’s very reliable friend. Keifetz was the best tool-pusher and all-around oil man they had in the business in South America, the Near East, Asia or anywhere else.

Nick owned all the shares in the company. He had invested two-thirds of the money his mother had left him. Pa had invested information and clout only.

Jemnito was headquartered, in an intricate tax troika arrangement that seemed to exhaust tax collectors, in the Republic of San Marino, in the Faroe Islands, and in Bhutan, but was operated out of London as an Irish-Nigerian company. It was currently producing oil off Bangladesh and in the South China Sea off Brunei. It was about to begin negotiations for the concession to prospect on the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia. All oil leases exploited by Jemnito were obtained by Pa from his many friends, who were government ministers, reigning generals, sultans, presidents and others well disposed and dispersed.

Nick liked the oil business for solid reasons. It kept him remote from his father, who had believed in thrusting the world on Tim while ignoring Nick. So Nick ignored Pa. Pa had bought immortality for Tim—a sainthood for a family that had everything. Pa got what he wanted. The other reason Nick liked the oil business was that it produced the dramatic kind of wealth his father respected. Pa found it difficult to measure men who had only three, four or even five million dollars. People who had less than that did not exist for Pa any more than plankton existed for a whale.

But no matter how hard Nick tried, Pa looked right through him. Nick told himself Pa couldn’t see him because he wasn’t President of the United States. It was all pretty silly stuff and it hurt. Nick answered all of it by keeping ten or fifteen thousand miles between them.

Nick’s mother (who had conducted the Albany Symphony Orchestra, with Dame Maria Van Slyke as soloist, in a performance of “Rastus’s Dream,” Mrs. Thirkield’s own composition, at a charity concert held at Palazzo Bonetti, her home and shrine near Utica, New York, where her second husband, Gabriel Thirkield, manufactured superior harmonicas) had insisted that Nick learn to play the piano really well. Nick had studied piano formally from the time he was five until he was twenty-two. When he was moved across the continent to his father’s house after his mother’s sudden
death, Tim had told him (Nick being nine at the time and Tim almost twenty-four) that Pa considered piano playing to be “faggy,” this delivered in Tim’s bland, wary way from behind his remote gray eyes. The put-on was part of Tim’s famous emotional detachment, which also, Nick came to see, kept him out of conflict with Pa. It was a projection of calm weakness experienced tensely. Nick finally discovered that his brother was always fearful that Pa, or the world (in that order), would catch him out in a mistake. Despite the heroic detachment, it tended to make him excessively dependent on other people.

Tim’s big piano warning had the wrong effect on Nick, who concentrated with redoubled vigor on his piano studies, until Pa actually remarked how much he was beginning to enjoy listening to Nick play. As soon as he said it, Nick stopped playing on the full piano when Pa was near. He played on a silent practice keyboard. As he got older and went away to school, on the occasions when he did visit Pa he would set up the silent keyboard in his father’s sight and play on it lustily. For many years he actually believed he was depriving Pa of pleasure. Later he understood that Pa probably thought that reading books was “faggy.” There were books in all Pa’s houses but they were placed far from where they could corrupt Pa. Pa owned paintings and sculpture, but all he appreciated about any beauty was how much it had cost him and how much he could stick the next buyer for it. Pa hardly ever drank his own wine, because that would be cutting into capital. “You don’t have to read books, kid, if you can read a balance sheet,” he told Nick (when he was fourteen) in a rare bit of father-and-son tenderness. Pa wasn’t a Philistine, Tim explained, he was more of a barbarian. To put it one way: Pa was not one of Nick’s friends, but Nick loved him.

Nick had three friends. Keith Lee, his oldest and most seldom seen friend, was the son of Pa’s Chinese butler. Next came Keifetz, who had been working with
Nick since Nick had rushed to the Orient in 1958, when Pa had gotten him and his mining engineer’s degree an offshore job with Gulf. Last in calendar order (but first in the heart of her countryman) was Yvette Malone. Nick was in love with Yvette Malone, but just the same she was his friend. Three strong friends were a lot for a rich man to have, Tim had told him. But Tim had been like Pa, he hadn’t wanted friends, just people on whom he could be dependent and who were certified to appreciate his wit and wisdom. It all worked out backward. Why not, Nick thought. By 1974 the big difference between Tim and Nick, Nick felt, was essentially that he had three friends, and Tim, although dead for fourteen years, had approximately three hundred million.

***

Nick flew off the pad on the high stern of the
Teekay
on a rainy night. He was the only passenger in the ship’s twenty-six-seat Sikorsky S-61N that Mitsubishi had built under license for Pa (Pa having gone into Japan with his money and his specialists as a spiritual part of the treaty MacArthur had produced). It was fully amphibious, with twin stabilizing floats, and was cleared for all-weather operation. It had a 275-mile range.

The chopper had a crew of three, and ordinarily Nick would have visited with them all the way in to Brunei, but he had been telling Pa for the past seventeen days that the
Teekay
was as perfectly checked out as it could ever be, and still he couldn’t get away to get back to his own business, because Pa now wanted him to start all the goddam tests over again for the third time. Sometimes he wasn’t exactly clear on whether he was lurking around Asia with dirty fingernails in order to stay away from Pa or whether Pa was delighted to pile time on him to keep him in Asia safely out of the way. But safely out of the way of what? Or did he go through all these elaborate rituals just to bug Nick. They both knew at least three men as qualified or more
qualified to ran the shakedown on the
Teekay
, but Pa had insisted that he do it, then do it over and over. Someday he’d have to have a long talk with Pa and try to find out who was staying out of whose way. It was a pain in the ass to belong to any family, he thought, but to be in the same family with Pa was like having an anal fistula and having to run the hundred-meter dash in the Olympics. He moped in a seat at the back of the chopper trying to figure out what he could do to get off the goddam
Teekay
. Maybe Keifetz would have an angle. He supposed he should get laid or something now that he would be ashore, because he would be crazy if he didn’t, even if he was too goddam exhausted to get his pants off.

When they put down at the Shell airport in Brunei, Keifetz was there sweating Tiger beer. It was ten thirty at night, pouring down some hard January rain.

“Seasonal weather,” Keifetz apologized. Nick realized that he had never bothered to find out Keifetz’ first name. Maybe Keifetz didn’t have one. He liked it the way it was, just Keifetz. Who ever called a tiger Eddie Tiger?

“Is he still alive?” Nick asked stiffly, because he had to carry out being sore at the way Keifetz had hustled him off the drill ship.

“He’ll hang in until he talks to you.” Keifetz wrestled Nick’s suitcase away from him, waving amiably at the customs officer and speaking to him in rapid Bahasa.

The Jemnito company car was a 1965 Dodge half track. Nick sulked and Keifetz pretended he had traffic problems until they got out on the highway, then Keifetz said, “This crane operator has been with us four years, which is pretty fantastic. I signed him on first in East Pakistan. When we moved he showed up on the next job. I asked him how come. He said it was a privilege to work for Tim Kegan’s brother, you dig?”

“Oh, shit.”

“After he came to, he knew he was a goner, so he asked me if I could get you here and he told me why.”

“Who is he?” Nick asked with irritation.

“His name is Turk Fletcher. When he signed on he even had a reference. It was a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from General Nolan—that friend of your family.”

“General
No
lan?
James
Nolan, Tim’s old commanding officer?”

“That’s him. You know him?”

“I never met him. He’s been Pa’s caretaker up at Rockrimmon, in Connecticut, almost ever since the war was over. This man’s name is Turk Fletcher?”

“Yeah.”

“I know most of our guys. I never heard of him.”

“So he was in the cab fifty-one fucking feet over your head whenever you came aboard. Whatta you want?”

“Okay, tell me.”

“He said he was Number Two rifle when they killed your brother.”

“Oh, come on! You’re a fanatic on this. There was no second rifle.”

“Only according to the Pickering Report.”

“Do you believe this guy?” Nick was incredulous.

“Let’s say I believe there was a second rifle.”

“Suppose there was a second rifle. What am I supposed to do about it?”

Keifetz shrugged. “Let me put it this way: the Pickering Commission didn’t want to know anything about a second rifle so why should you—right?”