Authors: Stephen White
“Of course. I think I’m feeling the same way.”
“Yes, that’s understandable. We should have anticipated it from the beginning, but … Regardless, an event — usually external, something regrettable and tragic with a friend, or a loved one — would usually help these clients clearly see the peace of mind that comes with full enrollment in our program. With me?”
“Yes.”
“To accommodate our clients’ needs, we’ve adapted our service so that the contract is considered quiescent —”
“Which means revocable?”
“Inactive, actually, until the client makes the second payment. Prior to that point, the client is betting that he will not suffer an activating event.”
“And an activating event is defined as …”
“We have a basic definition, which provides a minimum threshold for activation. The client may choose more exacting criteria, if he or she chooses.”
“The basic definition includes what exactly?”
I felt as though I were pulling teeth. It was like trying to get the guy from Allstate to tell me whether I had coverage if my basement flooded after a heavy rain.
Come on, yes or no?
The waiter approached the table. My host, who was about to answer my question, paused.
THIRTEEN
I needed a break to consider what he had said so far. Arranging my own death was a much more complicated undertaking than I had anticipated. The Yebisu had taken its inevitable toll and I excused myself at that moment to go to the bathroom. I noticed the Death Angel was watching my hands as I stood up from the table and dropped my napkin onto the chair.
When I returned a few moments later the table had been cleared. Totally cleared. Plates, chopsticks, soy, Yebisu, sake, Pellegrino. Everything except my half-filled glass of beer.
Antiseptically cleared,
I thought.
“I thought we’d pass on dessert,” he said. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all. I’ve had more than enough to eat. It was terrific.”
“Tea?”
“No, thank you. You were discussing the addition of the ‘quiescent’ period to your company’s protocol, and you were about to describe the basic criteria for an activating event.”
“Yes, I was. Some clients, it turned out, fear accidents more than they fear illness. Others fear illness more than they fear accidents. The ones that have a personal experience with or a family history of debilitating illness are typically looking for a net that they can put in place when the feared diagnosis looms … nearer, so to speak. A man of fifty worries about heart disease more than the man of forty. Yes? You understand? Alzheimer’s is typically more of a concern as we age.”
“Yes.”
“The addition of the quiescent option allowed everyone to have what they need. Those seeking protection against a debilitating accident could have the comfort of knowing the policy was in effect immediately after the eligibility assessment, should they choose. Those who were more concerned with the effects of serious illness could choose to extend the quiescent period until a diagnosis loomed closer.”
“Gotcha,” I said, as the rationale for the arcane structure became more clear. “The aforementioned second payment. An additional fee is associated with activation?”
“The initial deposit covers one decade of our services. Then we charge one million dollars for each five years of additional life expectancy, which is based on an actuarial evaluation completed at the time of the initial assessment. The total fee is paid in advance, of course. That is the second payment.”
“For a young man, total premiums could approach … ten, six zeros,” I said.
“Yes. For a very young man. Now, if our services are never required, and the client dies naturally or accidentally prior to his expected longevity, any fees unearned by us — the actuarially derived life expectancy less the actual age at the time of death — are anonymously donated to a charity identified by the client at the time the contract is entered. No moneys are ever — ever — returned to a client’s estate after his or her death.”
I raised my eyebrows just to see what he’d do.
“For obvious reasons,” he said.
“Of course,” I concurred.
“I’m sure you understand.”
“I do.”
“Our promise? We are prepared to act in case of an unexpected event from the moment we receive the second payment. But once the contract becomes active, the irrevocable nature of our commitment requires a nonrefundable investment on the part of the client.”
Our waiter chose that moment to deliver the tab. My host took a fast glance at the total, pulled a thick clip of currency from his front trouser pocket, snapped three large bills from the wad, and left them spread on the table like a winning poker hand. He pocketed the restaurant check.
The tasting menu at Nobu was apparently pricey.
“The next step?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t have any trouble getting a taxi.”
More humor, I supposed.
He shrugged. It was a-guy’s-gotta-try kind of shrug. I gave him points for recognizing that his humor was going over with me like a Chris Rock monologue at a Focus on the Family picnic.
“If you would like to apply for enrollment, I will provide instructions on how to make the initial deposit. At that point we will begin our evaluation. I assure you of our discretion.”
“I would like to apply.”
I surprised myself with the pronouncement. I hadn’t been aware that I’d reached a decision.
He nodded. “Consider it done. Please open a new mobile-phone account with this carrier” — he reached into his lapel pocket and slid a small card across the table imprinted with the name of one of the national mobile-phone companies — “and give the number to no one. No one, do you understand?”
“Yes. I’m a quick study. How do I get the number to you?”
“We’ll know the number within hours of activation. And we’ll be in touch shortly thereafter.”
“So,” I said. “How many clients does your organization … serve?”
“I’m so sorry. I would love to be more forthcoming about details like that. Rest assured that we have sufficient resources to cover our obligations. However, we do try to be ever so discreet. For our own protection, and especially for that of our clients.”
I decided to try a different tack. “You have had circumstances develop where it has become necessary for you to … follow through on the ultimate terms of the agreement? On … hastening.”
He leaned forward and pursed his lips so that the unnaturally dark color momentarily disappeared. For the first time he whispered. “We call them end-of-life services.” He leaned back and resumed his normal speaking voice.
“Like a hospice?”
He couldn’t tell if I was joking. It was exactly what I had intended.
“Please understand our position. When you choose to enroll, we’ll discuss those mechanisms, and others, in more detail, much more detail. I assure you that we do endeavor to be discreet both before and after our clients’ deaths, which means we do everything possible to shield their families from the actual circumstances of the loved one’s … end. To an outsider, either a loved one or a forensic professional, the circumstances of a client’s death will never appear suspect.” He smiled an undertaker’s smile. “We’ve not yet failed to provide that shield. We don’t expect to fail in the future. Is there anything else you would like to know?”
He stood to leave at that point — expecting that I would have no other questions, or at least expecting that I would have the good sense not to ask them. I watched curiously as, holding his napkin in his right hand, he wiped the linen, seemingly absently, over the top rail of the chair.
I realized he’d just wiped away any fingerprints he might have inadvertently left behind during our meal.
The guy was dead serious about discretion.
“Please,” he said, gesturing me toward the restaurant door. “I have to make a stop before I leave.”
He had to pee, I guessed. He was discreet about even that.
I thanked him for the meal, and we said good-bye without shaking hands.
When I stepped outside, I walked into a day that had turned gray and was threatening the city with rain. I found myself hoping that my new, old friend was waiting for me with her chauffeured Town Car and her probing fingers.
No such luck.
I succeeded in hailing a cab right away and felt lucky to have it. I told the driver to take me out to Teterboro Airport in Jersey, where Mary would be waiting to take me home. The cabbie made a point of telling me how much the ride would cost. I was thinking about other things. I said, “Fine.”
FOURTEEN
“I’d like to come back,” I said to my Boulder shrink at the end of that first day’s pair of sessions. “This has been fun.”
“Sarcasm? Yes?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” he said. “When?”
“Soon, maybe. Same arrangement. Two visits in one day. That works for me. When can you do it again?”
He picked up an old-fashioned appointment book, not a handheld computer. He spent a moment checking this and that before he said, “Thursday this week. Or Tuesday next.”
“Thursday this week.”
“You’re feeling some urgency?” he asked.
Yeah, you could say that.
“What times do you have?”
“Ten-thirty and two-fifteen.”
“Can do. It’s been a pleasure,” I said, standing.
“If that remains the case,” he said, still in his seat, “then I’m not going to be of much help to you.”
“And that means … what?”
“My impression is that you’re a guy who walks into a room and takes it over. Either by charm, or by skill, or by sheer force of will. If none of those things work, you’ll do it by fiat. But you’ll do it.”
I didn’t disagree with him. I did like to run the world, or at least any part of it that I was currently inhabiting. I hadn’t been like that my whole life — people who knew me when I was younger would’ve called me a free spirit — but I’d been like that since I’d decided to make some money.
But I was curious about exactly what point the psychologist was making. So I waited him out. To my surprise my wait wasn’t long.
“If I permit that to happen here,” he said, “I’ll be conspiring with you to waste your time. And wasting your time, I’m afraid, given your circumstances and your agenda, whatever it is, would be a crime.”
“How do you know so much about me?” I asked. “Or think you know so much?” He did know a lot, and then he didn’t, but I wanted to see how he’d respond to being thrown a bone. I sat back down to hear his answer.
He took a quick glance at his watch deciding, I thought, whether or not he had time to answer me.
He said, “I only know what you’ve taught me. When you meet somebody, if you shut up and give them half a chance, in a remarkably short period of time they’ll teach you almost everything you need to know about them. If it’s important that you know the person, and understand him, the trick is to pay attention during the lessons and be the best student of that person you can be. That’s how I know what I know about you. You are the expert on you in this room, not me. You’ve been teaching me things about you that you aren’t even aware have been part of the lesson plan. As you teach me about you, I try to pay attention, to be the very best student I can be.”
“I’ve told you almost nothing about me,” I said. But what I was thinking was,
This guy does his work the same way I do mine. I pay attention. If there’s any way at all to pull it off, I will let the guy on the other side of the table show his cards before he’s ready.
I knew my retort had been weak.
He knew that, too. He said, “Facts are crap.”
FIFTEEN
I drove out to Jeffco Airport and left my new Prius in the parking lot at the FBO — Fixed Base Operator; think airplane service station, but with a clean bathroom — that had fueled the plane. Patience isn’t one of my long suits, so I paid one of the line guys, a kid, twenty bucks to wrestle the car cover into place on the Toyota, a task that seemed to me like trying to force a cantaloupe into a condom.
Mary had spent the day antiquing north of Boulder and a few of her finds were strapped into seats in the back of the plane.
She came back into the cabin when I came on board, but she didn’t ask what I’d been up to. She never did. Trace, the copilot, stayed up front doing preflight checks.
The flight over to Montrose was uneventful.
Little that happened those days felt uneventful, so a smooth flight over the Divide was a wonder.
Facts
are crap.
Is that true?
SIXTEEN
I wasn’t aware there was going to be an interim meeting in the enrollment process, but I was summoned back to New York three weeks to the day after I made the initial payments to Death Angel, Inc. As I had been instructed during the first call I’d received on that mobile phone I’d been told to buy, I’d dutifully sent the required funds in a shotgun pattern to multiple offshore destinations, the money going to a wide variety of charitable fronts.
My favorite was the 225K I “donated” to the ever so ironically named Youth in Asia Foundation.
It was in Singapore.
Yeah, and I was on the moon.
My assistant, LaBelle, handled the transfers for me. She handled the details and the paperwork related to everything important in my life, both business and personal. I could tell she had questions about what I was doing with all that money, even opened her mouth once to ask me about it.
I held up an open hand and said, “Don’t go there, LaBelle. This one’s a state secret. Okay?”
She shook her head once. That was her statement of underlying disapproval. She nodded twice. That was her assent to my caution. I knew that would be that.
LaBelle was my rock.
The “eligibility assessment” had been completely transparent. I assumed it was ongoing, but I never noticed a thing. None of the people who typically act as the pillars that support the temples of the wealthy — my accountant, my attorney, my bankers, my financial advisors, my business partners — ever called me late at night to clue me in that someone was checking up on me or my affairs.
Jimmy Lee never pulled me aside and asked me how things were going in New York.
The Death Angels were as discreet as advertised.
The second time that my private mobile phone rang — okay, it actually vibrated — the caller was inviting me to make a return visit to New York City. The caller was a woman.
The voice sounded familiar. I asked, “With whom am I speaking?”
My question caused the woman to stumble for a split second, but not to fall. She continued to spell out the details of the “invitation.” I tried small talk, and I even made an allusion to the Town Car heading downtown on Park Avenue. My flirtations were rebuffed, or more correctly, ignored. The call was all business.
Of course I wondered whether I’d been speaking with the woman with the traveling fingers, the one from the backseat of the Town Car.
Mary flew me to New York the night before the meeting. The copilot that day was a temp named Andre who’d flown with us before, but wasn’t interested in our gig on a permanent basis. It was too bad; we both liked him. I asked Mary to do a couple of things for me in the city the next day. She asked if I minded if she visited her cousin in Brooklyn when she was done. I assured her I didn’t.
I checked into a park-view room at the Four Seasons on 57th Street. I could have afforded an immense suite with a view of the park — hell, if I liquidated some things I could have made a respectable offer to buy the whole damn hotel — but I chose a standard room with a view of the park. I like luxurious hotel rooms but I don’t like big hotel rooms. They don’t feel right to me. I’ve never liked huge bathtubs either.
Don’t know what that’s all about.
If I ever got around to having the luxury of confronting my secondary demons, it’s something I’d consider working out with a shrink.
A bowl of fruit, a bottle of Badoit, and an ice bucket with a tall bottle of Yebisu — nice touch, I admit — awaited me when I walked into the hotel room. I hadn’t told anyone but LaBelle and Thea where I was staying in New York, so the fact that the Death Angel had tracked me to the Four Seasons was the real message. It wasn’t super-spy stuff, but it was a message nonetheless.
The presence of the Badoit was the exclamation point, however. Badoit is mineral water from France — think Pellegrino, but France, not Italy.
Maybe five or six people in the world knew that Badoit was my preferred sparkling water; to my knowledge I’d never made a big deal of that predilection with anyone. If you hadn’t had dinner with me in Paris or Nice, you wouldn’t know I had a thing for Badoit.
But the Death Angel knew.
The note on the silver tray with the fruit and water wasn’t signed. The neat, androgynous script welcomed me to New York and suggested — ha! — an eleven A.M. rendezvous in the main lobby at MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn’t been back to MOMA since Taniguchi’s overhaul had begun, so I planned to walk over early and check out the progress that had been made to the building before I made my way back to the street-level lobby.
They’re too infrequent, but New York City sometimes has days that are as crystalline as anything I get to experience four days out of five in Ridgway. What’s different in the city is that the inhabitants recognize how special those days are and they all come out to celebrate. On glorious days in Manhattan the sidewalks come alive, the plazas and parks fill with people, and cafés and restaurants push tables out into the sunshine. On those days a descent into the dreary subway feels like torture, and for a few fleeting hours visitors and tourists have no trouble believing that there really are so many people squeezed onto that little island.
I woke to one of those days in Manhattan, and — like a few hundred thousand other people who decided to skip school, or work, or whatever to enjoy the weather — I gave up on my plan to spend the morning inside the usually irresistible galleries of MOMA.
She caught me on the sidewalk just outside the entrance to the museum on 53rd Street. I wondered if I was under surveillance.
Did it matter?
Nah.
She wasn’t the elegant and sophisticated Park Avenue lady this time; she wore denim jeans that celebrated her ass and a supple leather jacket that was layered over a thin sweater that scooped down to reveal the swell at the top of her breasts. This was the costume of an Upper West Side wife heading out for lunch and some minor-league shopping with her girlfriends. Not Bergdorf shopping, or Henri Bendel shopping, or Jimmy Choo shopping. Not even Madison Avenue boutique shopping. Something slightly downscale and funky.
I wasn’t surprised by the exuberance of her greeting this time around; I was actually looking forward to it. I’d already removed my jacket to make the initial body search easier for her, and more fun for me.
“Hi,” I said into her ear as she pressed herself against me and her hands rubbed up and down my back. “If we’re going to pretend to be so closely acquainted, I should probably know what to call you.”
“Call me Lizzie,” she whispered back. “Nobody else does. It can be our special thing.”
She pulled away from me and took my jacket from my hands. For the next few moments, as she absently palpated its seams and folds without appearing to be doing anything at all, I felt an incongruous pang of envy for my sport coat.
“I was just heading inside,” I said, pointing toward the museum, playing along. “Are you free to join me?”
“I wish I could, oh I do, but I don’t have time. Maybe I could squeeze in a minute for coffee, though. How does that sound? Come on, let’s,” she said, knowing I would. Knowing almost any male would, not to mention a healthy percentage of females. She grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the distant corner. As soon as we’d started hustling to the end of the block, I recognized two important things: one, that she was walking me against traffic, and two, that she was leading me toward the familiar waiting Town Car.
“Here we are,” she said. “You remember the tune?”
“I think I could hum a few bars.”
In perfect pitch, she sung the first few lines of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Yes, the old Beatles classic that was the ring tone on my cell phone.
I slid into the car and she followed me inside.
How did she know that?
We headed uptown this time in the direction of Central Park, which meant that there was to be no return visit to Nobu in my immediate future. Routine midmorning congestion impeded our progress until the driver steered the car past The Plaza onto one of the roadways that weave through the park. I’ve never known the names of the streets in Central Park. But that was the point in the journey where Lizzie began to frisk me more thoroughly.
“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked, trying to flirt. “Can I be of some help? I know where everything is. Especially the good parts.” She was busy on my left leg, tracing my Achilles tendon, squeezing a little too forcefully at the hard muscle in my calf, and using her fingernails provocatively as she skated up the vulnerable spot behind my knee. “Weapons, wires? What?”
“I’m not looking for anything,” she teased. “This isn’t part of my job description. I do this only because it’s fun. For some reason I don’t understand, people don’t seem to mind.”
I laughed and lifted my arms. She shifted on the seat so that her knees and my thighs were in firm contact, and began to do her thing on my upper body. She said, “I’ll finish what I was doing down there later.”
I relaxed and let myself appreciate her doing her thing on my upper body for the next half minute or so. True to her word, she then did indeed finish what she had started doing down there.
I was definitely one of those people who didn’t seem to mind.
The driver exited the park on the Upper East Side just before we reached the reservoir. I reminded myself to pay attention to where we were. In a couple of minutes he pulled over to the curb at a bus stop just beyond the corner of 86th and Third.
I smiled as I looked outside at the storefront.
She said, “We’re here.”
I was still smiling. “At least I know where ‘here’ is this time.”
“Well, it is kind of hard to miss,” she admitted, glancing up at the brilliant yellow-and-tropical-fruit-colored sign.
She crossed over me on the seat, her face so close to mine that I could make a snap appraisal about the quality of her skin — a persnickety dermatologist would rate her complexion almost flawless — and stepped out of the car first. I followed her onto the sidewalk in front of Papaya King. On the way into the dog palace she stole a peek down Third checking, I assumed, for tails. I let my eyes follow hers down the block to see if I could spot any evidence we’d been followed.
I couldn’t.
Cool.
Like Nobu, Papaya King is one of those restaurants in New York City that live up to their hype. At Papaya King, the hype is about hot dogs.
We joined the queue that snaked to the counter. With the weather as good as it was, the prospect of a quality al fresco lunch had apparently tempted much of the population of the Upper East Side, and it appeared that many of them were lined up in front of us waiting to eat at the legendary frankfurter emporium. With the weather as good as it was, though, nobody seemed to care about the length of the line. They get little credit for it, but in normal circumstances New Yorkers do lines well. In glorious weather, New Yorkers do lines marvelously.
“Is it just you and me today?” I asked Lizzie.
“And a pretty healthy chunk of Manhattan. Would that disappoint you? If it were just you and me.”
“Hardly. So is it?”
She eyed me. She didn’t just look at me; she eyed me. But she didn’t answer me, exactly. “You’re married,” she said, at once reading my mind and mockingly dismissing me.
I decided to continue to play along. Why? I flirt for two reasons. I flirt for amusement. And I flirt for advantage. In my youth, the advantage I sought was almost always sexual. The older I get, the more complicated the advantage I’m seeking has become. The reality is that I prefer advantage. What bravado and bluster accomplished for me in repartee with men, flirting accomplished for me with women.
The amusement factor? That was more of a constant. Flirting with Lizzie was fun.
I said, “Are we discussing breaking my vows, Lizzie? What an interesting progression. I thought we were discussing lunch at one of Manhattan’s fine dining establishments.”
She squeezed my hand and looked away from me, up toward the big menu board. “I like you,” she said. “I’m sorry about the circumstances of our meeting. I am. But … you know —”
I finished her thought for her. “Business is business. Don’t be sorry.”
She squeezed my hand again.
“I like you, too,” I said.
“So what are you getting?” she asked.
Aroused?
I thought, but quickly realized that her question had an alternative, more likely, connotation.
I didn’t have to look up at the menu board: I knew my Papaya King preferences by heart. I said, “An Original Special with a Tropical Breeze. Or — if I feel especially adventurous when we finally get up to the counter — I may just go for a couple of Slaw Dogs and a Tropical Breeze. What about you?”
“You don’t get curly fries? I love their curly fries.”
“I’ll steal some of yours.”
“Try, and you’ll leave the city without one or two of your favorite fingers.”
I laughed. “You get the King Combo, then?”
“I do.”
“Kraut?”
She raised then lowered her eyebrows in one quick, provocative move. “I’ll do kraut if you’ll do kraut,” she said. We both recognized that we’d become engaged in the sort of bartering that new lovers do about garlic as they sit down at a red-sauce trattoria on a night when they know that whatever they eat is going to end up being only an appetizer.