Narabedla Ltd (2 page)

All I could do was agree.

So we talked for a while about whether I could hope to keep the government from foreclosing on his fiddle for a while, and how he might be able to get some fill-in work with a New Jersey orchestra to eat on, and by and by he went away, looking dejected.

And three days later I got a letter containing a cashier’s draft for a thousand dollars, issued on a Pittsburgh bank and mailed from Baltimore, with a note that said:

Pay the bastards off for me, Nolly, and credit the rest to what I owe you. I’ll let you know how the tour goes after a while.

Of course, there was only one tour he could have been talking about. So he had my curiosity turned up high, but it all sounded fine enough.

What wasn’t so fine was that the next day there was a little story in the
Times
arts section that said Woody Calderon had been in a light plane that crashed twenty miles off the South Carolina coast, no bodies or survivors found, everyone on board presumed dead.

T
he first few days of June aren’t the ulcer season for accountants—that’s early April, just before filing date—but June comes close. Early June is when I have to lash the clients with the sixty-day deferments into getting it all together for June 15th. My clients being what they are—because it is quite true that concert musicians do not well comprehend the real world—means that I have enough on my plate at that time to keep my mind occupied.

I did think about Woody as time permitted. I even mourned him. Not so much as a friend, of course, because he’d been right in saying that we weren’t very close. But he was, by God, a cellist I loved to listen to, and he was missed. He wasn’t just missed by me, either. Even the critics who had done him in were now regretting his loss, though I didn’t notice any of them apologizing for shafting him while he was still around.

After half a dozen twelve-hour days I had the last of the sluggards’ W-2 forms and airline ticket stubs entered into the computer, and their checks to the state and the Feds and everybody else made out and clipped to their returns so that all they had to do was sign and mail.

Then I closed my door and got on my exercise bike. It’s a good thing to do while I’m making phone calls, and, after I thought for a while, I dialed my oldest, and homeliest, friend, Wiktor Ordukowsky. “This is Nolly Stennis of the accounting firm of L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates, Mr. Ordukowsky,” I said. “Isn’t it about time you let me proposition you again so we can have a nice, tax-deductible lunch?” He was agreeable, and we settled on the Four Seasons.

Vic Ordukowsky is not only an old buddy from both high school and Columbia University, he also thinks he saved my life. Maybe in a way he did, after the mumps did me in, and anyway ever since then he has felt obliged to keep it saved. In school we saved each other’s lives in class as a matter of routine. We had partnered each other in those desperate semesters on tax law and estate management. We made up weird and wonderful financial transactions to set each other, then helped reduce them to orderly columns of figures for the professors to check over. We coached each other for examinations, and took notes for each other when we cut classes—Vic more for me than I for him, because I also had those everyday sessions with my vocal coach to add to my burden. It worked, though. We both graduated up near the top of the class, and the job offers came in.

Of course, I turned them all down. I was going to be a
singer.

What made me think of Vic Ordukowsky was that the job offer he had accepted had come from Narabedla Ltd.

When I got there Vic was at the bar, chatting with a Caribbean-tanned old man with “corporation lawyer” written all over him, and a woman I easily recognized to be one of the mayor’s chief administrative assistants, and, although the Four Seasons is used to having plenty of high-powered people there, half the bar was rubbernecking at them. Mostly at Vic. He had on a dove-gray open-throated shirt and a dove-gray raw silk jacket over it; he smelled of good cigars and expensive barbers, and he was, as I have said, the homeliest man I know. (Of course, that was before Narabedla, so I hadn’t yet found out what homeliness was like.) Vic’s looks never stopped him. He looked like Mr. Potato-Head in high school, too, fat face and eyes a quarter-inch apart, but the girls never let him alone.

“Let’s go inside,” said Vic, terminating his conversation, and I followed. Accountancy Rule No. 1: Never drink at the bar before lunch; the expense account looks better when everything is on the mead check. They seated us immediately, although the big room was full, and they put us right next to the pool. Vic ordered one of those filthy European things that taste like burned bicycle tire steeped in cough syrup; I had a glass of white wine; and we did the necessary.

“I have asked you to lunch, Vic,” I said, pro forma, “because I want to make a presentation on behalf of my accounting firm, L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates. We believe we could provide for Narabedla very satisfactory service for such accounting matters as are not handled internally.”

Vic returned my serve neatly. “I’m really sorry, Nolly,” he said, “but it’s the policy of Narabedla Limited to perform all its accountancy functions with in-house staff. Since we’re privately owned we are excused from a lot of filing—and so we have the option of keeping many of our financial affairs quite confidential. However,” he added, getting carried away with the spirit of the game, “if at any future time these policies should change I will certainly see that your firm is considered.”

He beamed at me. I beamed back at him. The letter of the law was satisfied; we had had a business discussion, and 80 percent of the cost of the luncheon had therefore become deductible as a business expense. “So how have you been?” he finished, as the drinks came.

I said, “Fine, fine, Vic. You’re looking good yourself. Lost a little weight?”

“I wish,” he said glumly. Vic had been chubby even in high school, but when he started earning big bucks he really let himself go. He had to be three hundred pounds. Where he found those good-looking suits that actually seemed to fit him I couldn’t guess. He gave me a rueful grin. “Mary-Ellen’s been putting on a little weight, too.”

I said, “Oh.” His wife had been a skinny little thing when they married; a few more pounds wouldn’t have hurt her.

“She’s up to two hundred,” he said, sipping his Fernet-Branca almost as though he liked it, and added quickly, “She looks great, though. The only thing is, it gets kind of tricky to, uh, make contact. If you know what I mean.” He gave me a look both comical and gloomy and began to tell me about his doctor’s advice, which was no good because, basically, it came down to eating less—and, my God, hadn’t he been trying to do that for years?—and his wife’s best girlfriend’s advice, which was to put planks under the mattress so Mary-Ellen wouldn’t, you know, sink out of reach.

It was a great, friendly lunch. We had a bottle of wine with the artichokes and the stuffed veal, swapping personal stories and reminiscences and getting mellow. When I judged he was mellow enough I said, “I’ve got a little problem, Vic.”

He mopped the last of his crusty bread in the last of his cream sauce, looking at me. “That was true about company policy, Nolly.”

“I know that, Vic.”

He nodded and waved to the waiter for coffee. “It isn’t money, is it? Because if it is, hell, Nolly, I know you’re good for whatever you need.”

“Not money. Just a problem. I have this client, or at least I did have him …” And I told him about Woody Calderon, and the offer he couldn’t refuse, and the thousand-dollar cashier’s check.

Vic refilled his coffee cup twice while I was talking. He drank it hot and black, swallowing it down as though he wanted to make sure he blotted up the last of the wine before he said anything he maybe shouldn’t.

Then he sighed. “That’s funny,” he commented. “So what are you going to do? Pay off his I.R.S. tab?”

“I already did that. There’s two hundred dollars left over.”

“So that’s your fee. Just keep it— No,” he said, nodding as though the dentist had just told him the tooth would have to be recapped, “I know. It isn’t the money that’s worrying’ you. You want to know if I know anything about it, as far as Narabedla and Mr. Davidson-Jones are concerned.”

I said, “You can see where I might be curious.”

“I don’t mind your curiosity, Nolly.” He thought for a moment, beckoning for more coffee. “You understand, Narabedla’s
huge.
I don’t know everything that goes on in it. Maybe nobody does but Henry Davidson-Jones himself, and I’ll bet even he can’t keep track of the details. I have a specific job. I’m U.S. investments and subsidiaries, that’s all. I audit the statements from the other offices and prepare a consolidated profit-and-loss for the board meetings—that takes my time and seven other people’s, just for that. I don’t have a thing to do with, for instance, any of the offshore holdings, except now and then when one of the U.S. executives makes a trip to Europe or somewhere for meetings and we get his expense records. And I certainly don’t know anything about Davidson-Jones’s personal philanthropies. He’s never discussed his interest in the arts with me. He’s never discussed
anything
with me. I’ve never met the man.” 

“It was just a thought,” I said.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you, Nolly,” he said warmly, his big face friendly enough and regretful enough. To make up for it, he said, “How about a brandy?”

So we had a brandy, and Vic told me why the Mets couldn’t possibly repeat last year’s season, while the Yankees were bound to improve, and when the check came he grabbed it. “Narabedla’s got more money than you do,” he said. And then, while we were waiting for his credit-card imprint, he said suddenly, “There is one funny thing.”

I took a deep swallow of the cooling coffee, then I sat up straight, wishing I hadn’t had the final brandy. Something was coming.

“It’s not a secret,” he said seriously—to himself more than to me, I thought. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know about it.”

He paused to add in the tip and scribble his name. I didn’t even breathe. “It’s just this woman,” he said. “She came into the office a month or two ago. Irene Madigan. From Beaumont, Texas, I think, only she was staying at that women’s hotel downtown—the Martha Washington, is it? God knows if she’s still there. And she didn’t belong in our department at all. She just came in off the street and somebody got rid of her by shooing her onto me.”

He paused to put the pen back in his pocket, then remembered it was Restaurant Associates’ pen and dropped it on the plate. He sighed. “This is just between us, Nolly?” 

“Promise.”

“The last thing I want to do is get the company into some embarrassing situation. Well, what it is, her cousin had some kind of deal with Mr. Davidson-Jones. And the cousin disappeared, too.”

T
here have been times when I missed my little old office with the kind of despairing passion a former grand duke might have held for the droshkies and white nights of old St. Petersburg. Whatever else it was, it was
sane
and, not counting such times as the 14th of April, never scary.

The firm of L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates comprised altogether six people, counting me and the receptionist. The other person who really mattered was Marlene Abramson. In ways I did not like to admit, she was more important to the firm than I was.

When Marlene was nineteen years old she married a brilliant young medical student. For the next seven years she spent her time bearing three of his kids, supporting them all while he finished school, keeping up her own studies on the side, and providing an impeccably kosher house.

Then, one night, the medical student, now a gynecologist, took her out to an expensive dinner in the kind of place where you can’t make a scene and told her about the physiotherapist who was about to make him the kind of attentive, loving,
sharing
wife he had always dreamed of.