Authors: Naomi Ragen
Adam pressed both palms against his eyes, his fingers gripping his head on either side as if it were a coconut that had been cracked and was about to halve. Strange thoughts rushed by, then images: holding Kayla in his lap on a park swing when she was still too young to sit upright, both of them swinging toward Abigail, who stood in front, her arms outstretched, the baby’s big smile reflected on her face as she looked back into his eyes, acknowledging the perfect joy of the moment; the cork popping out of the bottle of Israeli champagne in their tiny Queens living room the day he’d signed the contract with his first big client, transforming himself from a lowly accountant to a “trusted advisor.”
Many clients had followed. People with computer start-ups and manufacturing plants, doctors branching out in their practices. In fact, almost all the successful people in his synagogue had begged him to do their books. He had given them all excellent advice, nurturing and sheltering their money, their work, and their vision as if it were his own.
He loved it. He loved being part of their adventure without shouldering any of the risks, and without limiting himself to one narrow field of activity. Every day he learned something new. It was like living a few lifetimes simultaneously, having people trust him, and trusting them, becoming part of their families, their lives.
He looked through the greyed-out FBI car window, glimpsing the Esplanade and Hatch Shell, where he and Abigail had taken the children on warm summer evenings to listen to concerts. And there was the shining surface of the Charles River. He loved the way the sun transformed it into a jeweled carpet. A team of college rowers were making their way swiftly through the waters. They looked strong and carefree. And young. So young.
He’d loved this city, he thought, from the moment he’d set eyes on it; loved its refined buildings and cultured, educated people, the fact that there was so little prejudice, and no rampant crime or corruption. It was a quintessential place to enjoy the blessings of being an American.
He thought of his father, Alex, born in a little village in the Carpathian Mountains, a place that had changed loyalties and languages with each new
conqueror. He had never really spoken about what he had been through during the war. But then, when Adam turned eighteen, his father had come into his room, reaching inside his jacket to take out a peeling, sepia photograph of a slim, pretty young woman in an old-fashioned dress with thick black hair and beautiful dark eyes. In her lap was a little girl wearing a frilly dress and hair bows, and on her right a sturdy, handsome little boy. “Your half brother and sister,” his father whispered. “My first wife. The Hungarians made me slave labor for the Germans. And when I got back, my neighbors told me they’d all been deported. To Auschwitz.”
It was the first and last time they’d ever spoken about it. But when his father died a few years back, and they’d buried him beside Adam’s mother, he and Abigail decided to have the names of his first wife and children etched on his tombstone, finally giving them a gravesite.
They say when you are about to die, your whole life flashes before your eyes, like a video on fast-forward. But he wasn’t dying, he thought. This was nothing like his battle with cancer.
For months, he had avoided doing anything about the little lump in his chest. And then, when he finally showed it to Dr. Siegel, the young doctor’s reassurances had been so emphatic and convincing that he felt no sense of urgency at all about following his advice to “get a biopsy just to put your mind at rest.”
His mind was at rest.
He’d only known Siegel a few months. He was a kid compared to wise, grey-haired Dr. Arnold who had been his doctor for several decades before retiring to take Lindblad cruises to Antarctica. But he had instantly liked the bright, friendly thirty-two-year-old with diplomas from Columbia and Harvard hanging in glorified lamination on his office wall. His desk photos of a perky blond woman and three adorable little kids made Adam like and trust him even more. Besides, he felt sure Dr. Arnold would not have handed over his practice to someone less than excellent.
And Siegel was—an excellent doctor, thorough and caring. Adam didn’t blame him for not catching the cancer earlier. A malignant sarcoma was so rare that many GPs never came across one in their entire practices. Rare, and for the most part, untreatable, chemo having no effect on them whatsoever. All you could do was cut them out, zap them with radiation, then hope for the best.
For some reason, he had greeted this terrifying news with stoicism. He was shocked, but somehow not really surprised. Many people his age wound up getting something for no good reason. It had just been his time. God had been good to him all his life. He had no complaints. He was willing to do what he had to do, then leave it up to fate. He made an appointment with the young surgeon that Siegel recommended.
But when he broke the news to Abigail, she was—to his mind at least—hysterical. After urgent, nonstop phone calls to every person who might be in a position to know, she’d zeroed in on the undisputed sarcoma king of America, or perhaps Planet Earth. At twelve midnight the same day, he had an appointment. He didn’t ask her for details about how she’d managed that when the specialist’s appointment book was crammed up to nine months in advance. He knew better.
While part of him was grateful for her concern and no-stone-left-unturned whirlwind of activity on his behalf, truthfully, a part of him resented her interference. He’d been perfectly fine with the young surgeon Siegel had recommended, a choice Abigail had viewed as tantamount to being operated on in the park by a wino with paper cutters…
She was furious at Siegel for not catching the cancer earlier, unforgiving of his original mistaken diagnosis. And Adam had been furious at her for being furious, accusing her of making things worse. She’d been devastated, breaking down for the first time, her frenzy of activity lapsing into mourning.
Repentant at seeing her in such pain, he’d reluctantly agreed to see Dr. Sarcoma King. He was glad he did. Because even Abigail had had to accept it when the great man said: “We’ll cut it out, then radiate. But only God knows why sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
That had been five years ago. His chest scars had healed along with the radiation burns, a hairless patch of smooth white skin the only memento of his journey through hell. And even hell had not been so bad. It had been quick, and not particularly painful. Healing had been fast. The worry—well, coming to terms with your mortality was deeper than just worry, he thought—bearable.
The moment of diagnosis—though shocking and depressing—had not felt like the end of the world, just the beginning of a trip you were being forced to make to a third-world country full of inedible food, bad hotels, and dangerous
natives. But something inside him had assured him he’d purchased a round-trip ticket, and would be arriving home again, a little battered but safe and sound.
This was different.
He clasped his fingers together in a tight grip that slowly drained them of color. Bringing them to his mouth, he gnawed on his knuckle until he tasted blood.
This was worse. Much worse.
With cancer, he had been cast in the role of innocent victim and embattled hero, surrounded by loving family and friends who sympathized and encouraged, deploring his tough break and praising his forbearance. This, he sensed, was quite a different role. Even if after a long, hard fight he was proven innocent, no one would think of him as a victim. “Where there is smoke there is fire” was the mentality of most average people, who had been turned into wide-eyed morons by too many years of feeding on half-baked stories written by hasty, irresponsible opinionated reporters with egos the size of the Grand Canyon.
The average person, ignoring the growing mountain of debunked information in the press, still read newspapers with a trust best reserved for religious texts. If something was “written in the newspaper,” they assumed it had gone through some kind of rigorous scrutiny, when the truth was it was no more reliable than the things your friends told you about sex in the third grade. Until they read about themselves in the papers, few people cared to acknowledge this fact.
Yet—a small surge of hope welled up, like the bubble from a fish exhaling underwater confirming its unseen presence—he was innocent! No one who knew him could possibly believe these outlandish charges. Still!—WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? WHAT WAS THIS ALL ABOUT! HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY ACCUSE ME OF THIS! his mind repeated incessantly, scurrying from place to place, seeking answers the way a small creature fleeing a huge predator seeks refuge.
Maybe it wouldn’t make the national wire services, and would be confined to Boston? Even then. Just the thought of Seth’s parents’ reaction was like a brutal boot stomping out his delicate, meager hopes, the way you stamp out
the dying embers of a discarded cigarette, determined to kill any potential it might have to flare up again and start a forest fire. Somehow, as he was from an older generation, the idea of any other source of news other than a newspaper never crossed his mind.
Then he suddenly remembered: the Internet.
He sank back into his seat, his knees buckling, his heart beating fast. He felt suffocated. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He had to call them all before they read about it online.
“Please, can I have a drink?”
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Where?”
“Our headquarters. And then to the initial arraignment in federal court.”
“But please, why? I haven’t even seen a lawyer yet! Maybe we could just clear this up… ?”
He had been hoping he could somehow settle this before it got to court—after all, it was too absurd! He remembered that movie
My Cousin Vinny
. It didn’t matter what kind of evidence they had against you if you were really innocent. He certainly hadn’t violated any antiterrorism laws. It was ridiculous!
Or was it?
He searched desperately for something to hold on to, some innocent thing that had been misconstrued. Was it the Donleavy account, perhaps? They did a lot of outsourcing to places like Bangladesh and Pakistan. Or was it, perhaps, Milton Ornby Ltd., the recycling plant, which sold quantities of raw material to Indonesia? None of it made sense. They were all invested in U.S. stocks and bonds…
And then, suddenly, to his horror, something occurred to him.
Christopher Dorset.
It was at the mixer for Harvard Law parents. Adam had been surprised and flattered that the high-rolling tax attorney even remembered his name, let alone bothered to come over. He was the kind of person who hung out with CEOs, movie stars, and media bigwigs; the kind whose name and photo with a blond bimbo showed up in gossip columns on the backdrop of Las Vegas casinos.
They had met only once before, briefly, when Dorset had been consulting
for one of Adam’s largest clients on a major case. They didn’t really know each other. He remembered being in a kind of daze at the unexpected attention. And then Dorset had introduced him to Gregory Van, who, according to Dorset, had been his friend at Cambridge, and was now the financial world’s most-well-kept secret: “the most successful hedge-fund operator in Europe,” according to Dorset. Adam had been even more surprised that Van had lingered, making no attempt to mingle with the far more powerful and interesting mix of people around them.
What had they spoken about? Adam tried to remember, his dry lips gnawing each other, peeling off the chapped skin. Had there been any warning signs that he’d registered but ignored? All he could recall was a vague sense that the hedge-fund man knew how to dress, and that his suit was no doubt bespoke. The introduction by Dorset had been enough to convince him to listen in fascination to Van’s long and complicated tale of banking and investments all over Europe. “We are developing some very interesting financial instruments,” he’d said, sounding like Prince Philip. (What was it about that clipped, upper-class British accent that puts Americans off guard, making them feel inferior and worshipful?) Was it that?
At the time, he’d felt the meeting was serendipitous. Only weeks before, A. J. Hurling had called him out of the blue, claiming to have read about Adam in
Fortune
magazine. Adam remembered the article. In it, the CEO of a small but successful start-up that made software for farmers had been kind enough to thank Adam for his guidance and support. Adam had been thrilled that the piece had attracted someone of Hurling’s stature, who asked for guidance in investing the millions his software-security company had been raking in over the past year.
Adam had agreed to look around and get back to him. But until the meeting with Van, nothing seemed to fit the bill. He’d listened, wondering at the remarkable coincidence of finding exactly the financial instruments Hurling seemed to be looking for. It was a match made in heaven that had just fallen into his lap. He calculated that his fees alone would be close to a million a year.
And he really needed the money.
The house had eaten up so much, more than he’d ever dreamed possible. And then there was Kayla’s tuition, and helping Shoshana and Matthew finance
the dream house that he’d been told was going at a bargain price, a beautiful home for his grandchildren. Not to mention Joshua’s incessant demands for money to keep his company afloat, demands his wife knew nothing about, and Adam wanted to keep that way.
All he’d wanted—ever wanted—was to keep his family and his clients happy. To do his job well. Had he taken shortcuts? Had he investigated Van properly? Or had he, even unknowingly, slacked off, the lure of profit too strong for him? He felt a sudden panic.
What if it was all true? What if he had unwittingly become part of something evil, and dragged his family and his client into it?
Oh, my God! he thought. Oh, my God!
What, he thought with horror, if I am guilty?
NO, no, no. He had not done anything wrong at all! He hadn’t set up the tax shelter, and he wasn’t the only financial investor using it. Dozens, if not hundreds, of other clients from very respectable firms had jumped on board. At least, that is what he had been led to believe by men he thought he could trust. He had even traveled to London to check the books twice a year. But what… what if it wasn’t true? If A. J. Hurling was the only investor? My name and signature are on every single piece of paper. It all leads back to me, he realized with a sense of impending doom.