Outside the window, he watched a group of men in dark suits approach the front door. In an instant Ben saw the whole thing unraveclass="underline" They would come in fast, guns out, wallets high, a sting operation, like a tiger trap in the jungle. Ben saw himself flipped on his belly, cuffed, his summer suit stained beyond repair, dirty footprints on his back. But the men kept walking. The moment passed. Kipling breathed again, finished his scotch in a single draft.
“—money you can’t use has no value.”
He sized them up, the men from Geneva — no bigger or smaller than a dozen other men he had sat across from, making this same pitch. They were fish to be caught on a hook, women to be flattered and seduced. FBI or no FBI, Ben Kipling was a money magnet. He had a quality that couldn’t be put in writing. Rich people looked at him and saw a vault with two doors. They visualized their money going in one door, and coming out the other multiplied. A sure thing.
He slid his chair back, buttoning his jacket.
“I like you guys,” he said. “I trust you, and I don’t say that to just anyone. My feeling is, we should do this, but in the end it’s up to you.”
He stood.
“Tabitha and Greg are gonna stay behind, get your details. It was a pleasure.”
The Swiss stood, shook his hand. Ben Kipling walked away from them, the front door opening before him as he exited. His car was at the curb, back door open, driver standing at attention, and he slid inside without slowing.
The black vacuum of space.
* * *
Across town, a yellow cab pulled up in front of the Whitney Museum. The driver had been born in Katmandu, had stolen down into Michigan from Saskatchewan, paying a smuggler six hundred dollars for fake ID. He slept in an apartment now with fourteen other people, sent most of his pay overseas in the hope of one day bringing his wife and boys over on a plane.
The woman in back, on the other hand, who told him to keep the change from a twenty, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and owned nineteen televisions she didn’t watch. Once upon a time she was a doctor’s daughter in Brookline, Massachusetts, a girl who grew up riding horses and got a nose job for her sixteenth birthday.
Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.
Sarah Kipling turned fifty in March — there was a surprise party in the Cayman Islands. Ben picked her up in a limo to go to Tavern on the Green (she thought), but took her out to Teterboro instead. Five hours later she was sipping rum punch with her toes in the sand. Now, outside the Whitney, she climbed out of a cab. She was meeting her daughter, Jenny (twenty-six), to tour the biennial and get a quick download on her fiancé’s parents before the dinner. This wasn’t so much for Sarah’s benefit, because she could talk to anyone, as it was for Ben’s. Her husband had a hard time with conversations that weren’t about money. Or maybe that wasn’t it exactly. Maybe it was that he had a hard time talking to people who didn’t have money. Not that he was aloof. It was just that he’d forgotten what it was like to have a mortgage or a car loan. What it was to be getting by, to go to a store and have to check the price of something before you buy it. And this could make him seem vulgar and aloof.
Sarah loathed the feeling she got in those moments — watching her husband embarrass himself (and her). There was no other word for it, in her mind. As his wife she was irrevocably tied to him — his opinions were her opinions. They reflected poorly on her, perhaps not because she held them exactly, but because by choosing Ben, by sticking with him, she showed herself (in the eyes of others) to be a poor judge of character. Though she grew up with money, Sarah knew that the last thing you did was talk about it. This was the difference between new money and old. Old-money kids were the ones in college with bed head and moth-hole sweaters. You found them in the cafeteria borrowing lunch money and eating off their friends’ plates. They passed as poor, affecting a disposition that they were beyond money—as if one of the riches wealth had bought them was the right never to think about money again. In this way they floated through the real world the way that child prodigies stumbled through the daily travails of human existence, heads in the clouds, forgetting to wear socks, their shirts misbuttoned.
This made her husband’s tone-deafness on the subject of money, his need to constantly remind others how much they had feel so gauche, so rude. As a result it had become her tired mission in life to soften his edges, to educate him on how to get rich without becoming tacky.
So Jenny would fill her in about her future in-laws, and Sarah would send Ben a text. You can talk about politics with the husband (he votes Republican) or sports (Jets fan). The wife went to Italy last year with her book group (travel? reading?). They have a son with Down syndrome in an institution, so no retard jokes!
Sarah had tried to get Ben to show more of an interest in people, to be more open to new experiences — they’d gone to counseling about it for two weeks, before Ben told her he’d rather cut off his ears than “listen to that woman for another day”—but eventually she’d done what most wives do and just gave up. So now it was she who had to make the extra effort to ensure that social engagements went well.
Jenny was waiting for her outside the main entrance. She had on flared slacks and a T-shirt, with her hair in the kind of beret the girls were wearing these days.
“Mom,” she called when Sarah didn’t see her right away.
“Sorry,” her mother said, “my eyes are shot. Your father keeps telling me to go to the eye doctor, but who has time?”
They hugged briefly, efficiently, then moved inside.
“I got here early, so I got us tickets,” said Jenny.
Sarah tried to shove a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.
“Mom, don’t be silly. I’m happy to pay.”
“For a cab later,” her mother said jabbing the bill at her like a flyer to a mattress store they shoved at you on the street, but Jenny turned away and handed their tickets to the docent, and Sarah was forced to put the bill back in her wallet.
“I heard the best stuff is upstairs,” said Jenny. “So maybe we should start at the top.”
“Whatever you want, dear.”
They waited for the elevator and rode up in silence. Behind them a Latin family talked in animated Spanish, the woman berating her husband. Sarah had studied Spanish in high school, though she hadn’t kept up. She recognized the words for “motorcycle” and “babysitter,” and it was clear from the exchange that something extramarital may have occurred. At their feet, two young children played games on handheld devices, their faces lit an eerie blue.
“Shane’s nervous about tonight,” Jenny said after they exited the elevator. “It’s so cute.”
“The first time I met your father’s parents, I threw up,” Sarah told her.
“Really?”
“Yes, but I think it might have been the clam chowder I had at lunch.”
“Oh, Mom,” said Jenny, smiling, “you’re so funny.” Jenny always told her friends that her mother was “slightly batty.” Sarah knew it, or sensed it on some level. And she was — what’s the word? — a little absentminded, a little, well — sometimes she made unique connections in her head. And didn’t Robin Williams have the same quality? Or other, you know, innovative thinkers.
So now you’re Robin Williams? Ben would say.
“Well, he doesn’t have to be nervous,” said Sarah. “We don’t bite.”
“Class is a real thing,” Jenny told her. “I mean again. The divide, you know. Rich people and — I mean, Shane’s parents aren’t poor, but—”