“I know you care for her-”
“Care for her? Oh, honey, I love that girl.” Her voice trembled.
“I know.”
She couldn’t talk for a while. Then she said, “How much are they demanding?”
“They must have given her a script. She said they want something called Mercury. Marshall says he has no idea what that referred to.”
“Mercury?”
“You worked for him for years. You must have come across that name in a file or a letter or something.”
“My memory’s still sharp, thank God. That doesn’t ring any bells. But if Marshall has the slightest idea what Mercury is, he’ll give it to them in a heartbeat. He’d give up his fortune to get his daughter back.”
“If he had a fortune left.”
“I never heard anything about this. He didn’t mention his troubles at all. But he and I don’t talk much anymore. How widely known is it that he’s… what?”
“Ruined. So far he’s somehow managed to contain it. But I’m sure the word will get out any day now. He doesn’t confide in you?”
“Not since Belinda moved in.”
“That’s quite a change.”
“Honey, Marshall used to check in with me before he used the john. That’s the difference between him and your father. One of the many differences. Marshall actually respected my judgment.” This was painful to hear, but my mother was always allergic to self-pity, and she said it lightly.
“You think she’s deliberately cutting you off from him?”
She inhaled deeply. The red ember at the tip of the cigarette flared and crackled and hissed. “They’ve had me over to dinner twice, and she’s always hugging me and telling me in that Georgia peach accent that ‘We just have to go shopping on Newbury Street, me and you,’ and ‘Why don’t we see more of you?’ But whenever I call Marshall at home, she answers the phone and says she’ll pass along a message, and I doubt he ever gets it.”
“What about e-mail?”
“She changed his e-mail address, and I never got the new one. She says he has to be much more careful, much less accessible. So I have to e-mail Belinda, and she actually answers for him.”
“Well, Alexa doesn’t get along with her either.”
She shook her head, blew out a lungful of smoke. “Oh, that woman is toxic. Alexa was always complaining about her, and I kept urging her to give Belinda a chance, it’s not easy being a stepmother. Until I met the woman and understood. I think Belinda actually hates her stepdaughter. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“She talks about how much she adores Alexa.”
“In front of others. With Alexa, she doesn’t bother concealing it.”
“Maybe that’s not the only thing she’s concealing. You haven’t complained to Marshall about being cut off?”
“Sure I did. At the beginning. He’d just shrug and say, ‘I’ve learned not to argue.’”
“Strange.”
“I see this sort of thing happen to a lot of married men as they get older. Their wives start taking charge of their social lives, then their friendships. The husbands abdicate all responsibility because they’re too busy or they’d just as soon not take the initiative, and before you know it they’re wholly owned subsidiaries of their ladies. Even rich and powerful men like Marshall… used to be. I think the only person he sees outside the office besides Belinda is David Schechter.”
“How long has Schechter been his lawyer?”
“Schecky? He’s not Marshall’s lawyer.”
“Then what is he?”
“You know how Mafia dons always have an adviser?”
“A consigliere?”
“That’s it. Schecky is Marshall’s consigliere.”
“Advising him on what?”
“I just think he’s someone whose judgment Marshall trusts.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know him. But Marshall once told me he has the most extensive files he’s ever seen. Reminded him of J. Edgar Hoover.”
I nodded, thought for a moment. “Why did Marshall hire you in the first place?”
She smiled. “You mean, why would he hire a woman with no particular skills to run his office?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yes, it is,” she said kindly. “You don’t want to hurt my feelings. That’s all right.” She smiled. “Marshall is a good man. A good person. He saw what had happened to us after your father left. How the government took everything. Was there a part of him that thought, There but for the grace of God go I? Sure, probably.”
“You always said that he was a friend of Dad’s, and that’s why he wanted to help.”
“That’s right.”
“But he didn’t know you, did he?”
“Not really. He knew your father much better. But that’s Marshall. He’s the most generous person I know. He just loves to help people. And that was a time when I needed help, desperately. I was a mother with two teenage sons and no house and no money. We’d gone from that house in Bedford to sharing Mom’s split-level ranch in Malden. I had no income and no foreseeable income. Imagine how I must have felt.”
In the scale of human misery, that barely registered, I knew. But at the same time I truly couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to be Francine Heller, ripped untimely from her chrysalis of immense gilded wealth, naked and shivering, lost and vulnerable, not knowing who to turn to.
“I can’t,” I admitted. “But you were a hero. That much I do know.”
She gripped my hand in her small soft warm one. “Oh, for God’s sake, not even close. But you need to understand how much it meant to me to have this man step in, someone I barely knew, and offer me not just an income, a way to keep food on the table, but an actual job. A way for me to do something useful.”
She looked so uncomfortable that I felt bad I’d raised the subject. She shifted in her seat, blew out a puff of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette, her face turned away.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Marshall secretly cooperated with the SEC when they were building their case against Dad. In effect helped turn Dad in.” If they were true, though, then Marcus would have hired my mother for one very simple reason: guilt.
“Never. Not Marshall.”
“Well, you know him as well as anyone.”
“I did, anyway. So let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think these kidnappers will let her go if they get what they want?” She asked this with such hushed desperation that I had no choice but to give her, dishonestly, the assurance that she, like Marcus, seemed to crave so badly.
“Yes.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“Why? Because the typical pattern in a kidnap-for-ransom situation-”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I mean, why do you think I can’t hear the truth? I know when you’re not being honest, Nick. I’m your mother.”
I’d always thought that I’d gotten my talent at reading people from her. She was, like me, what Sigmund Freud called a Menschenkenner. Loosely translated, that meant a “good judge of character.” But it went beyond that. She and I both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling us the truth. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it’s not at all like being a human polygraph. It’s merely an innate talent, the way some people are natural painters or can tell stories or have perfect pitch. We were good at detecting lies. Though not perfect.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to let her go.”
55.
She was crying again, and I immediately regretted my candor.
“I’ll do everything in my power to find her,” I said. “I promise you.”
She held my right hand in both of hers. Her hands were bony yet soft. She leaned close, her eyes pleading. “Get her back, Nick. Please? Will you please get her back?”