He moved away from the window and walked the few steps to his desk. His office was large and filled with things he never had as a child.
Born in the Bronx, Louis came from a poor, working-class family. He looked across the room at his parents’ wedding picture. In it, his mother was seated on a red velvet chair, her hands arranged in her lap, a faint smile on her lips. She was in the simple, ivory-colored wedding dress her mother and grandmother wore before her. She was seventeen in that photo and Louis thought she was beautiful.
Standing behind her was Nick Ryan, wearing one of the few suits he ever owned. It was dark blue and a few sizes too large for his slim frame, but the smile on his face and the defiant way he held his head made one notice not the suit, but the man himself.
He wished his parents could have witnessed his success. In the fall of 1968, Nick Ryan had been killed while on duty in Vietnam. On the day Louis learned of his father’s fate, he quickly learned his own. At the age of thirteen, he was thrust into the position of provider and nothing was the same for him after that. While his mother took in laundry and became a seamstress on the side, Louis worked forty hours a week washing dishes at Cappuccilli’s, the Italian restaurant at the end of their block. He pulled straight A’s in school. He and his mother planned budgets together and managed to put something aside for a future they were hesitant to face.
As a team, they were invincible. It was in his eighteenth year, only days after Harvard offered him a full scholarship, that his mother became ill. She was tired all the time. There were lumps in her neck and groin. Her joints ached. “I’ve lost a lot of weight, Louis. There’s blood in my stool.”
He brought her to the hospital. The doctor was crass, frank and cold. After examining Katherine Ryan, he took her son aside. “There are holes in your mother’s bones,” he said. “She has cancer. It’s beyond treatment. She’ll need to be hospitalized, if only to keep her comfortable. That will be expensive. Do you have insurance?”
Louis looked the man hard in his eyes. “We don’t,” he said. “But we have money, so you treat her right just the same.”
His private hell began then. Times were hard and the hospital was overcrowded. His mother was placed in a room with three other women-each struggling to hang on to lives that were leaving them. Louis wouldn’t forget the days that followed-working three jobs so he could afford bills that were scarcely affordable; going without sleep so he could spend time with a woman who no longer resembled his mother; holding her hand because he knew that she was frightened and missing her husband.
He remembered the never-ending stream of specialists injecting poison after poison into a body that was manufacturing poisons of its own. He watched his mother slowly slip away from him. Her skin gradually becoming too large for her body. The experience hardened Louis. Made him see things differently.
At the end of her first week’s stay, Katherine, so weakened by the toxins in her system, reached out a hand and gripped Louis’ knee. Her voice unusually strong, resolve still burning in her eyes, she spoke calmly and clearly. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But you won’t drop out of school. I won’t hear of it.”
“Mom-”
“You listen to me, Louis. My life will have been for nothing if you don’t succeed. God gave you that scholarship and God gave me this cancer. He’ll take me, but He won’t take that scholarship. You go to school in the fall. You become a success.”
“But the bills-”
“-will take care of themselves.” Her face softened. Drugs had clouded her eyes and they now were as gray as the four walls surrounding them. “Don’t you see?” she said, squeezing his knee. “Don’t you see what you’re going to become?”
She died three weeks before he started Harvard. On the night before her death, she said to him in a whisper, “I want to be cremated. If I’m going to die, this cancer is dying with me. I’m not going to let it feed off my body any longer. I’m going to burn it up. I’m going to have the last say.”
He granted her wish and scattered her ashes in the park she and his father used to bring him to in upstate New York. It was then that he made a vow-no matter what the costs, he would conquer the business world. He would become the best of the world’s best.
His focus wasn't broken until his Junior year at Harvard, when he met Anne.
He had been walking home one afternoon when he heard what sounded like a woman shouting and several barking dogs. Curious, Louis stopped to listen. For a moment, he thought he was hearing things-there now was nothing but the buzz of traffic and the sound of leafless trees clicking in the stiff March wind.
But then, suddenly, a team of seven dogs rushed around the street corner he was standing at, nearly toppling him as they hurried toward downtown Cambridge. Louis turned and watched them run, their expensive leather leashes whipping and writhing behind them.
And then he saw her.
“For God’s sake!” the young woman shouted as she shot around the corner. “Help me catch them!”
Louis ran after her. She was out of breath, her face flushed, her long black hair swinging. Louis was about to ask how they got free when she stopped and her hands flew to her mouth. There was a screech of tires. Undaunted, the dog joined his friends and trotted on-only this time a bit slower as the group weaved through traffic and moved toward the center of town.
“Hurry!” she said.
They began running again, faster this time. Louis’s mind raced. “Are they all joined by one leash?” he asked.
“Yes!”
He was running alongside her now. She’s pretty, he thought. “I’m going to cross the street and head them off. You lure them to me.”
Her eyes widened. “How?”
“I don’t know-get in front of them, chase them in my direction. When they’re close enough, I’ll grab their leash and they’ll be yours again.” He looked across the street and pointed to a cluster of trees. “I’ll be over there.”
“It won’t be that easy.”
“It will be,” he said. “Go.”
He started across the street. “I don’t even know your name,” he said. “I’m Louis Ryan.”
“Anne Roberts,” she said, starting to run again. “And I promise if we get these dogs back, you won’t regret it!”
It was over dinner that evening that Anne told Louis she walked the dogs to earn extra money for college. Now, remembering that day and those that followed, almost made her death seem as if it hadn’t happened, as if George Redman had never fouled their lives. But then, as always, Louis remembered that snowy February evening, just days after George lost his final appeal in court, and the first memory shattered.
He leaned forward in his chair and lifted Anne’s picture from his desk. When his mother died, he had been powerless to help her. He accepted her death as he accepted his own fate. But his wife’s man-made death could be fought. This time he didn’t have to accept the unacceptable.
For years, Louis fantasized about killing George Redman’s wife. For years, he imagined how sweet it would be to take from the man what he assumed was his greatest love. But as time passed and he learned more about his wife’s murderer, Louis realized that while Redman loved his wife deeply, he was just as passionate about Redman International and his daughter, Celina.
They were his life’s accomplishments. They hadn’t failed him. It was then, as Redman’s daughter and his conglomerate matured, that Louis had his awakening. In order to make Redman feel the pain he had felt for years, Louis would take everything from the man, not stopping until his own thirst for revenge was satisfied.