“I know, Karen,” he said, bowing his head. “I know.”
“No, you don’t know, Charles.” She glared. “You have no fucking idea what it is you’ve stolen from us. From Sam and Alex, Charles. And for what? But I know. I know exactly what you’ve done. I know what a lie you’ve lived. I know what you’ve kept from me. Dolphin. Falcon. Those tankers, Charles. That old guy in Pensacola…”
His eyes fixed on her. “Who have you been talking to, Karen?”
She hit him again. “Go to hell, Charles. Is that what you want from me here? You want me to tell you what I know?”
Finally he caught her arm, his fingers wrapping around her wrist.
“You say you know! You don’t, Karen. You’ve got to listen to me and hear me out. I never meant to hurt you like this. God knows, in a million years, I never meant for you to find out. Whatever I did, I did it to save you, Karen. All of you. I know how you must hate me. I know what it must feel like for you to see me here. But you have to do one thing for me, Karen. Please, just hear me out. Because whatever I did, and why I’m standing here now, taking my life in my hands, I did for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, for you, Karen. And the kids.”
“All right, Charles.” Karen sniffed back tears. They moved out of the sun, near the brush. They sat down in the sand, cooler there. “You’ve always been able to charm me, haven’t you, Charlie? Let me hear your best shot at the truth.”
He swallowed. “You say you know what I’ve done. The offshore trading, Falcon, Dolphin Oil…It’s all true. I’m guilty of all of it. I ran money for years I never told you about, Karen. I ran into some problems. Liquidity problems. Big ones, Karen. I had to cover myself. I panicked. I concocted this elaborate fraud.”
“Those empty tankers…You were falsifying oil.”
Charles nodded and sucked in a breath. “I needed to. My reserves were so low, if the banks found out, they would call in my loan agreements. I was leveraged up eight to one, Karen. I had to create collateral. Yes.”
“Why, Charlie, why? Why did you have to do these things? Didn’t I love you enough, Charlie? Wasn’t I there for you? Didn’t we have a good enough life together? The kids…”
“It was never that, Karen. It had nothing to do with you.” He shook his head. “You remember years ago when I got overleveraged and Harbor was about to go under?”
Karen nodded.
“We would have been totally underwater. I would have had nothing, Karen. I would have ended up on some trading desk again, with my tail between my legs, trying to work myself back. I would’ve spent years paying off that debt. But it all came at a price, Karen.”
“A price?”
“Yeah.” He told her about the funds he’d been overseeing. “Not the birdshit little accounts I had at Harbor.” The private partnerships. Falcon. Managed offshore. “Billions, Karen.”
“But it was dirty money, Charles. You’re a money launderer. Why don’t you call it what it is? Who did this to you, Charles?”
“I’m not a money launderer, Karen. You don’t understand-you don’t judge these kinds of funds. You run them. You manage the money. That’s what I do, Karen. It was our way out. And I took it, Karen, for the past ten goddamn years. I didn’t know where the hell it all came from or who they fucking robbed or stole it from. Just that it was there. And you know what? I didn’t care. They were accounts to me. I invested for them. It was the same, the same as the Levinsons and the Coumiers and Smith fucking Barney. I’ve never even met these people, Karen. Saul found it all for me. And what do you think, there aren’t others? There aren’t people doing this every day, respected people who come home every night and toss the ball with the kids, and watch ER, and take their wives to the Met. People like me! It’s out there, Karen. Drug financiers, mobsters, people siphoning off their country’s oil pipelines. So I grabbed it. Like anyone else would have. It was our way out. I’ve never laundered a penny, Karen. I just managed their accounts.”
Karen looked at him-like a laser, looked through him. The truth, like some haze in the sky, melting away. “You didn’t just manage their accounts, Charlie. That sounds so good, doesn’t it? But you’re wrong. I know… This is what Jonathan Lauer wanted me to know, Charlie. After you so conveniently ‘died.’ But now he’s dead, Charlie. For real. He’s not coming back on some island. Like you…He was set to testify at some hearing a few weeks back, but he was killed, run over, just like that innocent boy in Greenwich, Charlie.”
Charles averted his face.
“The one you went to see, Charlie, after Grand Central, when you stole that person’s identity. The kid you helped kill, Charlie. Or did kill for all I know. I have no fucking idea.
“What was he going to do, Charlie, turn you in? Blow your little scam out of the water? You’re not some money launderer-you’re a whole lot worse, Charlie. These people, they’re not coming back. Not to mention how many thousands were ruined or murdered in the name of all this money you so sacredly invested. Oh, Charlie…what the hell did you do? How did you lose your way? This was your big way out, right, baby…? Well, look at you! Look at what the hell it’s done.”
Charles stared at her, eyes pleading. He shook his head and moistened his dry lips. “I didn’t do that, Karen. What you think. I swear. You can hate me if you want, just hate me for the things I’ve done.” He took off his cap and ran his hand over his shaved scalp. “I didn’t kill that boy, Karen. No matter what you think. I went up there to try to save him.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
“Save him?” A surge of anger flared up in Karen. “Like you were going to save me, Charlie?”
“I went there to stop him, Karen! I knew what they were threatening to do.”
“Who, Charles?” Karen shook her head in frustration. “Tell me who?”
“I can’t spell it out for you, Karen. I don’t even want you to goddamn know.” Charles’s face dimmed, and he drew in a harried breath and puffed his cheeks, slowly exhaling. “I had met with him once before. Near his shop. I tried to persuade him to convince his bullheaded father to simply let things go. If it got out, what we were doing with the tankers, it could unravel everything. You don’t have a fucking clue where it would go. So I went there. Back to Greenwich. After the bombing. I was totally rattled. Part of me saw this as a chance to simply disappear. I should’ve died there anyway. These people had threatened me, Karen. You have no idea. Another part of me just wanted to make this whole thing go away.
“So I called him. Raymond. To come and meet me. I rang him from across the street, using the dead guy’s name. And I sat there, in that goddamn booth, not knowing what I was going to do or what I was going to say. Just thinking, this whole thing has to end. Now. These people are bad. I can’t have this poor kid’s blood on my hands.
“And then I saw it.” Charles looked through her, staring blankly. “I saw that kid through the goddamn window, coming toward me, crossing the street, flipping open his phone… I saw the car, a black SUV, coming down the Post Road parallel to him, picking up speed.
“The vehicle veered around the corner. The kid, these locks of red hair in a ponytail, realizing what was about to happen. That moment I knew that the door had closed for me, Karen. I had lost all that money. Falsified my reserves. These bastards wanted blood. And now I had this kid’s blood on my hands.” He looked at her. “You have to see it, Karen, I was at risk. You were at risk, the kids… There was no turning things back for me. I wasn’t going to spend ten years in jail. I might as well have perished in that train. So I did.”
“For what, Charles? To protect those monsters?”
“You don’t understand.” He shook his head at her. “I lost over half a billion dollars, Karen! Every day I watched, having to cover my long contracts, the spread between my position growing larger. Our life sliding away. I crashed through my reserves. I could no longer cover my loans. They were going to kill me, Karen. I needed to hold them off. So I started to fake things. I had these goddamn tankers crisscrossing the fucking globe- Indonesia, Jamaica, Pensacola… All empty! And this goddamn bullheaded fool in Pensacola who wouldn’t go away…”