Only a month ago he had been a member in good standing of Morgan Stanley's fall batch of executive recruits. One of thirty blessed men and women (culled from a bumper crop of two thousand) who had deemed a starting salary of ninety thousand dollars, a signing bonus of seven thousand dollars, and a future promising untold millions adequate compensation for allowing the savviest brains on Wall Street to daily instill in them their combined and hard-earned knowledge. And not just another member of his class, but a leading one- for he had recently been offered his choice of positions as assistant to the chief of equity trading or junior member of the international mergers and acquisitions team, both plum assignments his fellow trainees would have killed, maimed, or mutilated to obtain.
On Wednesday, November 20, Nick received a call at work from his aunt Evelyn in Missouri. He remembered checking his watch the moment he heard her squeaky voice. Two oh five. He knew right away what she had to tell him. His mother was dead, she said. Heart failure. He listened as in lugubrious detail she chronicled his mother's deterioration these past years. She chastised him for not visiting, and he said he was sorry. Finally, he got the date of the funeral, then hung up.
He received the news stoically. He recalled massaging his chair's cool leather armrests as he struggled to show the proper shock and sadness at the news of his mother's death. If anything, he felt lighter, the proverbial weight lifted from his shoulders. His mother was fifty-eight years old and an alcoholic. Six years had passed since he'd spoken to her last. In a burst of temperance and good intention, she had called to say that she'd moved from California to her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. A new beginning, she'd said. Another one.
Nick found a flight to St. Louis the next day and from the Gateway to the West, rented a car and drove the hundred miles upriver to Hannibal. He had come in a spirit of reconciliation. He would see her buried. He would forgive her her lapses as a parent and as a self-respecting adult- if only to gild his tarnished memory of her.
His childhood had been a record of sudden disappointments, his father's death being the first and of course the greatest. But others had followed, their arrival as regular as the change of seasons. Nick recalled them all- low points of a peripatetic adolescence flickering through his mind like an old, scratched film. His mother's remarriage to a larcenous real-estate developer; his stepfather's frittering away the insurance settlement, but not before delivering the family a financial coup de grace- losing Alex Neumann's dream house at 805 Alpine Drive to repay a litigious investor; the Haitian divorce that followed.
Then came the "Fall": a downward spiral through the curdled underside of southern California: Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Hawthorne. Another marriage came and went, this one briefer, less expensive- by then there was nothing left to split, settle, or divide. And finally, mercifully, at seventeen, the split from his mother. His own "new beginning."
The day after the funeral, Nick drove downtown to a storage facility his mother had filled with reminders of her past. It was a grim task, sorting through her affairs. Box after box filled with souvenirs of a mundane and failed existence. A chipped piece of china he recognized as his grandmother's gift to the newlyweds; a manila envelope stuffed with grade cards from elementary school; and a box of record albums containing such gems as Burl Ives' Christmas Favorites, Dean Martin Loves Somebody, and Von Karajan Conducts Beethoven- the scratched soundtrack of his early childhood.
At day's end, Nick came upon two sturdy cartons well sealed with brown electrical tape and marked "A. Neumann. USB- L.A. " Inside were his father's effects taken from his office in Los Angeles days after his death: a few paperweights, a Rolodex, a calendar showing scenes of Switzerland, and two calfskin agendas for the years 1978 and 1979. Half the agendas' pages were stained a muddy brown, swollen with the Mississippi floodwater that on two occasions had risen high inside the corrugated tin shed. But half were unharmed. And his father's looping script was easily legible almost twenty years after he had written it.
Nick stared, transfixed, at the agendas. He opened a cover and skimmed through the entries. Nervous energy coursed through his body like a weak current. Hands that had mastered the buck of a sawed-off twelve gauge trembled like a schoolboy's at his first communion. And for one quicksilver flash, his father was alive again, holding him on his lap in the downstairs study while a fire burned in the grate and a November rain pelted the windows. Nick had been crying, as he often did after hearing his parents argue, and father had taken his son aside to console him. Nick laid his head on his father's chest and, hearing the heart beating too fast, knew that his father was also upset. His father hugged him tightly and caressed his hair. "Nicholas," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "promise me that you'll remember me all of your life."
Nick stood motionless in the dank shed. The words echoed in his ears and for a second longer he swore he was staring into those cold blue eyes. He blinked, and the apparition, if it had been one, faded.
Once, that memory had been an important component of his daily life. For a year after his father's death, he had replayed it endlessly, hour after hour, day after day, trying to assign some deeper meaning to the words. Tortured by his futile curiosity, he had arrived at the conclusion that his father had been asking for his help, and that somehow he had failed him and was thus himself responsible for his murder. Sometime in his teens, the memory had faded and he had forgotten it. But he never quite absolved himself of his role in his father's death.
A decade had passed since that memory had taunted him. His father had been right to worry. He could hardly remember him.
Nick stayed in the shed for a while longer. He had given up the idea of learning more about his father. To have the opportunity from Alex Neumann's own hand was almost too much to believe. An unexpected gift. But his joy proved short-lived. A receipt acknowledging acceptance of his father's possessions signed by a "Mrs. V. Neumann" was tucked inside the front cover of one of the leather-bound books. His mother had known about the agendas. She had purposely hidden them from her only son.
Nick spent the return flight to New York examining the agendas. He read both from cover to cover, first perusing the daily entries, then, alarmed, slowing to read each page carefully. He found mentions of a slippery client who had threatened his father and with whom, despite this, he had been pressed to do business; a shadowy local company that had merited the attentions of the Zurich head office; and most interesting, one month before his father's death, a note providing the phone number and address of the Los Angeles field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Taken singly, the entries constituted only small worries. Taken together, they demanded explanation. But when set against the backdrop of his father's unsolved murder and his own guilty memories, they ignited a fire of doubt whose flames cast ill-defined shadows on the inner workings of the United Swiss Bank and its clients.
Nick returned to work the next day. His training schedule called for classroom instruction from eight to twelve. An hour into the first lecture- some dry cant about the underpricing of initial public offerings- his attention began to waver. He cast his eye around the auditorium, sizing up his fellow trainees. Like him, they were graduates of America 's leading business schools. Like him, they were pressed and coiffed and packaged into tailored designer suits and polished leather shoes. All managed to convey a slight insouciance in their postures while writing down every single word the speaker uttered. They regarded themselves as the chosen ones, and in fact, they were. Financial centurions for the new millennium.