“Is that all?” I asked the brooding billionaire.
“Will you do it?”
“I’ll start and see where it goes.”
“That’s all I can ask,” he said, and then paused. “Brunch is served soon. Let’s go over the particulars and then have something to eat.”
2
Roger and I spent the next three-quarters of an hour going over the details of what he’d been told and what he’d found out on his own, how much I’d charge, and, finally, what resources he could make available to me.
“Let’s wait till I ask around,” I said, “before you call out the cavalry.” I stood up from the folding chair and added, “After all, this is intelligence gathering, not war.”
He nodded, but my estimation of the job caused a sour twist in the rich man’s lips. He was used to bullying his way through the world.
I was used to clapping bullies into cuffs.
“I have something for you,” he said, reaching into a pocket.
“Hi, Daddy,” Aja, my daughter, hailed as I stepped out of the cube room into the wide, blue-carpeted hallway.
“What are you doing here, honey?”
“Grandma B invited me to brunch.”
Aja was a couple of inches shorter than I with dark brown skin and bright eyes. Valedictorian of her high school class, she swam competitively and loved playing in basketball pickup games around Manhattan. There were very few women allowed in those games, but the city basketeers knew that she left it all on the court.
“I thought you were going to write that paper today.”
“And that I wouldn’t even eat?”
I smiled and she kissed my cheek, the scarred side. She was the closest person in my life and I thanked the God I didn’t believe in every day for her.
“Aja-Denise,” Roger greeted, coming out after me.
“Hello, Mr. Ferris,” she said. “How are you?”
“Even if I fall dead after our meal, this would have still been a pretty good day.”
My daughter giggled at his over-the-top words and the three of us made our way toward the afternoon dining room.
Everywhere was a trek at Silbrig Haus, Roger’s name for his humble abode. We walked down the long hall, through a painting gallery, across a sitting room, and finally into a room that sported a twenty-foot-long hickory table set next to a bulletproof wall of a window that looked across the Hudson into New Jersey.
Everything Roger had or did, lived in or thought, was immoderate and excessive.
Seated at the north end of the dining table were my grandmother and her grandnephew, my watered-down cousin, Richard “Rags” Naples.
“Rags,” I said, holding out a hand as he rose to his feet.
“King,” he rejoined.
I felt the strength in that grip. Rags was a rough-and-tumble ex-soldier, ex-mercenary, ex-bodyguard who now worked as a specialist in delicate extractions. Ten years my junior, he didn’t look dangerous but that’s what made him so good at his job. His hands were not only powerful but roughened from extreme exertions. His face was... wizened; not wrinkled, but rather etched with extremely fine lines. He was acorn brown and the same height as my daughter.
“How’s extractions?” I asked.
“Keepin’ me on my toes, all eight of ’em.”
Everyone got to their feet to exchange kisses, hugs, and handclasps. My grandmother’s place was at the head of the table for all daylight meals. Roger took that position for dinner.
After Forthright came to join the get-together, we all sat.
The meal consisted of buckwheat waffles, wild rice and citrus salad, smoked salmon for my daughter, who’d given up mammal-red meat, and thick bacon for the rest of us. The serving staff brought out the trays containing the meal and then left us on our own to divvy up the largesse.
“So,” Roger said a while after we’d started eating, “Aja-Denise, how’s school going?”
“Okay. They have us studying world history from the Industrial Revolution up through the later nineteenth century.”
“That’s an interesting period,” Roger said. “A lot happened then to shape the world — for better and for worse.”
“That’s what they say in almost every lecture,” Aja agreed.
“What college is it?” Rags asked.
“Beckton University.”
“Never heard of it,” our cousin stated.
“It’s in Detroit, been around for nearly fifty years.”
“You moved to Michigan?”
“Beckton is a low-residency school,” Forthright put in. “They offer what one might call a radical arts education.”
“So what do you study there?” Rags asked anyone who wanted to answer.
“They have all kinds of degrees,” Aja responded. “You can study architecture for the twenty-first century, Chinese medicine, footprint ecology, and about fifty other subjects.”
“And what’s your major?” Rags asked.
“I’m getting a degree in knowledge, which is also called a PhD in liberal arts.”
“PhD? Don’t you have to get a BA first?”
“It’s a six- or seven-year course of study,” my patient daughter explained. “You pick up the lower degrees along the way.”
That conversation went on for a while. As it meandered, my mind drifted to the job Roger wanted me to do. There was little involved that I liked or felt drawn to. To begin with, there was the nightmare called Rikers Island.
Most of the literature I’ve read on psychotherapy says that all humans’ true psychological natures were developed before the age of six; what you experienced combined with the structure of your DNA bespoke who you would be from then on. You could make conscious changes to your mind, but you had to work at it all the time because the person you were born to be was always ready to come out and play, and play hard.
I believe in that psychological rule of thumb even though my experience has seemingly been the exception.
While Aja explained the ins and outs of her extremist education, I was remembering the twelve weeks I endured becoming a new man under the pressure of Rikers. When I was incarcerated I was still a New York City cop, a detective working his way up the ladder. Then I was framed, arrested, beaten, doused with piss, and threatened from the time I woke up, through my tedious and dangerous day, until falling back into nightmare, only to wake up in terror again.
I’d been in the hole three weeks when guards took me to the shower room to wash off the crud. I was already permanently scarred by a con named Julee, who wielded a jagged tomato can lid. I’d already been told that I’d spend the rest of my life in stir.
The shower was an empty room made of concrete and cinder blocks. When we got there the guards made me strip. Then they brought out a hose designed to put out fires. They blasted me for maybe two minutes, but it felt like forever. I could still feel the bruises at that rich man’s table.
When the hose was shut off I was too stunned to get to my feet. Freezing, I could hardly breathe. One of the guards was yelling something, but the words failed to convey meaning — at first.
“He said get your ass up or we gonna clean out your butthole with this here hose!” one of my tormentors shouted.
Biding for time I said, “Why you doin’ this shit to me, man?”
“For knockin’ out Jimbo’s tooth,” another guard replied.
There were four guards in all. That was the usual count for badasses, and by that time I was one of the most dangerous convicts in stir. Jimbo was a huge Black guard who thought he didn’t need any help transferring me to the meeting with my lawyer. Despite hunger, thirst, and fifteen pounds’ worth of chains, I whipped around and hit Jimbo so hard that the blood was gushing from his mouth.