This simple disclosure catches Posner unawares. So much for initial judgments, he thinks, but he recovers quickly enough to ask about her accent.
“Ach. That is German. I grew up in Austria, in Vienna. That’s after my parents left Iran just before the shah and his family did.”
Everything is clear now to Posner, the facial coloring and the accent all come together. And a doctor, no less. She must have sensed his surprise. She’s probably seen it many times, but before he can say a word the bus begins to slow as it approaches the East Hampton stop. The empty driveway of the Palm Restaurant lies to the right. She stands and moves a step closer up the aisle and stops next to where he sits. The movement causes her to sway slightly and her hip brushes his shoulder. She seizes his eyes with her own, a pair of wide black bullets that bore through him, a discomfort he cannot evade.
“Do you get off here?” she asks, still swaying slightly as the bus slows. “Perhaps you can drop me at the beach.”
“Sorry, but I go on till Amagansett,” he answers. “Next stop.”
She nods slightly. “Too bad.” Her eyes remain locked on his.
The bus stops. “Well, thank you anyway,” she says, and offers her hand.
It all seems very formal to Posner. Very European. Her grip is warm, and he senses her fingers linger across his palm far longer than normal. But what is normal?
“Enjoy,” he says and releases her hand. He watches her walk down the aisle, briefly wonders why she was flirting with him, and smiles at the idea. The woman is probably only slightly more than half his age. Whatever it is, he feels a physical quiver where he has become used to near dormancy.
As the bus pulls away, he catches a flicker of pink and white against green foliage as she heads in the direction of the village shops. In a moment the bus escapes the area and he awaits the five-minute drive into Amagansett. The woman diverts his attention from his legal issues for a few minutes, but as soon as she leaves, his angst resurfaces with even greater intensity. He concentrates on a relaxation exercise where he breathes in and out slowly. It always seems to help.
A few minutes later, the bus slows and the gasp from the air brakes shakes him back to reality. He is the last passenger. He begins the short walk to the parking lot behind the library.
He finds the car, a new blue Lexus, hiding where he’d left it two days ago. Sara bought the car for cash from her own account the previous October. Since he lost his job and his severance has nearly disappeared, she now pays for everything. The Lexus was her choice although he would have preferred a more modest car, a hybrid, but he had no input.
“She’s the one who’s ringing the cash register now,” her colleague Howard had said at the reception he attended a few months before that celebrated her law firm’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Howard had been more than a little drunk when he spoke, but everything he said was true, however impolitic.
He sits motionless in the front seat, staring at the empty stretch of field beyond the parking lot. Tiny green shoots dot the earth. Regeneration, he thinks, but not for him. He is essentially unemployable within the international trading community, although there has been no publicized accounting of his activities. There is, however, a unique form of radar that links all elements in the relatively small commercial sector that deals in commodities. For millennia, the stock in trade for those whose survival depended on sound trading was clear and accurate information. Adverse weather, strikes, revolutions, mechanical failures all shaped supply and demand. Posner himself had once singularly procured information about the unanticipated early arrival of a large cargo of aluminum metal into Rotterdam at a time of great shortage. The cargo would replenish depleted stocks and prices would decline, but not before Posner sold considerable quantities short. He had acquired the correct information at the cost of a modest bribe to the ship owner’s agent for daily updates on its arrival expectations.
But now he is little more than damaged goods. The same intelligence network that affords traders the opportunity to grasp early options now exposes the potential dangers in employing someone who might lead authorities to their door.
He has considered other employment options, but Wall Street is no longer one of them, the rejections were too long to list. He had always wanted to be an architect, ever since his parents took him to an Art Deco museum show. In high school he would endlessly design buildings, based on the ideas in that show. He wanted to build houses with new, spacious interiors. He wanted to renovate every aging brownstone in New York into airy, sun-filled homes. He wanted to do all this and his father, Stephen Posner, grandson of immigrant refugees from the Kishinev pogrom, agreed with enthusiasm.
“He will help build a better America,” his father said a few months before his first year of Cornell’s five-year architecture program. “We will find the money.”
And somehow the money was there, at least for his first two years. Then there was his father’s heart attack. He sat in a class that discussed how to measure stresses on structures when an aide brought a message to the teacher who interrupted the lecture to call him forward. His father was ill and his family wanted him to go home as soon as possible. His father had already died, but he wouldn’t know that for seven hours. That’s how long it took to take the bus from Ithaca to New York City, and then the subway ride and bus trip to the Bayside, Queens, house that was the only home he’d ever known. He never returned to Cornell. There was no money, and they needed money. His mother’s brother had a Wall Street job and arranged for an interview with a firm that needed a trainee for their commodities group. He got the job and never left the industry. The only remnant of his architectural interest was a framed preliminary sketch he made years before of the house he now lives in.
He inserts the key into the ignition. The car still smells of new leather. Even if this is the car Sara wanted, he has the satisfaction of driving it to the home he chose and paid for out of his own earnings nearly twenty years ago, even before he and Sara had ever met. He takes considerable pleasure in this recollection.
The house is modern and sits on nearly half an acre of high dune only a block from the beach. A gray crushed-stone driveway climbs from the street amidst thick sand pines. A red quarry tiled entrance floor leads to four bedrooms and two baths, and a steep flight of wooden stairs just beyond the front door provides access to the main living quarters, a master bedroom suite, kitchen, and open living and dining areas. The exterior upstairs walls are interspersed with large floor-to-ceiling windows. There are wraparound decks and dramatic views of the ocean.
There is also a desk and chair from which he enjoys these views, a place where he now writes a history of his indiscretions. He often wonders if that is the correct word, but the meaning is clear, if only to him. He writes about his days in Iran, Venezuela, Chile, and Japan, and the bribes he’s paid to obtain contracts. He remembers the envelopes he’s passed over cocktails, the nods and winks that preceded every transaction, each the understated language of modern business, the lingua franca of twentieth-century corruption, although the practice has been entrenched for thousands of years.
“What will it take to make this business work?” he asked the ultimate buyer or seller, in words that have been repeated for centuries. Nothing has changed, except that penalties for such activities now exist. So he writes about what he has done. He does not think of this manuscript as a form of memoir. It is more or less a confessional of sorts. The process of writing eases his guilt, although the painful risk of discovery remains. His prose justifies his innocence. He only obeyed his senior managers. He didn’t realize such activities were illegal. His justifications rise to absurd heights. His efforts helped an underdeveloped country obtain needed foreign currency, or have, in the national interest, profited American companies at the expense of overseas competitors.