Before the Fall Page 13

  Kipling had a sudden impulse to drop cash on the table and walk away. He tamped it down, because if he was wrong, it was a hell of a lot of money to walk away from, and Ben Kipling wasn’t a man to walk away from—what did the Swiss say? Potentially a billion dollars in hard-to-convert currency? Fuck it, Ben decided. If you’re not going to retreat then you’ve got to charge. He opened his mouth and gave them the hard sell without getting too specific. No hot phrases that could be used against him in court.

  “So, okay with the small talk,” he said. “We all know what we’re doing here. The same thing cavemen did in the age of the dinosaur, sizing each other up, seeing who you can trust. What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

  He smiled at them. They looked back, unsmiling, but engaged. This was the moment they cared about—if they were who they said they were. The deal. The waiter brought Kipling his scotch, put it on the table. By habit, Ben moved it deeper toward the center of the table. He was a hand talker and had spilled his fair share of cocktails in the middle of a good monologue.

  “You have a problem,” he said. “You’ve got foreign currency you need to invest in the open market, but our government won’t let you. Why? Because at some point that money found its way to a region they keep on a list in some federal building in DC. As if the money itself had a point of view. But you and me, we know that money is money. The dollar a black guy in Harlem uses to buy crack with today is the same dollar a suburban housewife uses to buy Hamburger Helper tomorrow. Or that Uncle Sam uses to buy weapons systems from McDonnell Douglas on Thursday.”

  Ben watched plays of the day on the television —a string of towering home runs, shoestring catches, and baseline rundowns. It was more than a passing interest. Ben was an encyclopedia of arcane baseball figures. It was a lifelong passion, one that had taught him (coincidentally) the value of a dollar. Ten-year-old Bennie Kipling had the premier bubble-gum card collection in all of Sheepshead Bay. He dreamed one day of playing center field for the Mets and every year tried out for Little League, but he was small for his age and slow on the base path and couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield, so he collected baseball cards instead, studying the market closely, exploiting the amateur mind-set of schoolmates—who focused only on players they liked—tracking rare cards and playing the rise and fall of each player. Every morning Bennie would read the obituaries, looking for signs that the recently deceased were baseball fans, and then he’d call the widows, saying he knew their husbands (or fathers) from the trading card circuit and how so-and-so had been a mentor to him. He never asked for the decedent’s collection outright, just played up his saddest little-boy voice. It worked every time. On more than one occasion he took the subway into the city to collect a once prized box of baseball nostalgia.

  “We come to you, Mr. Kipling,” said Jorgen, the dark-haired Aryan in the cotton-weight suit, “because we hear good things. Obviously these are sensitive subjects, but my colleagues agree you are a straight man. That complications do not arrive. Additional expenses. The clients we represent, well, these are not people who appreciate complications or attempts to take advantage.”

  “And who is that again?” said Hoover, sweating at the brows. “Say without saying, if you can. Just so we’re all clear.”

  The Swiss said nothing. They too feared a trap.

  “The deal we make is the deal we keep,” said Kipling. “Doesn’t matter who’s on the other side. I can’t tell you exactly how we do what we do. That’s our proprietary advantage, right? But what I will say is, accounts are opened. Accounts that cannot be connected back to you. After that, the money you invest with my firm gets a new pedigree and is treated like any other money. It goes in dirty and comes out clean. Simple.”

  “And how does it—”

  “Work? Well, if we agree now, in principle, to move forward with this thing, then colleagues of mine will come to Geneva and help you set up the systems you’ll need using a proprietary software package. My operative will then stay on site to monitor your investments and navigate the daily password and IP address changes. He doesn’t need a fancy office. In fact, the less attention he draws the better. Put him in a men’s room stall or in the basement next to the boiler.”

  The men thought about this. While they did, Kipling grabbed a passing waiter and handed him his black Amex card.

  “Look,” he said, “pirates used to bury treasure in the sand and then row away. And the minute they left, in my opinion, they were broke, because money in a box—”

  Outside the window, he watched a group of men in dark suits approach the front door. In an instant Ben saw the whole thing unravel: They would come in fast, guns out, wallets high, a sting operation, like a tiger trap in the jungle. Ben saw himself flipped on his belly, cuffed, his summer suit stained beyond repair, dirty footprints on his back. But the men kept walking. The moment passed. Kipling breathed again, finished his scotch in a single draft.

  “—money you can’t use has no value.”

  He sized them up, the men from Geneva—no bigger or smaller than a dozen other men he had sat across from, making this same pitch. They were fish to be caught on a hook, women to be flattered and seduced. FBI or no FBI, Ben Kipling was a money magnet. He had a quality that couldn’t be put in writing. Rich people looked at him and saw a vault with two doors. They visualized their money going in one door, and coming out the other multiplied. A sure thing.

  He slid his chair back, buttoning his jacket.

  “I like you guys,” he said. “I trust you, and I don’t say that to just anyone. My feeling is, we should do this, but in the end it’s up to you.”

  He stood.

  “Tabitha and Greg are gonna stay behind, get your details. It was a pleasure.”

  The Swiss stood, shook his hand. Ben Kipling walked away from them, the front door opening before him as he exited. His car was at the curb, back door open, driver standing at attention, and he slid inside without slowing.

  The black vacuum of space.

  * * *

  Across town, a yellow cab pulled up in front of the Whitney Museum. The driver had been born in Katmandu, had stolen down into Michigan from Saskatchewan, paying a smuggler six hundred dollars for fake ID. He slept in an apartment now with fourteen other people, sent most of his pay overseas in the hope of one day bringing his wife and boys over on a plane.

  The woman in back, on the other hand, who told him to keep the change from a twenty, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and owned nineteen televisions she didn’t watch. Once upon a time she was a doctor’s daughter in Brookline, Massachusetts, a girl who grew up riding horses and got a nose job for her sixteenth birthday.

  Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

  Sarah Kipling turned fifty in March—there was a surprise party in the Cayman Islands. Ben picked her up in a limo to go to Tavern on the Green (she thought), but took her out to Teterboro instead. Five hours later she was sipping rum punch with her toes in the sand. Now, outside the Whitney, she climbed out of a cab. She was meeting her daughter, Jenny (twenty-six), to tour the biennial and get a quick download on her fiancé’s parents before the dinner. This wasn’t so much for Sarah’s benefit, because she could talk to anyone, as it was for Ben’s. Her husband had a hard time with conversations that weren’t about money. Or maybe that wasn’t it exactly. Maybe it was that he had a hard time talking to people who didn’t have money. Not that he was aloof. It was just that he’d forgotten what it was like to have a mortgage or a car loan. What it was to be getting by, to go to a store and have to check the price of something before you buy it. And this could make him seem vulgar and aloof.

  Sarah loathed the feeling she got in those moments—watching her husband embarrass himself (and her). There was no other word for it, in her mind. As his wife she was irrevocably tied to him—his opinions were her o
pinions. They reflected poorly on her, perhaps not because she held them exactly, but because by choosing Ben, by sticking with him, she showed herself (in the eyes of others) to be a poor judge of character. Though she grew up with money, Sarah knew that the last thing you did was talk about it. This was the difference between new money and old. Old-money kids were the ones in college with bed head and moth-hole sweaters. You found them in the cafeteria borrowing lunch money and eating off their friends’ plates. They passed as poor, affecting a disposition that they were beyond money—as if one of the riches wealth had bought them was the right never to think about money again. In this way they floated through the real world the way that child prodigies stumbled through the daily travails of human existence, heads in the clouds, forgetting to wear socks, their shirts misbuttoned.

  This made her husband’s tone-deafness on the subject of money, his need to constantly remind others how much they had feel so gauche, so rude. As a result it had become her tired mission in life to soften his edges, to educate him on how to get rich without becoming tacky.

  So Jenny would fill her in about her future in-laws, and Sarah would send Ben a text. You can talk about politics with the husband (he votes Republican) or sports (Jets fan). The wife went to Italy last year with her book group (travel? reading?). They have a son with Down syndrome in an institution, so no retard jokes!

  Sarah had tried to get Ben to show more of an interest in people, to be more open to new experiences—they’d gone to counseling about it for two weeks, before Ben told her he’d rather cut off his ears than “listen to that woman for another day”—but eventually she’d done what most wives do and just gave up. So now it was she who had to make the extra effort to ensure that social engagements went well.

  Jenny was waiting for her outside the main entrance. She had on flared slacks and a T-shirt, with her hair in the kind of beret the girls were wearing these days.

  “Mom,” she called when Sarah didn’t see her right away.

  “Sorry,” her mother said, “my eyes are shot. Your father keeps telling me to go to the eye doctor, but who has time?”

  They hugged briefly, efficiently, then moved inside.

  “I got here early, so I got us tickets,” said Jenny.

  Sarah tried to shove a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

  “Mom, don’t be silly. I’m happy to pay.”

  “For a cab later,” her mother said jabbing the bill at her like a flyer to a mattress store they shoved at you on the street, but Jenny turned away and handed their tickets to the docent, and Sarah was forced to put the bill back in her wallet.

  “I heard the best stuff is upstairs,” said Jenny. “So maybe we should start at the top.”

  “Whatever you want, dear.”

  They waited for the elevator and rode up in silence. Behind them a Latin family talked in animated Spanish, the woman berating her husband. Sarah had studied Spanish in high school, though she hadn’t kept up. She recognized the words for “motorcycle” and “babysitter,” and it was clear from the exchange that something extramarital may have occurred. At their feet, two young children played games on handheld devices, their faces lit an eerie blue.

  “Shane’s nervous about tonight,” Jenny said after they exited the elevator. “It’s so cute.”

  “The first time I met your father’s parents, I threw up,” Sarah told her.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but I think it might have been the clam chowder I had at lunch.”

  “Oh, Mom,” said Jenny, smiling, “you’re so funny.” Jenny always told her friends that her mother was “slightly batty.” Sarah knew it, or sensed it on some level. And she was—what’s the word?—a little absentminded, a little, well—sometimes she made unique connections in her head. And didn’t Robin Williams have the same quality? Or other, you know, innovative thinkers.

  So now you’re Robin Williams? Ben would say.

  “Well, he doesn’t have to be nervous,” said Sarah. “We don’t bite.”

  “Class is a real thing,” Jenny told her. “I mean again. The divide, you know. Rich people and—I mean, Shane’s parents aren’t poor, but—”

  “It’s dinner at Bali, not class warfare. And besides, we’re not that rich.”

  “When was the last time you flew commercial?”

  “Last winter to Aspen.”

  Her daughter made a sound as if to say, Do you hear yourself?

  “We’re not billionaires, dear. This is Manhattan, you know. Some of the parties we go to, I feel like the help.”

  “You own a yacht.”

  “It’s not a—it’s a sailboat, and I told your father not to buy it. Is that who we are now, I said, boat people? But you know him when he gets an idea.”

  “Whatever. The point is, he’s nervous, so will you please—I don’t know—keep it light.”

  “You’re talking to the woman who charmed a Swedish prince, and boy was he a sourpuss.”

  With this they entered the main gallery space. Oversize canvases lined the walls, each a gesture of will. Thoughts and ideas reduced to lines and color. Sarah tried to let her daily brain go, to quiet the constant natter of thoughts, the chronic to-do list of modern life, but it was hard. The more you had, the more you worried. That was what she’d decided.

  When Jenny was born, they’d lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. Ben earned eighty thousand a year as a runner at the exchange. But he was handsome and good at making people laugh, and he knew how to seize an opportunity, so two years later he had graduated to trader and was pulling in four times that amount. They’d moved east to a co-op in the sixties and started buying groceries at Citarella.

  Before motherhood, Sarah had worked in advertising, and after Jenny was in preschool she’d flirted with the idea of going back to it, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of a nanny raising her daughter while she was at work. So though she felt like she was giving up a piece of her soul, she’d stayed home and made lunch and changed diapers and waited for her husband to come home and do his share.

  Her mother had encouraged her to do it, becoming—as her mother described it—a lady of leisure. But Sarah didn’t do well with unstructured time, possibly because her mind was so unstructured. And so she’d become a woman of lists, a woman with multiple calendars who left sticky notes on the inside of their front door. She was the kind of person who needed reminding, who would forget a phone number the second after someone recited it to her. She’d known it was bad when her three-year-old daughter started reminding her of things, even went to see a neurologist, who’d found nothing physically wrong with her brain and suggested Ritalin, suggesting she had ADHD, but Sarah hated pills and worried they would turn her into a different person, so she’d gone back to her lists, to her calendars and alarms.

  On nights that Ben had worked late—which became increasingly frequent—she couldn’t help but think of her mother in the kitchen when Sarah was young, washing up after dinner, supervising the end-of-day arts and crafts while packing lunches for the next day. Was this the cycle of motherhood? The constant return. Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

  Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.

  And so Sarah had found herself in her own kitchen on East 63rd Street, packing preschool lunches and reading picture books during warm baths, her body and her daughter’s body one and the same. On those nights when she’d fall asleep alone, Sarah would bring Jenny into bed with her, reading books and talking until they both nodded off, intertwined. This would be how Ben found them when he came home, smelling of booze, his tie as
kew, kicking his shoes off noisily.

  “How are my girls?” he’d say. His girls, as if they were both his daughter. But he said the words with love, his face brightening, as if this was his reward for a long day, the faces of the women he loved looking up at him with sleepy eyes from the comfort of the family bed.

  “I like this one,” said Jenny, now a woman in her twenties, five years from children of her own. They’d managed to stay close through her divisive teen years, despite all odds. Jenny never was one for drama. The worst you could say now was that she didn’t respect her mom the way she used to, the curse of the modern woman. You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.

  Beside her, Jenny was going on about Shane’s parents—Dad fixed up old cars. Mom liked to do charity work for their church—and Sarah tried to focus, listening for red flags, things Ben would need to know, but her mind wandered. It struck her that she could buy any of the art in this room. What was the most these pieces by young artists could cost? A few hundred thousand? A million?

  On the Upper West Side, they’d lived on the third floor. The condo on East 63rd was on the ninth. Now they owned a penthouse loft in Tribeca, fifty-three stories up. And though the house in Connecticut was only two floors, the zip code itself made it a space station of sorts. The “farmers” at the Saturday farmers market were the new breed of hipster artisans, championing the return of heirloom apples and the lost art of basket weaving. The things Sarah called problems now were wholly elective—There are no first-class seats left on our flight, the sailboat is leaking, et cetera. Actual struggle—they’d come to turn off the gas, your kid was knifed at school, the car’s been repossessed—had become a thing of the past.

  And all of this left Sarah to wonder, now that Jenny was grown, now that their wealth had exceeded their needs by a factor of six hundred, what was the point? Her parents had money, sure, but not this much. Enough to join the nicest country club, to buy a six-bedroom home and drive the latest cars, enough to retire with a few million in the bank. But this—hundreds of millions in clean currency stashed in the Caymans—it was beyond the boundaries of old money, beyond even the boundaries of what was once considered new. Modern wealth was something else entirely.