needed help, desperately. I was a mother with two teenage sons and no house and no money. We’d gone from that house in Bedford to sharing Mom’s split-level ranch in Malden. I had no income and no foreseeable income. Imagine how I must have felt.”
In the scale of human misery, that barely registered, I knew. But at the same time I truly couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to be Francine Heller, ripped untimely from her chrysalis of immense gilded wealth, naked and shivering, lost and vulnerable, not knowing who to turn to.
“I can’t,” I admitted. “But you were a hero. That much I do know.”
She gripped my hand in her small soft warm one. “Oh, for God’s sake, not even close. But you need to understand how much it meant to me to have this man step in, someone I barely knew, and offer me not just an income, a way to keep food on the table, but an actual job. A way for me to do something useful.”
She looked so uncomfortable that I felt bad I’d raised the subject. She shifted in her seat, blew out a puff of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette, her face turned away.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Marshall secretly cooperated with the SEC when they were building their case against Dad. In effect helped turn Dad in.” If they were true, though, then Marcus would have hired my mother for one very simple reason: guilt.
“Never. Not Marshall.”
“Well, you know him as well as anyone.”
“I did, anyway. So let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think these kidnappers will let her go if they get what they want?” She asked this with such hushed desperation that I had no choice but to give her, dishonestly, the assurance that she, like Marcus, seemed to crave so badly.
“Yes.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“Why? Because the typical pattern in a kidnap-for-ransom situation—”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I mean, why do you think I can’t hear the truth? I know when you’re not being honest, Nick. I’m your mother.”
I’d always thought that I’d gotten my talent at reading people from her. She was, like me, what Sigmund Freud called a Menschenkenner. Loosely translated, that meant a “good judge of character.” But it went beyond that. She and I both had an unusual ability to read faces and expressions and intuit whether people were telling us the truth. It’s certainly not foolproof, and it’s not at all like being a human polygraph. It’s merely an innate talent, the way some people are natural painters or can tell stories or have perfect pitch. We were good at detecting lies. Though not perfect.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to let her go.”
55.
She was crying again, and I immediately regretted my candor.
“I’ll do everything in my power to find her,” I said. “I promise you.”
She held my right hand in both of hers. Her hands were bony yet soft. She leaned close, her eyes pleading. “Get her back, Nick. Please? Will you please get her back?”
“All I can do is promise I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I ask,” she said, and she squeezed my hand again.
As I got up, the hound from hell growled at me without even bothering to move. As if to remind me that if I disappointed its Master, I’d be facing the wrath of the beast.
* * *
ON THE way out I stopped at Gabe’s room. Stacked in tall heaps everywhere were his favorite graphic novels, including multiple copies of Watchmen, the collected comics of Will Eisner, Brian Azzarello’s Joker.
It was remarkable how much his temporary quarters here had acquired exactly the same funky odor as his room back home in Washington. It smelled like a monkey house: that teenage-boy smell of sweat and dirty laundry and who knows what else.
He sat on his bed, headphones on, drawing in his sketchbook. He was wearing a red T-shirt—a rare departure from his habitual black “emo” attire—with a drawing on the front of a stylized, boxy computer exploding and the word KABLAAM! superimposed over it in a comic font. I took a chair next to his desk, which was dwarfed by a big monitor—probably a gift from my mother—and an Xbox 360 video game module and wireless controller. When he felt the bed move he took off his headphones. I could hear some loud, repetitive electric guitar riff and a screaming vocal.