She laughed, held my hand for a second longer than she should, and that’s when I knew she’d fallen for me. Amanda was strong, independent, highly intelligent, incredibly good-looking, and she had—or would have—more money than she could spend in ten lifetimes. She was also a pawn in Daddy’s world. And while her dad loved her, I had a feeling he loved his money more.
The next two weeks were some of the loneliest I’d ever known. I forced myself to stay gone a week longer with no contact just to give an impression. The bluff worked. When I landed in Boston, her driver was waiting on me at the airport. He stood next to his limo. “Mr. Finn?”
The window behind him rolled down slightly and Amanda’s emerald-green eyes smiled at me. We didn’t leave each other’s side for nearly a week.
A month later, she invited me to have dinner with her folks, private plane, helicopter, yacht, the Hamptons, all in a casual effort to meet the family. I was no dummy. Mr. Pickering had a file on me six inches thick. I was pretty certain he knew my grades in grammar school, how many pizzas I’d delivered, that I’d had my wisdom teeth pulled my senior year of high school, and he could recite my college transcripts from memory. He was either allowing me to come to dinner to publicly undress me in front of his daughter and show her the fraud I really was, or he was raising an eyebrow and wanting to know what I was made of. His future son-in-law might marry into this family, but he’d earn every penny of her money.
After kissing his daughter, he extended his hand and put his arm around me. “Charlie. Welcome. Come in. We’ve heard so much about you.” He could not have been warmer. My first thought was, This guy is good. Remind me to never play poker with him.
Too late. We were already playing.
I chose my words at dinner, speaking only when spoken to, responding to Amanda’s mom, who fired off most of the questions. These people had made up their minds long before I walked in that door, so I enjoyed my meal and answered honestly and casually. I figured that by not trying to impress her folks, I was actually doing a better job of impressing them—if that was possible. When asked, I gave the short details of my life—which I was pretty sure they already knew. Dad drove a cab but killed himself when he wrapped it around a concrete barrier with a blood alcohol of about .3. Mom worked two to four jobs to support us but followed Dad my junior year of high school. Three questions shy of acing the SAT. Harvard full ride. 4.0 GPA. Four-minute, seven-second mile. Would graduate a semester early.
Her mother raised a finger. “Following the death of your mother, who raised you? Supported you?”
“I did.”
“How did you survive? Buy food? Pay the power bill?”
“I delivered pizza and sold drugs.”
While she laughed at the joke, thinking I was making one, he sat back and smiled smugly—telling me he knew I was not.
Amanda’s dad poured wine for everyone at the table and saw it as his personal mission to stoop to the level of a butler and make sure everyone was sufficiently happy with his “house” wine, which, Amanda whispered, wholesaled at $200 a bottle. I didn’t touch it and every time he offered I declined.
He noticed my lack of consumption before we ate our salads and watched with curiosity as my wine sat untouched all night. When they lit the bananas Foster, he asked almost with disappointment, “Could we get you something else?”
This was it. His first push and I knew it. He was raising me. I shook my head and answered only what I was asked. “No thank you.”
Another push. A raise. “You don’t like my wine?”
I met his raise and raised again. “Don’t know. Haven’t tried it.”
He waited, eyeing the cards in his hand.
Amanda sipped and smiled. More amusement. She tapped my foot below the table.
A single shake of my head. “Don’t drink.”
He knew this, but rather than admit that, he raised his glass and toasted me and then his daughter and finally his wife and their Persian dog. I wouldn’t say that I won that hand as much as I had succeeded in earning myself a seat at the invite-only table.
Following dinner, we “retired” to his porch, looking out across the water. He offered me a cigar. Again, I refused. He rolled his around his mouth, lit it, and then sucked on it until the end glowed like a hot iron. Oddly, the color matched his eyes. Drawing several times on the Cuban, he exhaled and filled the air around us with a haze of smoke. “You don’t appear to have any vices, Charlie.”
I was in way over my head. Any idiot sitting in my chair knew that. This guy ate guys like me for breakfast and picked his teeth with what remained of our backbones. Somewhere around the third course, his stiffening body language told me that I’d be seeing less of Amanda following dinner. Little I could say or do would change that. He wanted someone strong but not someone who would so willingly challenge him—which is what I’d been doing all night. And he knew that. And he knew that I knew that.
Given that I could read the cards I’d been dealt, I again decided on the honest approach. I can’t really tell you why other than I had a pretty good feeling that this guy could read my bluffs far better than I could make them. Besides, I’d never had dinner with a man worth almost a billion.
Halfway through his cigar, he said, “Amanda tells me you’re a bit of a poker player.”
“I’ve played some.”
He pointed to a felt-covered table. An innocent fatherly face. “Shall we?”
I folded my legs and rested my hands in my lap. “No need.”
He studied his cigar, drawing deeply. I think he was starting to get irritated. “Really?”
“I made money by playing trust fund kids who viewed poker as entertainment. And I sincerely doubt you brought me here to entertain you.”
He chuckled, admiring the red tip. “You preyed on gullible people.”
“I provided a service to kids who were burning through Daddy’s money and should know better.”
“And you know better?”
“I saw an opportunity.”
He nodded. “And seized on it. I like that.” The innocence drained out. “I pay a lot of money for people who can read other people.”
“Mr. Pickering, I have the feeling you can read me a lot better than I can read you.”
He smiled and grabbed his imaginary chips off the table. “Touché.” He may not have liked me, but he admired me for folding my hand when faced with someone who held better cards. He glanced at me. The smoke exited his throat like a chimney. “Marshall. Call me Marshall.”
* * *
With her parents’ apparent approval, Amanda and I “dated” through our senior year. Harvard seemed impressed enough with my undergraduate record that they offered to take me in the MBA program, and while I didn’t know for sure, I was pretty well convinced that Marshall had more than just a little to do with it. After the first week of classes, Marshall called me into his office and made me a job offer I couldn’t refuse. I decided to play another hand and accepted.
Marshall ran money. His and others’. He also owned companies around the world. The more I got to know him, the more I came to realize that the story about his net worth being a billion was off by about $2 billion. There was a lot at stake. He had three billion reasons to choose wisely. Knowing this, he’d staffed his “firm” with young guys like me under the guise of training us. Mentoring us. Showing us the ropes out of the goodwill of his heart. In truth, he meant to run us through the wringer and see what we were made of. Owners of horses do the same thing. Fill their stable with the cream and see which Secretariat rises to the surface. Butchers also do this with meat they are about to tenderize. Pickering and Sons was a highly successful hedge fund in an era when most were folding up shop. It was also Marshall’s own private joke on the world. He had no sons. His entire life’s goal after becoming otherworldly wealthy was finding the one thing he couldn’t buy.
Someone to guard what he valued in his prolonged absence—i.e., his death.
He showed me around h
is office, introduced me to the guys, and then casually showed me my cubicle. Gone was the tender father from dinner, pouring wine and lighting cigars. “I have several hundred résumés, many better than yours, sitting on my desk. Each detailing why and how some young man is chomping at the bit to sit in this chair.” He spun the chair around. “Why don’t you take a turn?”
My mother was fond of saying something that had always stuck with me: “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
So I started classes and, with Amanda dangling as the unspoken carrot, became Mr. Pickering’s boy. His money also dangled—not so subtly—but unlike the other forty men who worked for him, I wasn’t there for his money.
Amanda and I fell in love—at least as much as any two people can when they’re separated by nine zeros and a father who is little more than a master puppeteer controlling everyone’s motions with the strings between his fingers. For Christmas, we flew the family’s G5 to Vail and then Switzerland. Venezuela for summer vacation and everywhere in between. I studied, managed to hover near the top of my class, and responded to Marshall’s requests. Given my ability to read people and situations, I became his “assessor.” Meaning he sent me into new territory, new acquisitions, and asked me to evaluate the three things upon which all businesses live and die: the balance sheet, the widget, and leadership. Harvard might have printed my sheepskin and been credited with my education, but I cut my teeth with Marshall.
Over the next two years, I got pretty good at it. Better than any “boy” he’d ever had. I graduated with my MBA and then the real work began. Marshall paid me a modest six-figure salary, which I didn’t have time to spend, with the promise of a bonus at the end of the year based on production. He did this with all his horses. I owned a condo in Boston but lived on his Gulfstream. In the first year out of Harvard, I slept in my own bed twenty-six times.
Throughout all of this, I kept up my running. Not quite as fast as I once was, but pain needs an exit so my miles increased. Running was where I worked out my legs and feet what I couldn’t work out of my mind. It was therapy. It was the bubbling effect of Marshall on me. Whether I was running to or from, I couldn’t say.
My first bonus brought me mid-six figures. Sounds like a lot, and it was, except that my work had produced almost a hundred million in balance sheet revenue for Marshall. Upon one of my returns, somebody hung #23 above my cubicle. And they were right. In everybody’s eyes but Marshall’s, I was.
Remember how I told you I never played cards with people who were better than me? That works only if you figure out ahead of time that they’re better. Brendan Rockwell was a pedigree kid, a standout on the Harvard crew team, and first in his Stanford MBA class. That in and of itself created immediate tension between the two of us. Stanford and Harvard have long disdained each other because they both do the same thing better than anyone. While I was traveling the continent and half the globe, Brendan had worked his way up Marshall’s ladder, even earning the nickname “Papa Brown” because of his extensive work brown-nosing Marshall. Evidently, Marshall appreciated the fealty because I soon found myself working alongside him. Teaching him the ropes. He was tall, chiseled, highly intelligent, articulate, crafty, quick on his feet, as good if not better with numbers than I, and would not hesitate to slit my throat if I let my guard down. Brendan wanted one thing and it had nothing to do with Amanda—although he’d take her if she came with the package. He intended to get his money the old-fashioned way.
In Marshall’s battle plan, I was the boots on the ground and he had no better field general than me, but the problem with that scenario is that I was always gone. Reporting in by phone. Brendan, on the other hand, reported in person and Brendan wanted that old man’s money. Pretty soon, he weaseled his way into every reporting relationship and became the hand behind the curtain controlling the levers. Hence the revised nickname “Oz Brown.” I told you he was a better cardplayer than me. He and Marshall were cut from the same cloth. I soon learned that Brendan would take my reports, study them, lift what he wanted, and later use incomplete facts to poke holes in my arguments. It’s not the frontal assault that kills you. It’s the flank attack. Death by a thousand cuts.
My second year in the firm, Amanda came to see me in my office. As she left, she lingered at the door. She was heavy. Anytime she left his office, she was heavy. She leaned against the doorframe and whispered, “You busy this fall?”
“Not especially.”
“How would you like to go on an extended vacation—with me?”
I had a feeling she was talking about more than just travel. “Define ‘extended.’”
She walked to my desk and kissed me, holding her lips to mine for several seconds. “As in, ‘the rest of our lives.’”
It was the first and only time we ever talked about getting married, but it also let me know that Marshall had bugged my office because after this conversation with Amanda, his interaction with me changed. More voice mails. Less face-to-face. The next morning I was on a plane for parts west. Of the next eight weeks, I was gone all but four days. Then came Thanksgiving, on which I was conveniently stuck on a well-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico with a bunch of sweaty Texans. Amanda called me and I heard Marshall laughing with Brendan in the background. I could read the writing on the wall. Amanda and I were caught in a machine and the gears were chewing us to pieces.
Given my experience with my office, I was rather certain Marshall listened to all our calls, so, in a sense, I was forcing his hand. I said, “Remember that vacation?”
“Think about it all the time.”
“When?”
I could hear the smile in her voice. “Is this a family affair or just the two of us?”
“That’s up to you.”
“It’d kill Daddy.”
“He’ll get over it.”
* * *
The following week, Brendan came to work to discover that his office, which had sat next door to mine, had been—wonder of wonders—moved upstairs. Same floor as Marshall. Just down the hall. Shouting distance. Further, while us boys had been working the chain gang, her father had continued to insert her in the public eye and Amanda had become the face of Pickering. That meant that Marshall began “requiring” more of her presence up front. More face time. Interestingly, those requirements, more often than not, conflicted with our plans.
Then came the Cinco Padres Café Compañía fiasco.
CHAPTER FIVE
The wind had picked up and created a six-to-eight-foot chop, which made the nighttime crossing challenging and not so fun. I’d done it before but bigger boats handle that better. I left Storied Career in her berth and motored Colin’s sixty-foot Bertram out and into the open water.
As the bow rose and fell through a dark night and the spray from each wave swept across the glass in front of me, I kept one eye on the radar and the other on my rearview mirror. Staring back through the years. Colin and I had crossed some water together.
When the Miami skyline rose into view, the knot in my stomach told me how much the mess I was walking into was going to hurt—and how much was my fault.
* * *
Two hours later, I was on the floor of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Angel of Mercy Hospital. The room was dark. Quiet. Colin was sitting in a chair, head in his hands. He was wearing what remained of the tuxedo he’d worn the night before. His coat, tie, and cummerbund were gone, and the front of his shirt was stained a deep red where he’d held and carried Maria. His black patent leather shoes were dull and smeared. Marguerite sat in a strapless, flowing gown. She was dozing in a chair next to the bed, resting her head on the sheets, holding Maria’s hand in both of hers. Maria was connected to tubes, and her entire face was bandaged like a mummy except for a small opening where a tube had been inserted in her mouth. Other smaller tubes ran up her nose. An IV dripped over her left shoulder and into her arm. The bandages on her face were partially soaked through. Machines above her head beeped and flashed. She was asleep bu
t her legs, fingers, and toes were twitching slightly. As if she were running.
I put my hand on Colin’s shoulder but he didn’t look up. He just put his hand on mine and shook his head. Marguerite stirred when I laid a blanket across her bare shoulders and then knelt next to her and put my arm around her. She leaned on me, resting her head on my shoulder. Maria lay gently jerking.
Marguerite began to relay the events of the night as two nurses walked in and began gently pulling the gauze off Maria’s face. When they peeled away the soaked cloth, I could not recognize Maria’s swollen and sewn face. The left half of her head had been shaved, and stitches covered the top and back of her head. When the nurses gently lifted Maria’s head, Marguerite covered her mouth and turned away. Colin wanted to hold her but something stopped him. Maria remained unaffected in a medically induced coma.
When finished, the nurses left as quietly as they’d entered. Colin spoke over my shoulder. “After we left you last night, we attended a gala. Fund-raiser. Not gone more than an hour. Zaul had offered—” Colin’s voice trailed off as incredulity set in.
Marguerite spoke from the bed without lifting her head. “We should have known better.”
The dart stung Colin. He swallowed, and he continued, “I don’t know how he found out about the drop.” Colin was telling the truth. One of the signs of his genius was the amount of details, dates, and account numbers, which he kept inside his head—with no paper trail. There were account transfers, but that was easily “laundered” under his legitimate business interests. Regarding our business—the boutique firm, which sold and delivered high-quality cocaine to wealthy and elite members of society—no record existed. “After being so careful for so many years? Maybe…” He trailed off, continuing a moment later. “After we left, he told his sister they were going for a nighttime cruise.” A shrug. “Something we’ve done a hundred times before. How was she to know? She loaded up. Put on her life jacket. They meandered through the canals.”