The Take(15)
When the report ended, Simon realized he hadn’t taken a breath the entire time. First the job at the Sotheby’s auction, now this.
Agitated, he rose and walked to his bedroom. He took off his suit, hung it up with care, taking time to dust the shoulders and lapels with a mohair brush. Finished, he threw his shirt in the hamper and returned his shoes to the rack.
A pull-up bar was bolted to the ceiling at the back of his closet. With a grunt, he grabbed hold of it and did fifteen chin-ups, then hung for a few seconds, feeling his shoulders burn, his biceps strain under his weight, his stomach grow taut. And when he couldn’t hang a second longer, when his fingers began slipping off the bar, he summoned the strength to grip it tighter and knock out five more.
“I can,” he grunted with each repetition. And then: “I will.”
Four words he’d adopted as his creed a lifetime ago.
He dropped, savoring the rush of blood to his arms, the hard-won lightheadedness, the victory, however fleeting, of mind over body.
I can.
I will.
Winded but still antsy, he pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and returned to the living room. He switched the channel to BBC 2, only to be confronted with another report about the robbery in Paris. He shook his head in frustration but listened nonetheless, like a child made to sit through a lecture he’d heard before. He turned off the television the moment it ended.
There would be no sleeping for a while.
He knew of only one salve for what ailed him. Work.
Back in the garage, he hit the lights. A dozen floods lit up the floor as if it were high noon. Already feeling better, he walked to his office. In its prior incarnation, the shop had been a posh nightclub managed by a hood who’d been skimming twenty percent off the top and cooking the books. Simon had been hired by the investors to obtain the real ledgers. He’d traded his success fee for the lease on the building, making sure the deal included the sound system, lock, stock, and barrel.
He opened the audio cabinet and punched in a playlist. The growl of an electric guitar reverberated across the floor. Marc Bolan and T. Rex. The seventies. Rock ’n’ roll at its wildest. Raw. Primal. He cranked the volume, then went onto the floor and surveyed his small Italian dukedom.
The latest arrival was a ’74 Daytona Spider set for full restoration. His father had owned a car identical to this: corsa red, beige leather, wire-spoked rims. He’d called it his “stallion,” after the rampant horse that decorated the badge on the hood.
Simon slid into the driver’s seat and placed his hands on the wheel, fingertips brushing the polished wood. He’d done the same thing hundreds of times as a child when his father was away on business and he’d been left alone with Abigail, the bibulous housekeeper. He was eight or nine, the age when cars are objects of awe and worship, emblematic of all things sophisticated and mature. All things adult, and thus off-limits.
He remembered the scent of the old garage: damp hay, oiled leather, rotting rafters. They’d come to England from New York to open the European office of Riske Commodities Trading Corporation, a firm his father had started from an office in Lower Manhattan, and which at its peak included branches in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.
The divorce had been far in the past. All he’d known of his mother was that she lived in France and had a new family of her own. It had been just the two of them, Anthony Riske and his son. They’d lived in a rambling country house in Kent, forty miles outside London. Even now, Simon had little idea what his father had done for a living. He recalled talk of gold and silver and oil, and howls of protest about prices being too low or too high.
Sundays had been reserved for excursions into the city and surrounding countryside. Visits to the Natural History Museum and Covent Garden, lunches at the Compleat Angler. Invariably, on the way home, his father would stop the car on a country road, drag Simon onto his lap, and teach him to drive, goosing the motor to make his son squeal with delight.
“Twelve cylinders with a dual six. That’s not an engine. It’s a force of nature. You can feel it in your bones.”
And when Simon asked when he might drive by himself, his father would pat him on the head and answer in his rich, tobacco-cured voice, “In due time. In due time.”
The downfall, when it came, was swift, brutal, and without warning.
One day all was fine. The next, Simon was pulled out of school, the house put up for sale, and the housekeeper, nannies, and gardener let go. The cars were loaded onto trailers and driven away by men in blue jackets with a half-dozen policemen watching. All the while, his father stalked the empty house promising that it was all a misunderstanding, a “temporary problem of liquidity,” and that he was going to make it up to him.
“In due time. In due time.”
It was Simon who discovered the body. His father had not come down to breakfast after failing to tuck him in the night before. Hungry and frightened, he’d searched the house, calling for his father, before venturing outside and padding barefooted through the damp rose garden. With every step, his worry grew. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
He found his father in the garage hanging from a rafter. Simon was twelve but small for his age. He rushed to his father, wrapping his arms around his legs, trying with all his might to lift him, hoping to relieve the pressure even a little so the rope would stop digging into his neck and maybe his father’s eyes wouldn’t bulge so horribly.