Chapter 13 #2
Malcolm made one attempt, and he made it on Clara, because there was nobody else left.
He did not call. He wrote — on paper, by hand, on the heavy stock he had used for thirty years, and had it couriered to the Whitmore Group offices marked for her attention, which meant it went through two people before it reached her.
It was one page.
Clara,
I am told you found it. I want you to know that I am not going to insult you by explaining any of it. You have looked at the numbers and the numbers are what they are.
I want to say two things instead.
The first is that everything in that file was ordinary.
I do not mean permissible — I mean ordinary.
It is what men of my generation did in every company of that size in this county, and it was understood, and nobody was harmed, and the fact that it now looks like theft is a change in the weather rather than a change in me.
The second is that my son will not survive being this person.
I have watched him for two weeks now and he is doing it with the terrible thoroughness of a convert, and converts do not last. In a year he will be tired and he will want the easy version back, and there will be nobody left to give it to him, because he has burned every man who knew how.
You could have stopped this. You still could.
I am not asking. I have never asked anybody for anything in my life and I am not going to start at seventy-four.
M.
Clara read it twice, standing at a desk that was not hers in an office she refused to move into.
Then she did the only thing she could think of that was both honest and final, which was to write four words on a compliments slip, clip it to the letter, and send the whole thing back by the same courier.
The four words were: Then don't write again.
He didn't.
She saw Willa on the Friday, as she had every Friday since March, and they went to the taqueria on Milpas because Willa had decided that the two of them eating anywhere with tablecloths was "grim."
"So you got Grandpa fired."
"Your father got your grandfather fired."
"Right." Willa tore a napkin. "But you found it."
"I found it in a spreadsheet. That's not the same as doing something about it."
"Mm." A long pull on a drink. "He's telling everyone you did it."
"I know."
"Are you going to say anything?"
"No."
Willa looked up. "Why not?"
And Clara thought about how to answer that honestly, because uncareful was the arrangement now and she had been holding to it for four months.
"Because if I defend myself, this becomes a fight between me and a seventy-four-year-old man," she said, "and every single person in this county will watch it and enjoy it, and the only thing anybody will remember afterward is that there was a fight.
And your father will have done the hardest thing he's ever done and it'll be a footnote in somebody else's story. "
Willa chewed on that.
"That's kind of a lot of strategy for someone who says she's not managing anything anymore."
Clara laughed out loud, and put her head in her hands for a second.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, that's fair. That's completely fair."
"I'm just saying."
"No, you're right." She looked up. "Okay. Uncareful version. I don't want to defend myself because if I stand up and say actually Adrian did it, then I'm the woman explaining to the county what her husband is worth, and I have done that job for nine years and I have retired."
"That's better," Willa said, with enormous satisfaction.
Esther called on a Tuesday in late June, at six in the evening, which was not an hour she called.
"I want to tell you one thing and I want to be clear that I have thought about whether to, for about three weeks."
"Go on."
"He asked me not to send you the file."
Clara sat down.
"When?"
"The Monday. About twenty minutes after he opened it." Esther's voice was perfectly even. "He called and asked whether it had gone to you. I said it had. He said — and I want to give you this exactly — he said, I'd have preferred to fix it before she saw it."
"That's —"
"I told him that was the entire disease," Esther said. "Those were my words. I've been at that company nineteen years and I have never spoken to a Whitmore like that."
"What did he say?"
"He was quiet for a while. Then he said, yes. And then he said, don't ever ask me first again, and hung up."
Clara looked at her window.
"Esther, why are you telling me?"
"Because you are going to spend the next four months watching that man do things and wondering which of them are for you," Esther said.
"And I can tell you, as the person who processes the paper, that this one was not.
He did not know you'd found it. He was through the advisory arrangement and the room block before he ever reached the page that touches you. "
"He was —"
"He started on the Monday morning, Clara. Before he'd read past page nine." A rustle. "That's the whole call. Goodbye."
She drove to Ojai in July, on business, and had lunch with Hugo Bertrand at a table outside a place he liked, and did not mention any of it for fifty minutes.
Then she said, "You were going into the Sycamore property with us in 2023."
Hugo put his glass down.
"I was."
"We killed it."
"You did."
"You've known that for two years."
"I've known that for two years," he said.
He did not look uncomfortable. He looked like a man being asked about the weather in a year he remembered well.
"Old man Whitmore told your husband I wasn't a serious operator.
It got back to me the way these things do.
I bought it eighteen months later at a lower price from a bank, so honestly, on the numbers, he did me an enormous favor. "
"Hugo."
"What?"
"You never said."
"Why would I say?" He seemed genuinely puzzled.
"It's not yours. You didn't do it. And if I'd told you in October it would have been to make you think worse of him, and I'd have been doing it while asking you to come work for me, and I'd have known exactly what I was doing.
" He picked the glass back up. "I'd rather have the company and not have done that. "
Clara looked at him for a long moment.
"That's the second-best thing anybody's done for me this year," she said.
"What's the first?"
And Clara opened her mouth, and found that the answer was a man read thirty-six pages out loud in a boardroom and put his own name on every line of it, and did not say it, and drank her water instead.
Hugo watched her not say it.
He was, she thought later, far too good at his job to have missed what that pause was.
"Right," he said, easily, and changed the subject, and let her keep it.