Linus led him through the apartment. The paintings on the walls were what they called modern art; the rest of the decor was Rich Mummy.
The safe was in the library. The books on the shelves and inside the glass cases were dignified and elegantly bound. As Linus moved around the large, walnut executive desk, Freddie got a gander at one line of volumes. A lot of The Complete Letters of Sir Baron St. So-and-so, Vol. 6 and nary a Jailbait Kitties or Murder Was Her Right in sight.
Behind the desk hung a portrait of Robert A. Van Wyck, first mayor of the newly incorporated New York City. It was hinged. Push, click, and it swung to reveal the round door of the wall safe.
“What kind?” Carney asked.
“Fuck should I know.”
Linus knew the combination. His father had let him play with the safe when he was younger and allowed him to store baseball cards. His father being Ambrose Van Wyck, the patriarch, the shadow drawing everything within the icy cape.
“Everybody says Van Wick,” Carney said.
“That’s dumb. It’s Van Wyck.”
Linus asked Freddie to hold open the briefcase as he scooped. “I thought there was more,” he said.
Then Freddie got a load of the necklace. “I had a heart attack,” Freddie told Carney. “You should see the size of the thing.”
“I have.”
“Oh.”
At 9:31 p.m. the night of the robbery, Linus’s father said, “Put that down.”
Van Wyck the Elder stood in the doorway in his pajamas. The same kind as Linus’s favorite pair—red with white piping, monogrammed, but less faded. His father was in his seventies, Linus being a late addition to the dynasty. Skinny, shriveled all over, above the shoulder blades downright scrotal, but he had mean blue eyes and Freddie remembered Linus’s story about the time he’d said “Can I?” instead of “May I?” and Ambrose took off his loafer and slapped him across the face with it seven times.
He held a glass of milk. Ambrose Van Wyck kept his beechwood walking stick one story below in the foyer umbrella stand. He didn’t use it in the house, which was unfortunate because he dearly wanted to poke his son in the chest with it, to punctuate each syllable of the diatribe rising in himself. The sight of his son used to cause him pain—wincingly so—but that had been years before. He was at peace with his son’s failure now. Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor. Linus would never occupy Ambrose’s corner office on the twenty-fourth floor, sit for a conference-room portrait to hang next to those of his ancestors. Ambrose’s partners’ sons—that cohort of Aryan dipshittery—were in place to steer VWR into the future and with Ambrose’s death the firm would cease to be a Van Wyck concern. So be it. The man-child before him was a technicality; Ambrose Van Wyck regarded the structures as his true offspring. The skyscraping pillars, bustling office hives, global HQs, mixed-use complexes blocks wide and so full of families that they were villages unto themselves. When Ambrose looked out of the dining-room window onto Park Avenue and beyond, he recognized his own features in the white brick apartment houses and silver deco steeples, found his face returned to him in the pitiless steel and concrete of the city. The birthmark of the clan was a brass plate bolted by the lobby entrance, affirming paternity: VWR. This man before him? A stranger he might come across on the subway. If he took the subway. Which he didn’t. It was a filthy cage for filthy people.
As for his son’s companion…Ambrose had lived in this apartment his whole life and in all his seventy-five years, as far as he knew, this was the first time a nigger had set foot in it.
“You’re here,” Linus said.
“When I heard we were sitting with the Laphams, I was staying home, of course.”
This was some blueblood vendetta shit, Linus explained later. His mother had had an affair with the husband, or his father had had an affair with the wife, perhaps both things had occurred simultaneously or one had happened later in retribution, and his father was still sore over how it’d shaken out.
“I thought I heard something,” Ambrose Van Wyck said. “I should have guessed. I’m too tired to deal with your foolishness right now. Put that back and wait in your room until your mother gets home.”
Linus hesitated, then closed the safe. “We’re leaving,” he said.
There are things a parent can utter to a child that should not be heard by others. Verdicts and spiky assessments, pettiness masquerading as principle and magnified by time, grudges that have taken root in the bones. A witness can render these things indelible and real in a way that they wouldn’t be if there were no one else around. No, it’s best not to hear your grown friend talked to the way Ambrose Van Wyck addressed his son. The humiliation splashes everywhere. You’ll get it on you and it’ll become your own bad time, the bloody resurrection of your own childhood sadnesses. In two minutes, Freddie was five years old again, back on 129th Street, cowering under the kitchen table as his father enumerated his mother’s shortcomings with sadistic flair.