three

He heard the news in his study. The room where he had made the calls that moved money from one country to another. Where he had sat with men whose names appeared in newspapers and talked about the future as if they owned it. The television was on but muted and he saw the words crawl across the bottom of the screen and he set down his glass very carefully on the leather top of the desk his father had left him.

Dead.

He sat for a long time. The ice melted in the glass and the light changed in the windows and he did not move. He was thinking about a night twenty years ago. A party in a townhouse in the city. The beautiful people and the money that hung in the air like perfume. A man had introduced himself. Slight. Smiling. A face that seemed to hold a secret it wanted to share.

They had talked. They had talked again. There had been dinners. Invitations. An ease to the friendship that he should have questioned but did not.

The island came later.

He had been going through a hard time. This is what he told himself then and this is what he told himself now. His marriage had gone cold the way marriages do when two people stop looking at each other. He was fifty-three and wealthy and powerful and profoundly alone and the man with the smile seemed to understand.

The plane was private. The water was blue. The house was white and sprawling and the girls were young and beautiful and available in ways that should have made him leave. Should have made him get back on the plane and fly home and never speak to the man again.

He did not leave.

-----

There is a moment in every man’s life when he becomes who he will be. Not who he was raised to be or who he pretends to be but who he is when no one is watching. When the doors are closed and the rules suspended and the darkness inside is given permission.

He had not known he was capable of such things. This is what he told himself. That something had been done to him. That he had been drugged perhaps or manipulated or deceived. But in the quiet of his study twenty years later he could admit what he had not admitted then.

He had wanted it.

And they had known.

-----

The call came three weeks after he returned home. The man’s voice on the phone, pleasant as always. A favor needed. Nothing significant. A introduction to someone. A door that needed opening.

He made the introduction. He opened the door. And then there were other calls. Other favors. A vote that needed casting a certain way. A investigation that needed to quietly close. A name that needed to be left out of a report.

He understood by then what had happened. He understood that there were cameras in the rooms with the white walls and the soft beds. He understood that somewhere there were images of him doing things that would end his marriage and his career and his place in the world he had spent his life building.

He was owned.

This is what the man did. This is what the man had always done. He collected men the way other men collected art. He hung them on his walls and showed them to the people who needed to see and they did what he asked because the alternative was unthinkable.

-----

Now the man was dead.

He should have felt relief. He told himself he felt relief. But underneath the relief was something else. A tremor. Because the man was dead but the cameras were not dead. The images were not dead. They were somewhere. In a safe. On a server. In the hands of whoever had helped the man build his collection over all those years.

The phone would ring again. Someday. Someone would call with a voice he didn’t recognize and the favors would continue and he would do what he was told because he had always done what he was told and there was no end to it.

There was no end.

He picked up the glass and drained what was left of the watered bourbon and looked out the window at the lawns that rolled away to the trees. His wife was somewhere in the house. His children were grown and gone. He had grandchildren he saw at holidays and smiled at and held.

They would never know.

He would make certain they would never know.

The screen still showed the crawl of words. The face of the man who had owned him. Who perhaps still owned him from whatever hell he had gone to.

He turned off the television and sat in the silence and waited for the phone to ring.