Authors: MAYNARD SIMS
Ray
shrugged his wide shoulders and drained the last of his
Chivas
Regal.
No more for you tonight, Ray boy.
“My only suggestion would be
for everyone to butt out and let mother and father get on with whatever it is
they are getting on with.” He turned to face his sister who was staring at him
as if he’d just slapped her.
“I
don’t think I heard you right,” she said.
“Think
again.”
“But
you can’t mean you’re going to do nothing about this?”
He
rested his knuckles on the windowsill trying to quell the tide of anger that
was surging inside him. Staring at his reflection in the window he leaned
forward until his head was touching the glass. It felt cool. It was always the
bottom line, even now, with his mother upstairs dying of cancer. He hadn’t been
asked to come here tonight to give comfort to the sick; he was here to add his
weight to his sister’s argument. It had been the family curse for years.
The relentless pursuit of wealth.
Caroline’s motives were
becoming as clear as her vodka tonic. Mother was dying and these people, the
Church of the Divine Light, were helping to ease her through it. The fact that
the old man was dipping into company profits to finance this spiritual care had
got under Caroline and her husband’s skin. Greed had diseased this family for
generations. The old man’s drive to acquire wealth and to turn the Yellow Beach
Corporation into one of the worlds largest and most successful precious stone
marketers had cost him the life of his first born son, lost him the respect of
his second son, and had left the old man an embittered wheelchair bound
cripple. Maybe, at long last, Randolph Stock had discovered there was more to
life than turning a quick profit. Spiritual
care for his
wife, Marlene, however off
the wall and unorthodox as it appeared to be,
was a step in the right direction.
Well, hurrah for that!
“Look,
Caro
, this is none of my business. I came here
tonight to see my mother, to give what comfort I can. I’ve been away a long
time, and, God knows, my quarrel wasn’t with her, and I dare say my absence has
hurt her. But if I get involved in a fight between father and you and Martin, I
don’t really see that my coming back will have achieved anything.”
“The
only thing you wanted to achieve was to soothe your own sense of guilt!”
Caroline spat.
“Maybe,”
Ray said, turning around slowly to face her. “But that’s something I’ve got to
live with.”
The
library door opened and Martin
Devereaux
stalked into
the room, making straight for Caroline and ignoring Ray completely.
“Caroline,
do you know how long you’ve been away from the party. People are beginning to
notice. Senator Cole’s wife was asking if you’d been taken ill.”
Caroline
rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Martin, don’t make everything into a
crisis.” She stared at her brother for a long moment and said, “I’ve finished
here anyway.”
“Does
your father know
he’s
here?”
“I
didn’t tell him I’d invited him.”
“You
should have done,”
Devereaux
said. “You’re just
giving him more ammunition to use against us.”
“My
God, you two
are
entrenched, aren’t you,” Ray
said.
“It’s
none of your business,”
Devereaux
snapped at him.
“Couldn’t
agree more,” Ray said with a smile, and went to sit down by the fireplace.
“How
much have you told him, Caroline?”
Devereaux
demanded.
“
Enough,
and he won’t help. My dear brother wants to keep out
of family squabbles.”
“Well
there’s a first time for everything,”
Devereaux
said
sarcastically.
“Good
evening, Martin,” Ray said. “I’d like to say how good it is to see you
again…but I was always brought up to tell the truth.”
Devereaux
coloured slightly but ignored him, turning once
more to his wife. “I can’t find Paula either. I mean, for Christ’s sake, it’s
her
party.”
“Yes,”
Caroline said. “And it’s about time we got back to it. Excuse us, Ray. As I
said earlier, your room is still upstairs if you intend to stay the night. And
I would ask you not to go into the ballroom until all the guests have left. God
knows, you’ve embarrassed me enough in my life, I’d prefer it not to continue,
at least not tonight.”
Ray
grinned and raised his glass to them as they left the library arm in arm.
The door closed and his face darkened. The anger that
had been simmering inside boiled over and he hurled the glass into the grate,
smashing it into a thousand glittering pieces. Much of the anger was directed
at Caroline and Martin, but he reserved a lot of it for himself. For a moment
back then he had allowed himself to be taken in by his sister. For a moment,
when the tears started to flow, he’d forgotten what a devious and manipulative
bitch she was, and always had been.
It
had been hard for the both of them growing up in their elder brother Frank’s
shadow. Their father had always made it clear that, in his eyes, Frank was
number one and Caroline and Ray were also
rans
. The
accident had changed all that. With Frank in his grave, and their father
hospitalized with a broken spine, Caroline had seen her chance and made a grab
for it with both hands. Ray was away at college so Caroline had a clear run.
She
took over the day-to-day running of Yellow Beach, and within six months had
several major coups under her belt. Buying into a Thailand based pearl giant
and eventually taking it over; the acquisition of several of the smaller German
stone dealers and establishing a firm base in
Idar
Oberstein
from which to attack the European market. Soon
Yellow Beach was one of the leading exporters of opals, aquamarines,
peridots
and pearls.
In
those six months she had done enough, if not to earn her father’s love, then at
least to earn his grudging respect, and to secure herself a place in his
affections, albeit several notches down from the position Frank had enjoyed.
Over
the next year or so Randolph Stock grew fit enough to re-establish himself as
head of the corporation. Caroline married Martin
Devereaux
,
at that time the owner of a small string of elite fashion jewellery outlets on
the east coast. They had a daughter, Paula, and Caroline, while maintaining a
certain interest in Yellow
Beach,
was content to stay
at home and play the good mother, while her husband ensconced himself as
vice-president of the company and acted as her surrogate.
Ray
remained in the shadows. He graduated from UCLA with a
Ph.D
and was given a job by his father. A low-key position in Yellow Beach’s San
Francisco based P.R. department, looking after domestic advertising, under the
supervision of Walt Freeman, an old wartime buddy of Randolph Stock. In many
ways the job suited Ray well. He lacked ambition; for some reason the
raison
d’etre
behind the Stock family had passed him by.
To his father’s immense disappointment and annoyance Ray could find nothing
about the precious stone and jewellery business to interest him enough to make
him want to devote his life to it. And the philosophy of having money for
money’s sake left him with a curiously cold feeling inside.
His
office was situated close to Fisherman’s Wharf and he spent many of his free
hours down there developing a love for the sea all things oceanic. He bought
his first boat, a small skiff with an outboard motor. He learned to scuba dive,
learned to fish. He’d spend many of his weekends watching the fishing fleet
come in and disgorge their cargo. In those leisure hours he decided where his
future lay and the Yellow Beach Corporation didn’t figure much in his plans. He
knew he was on a direct collision course with his father, but kept delaying the
moment of impact.
The
years living second-class to Frank had brought him and Caroline close together.
They shared with each other their secrets, their desires, their dreams. They
trusted each other – at least he had trusted her. Perhaps he’s just been naïve.
Perhaps he’d loved her too much as a sister to recognize that as individual
human beings they were growing away from each other. She had Martin and Paula,
a family of her own, and she wanted the very best for that family. And she was
prepared to go to any lengths to safeguard their interests; watching over them
with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs.
When Randolph Stock mooted the idea of bringing Ray back from the
coast to sit beside him on the board Caroline panicked.
She saw Martin’s
position in the firm becoming vulnerable and with it her power and influence in
the running of Yellow Beach waning. In a head to head with her father she
betrayed every secret, every desire Ray had ever shared with her, precipitating
the long deferred collision between Ray and Randolph Stock, and leading,
ultimately, to Ray’s rejection of the family business and with it the rejection
of the entire Stock family.
In a
perverse way he felt grateful to her. Without her intervention the life he was
leading now might always have been a half-glimpsed dream, an unattainable goal.
But grateful or not, he could neither forgive nor forget his sister’s betrayal,
and he doubted that he would ever fully trust another human being for as long
as he lived.
He
stared morosely at the smashed glass in the grate. He would stay the night, see
his mother in the morning, and then he’d leave. This time he didn’t think he’d
be coming back.
Phil
Ryker
stood on the
doorstep, his arms folded. “I’m sorry, but without an invitation I can’t let
you inside.”
The
fat man in the white robe beamed at him benignly and spread his hands in a
gesture of supplication. “Of course, I wouldn’t want you to do anything that
might get you into trouble with your employer, but I would like to speak with
Mr. Randolph Stock. It’s a very important matter, you see.
The
utmost urgency.”
Phil
Ryker
sniffed and looked implacable. The two smaller
figures stood silently throughout the discussion, with their hooded heads
bowed.
Ryker
couldn’t even tell if they were male or
female, though he guessed female as they were dressed the same as the sisters
he’d seen moving around the house.
“Would
you just contact Mr. Stock, and tell him I am here. I’m sure he will see me.”
The fat man’s voice was mellifluous, and laced with just the faintest trace of
a foreign accent. Phil
Ryker
was pretty hot on
accents, as a cop he’d trained his ears as well as his eyes to take in details
and store them up for later use, but he couldn’t find a tail to hang onto on
this one. It could have been European, but equally it could belong to the
Indian sub-continent. The opaque sunglasses weren’t giving any clues either.
They were Ray Bans, US issue.
“I
can see you are wavering,” the fat man said. “You think that perhaps I might be
right.”
The
hell I am
, Phil
Ryker
thought, but said, “Just
wait there. I’ll ring through and see if it’s okay. But I assure you that if
Mr. Stock burns my ear I’ll kick you in a special place so hard you’ll have
three Adam’s apples.”
The
fat man smiled broadly and bowed his head obsequiously.
“Who
shall I say wants to see him?”
“Please
say that it is Brother Simon, on a matter of great urgency.”
“Brother
Simon?
You sure about that?”
The
fat man bowed his head again, this time in assent.
In the vast oak lined study that took up the entire
upper east wing of the Stock mansion, Randolph Stock sat in his electric
powered wheelchair facing a bank of video screens. During a three week period
two years ago when Caroline and Martin were vacationing in Europe, Stock had
brought in a security firm to install hidden cameras and listening equipment in
every room of the house. The cameras were cunningly disguised, and two years on
neither Caroline nor her husband were aware that every move they made and every
conversation held within the walls of the house was being monitored by Randolph
Stock in his study.