Buried Secrets

5.



Marshall Marcus lived on the North Shore, about a forty-minute drive from Boston, in the impossibly quaint town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, once a summer colony for rich Bostonians. His house was enormous and handsome, a rambling shingle-and-stone residence perched on a promontory above the jagged coastline. It had a wraparound porch and too many rooms to count. There were probably rooms seen only by a maid. Marcus lived there with his fourth wife, Belinda. His only child, a daughter named Alexa, was away at boarding school, would soon be away at college, and—from what she’d once told me about her home life—wasn’t likely to be around much after that.

Even after you’d pulled off the main road and could see Marcus’s house off in the distance, it took a good ten minutes to get there, winding your way along a twisting narrow coastal lane, past immense “cottages” and modest suburban houses built in the last half-century on small lots sold off by old-money Brahmins whose fortunes had dwindled away. A few of the grand old homes remained in the hands of the shabby gentry, the descendants of proper Bostonians, but they’d mostly fallen into disrepair. Many of the big houses had been snatched up by the hedge-fund honchos and the titans of tech.

Marshall Marcus was the richest of the nouveau riche, though not the most nouveau. He’d grown up poor on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, in the old Jewish working-class enclave. Apparently his uncle owned a casino out west and Marshall had learned to play blackjack as a kid. He figured out pretty early that the house always has an advantage, so he started coming up with all sorts of card-counting schemes. He got a full scholarship to MIT, where he taught himself Fortran on those big old IBM 704 mainframes the size of ranch houses. He came up with a clever way to use Big Iron, as they called the early computers, to improve his odds at blackjack.

According to legend, one weekend he won ten thousand bucks in Reno. It didn’t take him long to see that if he put this to use in the financial markets he could really clean up. So he opened a brokerage account with his tuition money and was a millionaire by the time he graduated, having devised some immensely complicated investment formula involving options arbitrage and derivatives. Eventually he perfected this proprietary algorithm and started a hedge fund and became a billionaire many times over.

My mother, who worked for him for years, once tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. I was never good at math. All I needed to know about Marshall Marcus was that he was good to my mother when things were bad.

When we moved to Boston after my father disappeared—Dad had gotten tipped off that he was about to be arrested, and he chose to go fugitive instead—we had no money, no house, nothing. We had to move in with my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in Malden, outside of Boston. Mom, desperate for money, took a job as an office manager to Marshall Marcus, who was a friend of my father’s. She ended up becoming his personal assistant. She loved working for him, and he always treated her well. He paid her a lot. Even after she retired, he continued to send her extremely generous Christmas presents.

Despite the fact that he’d been a friend of my father’s, I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it. He was gregarious and affectionate and funny, a man of large appetites—he loved food, wine, cigars, and women, and all to excess. There was something immensely appealing about the guy.

His house looked exactly the same as the last time I’d visited: the Har-Tru tennis court, the Olympic-size swimming pool overlooking the ocean, the carriage house down the hill. The only thing new was a guard booth. A drop-arm beam barricade blocked the narrow roadway. A guard came out of the booth and asked my name, even asked to see my driver’s license.

This surprised me. Marcus, despite his enormous wealth, had never lived like a prisoner, the way a lot of very rich people do, in gated communities behind high fences with bodyguards. Something had changed.

Once the guard let me through, I drove up to the semicircular driveway and parked right in front of the house. When I got out of the car I glanced around and spotted an array of security cameras mounted discreetly around the house and property.

I crossed the broad porch and rang the bell. A minute or so later the door opened and Marshall Marcus emerged, his short arms extended, face lit up.

“Nickeleh!” he said, his customary term of endearment for me. He bumped the screen door aside and engulfed me in a bear hug. He was even fatter, and his hair was different. When I last saw him, he was mostly bald on top and wore his gray hair down to his shirt collar. Now he was coloring it brown, with an orange tint, and the hair on the top of his head had magically grown back. I couldn’t tell if it was a toupee or very good implants.

He was wearing a navy blue robe over pajamas, and he had deep circles under his eyes. He looked exhausted.

He released me, then pushed against my chest and leaned back to examine my face. “Look at you—you get more and more handsome each time I see you. Enough, already! You don’t age. You make a deal with the devil, Nicky? Is there a portrait of you looking like an alter kaker in your attic?”

“I live in the city,” I said. “No attic.”

He laughed. “You’re not married, are you?”

“I’ve avoided that so far.”

He put a palm on my cheek and slapped gently. “Punim like this, I bet you gotta beat off the girls with a stick.” He was trying valiantly to feign his customary high spirits, but I wasn’t convinced. He put a pudgy arm around my lower back. He couldn’t reach as high as my shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Nickeleh, my friend. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“This new?” he said, jerking his head toward my car.

“I’ve had it for a while.”

I drive a Land Rover Defender 110, which is boxy and Jeep-like and virtually indestructible. Hand-cranked windows. Rock-hard seats. Not a very comfortable ride, and pretty noisy inside when you exceed thirty miles an hour. But it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.

“Love it. Love it. I drove one of those around the Serengeti once on safari. Ten days. Annelise and Alexa and me. Of course, the girls hated Africa. Spent the whole time complaining about the insects, and how much the animals stank, and…” His smile disappeared abruptly, his face drooping as if worn out by the effort of keeping up the façade. “Ahhh, Nick,” he whispered, a look of pain contorting his face, “I’m scared out of my mind.”