I’d never been so sure about anything as I was of this.
He didn’t say if he was or wasn’t Dalmar, but asked what I had for him instead. When he spoke, his voice was a low, bass voice, one which held on to its African enunciation for dear life. I invited myself into the chair opposite him and noted that he was big, much bigger than me, each of his hands, as he groped the envelope that I removed from my bag and set on the table, twice as big as my own. He was black, like the blackest of black bears, like the blubbery skin of the killer whale, an alpha predator with no predators of their own. He knew, as he sat across from me at the unpretentious table, that he was at the top of the food chain and I was mere algae.
He asked why he should trust me, how he could know for certain he wouldn’t be played for a fool. I gathered what courage I could possibly muster, and replied, unblinkingly, “How do I know that you won’t play me for a fool?”
He laughed audaciously and in a somewhat deranged manner, and said, “Ah, yes. But there’s a difference here, you see. Nobody plays Dalmar for a fool.”
And I knew then, that if anything went wrong, he would end my life.
But I would not let myself be scared.
He removed papers from the envelope: the proof, which I’d had in my possession for six weeks or more, until I knew what to do with it. Telling my mother or going to the police seemed too easy, too mundane. There needed to be something more, a gruesome punishment to fit a gruesome crime. Disbarment does not offset being a lousy father, but the loss of a hefty sum of cash, the shattering of his splendid reputation, that came close. Closer at least.
It wasn’t easy to find. That’s for sure. I stumbled across some papers in a locked filing cabinet, late one night when he dragged my mother to a benefit dinner at Navy Pier, paying $500 a piece to support a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the educational opportunities for children living in poverty, which I found to be absolutely absurd—ludicrous—seeing as how he felt about my own career path.
I came to their home that night, took the Purple Line out to Linden and, from there, a cab. I came under the guise of a crashed computer. My mother, offering her own old, slow one, suggested I pack a bag and stay for the night, and I said okay, but of course I wouldn’t stay. I packed a bag anyway, for appearance’s sake, the perfect way to stow away the evidence, hours later, after a complete dissection of my father’s office, as I called for a cab and returned home to my own apartment, to a fully functioning computer where I researched private investigators to turn my suspicion into full-fledged proof.
It wasn’t extortion I was looking for. Not exactly. I was searching for anything. Tax evasion, forgery, perjury, harassment, whatever. But it was extortion that I found. Evidence of a $350,000 transfer into an offshore account that my father kept in a sealed envelope in a locked file cabinet and I, as luck would have it, found the key, tucked inside an antique tea tin given to my father by a Chinese businessman a dozen years ago, lost in the midst of loose tea leaves. Small and silver and sublime.