At 8 a.m., Angelo Marino comes in. He seems startled to see me. He should know better. He knows my habits. He immediately becomes even more clandestine and circumspect than usual. His long jaw clamps shut, and his wiry limbs become springy and coiled like a rangy leopard.
Angelo Marino has always been here—a handsome cadaverous presence who knows all of our secrets and seems indifferent to them—and I’ve always enjoyed the way his name rolls around in my mouth, the words frothing out like waves on the Sicilian shore: Angelo Marino. He and my father went to college together. My father was the engineer and Angelo Marino was the lawyer. Surprisingly, Angelo Marino never wanted any points in Nylo, but he has been at my father’s elbow ever since they first opened up shop.
He is seventy years old, but so olive-skinned and oleaginous that he has aged with the same tenderness as an expensive wallet. He still has a full head of iron-gray hair, and he has stern, vulpine features that I’m sure have been dropping Ivy League panties all over the Upper West Side for decades. He has never married, but I know from the unrestrained lust with which he looks at every comely assistant or intern (yet he never acts on these impulses—he is a passionate man, but a disciplined one) that he is not gay, as Henley has always insisted. “Prostitutes—very mean ones” is my rejoinder to Henley.
After saying hello to each other, we sit in silence for an uncomfortably long time.
It is Angelo Marino who finally speaks.
“It wasn’t painful, just so you know.”
“Oh?”
“I looked at the coroner’s report,” says Angelo Marino. “It happened very quickly, in the shower. Just turned his head to the side and that was that. The fall didn’t kill him, like we originally thought. I’ve actually never heard of anyone dying so peacefully. Usually, people stagger around, clutching their hearts and shrieking. Or else they fight to the end, eyeballs twitching as they relieve themselves on hospital beds in front of their children. He had a perfect death. A giant stroke. The H-bomb of strokes. I think he would have liked for you to know that. That his death was a good one.”
“I guess that does make me feel a little better,” I lie.
We sit across from each other in my father’s office for another hour. I answer emails about the Playqueen acquisition while Angelo Marino shuffles papers, getting documents in order.
Finally, at 9 a.m., Bernard arrives. He seems bored and slightly irritated.
“I’m the first one here?” he says.
“Uh, second one,” I reply with a mild snort of exasperation.
“I don’t know why we all have to be here,” says Bernard, oblivious. “Seems strange, right?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Nothing is going to change. You’re going to be just fine for the rest of your damn life.”
“There is ten billion in tangible assets,” says Angelo Marino. “That does not include the investments, property, or company, of course. We are talking about ludicrous sums of money, and almost none of it is going to be taxed in a confiscatory fashion, on account of the various trusts and holding companies that we established together before his passing.”
“His passing,” snorts Bernard. “Where did he pass to? Where is he now?”
Gabriella and Henley arrive together. They are both a little drunk and I can tell that they have been up all night. Gabriella is bowlegged in her short cocktail dress and Henley is wearing a purple velvet suit with a giant purple ribbon around his neck that is tied like shoelaces.
“We are here for the formalities!” says Henley. “We are here for the ceremony of apportionment!”
“Can we please just get this over with?” asks Gabriella.
“I have an announcement to make,” says Henley, drunkenly. “I have decided to produce films. From now on, you must think of me as a film producer. I intend to be public-spirited about the whole thing. We will be adapting modern American classics for the screen, just like Merchant Ivory Productions in the UK. This will be an attempt to fight back against the intrusions into culture of godless China, which seeks to threaten democracy itself with its new cultural imperialism.”
“Is Bernard really going to get an equal share?” Gabriella asks Angelo Marino. “You know he will just gamble it away. Or spend it on mistresses. Or give it to his dumb church. What?” She gives Bernard a withering look. “We’re all thinking it.”
Bernard scoffs.
“I’ll call Alistair up from the basement,” says Angelo Marino, “to let him know everyone else is here.”
While we wait for Alistair, Henley tells us more about his plans for a new movie studio. He will first hire a team of readers to visit every respectable and ancient small publisher in the city and inquire about their forgotten classics, their most obscure masterpieces.
“The more unfilmable the better!” he says. “I want to produce works that mystify and bemuse foreigners. I want to show the real America, the one that exists outside of marketing departments and sales meetings.”
“What the fuck do you know about the real America?” Bernard says. “What the fuck do ancient small publishers know about the real America?”
Thankfully, Alistair arrives at that moment and the conversation halts. He sits down next to me on our dad’s sofa and pats my leg.
“So, you are all here now,” says Angelo Marino. “That means we can officially begin the reading of the will.”
He sends a text and a team of assistants pours in from where they have been waiting in the next room. They set up a projector and bring in five giant steel briefcases, which they stack by the door. One of the assistants shows Angelo Marino how to work the projector. Angelo Marino slots a flash drive into the USB port, queuing up a video that he has preloaded.
“Your father recorded a video message to be played in the event of his death,” says Angelo Marino. “He
