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  Jake looked at the madman in front of him. “Sounds pretty straight forward to me,” he answered. “But remember this, Mr. Sorrentino: for every man who cheats there is a woman cheating as well. And for every man who lies there are at least an equal number of women lying. Men just can’t hide it as well. The chance of me breaking Kate’s heart is equal to the chance that she will break mine.”

  “Just so we know where we stand,” Mr. Sorrentino answered as if he hadn’t heard Jake’s short soapbox sermon.

  Kate knocked on the glass door and her father changed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

  “How are my two favorite guys?” she asked, opening the door.

  “Just getting to know one another, right Jake?” Mr. Sorrentino said.

  “Right.”

  “Dad, if you don’t mind, I want to steal Jake from you. Aunt Theresa wants to meet him.”

  “He’s all yours,” Mr. Sorrentino said with a sadistic twinkle in his eye aimed in Jake’s direction. With Kate’s father in mind, Jake chalked one up in the “cons column.”

  Jake and Kate stepped outside. His uneasiness didn’t go unnoticed. They may not have been dating long, but both were already good at knowing what the other was thinking.

  “Kate, we need to talk.”

  “Sure, Jake. But first I want you to meet Aunt Theresa.” A quick smile and light handshake later, Aunt Theresa turned to Kate. “Very handsome.”

  “I know,” Kate said, pulling Jake away.

  Hand-in-hand they turned from Aunt Theresa straight into a human wall. Three broad-shouldered men stood abreast, creating a barrier that would require a less-than-subtle change in direction.

  “Hi, Tony,” Kate said, looking upward.

  “Introduce us to your new friend,” Tony said, standing between two massive sides of beef known as the Castello brothers.

  “Tony, this is Jake. Jake this is Tony. He’s a friend of the family and a business associate of my father.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jake,” Tony said, squeezing Jake’s hand until the bones in his knuckles rubbed each other.

  “And these other two guys are Eddie and Mike Castello,” Kate said. “People call them brothers, but they are really cousins. My aunt raised both of them.”

  “As far as you are concerned, we are brothers,” Mike said, shaking Jake’s hand with a reasonable grip. Eddie stuck out his tree trunk arm and grunted something only Mike understood. They may have been cousins, but they had the mannerisms of two people who were raised under the same roof. A house where the family didn’t speak.

  “For what it is worth, you don’t look like brothers,” Jake said.

  “That’s because they’re not,” Tony added, as if he had solved a mystery.

  “Well, I guess that’s why.”

  “Jake, I expect you to treat Kate right. She is like my kid sister.”

  “Of course,” Jake answered.

  “Don’t worry about Tony,” Kate said. “He is a big teddy bear on the inside.”

  And a grizzly on the outside, Jake thought. “Nice meeting you all. We’ll see you around.” God I hope not. At least not when it is dark.

  Jake stepped to the side and let the trio-of-trouble walk by. Kate led Jake through the yard by his hand, directing him to the gazebo. She sat him down and looked into his eyes. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure how to tell you this.”

  “Just say it. You can tell me anything.”

  Jake’s stomach turned with a combination of early relationship infatuation and fear. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your father is crazy.”

  Kate laughed. Jake wasn’t the first boyfriend she had brought home who had voiced concerns over her father. “He is just a little overbearing.”

  “Oh, Kate, he’s more than a little overbearing. And Tony… the guy nearly broke my hand.”

  “They are just trying to be protective. They are harmless.”

  “Harmless?”

  “Jake, my mother and father have a saying. ‘Sometimes it takes an insane act by a sane person to prove a point.’ Don’t worry about my father. He gets a little crazy when it comes to his daughter. He is just showing that he loves me.”

  “Kate, I understand your father loves you, but let me tell you about our little conversation. Your father said, and I quote, that he would ‘cut off my balls and my tongue if I cheated on you or lied to you.’”

  “I’m sure he meant it figuratively,” Kate said, gently rubbing Jake’s thigh.

  “How the hell could he mean that figuratively? He said he would cut my balls off and feed them to the dogs.”

  “See, there you go,” Kate said with a satisfied look on her face. “I told you he was speaking figuratively.”

  “’There you go’ what?” Jake asked.

  “We don’t have any dogs.”

  Chapter 10

  Marilyn walked into the office Monday morning to a full voicemail box. Even when the CEO and president of Winthrop Enterprises wasn’t out of town, Peter Winthrop didn’t answer his own calls unless they came directly to his private cell phone—a number he didn’t give out to just anyone. You had to be royalty, or close enough to royalty that you could arrange a meeting with them. Marilyn was Peter’s assistant and switchboard. She did her job with perfection, trained to perfection over the last twenty plus years. She was very well compensated for standing guard as the final barrier to communication between the outside world and her boss.

  The frantic urgency of the messages left on Peter Winthrop’s phone was unusual, and Marilyn wrote down the number with haste. She listened to the messages a second time and decided a return call was in her best interest. Her boss was outside Rio, scoping out a potential factory to sell to a Japanese investor, but she knew he would call. He liked his morning update, the more detail the better. And if she could solve a problem without wasting her boss’s time, that was fine too. That’s what she was paid to do.

  With the name and number of an employee from Republic Outfitters scribbled on the paper in her hand, she hit the numbers on her phone. She checked the clock on the wall, and after two rings, was surprised to hear a human voice this early in the morning.

  “Good morning. Republic Outfitters, Amy Grant speaking.”

  “Good morning. This is Marilyn Ford, personal assistant to Peter Winthrop. I am returning several calls that were left for Mr. Winthrop over the weekend. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Good morning, Marilyn. Thank you for getting back to us. We have a bit of an issue with the rush order of shorts we received from our manufacturer in Asia.”

  “Could you please hold for a moment?

  “Yes.”

  Marilyn opened her desk drawer and pulled out a file on active projects. Republic Outfitters was third from the front. She read the file quickly and returned to the phone. “Twenty thousand pairs of shorts. Rush-ordered. Chang Industries, correct?”

  “That’s right,” the unlucky employee from Republic Outfitters answered from the company’s quiet headquarters in Maine.

  “Rest assured that if there are problems with the quality of the product, we will handle it immediately at no cost to you.”

  Amy Grant, corporate firefighter for the Republic Outfitters’ director of logistics, fumbled for words and went back to her original request. “I really need to speak with Mr. Winthrop directly,” she said forcefully.

  “Mr. Winthrop will be out of the office for a few days. I assure you I keep all of his affairs in the strictest of confidence.”

  “Still….”

  “I understand your concern, but please understand mine. I have worked directly for Mr. Winthrop for over two decades and everything he knows, I know.”

  “Well we have a bit of an unusual situation with the rush order of shorts.”

  “As you have said.”

  “You might have to see this to believe it. Do you have a fax number where you can be reached?”

  Marilyn gave her the fax number, again promised
to handle the situation, whatever it was, and hung up.

  Amy Grant, black spiked hair to go with her pierced eyebrow, took several minutes cutting, pasting, taping, and copying. She had been working on the company emergency all weekend with her boss, trying to find the right people to talk to. When they found the first note, everyone assumed it was a hoax. When the number of notes passed two dozen, Republic Outfitter’s quality control group checked the contact person for the contract on the emergency order of shorts. Surprisingly, they found the same name in the contract as in the notes. Peter Winthrop.

  Amy finished honing her kindergarten cut-and-paste skills and looked at her handiwork. She placed the stack of paper face down, and fat fingered the final number on the fax machine before hitting send.

  Marilyn impatiently waited by her personal all-in-one fax, copier, and scanner. Peter was due to call any minute, and she would feel better knowing what the emergency from Maine was all about.

  Jake walked in the office, gave Marilyn a wave and a “good morning,” and continued on to his office, briefcase bulging with files and newspapers. Twenty minutes later, Marilyn contacted Amy Grant at Republic Outfitters to tell her she was still waiting. The spike-haired employee insisted she had sent the fax, and checked the confirmation ticket that the fax machine generated automatically. She confirmed the number with Marilyn, who reconfirmed that the sender had sent the fax to the wrong number. The first page of the fax came in, inching its way from the slit in the top of the machine. The page was a photocopy of smaller pieces of paper, pushed together in an odd collage—a Picasso masterpiece made from scraps of paper, a plain sheet of office paper serving as the canvas.

  Marilyn looked at the first page and then the next. She glanced at the machine and its small display window. There were five pages in total, but she didn’t wait to see them all before picking up the phone. Her demeanor was noticeably more serious.

  “Where did this come from?” Marilyn asked.

  “That’s just it. They came in the order of shorts we just received. We do a cursory examination on a sample number of shorts as they come in and the inspector found the first note. Then he found another.”

  “How many did you find all together? I see the fax is five pages long.”

  “Oh that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of notes so far, and still more keep coming. I don’t have a clue what the total number is, but it looks like it is in the thousands.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful,” Marilyn muttered.

  “What would you like us to do?”

  “Check all the shorts and any other merchandise you get from Chang Industries. Keep all the notes. Mr. Winthrop will see to it that you are compensated for the extra work.”

  “But what about the notes?”

  “I will handle it and get back to you.”

  Marilyn hung up the phone, looked around helplessly, and began to cry.

  When Peter called, Marilyn grabbed her keys, unlocked her boss’s door and went into the privacy of his office. She came out a full hour later, eyes watering, sniffling like a kid with allergies in the middle of spring. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, and already it looked like the beginning of the second worst day of her life. ***

  Jake fetched a cup of coffee from the main lounge on the far side of the floor and returned to his office to check his email. There was plenty to do at Winthrop Enterprises, if Jake felt like working. As the president’s son, no one was busting his balls. He did have daily meetings with the international trade team, a group of ten serious professionals who kept track of the movement of goods across the globe. They were masters of importing, exporting, and international trade law. They knew custom officials by name in fifty countries and had bought, sold, imported, and exported just about every item known to man. The group of international trade specialists at Winthrop Enterprises was like the prison inmate who could get anything for anyone, for a fee. They danced the edge of legality, toes just inside the line, but willing to cross it if the money was right.

  Jake liked the international group. They opened his eyes to a whole new world. He had done a short, two-day rotation in accounting and finance, but found the people even more boring than their stereotypes. Even the marketing group, which as far as Jake could tell didn’t actually do any marketing, was surprisingly quiet. But international trade was interesting, and the group humored him and his questions. Sure Jake knew he was the president’s son and the employees were probably following orders—showing Jake the ropes, entertaining him.

  But Jake wasn’t loafing on the job either. He was working hard to learn something so different from English Literature that at times the trade group members seemed like they were speaking a foreign language. The international trade team may have had to accept him with open arms, but if Jake had any say in the matter, they were going to absolutely love him before long. Diligence served with a smile.

  A megaphone blared outside the window and Jake stood from the piles of paper at his desk and checked on the action in Franklin Park across the street. It was early, before the heat really set in, and there was already a loose-knit group forming in the one-square block park.

  He was learning to love his office and his front row seat to the live entertainment played out across the street. The organizers of today’s gathering either had no agenda or weren’t well prepared. There was no indication that the religious freaks or abortion nuts were going to spend the day praying for the sinners’ souls. The group didn’t look like the normal vets either, who formed regularly to bitch about poor treatment, a complaint that was probably true. They sure as hell weren’t tree-huggers from the West Coast converging on the city. The most organized faction in the park was still the homeless camped out in their normal spots on the park bench, behind the hedges, and on the heating grates fed by the subway system below—prime real-estate in the winter that the homeless marked with their belongings year-round.

  Jake looked away from the window and his eyes fell on the tray of his fax machine. Another random junk fax. Someone had his number. He took one step on the plush beige carpet, reached down, and picked up the piece of paper that would forever change his life. Pandora’s Box on an eight-by-eleven inch sheet of paper. ***

  Marilyn sat at her desk, shoulders slumped, eyes puffy, a small trashcan full of tissues next to her chair. The morning went down the crapper with the phone call from Republic Outfitters, and Marilyn now looked ten years older than she had when she got off the subway. The wrinkles were showing, the small veins pronounced, the first layer of make-up wiped away one tissue and tear at a time.

  Jake approached Marilyn’s desk like a defensive lineman on the blind side of a quarterback.

  “I need to speak with my father,” Jake said with bite.

  “I just spoke with him. He’s on the road and can’t be reached until tomorrow.”

  “Then you and I need to talk.”

  “Can it wait, Jake? It has been a rough morning.”

  “No, Marilyn. It can’t wait.” Jake held up the fax. Marilyn looked at the unmistakable piece of paper she had neglected to look for in the midst of her morning emotional breakdown. Fresh tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Grab your bag and let’s go,” Jake said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out of the office.”

  Marilyn snagged her purse from the back of her chair and snatched her cell phone off the desk. She ripped a handful of Kleenex from the box in rapid succession and shoved them in the pocket of her white cotton blazer. The receptionist and several Winthrop Enterprise regulars gave Jake and Marilyn suspicious looks as they waited silently for the elevator. The whispers grew as soon as the elevator doors shut.

  A block from Winthrop Enterprises, Good Morning Sunshine served breakfast, usually coffee and toast, to a paper-reading clientele in suits. Marilyn and Jake were the only couple in the joint—all the other patrons were enjoying their morning dates with The Washington Post. A few Wall Street Journals were
on the counter, read and folded.

  Jake ignored the “wait to be seated” peg-lettered sign standing near the door and led Marilyn to a table near the window.

  “Two coffees and one order of waffles,” Jake said to the lone forty-something waiter who took the order with a nod. The twenty-seat wannabe diner was library quiet.

  “What the hell is this?” Jake asked, whispering forcefully, placing the fax on the table.

  “How did you get this?”

  “It was on my fax machine.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Marilyn said. “Of all the fax machines in the company.”

  “Who is Wei Ling?”

  “She’s a girl your father knows.”

  “And she is pregnant?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “It also says that she is being held against her will. Just what the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does my father know?”

  “Yes. I told him this morning.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me he was going to make some calls,” Marilyn answered. “But I got the feeling there was more to it.”

  “So who is the girl?” Jake asked again.

  “She works in a factory in Saipan that your father does business with.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Jake, your father doesn’t have girlfriends.”

  “Is it his baby?”

  Marilyn tried to answer, but the tears suddenly streaming down her cheeks magically prevented it. Jake waited. Women cry for different reasons, and Jake wasn’t in the mood to soothe anyone’s tears.

  “Jake, I’m sure this Wei Ling girl is, shall we say, a romantic interest of your father. Not a girlfriend, mind you. More like a play toy.”

  “And she is pregnant.”

  “We don’t know,” Marilyn said almost incomprehensibly through a new round of tears.

  “You seem to be taking this hard.”

  “There is something you need to know, Jake. Something that may come as a surprise.”

  With that simple sentence, all remaining hints of composure drained from Marilyn. She sobbed openly and every customer in the restaurant looked over.