The Man With No Borders Read online

  PRAISE FOR RICHARD C. MORAIS

  The Hundred-Foot Journey

  “The novel’s charm lies in its improbability: it’s Slumdog Millionaire meets Ratatouille.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “This novel, of mythic proportions yet told with truly heartfelt realism, is a stunning tribute to the devotion to family and food, in that order. Bound to please anyone who has ever been happily coaxed to eat beyond the point of fullness, overwhelmed by the magnetism of just one more bite.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Serious foodies will swoon. Morais throws himself into the kind of descriptive writing that makes reading a gastronomic event.”

  —Washington Post Book Review

  Buddhaland Brooklyn

  “The world Morais creates is quirky and enchanting. His recurring rumination on the meaning of enlightenment and acceptance is worth savoring.”

  —Washington Independent Review of Books

  “A charming and touching tale of discovery . . . certain to be appreciated by those who enjoy reading about the human condition.”

  —Library Journal

  “Readers who follow Morais’s lyrical narrative will find spiritual redemption of their own in his search for the paradisiacal Buddhaland. A vivid portrait of faith lost and found through the eyes of a Japanese Buddhist monk in America.”

  —Shelf Awareness, starred review

  ALSO BY RICHARD C. MORAIS

  Fiction

  The Hundred-Foot Journey

  Buddhaland Brooklyn

  Nonfiction

  Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became a Label

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 Richard C. Morais/RCM Media LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542093828 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542093821 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542093835 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 154209383X (paperback)

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  First edition

  FOR SUSAN

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  ONE

  TWO

  PART II

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART III

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART IV

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  PART V

  TWELVE

  PART VI

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  PART VII

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  My mind drifts back to those days when I was young and full of vigor and just starting my career as a private banker. It is the nature of old age, I am discovering, to remember the entire panorama of the past, everything from those difficult memories we spend a lifetime trying to suppress, to those inconsequential moments that seemed so trivial at the time, but now, with hindsight, take on added meaning and weight.

  In particular, I remember a day from that summer of the late 1960s, shortly after Lisa and I had moved to Zürich so I could learn my trade at Swiss Federal Credit Bank, the universal bank with headquarters on the Bahnhofstrasse.

  An elderly Swedish couple came to the bank in the late afternoon to make changes to their will and estate. They were valued and respected clients of the bank, so my supervisor, Herr Albiez, ushered this remarkably spry and distinguished-looking couple into the grand conference room overlooking Paradeplatz, and ordered them coffee and sugar biscuits.

  I was his assistant at the time and came shuffling into the conference room with the accordion of documents we had prepared for their visit. The couple sat opposite, white-haired and leather skinned, looking like tanned beef hides after a decade living under the Riviera sun. They lived in a harborside penthouse in Monaco for most of the year, to avoid confiscatory Scandinavian taxes, and had come to Zürich for one purpose that day—to cut their children out of their will.

  I pushed forward the last document, the amended trust.

  “Please sign here. And here.”

  The elderly couple signed.

  “It is over,” the man said.

  The finality of the signing touched something inside of them, and their emotions spilled out from their normally carefully enforced Swedish borders, as if we could somehow absolve them of their decision. Their daughter was a heroin addict, they told us, and had gone missing with her baby somewhere in India. Their son lived in Tangier. He was fond of entertaining rough sailors and was constantly getting robbed and asking his parents for more money.

  The couple could barely spit out the words, they were so full of disgust. They seemed to both loathe their children—who, they said, did nothing but break their hearts and disappoint them—while at the same time they were racked with guilt for washing their hands of their own flesh and blood.

  “Yes, it is over and good riddance,” the wife said. “Now I can finally sleep. If Josephina overdoses now, at least it won’t be our money in her veins.”

  When the couple stood again, they were old and stooped, as if their robust Riviera life had been stripped away by this act of family betrayal. I was shocked by their transformation, and, unsettled by the entire meeting, I suspect I conveyed a certain amount of cold contempt. Herr Albiez, without saying anything specific, managed in contrast to convey great empathy, and he thanked the Swedes for their visit and wished them a safe journey back to Monaco, as we escorted them to the elevators.

  Herr Albiez and I turned heel, when the elevator doors shut, and began to walk down the bank’s long corridors to our offices.

  “Your performance with the client today was not what I was hoping for.”

  My supervisor was blue-eyed and silver-haired and said little, but when he spoke, his comments carried weight. I glanced nervously in his direction.

  “In what way?”

  “You must think more like a priest in a confessional and less like a banker on the Bahnhofstrasse.”

  “I’ve never thought about our work in that way.”

  “You will hear lots of stories from the clients. Some of them will be unpleasant, some even distasteful. Reserve judgment. Families and their issues are complicated. Remember, you are not really in the business of managing money. You are in the business of keeping family secrets.”

  I absorbed his comments as we turned down the next hall, the echo of our footsteps reverberating through the corridor.

  When I finally spoke, I did so with far more vehemence than I intended.

  “I can keep family secrets.”

  PART I

  2019

  ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND

  ONE

  I’ve asked Herr Heinrich to prune the pear orchard a little earlier this year,” my wife says, pausing just long enough for an intake of breath. “He tells me we should expect about twenty kilos of honey from the beehives and that he will dispose of any surplus w
e don’t want . . .”

  The truth is the silence that hangs like tombs between the words.

  “The price for honey is up this year—it’s the bees, they’re all disappearing—but I want to make sure our friends all get a jar for Christmas. Not like last year. So, I’m not entirely sure there will be a surplus . . .”

  A nurse steps through the door and everyone in the waiting room lifts their head at the same moment, like gazelles at a watering hole as a leopard slinks through the tall grass. The nurse looks up from the clipboard and says “José María Álvarez de Oviedo” with that Swiss singsong inflection.

  Lisa squeezes my hand, finally silenced. The others in the waiting room drop their heads back to their magazines, and I stand up, alone, my loden raincoat draped over my arm. That phrase—it’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t precisely remember where it comes from—keeps pushing its way into my head.

  The truth is the silence that hangs like tombs between the words.

  Dr. Sutter’s offices are at the University of Zürich, and after his staff puts me through the MRI machine and takes blood, Lisa is escorted back to the oncologist’s office, just as I arrive as well. We smile wanly at each other, the shorthand of old couples, and step through the door.

  The doctor stands and greets us from behind his desk, offering us hibiscus and rose-petal tea of his own making, which Lisa and I both decline. We’ve had his home brew before and it is awful.

  We wait for the MRI images. Dr. Sutter’s office looks down over the gray-stone university; two red construction cranes are visible in the corner of the window. He has on his desk a silver-framed picture of his wife and three young children, sailing on the Lake of Zürich. It is the only personal object in his otherwise impersonal office.

  We make some small talk about our children. Dr. Sutter’s salt-and-pepper hair is swept back, and he is handsome and fit in that natural Swiss way. I imagine him taking his children out on weekends to run the Vita Parcours, the military-like obstacle course in the woods around every Swiss village, his entire family engaged in chin-ups and jogging and stomach crunches. The thought of it makes me weary.

  We are rescued, finally, by the pictures popping up on Dr. Sutter’s backlit computer screen, red and green and blue blotches that look like abstract art and seem to have little to do with me.

  For a few minutes, Dr. Sutter sucks the end of his eyeglass stems as he silently flips back and forth between the screen shots. He turns in our direction then, and speaks in a dispassionate, factual way. After showing pictures of my lower abdomen, and the tumors sitting like clumps of underground truffles, he switches to a new series of images. “The cancer has returned in a pattern similar to what we saw last time, but for one important difference. The cancer has spread to the brain. See this picture?”

  Dr. Sutter points his ballpoint pen at the center of the illuminated screen, where a red-and-green blot sits glowing. “This is a tumor. Here. I think it is unlikely you will experience hyperalgesia, which is intense pain everywhere in your body. No, no. The pain you experience will most likely be intermittent, sometimes intense and sometimes not at all, because this tumor is now pressing on the brain’s cortex. This is the center of the pain communication system, what we call the neuromatrix. This tumor is, in effect, suppressing and interrupting your ability to experience pain. It is consistent with what you have described, Herr Álvarez. No pain—and then a sudden attack.”

  Lisa says in a small voice, “That’s a blessing of sorts.”

  “Yes, it is. This is very good news.”

  “I see. What will happen next?” I ask.

  “It is entirely possible,” he says, turning back to the screen and again tapping the red blotch with his pen, “that you will periodically experience extreme disorientation, a kind of dementia, and the deterioration will not happen in a straight line, I would say, but is likely to look like a string of ever-smaller islands of lucidity sitting in a growing sea of darkness and confusion. Intense hallucinations also cannot be ruled out.”

  Neither Lisa nor I say anything for a few moments. When I am able to find my voice, I say, “Finalmente? The end. How will it come?”

  “Ach. That is the great mystery. We won’t know what cancer will first eat what vital organ—until it has happened. It could be the liver or die Nieren . . . the kidneys. The pancreas. Die Lunge. It could very well be the brain itself or, most likely, everything at the same time. We will watch and see what happens. It’s very unpredictable, the path the cancers take. There is much for us yet to learn. The main thing is to keep you comfortable throughout the process.”

  Comfortable.

  I keep turning that word of his around and around in my head.

  Lisa and I return to our Niederdorf pied-à-terre, a small penthouse atop a seventeenth-century guild house on Hechtplatz, and collapse on our beds. We are so exhausted by the doctor’s visit that we fall into a deep sleep. But there is much more to be done, and, in the afternoon, after our nap, we take the elevator down from our apartment.

  Hand in hand, we cross the Rathaus Bridge spanning the Limmat River, threading our way through the city’s cobblestone backstreets, until we slip through a horse-wide lane onto the Bahnhofstrasse.

  The private bank I founded for the family decades ago—Privatbank Álvarez GmbH—is located in an unassuming office building, directly opposite the massive limestone offices of Zürich Union Bank Wealth Management. Plaques outside identify a few tenants—Bank Arabia AG, Banque Jacques Rothschild et Fils GmbH, Park Wong Family Offices (Europe)—and I am visited by an unexpected flood of pleasure, when I see, once again, the Privatbank Álvarez name next to the prime top floors of the office building that is part of our property portfolio.

  Hans-Peter Grieder, my protégé who took over as the bank’s managing director when I retired, is waiting for us upstairs, as the elevator doors ping open. He shakes my hand and kisses Lisa’s cheeks, left-right-left, as is the Swiss custom. Hans-Peter sports the black-rimmed eyeglasses and porcupine haircut of a rather dull provincial Swiss military officer, which is entirely misleading, since he is a sophisticated and INSEAD-educated international banker with a brilliant mind.

  He guides us to the client conference room in the back of the office, down the corridor walls lined with Man Ray and Cartier-Bresson prints from the 1920s. A few secretaries and client managers come out to greet me when they see me hobbling down the hall, and I have to stop and ask each small questions, about their boyfriends and babies and holidays. But not long afterward, Hans-Peter has Lisa and me sitting around the conference table, ready to work.

  He is everything I could wish for, solicitous and efficient in helping us get our affairs in order. The trust lawyer, a young woman who graduated with honors from the University of St. Gallen, is called in. We agree the grantor-retained annuity trust, which I long ago set up for Lisa and the boys, needs to be updated, decanted into a new trust with terms reflecting the boys’ maturity and my coming end. The trust only has ten million Swiss francs at this stage, and needs more of my wealth transferred into it, so we can avoid estate taxes. Papers are signed and a small portion of the investment portfolio liquidated and prepared for disbursement. There is only a slight pause of the pen, a rapid eyeblink, when we come to discussing how the estate, in its entirety, will be divided after my death.

  “Lisa will get the farm in Ägeri, the apartments in Zürich and New York, plus the forty-six million Swiss francs sitting in the money-market accounts. The private equity investments should get paid out directly to her, over time, as they mature and liquidate. But I want you to manage the real estate properties for her. Furthermore, she can’t . . .”

  “Seriously, José?” Lisa is staring at me. “You’re going to control everyone and everything from beyond the grave? Seriously?”

  I stop. Take a deep breath.

  “Lisa can do with the properties what she likes,” I say. “Sell them. Live in them. I don’t give a damn. It’s her choice.”

  My wife
doesn’t say another word, but Hans-Peter is studying her out of the corner of his eye. “This is very difficult for you, Lisa. Part of the anxiety comes from not knowing how things will change after your husband has passed. It is entirely understandable. But, in my experience, I have seen, again and again, how it all becomes clear, in time, as to what must be done. And when it does, I hope you will not be shy about calling on me—in any capacity where I might be of assistance.”

  The kindness in my old partner’s voice sets off a wave of emotion, and Lisa lowers her head and fishes inside her purse for a tissue. “Thank you, Hans-Peter,” she finally says. “You have always been a good friend—to the entire family.”

  Hans-Peter, giving her some space so she can gather herself again, turns his attention back to me. “And the rest of the estate? We haven’t sent you your statement yet, but we just did the calculations, and the fiscal year-end valuation of the Privatbank Álvarez shares was one point two billion Swiss francs. We will be recommending to the board, after such a profitable year, that a special thirty-four-million Swiss franc dividend be paid the shareholders. Are the bank’s shares to be divided equally among your three sons?”

  “No.”

  Lisa gasps. “José!”

  I hold up my hand, a warning to remain silent. “I haven’t decided yet how much will go to the boys. I will let you know what I have decided, when I have decided.”

  They hear the resolution in my voice, and no one could say, at that moment, I am not compos mentis and in full control of my faculties.

  “As you wish,” Hans-Peter says, “but with such a disease, at such an advanced stage, I trust you will let an old colleague remind you that it is unwise to postpone your decision for long. There might come a day, unexpected, when you are incapable of making a decision; or, um Gottes willen nicht, you make a decision that your sons can challenge in the courts, due to your mental condition at the time you gave me your instructions. There are practical matters to consider here.”

  “I am aware of that. You will have my decision soon.”