IT TOOK A LONG TIME for Becky to recover after completing the Green portraits. In fact, she never did recover in time. Just after the Docks painting arrived she fell ill with the flu and a high fever, spending two days at the hospital for fluids and another week in bed—the first time she could remember taking time off work for anything other than art business.
On a follow-up visit to her GP, the doctor took one look at Becky and ordered a full workup. She was visibly weakened and had lost almost twenty pounds from her already slight frame. There were sores in her throat and white lines on her fingernails she’d never noticed before. I’m fine, she insisted. Just need to eat more meat. She tossed the prescription for follow-up tests in the garbage on her way to the parking garage, but annoying health issues continued to plague her.
All that summer she often had to work from home, constantly on speakerphone with the office, having the junior accountants drive to and from with folders and paperwork and the mail, of course. She insisted that the mail be brought to her as usual, and as usual everyone accommodated this eccentricity. Mrs. Bucaro—who was covering Mrs. Fletcher’s desk until Becky could figure out how to replace Mrs. Fletcher (no one could replace Mrs. Fletcher)—boxed up stack after stack of get-well cards that had been dropped off by residents and vendors. Everyone wondered when she would be back “for good.” Becky herself wondered. Some days she felt energy returning, but most mornings she couldn’t will herself out of bed. Would end up bringing her laptop and phone into bed and doing as much as she could from there.
She couldn’t even begin to think about tackling plans for a giant sale, dismantling as much of her collection as she could, the recoup of capital that would let her pour all the money back into Pierson’s coffers. Right now that was too much, too hard. But she would. She’d get it back.
By the end of September Becky had made it into the office several days in a row. One morning Ken poked his head in first thing. “Hi,” he said, staying outside the door. She saw him try to hide his surprise at how she looked: pale, wobbly, lessened, no matter how hard she’d worked on her makeup and outfit this morning.
“Thank god,” Becky said, pushing one of four fruit baskets toward him. “Someone to help me eat my way to a clear desk.”
“Just wanted to say, um, how’re you feeling?”
Becky wondered if they would ever find their way back to the easiness of the years before, when their visions for Pierson were so aligned and clear, their goals and methods so closely determined. Used to be that Becky had literally been unable to tell who had written a budget memo, because over the years her language had become entwined with Ken’s. All that had died with the Springfield trips.
“I’m back.” She smiled. “Want to come in?”
“No. No, that’s okay. I’ve got the thing at eleven. Did you change things around in here?” He gestured at her office, where the quietly expensive furniture was arranged as usual. Only a familiar eye would have caught the difference: the art, almost all of it, was gone. Becky had pruned her collection down to the bone, first as a way of becoming a completist, and later in order to raise funds for the Green portraits.
“Just a refresh,” she said, smiling at him.
“Anyway—you’ll get me those edits? Any time this afternoon.” He tapped twice on the doorframe.
“Listen, Ken?” Becky stood, but dizziness overtook her and she needed to press a hand against her desktop. “Whoa—”
“Are you—” Ken started toward her.
“Fine, fine.” Becky waved him away. “I just wanted to say that I—”
“You should take care, Becky,” Ken said quietly. “Take it easy today.” Then he left.
November 29, 2012. Almost two months since Ken stopped by her office alone. When Becky pulled into her spot behind Town Hall she instantly noticed the drab brown Toyota out of alignment in the parking lot, engine running. She’d driven in from Chicago where she’d spent a night at the horrible Hilton on State in order to hand-deliver a piece to a German gallerist who—surprisingly—sold her on three new Luc Tuymans he had brought for a private showing. Becky hadn’t been at all interested in Tuymans until she saw these in person. Two of the larger pieces were in her trunk now and one unframed sketch lay in the leather tote bag on the seat next to her.
Becky observed the two women in their strange car, their eyes on her, their Illinois plates. When she shut off the engine and stepped into the cold dry air they did too. They followed her at a distance of fifty yards as she struggled to open the building’s rear door while balancing a box of yellow and pink frosted cupcakes. Padma Bedi was having twins and this afternoon was the office shower.
Becky didn’t look back, although the women followed her up the stairwell, not saying a word. She felt them follow her into the long hall that led to her office, door open, no secretary in sight. Becky still didn’t look back, even though by now she knew.
After that, things happened fast. Many people in her office. Men in FBI windbreakers, men in suits, uniformed police officers. Talking loud and hard to her or to each other. Her arms were relieved of cupcakes. Someone was very close, hands along her sides, her underarms, her thighs, the back of her neck. Her couch was tipped down and away from the wall, her bookcases emptied, her desk drawers broken open. She began to protest, not at the fact of what was being done, but its method. Couldn’t they slow down? Couldn’t they be more careful?
And then at last, the moment she’d feared and dreaded and imagined for nearly thirty years: “Rebecca Farwell, this is a warrant for your arrest on charges of fraud. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right . . .”
“I want to read it,” Becky broke in, stopping the man’s recitation. Close-cropped gray hair, unbuttoned suit jacket. “Can I—am I allowed to read it?”
Her arms were released, and she took the papers into her hands. Everyone in the room got quiet. Becky ran her eyes over the text, the embossed seal, the government heading, but the pages shivered before her and she only wanted the stolen moment to gather herself, to try to breathe through and around the heartbeats hammering at her throat, lungs, skull.
“All right.” She handed the warrant back. “Go ahead.” Becky could sense without seeing the consternation of a crowd building in the hall: assistants, secretaries, accountants.
How had it finally happened? What was the detail that snagged, that gave it all away?
Later she would learn that the cause had been her uterine biopsy, which her ob-gyn had insisted on when he discovered her erratic and often missing periods. Supposed to be a minor procedure but she’d had pain and a fair amount of bleeding, so she took two days off to recover. She hadn’t informed the office of anything—none of anyone’s business—but neither had she arranged for an assistant to get the mail; she’d assumed each day that she’d be strong enough to drive over to the post office at some point. But then the Norco made her sleepy and she put off calling someone to do it and eventually decided without actually deciding that she could skip that whole rigmarole. Just the once.
At the moment of her arrest, Ken was in his house. He had two FBI agents standing in his foyer, off and on their phones, plus a couple more in an unmarked car parked out front.
Ken sat at his kitchen table, doing nothing. Marie had taken the kids to her sister’s in St. Louis. They wanted to make sure that the twins had as much peace as possible before the town exploded with the news.
Three weeks ago, Rosalind McInterye from Accounting had tapped on his door: worried, uncertain. He listened to her story with a sinking feeling. Earlier in the day Ros had gotten a call from her assistant who’d gotten a call from a temp, a floating temp they all liked named Trevor. Trevor had been on Becky’s floor for the past few days, answering calls, filing, responding to letters. So he happened to be there when the postman called, surprised that Ms. Farwell hadn’t stopped by that day, or the one before, to get the mail.
No problem, Trevor said. I got it. He carried the two plastic tote boxes into Town Hall and settled in to open and sort the mail. He used the wide empty surface of Mrs. Fletcher’s old desk to open the bills and letters, arranging them into neat piles. Make yourself necessary, his mom always told him. So he organized the mail by department and delivered most of it to the right in-boxes. All well and good.
Except all the different bank statements were confusing. Some were obvious, but what about this Midwest Credit Union account, for example? Should that statement get filed with all the others, or should he put it on Ms. Farwell’s desk? On her desk, he thought. But maybe he should check first.
So Trevor asked one of the accounting assistants to take a look. She asked her boss. Soon that woman came over and took away more of the statements—messing up my piles, Trevor thought—for further study.
Ken didn’t leave the office until nearly three the next morning. At eight am, with two lawyers behind closed doors, Ken called the police. By the time Becky returned to the office two days later, the FBI had opened a case. For the next seventeen days they tracked her every move, meticulously uncovered her money trail, bugged her phone. And all the while Ken had to smile and joke and run meetings with her, and never let on.
His refrigerator had a cycle of noise about one minute long: hum, rattle, hiss, back to humming. Ken listened to it churn, unable to move, unable to ask the agents if it was over.
In the agony of the past twenty-something days he’d said the same thing over and over to the investigators: I’ll do anything. He had no choice, of course. I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I just can’t be there when it happens.
Even though Becky Farwell had ruined his career and most probably was about to ruin his life, Ken Brennan recognized what was true about himself in his kitchen: it was him, failing her, right now.
Becky realized Ken wasn’t there, even though she would have had a hard time sighting him through the melee of agents and police crowded in her office. She could feel that he wasn’t there, even as she called his name. He wouldn’t have been able to take this, she thought, as her arms were positioned for the cuffs.
Trapped, unable to move. Rising panic.
But maybe she still had time? For one last stolen moment?
“I have to go to the bathroom.” Politely, clearly. Though they all still ignored her, preparing to move.
“Excuse me,” she said, twisting to direct this at the female agent who held her arms. “I need to go.”
It took a few exchanges between the agents and their boss, the gray-haired man who’d shown her the warrant, but eventually it was cleared. The female agent—Becky recognized her as one of the two who’d followed her in from the parking lot—took off the cuffs and led her out of the office. Her own personal restroom was across the hall.
“But I need my bag,” Becky said, voice wobbling. That was the point!
“You’re going to use the toilet,” the woman said, not unkindly.
“Could you get it for me? The brown one, the leather tote?”
No answer. Step by step, she was being forced toward the bathroom. Wrong, all wrong! Now Becky became aware of others in the hall, office workers gathered by the west stairs. Some dropped their eyes when she saw them. One was crying. Most stood motionless in utter shock.
“Wait, please!” Becky cried. “Could you get my—ow—Wait!” Someone else had taken hold of her arm, not gently, and together the agents pushed her into the small powder room. One held the stall door open, the other stood in the main doorway.
“Go.”
“But I—”
“You have thirty seconds to urinate.”
Shaking, stymied, Becky gave up hope. What a foolish plan, to somehow get in here alone with her bag and have time enough to take out the Tuymans, unwrap it, and hold that small beauty in quiet, in private.
When she wept, it was for her own stupidity and because she felt the full loss of that impossible last moment and because she had to hike up her skirt and lower her underwear in front of two strangers with guns, had to crouch, trembling, as they watched, had to piss with both doors open, the stall and the restroom, had to piss in full view of the hallway where her coworkers had gathered, and she did, with wet cheeks and bare thighs, she cried and pissed and the agents were right there, impassive, unconcerned, and Becky understood for the first time what life would be like from now on.