The suite at the Carlyle Hotel was no longer a neutral space; it had become a courtroom. David Rockefeller's question, sharp and laden with the pain of betrayal, hung in the air between them, demanding a verdict. "Am I an ally to you," he had asked, "or just another pawn on his chessboard?"
Alta Prentice looked at her nephew's face, a face she'd known when he himself'd been a lad. It was a face now indelibly stamped with a fervid, idealistic conviction which to her seemed a distant memory, a ghost of a woman she'd once been herself. In his eyes, she saw a glimmer of a world where there were clean victories and moralities, a world her husband'd burned to ashes, piece by piece.
She could not lie to him. To invent a defense for the monstrous act she now knew, with sickening certainty, that Ezra had committed would be the final betrayal, not just of David, but of the last remnants of her own soul. Yet she could not confess. To confirm Ezra's guilt aloud, to give voice to the ugly truth, would be to formally declare war on her own husband, a man whose power was as vast as his conscience was nonexistent. She knew his capacity for ruthlessness better than anyone on earth; she slept next to it every night.
So, she opted for the only course remaining to her, the third option of complete, devastating breakdown. The polite, aristocratic mask she'd worn all her life, a shield tempered in the flames of a thousand unspoken dinners and unspeakable terrors, gave way at last. What composed features she'd managed to maintain dropped away in a wreck of real sorrow. Tears, hot and guilty, rose in her eyes and carved channels down her cheeks.
"David," she exhaled, her voice breaking, falling apart. "When I gave you money... when I promised to support you in what you were doing... I believed in what you believed in. With everything in me." She shook her head, a movement from deep, impotent sorrow. "I still do." She paused, her voice catching. "It's... it's the only decent thing left in my life."
She didn't reply to him directly. She didn't need to. Grief was her confession. The depth of her despair was her indictment. In her moment of submission, she was confessing everything to him. She wasn't Ezra's co-conspirator; she was his initial and deepest heartbroken victim, a captive in the gilded cage that he'd created to imprison himself and her.
David saw the truth of her despair. It was cruel and irrefutable. The anger he'd felt against her, the bitter sting of potential betrayal, dissipated in an instant, and in its place, a deep and communal experience of horror set in. He knew the answer. The worst of his doubts were genuine. The ugliness of this act of political treachery wasn't committed by some foreign power or some political foe; the venom had been inflicted from within his own household.
He now saw Alta not as an accomplice, but as a fellow captive, trapped inside the fortress with the monster. His righteous anger gave way to a wave of sympathy and a grim, unifying clarity.
"I'm sorry, Alta," he answered, his voice soft too from a fresh perspective. "I shouldn't have put you in such a position. That wasn't right."
Their positions were redefined within that silent, reciprocal moment of despair. They were no longer simple benefactor and recipient, aunt and nephew, but instead, two individuals who were connected by an horrific comprehension, comrades against an external, internal enemy who wore a familiar visage.
Alta pulled a handkerchief from her bag and dried her eyes, her motions slow and unsteady. But looking up, what tears were left in her eyes were no longer accompanied by grief: instead, a fresh, iron-like determination, as solid and unforgiving as hammered iron, appeared there too. The sobbing victim no longer existed, only a woman who'd been shoved to her very limits.
"This cannot be allowed to stand, David," she stated, her voice no longer a whisper, but a stern, low directive. "This has nothing to do with business or politics. What he has done... it sullies our name. Sullies everything my father based his life upon. Honesty. Integrity. Public service."
She knew, with a certainty born of long and bitter experience, that she could not confront Ezra alone. It would be a moth flying into a flame. And she knew that David, for all his brilliance and passion, could not win a head-to-head fight against his uncle. Ezra would crush him with a casual, brutal efficiency. They needed a different venue, a higher court.
"There has to be an accounting," she pressed, her voice building more power. "A formal, family accounting. Your father... he has to hear this. From you. He has to know what his name is being used to justify."
She rose from her chair and crossed to the hotel telephone. She did not tremble as she lifted the receiver. She did not call her husband. She did not call her lawyers. She called the private, direct line to the Rockefeller home at Kykuit. When the head of household answered, her voice was calm, crisp, and imperial.
"Please tell my brother," she stated, "that I need an immediate and formal family conference tonight. I'll be accompanied by my nephew David. It's a matter of extreme seriousness."
She wasn't merely a victim anymore. She was preparing to have a trial.
The magnificent library at Kykuit, as a rule a chamber of serene quiet, vibrated with strained, anticipatory energy. The staff glided on tiptoed, respectful footsteps, arranging elegant, high-backed chairs around the long, highly polished mahogany table, their images skewed in its dark, mirror-like expanse. The air was dense, fraught with the foreboding emotion of a court-martial, not a family reunion.
John D. Rockefeller Jr., his form weakened but his presence still intimidating, was assisted to his usual chair at the head of the table. His countenance a picture of tired resignation, the face of a patriarch who knew there to be a strong and incurable split in his lineage, he pulled the lap blanket around his knees, his elderly, tired eyes glinting to stare at the imposing double doors, waiting to see when the feuding members of his own family, the two mighty entities who would divide his legacy, would enter.