Why I Had To Kill My Brother Read online

  I shook my head. I had imagined this conversation could have gone several different ways but I had hoped for what I called Scenario A. In this version of our encounter my brother would have burst into tears during my diatribe and would have apologized for what he had done. He would have begged for my forgiveness and asked what he could to do make things right between us and how we could have put this whole, horrible affair behind us. That was what I wanted. It was all I had ever wanted. I had wanted a sincere apology and an acknowledgement that he had behaved improperly. All during our collaboration he had told me I was a greedy pig, just as he was. I had argued with him, assured him that was not my nature, but he didn’t believe me. He couldn’t. That was all he knew. But it really wasn’t true for me and, when I finally separated myself from him, having gotten sick several times when we worked together, once catching pneumonia, having collapsed from sheer exhaustion, I asked for no remuneration for the extra work I had contributed. For me, it was never about money. It was about family working together. For him, well, money was all there was.

  What I saw in my brother today was not contrition. What I saw was someone who was most unapologetic, someone who did not care in the least that he had done a terrible thing to a blood relative, to a brother. In fact, what I saw in his eyes was defiance and I got a sense of superiority from this unethical and immoral ex-brother of mine. This was, unfortunately, my Scenario C, the scenario that I had dreaded, the one that would not end well at all.

  “I came here to give you a chance to redeem yourself,” I said. “But apparently redemption is not to be.” I paused and looked at him but I saw nothing looking back at me. “I must have my vengeance. I need closure. I need to get on with my life, something I haven’t been able to do for a year.”

  I saw a flicker of understanding cross his face and saw his muscles begin to tense. He was not going to sit there any longer and it looked like he was about to say something else. But I was worried that he would lunge for me so I knew what I had to do. The time for discussion was over. I simply did it. The gun had been pointing at him all the while, right at his chest. And with his defiance I lost all sense of mercy and I pulled the trigger with no sense of guilt or regret.

  I do not want to dwell on the details of what happened but it was a messy business, much messier than what I had imagined. I would have preferred the clean, neat result of my imagination but that was not to be. My ex-brother did not die instantly like they do in the movies. Suffice it to saw that, after five minutes of unpleasantness, my brother was dead, killed by my own hand. But even as he lay dying there was to be no remorse. And no apology.

  The room was a mess and I felt sorry for the state in which my sister-in-law would find her husband. But I could not stay to clean up. The black leather gloves I had been wearing would be ditched hundreds of miles from here. I would drive back to DC and return the rental car and I would be home before sunrise tomorrow. I felt not a single twinge of regret or remorse as I stood up and looked around the room, nodded to myself in satisfaction and left the house never to return.

  I had been right. It had been cathartic.

  Chapter 2 - The Characters

  My brother and I had never been very similar. I was always disturbed by injustice and had a genuine concern for others; he was only concerned with himself. Don’t misunderstand me: I was never a saint and I had my fair share of insensitivities. But my general concern for others was very real, even if it was limited to those I judged to be good people.

  My brother’s big sin was that he worshipped the dollar and seemed prepared to do whatever was necessary to align himself with his god. Now, I am no monk nor have I taken an oath of poverty. I like nice things, although I am not prepared to do whatever is necessary to get them. I have always known there were more important things in life than money and luxuries. As I grew up I tried to avoid decisions based purely on money. I wanted to lead my life in a way that I could look back and say that I had done most things right, that I had been a good and honorable person. I tried to do the right thing, tried to honor my obligations and hoped that I might one day get a few of the luxuries I enjoy without being a scoundrel. But that was not to be.

  If there was one thing I hated more than anything else it was hypocracy. I did, however, understand vengeance and I was myself a vengeful person, feeling strongly that it was right and proper to punish those who had been unfair to me, to those I loved or, in fact, to anyone who was treated unfairly. I had been called an idealist my many but the simple truth was that I loathed the way the world operated. On the surface everything seemed reasonable but, if you looked closely, the world was about deception and illusion. Marketing made businesses successful but marketing was designed to create an illusion. Was that not deception? Sales clinched the sale through personal relationships and psychological warfare. Was this not deception? Marketing and sales were more important to most businesses than the products they sold. Many businesses were built on deception. I would have been a terrible businessman.

  I had met people who understood the hard truth that the world is unfair but they usually took it all in stride. “You can’t change the world,” they would say. I could not take it in stride. It ate away at me and made me angry. I found life difficult because I didn’t know how to let the bad stuff pass me by.

  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that I needed ways to escape from this world. And for that I had books and movies. I enjoyed books but I loved movies. The more escapist the better so science fiction was perfect, something that pulled me into a different reality. Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, Contact, The Thirteenth Floor: I loved them all. Much of science fiction expected humanity to grow out of its animal roots and it enabled me to hope that the world would improve with time. I also enjoyed the superhero films: Batman, Spiderman, Superman and the like. If I could have been a superhero, I would have done the best damn job I could have. But I wouldn’t have been known by many as I would have been unable to market myself.

  My brother, on the other hand, never seemed to be upset by injustice unless it was perpetrated directly against him. He didn’t seem to enjoy the escapist movies I enjoyed. He preferred the dark movies, especially black comedies, movies that I could never understand. Fargo, Pulp Fiction and gory vampire movies seemed to be his choices. I now assume that he enjoyed these movies because those were the worlds he understood.

  He was also completely indifferent to the plight of others. While I was certainly conservative politically, he made me look like a communist. He had no concern for those who could not fend for themselves or those who ended up on tough times through no fault of their own. That he had enjoyed a mildly privileged upbringing, including a parent-paid university education and a graduation gift of a car, charity never seemed to occur to him. He felt that he owed his financial success to no one, even though that success was built on the shoulders of the hard working, kinder, simpler folk that many of us have respected all our lives.

  But the feature of my brother’s personality that had always concerned me most was his inability to see any point of view that did not jibe with his own. He did not even seem to care that there might be other points of view. As a result, in business he had a take it or leave it attitude. My gut feeling was that he could not have always been this way but that this attitude had evolved as he grew more financially independent. And he did not believe in fairness, not the way the rest of the world did or at least I did. To him fairness was whatever you could get away with. Whether in contract negotiations, or dealing with an employee or making a purchase, his attitude was driven by pure greed with no consideration for others. I did not understand this until much later but it seems so clear to me now.

  I had always known what my brother was, more or less. But the one thing that enabled me to deal with him day to day was the conviction that, despite his flaws and his mercenary nature, he would deal differently with family. That is what he had told me so often and that is what I had believed. I should have known better because I
had learned over the years that talk is cheap and that the only way to judge people was through their actions. It turned out that, even with family, he only did the right thing if it was convenient. He was happy to help out if it was easy but not if it took any real effort on his part. And now, after my experience working with him, I know that he would never help someone if it was either too much effort or too expensive. That included family. It may even have included his own children, but of that I cannot be 100% certain.

  By now you are probably wondering why, if my brother was such a terrible person, did I spend enough time with him to get hurt. And why did I take his treatment of me so personally? For the answer to these questions you have to understand our upbringing and the other significant characters in my life.

  My father was the finest person I knew. Perhaps that sounds unfair to my mother, but let me explain. My vindictiveness, of which I have already spoken, came directly from my maternal genes. My father, on the other hand, seemed to have no vindictive nature whatsoever. That made him better than both myself and my mother. That is not to say that my father was perfect; he was not. In fact his approach to fairness often bordered on the unreasonable. It is probably difficult to believe that someone could be too fair but that was my father. And if you had never met him then that was your loss. He was a very fine person, but perhaps all of this is a little too abstract so let’s think of an example.

  One of my father’s brothers passed away when he was only in his 50’s, leaving a widow, two sons and a daughter. The daughter continued to live with her mother until the mother herself finally passed away. By that point the daughter was stuck in an untenable situation. She continued to live in her mother’s house on her own but, since she had spent so much time looking after her mother, she felt very much alone. Her brothers were too busy with their own lives to do much to help. So my parents got involved. For a long time they took her out weekly for breakfast or dinner, bought her birthday presents, provided funds (even when they themselves were financially strapped) and generally acted as a support group for someone who had no support. No one else in the family did what my parents did (even though my father had some wealthy siblings and one obscenely wealthy sibling) and my parents were the least able to shoulder the burden financially. But they did it out of love for my uncle and my aunt who were no longer around to be parents to my cousin. Now, compared to fantastic stories of selflessness during a war, where lives were risked, this may sound inconsequential. But it is not. It is a mark of true goodwill, something that myself and my siblings all grew up with, something that we should have learned for ourselves.

  But apparently we did not.

  Chapter 3 - The Family Business

  I had a very fine education which began in one of the best public high schools in the Canada. I then proceeded to graduate with honors from one of the best engineering degrees in the country. Not knowing what to do with an engineering degree on graduation, I decided to continue to accumulate pieces of parchment. First I got a masters degree in Engineering and then I capped it off with a doctorate from a famous English university, a university that I was very pleased to learn counted among its alumni the fictitious spy, James Bond. So I knew a lot but I really knew nothing.

  Upon graduation I applied only for two jobs and received two offers of employment. For one offer, I had the opportunity to work in Japan for a multinational electronics company; for the other, with a company that designed and built the robotic arm for the space shuttle. After a quick visit to Osaka and several quick discussions with expatriate Americans who had been working in Japan, I decided that the space shuttle was for me. The Americans did not enjoy either working in Japan or working for the electronics company so I figured I wouldn’t enjoy it either.

  But working for the company that built the space shuttle arm was an unmitigated disaster. I did not feel that I was working on anything important. This may seem surprising, given the high tech nature of the work, but I quickly learned that, with a virtually unlimited budget, nothing was impossible. The original shuttle arm cost about $350 million to design and build but the budget for the space station arm, which was to be just a little more complex, started out at $1.2 billion. I don’t want to get technical here but most of the issues with creating a brand new space technology had already been sorted out during the design of the shuttle arm. The $1.2 billion dollars for the station arm was padded with profit, or so I assumed. The other engineers seemed satisfied to take a pay check, knowing full well that their work was all but irrelevant. I only lasted two years working on robotics.

  But where to go? My experience at the universities and in developing space arms had jaded my view of the world. I wanted to do something where I could make a real contribution but I couldn’t see myself working for others. My final decision came as a surprise to my friends but I decided to work for my father. My feeling was that I would, at a minimum, be helping my family. And that was as good a reason to work as I could think of.

  But my outlook on the family business changed as I worked there. My father trusted me, of that there is no doubt. But he trusted me with technicalities, not with the business aspects of the company. I was put in charge of millions of dollars worth of purchasing decisions and I could sign cheques on my own without a second signature. For that he trusted me. But I was not an owner in the company; I had not one single share in my name. Control of the company was apparently not for me.

  So I worked very hard, making what both my father and I felt were significant contributions to the business. I worked eighty to one hundred hours each week, not for any other reason than I felt it was necessary to look after my father’s interests. And, since I not ownership in the business, I simply expected that my interests would be looked after by my father. And, for the most part, they were. After five years or so I realized I had probably contributed all that I could and it was time for me to leave. I felt good about my contributions but I knew that it was not a family business; it was just a business that happened to be owned by my family.

  But just as I was about to start looking in earnest for an alternative, a horrible thing happened. One of my sisters died and it devastated my parents. She had been divorced from a drug using and criminal husband and she left behind two lovely children, my niece and nephew whom I adored. I could not leave. It would have been wrong to leave and I could not leave my father without my support. So I worked my eighty hour weeks for another five years until I again felt it was appropriate to begin looking for an alternative.

  But then another horrible event happened. My father’s cardiologist discovered life threatening blockages in three of my father’s blood vessels just before my parents were to leave for their winter escape to Florida. Two days later my father underwent a triple bypass. Again, I could not leave. Again, it would have been wrong. So I continued to work my eighty hour weeks, looking after my father’s interests.

  During the period that I worked for my father, my brother and I kept in intermittent contact, perhaps talking once or twice a year. My parents often visited him and brought news back from him. After my father’s triple bypass I worked for almost five more years until my brother started hinting that he was beginning a new venture on his own and that he would like me to work for him. I explain that, although it would be nice to work with family, it would have to be under an arrangement that would work for both of us. I had worked as my father as an employee and I had had my fill of that arrangement. I therefore told my brother I would not work for him. It had to be a different sort of arrangement.

  After several months went by, my parents returned from another visit to my brother. My father told me how much my brother felt he needed my engineering background on his next venture and that wouldn’t it be nice for two brothers to work together? By this point in time the family business was not doing well. The trade treaty with China was causing problems for the company. Though Canada was honoring the treaty, the Chinese were cheating by subsidizing their domestic companies in order to boost exports. I
went through an accounting exercise where I could prove that the Chinese were dumping product. But the government in its infinite wisdom advised against applying for countervailing duties and my father was against a legal battle so we let the situation alone. More bad luck came when my father’s largest customer reneged on a multi-million dollar order. The writing was on the wall for my father’s company. It was no one’s fault but the end was near and my father made clear that he would like to see me join forces with my brother.

  Chapter 4 - The Deal with My Brother

  My brother invited me down to visit him in Greensboro to discuss how we could work together. We had had some initial discussions about how to structure a deal but three solid days in Greensboro would be used to see if a deal could be done.

  Before my trip down, I had been concerned about several things. First, given my history working for my father, I did not want to be an employee. I would not, therefore, work for my brother; somehow, I wanted us to be partners. Second, I did not want charity. Whatever arrangement we made had to be justifiable on the business merits. That meant that my experience and expertise would be crucial for the success of the enterprise and both my equity stake and remuneration would be fair. My brother had done well for himself financially whereas I had not. Yet I did not regret my financial situation since I felt I had made the right choices in helping my father. I raised the issues of partnership and charity several times in conversations with my brother before I headed down to Greensboro. And he had agreed to address both.

  In Greensboro we discussed many things including how to structure the business. My brother suggested an interesting arrangement to address my concerns. He suggested that we each take a 50% stake in a company which would do the majority of the software work. There would eventually be a second company created to deal with other services in which he would retain 100% ownership. The approximate split in profits between the two would be 50/50, leaving me with a 25% share of the overall profits. My brother would provide all of the capital and I would be able to take a basic salary before the profits started rolling in.