Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  “But why, Arthur? How could such a person have anything to do with Florencia?”

  I hesitated before answering, which made the answer more difficult to frame.

  “I think I know. But until I’m sure, I don’t want to say. Not over the phone.”

  “You told me these disposables were secure.”

  “As long as no one has any reason to listen in,” I said. “I can’t say that for certain anymore.”

  “That’s disturbing.”

  “I can’t tell you things if you aren’t prepared to be disturbed.”

  “Okay. You’re right,” she said.

  “I just have a question for you. Had you seen any changes in Florencia in recent years? In mood, behavior, anything?”

  “No. Never. She had that great Latin, ‘The world is crazy, Evelyn, so let’s go have some fun’ thing about her. All the time. I don’t suppose you can tell me why you’re asking.”

  Her imitation of Florencia’s Spanish-inflected English was painfully accurate.

  “Not yet. By the way, how’re the agency’s new owners doing? Any word?”

  “Haven’t heard a thing. Bruce had plenty of time to prepare the transition. Said it went very smoothly. He’s now completely retired to his home in the Virgin Islands, God bless him.”

  I only held her on the line long enough to provide some feeble reassurances and another apology. We hung up with feelings intact on both ends.

  THAT EVENING I got an alert of a new email connected to the account I’d used to monitor the video camera trained on Shelly Gross.

  It said: “Still interested in selling that Mercedes, Alex?”

  As the implications sank in, I felt a blast of heat across my torso and a fuzzy roar building in my head. I took deep breaths to calm my mind and short-circuit a blizzard of panic responses that sought to animate reckless action.

  In theory, he could know everything that I’d done under the name Alex Rimes. All the bank accounts, all the credit cards, all the purchases and rental agreements. He could know the identity was purloined from an unfortunate guy in Alaska. He could trace everything back to Gerry’s shop at the clock factory. From there, by contacting Gerry in Amsterdam, he could make the link to another dead guy named Arthur Cathcart.

  He could learn that Alex had recently bought, and then soon after sold, a food truck business. Linking that to a heist of precious metals from Collingsworth Machine Tool and Metals Company was unlikely, since CMT&M were not yet aware of a potential heist. He also couldn’t know that Alex Rimes had now moved uptown and taken on a new identity, since I was meticulous in walling off Alex from Mr. Frog.

  On the other hand, my saner self argued, setting up that account required nothing but a bunch of made-up data. No Social Security number, no credit card, just a registration. It was conceivable that the site recorded my computer’s MAC address, but unlikely. And even so, I’d paid cash for the computer and given the retail outlet more false information, so it was untraceable to me by itself.

  So, also theoretically, all he could have was the name Alex Rimes.

  Yet it was bad, especially since I couldn‘t know for sure what he knew, what had been compromised and so had to be jettisoned, and even that involved further risk.

  With nothing left to do, I wrote him back.

  “These cars are rare birds, but maybe not for the determined hunter.”

  His response came in minutes. And the dialog began.

  “I want to help,” he wrote.

  “With what?”

  “Your pursuit.”

  “I don’t want the cavalry riding in,” I wrote. “It’ll blow the whole thing.”

  “It’s only me for now.”

  “How can I know that?” I wrote.

  “You can’t. But I no longer work for those guys. I have no legal obligation to communicate what I know.”

  “So what’s in it for you?”

  “The offer you already made,” he wrote. “To get the big fish on the end of the line.”

  “How did you get this address?”

  “There’s another serial number on the lens of the camera. You’d have to break the case to even know it was there. Easy to match it up to the transmitter, and subsequently the wildlife web site. A visit to the web master with my old badge and five minutes later there’s your name and email.”

  There was no reason for me to believe that was all he had, or that was what he wanted me to think. I had to pick my reality.

  “Can you tell me any more than you already have?” I wrote.

  “No.”

  “Then, with all due respect, how can you help?”

  “There might be a photo,” he wrote.

  I waited longer to write back than I wanted to.

  “Might?”

  “It’s ten years old, not terribly clear and uncorroborated. Though the guy who took it made a second try. Unsuccessfully. We found him a piece at a time.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “No. I have to get it,” he wrote. “Not that easy. Not worth the trouble if you won’t play ball.”

  “Ball? What are the rules?”

  “No formalities. Just a little trust.”

  “Nothing little in this game,” I wrote. “Not for me.”

  “You gave me Frondutti. I didn’t appreciate what that really meant before, but now I get it. Proof of trust. Okay, the pic will be in this mailbox in twenty-four hours.”

  “No. This mailbox is dead. Send it here.”

  I gave him instructions on posting to wallbox.com, then signed off. A few minutes later I cancelled the mailbox, though I knew it could leave a traitorous little tunnel back to me, if followed by an official digital wizard with all the right secret maps.

  I emerged from my computer room a slightly changed man. I found Natsumi on the big metal-framed, glass porch off the dining room that would be the location for the silver and ice phase of the festivities in a few weeks. She and the Costellos were moving tables around. I asked in a lighthearted tone if I could borrow my wife. They said si, si, and I led her to the overstocked library where I could at least share the news in comfortable leather chairs in the company of the great works of Western civilization.

  She listened intently, showing little reaction.

  “You don’t know, so what do you feel? Feelings are sometimes smarter than thinking,” she said.

  “I feel he’s far more interested in my quarry than in me. I’ve given him cause to be wicked curious, but getting to me can’t be his prime objective. He’s basically rolled up all of the serious organized crime in Connecticut with the exception of Little Boy, Sebbie Frondutti, who I handed to him, and Three Sticks, who I might. Why not play it out?”

  “I agree. Sometimes the best place to hide is in the open, and the best way to stay safe is to be exposed.”

  “Japanese philosophy?”

  “Psych 401. The Application of Counter Instinctual Behaviors in Balanced Life Strategies.”

  “Tell me you made that up,” I said.

  “I did. But I’ve taken worse.”

  She went back to the glass porch and I sat alone in the library trying to let go of my racing thoughts. I was reaching the point where the complexities of the project were oozing out of control. Even with my reduced mathematical capabilities, I knew the science and understood the odds. I’d mapped probabilities and studied chaos theory, where a tiny bit of statistical noise grew over time to overwhelm the dominant equation.

  I pictured a graph, with the erosion of my personal security on one axis and time on the other. It indicated that I was running out of time. Rapidly.

  I made two decisions. I would trust Shelly Gross, and my feelings, as instructed by Natsumi Fitzgerald, whose own feelings had thus far proved both judicious and wise.

  CHAPTER 21

  Even someone as ruthlessly rational as I am harbors a suspicion that mystical beings are out there wielding destructive forces against your better interests. So it was with some relief and gratitu
de that I welcomed the crystal clear cold, but not unbearably frigid weather that was forecast for the night of the party.

  Nitzy and Aidan had come through, if the RSVP’s were to be believed, with a head count of Fairfield County’s A-list glitterati, numbering just north of fifty. The event had escaped the notice of the New York Times, though the local paper had it on the front page of the Sunday lifestyle section, complete with a description of the hosts as “a beautiful and über-wealthy power couple from who-knows-where.”

  Natsumi and the Costellos looked grey with exhaustion, and I likely looked no better. We’d all put in eighteen-hour days over the last week, and there was still plenty of unfinished business that haunted our fleeting intervals of sleep.

  THE MORNING of the event I stole an hour to go online. Shelly was true to his word. In wallbox was a black and white photograph of a man and a note:

  “It’s already been enhanced as much as possible before distorting the image. You can only work with the pixels you got. Also add ten years.”

  His skin was on the lighter side of white, his black hair slicked back from a high forehead. Incipient signs of balding were apparent. He wore sunglasses and the collar on his white shirt was pulled up. With the top two buttons unbuttoned, it wasn’t a shirt you’d associate with someone named Austin Ott, the Third. He was coming through a door, leaving either a storefront or a restaurant.

  Height was difficult to determine. Some fleshiness around the throat suggested a paunch hidden by the door. Age, at this point, mid to late fifties. Shelly was right to lower my expectations.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but it wasn’t nothing.

  THE GUESTS arrived under a blaze of light from lamps mounted up in the trees trained on the façade of the house and the parking area plowed out of an expanse of lawn. Most accepted the offer of a valet, though a few were insistently self-reliant.

  My spot was the front door, where I shook everyone’s hand and took their coats, which I passed along to a team of coat managers. Then I directed the guests down a path that led to a succession of bars serving hot toddies and hors d’oeuvres that large men in red and gold outfits were preparing over open-flame grills.

  I had just enough time between greetings to jot down the names of men who could possibly fit the Austin Ott criteria. When the last car pulled in, I had fifteen names.

  Natsumi worked the house. After running the food and drink gauntlet in the foyer, guests were funneled into the main hall of the house, the walls of which were lined with narrow platforms upon which the French-Canadian fire dancers rendered a variety of performances, from twirling poi and mounting giant stakes to exhaling great gusts of flame.

  The live band naturally played songs with a fire theme, though at a volume that permitted conversation, which frankly failed to invoke the proper spirit of Jimi Hendrix.

  I found Natsumi engaged with one of my candidates who was accompanied by a woman in a gold bodysuit so tightly fitted I first thought it was paint.

  Natsumi explained that the woman had ordered the outfit for a James Bond party where she played the unfortunate victim of Goldfinger’s revenge.

  “And your name is Auric,” she said to me. “So do you find this moment disturbing?”

  “I find it brilliant,” I said. “Do you agree?” I added to her companion.

  “I played Ernst Stavro Blofeld, so of course I find her brilliant,” he said. “Pretty cool party, Auric. You know how to make a splash.”

  “It was all Charlene,” I said, putting my arm around her woven silver tank top.

  This same conversation, only slightly varied, continued on through the cocktail phase, as we moved around through the crowd. Since most of the partygoers knew each other, the chatter was free and friendly. When I finally banged into Nitzy, she grabbed my arm and guided me around the room, making introductions and subtly taking credit for the event’s underlying concept. Her dress was a remarkably soft red velvet held at the middle by a gold chain, which she found a way to tell me was solid fourteen karat.

  “I think Aidan must have bought it off a gangbanger in Harlem. Just kidding.”

  I’d deleted some of the candidates from my list as I learned more about their lives, but not Aidan. He fit too many of the criteria. Not that it meant that much. It was all so highly speculative; though as Natsumi said, sometimes feeling is smarter than thinking.

  At one point, Nitzy dragged me over to a server with a tray of edible gold leaf canapés. Picking a sample off the tray was Elliot Brandt, the new owner of Florencia’s insurance agency.

  “Hello again,” I said, reminding him that I’d introduced myself at the door.

  “Very nice event, Mr. Grenouille,” he said. “Impressive even for this neck of the woods.”

  “Please call me Auric. We’re very flattered at the turnout. What compelled you to come, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A phone call from Nitzy, naturally. She who will not be denied.” Nitzy curtsied, a weird gesture even for her. “She was very complimentary of you and your wife. Who I think is divine, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I lived in Tokyo for a few years. Stationed there with Goldman. Japanese women, what can I say.”

  “What’s keeping you busy these days?” I asked.

  He went on to describe a number of investment and acquisition projects he was working on. All of a faceless industrial nature, all in the hundred million dollar range, and thus well beyond the insignificant purchase of an eight million dollar insurance agency.

  “So, do you have kids?” I asked.

  Brandt let off the usual parental glow.

  “Daughter Elise and son Damien. Elise is studying dance and picking up bit acting parts in the city. Damien’s a CFO. For an insurance agency. Can you get any more different?”

  “I have no children myself, but I hear that a lot from parents I know.”

  “Damndest thing.”

  “Is Damien in the city as well?”

  “Stamford. Little town is full of financial services. Probably why you’re in these parts, eh?”

  “Have to fish where the fish are.”

  “You’re in metals? Definitely not my thing,” he said, with a snort, a sneer and a belt of his scotch on the rocks.

  “I thought you were interested in the highest profit possible,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “What I do is your thing. Squared,” I said, shaking his hand again, then walking away. I moved toward a couple standing off to the side, looking around not at the fire performers nor the other partygoers, but at the house itself. I remembered his name, recorded on my list, but not hers.

  “So you’re Larry,” I said, then turned to his wife, “which means you’re . . .”

  “Jennifer. Easy to forget. Back when I was a kid it was a rare name. Now every broad in the city is named Jennifer.”

  “I appreciate that you came to the party,” I said.

  “Not our usual scene,” said Larry. “But we made an exception in your case.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Most of our friends are still in Queens,” said Jennifer, by way of explanation. “We moved here for the schools.”

  “So I’m especially glad you made the effort,” I said.

  “Maybe it was your name that caught my eye,” he said, with a twitch that involved most of the left side of his face.

  “You know other Auric Grenouilles?” I asked.

  “None, but that’s the point, right?”

  “I forgot your last name.”

  “Antonelli. I was born Anderson, but changed it to Antonelli for business reasons,” he said, with another twitch, which I began to understand stood in for a smile.

  “So what do you do, Larry?”

  “Diversified business interests. A little of this, a little of that. I get bored just doing one thing.”

  “I’m in metals,” I said. “I like the focus.”

  “So I keep hearing. Which
I got to admit, has me a little curious.”

  “Always ready to talk to any interested party,” I said.

  “Don’t you need to go powder your nose or some crap?” he asked Jennifer.

  She got the message and left, with no sign of opprobrium.

  Larry cocked his head at the crowd maneuvering their way from food station to food station, or clustered in little groups, juggling glasses and plates of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Yeah, we moved here for the schools. The school of bongo bucks,” he said with another twitch. “Them people out there? Some of the smartest in the world. More brainpower than the rest of the universe combined. And every megawatt is focused on one thing and one thing only. Making money. None of them could give a rat’s ass about the dopey woman’s museum. They’re here because of you, because Aidan Pico said an opportunity is riding into town, and nobody wants to be the chump sittin’ out the game on the sidelines.”

  “I appreciate your candor,” I said, “It’s refreshing. I have to attend to the party, but I’d be happy to discuss the possibilities anytime next week.”

  “Sure thing. But what’s the bottom line?” he said, squinting at me.

  I squinted back.

  “Everybody’s dazzled by gold and silver, because that’s what they know, what they buy their wives to hang around their necks. What they aren’t thinking about is the exotic stuff, like iridium, palladium and rhodium. They don’t know that these are essential ingredients in the only things people are actually buying these days—laptops, smartphones, tablets and games. And where does it come from? Places out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, in countries where people slice off your hands as easily as look at you. In the next decade we’ll be invading Africa just to insure that little Suzy can keep texting her idiot girlfriends.”

  Then I walked away, offering my hand to the next person I saw, a young toff in gold wide-wale corduroy pants and the most beautiful Italian shoes I’d ever seen. His date wore a red, floor-length, tube-like dress with a meager slit that severely limited her forward mobility. She took it in stride, sacrificing neither dignity nor equilibrium.