A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  CHAPTER 27

  I asked the cabbie if he could turn off the air conditioning and let me open the window. I’d barely left the canned air of the plane in from JFK, and keenly desired the embrace of hot, dense Caribbean air.

  “Fine for me,” he said. “I was born breathin’ it.”

  The cabbie, François-Marie, had also driven a cab in Manhattan for ten years before returning to his hometown of Port-au-Prince, so he represented a welcomed point of continuity. The cab was a model car I didn’t recognize, and he explained its provenance, beginning in France and arriving in Haiti after traveling through Trinidad and Guadeloupe, where it was turned into commercial transport.

  Traffic was tight, but moving steadily. Lanes were less than precisely honored, though the greatest distractions were the hand-painted phantasmagoria that covered many of the vehicles, including impromptu buses. I was reminded of Ken Kesey by way of Vincent van Gogh.

  Foot traffic was denser still, though it lessened as we rose and fell over the hills and through narrow streets lined with high concrete walls, many of which bore commentary in a French that resisted translation.

  “Not all French,” said François-Marie, when I asked him what the writing meant. “Creole and warnings by NGOs after the earthquake of dangerous buildings. Not that anyone pays any attention.”

  The Caribbean penchant for brilliant color was also on display at a market we passed, where the blast of the sun was blocked by umbrellas in every vivid hue. The fruits and vegetables in overflowing bins did their part as well, as did the shoppers and vendors’ T-shirts and occasional poster ad or giant billboard looming over the scene.

  The color dimmed as we moved into the outer parts of the city, and the walls of laid-up cement block were less artistically festooned. The sidewalks, alleys and curbsides were still amply filled with people on their daily missions of survival. Behind the walls I began to see an occasional cluster of private villas, or a hillside covered in crisp-looking homes of identical composition, painted into a sun-bleached rainbow. Though not long after, we’d passed a residential warren formed from scavenged debris, corrugated metal and blue tarps.

  Everywhere the rubble of the big earthquake lay strewn across open areas and in piles of masonry and twisted rebar. François-Marie, assuming I was too diplomatic to note it myself, said, “You don’t want to think what’s under there.”

  We followed a pickup carrying several men in the bed and clinging to the tailgate through the last of the urban jumble and into the countryside. The land rolled to either side, covered in grey-green Caribbean scrub interrupted occasionally by a clump of masonry buildings fully intact, or in various stages of collapse, giving witness to the capricious nature of earthquake destruction.

  François-Marie reached back for my smartphone GPS, as he had several times during the trip.

  “Tell me again where you going?” he said.

  “Don’t know how to pronounce it. I just have the latitude and longitude.”

  THESE WERE written on a tattered piece of paper handed to me by an elderly Japanese woman who forked it over after I answered a series of questions that only a person deeply intimate with her daughter, Natsumi, could answer.

  We were in a small garden temple down a narrow alley off a major thoroughfare in Kyoto, shielded by the koi pool and miniature foliage from the off-world neon lunacy just a half block away.

  “Glad you know what it means,” the old woman told me. “Just a bunch of gibberish to me.”

  “It’s a waypoint,” I said. “A dot on the globe.”

  “Don’t lose it,” she said. “It’s the only copy I have. She sent it to me inside a Chinese puzzle box. She loved those things. When I got it in the mail, I figured it was some weird thing from her. Took a hell of a long time to get it open.”

  I thanked her and tried to make polite small talk, but she waved me off.

  “Look, when you see her, tell her to give me a call. We do have phones over here in Japan. I take it she’s been keeping busy,” she added.

  I said she’d been thoroughly occupied, though I wasn’t up to date.

  “We have some catching up to do,” I said.

  “Well, me too. The last I heard she’d met some geek with a limp and a bald head. That must be you. Try to look after her, will you? I love her, but she’s a pig-headed one.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  FRANÇOIS-MARIE handed back the GPS, which I’d set on a chartplotter program that placed the position of our vehicle and the waypoint on the same map. According to the red and blue dots, we were closing in fast.

  It was at the end of a long unpaved drive. The dust kicked up by the cab followed us to where we stopped at a sign that read in French, English and Japanese: “Free Health and Well-Being Center. Japanese-Haitian Earthquake Relief and Goodwill Foundation. All Welcome.”

  Farther on, we came to a plain, white-washed building with the same words in larger, friendlier type painted above the big double front doors. Several cars and small panel trucks were parked to either side and people in various states of health and well-being sat at park benches and under the building’s wide eaves.

  I asked François-Marie to wait and I went inside. There was a wide hallway lined with benches and blocked off by a table covered with white cotton at which sat two bright-eyed young men, one Japanese and one Haitian. I said hello in their respective languages, and held up a photo of Natsumi on my smartphone.

  “She’s with her afternoon group,” said the Japanese guy, calling her by an unfamiliar name in barely inflected English. “You can wait here. Will only be about ten minutes.”

  I waited and watched them field a steady stream of other inquiries, performing the waiting room triage with calm and dignity. Eventually, the Japanese guy checked the time on his own phone, and left. He came back a few minutes later with Natsumi, wearing her Caribbean tan and native floral garb. Her face sparkled and she skipped up to me and jumped into my arms.

  “What did you think of my mother?” she asked.

  “Nonstandard.”

  “She’s a nut.”

  “Interesting place,” I said, looking around the foyer.

  “It’s full of French-speaking Japanese mental health professionals. Feels good to finally blend in. Those conversations at the gym with Okayo actually got to me. Most of the time I’m so involved with these people I forget everything. Except for missing you. Horribly.”

  “I missed you, too. When do you get off?”

  She gave me a time she could meet me at her house about a mile away. She gave me the key and told me what to pick up on the way over. While we talked she reset the smartphone GPS, placing the red dot in the middle of her neighborhood.

  So I just had to hand the phone to François-Marie again, and he got me there via the local outdoor market. We shook hands, I overtipped and we wished each other great future success.

  “Text me when you’re ready to go back to the airport,” he said, handing me his business card. “Unless you’re moving in. In which case, invite me over to dinner. We can talk about the Yankees.”

  Natsumi arrived when promised in a Toyota crossover SUV. I had the food and drinks she prescribed waiting on a tray in her small walled garden behind the house. It was green and well tended, with tiny stone replicas of Shinto temples and seating mats on raked gravel. All it needed was a koi pond.

  “No reliably clean water,” she explained.

  She told me how she left the room in Zurich and attached herself to a group of Japanese tourists, all of whom were too polite to object, even though it was a major social offense. She stayed with them until they entered the underground shopping mall, which had a convenient entrance to the train station. From there she hopped from Northern Italy, through Croatia, then by boat to Malta, where she joined another group of Japanese travelers, these college kids who enjoyed having the older, English-speaking countrywoman along for the ride.

  “I am now conversant in current Asian pop music trends and p
references,” she said.

  She hung with them all the way to Marseille, where she risked passport exposure to fly to DeGaulle, then Port-au-Prince.

  “As I told you, Okayo moved me with stories about the Japanese-Haitian Relief Fund,” she said. “It was how I finally got to her, invoking her greatest passion. Not surprisingly, the Japanese know a thing or two about earthquakes. When we had our own big one, Haiti lost a lot of the relief workers that were here. There were plenty of spots open, even for psychologists to treat PTSD.”

  “Hypervigilance,” I said.

  “I had been reading up on the subject.”

  Another lucky happenstance came a few months after settling in, when an unexpected gush of fresh funding hit the Japanese-Haitian Relief Fund ledgers.

  “We manage the country’s People Project microfinancing program. Suddenly each of our clients got a one-time grant for twice what they’d originally borrowed. We get a cut on every loan that goes through, same with the grants. We all got a special bonus.”

  “Remarkable,” I said, smiling.

  “I should have known it was you.”

  “Not directly.”

  “You’re going to explain.”

  “After I make another pot of tea.”

  “YOU KNOW the old joke about the guy who asked a woman if she’d sleep with a man for a million dollars,” I said, when we were comfortably back on the seating mats. “The woman thinks about it for a moment, then says she would. So the guy asks if she’d sleep with him for a dollar. The woman, offended, says, ‘What do you think I am, a whore?’ And the guy says, ‘We’ve already established that. Now we’re merely haggling over the price.’ ”

  “So every man has his price?” she asked.

  “Not every man. Though some do. And some women.”

  “Like a billion dollars?”

  “The Congress, and subsequently the State Department, earmarked the money that flowed through Fontaine into The People Project for their microfinancing program. Say what you will about the federal government, if your contract calls for you to buy popsicles, you can buy them for ten dollars a pop, but you better not spend a dime on ice cream cones.”

  “Albalita thought there were better places to spend some of that money.”

  “Chuck Andalusky convinced her that was true. Haiti, for example, his darling wife’s all-consuming obsession.”

  “They felt the ends justified the means?” she asked.

  “Sure. Even if the ends included a major enhancement of their personal bank accounts. Regular people get desensitized to big numbers hearing about them in the media. What if it’s flowing by, right under your nose, day in and day out. You know that somewhere downstream, waste and corruption are busy diverting much of what you’ve been stewarding with the utmost care and responsibility. You might think, ‘Why can’t I have some, too? Don’t I deserve it more, for all I’ve done for humanity?’ ”

  “You’ve got motive, what about means?”

  “That’s where Joselito comes in. Knowing the evil little weasel like I do, I’m sure he brought the idea to Albalita in the first place. He made it look easy, and it was, sort of. If you were expert enough in financial manipulation, accounting hijinks and digital security. And thought you were way too smart to ever get caught.”

  “But he did.”

  “Sure, by me, for aiding and abetting international terrorism. Not the massive embezzlement scheme.”

  “So when Joselito got busted he had a little leverage to use with the FBI,” said Natsumi.

  “Oh, yeah. He’d always been deep into their international division, as an informer, consultant, general fixer and Latin lover to one of their embassy liaisons, who worked directly for Stephen Holt. It takes a rat to know a rat. Joselito tells him the whole story and shows him the proof. Holt confronts Andalusky and Albalita, but instead of dragging them down the perp walk, he says, ‘It’s time to play Let’s Make a Deal.’ ”

  “But there was one little catch.”

  “The money suddenly goes missing,” I said. “According to Joselito, stolen by the same crafty bastard who nailed him in the first place. A shadowy figure, and the only man in the world capable of outwitting the master money manipulator. His nemesis.”

  “El Timador. The Trickster. Aka, too many names to list.”

  “But Joselito convinces the other conspirators that only he had the chops to get it back,” I said. “He just needed a safe haven, a cover story and a computer. And a little help from Holt’s ties within the FBI.”

  “But El Timador didn’t make it easy for them,” she said.

  “No he didn’t. Joselito looked a little strained when I saw him in Greenwich. I think he was running out of time.”

  “Because you hadn’t actually stolen the money, right darling?”

  “Would you rather I had?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “It would have been hard, since I knew nothing about it. But I was the perfect fall guy for Joselito. He truly hated me, and wanted revenge, but better yet, I fit the profile as a decent hacker and fulltime outlaw. When asked by Holt, our friend Shelly Gross validated that, and essentially gave up our entire story.”

  “Was he in on the plot?”

  “Shelly thought it was a legitimate operation. Holt was the only one he talked to. Shelly can be an asshole, but he’s an honest asshole.”

  Natsumi looked like she wanted to debate that a little, but instead asked, “What about Jersey?”

  “When Holt learned we’d extorted Andalusky’s name out of Ian MacPhail, alarms went off. He had to bring Jersey into the game, but still keep a lid on his ulterior motives. But like Shelly, Jersey’s a company man, so he bought the story.”

  “You’re sure about that,” she said.

  “You can ask him yourself. We’re meeting him for dinner on Detour back in Saint Thomas as soon as you can get away.”

  “I can get away whenever I want.”

  I took out François-Marie’s card and gave him a call.

  THEY ARRIVED by pontoon boat, a big red affair about the size of the one the mercenaries used to carry us away. Jersey worked the engines while Desiree stumbled from stem to stern tossing us lines to secure the boat raft-style to Detour.

  They both looked as brown, rangy and disheveled as they had when we first met on Saint John’s. Natsumi took drink orders while I convinced Omni to stop barking.

  It wasn’t till everyone was settled in the cockpit that Natsumi asked Jersey the obvious.

  “So you’re not arresting us?”

  Jersey beamed at her.

  “No ma’am. Nobody’s arresting you. You’re both free and clear.”

  Except for a little wetness in the eyes, she took it calmly.

  “That’s nice to know,” she said, then looked at me. “This is the news you were referring to?”

  “It was only confirmed a few hours ago,” said Jersey, saving me. “Arthur didn’t know for sure.”

  I told her about visiting Stephen Holt in his Maryland home. How I’d taken him at gunpoint to a hotel room where Jersey had agreed to meet after I’d laid out the whole embezzlement story and all the players involved, supported by evidence that Strider had neatly arranged into a step-by-step narrative, complete with charts, graphs and screenshots of accounting ledgers.

  Jersey was a bit startled to see his boss sitting on the hotel bed, but he let me play the recording I’d made of our conversation in the car on the way over, where Holt told me he’d make sure I’d live in exile, unmolested and fabulously wealthy, for the rest of my life.

  Not good enough, I’d told him.

  It wasn’t an easy process, but eventually the internal investigators at the FBI were convinced by Strider’s overwhelming evidence to charge Holt with a long list of offenses and issue a warrant for Albalita, who disappeared before they had a chance to pluck her out of Switzerland.

  “We also lost track of Joselito,” said Jersey. “Holt accused him of killing Andalusky, pretty c
onvincingly, since Holt’s alibi on that one is airtight. We assume he’s in Latin America somewhere.”

  Desiree, who’d mostly been an attentive audience till then, suddenly had a question.

  “What happened to the billion dollars?”

  Jersey insisted on giving the answer.

  “Before bringing me Holt, Arthur made a deal with the bureau to exchange the money stolen from The People Project for blanket immunity. Implicit in all this was the threat of wicked bad publicity, which everyone from the State Department on down was very eager to avoid.”

  “How big a blanket?” Natsumi asked.

  “As big as we need,” I said. “Shelly brokered the deal.”

  “So you got to him after all,” Natsumi asked.

  “No. Evelyn did.”

  At that point, Natsumi and Desiree broke free and went down to the galley to make dinner. Jersey and I played with Omni and talked about sailboats and the relative merits of sloops over cutters when sailing into the wind. We ate as darkness shrank the surrounding sea and opened up the sky above to the infinite stars. Jersey and Desiree agreed to stay onboard for the night, so we were all there when Jersey said there was a little more of the story left to tell. Natsumi looked concerned until he laughed and patted her knee.

  “Don’t worry, Arthur’s got his deal,” he said, “and the bureau’s got its renegade Holt. But then somebody realized it was time for the State Department to get its money. And son of a bitch, wouldn’t you know, it disappeared again. Poof.”

  “Arthur?” said Natsumi.

  Jersey started to explain, but then turned it back over to me.

  “Go ahead, Arthur. You know this better than I do.”

  I reminded them of some of the background before embarking on new territory.

  “The concept behind The People Project’s microfinancing program was to take a big hunk of money and distribute it in small amounts to thousands of people all over the world. When Albalita brought Joselito in as a consultant, he immediately saw an opportunity. The reason there isn’t a lot more thievery of government funds in programs like this are the auditors. Even if everyone’s crooked, including the fiduciary—which in this case he was—you still have the auditors checking over the books in meticulous detail.”