by Thomas Perry
“Anyway,” he went on, “if you’ve been paying attention, you get the idea. We capture the biggest sums by putting them into our sixty foundations. We use the giant charities to sop up the next chunk, and move down from there. We’ll have to pay attention to the size of each gift, so some charity won’t choke on it and reach for the phone to call a press conference. If we still have money left at the end of it, we can start mailing checks to symphony orchestras and museums and arts councils and so on.”
“I still have a question.”
Ziegler put down his sheet of paper and met her gaze. “I know. Why don’t I want to take any money myself. The same reasons you don’t. I don’t really need it enough to die for it.”
“What about the impractical reasons? You could have said no, and been in no danger.”
He smiled sadly. “Bernie Lupus. I wasn’t exaggerating about what he must have been like. With a mind like that, he could have done anything. He could have been a great scientist or something. It’s one of the biggest wastes I ever heard of. It’s as if Einstein spent his whole life disconnecting smoke detectors in airplanes so he could have a cigarette, or rigging pay phones to get free calls. I guess I see this as a chance to change Bernie the Elephant’s life after the fact. If I had listened to your pitch and said no, then Bernie Lupus was just one more dead guy who made the Mafia richer. If I said yes, then it’s a whole different story. Everything Bernie did for fifty years amounts to suckering the worst people in the country into doing good.”
“And you?”
“Me?” Ziegler smiled. “Maybe if I run into him in hell, he’ll tell me how he did it.”
Jane was silent for a moment, then decided. “You’ll get to meet him tonight.”
Ziegler’s mouth dropped open. “Is he alive?” asked Ziegler. “Or am I going to be dead?”
“The first,” said Jane. “Maybe the second too. We’ll do our best to avoid that, though. Are you ready to travel?”
14
There were still lights visible behind the upstairs window blinds when Jane drove around the last curve. She stopped the car along the road and walked the rest of the way in the darkness, then stepped into the pool of light on the porch and rang the doorbell. She listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and when she heard them they were wrong: too light, too quick for Bernie. Jane slipped to the side of the house and waited. The door swung open, and out on the porch stepped Rita Shelford.
Jane hurried to the porch, dragged Rita inside, closed the door, and bolted it. She leaned against the door and stared at Rita in silence.
Rita struggled to hold her eyes on Jane’s, then tried to avert them, but found that she could not. She took a breath and said, “I … decided … ”
Jane interrupted. “You decided. I guess that’s all anyone has to hear. I showed you your best chance to survive, and that’s all I could do. You never pretended that it was what you wanted, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.”
“I’m sorry,” Rita said firmly, “but—”
“No, you’re not,” Jane said quietly. “Not yet, anyway. But things are in motion now, and I can’t stop to drag you back across two states and make you stay there. I hope that at the end of this, you still think you made the right choice. Either way, you’re in.”
Rita stepped forward and grasped Jane’s hands. “Thank you. I’ll help you, honest. I’ll—”
“Where is it?” Jane interrupted.
“Where’s what?”
“The gun.”
Rita gaped at her, but said nothing.
“I plan to be here after the lights are out, and I don’t feel like tripping over a shotgun. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
Rita opened the small broom cupboard behind her. Between the mop and the broom was a short-barreled Winchester Defender. She started to close the door again, but Jane stepped past her and held it open. She bent down to the trigger guard of the shotgun and pushed on the safety so the red line went in. “Is there a shell in the chamber? I didn’t hear you pump it.”
Rita said, “I don’t know. I never saw one close up before. Bernie made me take him to garage sales until he found one.”
She sighed. He had done the smart thing, of course. Being smart was what had gotten him into trouble and kept him there.
She stepped back toward the door and turned the dead bolt. “I’m going out to bring in a guest, so be on your best behavior, whatever that is.”
Rita’s face was a mask of fright. “A guest? Oh, God. Look at me.” She gestured in despair at her tank top, shorts, and bare feet. She began to run her fingers through her recently dyed brown hair to straighten it. “What kind of guest? Who?”
Jane said, “You look fine. Your hair looks great. I still like that color, by the way. His name is Henry Ziegler. He already knows about Bernie.”
“What’s he doing here?” she asked suspiciously.
“We can’t get rid of ten billion dollars by sitting here writing thousand-dollar checks. We could do it until our arms dropped off, and we’d attract attention in time to die with nearly all of it still in the accounts. We need help, and he’s a specialist.”
“I just wish you could have … like, warned me.”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“Oh … yeah,” said Rita.
Jane slipped out past her, then returned a minute later with Henry Ziegler. Jane watched the man and the girl assess each other from a distance of eight feet, like two strange dogs. After three seconds, the short, dapper Ziegler suddenly grinned, stepped up to Rita, gave her hand a quick shake, and said, “I’m Henry.”
“Rita,” said the girl, looking at his hand instead of his face.
“Very good,” said Ziegler. He looked around brightly. “Nice place. I was afraid it would be more of a hideout, and less of a house.” As he walked around the kitchen, Rita was two steps behind him, watching him suspiciously. But Jane could see that Ziegler was counting electrical outlets. He seemed to be pleased. He turned to Rita. “Can you type?”
Rita gaped at him, dumbfounded.
Jane stepped closer and volunteered, “I can.”
Rita seemed to recover from a reverie. “I can type.” She addressed Jane. “I took a computer class in school.”
“Excellent,” said Ziegler. He turned to Jane. “We’ll need to get to a computer store first thing in the morning.” He began to pace. “We’ll need two PCs, two laser printers. A fax machine, some supplies. High-quality paper to print our own letterheads, envelopes, a hell of a lot of stamps. I’ll write everything down tonight.” He stopped and looked at Jane. “When do I get to meet Bernie?”
“I guess it’s now,” said Jane. “Bernie?”
The old man stepped into the doorway from the dining room. “Yeah, it’s me. It’s hard to sneak around much when you’re hard of hearing. Who are you?”
“This is Henry Ziegler,” said Jane. “I asked him to help us move the money.”
Henry Ziegler stepped forward and held out his hand. Bernie gave it a perfunctory shake and dropped it. He spoke to Jane. “Are you keeping us safe, or just collecting more of us to kill?”
Rita said, “She’s doing the right thing, Bernie. If you never heard of him, it’s got to be the best thing about him. And if he’s done anything like this once, it’s one more time than we have.”
Jane noticed Bernie’s expression and decided it must be a mirror of her own.
Bernie shrugged. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He said to Ziegler, “You know what happens if you screw it up?”
“There’s not much point in worrying about it,” Ziegler answered. “If we didn’t all think it could be done, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”
“I would, but you could look at it that way if you want,” Bernie said. “I’m just putting everything up front.” He gestured toward Jane. “A woman like that comes to talk to you, and pretty soon you think you’re better than you are, and the crocodiles have lost all their teeth. I can te
ll you they haven’t.”
“I’m just hoping we can keep them from waking up until after we’ve drained the swamp.”
“Sleep,” said Bernie. “That’s a good idea. I’ll see you in the morning.” He walked out of the kitchen, and Jane heard his footsteps going slowly and deliberately up the staircase.
“Take me to the Eldorado Hotel on West San Francisco Street,” said Ziegler. “I’ve got to do some faxes and E-mail tonight.”
A few minutes later, Jane brought Ziegler to the lighted front of the big hotel and cut the engine. “You don’t have to stop,” he said. “They’re expecting me. Can you pick me up at seven?”
“I’ll be here,” said Jane. As he took his leather suitcase from the back of the car, Jane added, “See if you can lose the fancy clothes. You’re not in New York.”
At seven the next morning he was standing outside with a cup of coffee in one hand and an attaché case in the other. He got into the car beside her. “Drive to Albuquerque. We’ll do our shopping now.”
Jane looked at him, then pulled out into the street. He appeared exactly the way she had hoped he would, like a man who was used to wearing tailored suits but had come to New Mexico on a vacation. The jeans and comfortable khaki shirt looked as new as they were. She had known he had no choice but to buy everything in the hotel shop, and the effect was perfect. He looked like a man who might walk into a store and buy a lot of computer gear on impulse.
As they approached the outskirts of Albuquerque, she said, “Do we know where we’re going?”
Ziegler handed her a list of stores and addresses. “I went through the Albuquerque Yellow Pages last night, so we can make this quick.” Jane drove from store to store, and watched Ziegler move up and down the aisles with another of his lists. He bought computers, modems, printers, reams of business stationery that was thick and textured, boxes of envelopes: so many purchases that he and Jane had trouble fitting them in the trunk of the car and had to pile them in the back seat. When the car was full, Jane stopped at a Dumpster behind an office building that had a huge FOR LEASE sign. She said, “We’ve got to make some space.” They took the computer equipment out of the enormous boxes and styrofoam padding and threw the packaging away to make more room.
They drove back to Santa Fe at one, and Ziegler went to work converting the dining room of the house to an office. He appeared to have thought of everything. He had included surge suppressors on extension cords that he ran into electrical outlets in the living room and kitchen. As he worked, he talked to Jane. “We’re going to have things on the hard disks while we work, and that’s a risk. If anything happens, don’t think you can smash the computer with a hammer and that’s going to do it. A computer is just a plastic box. You have to take the disk out and destroy it—put it in a fire, or break it in pieces. There are people who make a living retrieving data from disks that supposedly got erased. See? Undo these screws and slip it out with the drive.”
In late afternoon, he plugged his laptop computer into one of the printers and began to print out the stored information he had received from all over the country while he was in the hotels in Beverly Hills and Santa Fe. An hour later he was ready. He said, “Bring in the others.”
When Jane brought Bernie and Rita into the dining room, Bernie looked at Ziegler with distaste. “Computers. I hate computers.”
Ziegler was imperturbable. “That’s okay, Bernie. They’re for these two.” He handed Rita a long list of addresses. “You start out by typing in this list of names and addresses so they fit the grid on your screen. When you’re done, call me and I’ll show you how to print it out on labels.” He grasped Jane’s arm and led her to the other computer. “You start by writing a dozen form letters. You know what we’re after. You address it to the blank charity, blank street, blank city. The blank foundation is giving them blank dollars to continue their fine work. Or Mr. blank is. His check is enclosed. Or Mr. blank died, and left it to the charity. Keep all of them vague and simple, so we can fill in names and use each one fifty times.” Finally, he turned to Bernie. “You and I will get started on writing down where all this money is.”
Bernie smirked. “She’s ahead of you. She’s had me working on it for a few days.” He walked to the sideboard near the head of the dining table and took out a spiral notebook. He handed it to Ziegler. “That’s a start.”
Jane stood at Ziegler’s elbow and watched him leaf through the pages. They were all covered with handwritten names, account numbers, names of banks and brokers, even the dates when Bernie had made the investments. Jane saw that the first fifteen pages were all in the 1940s. Ziegler said quietly, “I don’t think I ever really believed this. I had heard about it, but it didn’t seem possible.” When he reached the end, he went back to the beginning and started through the notebook again. He said, “How much more to go?”
Bernie answered, “I can’t say. That’s the Langusto family.”
“That’s how you remembered it—by family?”
“Of course it is,” said Bernie. “You think I could put it all together in a jumble up here and have them tell me how much of it was theirs? They were thieves, for Christ’s sake.”
Ziegler finished his second perusal, set the book on the table, and tapped some keys on his laptop computer, then glanced up at Jane. “Over two billion,” he said.
She understood. It was far more than she had expected, more than Bernie had estimated. “I guess we should get started,” she said. She sat at the computer and began to type.
“I’m working on the Augustinos now,” Bernie announced.
“That’s great, Bernie,” said Jane. “It’s a terrific start. Let us know when you have it.” She struggled against a growing sense of futility. Across the table from her, Rita began with childlike concentration, slowly clicking away at the keys, muttering “Shit” every few seconds, then going back and correcting a single character. After ten minutes of it, Jane walked around the table and looked over Rita’s shoulder.
She said gently, “Don’t worry about mistakes. Make them and fix them as well as you can. No matter how bad we are at this, we’re not going to get fired and replaced.”
Rita stared at her mournfully, then returned to her work. After an hour, Jane noticed that the clicking of her keyboard sounded more even, and the expletives became rarer. Jane, Ziegler, and Rita worked at the computers for the next five hours, while Bernie sat in a chair in the living room writing in his next notebook. Now and then, one of them would stand up to walk around, or just stretch and sit down again. The talk was only occasional, low, and addressed to one person. At nine, Jane announced, “We’re going to need dinner. I’ll see about making something.”
Ziegler said, “No. Just write down what you like to eat. I’ll call in an order at the restaurant in the hotel and have them deliver it to my suite. We all need a break, and I can send some faxes from there. It’s safer.”
Jane said, “I’m not taking these two into a hotel. It’s too dangerous for them.”
Ziegler took in a breath to argue, but Bernie said, “Listen to her, kid. You’re a specialist. I’m a specialist. So is she.”
“She’s also our best typist,” said Ziegler. “I’ll go order the food and send my messages while they’re getting it ready. You can all keep at it until I come back.” He typed a command and the printer beside him began to slowly extrude printed sheets as he walked toward the door.
Ziegler returned an hour and a half later carrying a pair of shopping bags filled with boxes, and unpacked them in the kitchen. “I didn’t know who liked what, so I bought a bit of everything: steak, lobster, fish, chicken, pasta, red and white wine.”
Rita came out to look at the containers as Ziegler unpacked them. She seemed uncomfortable. “I used to see food like this at the hotel,” she said to nobody in particular.
Jane touched her arm. “Enjoy it. But if you’re not used to things like lobster drowned in butter, you might want to go easy on it the first time.”
Bernie said, “She means don’t eat anything bigger than your head.”
Jane picked up a plate and moved to the kitchen table with the others, then sat next to Henry Ziegler. “How are we doing?”
“Do you have that last batch of names I gave you filled in on the form letters?”
“They’re printed, stuffed in envelopes, and stamped,” she said.
“Then we should have a billion dollars ready to mail by this time tomorrow.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Bernie.
“What?”
“Checks,” said Bernie. “We don’t have checks.”
Ziegler smiled. “I’ll have some ready by the time you go to bed, and the rest in the morning. I have a format in my computer for checks. I type in the account numbers and addresses and names, and they come off the printer. A lot of companies do it. If you use the right paper, it looks as good as any other check, and we have the right paper. I’m afraid you’ll have to sign them, though. They’ll compare your signature with the samples you signed when you put the money in.”
“If I don’t get writer’s cramp from putting all this crap on paper.”
“If you want to dictate it, we’ll take it down for you,” said Jane.
“I’ll let you know if I have a problem,” said Bernie. “I finished the Augustinos a while ago. I started on the Molinaris, the sons of bitches.”
Jane rinsed her plate in the sink, withdrew into the dining room, and went back to work alone. After a time the others, one by one, returned to their places, but Jane sank deeper into her own thoughts.
She remembered a day a couple of years in the past. She had managed to get Mary Perkins out of the farmhouse where she had been held, and she was running with her. She had needed to get the injured woman indoors and out of sight for a few days while she regained enough of her strength to move on. Jane had stopped in Oklahoma on the single patch of old reservation that remained and knocked on the door of the trailer where Martha McCutcheon lived. Martha was a clan mother, and Jane had met her once.