Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  “More would be better, but the right references and the right introduction should convince him there’s a steady supply.”

  “And Bessemer is the guy to introduce you?”

  “He’s the best bet.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Of course not. But he’s known Prager for years, he’s been referring clients to him, one way or another, for a while, and he’s approachable. He’s the best bet.”

  “It’s your call,” Boyce says, and tees up his ball at the tips. “And what about the woman—Chun?”

  “Valerie has a good feeling about her.”

  “Good feeling? I like to base my investments on a little more than that.”

  “If we want to add six months to the timetable, then we can look elsewhere. If not, then Chun’s our girl.”

  Boyce shakes his head. “Let’s hope it’s a great feeling,” he says, and another gunshot echoes across the lake. The ball hits the fringe and bounces onto the green. Boyce nods slowly as it rolls, then he turns to Carr and leans his hip against his driver, as if it were a cane.

  “So Valerie’s doing all right?” he asks.

  “She’s doing fine.”

  “And Mike and Bobby, and the kid?”

  “Dennis. They’re fine too.”

  “Must be an adjustment for them, not having Deke there. A different rhythm for them—a different style.”

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve been around the block together.”

  “But you’re not part of the crew anymore. You’re the boss now. Management.”

  Carr pinches the bridge of his nose and looks at Mr. Boyce, whose eyes are like black stones. “It’s all good.”

  Boyce taps the toe of his golf shoe with his driver. “Deke ran a tight ship—very firm, very hands-on. He wasn’t worried about being liked—”

  “He didn’t have to worry—everybody liked him.”

  “Regardless, that wasn’t his focus. His focus was on having his orders followed. He was a good soldier that way—a good platoon leader. It’s not an easy job, and not everyone’s built for it. Some people need to be liked; some people get lazy or stupid.”

  “Which one of those do you think is my problem?” Carr says.

  The wind subsides for a moment, and the smells of grass and loam and trapped heat rise up, as if the ground has opened. Mr. Boyce straightens, and Carr takes a step back. “You’ll know when I think you have a problem,” he says, and Carr can feel the bass rumble in his chest. Boyce looks at him for a while, sighs, and drops his club into his golf bag.

  “You have anything for me?” Carr asks.

  Boyce points at Tina, who is already headed for the tee with something tucked under her arm. “She’ll fix you up,” Boyce says, and he turns toward the green.

  Carr and Tina sit on a bench off the cart path, in the heavy shade of an oak. The air is cool here, and Tina’s legs shine white in the shadows.

  “The new stuff’s at the last tab,” she says, and she opens the latest British Vogue while Carr opens the latest edition of Curtis Prager’s dossier.

  Carr remembers the first time he read it, six months back, in a hotel bar in Panama City, and remembers Declan’s whiskey-furred voice as he slid it across the table. Last job of work we’ll need to do, boyo. It’s the feckin’ sweepstakes. The lined red face split in a grin. Carr has read and reread it countless times since then—all but memorized it—but still he looks at every page.

  A picture comes first, Curtis Prager years ago, emerging from the back of a black car. He is lithe, tanned, and shiny, his features finely sculpted, his hair like blond lacquer on his neat head, his shoulders square. An Apollo of finance, Carr thinks—a gilded man for a gilded age. All that’s missing is a laurel wreath.

  After the photo are the puff pieces about him that appeared in financial trade rags in the United States and Europe with great regularity before the crash. In tone they run a narrow gamut from fawning to sycophantic, and they all tell the same tale: of the tow-headed prodigy, home-schooled in Cincinnati until age sixteen, then off to Princeton, Harvard B-school, and Wall Street after that. By age twenty-five, he was the youngest managing director in the history of Melton-Peck; by twenty-eight he was the head of all trading there; and by thirty he was out the door—off to seek his fortune as a hedge fund manager, with a very large fortune in bonus money already in hand, and a flock of investors following behind him, all eager to pay for the privilege of having the wunderkind manage their money.

  And so the birth of Tirol Capital, which from the first charged staggering fees, made a mania of secrecy, and cultivated an air of exclusivity to rival any Upper East Side co-op or private school. The formula worked well for Prager and, along with the outsize returns he reported year after year, helped make Tirol one of the fastest growing funds of the new century.

  Besides the money, and the truckloads by which it arrived at Tirol’s Greenwich, Connecticut, doorstep, the articles discuss Prager’s many good works. There are lists of scholarship funds, endowed chairs, research laboratories, and hospital pavilions that bear his name, and pictures of Prager and the missus—tall, blond, disdainful—at an endless series of charity events. Black ties, white ties, polo shirts and sunglasses—the dress code varies, but never the smiles, which are tight and entitled. Smiles of any sort are in short supply in the next set of clippings—the ones from the trials.

  There were two of them, the first just before the markets collapsed, the second just afterward, and despite the torch-and-pitchfork temper of those times, both ended in hung juries. The press attributed this to the complexity of the government’s case against Prager—the difficulty of making money-laundering and conspiracy charges stick, the arcane financial instruments involved—though some in the U.S. Attorney’s office grumbled darkly, and not for attribution, about jury tampering.

  The feds were about to have a third go when their only witness, a former Tirol compliance officer named Munce, drove his Lexus off a dark road in Litchfield County, and through the frozen skin of the Housatonic River. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and there was ice on the roadway, but still the feds had both Munce and his car stripped down to their frames. The autopsies found nothing, though, and the most they could do to Prager were a dozen stiff fines for a dozen obscure record-keeping violations.

  But the mere fact of his indictment, along with the implosion of the markets, had already dealt much worse punishment to Prager and his firm. Tirol was losing investors at a slow bleed before the first trial began, and like a broken hydrant afterward, and by the time the feds imposed their fines, the firm was down to a measly billion or so in assets under management, and a handful of clients in Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

  News coverage of Curtis Prager dropped off sharply four years back, after the fines—a mention in the Greenwich Time of the sale of his North Street estate, another in the New York Post of his divorce and exodus to the Cayman Islands. After which the press had bigger, more blatant frauds to cover, and the entries in the dossier switch from press clippings to what Carr recognized on first reading as intelligence reports.

  “Where does Boyce get this stuff?” he’d asked Declan at the time.

  Declan had shrugged and, typically, answered a different question. “He likes to keep an eye on the competition.” Carr stopped asking about what other lines of business Mr. Boyce was in, though he’s never stopped wondering.

  About Curtis Prager’s business, the reports leave little doubt. With a labored dispassion typical to the genre, and with no mention of sources or methods, they describe how Prager, having relocated to the Caymans, closed down what was left of Tirol Capital and established Isla Privada Holdings, a firm whose ostensible business is the acquisition, consolidation, and management of small banks and trust companies in the United States, but whose actual purpose is to deliver financial services to organized criminals.

  A comprehensive list of services too, according to the reports, especi
ally for a relative newcomer to the field: bulk cash processing, foreign exchange, electronic funds transfer, access to a network of overseas correspondent banks, provision of fully documented shell corporations, asset management, even tax consultation—everything a crime syndicate might require to launder large sums of money, move them around the world, invest them, and bring them home clean.

  The reports say that Prager is still building his business, and that his client base is still small—a Mexican drug cartel, a Colombian cocaine syndicate, a smuggling ring out of Panama, and a Salvadoran private army that expanded from death-squad work into regional arms supply. But he has grander things in mind, and his marketing efforts have recently spread beyond the Caribbean and Latin America to Central Europe and Asia. The list of Prager’s clients stopped Carr in his tracks the first time he read it. He peered across the table through the smoke from Declan’s Cohiba.

  “We know some of these guys,” Carr said. “We hit them twice, they’re going to take it personally.”

  “It’s not them we’re hitting, boyo, it’s their banker. Deposit insurance is his problem.”

  “You’re thinking about a cash shipment?”

  Declan shook his head. “Keep reading.”

  The lightbulb went on two paragraphs down, in the midst of a dry discussion of the common back office used by the banks that Isla Privada owns. The centralized processing system gives Curtis Prager ready access to all of the accounts in all of the banks in Isla Privada’s portfolio, and—with the help of an obedient, well-paid, and meticulously incurious operations and accounting staff—makes it a simple matter to commingle licit and illicit cash and hide dubious funds transfers in a forest of legitimate ones.

  Carr had looked up at Declan, who was grinning like a shot fox. “That back-office system of his is a fecking magic lamp,” Declan said. “The great Prager rubs away, wishing for some clean money, it spews a bit of smoke, and poof—out pops a wire transfer! Any given time, he can move a hundred million at least with that lamp, boyo. I say we do a bit of wishin’ of our own.”

  “You say something?” Tina asks him. She’s lifted her glasses off her nose, and her gray eyes are motionless. Carr shakes his head. “You sure you’re okay?” she asks. “ ’Cause you look like a fucking ghost.”

  “I’m fine,” Carr says. He flips past the profiles of Prager’s staff—his security chief, his tame accountants and auditors—and leafs through the technical section. Floor plans of Isla Privada’s offices on Grand Cayman and of Prager’s beachfront compound, the makes and models of alarm systems, registry listings for Prager’s sloop and his motor yacht, the tail number of his G650—Boyce’s people are good at this sort of thing, and it goes on for pages.

  Carr squints at a column of figures and rubs his head. He turns to the last tab and scans the latest updates.

  There are pictures of a party by a long swimming pool, at night—men in linen trousers, women in gauzy shifts, waiters in starched jackets, and in the background a line of luminous surf. Carr recognizes it as Prager’s Grand Cayman beachfront.

  “These are from his party last week?” he asks. Tina doesn’t look up from her magazine, but nods. “You bought yourself one of the caterer’s people?”

  “Rented,” she says.

  “Another fund-raiser?”

  Tina nods again. “For a local grade school.”

  “Prager schedule the next one?”

  “Just before Labor Day—right before he leaves on his prospecting trip.”

  “Still off to Europe?”

  “And Asia now. Lot of money to be washed out there. He’ll be gone about five weeks.”

  “So, Labor Day—that’s about eleven weeks.”

  “Ten,” Tina says, and turns another page of her magazine. Carr keeps studying the party photos.

  “I don’t see Eddie Silva here.”

  “Next picture,” Tina says.

  It’s a photo of a fifty-something man, thick, with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. It’s a daytime shot, and he’s coming out of a bar. His eyes are smeared and his face is like pitted pavement. “He’s off the wagon?” Carr asks.

  Tina nods. “Again.”

  “That’s what—the third time in five months?”

  “That’s what I make it.”

  “Hell of a thing for the head of security.”

  “Nice for you though.”

  There are more photos at the back of the folder, and the very last one stops Carr. It’s another shot of Curtis Prager, and like the first picture in the file it shows Prager climbing from a car, though this car is a Bentley, and the street, sunny and white, isn’t in New York, but in George Town, on Grand Cayman. Prager is wearing jeans and a guayabera. His hair is long, curling, bleached from the sun, and his mouth is open, as if he’s about to speak.

  Carr flips to the front of the file and then to the back again. There can’t be five years between this photo and the first one, but in the interim Prager’s face has aged fifteen years at least. His skin is hide brown, seamed, and pulled too tight over the fine bones. The cords of his neck are like rigging, and his eyes are adrift in a sea of lines and shadows. His mouth looks wider and hungrier—weathered, but avid too, Carr thinks. Prager’s thrown off the collar and found himself some appetites to indulge—found that indulgence agrees with him. So, more a pirate than ever; more Bacchus than Apollo now. Carr shakes his head. They hated this kind of thinking at the Farm, and his trainers dinged him for it more times than he could remember. Projection, they called it. Don’t impose a narrative, for chrissakes—let them tell their own stories. An agent gets an idea there’s something particular you want to hear, all he’ll do is sing it to you. He’ll have you chasing your tail right up your backside. Still, he looked like a pirate.

  Tina is holding a flash drive and looking at him. “File’s on here,” she says.

  Carr closes the dossier and pockets the drive. “You have anything else for me?”

  “Anything like …?”

  “It’s been four months, for chrissakes.”

  “I told you, it’s slow going. We don’t have a lot of friends down there.”

  “So four months of digging and nothing to show?”

  Tina closes her magazine and places it on her lap. “Not exactly nothing,” she says.

  Carr draws a hand down his face. He is awake now, fully, for the first time today. “Exactly what, then?”

  “Not a hundred percent sure. A guy one of our few friends knows met another guy who pilots for a vineyard down there. He flies in and out of an airfield near Mendoza. His brother works part-time at the same field, doing maintenance on the prop planes. The rest of the time, the brother works at a private field northwest of town, a dirt strip on an estancia.”

  “Bertolli’s place.”

  Tina nods. “Works there on Tuesdays and Fridays. And word is he told his big brother that one Friday morning, four months back, before he could even get his truck parked, the foreman waved him off. Told him hasta la vista—go home, no work today. No explanation besides there was a party going on at the ranch that night, which seemed weird to the mechanic because he knew that Bertolli was away in Europe for two weeks. But the foreman gave him a day’s pay anyway, for doing nothing, so he didn’t ask questions. He did notice something as he was driving out the gate that morning, though: a truckload of men driving in.”

  “What men?”

  “He’d seen some of them around the ranch before, but they scared him and he always kept his distance. Bertolli’s hard boys. The mechanic tells his brother they looked like they were there to work.”

  Carr stands slowly and puts a hand on the back of the bench. “Which Friday morning was this?”

  “Four months back, the second Friday of the month. That makes it the morning of the twelfth.”

  After a while, Carr clears his throat. “That’s the morning of the day before,” he says.

  “Mr. Boyce says not to read too much into it.”

  Carr looks down at Tina,
and at his own face, black in her black lenses. “It doesn’t take any reading,” he says quietly. “They knew he was coming. They were waiting for him.”

  8

  At 9:35 a.m. Howard Bessemer will leave his blue, Bermuda-style cottage, turn right on Monterey Road, turn right again on North Ocean Boulevard, and drive south, past the Palm Beach Country Club, to the Barton Golf and Racquet Club, there to meet Daniel Brunt for a ten o’clock court. He will play no more than two sets of tennis with Brunt, and afterward drink no more than two iced teas, and then he will shower, dress, get in his car, and drive across the Royal Park Bridge for lunch in West Palm Beach. This is Howard Bessemer’s routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this being 9:33 on a Tuesday, Carr knows that Bessemer will soon appear. Because if Carr, Latin Mike, Bobby, and Dennis have learned anything in the weeks they’ve been watching him, it is that Bessemer is a man of routines.

  Tuesdays and Thursdays: tennis and lunch. Mondays and Wednesdays: golf and cocktails. Friday mornings: sailing. Friday afternoons: more cocktails. And Friday nights straight through Sunday afternoons: high-stakes poker, cocaine, and whores—two, sometimes three, at a clip—all in a basement below a Brazilian restaurant, not far from the medical center. They can set their watches by Bessemer, and they love him for it.

  The garage door opens, and the blue BMW pulls out. Bessemer has the top down, and his thinning blond hair is a tattered pennant in the breeze. Right and right again, and Bobby waits another fifteen seconds before he pulls the gray painter’s van away from the curb. Carr calls Latin Mike.

  “We’re gone,” he says into his cell.

  “We’re in,” Mike replies, and in the side mirror Carr sees Bessemer’s front door swing shut.

  This stretch of Ocean Boulevard is flat and straight—a corridor of stucco walls, hedges, and gated drives, whose usual quiet is deepened by a sense of off-season abandonment. Traffic is sparse, and Carr can see Bessemer’s BMW blocks ahead, shimmering in the heat. The Atlantic appears to their left in flashes, in the alleys between properties—white, heaving, covered in sunlight.