THIRTY-TWO NORTH
The moment I’m alone, I begin my excavations. As instructed, I start with the “chron logs”—chronologically arranged lists of every memo, order, judgment, motion, declaration, decision, petition, and letter that has flowed in and out of the law firm regarding the matter of “George R. Englert, a/k/a ‘George Crombie Moncrieffe,’ a/k/a ‘Dr. Moncrieffe,’ a/k/a ‘Baron Moncrieffe,’ a/k/a ‘Prince George.’”
Because Cesar rates barely a mention, I get through the registers swiftly. I then turn to the Redweld folders—so named, it only dawns on me much later, because of their color (red) and the brass rivets that reinforce the seams. The Redwelds contain dozens of briefs, some of which are typeset and bound like paperbacks. Given my allergy to legal papers, they quickly join the chron logs at the far end of the conference table.
That leaves the ziggurat itself—fourteen cartons of documents relating to the prosecution of the Badische Trust Consortium. The outside markings do nothing to clarify the contents. I grab the carton at the peak of the pyramid and pop the lid. Inside, I find copies of bank records, subpoenas, phone bills, business plans, canceled checks, and monthly credit card statements. There is no order to the stuff; everything appears to have been dumped into the carton higgledy-piggledy. (I guess that’s what happens when a client pleads guilty and trial prep comes to a halt.)
It’s almost noon by the time I get through the first box. Since I have a lunch date with John scheduled for twelve thirty p.m., even a perfunctory review of the remaining material is impossible. I disassemble the pyramid, arrange the cartons in a single row, and remove the lids. My worst fears are confirmed. The uninspected cartons are every bit as jumbled as the one I’ve just examined.
Fourteen cartons. Each one is roughly the size of a five-thousand-sheet box of photocopy paper. That means—I make a quick calculation—seventy thousand documents!
Diane reappears to let me know that John is heading over. “So? Find what you were looking for?”
“Nope. Barely made a dent.”
“Well, come back after lunch if you want.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I will.” I could have kissed her.
Lunch with John is brief. Over crab cakes and iced tea, we reminisce about hiking in Jordan. John is gracious and attentive. I am distracted and rude. All I can think about is the cache of material still awaiting inspection.
By two p.m., I’m back upstairs, excavating the residue of a fraud that may or may not implicate my nemesis. Around two thirty p.m., I find a file of AmEx receipts for purchases made by the Cesar of San Francisco in his capacity as managing director of the Barclay Consulting Group. The charges confirm that the cardholder has ties to Switzerland—there’s an invoice for a weekend at the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich ($18,598)—and that he likes Southeast Asian food. Those two details hardly constitute irrefutable proof of a link. Still, they’re circumstantially encouraging.
Around five p.m., bundled-up paralegals begin passing by the conference room. The workweek appears to be over. I hunt down Diane before she, too, heads home.
“How’d we make out?” she asks from a cubicle facing Goodman’s corner office.
“Not great. All that paper. It’s a bit overwhelming.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“I was hoping to schedule a time when I might come back.”
“Leaving already?”
“It’s past five, it’s Friday, and the city’s a mess. I figured everyone would be heading out.”
“Not everyone,” Diane says, nodding at the closed door across from her sentry post. “Someone has to hand in a big report on Monday. In fact, someone, and that someone’s assistant, will be working all weekend. You’re welcome to join us.”
Once more, I’m tempted to give her a kiss.
“Oh, and here, take these,” she adds. “Mark thought you might find them interesting.” Diane places two more bulging Redwelds on the parapet of her workstation.
I carry the files back to the conference room, plop into a chair, and put my feet up on the table. Two more days! The extension comes as a huge relief. I call Françoise. “Just letting you know, I’ll be down here all weekend. I’ll sleep at my mom’s.”
“Find something?”
“No, but there’s still tons to go through.”
I anticipate a mild reproach, maybe something as subtle as a sigh.
“Bon courage,” she says. Her support catches me off guard, uplifts me, reminds me why I love my wife.
I skip dinner and leave the law firm sometime after nine none the wiser. The thundersnow has stopped, but the effects linger. Everything is white. The parked cars. The trash cans. The streets. The signs. Everything. As I walk west toward my mother’s place, I pass a man pulling his son on a sled. I follow the pair for half a block even though it’s out of my way. The scene, of son and father tethered to each other, hits me with a vague sense of longing.
Near Fifth Avenue, I manage to hail a cab. The ride crosstown is slow and silent. Snowdrifts muffle the din of the city. Sledders and cross-country skiers transform Central Park into a winter scene reminiscent of Villars. My wistfulness grows. I lower the cab window and breathe in the smell of fresh snow and for the first time in a long while, I think about my father. I miss him.
THE RAISED-LETTER CARTE DE VISITE
I sleep poorly that night. The uninspected cartons, the creaky Murphy bed in my mother’s study, and the beeping of snowplows make it impossible to nod off. I find myself checking the time on my cell phone, a gesture that recalls the sleepless nights in Belvedere before my father’s wristwatch disappeared.
By nine the next morning, I’m back at the law firm. Diane greets me at the guard station. In the elevator, she asks about my interest in the fraud. I tell her about Cesar.
“You were ten, and he did that to you? What a little shit!”
“No argument there.”
“And you think he’s one of the crooks who worked with the baron?”
“I’m not sure, but I think so.”
“Well, I’m sure,” she says.
“You sound like my son. He’s positive the two Cesars are the same guy.”
“Smart kid. You know what they say. What goes around comes around.”
I have two days to work through the rest of the discovery materials. The task is so daunting that I make a pledge to myself: If a document doesn’t concern Cesar, it won’t concern me.
By noon, I manage to polish off two cartons. No smoking gun. At this rate, I’ll be able to survey all the files before I have to catch the train back to Providence on Sunday. But around two o’clock, a folder full of black-and-white celebrity photographs slows my pace. “The [Badische] Chairman with his wife and Pope Paul during the bestowal of decorations at the Vatican,” reads one caption. “The Chairman and the Administrator presenting the President of Malta with a donation for the disabled children at the Presidential Palace,” reads another. “The executive committee director with British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and General (later U.S. President) Eisenhower,” reads a third. Many of the photos feature Prince Robert tapping a ceremonial sword on the shoulders of movie stars: Anthony Quinn, Sammy Davis Jr., Liza Minnelli, Ernest Borgnine.
I’m hoping to find a picture of Cesar. No such luck. Soon after I force myself to set aside the photo file, I uncover another possible clue. It takes the form of a raised-letter carte de visite bearing the House of Badische coat of arms: a golden eagle with outstretched wings and a pair of lions standing on their hind legs, front paws raised as if ready to strike.
I’ve seen a crest just like it, but I can’t recall where.
With a growing sense of déjà vu, I reach for the Cesareum. It doesn’t take long to locate what I’m looking for. Eagle with outstretched wings? Check. Lion rampant with paws extended? Check. The heraldic symbols on the Badische calling card are uncannily similar to the ones on my Aiglon blazer patch. The correspondence suggests yet another. A crazy image pops into my h
ead: Cesar sketching the Badische coat of arms with his Aiglon blazer close at hand.
I take a break to inform Goodman and Diane of the graphic connections.
“Case closed,” Diane says, delicately touching my tattered school patch as if it were the Shroud of Turin.
“Not so fast,” Goodman interjects. He asks if I have further proof.
I run through the rest of the corroborating evidence.
“That’s it?” he says. “Sounds like a stretch.”
His doubts don’t surprise me. He’s a lawyer. He’s paid to be skeptical. I return to the conference room and continue to dig. By midnight, I have worked through the last of the fourteen boxes. Seventy thousand documents and not one of them, not a damn one, provides the proof I’m looking for.
Did the Aiglon crest inspire the logo of the Badische Trust Consortium?
DEFENDANT’S MEMORANDUM IN AID OF SENTENCING
By the time I arrive at the law firm Sunday morning, Goodman and Diane are already at work, fine-tuning a seventeen-hundred-page report for a drug manufacturer fending off a multibillion-dollar class action suit. I say a quick hello before returning to the conference room. Documents blanket the full length of the table. It’s as if the Friday blizzard has moved inside.
Cesar, you son of a bitch, where are you?
Beleaguered by the mess, I barely have the energy to reach for the Redwelds Diane furnished late Friday. But hours before I’m scheduled to return home, while forcing myself to leaf through the supplemental index to a “Defendant’s Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing,” I come across a short declarative sentence that raises the hairs on the back of my neck: “Cesar A. Viana was born on April 24, 1958 in Manila, Philippines.”
Bingo! After unleashing a string of curses and completing a fist-pumping victory lap around the conference table, I call Françoise.
“Listen to this!” I read her the incriminating line.
“Merde! What else does it say?”
“That he’s upper-middle-class. That his mother ran the family business, the Realistic Beauty Institute, and that his father was an inventor.”
“Like your father,” Françoise interjects.
“I know. Eerie.”
“So I guess Cesar’s father didn’t torture people for a living.”
“Guess not. He left that to his son. It also says the dad was a severe alcoholic and that he died of a heart attack when Cesar was nineteen.” I read Françoise a key paragraph:
Although the defendant suffered no physical abuse or neglect at the hands of his father, the emotional impact of his father’s deterioration was crushing to him. . . . Cesar “has spent much of his life seeking appropriate male role models to fill the void left by his father’s illness and eventual passing,” as his sister documents in her letter to the Court. See letter annexed hereto as Exhibit C.
I flip to Exhibit C, the letter from Cesar’s sister, and read part of that submission to Françoise as well:
Cesar’s school, Aiglon, was a mountain away from my school, and essentially he was all on his own through puberty. I imagine he must have been quite lonely, and this and the lack of a male parental role model made him unusually susceptible to peer pressure from his male classmates . . . he would go to great lengths to have his schoolmates like him, doing their work for them, despite my phone calls to him to be his own person.
This was a pattern that I believe caused his present difficulties and if he has one fault it has been to not possess a proper sense of discrimination. . . . In his desire to belong to this present group of people with whom he was charged he showed poor judgment and I believe they took advantage of him. To my knowledge, in the over 40 years I have known him, Cesar has never knowingly taken advantage of any individual, although he suffered many incidents of being on the receiving end of abuse.
“C’est pas possible! She’s saying he’s the victim?”
“Yup, that’s exactly what she’s saying.”
Françoise’s shock pales in comparison to mine. The bizarre professional overlap between our fathers—that they were both inventors—is mildly annoying. Far worse is the suggestion that Cesar is a blameless casualty of the boarding school that brought us together. But the detail that really kneecaps me, the thing that hits way too close to home, is that all of Cesar’s problems are tied to the absence of his father. Join the club, buddy.
With time to kill before heading to Penn Station, I gather together the most compelling discovery documents and arrange them in nine discrete piles: SWINDLERS, VICTIMS, BADISCHE BANK DOCS, LAWYERS, KNIGHTS OF MALTA, TRANSCRIPT, CELEBS, and (the biggest pile) CESAR/BARCLAY. Then I take a few pictures of the reconstructed ziggurat before dialing Diane’s extension to say that I’m done with the files, at least for now.
“Mark wants to know if you found your smoking gun,” she says.
“I did.”
“We’ll be right over.”
A few minutes later, the pair enters the conference room to review the newly uncovered evidence. I show them the relevant sections of the sentencing memo.
“See, I told you,” Diane tells her boss. “What goes around comes around.”
Goodman leafs through the brief. “This is more convincing,” he acknowledges.
I could have ended my search there and then. After all, I had proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that “my” Cesar was a convicted felon. Yet the notion of wrapping things up never occurred to me. Over the course of the weekend the focus of my obsession had broadened to include the fraud that had put my ex-roommate behind bars. The completionist in me needed to know a little more about the Badische Trust Consortium. No, that’s not accurate. The completionist in me needed to know everything about the Badische Trust Consortium.
Which explains why I turn to Goodman and Diane and say, “I’m hoping I can come back and review some of these files more closely.”
Diane frowns. “Does that sound convenient, Mark?”
“During the holidays?” Goodman shakes his head. “Way too much of a hassle.”
Their rebuff unsettles me. What if I can’t return to the firm? Over the last three days, documents have been passing through my hands like envelopes through an optical mail sorter. There’s no way I’ll remember what I’ve looked at.
“Is that the stuff you’re hoping to go through?” Goodman asks, motioning to the nine stacks of paper.
“That, plus the trial transcript and some briefs.”
Goodman thumbs through the documents, pausing occasionally to pull an item. He says nothing as he conducts his review.
“I could come back at the beginning of the year,” I say, doing my best not to sound desperate.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Or maybe I—”
Goodman raises his hand like a cop halting traffic.
I snapped this picture an hour after I found proof that my roommate worked for the Badische Trust Consortium.
In the silence that follows, I find myself wondering once again why I’m so intent on looking through the trial documents. I know for certain that Cesar is a crook. Isn’t that enough? Not by a long shot. The bank fraud that landed him in jail remains a total mystery. Ditto his role in the crime. The journalist in me can’t let go of the story. At least that’s what I tell myself.
“You really need to review all these documents?” Goodman asks after completing his examination.
“I really do.”
“Then we’ll just have to send you duplicates.”
“Excuse me?”
“Merry Christmas.”
I look over at Diane. She says nothing, but the smile stretching across her face betrays what she’s thinking: What goes around comes around.*
TEN THOUSAND DOCUMENTS LOST IN THE MAIL
The night before the night before Christmas, I have dream in which the Badische files get lost en route to Providence. The mix-up compels me to return to the law firm, where a mailroom clerk informs me that my shipment has been dispatched to Bermuda. While he’
s detailing the weight limits of parcels posted to US protectorates, the law firm is bombed, and I find myself plunging down a stairwell under a shower of construction debris.
I don’t need help unpacking the significance of the stairwell tumble. It seems pretty obvious that I have linked the fraud to memories of Aiglon, although the nature of the connection remains vague.
Christmas arrives. I make out like a bandit. Max has put a copy of How to Be a Villain in my stocking. Françoise has wrapped up a printer/scanner in anticipation of the care package I’m expecting from New York. My sister and brother-in-law present me with a first edition of Forty Years a Gambler, the late-nineteenth-century memoir of a notorious flimflam man named George H. Devol.
It’s a bit unnerving to receive so many gifts tied to a kid I haven’t seen since I was eleven, especially since they call attention to the undelivered gift I want most of all: the legal files from New York. I spend much of Christmas day moping about like an ungrateful brat.
On December 26, my sister and her husband, Max, and I drive to Vermont, for three days of skiing. (Françoise, a devotee of the desert, forgoes all winter sports.) Perfect conditions on the slopes improve my mood. When not skiing just a little faster than I’d like (in a futile effort to keep up with my daredevil son), I immerse myself in the hotel pool, after which I immerse myself in free nachos, after which I immerse myself in the ostentatious reflections of George H. Devol, who, the title page of his memoir proclaims, cheated at cards by the time he was eleven, stacked decks by fourteen, “bested soldiers on the Rio Grande during the Mexican War; won hundreds of thousands from paymasters, cotton buyers, defaulters, and thieves; fought more rough-and-tumble fights than any man in America; and was the most daring gambler in the world.”
{Illustration from the title page of Forty Years a Gambler by George H. Devol, 1887}
This memoir of a riverboat cheat was one of the fraud-themed gifts I received for Christmas.
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