A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “How is your loft coming?” Christopher asked when they were the last three in the basement.

  “Well, therein lies a sad tale,” Willie groaned and collapsed onto the sofa in his improvised dressing room. “Let’s go to dinner tomorrow. I’ll make a reservation somewhere close. But first come by for a drink. I need Helen’s help on paint colors. I need to find someone who will agree with me.”

  * * *

  They heard Willie singing—“Got to find me some thunderstorms and a warm-hearted woman”—on his way to answer the door. He appeared buttoning his shirt. “I probably should have been a country western singer. I think my lyrical talent is underutilized.” He had just gotten out of the shower. “Welcome.” He kissed Helen on both cheeks. Christopher and Helen stepped over scrap pieces of wood, caulking guns, and boxes of nails as they crossed the room.

  Willie asked Helen what she would like to drink. “Nothing for me,” she said.

  “You are a strange creature.”

  He fixed Christopher a gin and tonic and then poured some scotch for himself. He handed Christopher his drink and looked at Helen. “You sure?” he asked again.

  They walked around the downstairs. Willie amused Helen with the grand names of the paint colors he was considering for the walls—Marie Antoinette Yellow, Sutcliffe Park Green, Della Robbia Red. He explained how he had felt he had a special bond with the contractor. How they had understood each other. “I thought it was okay to give him all the money. Now he’s disappeared, and the work isn’t finished. The sad thing is that I’ve spent all summer working on this loft. I had planned to get a lot of writing done, but I’ve done nothing.”

  “But you have your play,” Christopher said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But that was written several years ago, and it’s still a work in progress.” He shuddered the way a dog throws off water. He stood up and offered to finish the house tour. “I’ll show you the upstairs. As you can see, it’s small and won’t take long.”

  Christopher stood up, too. “Take Helen. You’d like to see it, wouldn’t you, darling? I need another drink.”

  Willie held his drink in one hand as if it were a candle and offered Helen his other. At the top of the stairs, he paused to take a sip. “You know this used to be a belt workshop? I think I can still smell the glue and tannic acid.”

  She breathed in deeply and paused. “Maybe a little.”

  He moved to the large industrial window and looked out into the darkness as if trying to see something. “Well, let’s face it, we’re no longer living in a John Lennon song. Hey, we’d better go downstairs and make sure Christopher isn’t drinking all my gin. Also, remind me to show you where I hung the palm trees.”

  Christopher left for his dinner with Dan O’Connor. Helen stayed and walked to a restaurant with Willie.

  Willie ordered after-dinner drinks and made Helen laugh with tales of hardship and duress he endured as a professor of creative writing. “Dying pets—dogs, cats, turtles, goldfish. Dying grandmothers—by the way, always grandmothers and never grandfathers—adolescent boyfriend and girlfriend troubles. The latest is vampires. Now every other story has some vampire angle. The understanding of grammar ranges from severely limited to nonexistent. And if I hear one more time how a story ‘flows’—I should just ban that verb from my class. Oh, God, I need more scotch. Where has our waiter gone?”

  He walked with her to Broadway and waited until a cab appeared. They talked about Christopher. Willie thought he seemed preoccupied. “I’ve never seen him so haggard. He’s working too hard.” Without going into details, she explained that Christopher was spending a lot of time and energy making certain Marc was staying within the tram lines.

  As she was getting into the taxi, he said, “You know, if Marc, Christopher, and I were walking down the street, and we saw an automobile turned over with a person trapped underneath, Christopher would immediately run to help, Marc would walk right past it, and I could go either way.” She didn’t know what to do with his comment and she didn’t know why he was telling her this now.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  New York

  The vast majority of money-laundering schemes are not complex. The biggest hurdle is getting cash into banks, so all you need, really, is one dirty bank.” Dan O’Connor laid out an understanding of money laundering and the recent banking regulations adopted to circumvent illegal transactions. Smart as hell and Irish Catholic to the core, Dan had developed a reputation of going after greed and fraud on Wall Street, and Christopher knew he could speak to him in confidence.

  Christopher listened as Dan explained how, over recent decades, the laws had tightened. Neither ignorance nor lack of knowledge was an excuse. The Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 established money laundering as a federal crime, and in one of the biggest blows to money laundering—especially the drug cartels—the recent Patriot Act of 2001 prohibited financial institutions from engaging in business with foreign shell companies. While Christopher’s jurisdiction was outside the U.S., Dan explained that European countries such as the U.K. either had or were adopting similar, if perhaps not as stringent, laws. The trades Christopher’s firm was dealing with were too large to be able to slip into the system unnoticed without the complicity of a bank. Most banks, even if not headquartered in the U.S., had U.S. branches and therefore fell under U.S. banking laws and regulations.

  Christopher told Dan that he and a team of tax lawyers and accountants had vetted the trading strategies Marc had devised. Dan’s questions and Christopher’s answers reassured both of them that the due diligence of the trading activities had been thorough and conclusive. Dan said it made him suspect not the character of the trades but rather the ownership of the funds underlying the trades. He asked if they had examined the entities behind the nominee and corporate names that were used for such trades. He didn’t know, but he suspected that Europe was not as strict as the U.S., which, as he had mentioned, had increased disclosure and transparency standards because of 9/11. It became clear to Christopher that when he returned to London he should authorize Nigel and his team to conduct a thorough analysis of the ownership of each account. He wanted to make sure that his firm was holding itself to the highest standard, whether it was required to or not. He wanted to eliminate any possibility of reputational risk.

  Dan went on to say that the drug cartels had gotten so powerful and brazen that in a few instances they had backed a “respectable” businessman in his purchase of a small regional bank and used it to wash money. “Their biggest problems are their duffel bags of money. There are a lot of strategies to get the money into banks, such as smurf transactions, in which cash transactions are structured to avoid reporting requirements. But given the size of most of your trades, it would require a small army of smurfs to convert the money into CDs and money orders and then deposit them into banks.”

  “Smurf transactions?”

  “Yeah, named after a cartoon that had all these little blue guys called smurfs running around. In its simplest form, a drug cartel can deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars a day by getting a large group of ‘smurfs’ to deposit cash in bundles of less than ten thousand dollars but generally around two to three thousand in a number of different bank accounts. It used to be a very successful way to wash money, but since the late 1980s the regulations about suspicious activity have increased. So really about the only practical way to get duffel bags of money into the banking system quickly is through a dirty bank where everyone looks the other way. Once the funds are in the banking system, they can be wired and transferred into European accounts.”

  “But take the millions of dollars of drugs being sold in the U.S.—doesn’t the problem still remain of how to get the cash back into Mexico?” Christopher asked.

  “Now they mostly ship it back to Mexico or Colombia in cargo ships and by airdrops. Once the money is ‘legitimately’ in a Mexican or South American bank, it’s traded with foreign banks and financial institutions, so it gets further wash
ed as it moves on.”

  “Such as Cayman Island securities firms?”

  “Used to be that way but not so much anymore. There was so much abuse that there was a big crackdown. Now most of the money—or at least this is what we think—is going to tax havens such as Panama, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Channel Islands, Monaco, and somewhat less Switzerland—only because the U.S. has really pressed Switzerland on its secrecy. But the money launderers are getting more and more sophisticated. There are a couple of brokers who do business with a number of prominent Wall Street bankers.”

  “Illegal?”

  “Well, that’s the point. By the time the money gets to them it has been scrubbed so well that it’s almost impossible to prove it was ever dirty. They launder money though Europe and then bring it back to Mexico and South America through legal transactions with supposedly lily-white counterparties.”

  “Such as?”

  “Some investment, but trading mostly. For the liquidity. That’s where Wall Street comes in. All the major banks have international offices. We’ve seen a rise in complicated trading strategies such as repos and currency swaps. Those kinds of transactions make the money harder to find than, say, buying and selling corporate bonds.”

  “Prominent Wall Street bankers? Really?”

  “Yeah—there’s this one guy, Carlos Muñoz, who specializes in partnerships that own or control monopolies in Mexico.” Dan also named six well-known American businessmen.

  Christopher recognized all of them, including the name of Charlotte’s husband. “Wait. Colson? Eric Colson?” he asked, looking for clarification.

  “Yep. He recently made a major investment in a bottling business with Muñoz.”

  “Surely he’s not corrupt?”

  Instead of answering, Dan finished his beer and shrugged his shoulders.

  Chapter Thirty

  New York

  Christopher returned from his dinner more distracted and preoccupied than usual.

  “Remember the South American we met at Eastthorpe?” he said, emptying his pockets on the desk in their hotel room.

  “Yes, Carlos something—he left early.”

  “Carlos Muñoz. Turns out he’s a very questionable figure. Dan and I were talking about money laundering, and out of the blue he mentioned Carlos Muñoz. He thinks Carlos is some kind of middleman laundering money for Mexican drug cartels.”

  “Does Marc know this? Why don’t you ask Marc?”

  “Because I don’t know what he knows, but I do know he’s not telling me everything. The week I spent in Milan, Marc never once mentioned Carlos’s name, and I was with him pretty much every day, all day. A small army of lawyers and accountants didn’t find anything either. But we weren’t looking specifically for Muñoz or any companies he’s associated with.”

  “If Muñoz is laundering money, wouldn’t Marc know?”

  “He should. But Dan said all you need is one dirty bank. They take in the funds and don’t ask any questions and then start washing it by transferring the funds into different accounts in tax havens like Panama or Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. They use nominee accounts or shell corporations, and soon the trail becomes cold.”

  “You think Marc is hiding things?”

  “I don’t know. Dan brought up Eric, who he said had invested with Muñoz in a bottling business in Mexico. He said Muñoz works by attracting equity investors with deep pockets to monopoly situations. Explains why he was invited to Eastthorpe.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Christopher rested his front teeth on the top of his thumb and drew in a breath to speak but then stopped himself. Discussing the situation with Helen would not be helpful. She would focus on all the wrong things. “I don’t know.”

  Helen had been looking forward to their flight home, having Christopher all to herself, away from phones and emails. Except for Willie’s play, he had worked long hours each day, and she had been alone for most of the week. But on the flight back to London, he was preoccupied and gave her flat, staccato answers. She had noticed that his habit of running ahead of her in conversation—waiting for her to finish so he could get to the point—had gotten worse. He often became impatient, as if she were trying to slow him down. She felt as if he were always trying to redirect her. She compared his situation to Pauling’s explanation of converging lines—how where you stand determines what you see.

  Christopher laid his newspaper down on his lap to listen. When she had finished speaking, he pushed up in his seat and looked to see who was sitting behind them. No one. “Helen, I’m concerned about corruption, not art.” He didn’t understand how he had offended her, but he wasn’t in a mood to find out.

  She knew that once they arrived in London she would feel more desperate. Christopher’s driver would be outside their mews house most mornings at six, and he would rarely get home before one A.M. She wasn’t like most of the wives of his colleagues and clients—she cared little for money or social connections. No one would ever make the mistake of identifying them as one of the power couples who plotted together to get things done or aimed their attention at those who could advance careers. His absence didn’t lend itself to substitution. Going out with friends didn’t fill the time. It just made her feel his absence more. She knew she had no ability to affect or influence him. Was that what happened in some marriages, a coming together and then a falling apart? Did children hold couples together? She felt as if they were in free fall with nothing or no one to stop them.

  She had no choice but to turn all her attention to work. It wasn’t the answer, but it was the best she had. It had been Christopher’s idea—though she didn’t want to admit this—that she suggest articles she wanted to write—to go after things more. She knew David recognized how good she was and generally gave her what she asked for. She wanted to concentrate on subjects that were grittier and took, as one photographer she had worked with said, a bite out of her soul.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  London

  The raid occurred at seven-thirty in the morning. Five officials from the Serious Fraud Office, the SFO, appeared, asked for Christopher, and handed him an inspection mandate. As he read the document, he thought, Fuck, what has Marc done? Christopher put them in a conference room, told the official in charge that, of course, he and his firm would cooperate, but he would like to have his counsel present before they assisted with document collection. He stepped outside the conference room and asked the receptionist to get them coffee and tea and to say nothing. He went to his office and called Nigel.

  “I’ll come over straightaway. See if you can persuade them to delay the beginning of the investigation until I get there. Whatever you do, emphasize your willingness to cooperate. Also, Christopher, get your most senior people to act as shadows for each official. Don’t allow them to roam freely around the office. When I get there I’ll brief them on what the officials’ rights are to search and read documents. They’ll probably want to take away servers. Get the head of your IT department to make certain he has copies of all the files.”

  While Christopher was speaking to Nigel, Christopher’s secretary came in and handed him a note that Marc was holding on line two. He glanced at the message and interrupted Nigel. “Marc just called, he’s on the other line.”

  “Have your secretary tell him you and I are speaking. I’ll call him back. You shouldn’t. We’ll speak about this when I come in. For now just focus on delaying everything until I get there.”

  When Nigel arrived, he told Christopher he had spoken to Marc. The E.U. Commission had also sent several officials to the Milan office. Nigel had given Marc the same instructions he’d given Christopher and arranged for a partner from his firm’s Milan office to assist and advise him. Nigel and Christopher, with the five officials standing by, briefed the seventeen employees who had arrived for the Monday morning meeting. They were instructed to cooperate and warned that they were not to discuss the investigation with anyone outside the firm.

&nb
sp; In the privacy of his office, Christopher questioned Nigel about the review conducted earlier in the summer. Nigel told him that he felt they had done a thorough investigation, and the review had been followed with tighter ongoing oversight of the trading options. He said he could not imagine what they could be charged with.

  “What are the chances we can keep this out of the press?”

  “Zero,” Nigel said. “We need to speak to the head of your PR firm—you still use Alan Symons-Smith?”

  Christopher nodded.

  “We need to bring Alan in. You should meet with him later today, but off-site.”

  Christopher told his secretary to cancel all his appointments and reschedule them for the following week.

  The head SFO official spent five hours questioning Christopher with Nigel present. They asked questions about the founding of the firm, a number of the clients, and the nature of some of the transactions. From what Christopher could tell, a number of the questions were based on information that had appeared in the U.K. and European press. The questions were broad and not difficult. Christopher could not tell where they were headed with the investigation. They did, however, seize the firm’s server, his phone, his computer, and the computers of his four most senior colleagues.

  By five P.M. the SFO officials were finished for the day and asked to speak to Christopher and the employees. They informed the group that they were coming back the following morning, and nothing could be taken from the premises or destroyed. After they left, Christopher and Nigel reiterated their message. Christopher said that he knew the day had been upsetting for all and that he appreciated everyone’s cooperation. He assured them that he and Nigel had recently conducted a thorough review of the business, and as far as they knew, all was in good order. He told them that they might very well get calls from the press that evening, and if so they should decline to comment. He said that he was meeting with the head of their PR firm later that evening, and they would be drafting a response for the press and also for their clients.