Jean-Baptiste learned of Larrimer’s criminality from the newspaper. When he could not reach Larrimer, Ltd. by telephone, he went around to their offices. He found the door locked and sealed with yellow police tape, the same tape that now sealed Jean-Baptiste’s office and Brooklyn apartment. He called the Securities and Exchange Commission offices where, after a very long wait, he was connected to an official who confirmed for him that St. John Larrimer did appear to have absconded with the entire sum under his management.
“And who are you, sir?”
“Jean-Baptiste Vasiltschenko.” Jean-Baptiste told the official who he was and that he had invested more than half of the money under his management in Larrimer, Ltd., including his own money and that of several dozen clients.
“What is the name of your organization again? And the address and phone number?” Jean-Baptiste gave the official his name and address, which the man wrote down.
“And what has been your connection to St. John Larrimer?”
“My connection? I have no connection to him. I invested with him. My clients’ money.”
“Where are you from, sir?”
“I am from France.”
“And your clients?”
“Are all from France.”
“I suppose, sir, you know what a feeder fund is?” The official did not wait for an answer. “Larrimer, Ltd. was supplied by a number of feeder funds, funds that were set up to look like separate investment entities, but were designed specifically to supply Larrimer, Ltd. with cash. This is an illegal activity in the United States and in France as well.”
Jean-Baptiste did not reply.
“Well,” said the man, finally, “we will need the names of your clients and the amounts of money each has invested and lost. And we will want to examine your books. Our agents will ascertain whether, and to what extent, you might be complicit in this affair. I would urge you, sir, not to leave the country and to cooperate with our investigators. I would also suggest that you retain legal counsel.”
Jean-Baptiste held the phone to his ear long after the man had hung up. He saw in his mind’s eye his brother, his sister, his cousins, and friends who had each and every one trusted him with their savings.
Jean-Baptiste swiveled his chair around and looked out the window. New York, which only a short time earlier had seemed welcoming—the embodiment of opportunity—now looked hostile and forbidding. In his mind Jean-Baptiste heard a great steel door slamming shut. The towers across Fifth Avenue seemed to lean toward him, their windows a thousand accusing eyes. A siren passed on the street below, as they often did in New York. Then it stopped. It sounded to Jean-Baptiste as if they were coming for him.
Jean-Baptiste turned back around to his desk. As the blank windows watched, he composed a letter to his clients, begging their forgiveness.
My dear ones—
You have entrusted your hard-earned money to my safekeeping, and I have betrayed your trust. You are the very dearest people in the world to me. You do not deserve this. I cannot go on living, knowing the harm I have done. I hope you will someday forgive me for the misery I have caused.
With love forever,
Jean-Baptiste
XII
ON A BREEZY SATURDAY IN October, Jean-Baptiste was buried next to his parents in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His family and friends, many of whom had been his clients, were there.
“Poor Jean-Baptiste. Why did he have to do it?” said Anwar, Pauline’s former husband.
“He probably blamed himself,” said Louis.
“That’s what we do, isn’t it?” said Anwar. “The only ones who don’t blame themselves are the ones who should.”
Louis looked at Anwar. Anwar smiled. “Not you, Louis.” He took Louis’s arm and drew him close. “I’m talking about the Larrimers, the Madoffs, the thugs, the brutes, the sociopaths. They all sleep like babies.”
At the wake at the Bistrot des Platanes, Louis stood alone, looking into a glass of red wine. Marianne—Anwar and Pauline’s daughter—walked up and kissed him.
“Marianne.” He kissed her in return and held her head against his shoulder.
“Poor Jean-Baptiste,” she said.
“Yes. It’s awful,” said Louis.
They stood together and watched the others for a while.
“Did you have money with Jean-Baptiste?” Marianne said.
“A little,” he said. “Did you?”
She smiled. “I’m a schoolteacher, Louis.”
“Yes. Of course,” said Louis.
“Tell me, Louis, what do you think about this Larrimer guy?”
“I don’t think anything,” said Louis. “Why?”
“I don’t know, I just wondered,” said Marianne. “It’s awful that there are people like that.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve kind of been your specialty, haven’t they, Louis?”
“My specialty?”
“Scoundrels, I mean?”
“I guess so. In the past. Not anymore.”
“Why not?” she said. “Why not anymore?”
Louis didn’t answer for a while. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
Marianne tried another tack. “He’s French, you know.”
“Who?”
“Larrimer. St. John Larrimer.” She emphasized the Saint. “Saint John.”
“He’s French?”
“Well, he’s got a French passport.”
“How do you know?”
“It was in the papers. Did you know he stole three billion dollars? No Bernard Madoff, but still … I wonder what makes somebody do such a thing.”
Louis studied Marianne’s face. She pretended not to notice.
“Nothing will happen to him, will it?” she said. “He probably stashed the money in Swiss banks.”
“Probably,” said Louis.
“You know he has an apartment in Cap d’Antibes,” said Marianne.
“No. I didn’t know.”
“And an apartment in Paris, and who knows where else, probably all bought with stolen money. He’ll get away with it, won’t he?”
“Will he?” said Louis.
“I think he will, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily. Interpol is pretty good.”
“They’re pretty good?”
“They’re very good,” said Louis. “They’re very good.”
XIII
ON THE INTERNET, Louis found an endless string of articles and news reports describing the magnitude of Larrimer’s crimes. There were lists of Larrimer’s victims and how much each had lost. There were indictments of his moral turpitude and conspiratorial speculations about who his accomplices might have been, including everyone from the American president to the Chinese, even al Qaeda.
There were reports from happier times too: society page accounts of St. John’s 1988 marriage at the Plaza Hotel to Carolyne Bushwick of the New Haven Bushwicks. St. John’s notable charitable involvements were also documented. He was on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Opera, and had at one time been a Yale trustee. He had made large donations to Republican and Democratic candidates alike. There were pictures of St. John and Carolyne at glamorous events. And there were articles documenting their contentious and very public divorce in 2000. Carolyne had lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, with their two teenage sons until they went off to college. Louis looked back at the list of Larrimer’s victims and found Carolyne’s name among them.
Pauline saw a file folder labeled LARRIMER lying beside Louis’s computer.
“I’m just curious,” said Louis.
“Just curious? You’re never just curious.”
“It’s an interesting case,” he said.
“It’s not a case.”
“No, it’s not. You’re right. But it interests me. That’s all. I just wonder, will they find him? Will he go to jail? Will justice be served?”
“Please don’t, Louis,” she said.
“Don’t what?�
��
“Because,” she said, dropping the folder with a thud for emphasis, “it’s not your business. You don’t need to do this. It really isn’t your business.”
“No. It’s not my business.” He paused. “But then, whose business is it?”
Pauline heard one of Louis’s provocative disputations about to begin. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to cut him short. “Just not yours.”
Louis smiled. He kissed her sweetly. “You’re right. It’s not my business.” Then: “I’m a changed man.”
She gave him a look.
They went to the kitchen. Louis cut two large wedges of tarte tatin, slid them onto plates, and set them on the table while Pauline brewed tea. The smell of apples filled the room. They ate the tarte and sipped tea. “Besides,” he said, as though there had been no interruption, “it’s not about justice. I shouldn’t use the word. It’s something else, something … more difficult.” He waited for a response, but got none. “Don’t you think?” he said finally.
“It’s your argument,” she said. “You tell me.”
He set the teacup on its saucer. He said that what he was thinking of was as bad as it was good. If there had been a map plotting out human motives, Louis would have located what he had in mind where justice and revenge intersect. Louis was speaking about Larrimer, but he knew all too well from his own experience precisely where justice and revenge came together. It was an intersection that was heavily traveled and dangerous.
Forty years earlier, in the back alleys of Cairo, Louis, then in his early thirties, had met secretly with a smuggler and arms dealer he knew only as Ali. Ali was an odious human being, a bully and a sadist, proud of who he was. He was known to have committed more than a few brutal crimes just for the pleasure of doing so. Though his work was often dangerous, Louis rarely carried a weapon. But he did whenever he met with Ali.
Ali was worth meeting because, among other questionable enterprises, he procured young women for various people, including an Egyptian general and a fundamentalist mullah, both of whom were enemies of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat. Ali claimed to have information about a plot against Sadat and was now offering it for sale to the Americans. It was Louis’s job to assess the value of the information and pay Ali what it was worth.
Louis quickly decided the information was worthless. It was more in the nature of rumor, and there were few specifics, no names of anyone involved, no dates or places. He kept his hand on his gun as he told Ali there would be no payment. Ali knew Louis had a thick envelope of bills inside his jacket. He also knew that Louis had a gun. Louis watched as Ali weighed the two factors one against the other.
Ali walked away muttering. It was the last time Louis saw him. A week later his bloated body was fished from the Nile. There were multiple knife wounds in his back and about his neck. It was the mullah who had had him killed. But the father of a teenage girl Ali had raped and then passed on to the mullah was arrested for the crime, tried, and imprisoned.
“Well,” said the station chief, “Ali was a bastard. He needed killing. Sometimes you don’t get to do justice. It just gets done for you.”
“And what about the wrong guy going to jail? Is that justice?”
The chief shrugged. “No. That’s just tough shit.”
Louis had stopped believing in justice. Justice? Whose justice? Such concepts—justice, virtue, good, evil—sought to project a false sense of clarity onto the world. Louis did still care, however, about what he called “the balance of things.” He cared that a kind of equilibrium be maintained. He called this “happiness,” by which he did not mean anything more than a reasonable calm. “It seems like the best we can hope for. Somehow, though, even this seems like a utopian dream. Notions like good and evil always get in the way.
“Much of humankind pretends to be happy so they don’t have to face the fact that they’re not. Justice will prevail, they think, because they can’t stand to acknowledge the injustice in their own lives—our lives, I should say, and which we in turn inflict on others.
“Think of the wars waged back and forth, think of Israel and the Palestinians, think of Shiite and Sunni, think of Hindu and Muslim, think of the people in prison around the world because of false evidence, faulty testimony, misapplication of the law—” Louis stopped speaking abruptly and sipped his tea. “I’m sorry.”
Pauline smiled a not particularly happy smile.
From then on, Louis kept a tight rein on his interest in sorting out St. John Larrimer. He continued to read news reports about Larrimer’s crimes and followed the speculation in the press about his whereabouts, about whether and how and which authorities might actually get involved. But he let the file he had assembled sit by the computer, unopened. Pauline was right. There was nothing he could or should do.
Louis painted the shutters. He planted a new hedge of charme on the downhill side of the garden to protect it from the north wind. He planted rosebushes along the drive. He tended the beans and lettuce and the last tomatoes. It had been hot and dry, so he had to water the garden daily. The beans had mostly been eaten by rabbits, but the tomatoes had been especially good this year. Gardening seemed a much better pastime than St. John Larrimer. Until Jennifer called.
XIV
THANKS IN LARGE PART TO Louis, neither of his children had had a particularly easy life. He had allowed his career to keep him away from home for long periods when they were young. And even when he was home, he spent long days at the office. He blamed the demands of the work, but eventually he came to realize and admit that he was uncomfortable at home. He felt ill suited for family life. The best that could be said for his fathering was that he had, by his long absences, prepared his children for the day when he left for good.
To his credit, he worked later to reconnect with them. For years they would not answer his letters or take his phone calls. They were stubborn and wounded and would not relent. After all, they were his children, and he was nothing if not stubborn and relentless. And so the more they resisted his efforts, the more resolute he became. He wrote long letters about his life and sent little gifts that went unacknowledged. He knew of course that the past was past. But he was determined to make up as best he could for his absence from their earlier lives by being a presence in their lives from now on. And eventually they let him. First Michael, the younger of the two, and then Jennifer.
Louis thought that Jennifer had suffered particularly from his absence. If he had been there more, she might not have dropped out of college, married early, and then quickly divorced, or so he told himself. (His theoretical debates with himself about justice were of little use when it came to measuring his own culpability.) Jennifer might have gone off the rails—it had almost happened—but instead, after her divorce she had gone back to college and studied nursing. Louis was back in touch with her. He paid for her school. Then, to his delight, she started and ran—more or less single-handedly—the Arlington Nursing Clinic, a storefront walk-in medical center on Arlington Boulevard that served the indigent and poor of Arlington, Virginia. She found quarters, persuaded foundations and hospitals to underwrite the clinic, and got doctors and nurses to volunteer their time. The day the clinic opened, there was a line of people down the block. Jennifer’s tenacity filled Louis with admiration. He sent money for the clinic when he could. And eventually he and Jennifer became friends.
“Have you heard of someone called St. John Larrimer?” she asked.
“I know who he is,” said Louis. “I know what he’s done.”
“The clinic, Dad.” Louis heard her voice crack.
“What about it?”
“It closed.”
“It closed?” he said stupidly. He did not want to hear what was coming. “Why?”
“Larrimer, Dad. I don’t know. It’s these fucking times!”
“Tell me, Jennifer.”
One of the mainstays of support for Jennifer’s clinic had been Fred Cohen, a Virginia real estate developer. He owned the storefront that ho
used the Arlington Nursing Clinic, and he had allowed Jennifer to rent the space at a greatly reduced rate. He also donated funds for medical supplies. His contributions had amounted to a significant part of her budget.
But he had invested nearly all his money with Larrimer, and now he was ruined. Jennifer had tried to make up the budget losses though her hospital contacts, but she had been unable to find anyone who could take up the slack. And worst of all, because Fred Cohen couldn’t make his mortgage payments, the building that housed the clinic was in foreclosure.
“We have two weeks to get out.”
XV
LOUIS SAT ALONE at a table on the terrace in front of the Hôtel de France and waited. He wore a wool jacket and a scarf around his neck. His hands were wrapped around a coffee cup. His white hair fluttered in the breeze. Christoph came out to see whether he wanted anything more.
“No, Christoph. Thank you. I’m fine.”
Christoph inclined his head in the direction of the police station across the square to indicate that Renard had just come out.
Louis acknowledged Christoph’s gesture, but did not look.
Renard saw Louis and smiled to himself. Louis sat like that sometimes, alone on the hotel terrace, a coffee cup in front of him, when he wanted something from the policeman. He could have come to the office or called, but usually he preferred to sit until Renard came over. Louis fiddled with the coffee cup or looked at the rose climbing the hotel wall beside him. Renard wondered whether this odd behavior might be a holdover from his CIA days.
Louis had helped Renard with some of his cases, despite the fact that Louis held many of the laws and regulations Renard had sworn to uphold in low regard. Renard admitted—although not to his superiors, never to his superiors—that a partnership between a servant of the law, such as he was, and a man like Louis could be and in fact had been fruitful.
Louis had been on the wrong side of the law often enough. And each time, the wrong side had somehow ended up being the right side in terms of justice or morality. One read about such moments in novels. But it had been edifying to Renard to encounter such a situation face-to-face. Thanks to Louis, Renard had been instrumental in solving some cases involving assassination and kidnapping and international terrorism, big cases where great men were culpable and small-time villains turned out to be innocent of wrongdoing.
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