The Capitalist

by Peter Steiner

  “Anyway, when he’s in the US, which he is right now, he hangs out at the Odessa Grill. He stays with a cousin, Stanislav Borgoi—1077 Ocean View Avenue. The cousin owns a clothing store. The cousin seems legit. Adropov likes to keep a low profile, which isn’t easy for a guy his size. He’s big. And mean looking. Have you seen him?”

  “Yes,” said Louis. “He is big.”

  “You think he’s dangerous?” said Bruno.

  “He could be,” said Louis.

  “I’m not asking for myself, but Lorraine…”

  XXXVI

  DIMITRI ADROPOV LIVED IN PLAIN sight. The FBI knew where he was, the CIA too. Dimitri knew about their “hidden” cameras above the bar and in the men’s room in the Odessa Grill, where he spent his afternoons drinking Turkish coffee and playing dominoes. There were cameras in Cousin Slava’s apartment too. Good old Slava, he didn’t have a clue. Dimitri was pleased to have the camera surveillance; he acted as though he didn’t know it was there. Being watched afforded him a kind of liberty, as long as he did nothing illicit on camera. The surveillance tapes and recordings offered him ready-made alibis and certified his innocence.

  They couldn’t watch him all the time, of course. He was not that high on anyone’s interest list at the moment, and he wanted to keep it that way. Nobody followed him when he left the Odessa or his cousin’s apartment. He had checked with his FBI sources. So when it came time to engage in activities the authorities might frown on, Dimitri conducted his business on the move—usually walking—using stolen cell phones, which he discarded frequently.

  Dimitri had tracked down a former EisenerBank trader right here in New York. He had not only promised to allow the guy to go on living, but he now paid him a monthly retainer. And while the ex-banker had managed to get the computer codes and routing numbers for Larrimer’s old accounts, and for Jeremy Gutentag’s London accounts too, the numbers were all essentially useless. Larrimer had moved his money around to banks whose expertise, presumably, was hiding money. He had surrounded his millions with an apparently impenetrable layer of firewalls and passcodes. Dimitri was no closer to Larrimer’s money than he had ever been. And it was a small comfort that nobody else was either.

  “But how is this possible?” Dimitri hissed into the phone. “How he can hide so much money?” He had just come out of the Q train’s Sheepshead Bay station and was walking east.

  “If you get me Larrimer’s personal codes—” said the banker.

  “And Gutentag, where he has money?”

  “You get me his codes—”

  “How I can get codes? I pay you lots of money for what?” Dimitri closed the phone.

  He turned south on Nineteenth Street. He opened the phone again and poked in the number of his FBI contact. “FBI has Larrimer’s bank codes? I need bank codes.”

  “They’re not available to me if we have them, which I doubt.”

  “What good is FBI then?”

  “I have got something for you, though,” said the FBI man. “Louis Morgon, the old guy that ran into you? He’s definitely not CIA. He was, but then he was dismissed from the CIA back in the seventies. And he was charged as a terrorist just a few years back.”

  “So, now you telling me, old man is terrorist? This is bullshit.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m telling you. The charges were dismissed and his file was sealed.”

  “Sealed?”

  “I can’t get it,” said the FBI man. “By the way, he lives in France.” He gave Dimitri the address.

  Dimitri stopped and turned around. “Where he is now?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s after the money like you. He tried to wire money to Larrimer’s old account. I’m guessing he hoped it would be forwarded and he’d get his account number. It didn’t work.”

  “Why in fuck he mess with me, this old man!” Without waiting for the answer, Dimitri jammed the phone shut. He looked around once more before letting the phone slide into a trash can as he hurried past.

  Louis watched him walk a good three blocks before retrieving the phone.

  XXXVII

  LOUIS HAD CALLED WITH THE news that he would be in Washington the next day, and Peter had agreed to meet him. But now as they sat opposite each other in a little Georgetown restaurant waiting for their salads, Peter wondered why. They were even, he owed Louis nothing, and the guy was a pain in the ass. Peter scowled at the cell phone Louis had just handed him. “This is the little present you mentioned? You came all the way to Washington to give me this?”

  “No, I came to Washington to visit my children,” said Louis.

  “So why is this interesting?” He waved the phone in front of Louis’s face.

  “It was thrown away by Dimitri Adropov.”

  “Who?”

  “The Russian. It’s how he’s doing business these days. Do you know where he is?”

  “We have him under surveillance. Of course we know where he is.”

  “And you know who he’s talking to?”

  “Cell phones make that a little tricky.”

  “That’s the reason for my little present. The last call he made before he ditched that phone was to someone inside the US government. The FBI, I think. And the call before that was to a banker. He also called some numbers in London, looking for Gutentag, I’m guessing. He’s trying to get to Larrimer’s money.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me,” said Louis.

  “And you know this how?”

  “I was tailing him. I saw him make the calls, then ditch the phone. I tried the numbers in the phone. He got some interesting calls too.”

  Peter looked skeptical. “And how did you find him?”

  Louis was not inclined to bring Bruno or Emilio Gramicci into the conversation. “He’s easy to find. It should be easy to find out who he was talking to. I’d do it if I were you. You’ve got a traitor in your midst.” Their lunch did not go any better after that. Both men were happy when the check came. They split it.

  * * *

  Michael and Rosita got up from the porch swing as Louis pulled the rental car into the driveway. Louis and Michael embraced and clapped each other on the back. Louis kissed Rosita. “And the baby?” he said.

  She smiled and held her belly between her hands.

  “Jenny’s in the house,” said Michael.

  The table was set for five. Jennifer came out of the kitchen and embraced her father. “Thanks, Dad, for all your support.” She kissed his cheek.

  “Any news on the clinic?”

  “Soon, I hope. Mr. Cohen has a building he owns where a ground-floor space just opened up. He’s been great. The rent will actually be less than the old place. And he’s helping with renovations. We’re working out the last details. It’s in a rougher neighborhood, but that’s where our clients live. If everything comes together, we can open in a month. And look who’s here, Dad.”

  Jennifer stepped aside, and there was Zaharia. He had gotten tall. He had to lean down a bit to receive Louis’s kisses on one cheek and then the other. “I hear your English is perfect.”

  “Pretty good,” said Zaharia.

  The house filled with wonderful smells, and Michael urged everyone toward the dining table. Rosita had made what she called weeping stew, since the recipe called for chopping up six large onions. Michael had done the weeping, she said. When the onions were soft, you added rice, chicken stock, chunks of lamb, cilantro, and a few mild chilies and let it cook on a low flame. And there were braised Brussels sprouts with slivers of almonds and chestnuts in a buttery mustard sauce. It was almost midnight before Louis left for his hotel.

  He was back the next morning right after breakfast. “Let’s go for a walk, Dad,” said Michael. It was a crisp day. The sky was streaked with narrow clouds whose shadows passed swiftly across the city. Louis had thought he would remember his way around Washington, but he didn’t. They walked through Rock Creek Park then climbed the hill onto Connecticut Avenue and then walked all the way down t
o Lafayette Square. Louis stopped and gazed at the White House. “I was inside many years ago,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Jenny said you’re trying to do something about that guy … not Madoff,” said Michael.

  “Larrimer,” said Louis.

  “That’s him. So what are you trying to do?”

  Louis tried to give his usual vague evasion about justice and retribution.

  Michael stopped walking. “What does that mean?”

  The question made Louis uncomfortable. Dealing with a swindler had already drawn him into swindles of his own. This was nothing new for Louis, but the uncomfortable feeling was new. The doubts and uncertainty were new. Louis was a few years into his seventies now. He was more careful going up and down stairs. He had always driven slowly, but now he drove slower still. He held himself to one glass of his beloved Médard Chinon a day. He went to bed earlier and slept longer. Despite his walking and gardening and other exercise, frailty and caution had infiltrated his daily habits. And, not surprisingly, caution had infiltrated his thinking too. He tried to resist, but it was inevitable.

  Louis was more aware than he had ever been of unintended consequences, of what military types were fond of calling “collateral damage.” He knew there were those entirely innocent of whatever misdeeds he was intent on punishing who, their innocence notwithstanding, might be caught in the line of his fire. Said a different way, he recognized that no matter how virtuous his intentions, the stones he cast into the pool sent ripples outward in all directions, and somewhere scattered here and there were people barely able to keep their noses above the surface. Without having played any part in what had gone before, they would be swamped by those spreading ripples. Louis knew nothing of Abinaash Chandha or Mohan and Golapi Kapoor or Irina Adropov. In fact, even the villains like Adropov and Jeremy Gutentag and even Larrimer were essentially unknown to him. But he knew they were not just villains, they were human beings, with aspects of innocence alongside their guilt.

  When Louis had been in fifth grade, he had been required to memorize population numbers, and while nothing else from the fifth grade had stayed with him, for some reason the numbers had. The United States: one hundred fifty million. Russia: one hundred million. China: five hundred fifty million. The earth: two and a half billion. There had been space between people then. But now much of the space seemed to have disappeared. There was global this and global that. Sneezing here caused a breakout of disease there. There was an epidemic of interconnectedness that seemed sometimes, at least to the seventy-plus Louis Morgon, to render the concept of individual and autonomous action a thing of the past.

  “Dad, what does that mean?” said Michael again.

  Louis turned and looked at his son as though he had only just noticed he was there.

  Michael repeated himself. “What do you mean when you talk about retribution and justice?”

  “For now it means nothing, Michael. I don’t know what I mean. I can’t find a way to him. I mean, I think I can get to him, but I don’t think I can get to his money. And even if I could—”

  Michael did not have Louis’s reservations. “Well, you can find out where the money is, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if you can find it, you can probably get it.”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  “All you need is someone to get through all the firewalls and that sort of thing. Someone who can move the money without Larrimer even realizing it’s being moved.”

  “You’re talking about fraud, Michael.”

  “Only in the legal sense,” said Michael. He laughed, and when Louis didn’t laugh with him, he added, “That’s what you would say, Dad.”

  “The real question is, is it possible?” said Louis, ignoring Michael’s implication.

  “Of course it’s possible,” said Michael.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just computer stuff, Dad. Software, breaking codes, that kind of thing.”

  “You don’t do that sort of thing, do you, Michael?”

  “Dad, you’re so thick sometimes.” Michael put his arm across Zaharia’s shoulders.

  “Zaharia?”

  “Do you remember what Zaharia studies and where he goes to school?”

  “Of course I do,” said Louis, beaming proudly. “Computer science at MIT.”

  XXXVIII

  ZAHARIA HAD BEEN LIVING IN his grandmother’s house overlooking the port of Algiers when his teacher had said to him, “Read books, Zaharia. Everything worth knowing is in books.” The teacher probably did not remember in the next minute what he had said, but the words were as if branded in Zaharia’s brain. He had been searching for an explanation of his miserable life, and he took the teacher’s words literally. If he read books, he would discover why his mother was a drug addict and prostitute, he would learn why his father had scraped along as a petty criminal and then been murdered before his eyes.

  Ali, an elderly man, opened his door to see the neighbor boy looking at him. “You have books,” said Zaharia. “I see them through the window on my way to school.”

  “Yes,” said Ali. “I have books.”

  “My teacher says everything is in books.”

  “Your teacher is right.” After a moment’s hesitation, Ali invited Zaharia inside.

  His apartment was small. But every centimeter of every wall was covered, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves. Even in the kitchen and above the door and the windows there were shelves packed with books. And where there were no shelves, there were stacks of books. Ali explained to the boy that he was a bibliophile. “It’s Greek,” Zaharia explained to his grandmother later that afternoon. “It means a lover of books. I’m a bibliophile.”

  Ali showed Zaharia where the house key was hidden under the geranium pot. “Come anytime,” he said. “Take any books that interest you. It is a shame to see them dying on the shelf. And a joy to see them used.”

  Zaharia came after school and on weekends and read and read and read, book after book. Consumed would have been the better word for it. He did not exactly find answers to the questions he had about his mother and father. But he found bits of understanding of life that promised, someday, taken together with other bits of understanding, to lead him to answers. By the time Zaharia finished with a book, it looked limp and depleted, like an exhausted lover. History, geography, religion, literature, art, and mathematics. Especially mathematics.

  Zaharia read mathematics the way others read the newspaper. Mathematics, it turned out, was his natural tongue; it spoke directly to him, unmediated, unfiltered, needing no translation. Ali watched all this with growing astonishment and joy. One day he took Zaharia to see a friend, a university mathematician named Mafouz, who immediately recognized Zaharia’s gifts.

  Mafouz pressed Zaharia into the chair in front of his computer, the first Zaharia had ever seen up close. At first the boy watched the screen and poked gingerly at this key and then that. In a matter of hours, the entire theory and structure of artificial intelligence had become apparent to him. He doped out the machine’s language and began programming it. Soon he was designing simple programs, then more and more difficult ones. He posited problems that needed solving and created the algorithms to solve them.

  The next time Mafouz saw Ali, he pronounced Zaharia a computer genius. “I have never seen anything like it,” he said. “He must go to America, and in America he must go to Boston, to MIT.” Mafouz wrote to a former student who was now a professor at MIT. A scholarship offer for the fall semester came by return mail. Prodded by Mafouz and Ali and also Louis, who had been his earliest benefactor, Zaharia accepted the MIT scholarship.

  The fall semester was still months away. Zaharia had by now read every book on mathematics in Ali’s library. And Mafouz had taught Zaharia everything he could without the resources of a university.

  “What you need now is a real-life computer problem,” said Mafouz. “Something that tests all your skills.”<
br />
  “And,” Ali added, “something that will make you think on your feet.”

  It so happened, that the news just then was full of the ferment and upheaval that two and a half years later would explode into the Arab Spring. Tunisia and Egypt were already having regular strikes and sit-ins. And Iran was seeing larger and larger street demonstrations against the regime’s oppressive control. Even in Algeria there were demonstrations and protests. They were quickly suppressed, and rarely got into the papers, but everybody knew.

  All these various uprisings were uncoordinated, and so their suppression could easily be accomplished by a handful of police waving batons or firing tear gas. But why, Zaharia wondered, couldn’t they be coordinated? Why could tyrannical governments so easily control the flow of information?

  He saw that others had been asking themselves the same questions on the Internet. Before long he found himself looking for digital paths around the Algerian government’s Internet restrictions and firewalls. He began using his computer—by now he had his own laptop—to disrupt the censorship and repression organized by the regime against the people. He shared his methods with others, and they shared theirs with him. Of course he could not tell Ali or Mafouz anything about his project. They would have been horrified.

  “I’ll explain what I’m doing, once I get results,” he told them, and they were wise enough not to inquire further.

  “And were you able to disrupt government censorship and help organize protests?” said Louis. The very idea amazed him. They were sitting on a bench in front of the Capitol Building looking down the great expanse of the National Mall.

  “It wasn’t just me. There were a lot of people involved. There still are.”

  Louis looked at Michael. Michael shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  “But a bank?” said Louis.

  “A bank might be harder.” Zaharia smiled.