Table of Contents
Part One: In Moscow
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: Private Banker
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Three: Russian Desk
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Four: The Magnificent Five
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part Five: Bull Market
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Six: Payback
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
About the Author
The Banker Who Died
Copyright © 2019 by Matthew A. Carter, Garin Ray Publishing House
All characters and events in this eBook, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Editing by The Pro Book Editor
Interior Design by IAPS.rocks
Cover Design by Garin Ray Publishing House
ISBN: 978-1-7330500-0-5
Main category—Fiction/Thrillers
Other category—Fiction/Thrillers/Crime
First Edition
Part One:
In Moscow
Chapter 1
Stanley McKnight stood in front of the fogged-up bathroom mirror, trying for maybe the hundredth time in his life to make out the worn letters on the blade of a razor. That straight razor was all he had left of his great-grandfather. A family heirloom, but a useless one—he had never learned to shave with it. Stanley’s grandfather, however, had held to that morning ritual and used the razor all his life. Even on his deathbed in San Francisco General Hospital, he had nearly given the Russian Orthodox priest a heart attack by pulling it out from under his pillow during his own last rites. Struggling to open it with fumbling fingers, he tried to say something, but all that came out was a bubble of saliva from his blackened lips. The priest shrieked and started frantically crossing himself, the sleeves of his cassock flapping like wings. Stanley’s mother, standing beside him, had taken the razor from her father and handed it to Stanley.
“He just wants to be shaved with this,” she reassured the priest, addressing him as “Batyushka” or “Father” in the Russian style.
Stanley liked the word, which he hadn’t heard before. Many years later, when he was studying Russian at Berkeley, he learned another name for a Russian Orthodox priest, “Pop,” which he thought sounded much funnier.
Stanley sighed and opened the bedroom door. He was instantly hit with the smell of cigarette smoke. Just as he expected, his wife, Christine, was still in bed, wrapped in a sheet, the little breakfast table strewn with her usual mess. She was holding a cigarette in one hand and a large cup of coffee in the other.
“My coffee’s gone completely cold. Will you make me some more?”
“You’ll have to make it yourself.” Stanley opened the cover of the secretary desk, pulled out a narrow drawer, and slid the razor inside. “I’m already running late.”
“But you found time to play with that stupid razor of yours.” Christine flicked her cigarette ash into the cup.
“Would you please quit smoking in bed?” Stanley closed the lid of the desk, turned the key, thought for a moment, and then put it in his jacket pocket. “If you flew thousands of miles here just to pick a fight…”
“Darling, you’ve forgotten our fights already. They all start the same way—with you criticizing. You’re a drag, is what you are. Don’t smoke in bed. What’s going to happen if I smoke in bed?”
“You could start a fire, for one. And anyway, I don’t like the smell.”
“Damn it, Stanley. Who’s falling asleep? I’ve got a plane to catch too. I have to be out of here in forty minutes.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Stanley.
“I told you about it yesterday. Several times. Surely, you didn’t get that drunk on three glasses of wine?”
“Not from three glasses, no.”
“You see! There you go. You never agree with me. About anything. You argue—you always have to argue.”
Stanley fell silent and started rocking from foot to foot. This sparring was pointless. They could go back and forth this way for hours without ever getting around to what they really needed to say.
His cell phone vibrated. A hoarse male voice informed him in German that his taxi was waiting downstairs.
“I have to head out,” said Stanley.
“Ok, bye.” Christine pulled another cigarette out of the pack, leaned back on the pillow, and lit up. “Be careful in Russia. I’ve heard it can be dangerous. Especially for such a handsome Yankee.”
“I’ll try my best. When are you planning to fly over to see me again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like Zurich. It’s a dreary, boring place. I don’t understand how anyone can live here.”
“I work here.”
“So I’ve heard. Work comes ahead of everything else with you.”
“Goodbye, Christine.”
“Auf wiedersehen!” Christine said derisively, but then she added: “Have a good flight.”
Stanley couldn’t get their parting out of his mind the whole half-hour drive to Zurich’s Kloten Airport. Each time he left his wife, he was genuinely relieved. But when he saw her after a long separation, whether she warned him in advance or just showed up unexpectedly, as she had this time, he felt almost happy.
At the airport, Stanley checked his bags and walked past endless fast-food restaurants to zone D. Before he reached his departure gate, he stopped in front of a bar called the Montreux Jazz Café.
A slightly disheveled man of about fifty in a dark-blue suit and brightly colored
tie sat at a table facing a television on the wall. The man was finishing his beer as he mechanically scanned through email on a BlackBerry, a half smile never leaving his face. The world is my oyster, that grin seemed to say. As he scrolled, he would glance covertly at the women passing by, raising his glass slightly in salutation and muttering something to himself every time he saw a pretty one without a companion.
“Isn’t it a bit early for drinking?” Stanley asked, putting his travel bag down on a chair and sitting on the one beside it.
“Where we’re going, at this hour of the day they’re already drinking vodka.” The man unwillingly detached himself from his phone and looked through Stanley at yet another pretty girl walking past. “The flight’s delayed. How about a beer?”
“Sparkling water, please. Ice on the side,” Stanley said to the Indian waiter who had walked up.
“Another Heineken for me, and make it quick.” When the waiter left, Pierre Lagrange, the senior managing director of the bank Laville & Cie, finally transferred his full attention to Stanley. Lagrange regarded him with what seemed to be a mixture of arrogance and distrust, although Stanley might simply be imagining things. He was about six feet tall and heavyset, with a disproportionately large head, short gray hair brushed back, and the friendly smile of a cannibal. His figure inspired fear and respect in the bank’s employees.
New beer in hand, Lagrange tugged the knot of his tie to one side and unfastened the top button of his shirt beneath it. The tie wagged its tail, briefly flashing a Hermès label to the world.
“How’s your new life in Zurich? Is everything to your satisfaction?” Lagrange asked more amiably, staring down at his BlackBerry again.
“Everything’s just fine. I rented an apartment recently, and I’m enjoying the city.”
“You’re enjoying Zurich?” Lagrange wheezed slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on his phone. “I’ve never heard such nonsense. Zurich’s a shitty little village, a rest home for the elderly. You can enjoy Paris. You can enjoy New York. You can enjoy Hong Kong, Havana, and even Moscow, if it comes to that. But Zurich’s like an old mother-in-law who tosses a bit of cash your way on holidays and promises you a good inheritance when she dies, if you behave yourself. You hate her, but your greed is stronger!”
Stanley shrugged and stared at the screen, which was showing a Billie Holiday concert with the sound off. Lagrange came from a family of French aristocrats, and he regarded the world with the superiority of one of the elect. He had been exiled to Zurich as a result of some scheming among the bank’s partners, sent from the Geneva headquarters to expand the Russian client department.
“Did you have time to prepare for Moscow?” Lagrange quickly finished his beer and ordered a double Scotch. “I’m putting a lot of faith in you, my friend. Russian clients are a particular breed, and they need a nonstandard approach. But if you do well here, you have a good future ahead of you.”
Five months earlier Stanley had received a call from a headhunter he knew, a man he met occasionally at the pub. The headhunter had suggested that he drop everything in London, including his career as an investment adviser with Goldman Sachs, to move to Switzerland.
The name of the bank Laville & Cie had meant little to him. A classic private Swiss bank specializing in the ultra-rich, it was one of the top-ten Swiss banks in terms of assets. Founded in 1878, it had a long and glorious history, and new clients needed a minimum of $20 million to open an account there.
Stanley had immediately been offered a role as a senior investment adviser, the title of director, a “welcome bonus” of 250,000 francs, a fixed salary of 350,000 francs, and a guaranteed bonus of the same amount at the end of the first year. Taking taxes into account, it was a lot more than he could have counted on from Goldman in London. He accepted at once.
Exactly two months after Stanley had started there, Lagrange called him into his office. August Landmesser, the account manager for Russian clients, had been killed in an accident. His Maserati had rammed through a barrier on a mountain highway near Lake Geneva and plunged into the lake.
Somebody in the bank had to take over Landmesser’s Russian clients, and Lagrange had decided that Stanley McKnight was the man for the job. “First of all, you’re not Russian, even with your roots, and Russian clients prefer foreigners as their private bankers,” Lagrange explained. “But you do speak good Russian. Second of all, I know that Goldman has to have toughened you up, and you need balls of steel to work with fucking Russians. So, do you have the balls for this, McKnight?”
Lagrange had little liking for Russian client managers in general, and the female variety in particular—he thought they lacked professionalism. These latter were generally Russian or Ukrainian women who had married Swiss men in the ’90s, or, as Lagrange called them, “babushka bankers.” The babushka bankers were quite useful at the start of the new millennium, when the influx of Russian money into Switzerland was at its peak. They didn’t have to apply for permits to work in there, and they were fluent in German or French; Swiss banks hired them as client managers en masse, despite their total lack of banking experience.
McKnight was quickly transferred from his position as an investment adviser to that of client relationship manager responsible for acquiring new clients from Russia and the post-Soviet states. The main difference in the role was that now he had targets, specifically, to bring in $250 million in net new assets per year.
As an investment adviser, Stanley’s work had a narrow focus: he consulted with clients on their securities portfolios and nothing more. No fuss, no muss. Now he was in a role where he had to attract new clients, to essentially be a hunter, the hardest possible job in the private banking industry.
There was some good news, though—he didn’t have to start from scratch. Management bestowed a dozen of Landmesser’s clients on Stanley and gave the rest to his new colleagues at the Russian desk.
Boarding for their flight to Moscow was announced, and a long line formed at the gate.
“Damn it, where is that little Swiss shit?” Lagrange rattled the ice in his glass, leisurely sipping the rest of his Scotch.
A young investment adviser named Bernard Mueller, assigned to work with Stanley, was supposed to be flying with them.
“I can’t believe it—did he oversleep, or what? Anyway, Stanley, let’s go. It’s time to board.”
The packed business-class cabin smelled of strong liquor. The stewardesses, in their dark, formal uniforms and bright scarves, glided silently between the rows. When one of them placed a glass of Macallan in front of him with a perfunctory smile, Lagrange took a gulp and proclaimed, with an enthusiasm born of Scotch, “Stanley, you have no idea the opportunities that are coming your way! You’ll be thanking your lucky stars that we plucked you out of the Firm and gave you the chance to work with us!”
“To tell you the truth, I had to think long and hard before accepting this job.”
Stanley was not, however, being fully honest here. He had not been enthused at the prospect of waiting around in London until a promotion finally came his way. It would have been two years at the very least, assuming that nothing happened to him before then, of course, along the lines of, say, losing his mind sitting in an office twenty hours a day. That offer from Laville & Cie had looked like a welcome way out.
“I had to think long and hard,” Lagrange repeated, a mocking edge to his voice. “Do you know how many people we hired to the Russian desk last year? No? Not a single one. If it hadn’t been for old Landmesser meeting a sad end, you would still be selling investment funds to retirees from Monaco. But”—Lagrange paused for emphasis, taking a sip of Scotch, and continued in a loud whisper—“the stars were on your side.”
“You’re probably right that I am lucky to be here.”
“Do you want to have an easy life?” Lagrange asked, suddenly grabbing Stanley’s hand and squeezing it tightly. “Then always stay with the
herd and lose yourself in the herd. Thus spoke Lagrange!” The Frenchman, already quite drunk, raised his glass and gave a booming laugh, frightening the stewardess. That laughter quickly turned into a rasping cough and back again to mirth.
Stanley freed his hand, wondering how to handle his boss in this state.
“Ok, let us speak plainly.” Lagrange went on in a calmer voice, seeming to pull himself together. “All the more so since the Russians you’ll be working with don’t like to beat around the bush, either. But why am I telling you this? You’re Russian. You should know.”
“Well, it’s my great-grandfather who was Russian—I’m an American,” Stanley reminded him.
“I had one client from Russia try to convince me that even a single drop of Russian blood changes the entire body. The blood of the Russian tsars, for example, was no more than one twelfth Russian, but they were no less beloved by the Russian people for that.”
“I might quibble with the ‘beloved’ part,” Stanley interjected, looking out the window to the snowy Swiss mountains below. “A hundred years ago those same people staged a revolution and butchered not only the tsar, but his whole family. Clearly not an act of love.”
“That’s just family drama. Lenin was getting revenge for the death of his brother,” Lagrange retorted, undeterred. “And anyway, all things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. I, for one, am convinced that it’s your great-grandfather who will help us set up good relations with our Russian clients. How did he end up in California, by the way?”
“My great-grandfather? He was a captain in the White Army. He was in Siberia when it became clear which way the wind was blowing, so he made it onto the last ship out of Vladivostok.”
“He must have had a rough time of it?”
“From what my grandmother told me, he found his feet pretty quickly. He was a skilled electrical engineer, and he spoke English, so he got hired by the Bell Telephone Company. And later married an American.”
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