An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected

by Schäfer, Fred

  “I just can’t get a feeling for how things could hang together,” Mike said. “The determination with which these people are trying to kill me doesn’t make sense. They should know that I haven’t a clue about who they may be. I’m not a danger to them. If I know something which they don’t want me to know I wouldn’t even know what it could be; if that makes any sense. So why is it so important for them to see me dead?”

  “It feels almost like something personal.”

  “Yes, we talked about this before. There are plenty of individuals who hate me, but I can’t think of an organization that wants me dead. It feels a bit like a movie – sometimes I think a typical gangster organization of the 1940s or 1950s is behind this.”

  “An interesting thought.”

  “Interesting or entertaining?”

  “Interesting, I think.”

  “Do you know someone from the 1940s or 1950 that runs an organization and wants to see me dead? Bear in mind, we are now well into the twenty first century.”

  “I knew someone who ran that type of organization in the 1960s, but firstly he is dead and secondly I don’t think he would hate you.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, your padre.”

  It was almost midnight when Mike arrived at the place he and Christina now called home. They had arranged the installation of sophisticated security and surveillance systems inside and outside the apartment where they lived. The equipment was continuously connected online with their smart phones and with monitors in their cars. They no longer drove cars provided by the police department. They had their own bullet and explosive proof vehicles. Mike was able to organise them within two weeks and although it was obvious that they must have cost a fortune, Christina didn’t ask questions.

  When Mike arrived at their place he could see on the monitor in his car that Christina was still up. He announced himself and they embraced five minutes later.

  Neither of them felt tired and Mike opened a bottle of beer for himself and a bottle of red wine for Christina. He filled a glass with wine and passed it to her before he sat down beside her on the sofa.

  “Someone phoned me today and told me a bit about a part of my past,” Christina started, “– a part which I thought nobody except I knew anything about.”

  Mike didn’t seem surprised. He replied, “These things do happen. In fact, pretty much the same happened to me today.”

  “Want to share your past with me and I’ll share my past with you?”

  “Good idea,” Mike agreed.

  27

  Back in the hotel Tony asked Nancy why each of the painters asked her to choose two paintings, any paintings she really liked. Earlier in the L’Astrance she had explained, primarily for the benefit of commissaire Daniel Brice, that she was in possession of twelve paintings. She had bought one painting from each of the four painters and each painter had given her two paintings as a gift.

  “Initially the French authorities had planned five separate court cases,” she replied to Tony’s question. “They clearly wanted to play the painters and me against each other.”

  “Wouldn’t that also have worked in your favour? After all, you were only the middle man, so to say, and because of the smart contracts you had with the buyers, you must have felt pretty safe.”

  “That’s true. My lawyer told me exactly the same.”

  “But?”

  “I guess I felt sorry for the four guys. They had little or no money, they could not afford a good lawyer and it just didn’t seem right that they would end up in jail, which would have been a very real possibility.”

  “Am I discovering a new side of you?”

  “I don’t think so. In the final analysis I think I helped them for a selfish reason.”

  “What reason was that?”

  “I didn’t want to feel guilty. But that would have been exactly how I would have felt if I had been cleared by the court and they had ended up behind bars.”

  “How did your lawyer go about the whole business from then on?”

  “Well, my initial lawyer didn’t like it at all and I had to sack him. I then hired three lawyers, two women from a French law firm and one retired lawyer, a man from New York. They made a brilliant team and successfully argued in a preliminary hearing of my case that all five cases were legally intertwined and to treat them separately would almost inevitably lead to fragmented considerations and consequently substantially increase the risk of injustice.”

  “And the judge agreed?” Tony asked.

  “Everybody agreed: the judge, the four painters and the court appointed lawyer who was meant to represent the four men. The prosecutors, of course, didn’t agree, but that made no difference.”

  “What next?”

  “I instructed my team to also take on the defence of the four men, which they did. We ended up with a team of four lawyers: the two women, the court appointed lawyer and the retired lawyer from New York. Of course the elderly gentleman from NY had no say in the court room. However, without him I am not sure if everything would have ended as well as it did. He was the smartest of all of us and he was a strategic thinker, like I have never met before or since. He taught us how important it can be to deliberately lose arguments at the beginning and then win the big arguments, the ones that matter, at the end of the court case. If you lose an argument deliberately, he explained many times, it has to be because you missed something which then the other side could exploit. Later, if you want, you can come back to it, explain it and by doing so make it obvious that the other side did not really win the argument. They, in fact, cheated because they had been aware of your mistake and if they had been truly interested in justice, and not just in cheap advantages, they would not have exploited your error.”

  “Sounds very tricky to me.”

  “It is very tricky and can go awfully wrong. You need to know exactly what you are doing and, perhaps more importantly, you need to get the psychology right. You need to be able to predict how your opponents will react psychologically to whatever it is that you want them to believe.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that Americans are good at playing psychological games in a French court.”

  “Probably not, but he had been married to a French woman and had lived more than half of his life in Paris.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Oh yes. He is seventy five, still going strong and lives in the Village. His wife and I became friends and she invites me for dinner now and then. When we are back in New York I introduce you to them.”

  The next day at lunch in a bistro near Montmartre, Nancy asked suddenly and without introduction or warning, “Why are we in Paris? What are you running away from?”

  Tony didn’t show surprise; perhaps because he was happy with this question. The events of recent days had shown him a side of Nancy which he didn’t know, but which, on the other hand, also didn’t come to him unexpectedly. It was as if he had always understood that the woman, he had fallen in love with, was far more interesting than he already knew. Suddenly their relationship had become unequal; he knew too much about her and she didn’t know enough about him. Her sudden question, “What are you running away from?” presented an opportunity to correct an imbalance.

  He came straight to the point. “Remember that shooting in a bar in Queens Village? The man who was shot and killed was a publisher in his sixties and the man sitting beside him was a detective. He was also shot at but only injured.”

  “No, I might have heard about it, but someone gets murdered in New York just about every day, I guess. You hear about it, you read about and you forget it.”

  “True. That’s one aspect of our city.”

  “What is your involvement?”

  “My involvement was a rather involuntary and positive one. I probably saved the detective’s life.”

  Nancy looked at Tony questionably. Obviously, to save the life of a police officer is not a reason to run away from the police. Nancy said nothing and waited for
the story to continue.

  “There must have been something like a million surveillance cameras inside and outside the bar. The police, I am sure, could watch the shootings from just about every angle they wanted to watch it.”

  “The shootings and you!”

  “Exactly … and me. I was sitting opposite the man and the detective. When I noticed that two guys behind them were pulling guns out of their jackets, I yelled a warning and dropped to the floor. The detective, I believe, did the same. I saw him move. He reacted very quickly. I didn’t actually see all of it because I disappeared from sight as fast as I could. The publisher probably hardly moved and was an easy target for the gunmen.”

  “You did a good deed. I am sure the police thanked you for it.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “They didn’t? That’s a bit rude.”

  “They didn’t because they couldn’t. I left the bar immediately.”

  “Why? You are not exactly a shy man.”

  “No,” Tony agreed and smiled, “I am not exactly a shy man.”

  For two or three seconds there was silence, before Nancy asked, “Who or what are you?” Her voice was perfectly balanced, neutral and free of emotions.

  “In moments of perfect honesty, I am …”

  “Is now such a moment?” Christina interrupted. She had to be certain.

  “Yes, like right now at this very moment, this is a moment of perfect honesty, I call myself a reasonably successful con artist.”

  “Thank God!” Nancy replied with a sigh of relief. “For a moment or two I was wondering if I should be worried.”

  “No need to be worried,” Tony confirmed.

  “So you decided to get away from New York for a while because the police might be looking for you since they have your face on surveillance tapes. But, if anything, wouldn’t it have been better for you to stay in New York; close to the scene, just so that you know what’s going on?”

  “I am pretty certain they don’t have a picture of my real face in their databases.”

  “Sorry to interrupt. What face am I looking at right now?”

  “At the real one,” Tony said with a big grin.

  “Thank God once more; for a moment I was worried.”

  “Of course, I could have stayed in New York. There would have been no real risk. It was a gut feeling more than anything else that told me to stay away from the city for a while. I didn’t want to become paranoid, looking over my shoulder every five minutes and buying dozens of papers every day and looking for my photograph. Can you understand what I mean? I didn’t want to create a picture of imagined danger in my mind.”

  “Yes, I think I understand; but what about now? – here in Paris.”

  “Well, thanks to the diversion and excitement that you and commissaire Daniel Brice created since our arrival I’ve hardly had time to think about New York and myself.”

  “So everything is okay so far?”

  “So far, couldn’t be better.”

  28

  “Would you like me to start?” Mike asked.

  “Why you? Do you think your past is more interesting than mine?”

  “Oops. Sorry. Maybe we should toss a coin?”

  Christina kissed Mike and replied, “No, you first, I just wanted to see your reaction and cheer you up a bit.”

  “Hope my reaction didn’t disappoint.”

  “Never has, never will.”

  “OK then. As far as I know, I was indeed born in Italy and brought to New York by my mother when I was two months old.”

  “Wow! That woman that phoned your boss was right. Man, you are in a lot of trouble.”

  “Probably yes; this smells like trouble. The woman was right. Everything she said was correct and I have no idea who she is or could be.”

  “Fair enough, but just because your dad was a gangster who got killed a week after you were born and your mother brought you to America when you were two months old and somehow managed to arrange a fake New York birth certificate for you, that doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong.”

  “I agree. That doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong.”

  “Did you?”

  “Promise that you will still love me if I did?”

  “Did you kill in cold blood?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill anybody at all?”

  “Yes, but only legally in self defence in my job as policeman.”

  “That makes it easy. I herewith promise that I will still love you whatever you may have done wrong in your private life as the son of an Italian gangster.”

  “Great promise. Thank you.”

  “So what did you do wrong? This is exciting.”

  “You don’t exactly sound like a duty-bound policewoman?”

  “Don’t worry. I did lots of so called bad things myself. But you first. Stop stalling.”

  “Let’s make love first,” Mike suggested. “This may be the last time. Once you know all my sins, you may never want to share a bed with me.”

  “Oh no!” Christina laughed and hit him in jest, with her hands flat on his chest. “You are delaying your confession just to create some sort of artificial excitement. It’s not on. Tell me now who you are and afterwards we can have sex for as long as you want.”

  “Another great promise. Thank you.”

  “Well?”

  “I have a bit over thirty million dollars in various overseas bank accounts.”

  “Damn it! That’s more than I have.”

  “I can give you some of mine so that we both have the same. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Christina replied. She had trouble keeping a straight face.

  “I have two specialities,” Mike continues. “I am good at blackmailing rich people, mainly politicians, bankers and real estate brokers who have accumulated their wealth illegally.”

  “So far so good.”

  “And in recent years I have also specialised in helping disadvantaged and poor people who fell foul of the law through no real fault of their own.”

  “Sounds tricky.”

  “It can be tricky,” Mike agreed.

  After a few seconds Christina asked, “Did you help that woman to escape? – you know that woman who killed her husband in Williamsburg ”

  “Yes, I did. She now lives abroad, far away from New York.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I thought you would be.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because I know a bit about your past. Before I agreed that you would become my partner, I arranged for someone to have a thorough look into what you have been doing in your private life, especially since you joined the drug enforcement agency.”

  “You didn’t arrange for someone from Internal Investigations to snoop around in my private life?” For a moment Christina looked worried.

  “No. They wouldn’t have found anything. You were too smart for them. I have a friend who is good at doing this kind of background investigations and who owed me a favour.”

  “Jesus Christ! We live in a crooked world.”

  “Yes and no. In my opinion, crooked looking things are not always crooked.”

  “You try to explain that to a judge one day.”

  “I hope I’ll never have to do that,” Mike replied. He looked serious. He knew that in such a situation he might not be able to win.

  “How long did it take you to extract nearly thirty million dollars from America’s politicians, bankers and real estate brokers?”

  “I extracted four million from them; by the way, not only from Americans; that didn’t take too long; six or seven years. I gave most of it to my mother who is an investment genius.”

  “Shares and real estate?”

  “No real estate, or maybe I should say, no longer real estate, as far as I know; shares yes, but her real speciality is art and antiques.”

  “Who was your most prominent victim?”

  “Well, let’s see … A bit over three years ago, you wi
ll remember the headlines when a billionaire by the name of Terrence Richter decided to join the race for the position of mayor of New York?”

  “Free guns for everybody?”

  “Exactly. He promised free guns for everybody, except for gay people, in the event that the people of New York entrusted him with the position of mayor. He came out of nowhere, hardly anybody had heard of him and within a few weeks he spent millions of dollars on advertising.”

  “He was the most right wing contender for the mayor’s job I’d ever heard of.”

  “To call him right wing is an understatement. He was a Nazi fanatic. At about the same time when he started to run for New York’s highest political office, he was investigated by the IRS for tax irregularities. The irregularities were minor ones and probably wouldn’t have harmed him politically. However, a friend of mine at the IRS told me that he was pretty certain that the man also had shady dealings with people in politics, but there was not enough evidence against him to succeed in a court case. He provided me with everything he knew and I agreed with him that there was no point in pursuing this matter further unless something entirely new became known. Ideally a document, my friend suggested. There is nothing in writing, I said. He wouldn’t be that stupid.

  “I deliberately gave my friend the impression that I was not interested. I had an idea, but didn’t want him to know about it. One of the politicians involved was council member Neil McCormack. He was renowned for being a perfectionist. Everything had to be documented; it is said that he hardly made a phone call without minuting the call afterwards and mailing a copy of the minutes to the person he had spoken to on the phone.

  “He lived in an apartment building in Manhattan, Upper East Side, 80th Street if I remember correctly. I arranged for a lady to break into his apartment and take photos of every document she could find that contained the name Terrence Richter.”

  “You arranged for a woman to do this job?” Christina asked surprised.

  “Of course! If you want someone to break in somewhere without leaving a trace, use an experienced lady burglar.”