Sprecher was listening intently to the Pasha. He nodded several times while bouncing a pencil off his thigh. Without warning he erupted in a flurry of disparate movements. The phone was tucked under the chin, the chair rolled backward toward the cabinet. Elbows flew, oaths were whispered. Finally an orange file was extracted and laid upon the desk. Still unsatisfied by his exertions, he lowered his head to search, along with five busy fingers, through the second drawer of his desk. Aha! Victory at last. He had found his treasure, in this case a mint green form bearing the words “Transfer of Funds” in bold capital letters, and now he waved it over his head as if he were a newly crowned Olympic champion.
Sprecher placed the phone to his mouth and took a deep breath before speaking. “I confirm that you wish to transfer the entire amount currently in the account, twenty-six million U.S. dollars, to the schedule of banks as listed per matrix three.”
The orange file was opened, consulted, then a five-digit operational code entered into the computer. Sprecher studied the screen as if he had discovered the Rosetta stone. “Twenty-two banks are listed. I will note that the transfer is to be urgent. The money is to be wired out before the end of business this day. Without fail. Yessir, I am aware that you have my bank reference. Not to worry. Thank you, sir. Good-bye, sir.”
With a sigh, Sprecher laid the phone in its cradle. “The Pasha has spoken. So shall his will be done.”
“Sounds like a demanding client.”
“Demanding? More like dictatorial. Know what his message to Cerruti was? “Get back to work.’ There’s a good chap for you.” Sprecher laughed as if he couldn’t believe the client’s gall, but a moment later his features darkened. “It’s not his manner that bothers me. It’s his voice. Bloody cold. No emotion whatsoever. Like a man without a shadow. This is one client whose orders we follow to a T.”
Nick was thinking that he wanted nothing to do with this difficult client. Let Cerruti handle him. Then he remembered the few words of Sprecher’s conversation he had overheard earlier.It will take fifty thousand more to bring me over to your side of the fence. I’m not leaving for a nickel less. Call it a risk premium. You fellows are new at this sort of thing. If, in fact, Sprecher had been talking about leaving the bank, it might fall to Nick to handle the Pasha in Cerruti’s absence. The thought made him sit up a little straighter.
Sprecher asked, “Did you pay attention to the procedure I followed?”
Nick said he had. “No information given to the client until an account number is received and the account holder’s identity confirmed.”
“Bravo. That is step one, and I might add, the most important one.”
“Step two, remove the client’s dossier from that filing cabinet.”
Turning his chair, Sprecher dragged a finger across the files visible in the open drawer. “The dossiers are filed in numerical order. No names, remember. Inside are his exact wire instructions. The Pasha uses this account strictly as a temporary way station. Money gets wired in at ten or eleven in the morning. He calls at three to check that it’s here, then tells us to get rid of it by five.”
“He doesn’t keep any money on deposit here?”
“Cerruti whispered about him having over two hundred million at the bank—in shares and in cash. I’ve looked like hell for it, but Cerberus won’t reveal a lick of information, will you, darling?” Sprecher patted the top of the gray computer monitor. “Uncle Peter doesn’t have high enough clearance.”
“Cerberus?”Nick asked.
“Our management information system. Guards our client’s financial information like the three-headed hound at the gates to hell. Each employee has access only to those accounts the proper fulfillment of his job demands he see. I can look at the accounts in FKB4, but no others. The Pasha may have two hundred million dollars stashed away, but someone somewhere”—Sprecher jabbed a thumb toward the ceiling, indicating the Fourth Floor, where the top executives of the bank resided—”doesn’t want me to see it.”
“Do the Pasha’s transfers always involve such a large sum?” Nick’s curiosity was piqued by the likelihood, however remote, that one day he’d be on the receiving end of that phone call.
“Same instructions twice each week. The amounts vary but are never less than ten million. The highest I’ve seen in eighteen months was thirty-three million. Scoot your chair over here and let’s look at his account together. The Pasha has set up seven matrices, each of which specifies the amounts we are to wire—as a percentage of the total sum in the account—and the institutions where they’re to go. Look here: matrix three.” Sprecher slid the orange file closer to Nick and peeled back the pages, stopping at a pink sheet. “We type each matrix on a different color sheet for easy differentiation. Matrix one is yellow, two is blue, three is pink. Cerberus has them all memorized, but we always double-check with the hard copy. Procedure.”
Nick ran a finger along the list of banks: Kreditanstalt, Vienna; Bank of Luxembourg; Commerz Bank, Frankfurt; Norske Bank, Oslo. A numbered account was listed next to each bank. Nowhere on the paper was there an individual’s name. “He’s certainly well traveled.”
“The money is, that’s for sure. The Pasha chooses a different matrix each time he calls, and never in order. He skips around. But his instructions are always the same. Confirm the balance of his account. Transfer the entire amount to anywhere from twenty-two to thirty-three financial institutions around the world.”
“I guess I shouldn’t ask who he is, or why he’s transferring his money through a maze of banks.”
“And you’d be correct in that presumption. Don’t get into any bad habits. All we need is another . . .” Sprecher exhaled. “Forget it.”
“What?” Nick bit his tongue a second too late.
“Nothing,” said Sprecher curtly. “Just do as you’re told and remember one thing: We’re bankers, not policemen.”
““Ours is not to reason why,”’ said Nick wryly. He’d meant it as a joke, but somehow in this office it sounded all too serious.
Sprecher clapped him on the back. “A quick learner, indeed.”
“Let’s hope so.”Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, his father’s stern voice reminded him.Become one of them.
Sprecher turned his attention back to the transfer of funds slip. He filled in the necessary information rapidly. When he was done, he checked the time, wrote it on the sheet, and finally signed it. “The Pasha requires our immediate and undivided attention. Therefore, it has become our practice to walk the sheet down to Payments Traffic in order to personally deliver it to Pietro, the clerk responsible for international transfers. When the Pasha says “Urgent,’ he means urgent. Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll be going every Monday and Thursday afternoon at three-fifteen.”
# # #
After work, Peter Sprecher invited Nick to join him for a beer at the James Joyce pub, a popular watering hole for bankers and insurance executives, owned and operated by one of the United Swiss Bank’s larger rivals, the mighty Union Bank of Switzerland. The pub was dark with low ceilings, lit by faux gas lamps and decorated with brass fixtures. Pictures of turn-of-the-century Zurich covered the walls.
Sprecher sat Nick in a corner booth and after quaffing an entire beer, began talking about his twelve years at the bank. He had started as a trainee fresh out of university, not so different from Nick. His first assignment had been a position on the trading floor. He’d hated it from day one. Every trader was held accountable for gains and losses in the investment “book” he managed, be it the Swiss franc versus the dollar, Iowa pork belly contracts, or South African platinum futures. That wasn’t for him, he happily admitted. Private banking was where he belonged. The days were hardly pressure filled. Success was determined by your ability to massage the client, to convince him that a four percent annual return really wasn’t something to fret about—and the bank took the heat for any poorly advised investments. It was heaven!
“The secret to this game,” he pronounced, �
�is to reckon exactly who your key clients are. The big fish. Take good care of them and everything else will fall into place.”
Sprecher hoisted a beer, sure to guard Nick’s eye. “Cheers. To your future at USB!”
Nick departed after a third beer, saying he was still jet-lagged from his flight over Friday night. He left the bar and walked the short distance up the Bahnhofstrasse to the Paradeplatz. It was only seven-fifteen, yet the streets were quiet. Few people passed in either direction. The stores were closed, their expensive wares lit only by dim night-lights. Waiting for the tram, he felt as if he were defying a curfew or the last man standing after some terrible pestilence. He stood shivering, bundled tightly in his too thin overcoat. A solitary figure in a foreign land.
Only a month ago he had been a member in good standing of Morgan Stanley’s fall batch of executive recruits. One of thirty blessed men and women (culled from a bumper crop of two thousand) who had deemed a starting salary of ninety thousand dollars, a signing bonus of seven thousand dollars, and a future promising untold millions adequate compensation for allowing the savviest brains on Wall Street to daily instill in them their combined and hard-earned knowledge. And not just another member of his class, but a leading one—for he had recently been offered his choice of positions as assistant to the chief of equity trading or junior member of the international mergers and acquisitions team, both plum assignments his fellow trainees would have killed, maimed, or mutilated to obtain.
On Wednesday, November 20, Nick received a call at work from his aunt Evelyn in Missouri. He remembered checking his watch the moment he heard her squeaky voice. Two oh five. He knew right away what she had to tell him. His mother was dead, she said. Heart failure. He listened as in lugubrious detail she chronicled his mother’s deterioration these past years. She chastised him for not visiting, and he said he was sorry. Finally, he got the date of the funeral, then hung up.
He received the news stoically. He recalled massaging his chair’s cool leather armrests as he struggled to show the proper shock and sadness at the news of his mother’s death. If anything, he felt lighter, the proverbial weight lifted from his shoulders. His mother was fifty-eight years old and an alcoholic. Six years had passed since he’d spoken to her last. In a burst of temperance and good intention, she had called to say that she’d moved from California to her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. A new beginning, she’d said.Another one.
Nick found a flight to St. Louis the next day and from the Gateway to the West, rented a car and drove the hundred miles upriver to Hannibal. He had come in a spirit of reconciliation. He would see her buried. He would forgive her her lapses as a parent and as a self-respecting adult—if only to gild his tarnished memory of her.
His childhood had been a record of sudden disappointments, his father’s death being the first and of course the greatest. But others had followed, their arrival as regular as the change of seasons. Nick recalled them all—low points of a peripatetic adolescence flickering through his mind like an old, scratched film. His mother’s remarriage to a larcenous real-estate developer; his stepfather’s frittering away the insurance settlement, but not before delivering the family a financial coup de grace—losing Alex Neumann’s dream house at 805 Alpine Drive to repay a litigious investor; the Haitian divorce that followed.
Then came the “Fall”: a downward spiral through the curdled underside of southern California: Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Hawthorne. Another marriage came and went, this one briefer, less expensive—by then there was nothing left to split, settle, or divide. And finally, mercifully, at seventeen, the split from his mother. His own “new beginning.”
The day after the funeral, Nick drove downtown to a storage facility his mother had filled with reminders of her past. It was a grim task, sorting through her affairs. Box after box filled with souvenirs of a mundane and failed existence. A chipped piece of china he recognized as his grandmother’s gift to the newlyweds; a manila envelope stuffed with grade cards from elementary school; and a box of record albums containing such gems asBurl Ives’ Christmas Favorites, Dean Martin Loves Somebody, andVon Karajan Conducts Beethoven— the scratched soundtrack of his early childhood.
At day’s end, Nick came upon two sturdy cartons well sealed with brown electrical tape and marked “A. Neumann. USB—L.A.” Inside were his father’s effects taken from his office in Los Angeles days after his death: a few paperweights, a Rolodex, a calendar showing scenes of Switzerland, and two calfskin agendas for the years 1978 and 1979. Half the agendas’ pages were stained a muddy brown, swollen with the Mississippi floodwater that on two occasions had risen high inside the corrugated tin shed. But half were unharmed. And his father’s looping script was easily legible almost twenty years after he had written it.
Nick stared, transfixed, at the agendas. He opened a cover and skimmed through the entries. Nervous energy coursed through his body like a weak current. Hands that had mastered the buck of a sawed-off twelve gauge trembled like a schoolboy’s at his first communion. And for one quicksilver flash, his father was alive again, holding him on his lap in the downstairs study while a fire burned in the grate and a November rain pelted the windows. Nick had been crying, as he often did after hearing his parents argue, and father had taken his son aside to console him. Nick laid his head on his father’s chest and, hearing the heart beating too fast, knew that his father was also upset. His father hugged him tightly and caressed his hair. “Nicholas,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “promise me that you’ll remember me all of your life.”
Nick stood motionless in the dank shed. The words echoed in his ears and for a second longer he swore he was staring into those cold blue eyes. He blinked, and the apparition, if it had been one, faded.
Once, that memory had been an important component of his daily life. For a year after his father’s death, he had replayed it endlessly, hour after hour, day after day, trying to assign some deeper meaning to the words. Tortured by his futile curiosity, he had arrived at the conclusion that his father had been asking for his help, and that somehow he had failed him and was thus himself responsible for his murder. Sometime in his teens, the memory had faded and he had forgotten it. But he never quite absolved himself of his role in his father’s death.
A decade had passed since that memory had taunted him. His father had been right to worry. He could hardly remember him.
Nick stayed in the shed for a while longer. He had given up the idea of learning more about his father. To have the opportunity from Alex Neumann’s own hand was almost too much to believe. An unexpected gift. But his joy proved short-lived. A receipt acknowledging acceptance of his father’s possessions signed by a “Mrs. V. Neumann” was tucked inside the front cover of one of the leather-bound books. His mother had known about the agendas. She had purposely hidden them from her only son.
Nick spent the return flight to New York examining the agendas. He read both from cover to cover, first perusing the daily entries, then, alarmed, slowing to read each page carefully. He found mentions of a slippery client who had threatened his father and with whom, despite this, he had been pressed to do business; a shadowy local company that had merited the attentions of the Zurich head office; and most interesting, one month before his father’s death, a note providing the phone number and address of the Los Angeles field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Taken singly, the entries constituted only small worries. Taken together, they demanded explanation. But when set against the backdrop of his father’s unsolved murder and his own guilty memories, they ignited a fire of doubt whose flames cast ill-defined shadows on the inner workings of the United Swiss Bank and its clients.
Nick returned to work the next day. His training schedule called for classroom instruction from eight to twelve. An hour into the first lecture—some dry cant about the underpricing of initial public offerings—his attention began to waver. He cast his eye around the auditorium, sizing up his fellow trainees. Like him, they were graduates of America�
�s leading business schools. Like him, they were pressed and coiffed and packaged into tailored designer suits and polished leather shoes. All managed to convey a slight insouciance in their postures while writing down every single word the speaker uttered. They regarded themselves as the chosen ones, and in fact, they were. Financial centurions for the new millennium.
Why then did he hate them so?
The afternoon saw his return to the trading floor. He took up his position at the elbow of Jennings Maitland, resident bond guru and avowed nail chewer. “Sit yer ass down, shut yer toilet, and listen up” was Maitland’s daily greeting. Nick did as he was told and for the next four hours immersed himself in the floor’s activity. He paid close attention as Maitland spoke with his clients. He kept dutiful track of the trader’s open positions. He even celebrated his boss’s sale of ten million bonds to the New York Housing Authority with an airborne high five. But inside him, his guts roiled and he wanted to throw up.
Five days before, Nick would have flushed with pride at Maitland’s big score as if his own presence were responsible in some minor, inconstruable way for the sale. Today he viewed the commerce with a jaundiced eye, wishing to distance himself not only from his boss’s dumping of ten million bonds (“fuckin’ dogs,” to quote Maitland, “real bowwows”) but from the entire trading operation.
He stood as if to stretch and peered around him. Row upon row of computer monitors stacked three high ran what looked like the length of a football field in every direction. A week ago he had gloried at the sight, thinking it a modern battlefield. He had relished his opportunity to join the fray. Today it looked like a technological minefield, and he wanted to stay the hell away from it. Lord pity the robots who passed their lives glued to bank upon bank of microwave-spewing cathode-ray tubes.
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