by Amy Gray
Our routine in such cases, in addition to doing our usual checks, included calling random lower-level employees of the company (mail-room staff, human-resources reps) to determine if there was any delay in their payroll. Certain kinds of guys were relieved to talk to anybody. José, the IT guy, is used to getting attention only when he's being berated by rich guys running his company because their keypad is sticking. We would ask the José's if any of their paychecks had bounced, or if they had missed any pay periods, only to discover their payrolls were six months behind schedule.
Many of our clients considered our work so rote that they had already started dishing out financing to the company they had hired us to investigate before they'd even engaged our services. Some had their suspicions raised by the dubious fate of that initial investment, as was the circumstance in the case of the Swindling Spin Doctor, probably the most brazen con artist ever to appear across the desks of the Agency.
With a few exceptions, the guys we investigated at these companies were so young they barely had college degrees, let alone paper trails and business histories that showed anything but their ability to hold down a summer job at Vail or flip burgers. These cases could be extraordinarily boring, but George and Sol insisted on taking them because they paid well.
Joe Smith, my subject, was running an online software-developer and retail portal. Mostly there were a lot of dull press releases about the company. These releases are some of the most important clues we use, especially when they're read as propaganda, as Brown's dime-store Marxist semiotics program taught me. PR Newswire and Business Wire are about the party line. I read some mind-numbingly tedious ones: “Joe Smith was appointed president of U-Celerate.com on May 8, 1998. He is the former CFO of BusyCorps.com, which he founded, and has also worked in financial advisory positions at International Business Machines and Peat Marwick. Mr. Smith also maintains a private financial consulting business handling clients from northern Massachusetts to the Cayman Islands.”
Anybody who wants to change their identity and slip into anonymity will pick the most ubiquitous first and last names they can muster. There are at least 10,000 Joe Smiths in the United States. It's harder to prove what evidence we find isn't about them than what is. Michael Ford. Karen O'Connor. These are all fitting names if you plan on committing identity fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, or any other kind of crime. Not that I'm handing out advice to criminals. Au contraire. I'm Spygirl. I found tens of thousands of documents—bankruptcy records and corporate filings—for Joe Smiths. I found Joe (aka Joseph) Smiths who were convicted rapists, embezzlers, founders of Vanderbilt University, professional wrestlers, and a Playboy bunny (Joe, short for Joanna).
This annoyed me and supplemented my resolve. I hated being lied to. I wanted to find Joe Smith if it killed me. Like wading through the knot of neckties at the Garment District, my job is a tricky business of finding what's already there, and there's always an element of chance involved. I tried focusing my searches for information about Joe Smiths with dubious pasts.
I found two curious things. The first was a news article mentioning his business partner in their company, a Russian named Dmitry Aleksandrov, who was being investigated for possible mafia connections in Philadelphia. The second was something Gus had brought to my attention.
When we ran the Social Security number our client had provided us, it turned up invalid. No such number had ever been issued. “Call the client,” George said. The client talked to Mr. Smith, who called back saying he'd mistyped the number. This was a big red flag indicating a big fat liar. The last digit was a seven, not an eight, they said. So Gus plugged it in again. This time, it was a valid number, but it was somebody else's. Although Joe Smith was listed as having used the number, it had been assigned to one Lonny Perkins. I was leaning over Gus's desk the whole time, and was getting very worked up. “Yes! That bastard is lying! Yes!” It was thrilling.
Gus, for the hell of it, started playing with the numbers in the Social, changing the last digits, and every time he did, he came up with another number it looked like Joe Smith was using—not to mention the similar names “Jack Smithe,” “Joe Smyth,” and “Joe Nguyen.” Gus ran those names and got nineteen other Socials, all listed to other people, that Joe Smith appeared to be using.
I ran those names in some news databases and came up with lots of nothing; then, finally, I hit something promising. It was a clip from the New York Post, which I think of as the crack rock of newspapers. But it tends to have more consistent and in-depth coverage of nonviolent criminals than, say, The New York Times.
“The Post has learned that a prison inmate conned a major publisher into signing him to a $50,000 contract for a book about how to avoid being bilked by financial consultants. Sources at the publisher now admit that Joe Smyth, a tax advisor and felon convicted of bilking his former investment clients out of more than $15 million, was slated to publish his book, tentatively titled Buyer Beware: An Investor's Guide to Stock Analysis, with them in 1998. Although the book's editor and agent declined to comment about the incident, the publisher confirmed that the book had been canceled, although it was only weeks away from publication. The book's author, Joe Smyth, is serving two more years of an eleven-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion.”
I took the piece to George, who seemed underwhelmed. “Well, do we know it's him?” he clucked.
“I have a feeling it is.” I knew as soon as I said this he would nail me for it.
“You can talk to your shrink about feelings. I want facts.” This was defeating, but I thought I could use some of my connections in the publishing business to get hold of the manuscript. I called several friends at the publishers, but they said the whole scandal was very touchy and they wouldn't know where to get the book if their lives depended on it. Then I had an idea. Since it was a business book, I'd call Andrew. Even though I felt a little strange about my last encounter with him, he was my final resort. I figured he might have gotten the proposal, and, with any luck, would still have it.
I told him the situation. “Oh, my God. Amy, darling, is this work safe for you?” His intonations conveyed a hushed sense of shared peril.
“Don't be silly Andrew. You know I'd never put myself in any serious danger.”
“I do?”
He had a point. “Honestly I'm much better-behaved now than I was in college.”
“Hmmm. Well, it doesn't ring a bell, lamb chop, but I'll have my assistant check and see if we have it on file.”
Working at my desk, I was diverted by Sol, who was entertaining a mystery guest—a woman—at his desk. We almost never had clients to the office, and on the two occasions when we did, we all had to wear business attire and shave. (Wendy and me notwithstanding.) Evan's scruffy mug suggested something else was afoot.
That day on a smoking break I asked who she was.
“Probably our next hire,” said Gus.
“I don't want them to hire her!” Linus interrupted.
Why? we asked.
“I think I'm in love with her,” he confessed, looking exasperated. Our potential new hire, Renora, was Linus's female Platonic ideal: a gamine Sylvia Plath devotee who had translated Nietzsche's collected works and loved Tom Waits.
“You'd make a beautiful, tortured-looking couple,” I suggested.
“No, I can never be with a woman I actually love,” Linus insisted. “It would ruin the whole point of love—desire and unful-fillment.”
“You need to stop reading so much Goethe,” Morgan sniffed. “You all do for that matter.”
“I think he just needs to do the Han Solo.” Evan chuckled.
“What's that?” asked Noah. Wendy and Gus giggled.
We filed back into the office as Noah assured a glum-looking Linus that he had the Star Wars trilogy on DVD.
A One-Way Ticket to Disstown
I spent the rest of my day thinking about Edward and working on my case. There were several other abstracts and wire pieces about Smythe, but none that had any
information that wasn't already in the Post article. The rest was spent alternating between downloading Blue Oyster Cult songs off Napster and running searches. At six, I was deciding whether to take off or call Andrew back again when the phone rang. Please let it be Andrew, I quietly pleaded. I hit the line.
“Boo?”
“Hey, Ben.” My disappointment was audible. “How are you?” I asked, gently.
“How come you never call me anymore?”
“How about having an adult conversation like, ‘Hi, Amy. So nice to hear your voice. How are you’?”
“Hi, Amy, how's your pussy doing? ”
“I'm getting off now.” I lowered the receiver.
“Mooooo!!! Waiiiiiit.”
“What?”
“I'm sorry. That was rude.”
“You're right, it was.” I took a deep breath. “You know, Ben, you don't make it easy for me.”
“I just don't understand why you don't call me anymore.”
“Well, you're my ex-boyfriend and we're both dating other people. Plus you're obscene, you're rude, and you're nauseating.”
“So we can't be friends? ”
“Wait, I haven't gotten to the negatives yet. I think you should be grateful we're not enemies at this point—”
My other line beeped. “Listen,” I said, “can you hold on a second? ”
“No, we're having a convo.” (Translation: conversation.) “Amee …” I clicked over.
“Hello?” Pleeeease let this be Andy.
“Hello?” The phone buzzed with static. “Hello? Hello?”
I clicked back to Ben. “Listen, I have to get off, I have work to do.”
“Amy,” he said, then paused.
“What?”
“My girlfriend broke up with me.” His voice cracked. My heart gave way.
“I'm so sorry.”
“Yeah. It's okay. She was a bitch anyway.”
“Listen, I really want to talk to you about this. Can I call you back?”
“Forget it,” he said defiantly. “You're on boycott. I'm sending you a one-way ticket to disstown.”
“Wait, Ben, don't be so fucking immature—”
He hung up. I remembered the night before I moved out of our apartment together. My dad was in town, helping me move into my own place. I had told Ben that it wasn't a “breakup;” I just needed distance. My father and I got back to the old apartment late. When I opened the door, Ben was draped over the living-room table. He jerked up, pulling a crumpled copy of The New Yorker onto the floor. A fine white dust swirled low around the table. His pupils were dilated. His eyes seemed to sink back into his face like shiny malachite marbles into dough.
My dad made a quick exit.
“You piece of shit! I can't believe you were doing dope in front of my father!”
He denied it. “I don't know what you're talking about. Just chill the fuck out.” Even though he protested, his denials were lazy and halfhearted. A line of black blood slowly drew out from his right nostril down over his lip. He didn't even seem to notice.
“You have a fucking nosebleed, you shit! How stupid do you think I am?”
“So? That doesn't mean anything!”
I was livid. I said, “Well, then let's settle this for good.” I licked my right forefinger and jabbed it up his other nostril, removed it, and put it in my mouth. It had a familiar bitter taste, like earwax.
Ben was completely still. “Give me the rest of it now,” I said. My heart was racing.
He went into the kitchen and reached under a frying pan. He threw something in my direction and walked into the bedroom. It was a small tin-foil ball. I grabbed it off the floor and ran into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet to the sound of him quietly crying as I realized I had unwittingly become a spy in his life, that I had been one for a long time.
THIRTEEN
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK
A Million and One Ways to Kill a Caterpillar
In 1982, my parents moved to the house where they still live in Massachusetts. It was the year of the largest natural infestation of gypsy moths in the United States since 1965. I remember walking up the flagstone path to our new house, flanked by an enormous oak tree. But what had looked like wispy Spanish moss from our Ford wagon was actually a dense tangle of spidery silk casements. Tree boughs hung sadly under the draping nets. Inside these dusty tombs, organisms bobbed against the mesh like war prisoners desperately pressing their faces against their prison bars. The caterpillar tents enfolded every angle and incline on every tree's dusty limbs.
By the time we reached the house, the caterpillars had fallen into my hair, my jumper, even twisting pathetically in my shoelaces. My dad was covered with them. My sister got one in her eye. They were fat and black with blue circles down their back and black dots inside the blue circles. Their feet were a running set of tiny suction cups, like narrowing train tracks down their bodies. When you picked one up, it would flail helplessly and curl into a ball, using its gummy feet to stick to itself, forming a perfect curlicue.
My friends and I also took note that when you stepped on one end of them, noxious yellow guts would squirt out one side. The walk up to our new house was covered in the dry, yellowy paste of caterpillar innards. As long as you didn't eat them— although my best friend, Peter Weeter, did once, on a dare—they offered infinite but twisted diversions.
All the trees everywhere in the neighborhood had special double-sided tape around them at one-foot intervals, and they were greased with insecticidal jelly. The tape, after a few weeks, would acquire a brownish, gooey texture, and would be crowded with bugs in various stages of gestation. Here was a male adult, half its body severed. Here was a baby one, just four days hatched, here was a blue sliver from the shell of a robin's egg, here was some sap from a maple tree. The tape caught lots of things it wasn't supposed to.
On Friday, as I sat plugging “Joe Smith” in innumerable permutations with the words “felon,” “indictment,” “criminal,” and “misconduct” into my databases, I thought about the caterpillars, which had seemed perfectly normal to me as a six-year-old. The caterpillars, which had crystallized in my mind, like the many extraordinary things that children see and assume, must be ordinary. Like gruesome clues, the caterpillars were always there for the finding. Once I read that all the bacteria and single-celled organisms living beneath the earth's surface are equal in mass to ten times that of plant and animal matter. It was a vile statistic. Now this wasn't just “the way things are.” It was sickening, encroaching on me with the claustrophobic immensity of an infestation.
It was six-ten. I leaned against a pillar at Penn Station, across from the doughnut store, and breathed in the familiar stink of frying fat, cigarettes, and piss. When Edward finally appeared at seven twenty-five, I held on for dear life.
“It's good to see you too, baby,” he cooed.
For dinner, I decided on a steamy little Korean restaurant in the East Village called Dok Suni. It was dark, so we leaned in over the tiny table over steamy platters of kim-chee and bikimbob.
Figuring this was my chance to corral information about Edward, I asked him everything, and he answered with the self-confidence of the genuine article.
He was the captain of his rugby team in college. This gave me a thrill. Rugby was quaint but European. Roguish yet sophisticated. We talked about how he came to be in medical school. His dad was a surgeon, and Edward had worshipped him. “I used to go to work with him when I was little. They'd give me a little white coat and I'd follow my dad around and take the pulse of chair legs and nurses and stuff. Plus I love to help people. This last Hallmark Sentiment made me simultaneously cringe and thaw a little. I smiled and focused on his good looks. “You have the most gorgeous eyes,” I murmured. I felt like melting into him.
But Edward was distracted. “Do you hear that noise?”
“I just said I like your eyes.”
�
�No.” He started rifling through his pockets. “It sounds like a cell phone.”
“Oh.” I grabbed my purse. It was my phone.
“Hello?”
It was Cassie. “Where have you been? I've tried you earlier today and your phone was fucked up or something.”
“I'm with Edward. Remember?”
“I need your help.”
“Okay hold on.” She was a dead woman. I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
Edward smiled sweetly. “Is everything cool?”
“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “I'll be right back.”
I slammed the bathroom door behind me. There was a lonely blue lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and Asian graffiti written all over the walls. There was no toilet seat. “This better be a big fucking emergency,” I panted. Jack was in town, and she was calling me from Niagara. He was in the bathroom.
“He's like, all over me. I think he wants to come home with me, but I feel weird about it. We haven't even talked about what happened between us.”
“Don't do it.”
“But here's the other thing. He looks so hot tonight. I don't know. I'm torn.”
“Fine, then fuck his brains out.” It was impossible to give her advice, and I was neglecting my stunningly handsome new boyfriend.
“Uh-oh, he's coming this way. I'll call you later.”
I returned to Edward. “Hey, sweetie,” he said, pulling me onto his lap. “I missed you.” Next we went to Decibel, a sake bar, where we soaked up warm rice wine and held hands for the first time. I was alit by his beauty. I looked around and noticed the other women in the room stealing glances at Edward behind their dates. He reached out across the table. “I'm so happy to be here,” he said.