Need You Now

by James Grippando

  “I was working in New York then, and he came to the city on business pretty regularly. We probably saw each other eight or ten times over the next few months.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it just sort of fizzled out. No big dramatic breakup, no speeches.”

  “No seagulls.”

  She gave me a weak smile. Enough with the jokes about the breakup.

  “We completely lost touch until I was in Singapore. He called me. This time, it was purely business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  A waitress came by, but there was no pressure to order. Puffy’s Tavern is one of the few remaining places on lower Hudson Street where you can sit as long as you like and not feel obligated to buy a fifteen-dollar bottle of sparkling water to justify your stay. Amid a spate of trendy restaurants and pricy bars, Puffy’s is a blue-collar throwback to old Tribeca, a shot-and-a-beer haven for artists and truck drivers alike, still with its original tile floor and an old-fashioned bar that dates back to Prohibition. Lilly ordered a diet soda. I could have used a couple of aspirin, but I went for a shot of tequila. To each his own, I say, when it comes to pain management.

  Lilly continued when the waitress stepped away.

  “Gerry had a client roster that read like a social register of south Florida-professional athletes, Grammy-winning singers, all high-net-worth individuals. You have to remember that Cushman was very clever. One reason his operation didn’t look like a Ponzi scheme was that he didn’t accept every client who threw money at him. Gerry was able to draw in heavy hitters with guaranteed access to the Cushman fund, but not all of them wanted to be a hundred percent in Cushman. Gerry was too busy networking to manage the non-Cushman part of the investment portfolios, so he needed someone else to do it. I was someone he trusted not to steal his clients away. The fact that I was on the other side of the world and would never meet his clients was actually a plus. I handled the non-Cushman part of the portfolios from BOS in Singapore.”

  “So Collins matched you up with clients you never met?”

  “There was always an introductory conference call.”

  Like most banks, BOS abided by the KYC rule: “know your client.” But in this business, KYC didn’t require anything nearly so onerous as actually knowing your client. Perfunctory conference-call introductions-“intro-functories,” we called them-made Lilly no different from any of the other private wealth managers in the Singapore branch.

  “But if you were helping these clients invest outside Cushman, how does that connect you to the Ponzi scheme?”

  “That came later. Gerry had other clients. Super-high net worth. Some with numbered accounts in Zurich, some with funds in other systems. I don’t know all the details, but over time, the relationship with Gerry was working very well for me and BOS. That was when he asked me to arrange for one of his super clients to meet with the head of our numbered account services in Singapore.”

  “Surprise, surprise. The link to Cushman is bank secrecy.”

  “The flag wasn’t nearly so red at the time.”

  A burst of cold air brushed my face, and I looked past Lilly to see who had entered the tavern. Puffy’s wasn’t exactly a Wall Street hangout, but you could never be too careful when discussing bank secrecy. The guy making a beeline to the bar seemed harmless enough. He actually looked ridiculous, a little fortysomething white man wearing one of those flat-billed rapper caps.

  “Who was the client Gerry wanted you to assist?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I arranged for the meeting, but the identity of the account holder was known only to Gerry and the manager of numbered accounts.”

  “You had no other involvement?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Our drinks arrived, and the waitress left us alone. Lilly sipped her soda. I belted back my tequila, but I should have known better than to order without specifying a brand. The man at the bar pretended not to notice, but he was clearly amused by my reaction to Puffy’s firewater. Lilly waited for my face to unwind, then continued.

  “After the account was created, Gerry wanted me involved. We had to jump through some administrative hoops in the bank, but we finally got it approved so that I could deal directly with his client.”

  “A client with no name.”

  “Or face,” she said. “Only the top brass knew who he was. To me, he was just a voice on the phone with a personal identification code. I was getting a glimpse into the private banking business that had put BOS on the financial map. I was excited, actually, but after a while it was fairly routine. Gerry’s client would call me, identify himself through the proper codes, and tell me what to do with the money.”

  “So you moved funds from a numbered account at BOS/Singapore to Cushman Investment.”

  “I didn’t physically push the buttons to make it happen, no. I filled out the transfer-of-funds paperwork and personally walked it over to one of the guys in Payments Traffic. They did the actual wire transfers.”

  “But the wiring instructions had your name on them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the transfer slips showed that the money was routed to Cushman Investment?”

  “Usually to offshore accounts, and then it went to Cushman.”

  “How do you know it actually went from the offshore accounts to Cushman?”

  “The transfers were done in a very compressed time frame, usually the same business day. I spoke to Gerry every day to make sure there was no glitch in the pipeline. He gave me verbal confirmation when the money hit Cushman Investment.”

  “How big were the transfers?”

  “On average, about ten million dollars. A day.”

  “For how long?”

  “Like I said: It came out to just over two billion. You do the math.”

  Math was something I was good at. Two hundred days. “And that’s the same two billion that my Times Square tour guide wants back.”

  “That would be correct.”

  “So the two-billion-dollar question is…”

  “Who was Gerry’s client,” she said, finishing for me. “The bank, of course, won’t divulge that information. The secrecy laws in Singapore are just as tight as Switzerland’s. Unless there’s evidence that the client used a secret account to assist in the commission of a crime, the bank itself violates the law by revealing any information about the account. Bankers in Singapore actually face more jail time than bankers in Switzerland for violations of bank secrecy. As far as BOS is concerned, their client isn’t a criminal. He’s a victim of Cushman’s fraud.”

  “I’m guessing that’s how you got yourself fired-trying to attach a name to the numbered account?”

  “I was desperate. With the threats I was getting, I wanted to know who I was up against.”

  I looked down into my empty shot glass, thinking. “What if we went up to the BOS executive suite right now and told the general counsel that we’ve both been threatened?”

  “First of all, we can’t prove that it’s a BOS client who is threatening us.”

  “Who else would it be? It’s either him or someone working for him.”

  “It’s him,” she said. “I heard his voice every day on the phone. There’s no doubt in my mind that I heard the same voice when he had the gun to my head, and when he called to tell me you were in the back of that SUV.”

  “Then we have to go to the bank,” I said.

  “Forget it. I’ve already taken it all the way to the Zurich headquarters. I flew six thousand miles from Singapore to meet with two stuffed shirts in Finanz Kundenbetreuung Abteilung,” she said, mangling her pronunciation of the German equivalent of Financial Client Management. “It was like talking to the wall. Trust me, Patrick: the bank is never going to help on this.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t find the right set of ears.”

  “Listen to what I’m saying. Eight figures a day moved into that secret account in Singapore. It was my job to execute the transfer orders going out, but I n
ever knew who put the money there in the first place, or where it came from. It’s clear to me that if we go through the proper institutional channels,” she said, using her fingers to put proper in quotation marks, “the bank will do everything in its power to make sure that no one ever finds out.”

  I rested on my elbows, running my fingers through my hair. “How did you allow yourself to be put in this position?”

  “What was I supposed to do-forget where I worked and become one of those people who automatically assumes that anyone who’s rich and has a Swiss bank account is a criminal? I respected the lines of authority at the bank. You would have done the same thing, and you know it.”

  She was right. I would have-with the exception of sleeping with Gerry Collins, of course. “Have you…”

  I stopped without even realizing I was in midsentence. That guy at the bar was pretending not to notice me again, but this time I hadn’t choked on my tequila or done anything else to draw his attention. What’s so damn interesting over here, buddy?

  “Have I what?” asked Lilly.

  I regained my train of thought. “Have you tried going to the authorities? The FBI, Interpol, whoever?”

  “Patrick, has one shot of tequila gone straight to your head?” she said as she took my empty shot glass away from me and put it aside. “The message to me was crystal clear: call the cops, die an instant and unpleasant death.”

  Like a reflex, I rubbed my neck. “Ditto. But let’s not rule it out.”

  “It’s not an option. Law enforcement won’t help.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “This arrangement with Collins has put me dead center in the hunt for the Cushman money. Treasury thinks I’m hiding the money, the same way these thugs think I’m hiding the money.”

  “You can’t assume that.”

  “I’m not just assuming. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Seen what?”

  She paused, and her voice lowered a notch, as if we were moving into an area of heightened sensitivity. “I’ve seen an internal memo written by someone high up at Treasury.”

  “How’d you get that?”

  “I don’t actually have it. I said I’d seen it. The guy who attacked me in Singapore showed it to me.”

  “How did he get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did he let you see it?”

  “After about the tenth time I told him I knew nothing about the Cushman money, he got fed up, said he knew I was lying. He stuck the memo right under my nose. It says it in black and white: Treasury’s most promising lead as to concealment of proceeds from the Cushman fraud remains Gerry Collins’ banking activities at BOS/Singapore. And the memo identifies me by name as the point person for those activities.”

  “But you were feeding money into the Cushman Fund, not taking it out.”

  “To them, it must be like the law of gravity: what goes up, must come down; what goes in, must come out. My point is that if I go to law enforcement, you can bet they’ll be happy to protect me, but only if I give them information I don’t have: what happened to the money I funneled to Cushman.”

  She was definitely in a box, but my focus had drifted again to the guy at the bar. Even though he was on his cell phone, I was still feeling watched.

  “Lilly, don’t be obvious about it, but when you get a chance, glance toward the bar and tell me if that guy looks familiar to you.”

  “What?”

  “Just take a look,” I said as I brushed her napkin off the table. She took my cue, picked up the napkin, and stole a glance in the process.

  “Not anyone I know,” she said. “I think I’m making you paranoid.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Stay with me on this,” said Lilly.

  “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “I was going to say that calling the FBI or whatever agency is not only dangerous, but pointless. Even if they wanted to help, the simple fact is that the bank isn’t willing to give up any information about the account holder. They fired me for trying to get it. How quickly do you think government lawyers can get into court and force the Singapore arm of the biggest bank in Switzerland to give up the name on a numbered account? These thugs gave me two weeks to come up with the money. Two weeks. ”

  “That’s a short fuse.”

  “And it’s even shorter now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…”

  “Because why , Lilly?”

  “I didn’t want to say this before. I’m not the kind of person who gets people in trouble and then looks for a pat on the back for getting them out of it. But that’s the deal I struck when I was freaking out on the phone, listening to what they were doing to you in the back of the SUV in Times Square. I promised to deliver their money in one week, instead of two, if they didn’t hurt you.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It’s done. So if the bank won’t help us, we have to find someone inside the bank who will. Someone who can work around the regular institutional channels and tell us what we need to know about numbered account 507.625 RR.”

  “Why would anyone stick his neck out like that?”

  “Because not everyone who works for BOS is interested in protecting organized crime. You just have to find him.”

  “Me? ”

  “I don’t work for BOS anymore, remember?”

  I could have used another shot of tequila; any brand would do. “Do you have any proof that the money flowing to Cushman was from organized crime?”

  “I’ve done some digging. Do you remember the name of the man who murdered Gerry Collins?”

  I felt another puff of cold air. That guy at the bar was heading out the door, leaving a full beer untouched.

  “I’m sure I heard it in the news,” I said, “but the name escapes me.”

  “A semiretired guy in his late fifties who lost his entire life savings in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme. Never stood trial. He entered a guilty plea in order to get a life sentence instead of the death penalty. His name was Tony Martin.”

  “Singapore Mall,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s where I’ve seen that guy before. It was one of our first dates. I was taking your picture in front of the fountain at Singapore Mall, and he’s the guy who came up and offered to snap one of the two of us.”

  “Patrick, that was months ago and on the other side of the world.”

  I jumped from the table, ran out the door, and stopped cold on the sidewalk. I looked left, then right. Parked cars lined the street, a delivery truck passed, and an old woman was scooping her poodle’s droppings into a plastic bag. I had no idea which way to go. I stood frozen, not sure what to do. There was no sign of the man in the bar, and as the moments passed, I became less and less sure that I’d actually seen him before in Singapore or anywhere else.

  You’re getting a little crazy.

  I went inside and returned to my seat at the table.

  “What the hell was that about?” asked Lilly.

  “Sorry, I-I just had this strange feeling that we were being watched.”

  She looked at me with concern. “Welcome to my world. The paranoia will take over if you let it. You need to get a grip. This is important. Please listen to what I’m telling you.”

  “I’m sorry, but I actually have been listening. You said the guy who killed Gerry Collins was Tony Martin.”

  “That’s my point. His name is not Tony Martin. It turns out his real name is Tony Mandretti.”

  “Who is Tony Mandretti?”

  The waitress returned. Either she’d read my mind, or Lilly had ordered a shot of tequila for each of us while I was chasing after nothing.

  But why would he order a beer and not drink it?

  “Now there’s a really good question,” said Lilly. “Who is Tony Mandretti?”

  She leaned over her brimming shot glass, and I saw a distinct sparkle of excitement in her eye. “This is where things re
ally get interesting.”

  6

  N ight fell as we left Puffy’s Tavern.

  Our bar talk had drifted well away from Ponzi schemes and bank secrecy, and I lost count of the empty shot glasses. Tequila had been known to loosen my tongue, and regrettably I found myself confessing that thoughts of Lilly had crossed my mind whenever I heard Lady Antebellum singing “Need You Now.” This she found even more hilarious than bird shit on my head. There’s a line in the song about being a little drunk, and we definitely were, so we sang our own rendition on the way back to my place, adjusting for the fact that we didn’t really care what time it was:

  … a quarter after something / I’m out of milk / and I need your cow.

  Okay, so we were more than a little drunk.

  My apartment was on the third floor. After several stabs at the keyhole, I managed to unlock the door and get us inside. It occurred to me that the first woman to visit my New York apartment was the same woman who had dumped me in Singapore, but there was no time to appreciate the irony. It took longer to find the light switch than to end up in the loft, though the decision wasn’t completely without discussion.

  “Should we do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “You make a very persuasive argument.”

  Knew I shouldn’t call / but I’ve lost all my clothes / and I need your towel.

  The rest was a blur, which was a shame. I’d experienced “make-up sex,” before, but this was better than make-up sex, since I wasn’t just mad at Lilly; I had actually lost her. That put us in the realm of reunion sex, a rare combination of the excitement of a first-time lover with the joy being with someone who knows exactly what you like. This was one of life’s greatest pleasures-and I was bumbling my way through it on too much tequila. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t our best performance-far short of our Chinese Sound of Music watershed-but Lilly fell asleep in my arms, and all was well.

  For an hour or so, anyway.

  The pain in my neck-literally-woke me. I sat up in bed and gave the burning sensation a minute to subside. Lilly was sleeping soundly, and it was nice to see the curve of her body beneath the bedsheet beside me. Morning couldn’t possibly have come so soon, and a check of the clock confirmed that the night was still young: 8:38 P.M. I quietly rolled out of bed, took a quick shower, and went to the dresser. We’d left a lamp burning downstairs, and it provided just enough of a glow for me to move around the loft without stubbing a toe. My overnight suitcase was packed when Lilly finally stirred.