House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  But of course he didn’t do that. He didn’t even permit the idea to form clearly in his mind.

  He found bathing suits in the bottom drawer of the dresser as promised, men’s and women’s suits in a range of sizes and styles. He went into the bathroom to change, taking a handful of the bathing suits with him.

  The bathroom turned out to be as opulent as the bedroom was simple. The space was lined on two sides with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A woman’s vanity table displayed a comb-and-brush set with inlaid pearl handles worked with gold as well as a shallow cut-glass bowl. A hair dryer, thoughtfully plugged into the wall, hung from a hook attached to the glass. The toilet and sink were on the opposite wall. A set of glass doors rising above a marble sill separated this area from an even larger space that featured a Jacuzzi the size of a double bed sunk into the floor. A shower head was mounted in a bracket well away from the tub. The outer walls of the bath area were glass. Beyond them the emerald lawn stretched for only fifty yards or so until it ended abruptly in parched bare earth dotted only here and there with clumps of stubborn-looking weeds.

  It wasn’t until he had undressed and selected a modest suit instead of one of the skimpy Speedos that he noticed the small silver spoon on the vanity table next to the glass bowl. He lifted the cover of the bowl and saw that it was filled an inch deep with snowy-white cocaine.

  The perfect host, he thought, replacing the cover.

  He checked himself out in the mirror—it was impossible not to; he was surrounded by mirrors—and liked what he saw. Although he hadn’t done much to stay in shape since college, except for an occasional squash or tennis game when business dictated, or when he was teaching Jessica to play, he was still lean and trim, perhaps a little softer around the middle than he would have liked but with very little else to betray the creeping advance of middle age.

  He realized when he thought about tennis with Jessica that this was the first time he had thought about his daughter since the day she called him at the airport to tell him she wasn’t coming home. Actually thought about her, that is. He had thought about her absence and about her defiance and had even tried, in an abstract way, to calculate how vastly different their relationship was going to be when she returned. But this wasn’t the same as thinking about Jessica herself.

  He found a beach robe in one of the closets and slipped it on.

  He knocked on Fiore’s door and Fiore opened it, dressed as he had been before, minus the jacket and tie, his only concession to the pool party their host apparently had planned for them.

  “Jesus,” Fiore said with mocking disapproval as he looked Jeffrey up and down.

  When Jeffrey and Fiore got to the pool, the black-haired woman was in the water swimming laps with a steady, powerful crawl, her arms pumping with the easy rhythm of a machine, her legs knifing the water so smoothly she hardly seemed to disturb it as she passed. Bolling was seated in a chair next to the chaise where she had been lying. He got to his feet and pulled two other chairs around to his, then sat back down and asked them if they wanted anything to drink. Without waiting for their response, he called over his shoulder, “Rachel, come here. There’s some people I want you to meet.”

  The glass in his hand was beaded with condensation. He took a long drink.

  Without breaking the steady pulse of her stroke, she swam to the side of the pool near where they were seated, coming to a rest only when her hands caught the lip of the drain channel. She tipped her head back in the water and used her hands to smooth her hair back from her forehead. She was almost unnaturally beautiful, her features perfect the way the simplest of sketches done with the fewest possible lines can be perfect, her eyes as black as her hair, her skin glistening, dark and wet, her lips full and red. She put her palms on the surface of the patio and raised herself from the water, slowly, effortlessly, shoulders and bosom and belly rising up out of the water like an apparition rising into view. She had put on her bathing suit top at some point since Jeffrey had watched her through the guest room window.

  Now she stood before them, water sheeting down her body, and Bolling said, with no further explanation, “Rachel, this is Mr. Blaine and Mr. Fiore. Rachel.”

  Her hand was cool, her grip as firm as a man’s. The bottom of her suit wasn’t skimpy. Smaller suits are seen every day on beaches everywhere. But the fabric was thin and fine and tight, molded to her body so provocatively that it outlined the mounded folds of her sex. As Fiore got to his feet to shake her hand, his eyes lingered for a long time at the top of her thighs. When he looked up, her eyes were looking back at his, bold and direct, demanding his attention for a long moment that seemed pointedly to exclude the other two men at poolside. She heard Bolling say, “You want to see what they want to drink?” and so she said, “He’s having iced tea but you could have anything.”

  Jeffrey said, “Iced tea would be fine.” Fiore said nothing, merely nodding his concurrence.

  She walked away.

  “She’s very beautiful,” Jeffrey said.

  Only then did Fiore’s eyes come off her retreating figure. “She is,” he said. “Tell her to put something on.”

  For a moment Bolling seemed not to have understood his guest. He looked at Fiore as though he were about to ask a question. And then he got to his feet and hurried from the patio.

  “Who the hell is she?” Fiore asked.

  Jeffrey shrugged. “His daughter, I suppose. His wife’s dead. She was Mexican. I don’t know,” he said.

  In a moment Bolling returned carrying two glasses of iced tea. The woman didn’t return.

  “I hope you don’t take anything in it,” he said, handing them their drinks. “What is it we’re supposed to talk about?”

  From this point on, Jeffrey did the talking, with Fiore listening as intently as Bolling. The proposal was as new to one man as it was to the other. Jeffrey started by explaining that venture capital was, among all investments, a uniquely high-risk, high-yield proposition. Large sums of money were sunk into start-ups for new enterprises. Investment banking firms like Layne Bentley, Jeffrey’s firm, raised this capital by in effect soliciting subscriptions to huge multimillion-dollar funds. This allowed them to reduce the risk to individual investors by providing start-up money for a variety of enterprises from a single fund. An investor who put twenty million dollars into a fund, for example, might find his money parceled to as many as half a dozen different enterprises. Conversely, a start-up that required capitalization of eighty or a hundred million dollars—and in many cases the figures ran far higher than that—might draw money from four or five different funds.

  Jeffrey explained all this as carefully as if he were teaching a class in elementary economics. The point, of course, was to smooth out the bumps on what would otherwise be a very choppy ride through the all-or-nothing countryside of venture capital, where some investments literally vanished without a trace while others multiplied like rabbits in heat.

  Neither Fiore nor Bolling asked any questions and Jeffrey moved on to the specifics of his proposal. He made no effort to disguise or conceal its purpose. They would start with three funds of approximately twenty million dollars apiece. Bolling would be the principal subscriber in all three, Fiore a secondary subscriber in only one of them. To put the matter simply, investments would be surreptitiously moved from one fund to the other, depending upon their returns, so that two of the funds would bear a disproportionate share of the losses while the third, in which Fiore had his money, would consist almost exclusively of winners.

  Jeffrey’s explanation was peppered with detailed examples so that both men got a clear picture of what would happen. When he was finished he asked them if they had any questions and he knew what Bolling’s question would be.

  “What’s in this for me?” the Oklahoman asked.

  “I think you know the answer to that already,” Jeffrey said, and then proceeded to explain the consequences. The aggregate return on the three funds would be exactly the same with or without these artifi
cial manipulations. Fiore’s account would show immense gains, Bolling’s offsetting losses. “Mr. Fiore,” he said, “has no interest in getting any of the money, so you get to keep all of the profits even though they appear on his books. You get cash and a tax write-off for paper losses, he gets taxable profits.”

  “This is money laundering,” Bolling said flatly.

  Fiore stiffened. He hadn’t expected Blaine to propose anything so transparent, and he couldn’t at the moment imagine how the banker was going to answer what seemed to be an obvious challenge.

  Jeffrey didn’t hesitate. “That’s exactly what it is,” he said.

  Bolling was quick enough to see how he gained from the enterprise. He knew how to add up a column of numbers. A paper loss of say twenty-five million was worth easily ten million in tax savings. An untaxed cash gain of say forty million was worth, say, seventy to seventy-five. What Blaine was offering came very close to a hundred percent return on his investment. But he thought he saw a flaw in the logic. “That’s cute,” he said, “but you’re solving his problem by making it mine. I’m left with a pile of cash I can’t account for.”

  Jeffrey laughed. He had a warm, ingratiating laugh. “Yes,” he said, “but your problem isn’t as complicated as his. You’re certainly right about one thing. What we’re talking about wouldn’t make sense if you were the only person we were approaching. The fact of the matter is four people can each hide ten million dollars far easier than one person can hide forty. We’re talking about manageable amounts of money here. I have people who can help you with that end of it.”

  Bolling nodded and was silent for a long time. “What if I say no?” he asked.

  “You won’t,” Jeffrey said.

  A heavyset woman in white linen appeared at the edge of the patio and announced that lunch was ready.

  “I’m working on the assumption,” Schliester said, “that this deal sucks.”

  Gus Benini’s voice got high and shrill. “What the fuck are you talking?” he said. “We’re taking care of you.”

  Schliester smiled and shrugged. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “My mother takes care of me, so I don’t really need you for that. On the other hand, she cut off my allowance, so let’s talk money.”

  In a funny way, Benini liked this guy. Because he was always saying things like that. Not the asking-for-money part. That was no good. Benini didn’t like being asked for money. But it was the way this kid put things. You couldn’t help liking him.

  They were walking along the West Side waterfront, a few blocks up from the Javits Center, a few blocks below where the Intrepid was moored. For the past few weeks they had been going out for walks whenever they had anything to talk about. Which meant that Schliester had to wear a body wire. The first time Benini suggested a walk, Schliester and Gogarty hadn’t been prepared for anything like that. The office was bugged but Schliester’s person wasn’t. And this turned out to be the meeting at which Benini laid out what he wanted from Schliester and how much he would pay for his services. They didn’t get a single word of it on tape, which meant they had to rely on Schliester’s notes on the meeting.

  Elaine Lester wasn’t very happy with them. Like all prosecutors, she wanted everything on tape. She wasn’t crazy about the whole Benini thing anyway. It would be, at best, an indirect way to get at Chet Fiore. More likely, if it worked at all, it would net only a minor player in a minor racket. It was what Schleister and Gogarty were doing when she took over, and they insisted it was worth pursuing. Well, she thought, if she couldn’t get them off it, at least she could make them make it work. “From now on,” she announced, “you wear a wire. It’s the only way.”

  Schliester shrugged; that was fine with him. But Gogarty had objections. He held up a finger, wagging it in his schoolteacher mode. “Not so fast,” he said. “Mr. Benini isn’t taking walks for his health. If he’s afraid the office is hot, he’s going to look for a wire. And if he finds one, it’s game over.”

  Elaine turned to Schliester. “Did he do that?” she asked. “Did he check you for a wire?”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Gogarty said, not letting his partner answer. “But that was only because he knew my man here wasn’t expecting to go outside. Next time he will be, so next time Benini’s gonna check.”

  Elaine considered the possibility a moment and then turned back to Schliester. “Your call,” she said.

  Schliester took no time whatsoever to think about it. “No problem,” he said.

  Gogarty muttered a string of curses under his breath. Later, when the two agents were alone, he let his partner have it. “Your call,” he said in a mocking falsetto. “You know what that means? It means, ‘Gee, Agent Schliester, let me see your balls.’ And you, boychik, you just laid them on the table.”

  Schliester laughed. “If she wants my balls she can have them,” he said. He saw the expression on Gogarty’s face, so he added, “She’s got a nice ass for a lawyer.”

  The next morning a technician named Wilson Something or Something Wilson came to the office with a sample case full of equipment. This wasn’t the old-fashioned stuff where they tape a transmitter to one part of your body and a microphone to another. It was James Bond stuff. There was jewelry for women, cufflinks and a wristwatch for a man, a little notepad, one of those little palm-of-the-hand computers, and a ballpoint pen that was a complete self-contained radio with a microphone and transmitter inside. On top of that the pen actually worked. You could write with it. Schliester chose the pen.

  “You got yourself all in a lather for nothing,” he told his partner. “This is amazing shit.”

  Nobody east of the Mississippi said things like got yourself in a lather. Gogarty wondered how long it would take this kid to talk like he came from around here.

  It turned out that Gogarty had been right about one thing. The next time Benini and Schliester went outside for a walk, the skinny little gangster insisted on patting Schliester down for a wire. He even made him empty his pockets, but all he found was a wallet, with Schliester’s New York driver’s license, Social Security card, and a few credit cards, all in the name of Frederick Linkletter, some folding money, some change, an address book, and a ballpoint pen. The time after that Schliester emptied his pockets the minute they were out of the building. They were standing on Eleventh Avenue. “Aren’t you going to feel me up?” Schliester asked.

  Benini glanced around at the steady stream of traffic flowing south on the avenue, and at the pedestrians making their way into the Center, where a housewares show was in progress, and then proceeded with a perfunctory frisk. His heart wasn’t in it.

  “That’s it?” Schliester said. “I look forward to this all week and I don’t even get a decent hand job?”

  Benini said, “Shut the fuck up,” and Gogarty, listening in with headphones and a tape recorder in a locksmith’s van with Jersey plates parked just below Thirty-second Street, laughed so hard the coffee he was drinking came out his nose.

  After that, there were no more frisks.

  Now all of a sudden this kid, who until this point was tops in Benini’s book, the best contact man he had ever had, was spoiling things by asking for more money. “Look,” Benini said, “you’re getting a couple of bills a week for absolutely nothing. What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with me,” Schliester said, “is that I’m not stupid. If you give me three bills before I even ask for anything, then it’s got to be worth more than three bills.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you’re not stupid.”

  “Right,” Benini said.

  “Right,” Schliester agreed.

  Benini looked at his shoes. He wasn’t quite sure what they had just agreed on.

  Schliester, on the other hand, looked up at the deck of the immense aircraft carrier looming eight stories over their heads. “Can you imagine the balls on a guy who would actually land a plane on a boat?” he said. It was his way of telling his pa
rtner where he was. Gogarty liked to keep track of those things.

  “They’re fucking heroes,” Benini said. “How does five bills sound?”

  “I don’t know. How much do you take off these guys?”

  Benini looked at him like he was crazy. “What do you wanna know for?” he said. “You wanna be my partner all of a sudden?”

  “I am your partner,” Schliester said.

  “Bullshit,” Benini said.

  Schliester stopped walking. “No it’s not bullshit,” he shot back angrily. “That skinny Korean with the stereo systems came into my office pissed, ready to start the Korean War all over again, says you took ten K off him.”

  “K?”

  “Oh right, I forgot, you guys still say G’s? You sound like a fucking George Raft movie.”

  Benini ignored the crack. “He’s fucking lying,” he said.

  “Hey, one of you is,” Schliester said with a shrug and a little bit of a grin.

  Benini’s face turned so red with rage that Gogarty, in the van, could practically feel the heat coming off the man over the radio transmission. You don’t tell guys like Gus Benini they’re lying because they have an overdeveloped sense of honor. But before Benini had a chance to express himself, Schliester switched gears. “Now if you’re telling me it wasn’t ten, I’ll take your word for it. But if he’s telling me ten, then it sure as hell wasn’t five and it wasn’t six. The point is he wanted to go to the cops and I talked him out of it.”

  “All right,” Benini conceded, his voice still sharp from the anger he was trying to get over. “That’s worth something. You did good.”

  “No,” Schliester said. “It’s not worth something. It’s worth a cut. Because the next guy maybe he won’t come to me at all. Maybe he’ll go straight to the cops. And he’s not going to know who you are or where to find you. But he’s sure as hell going to tell them where to find me. Now I wouldn’t tell them anything because that would be stupid and we both agreed that I’m not stupid. But I am going to end up with a lot more aggravation than I can justify for three or four bills a week, which, if I wanted it that bad, I could make tending bar.”