He went on to explain that the system contained what amounted to a burglar alarm designed to shut the machine down if it detected an attempt at unauthorized entry. “That’s the beauty of going in through an output port. The guards aren’t watching.”
Jeffrey, who knew very little about computers, was always surprised at how clearly the young man explained everything. “Like smuggling a handgun off an airplane,” he suggested.
Enriquez glanced back over his shoulder and nodded his appreciation. “Exactly,” he said.
The door was locked behind them.
As Gabriel completed the cable hookup and switched on his computer, Jeffrey could feel his pulses pounding in his temples like a drumbeat. He had to make a conscious effort to breathe normally. He was already a wealthy man; it wasn’t the prospect of more money that excited him. It was the very real likelihood, the certainty in fact, that in the next few moments he would cross over into a country where he had never traveled before, a country from which, if everything went according to plan, he would never have to return.
He leaned over Gabriel’s shoulder to study the screen of the laptop computer, but all he saw was a stream of numbers flashing by far too fast to be read. He knew they would have conveyed no meaning to him even if he had been able to read them.
“What it’s doing right now,” Gabriel said, almost as though he had read Jeffrey’s mind, “is reconfiguring the port. As soon as it’s done that, we can get in.”
“Kind of exciting,” Jeffrey said.
“Not really,” Gabriel answered laconically. “Not yet anyway. There—we’re in.”
The words, Jeffrey knew, were nothing but standard computer jargon but he felt as though he were literally in, as though he had just stepped through a door into a cold and brightly lit room filled with gleaming and complicated appliances, a room so bright that he cast no shadow and was completely invisible.
A simple menu appeared on the screen, with half a dozen lettered choices. It looked crude and primitive, lifelessly monochromatic compared with the lively and complex color-coded screens generated by the firm’s software. He didn’t recognize anything on the list.
Gabriel began typing at the keyboard, and with each keystroke another menu appeared and disappeared, some of them vanishing even before the machine had time to complete them. Finally, the screen showed him something he was able to recognize, the names of the fourteen firms that composed what Jeffrey referred to as the Branford Fund. It was named for Branford Technologies, an Atlanta metallurgy firm that was the chief beneficiary of the moneys poured into the fund. The company held patents on a dozen different alloys of exotic metals combined with plastics and exotic metals combined with ceramics. Clint Bolling was heavily invested in the Branford Fund.
The name of another fund in which Bolling had money appeared on the screen as Gabriel clacked away. A moment later an old dot-matrix printer, banished years ago to this inaccessible outpost, clattered to life behind Jeffrey. The sudden noise startled him. Panicked him, in fact. It couldn’t have been worse if the door to the room suddenly flew open and Everett Layne was standing in the doorway demanding in his courtly way to know what Jeffrey Blaine was doing in this place at this hour.
“Sorry,” Gabriel laughed, “I should have told you I was going to do that.”
Jeffrey let out a long, slow breath as Gabriel got up from his chair and stepped around him to get to the printer. With a flick of his finger, he separated the pages of the continuous form paper as they emerged from the machine. There were only two of them, reporting Bolling’s holdings in the two funds. He passed them to Jeffrey.
In terms of format, though not in the quality of the printing, they were identical to the reports Jeffrey regularly received. They were dated two days ago, and Jeffrey was familiar enough with the details of the Oklahoman’s holdings to recognize that half a million dollars had moved from the second fund to Branford.
“You created a predated transfer,” Jeffrey said, impressed.
Enriquez smiled. “I did better than that,” he said. “This runs all the way back to his first buy-in. As of now the money was always in Branford. No matter how you look it up, that’s what you’ll find.”
Jeffrey nodded because he didn’t trust himself to say anything. By tomorrow he would feel comfortable about passing invisibly through solid walls. Right now it was still too new to him.
He waited while Gabriel restored the original records.
Phyllis was asleep when he got home.
If you want to know what the word tedious means, try conducting a police investigation sometime. Not the kind where you dig around at a crime scene looking for clues, sorting out what looks important but isn’t from what doesn’t but is. That kind of work was at least vaguely interesting—or so Schliester assumed, although in fact he had never done it. His own experience tended to be in the kind of police investigation where you get in someone’s face and bang his head against the wall until he tells you what you want to know. This was interesting, too, but it numbed the soul.
No, what Schliester was thinking about when he used the word tedious was the kind of undercover work where you methodically build a case. That’s a great word, methodically. It means doing the same thing over and over and over. Catching someone like Gus Benini in a shakedown is nice but not nearly as nice as catching him in two shakedowns. Three is better still. At four even the prosecutor begins to concede that Mr. Benini is looking at some legal problems that could soon complicate his life.
“How much trouble does this little prick have to get into before we reel him in?” Schliester asked Elaine Lester.
They were in a bar way up on Broadway around Columbia University. It was eleven o’clock. They had taken to meeting at night to discuss the case, always in dark, out-of-the-way taverns in neighborhoods where neither of them, Schliester especially, was likely to be known. Gogarty wasn’t invited. When Elaine showed up for the first such meeting and noticed that Schliester was waiting by himself at a corner table for two, she knew even before she sat down that he was going to put the make on her.
Except he didn’t. In fact he didn’t even come close, didn’t give it so much as a half-hearted try. The same thing happened the second time, except that Elaine made up her mind in advance to bring up the subject herself if he didn’t. She liked Schliester, and she was having the most confused and conflicted feelings she had ever had in her life about her deepening involvement with Jeffrey Blaine. Was he or wasn’t he the subject of an investigation by her office? Well, yes. Well, no. Schliester and his partner insisted they weren’t investigating him. Lord knew she had asked them to, so where was the conflict? There was none. There wasn’t a single report in a single file anywhere in the office that contained so much as a shred of credible evidence of anything wrong there. Besides, she was absolutely certain that if, in fact, there was a connection between Jeffrey and Chet Fiore, it was her intimacy with Jeffrey that offered the best possible chance of finding it.
She knew that when the time came, if it came, she would be able to step back and smile and tell him, sorry but she had a warrant for his arrest in her purse. Sometimes she actually imagined the scene, which had a strange power to excite her. He would shrug and smile, a wan and wistful smile that made her wonder what games he had been playing while she was playing hers.
No, she had no reason to want to get out of her relationship with Jeffrey Blaine. All she needed, she told herself, was a breath of air. And right now Wally Schliester seemed like a good way to get it, in fact the only possible way that presented itself.
But first they had to talk about the case. “Wally,” she said, answering his question, “it has nothing to do with quantity. You know that. Quality.”
“What quality?” he objected. “A shakedown is a shakedown.”
She took a deep breath and explained carefully. On Benini’s first deal they didn’t have anything on tape. That made the case weak. Yes, all the conversations with Benini after that were recorded. But
what good was his shakedown of the Korean, who was back in Korea and wouldn’t return to the States to testify? Elaine also doubted very much that the jeweler from Wisconsin or the contact lens guy would testify. They were rabbits, with just enough imagination to form a vivid conception of the underworld assassins who would be coming after them if they gave a statement to the police. So what did that leave? One case on which, maybe, if they got lucky, they would have a witness.
“Except we don’t need any goddamned witnesses,” Schliester said. “We’re not taking him to court, we just want to lean on him.”
She finished her drink and gestured for another. “He’s got lawyers, Wally,” she said. She had taken to using his name a lot after hours. In the office she never called anyone by name. “If we don’t have credible witnesses, then we don’t have a case we can put him away with. In which case his lawyers will tell him to keep his mouth shut.”
He could see the logic. You needed less evidence to send a guy to jail than you needed to let him go. He said exactly that, and she said, “Always,” and the two of them laughed like two kids in on the same joke.
She waited until her drink came, and then she said, “Is it my turn to ask you a question?”
“It was,” he said. “Too bad you used it up for that.”
She made a face. She was really kind of pretty an awful lot of the time. He nodded for her to go ahead.
“How come your partner’s not here?” she asked.
He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a good one,” he said.
“Could it possibly be because he’s an asshole?” she asked.
“He doesn’t think that much of you either,” Schliester said, “but no, that’s not it.”
“In that case,” she said, “the other possibility that comes to mind is that we’re meeting just the two of us because you want to seduce me.”
“My,” Schliester said, “don’t we think a lot of ourselves.”
Elaine looked up over the rim of her glass with just her eyes, keeping her face down. “If I told you I have good reason to, what would you say?” she asked.
“Something clever,” he said. “Like, Hey, baby, you wanna fuck?”
They couldn’t go to her apartment because Jeffrey sometimes showed up unexpectedly after staying late in the office. So they went to his. Which wasn’t in the least what she expected his apartment would look like. It wasn’t cramped or cluttered or implacably adolescent. It was small, but it had furniture someone actually had gone out and bought. None of the prints on the walls bore the images of athletes. There were old views of New York, from the days when there was a wall at Wall Street, and photographs dating from the era when horses drew streetcars over cobblestones.
“I owe you an apology,” she said as she looked around.
He didn’t ask why, and she assumed it was because he knew what she meant.
The minute he put his hands on her, she was surprised at how simple it seemed.
Not that it was simple. She had just added cheating on her married lover to the mix. How was this making her life less complicated?
In the morning, while he was showering and she was still in bed, the idea came to her of setting Gogarty up as one of Benini’s marks. Schliester liked it.
He wasn’t as crazy about the fact that this was the kind of thing she thought about in bed in the morning.
Chet Fiore still lived with his wife in a little house on City Island three blocks from his mother. He bought it just after he got married and he lived there in the sense that sooner or later he showed up to sleep there almost every night. His wife’s name was Virginia, Ginny, and she was a City Island girl who never really wanted to live anywhere else. For this reason, and others as well, she was never troubled by what might have seemed, to anyone watching, a rather lonely and isolated life. The truth was that she wasn’t lonely in the least. She had a cadre of girlfriends from her high school days and she saw them constantly, for shopping, for cards, for endless cups of coffee in the spring and the fall and the winter, for iced tea and cakes in the pretty little backyard lapped by the ocean all through the summer. Her friends were all married, while Ginny was, for social purposes, effectively single, so that she functioned more or less as a spinster aunt, a confidante to her friends’ children and an odd place setting at dinner parties. Still, as the wife of Chet Fiore, she was entitled to and received enormous deference in the tiny community. She was satisfied with her life in a way few women are.
When she and Chet were first married, they planned on having children, but two second-trimester miscarriages and then a disastrous surgery eliminated that possibility. A few months after the surgery she asked her husband to consider adopting, but he shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room. She never asked again. He came home when he came home, and that was enough for her.
Being alone as much as she was, she could have had affairs of her own. She never did. Her sexual needs were minimal, and she experienced them not as passion or desire, but only as a vague restlessness that crept over her from time to time. She had only to move next to him in bed, to touch him, and they would make love, and then the restlessness would go away. If she had been asked, she would have said that she was happily married and that her husband loved her.
And he would have said the same thing.
He tended to sleep late, waking at ten or eleven. He usually made himself breakfast—he enjoyed doing it—and then Ginny joined him for coffee. They sat together and talked at the kitchen table for half an hour or so, until Jimmy arrived to take him to the city. Mostly, Fiore listened while she talked about things she was planning to do with the house, or about his mother’s health, which was deteriorating steadily. She had round-the-clock nurses now, and Ginny made it a point to see her every day. Ginny was a good daughter-in-law, and that was one of the things Fiore prized about her. She was a sensible and intelligent woman with clear and well-formed opinions on a wide variety of issues. Fiore enjoyed listening to her. If it wasn’t for Ginny, he sometimes thought, his brain would rot away from lack of exercise. In the city he was considered an intelligent man, but Fiore himself never felt that his dealings with the mobsters above him or below him called for much intelligence at all.
Until the thing with Blaine. That was different. Even in the privacy of his own thoughts he would never call it a stroke of genius, because he had too much respect for intellectual accomplishments to ever think anything like that. But it was sure as hell a clever piece of work. Every detail had been carefully worked out, from the moment he picked Blaine’s name off Erill Stasny’s client list. The carefully orchestrated chaos at Jessica Blaine’s birthday party, followed by the application of more pressure on Blaine through his daughter, had all worked perfectly. Blaine put up a good show of resistance until his daughter disappeared, but Fiore suspected from the very start that it was only a show, and he grew more certain of it as their partnership deepened.
The man he met on the Staten Island ferry a week ago was hardly the same man who dithered around so ineffectually on the night of his daughter’s birthday party. Fiore knew that no one changes that much that quickly. There was only one way to explain it. Something buried got unburied. But it had to have been there all along.
The situation would bear watching. A man like Blaine, trying on his new life, getting the feel of it, could be ruthless and reckless at the same time. Like a storm.
Fine, Fiore thought. A storm is never a problem if you dress for it.
On this particular morning, as on many others, Jimmy joined Fiore and Ginny for coffee and pastry. “Call Blaine, see if he can meet me this afternoon,” Fiore said, and Jimmy took his coffee cup to another room to make the call. He got the man’s secretary, who put him on hold while she buzzed her boss. Then she came back on the line. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Angelini,” she said. “Mr. Blaine says this afternoon will be fine. How is two o’clock?”
Angelisi didn’t bother to correct her on the name. Two o’clock, he said, was no problem.
A minute after she hung up the phone and noted the two o’clock appointment on Jeffrey’s calendar, his assistant was standing in Jeffrey’s office. Her name was Jennie and she had been with him almost three years. She was a bright young woman with a quick and intuitive understanding of Jeffrey’s complex business. She read every report submitted to him by his staff; like a monk poring over sacred texts, she studied the marginal notes with which he responded. When she didn’t understand his thinking, she got books from the firm’s library on the eighteenth floor or downloaded articles from business journals.
Still, for all her maturity, she had the disconcertingly girlish habit of standing pigeon-toed, clutching a memo pad in both hands in front of her skirt whenever she came into Jeffrey’s office. It made her look like a junior high school student at that perplexing stage in life when a girl is too tall to be a child and too awkward to be anything else.
“Excuse me, Mr. Blaine,” she said. “You just made an appointment with a Mr. Fiore.”
If it was a question, Jeffrey didn’t know what the question was. So he said nothing and waited.
“Is that who I think it is?” she asked.
Jeffrey smiled at her carefully. He had known that sooner or later he was going to have this conversation and would have brought it up if she didn’t. He wanted her to have answers in case others in the office had questions, and he wanted it clear that he was not keeping Fiore a secret. “Do you mean is he a gangster?” he said. “The newspapers seem to say he is. He’s never mentioned it to me.”
Her face flushed and her hands grappled with the memo pad, wringing it back and forth.
“That’s all right, you did well to ask,” he said. “He’s not the sort of man one expects to see here. But he has money to invest, and as long as it’s not undocumented cash…”
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