Some of the buildings west of the river were alive with lights and workers, but to my relief the Gateway building was not one of them. Its unlit windows were black against the dull sky.
The guard in the lobby let me in when I pounded on the door. I produced an old badge I’d found in my closet the night before, one that proclaimed me to be on official business for Cook County.
“I’m supposed to look for rodent evidence on all the floors where food is prepared. Can you tell me where to start? Or maybe you’d like to come along? We’ve been getting reports about rats the size of beavers in some of these buildings.”
The guard hastily disclaimed any interest in rats. The executive dining room was on thirty-six, he said, and the employee cafeteria in the basement. As I’d hoped, the idea of giant rats kept him from studying my badge too closely: it was signed by a man who hadn’t been in county politics for three years.
“You’ll have to take the stairs to thirty-six,” he warned me. “We don’t have any electricity in here.”
I groaned suitably. “The executive dining room on the same floor as the executive offices? I want to be able to talk to Donald Blakely or Eleanor Guziak as fast as possible if I find anything serious.”
“People can’t come to work here, miss: it’s not safe. Mr. Blakely and his officers picked up their vital documents on Tuesday. And you should have seen him lead them on a race. Thirty-nine floors. Some of the kids in their twenties had to quit halfway up, but not Mr. Blakely. He stays in tip-top shape.”
“I hope to do as well.” I smiled and followed his directions to the stairwell door.
I kept to a slow, steady pace, with frequent breaks to stretch out my calf muscles. Emergency lights burned on every second floor, providing a ghostly glow in which to read the floor numbers on the doors.
Around the fifteenth floor I abandoned my briefcase, stuffing my picklocks and rubber gloves in my pockets. Around the twenty-second my legs felt as though they were on fire. By the time I got to the thirties I was having to stop and sit for a minute after each flight. When I finally reached the door marked thirty-nine my legs felt like rubber bands. I lay down on the hall floor for ten minutes, resting my ankles against the stairwell doorjamb until the fire in my calves had subsided to a dull glow. Finally I got back up and wobbled along the corridors to Blakely’s office.
I found myself tiptoeing past the empty offices. A place whose only purpose was to be stuffed with human bodies in the frenzied dance of modern business seems not just forlorn, but ludicrous when abandoned. I felt a foolish impulse to pat the walls in comfort, to make sure the building knew I was sympathetic so that it would be my ally in my search.
When I got to Blakely’s suite I pulled on my latex gloves. The outer door was locked. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to bring a flashlight; kneeling in the dark to fumble with my picklocks took longer than I wanted to spend. I didn’t think the guard would hike up the stairs after me, but he might have an elevator on an emergency generator not available to people like me.
The door opened to the typical executive suite:secretary’s office with waiting area for guests, a conference room, which stood open, and the door to the holy of holies, also locked. I ignored Blakely’s secretary’s desk and file cabinets, assuming he didn’t share dangerous secrets with her. His office door yielded to the same combination of picks as the antechamber.
Once inside the ghost-room I worked fast. Blakely had a desk with one center drawer and a filing cabinet made of matching mahogany. Both were locked but opened easily. I started to pull out files, squinting at labels in the half-light. Fortunately he had a corner office, so I got two walls of windows.
Whistling softly through my teeth I flipped through executive reports on loans, profits, expansion, overseas clients, executive-suite clients—those with assets of a hundred million or more, according to a memo in the front of the file—there were only eleven, including Gant-Ag—the pros and cons of offshore banking, small banks that might make acquisition targets, personnel files of staff reporting directly to him.
The details of confidential personnel reports weren’t any of my business; I returned them immediately to the desk drawer. I skimmed the acquisitions file, but found no mention of Century Bank. Overseas clients included an impressive assortment in the Middle East. I thumbed through the pages quickly, and was about to return it, too, to the drawer, when the Gant-Ag name jumped out at me.
Rolling a plush armchair over to the window, where I could read better, I went back through the file until I found the Gant-Ag name again. It was in a letter from a man named Manzoor Khalil, whose letterhead identified him as an exporter with offices in Karachi and Amman. He thanked Blakely for the opportunity to do business with Gateway and with Gant-Ag, and assured him that Gant-Ag’s Agricultural Products—capitalized in the letter—had safely reached their final destination.
My client is extremely satisfied with Gant-Ag’s performance, and has, as requested, deposited payment in his own bank in the Caymans. I await your instructions on how to transfer money from this account to your own client.
Manzoor Khalil considered himself, in conclusion, Donald Blakely’s most esteemed and obliged colleague. I read the letter through three times, then held it sideways, as though that might shed further light on it.
If Gant-Ag was doing business in the Middle East, why couldn’t money simply be paid straight into their own account? Presumably they had transfer agents all over the world. Even if it was a country where civil unrest made business risky, they could still get paid, in dollars, in a bank of their choosing. Why this rigmarole of getting the customer to put money into his own offshore account?
Suddenly I remembered the letter I’d filched from Fabian Messenger’s desk. Senator Gantner was thanking him for advice on the Boland Amendment. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but the senator must have dozens or more lawyers on his staff to give him all kinds of advice on federal law. He’d turned to Fabian because he didn’t want to alert anyone in Washington to the possibility that his family’s company was breaking the law.
I didn’t know much about the Boland Amendment. I thought it only applied to sending arms to the Nicaraguan contras. But maybe it forbade any financial deals with terrorist organizations? I wondered what Fabian would do if I called up and asked him for an opinion.
Come to think of it, a whiff of Gant-Ag’s dealings must have surfaced somewhere in Congress: in the stack of documents Murray had pulled for me young Alec and the senator’s brother Craig had both testified before a Senate select committee that Gant-Ag was not violating the embargo. Grain companies had been hard hit by the embargo. If Gant-Ag had felt they wanted to sidestep it, then they would have to work through a third party like Khalil.
And the fifty-million-dollar line of credit that Century Bank ran through Home Free, which Ken Graham had found in Tish’s files: Was that the money from the Caymans being cycled through a not-for-profit for Gant-Ag?
If Century and Home Free were laundering money for Gantner, no wonder Blakely and Heccomb didn’t want me poking around in Century’s affairs. The musketeers had canceled the Lamia loan because when JAD bought Century they started to cut back on minority and women-owned enterprises. Then, according to Cyrus, they had put an effective omertà in place in City Hall.
Everything was fine until I started asking questions about why Lamia’d lost their zoning permit and their loan. Gantner talked to Phoebe, asking her to put my investigation into the deep freeze. In exchange, his daddy would get FDA approval for her T-cell enhancer. And to sweeten the blow to Lamia, they got Heccomb to scrounge around and come up with a rehab project for the women.
Small surprise: Home Free had gotten out of the business of direct placement of the homeless. If they were indeed serving as the point for bringing Gant-Ag’s money into the country, they wouldn’t have time or energy to work as a social services agency. They certainly wouldn’t want the state, or even the city, to come around on the tours of
inspection service providers have to go through.
At the same time, they were awash in cash. So why not funnel some of it into construction? By working with the Romanians, paying them almost nothing, they could pad their payrolls and make it look as though a lot more money was going into construction than in fact they were spending.
How much of this had Deirdre known? She might have stumbled onto the padded payrolls in her volunteer work. She might even have known about the line of credit. Since she was married to Fabian, she could have learned without too much difficulty that Gant-Ag was trying to violate the Boland Amendment.
A chill hand squeezed my stomach. Had Deirdre taken her knowledge to the three musketeers? Hoping for—I couldn’t imagine. Maybe she wasn’t trying to gain anything tangible—maybe she just thought if she held their secrets they would have to respect her. If fifty million dollars was at stake they might well have decided she was an expendable irritant.
The memory of Deirdre at her dinner party swam before my brain. Drunk, hostile, making innuendos—about Jasper Heccomb and how pleased Blakely and Gantner must be with him. It must have become clear to them that night that their secrets would not survive longer than it took her to drink a bottle of burgundy.
If. If all my suppositions were correct. I grabbed a piece of paper from Blakely’s desk and scribbled down Khalil’s name, address, and the date of the letter. Returning the foreign client file to his desk, I pulled out the Gant-Ag papers. This was the biggest collection Blakely had—about six inches of documents.
I looked at my watch: I’d been up here for over an hour now. Would the guard become suspicious? And if so, what would he do? Without electricity in the building I couldn’t photocopy anything. I had to study the papers here, and today was probably my only chance.
Nervous about time I flipped through the pages, not sure what to look for. Finally I pulled out sections that related to Gant-Ag’s debt. Near the end of the stack was a section on taxes. Ah, yes, the other half of Gantner’s letter to Fabian, wanting an expert on tax loans from offshore banks.
I had settled back into the plush armchair with my load of documents when I became aware of a whirring in the background. The office had been utterly soundless, but at first the noise didn’t rouse me because it was the commonplace hum of office life—an elevator.
I swore savagely. As I’d feared, the guard had become suspicious. And as I’d also feared, he had a machine at his disposal.
54
Down the Shaft
I shoved the desk drawers shut, stuffed the papers I was carrying down the back of my jeans, took a quick look around to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything personal behind, and scampered out of the office as fast as my sore legs would carry me. I slammed the doors behind me and went up the hallway in a shuffling run. My hamstrings protested, but I overruled them. “Move now or you can rest all you want in jail,” I muttered out loud.
When I got to the elevators I couldn’t hear them running. Maybe I’d been mistaken. Or maybe there was a service elevator in another part of the building. If I went back to the stairwell I could be intercepted on any floor, but at least I would hear my pursuer.
I had turned back to the hall when the motor started up again. I put my ear to each set of doors in turn: it was the left one on the far end. I looked around for cover. The elevator bank opened onto the executive reception area. A high mahogany counter separated the hall from the desk where the receptionist held court. That would have to do. As the motor behind me whined to a halt I ran to the counter, put a hand on the top, and vaulted over.
I landed with a clatter on a set of phone buttons built into the desk top. Biting off an expletive, I held my breath. The doors were rolling open. With any luck my crash landing wouldn’t be noticed. As I waited I heard static from a walkie-talkie, and the grunt of someone stooping. I slid quietly from the phone buttons and crouched underneath the desk. A few seconds later a flashlight played over the rug behind me. My left leg cramped up. I stuffed my fist into my mouth to beat back a gasp of agony.
The light disappeared. Footsteps were almost inaudible in the thick carpeting, but with no sounds from lights or machines to mask them I could hear the guard rustling off in the direction of Blakely’s office, the static from his walkie-talkie giving an occasional belch. When I heard his key scrabble in the lock I straightened out my cramped leg and crawled from my hiding place. I took a quick minute to massage the knotted muscle, then peered around the edge of the receptionist’s cave. In the murk I couldn’t make out the end of the hall to see whether Blakely’s door was open, or where the guard was, but he wouldn’t be able to see me either.
Staying on my hands and knees, I slithered across the open space to the elevator. He had wedged it open with a block of wood—the automatic call buttons wouldn’t work, so he’d have to keep the car with him. I climbed into the car. Without a flashlight I wouldn’t be able to see inside—it was hard enough to do so in the pale green of the emergency bulb in the hall.
Squinting, I saw the guard had removed a panel over a manual control that had to be key activated. My hands clammy with nerves, I fumbled with my picklocks in the dark. The slender shafts buckled at first and in the distance I heard Blakely’s door slam shut.
“Patience, Victoria,” I whispered. “The lock is an extension of your fingers. Feel your way into it.”
The light of the guard’s flash flicked in front of the door as two wards locked in place. I turned the lever two thirds of the way to the left and kicked the wedge away. The guard’s outraged bellow followed me down the shaft.
The car stopped at eleven. Good guess: I wanted to go back to fifteen to retrieve my briefcase. Aside from the fact that the case was covered with my prints, it also had my name written prominently on the inside. Reward if found and returned, or some such nonsense.
I took the Gantner files from the small of my back and removed the contents, which I tucked inside my shirt. Working the manila folders into a square, I stuck it carefully between the elevator doors.
When I got to the stairwell I expected to hear the guard running after me. The shaft was quiet. Sweat began running down the nape of my neck again. Of course. He was summoning help on his walkie-talkie.
They would assume at first that I was taking the elevator to the ground floor and wait for me there. I hoped. I started to calculate how much time I had, then decided it didn’t matter: I had to retrieve my briefcase.
Going up the four flights of stairs was a punishment on my sore legs. I couldn’t afford to sing or make any noise to deflect my mind. At least I wasn’t going into the tunnels again. Away from the depths and toward the light, I thought, remembering a night when I was eight or nine, when a snowstorm had blown into a blizzard as I was halfway home from school.
Gabriella always put a lamp in the living room for my father on stormy nights. I knew she would set it out for me. As the balloon of snow encased me I peered up at the shadowy bulks of buildings, looking for the light. My legs right now felt as they had then, my little-girl legs in the red tights Gabriella insisted on for winter, pumping one step after the other, looking for my mother’s beacon. She had been waiting on the front sidewalk for me, wrapped in a shawl. At nine my head already came to her shoulder, but she picked me up as if I were an infant and carried me into the house. She put me to bed with a treat reserved for special times: hot milk with cocoa and a dash of her strong Italian coffee.
I came to the emergency light at fourteen and found my case only half a flight above me. I paused before starting my downward journey, straining to listen. I didn’t think I was being approached from either direction.
On the downward journey I found a reservoir of strength I wouldn’t have imagined. Perhaps it was my mother’s spirit enveloping me, but I found myself able to sprint down the four flights to the eleventh floor. Retrieving the elevator, I turned the lever all the way to the left. In normal operation it would have stopped on the ground floor, but in its manual emergency mode it to
ok me to the service basement. Not so far from the tunnels after all.
I had my gun in my hand as I exited, but if my guard had summoned allies they were waiting in the lobby. In the dark I saw the red light of an exit sign. Moving with caution in the blackness I made my way to a door that opened on the garage. In another five minutes I was on Canal Street.
With a reckless disregard for my finances I flagged a cab at the corner of Washington and rode to my front door. I was so beat I didn’t even try to keep a lookout for Anton. I kept the Smith & Wesson in my hand with the safety off as I staggered up the three flights: if he jumped me I would simply shoot him on the spot.
I reached my own door without incident. Maybe Terry’s threat of a police watch had been more than bravado. Maybe the cops would help me out for a change.
Stopping only to set the alarm and do up all my bolts, I sank into a hot bath. I soaked for an hour, emptying and refilling the tub, flexing and stretching my legs against the wall. While I lay there I read the Gantner files.
The papers I’d taken away with me did not mention any Cayman Island banks. They did give a high-level summary of Gant-Ag’s and Gantohol’s debt position in the bank, repayment figures, and a reference to the buying of Gant-Ag debt from Century Bank.
When I finally climbed out of the tub I moved slowly to the living room to call Murray. Halfway through punching his number I thought again about Terry’s threats. Maybe he’d tapped my phone too. I slowly climbed back into my jeans and went out to my car. I drove along Diversey until I found a strip mall with a pay phone.
I managed to reach Murray at his desk. “I have a hypothesis, but I need to test it. Can you meet me on the North Side this afternoon?”
“This anything to do with young Messenger?” Murray rumbled at me. “We heard a rumor she’d disappeared again, but the cops, the hospital, and Papa are all sitting mum. I should have known that my best source was you.”
Tunnel Vision Page 38