James Grippando

by Money to Burn

  “Who’s next?” asked Graves. “Lehman? Merrill?”

  Another strike was not out of the question. It had indeed been McVee’s decision to target Saxton Silvers, but in the subprime insanity, other firms had made themselves equally vulnerable, borrowing as much as thirty or forty dollars for every dollar of capital they held in reserve, and then using it to purchase toxic NINA mortgages.

  “We’ll see,” said McVee. “They can all come down.”

  “If that’s the case, I’m curious: Why did you start with Saxton Silvers?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Cantella?”

  “Nothing to do with Cantella.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The solicitor’s tone was not merely one of idle conversation, and McVee knew where it was coming from. Just this morning, a story in the Post raised the possibility that Cantella was a fall guy for bigger players in the market. Graves, it seemed, was barking up that same tree, and flat denial would only have made him more curious.

  “Okay, I admit,” said McVee. “It was a little personal. For two years I’d been wondering when Wall Street would realize that subprime lenders all over America were ignoring a fundamental rule that’s been around since the Stone Age: You make loans based on the borrower’s ability to repay, not on Wall Street’s ability to repackage them and pass the risk of default up the daisy chain to someone else. But it really hurt that it was Michael Cantella—a guy who didn’t even have direct responsibility for mortgage-backed securities—who sounded the alarm last October and told his firm to wake up and smell the poison. My nephew and his mortgage-lending associates had over nine hundred million in NINA mortgages already funded and in the pipeline, and suddenly there was no Wall Street buyer. It was as if Cantella had finally stopped the music, and I was left without a chair.”

  “So this is especially sweet for you.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Graves seemed satisfied. He rose from the couch, and the men shook hands. Together, they walked down the hall and boarded the elevator. On the ride down, Graves reiterated that the sheikh would be “more than happy” to be the financial muscle behind the next go-round. McVee made no promises. He certainly didn’t bother to disclose that he didn’t really need outside money, that the sheikh was along for the ride only because the mob wanted an oil-rich Kuwaiti to blame on the off chance that Congress would finally drop its obsession with steroids in baseball and maybe even hold a hearing or two on what the hell was going on with Wall Street.

  McVee walked them out to the street, where Graves climbed into a limo.

  “We’ll be in touch,” said Graves.

  McVee watched from the sidewalk as the limo pulled away. His explanation for targeting Saxton Silvers had placated the sheikh’s solicitor, but destroying Michael Cantella was about so much more than money. The obsession had begun last fall, when he received a phone call from Florence.

  “She’s alive,” Ian Burn had told him. “She’s changed her look, but we locked eyes just before she ran, and I would bet my life it was her.”

  If true, the tip meant Tony Girelli was a liar—he hadn’t turned Ivy Layton into fish food. McVee was skeptical at first, but Burn was adamant that his eyes had not failed him. The way to lure Ivy out of hiding, he said, was to put the people she loved in danger—the very people she had protected by disappearing in the first place. McVee began cautiously, but last November’s sit-down between Burn and Cantella at Sal’s Place had been far too subtle, drawing no reaction from Ivy. Burn pushed for more convincing measures, and it was the anniversary of Marcus’ suicide that had put McVee over the edge. The thought of Ivy living a new life while his thirty-year-old son rotted in the ground was too much. It was then that McVee decided to turn the attack on Saxton Silvers into an all-out assault against Michael Cantella—destroying his marriage, wiping out his personal fortune, making him a traitor to his own firm. Then Ivy blinked. She warned her precious Michael and, in so doing, revealed herself. Tony Girelli—liar that he was—became the first wave of collateral damage. There would be more. But eventually McVee would get Ivy. And make himself richer in the process.

  Another limo with dark-tinted windows stopped at the curb. The driver got out and came around to open the rear passenger’s-side door. McVee climbed in, and the door closed.

  “Hello, Ian,” he said.

  Ian Burn was seated on the bench seat with his back to the soundproof partition. McVee sat opposite him, facing forward, and the limo pulled into traffic.

  “My nephew told me about last night,” McVee said.

  “Went well,” said Burn.

  He was wearing a hooded jacket and dark sunglasses that reminded McVee of the old FBI sketches of the Unabomber.

  McVee said, “I’m concerned about the number of bodies.”

  “I agree: The Bahamian was a long shot. He didn’t know anything about Ivy. That was a needless one.”

  “I don’t care about him. It’s this flurry in my own backyard that worries me. It’s a dangerous cycle. Girelli put a bullet in Bell’s head because Chuck didn’t have the balls to buck a subpoena and refuse to name Mallory’s boyfriend as his source. The boyfriend had to go because sooner or later he would name my nephew. Girelli had to go—well, just because Girelli had to go.”

  “Is there someone in that group you wish was still alive?”

  “I just want to make sure we’re efficient. You kill these fringe players, yet you let Michael Cantella go.”

  Burn removed his sunglasses. The lighting was dim, most of the sun’s rays blocked by the tinted windows. But with the glasses off, the scars on the right side of Burn’s face were evident.

  “This is my life’s work,” he said.

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. Have you ever wondered how I got these scars?”

  Of course he had. “Not really,” said McVee.

  “It has to do with money.”

  “Doesn’t everything?”

  “This was a very special kind of money,” Burn said, his Indian accent suddenly more noticeable. “Dowry. It still exists in some parts of my country. If a bride’s family doesn’t deliver as promised, that can be very dangerous for a new wife. The husband might even take her into the kitchen or garage, douse her with kerosene, and burn her alive. Happens about every ninety minutes in India. It happened to my sister.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “So was her husband after I caught up with him. That was my first experience with homemade napalm. I got the job done,” he said as he pulled back the hood, exposing his melted ear. “But it didn’t go perfectly.”

  McVee sat in silence.

  Burn tightened his stare. “Everything since then has gone perfectly. Everything.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Burn pulled up the hood and put on his sunglasses. “Michael Cantella’s freedom is only temporary. He’s holed up with Ivy’s mother in a motel over in Jersey. Your nephew is watching him as we speak. The minute Cantella makes a move, I’m on him. There is no doubt in my mind that he will lead me to Ivy Layton. Then they’ll both be toast. Literally.”

  “You should have just put a gun to Cantella’s head and threatened to blow his brains out if Ivy didn’t show up in thirty minutes.”

  “Wouldn’t have worked. Even if we could get a message to her, it’s not like a normal kidnapping. We can’t say, ‘We have your husband, give us a million bucks.’ Ivy knows that what we’re saying is, ‘We have Cantella, now come here and get him so we can burn you both alive.’ She’s not going to walk into that. We need Cantella to lead us to her.”

  “There’s logic to that,” said McVee.

  “Of course there is. Trust me. This is going to go perfectly.”

  The limo stopped. McVee pulled an envelope from his breast pocket. It was filled with cash.

  “Money to Burn,” he said, handing over the envelope. “If you don’t wrap this up soon, I may have to create a special expense ca
tegory on my balance sheet.”

  Without a word, Burn opened the door, climbed out, and left McVee alone in the back of the limo.

  50

  I DIALED PAPA’S CELL FROM THE MOTEL LANDLINE. I GOT HIS VOICE-MAIL greeting:

  “I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but I’m either away from my phone or still trying to figure out how to use this damn thing. Please leave a message.”

  I waited for the beep. “Papa, I called the airline, and they tell me your plane landed in L.A. an hour ago. The hotel says you haven’t checked in yet. I want to make sure you’re okay. I’ll keep trying, but if you see an incoming call from my old number, don’t answer. Someone stole my cell.” I paused, realizing that my message was sounding a little scary. “Anyway, I’m hard to reach, so just call Kevin and let him know you’re okay. Bye, love you.”

  I hung up and looked at Olivia.

  “Still can’t reach your grandfather?’ she said.

  “No. And the airline won’t even tell me if they were on the flight. It’s some sort of security policy.”

  “He probably forgot to turn his cell back on after landing.”

  That was more than likely. But with all that had happened, there were less benign possibilities. “I feel like I’m in an information dead zone in this motel. I need to get out of here.”

  “We can’t go anywhere. We’re being watched.”

  “How do you know?

  “McVee’s men let you go last night only because they’re betting that you’ll lead them to Ivy.” She walked to the window and crooked her finger to part the draperies an inch. As best I could tell, we had a view of a graffiti-splattered concrete wall with Tonnelle Avenue beyond.

  “They must be out there watching,” she said.

  “So you don’t know,” I said. “You’re assuming.”

  “It’s why we’re safe—at least for a little while. The cops can’t find us if we stay put, and McVee won’t touch us so long as they think Ivy might show up here, or that we might lead them to her.”

  “That means I didn’t hurt anything by telling Kevin to give McVee’s name to the FBI.”

  “In the short run, no. In the long run, you pretty much cinched it that they’ll kill all of us. I just hope it’s not at the hands of Ian Burn.”

  Burn had told me his name last night, but I hadn’t shared it with Olivia. “How do you know Ian Burn?”

  “How do you think?”

  “I’m through guessing.”

  She put her foot up on the bed and rolled up her pant leg to the knee. The scar on her shin bone wasn’t that big—about the size of a half dollar—but the crater was deep and grotesque, as if the flames had burned into the bone.

  “I’ve met him,” she said.

  I was speechless. I’d heard that women had a higher pain threshold than men, but napalm burning a hole into your shin had to be even beyond childbirth.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia. When did that happen?”

  “After Ivy’s memorial service.”

  “Burn paid you a visit?”

  She nodded. “My decision to cremate Ivy’s remains and scatter them in the ocean made McVee suspicious. He seemed to think that I was trying to close the book on any further DNA testing. He was right, of course. But when Burn couldn’t get anything out of me, that served as confirmation enough that Ivy was really dead.”

  “Back up a sec,” I said. “How did you get the first DNA test to come back with a match for Ivy?”

  “We’re talking about a crime lab in the west Caribbean, Michael. Think of the Natalie Holloway case—that young girl from Alabama who went to Aruba on a high school graduation trip and vanished from the beach one night. Never found a body, no charges ever stuck. The incompetence on some of those islands is surpassed only by the corruption. Money talks.”

  “So…whose body was inside the shark?”

  “There never was a body,” she said. “It was two pelicans and a half-eaten dolphin.”

  “So the ashes that we scattered were what?”

  “Flipper and his flying friends. I know that sounds crazy, but the shark was an afterthought. The plan we originally came up with was for Ivy to disappear, lost at sea. But we were afraid that McVee would never stop looking if there was no body.”

  “So the shark with the phony human remains was a way to have a body without having a body.”

  “Right. Kind of an interesting story how the shark idea came to her. Ivy attended an art exhibit with Marcus McVee before his suicide.”

  “With Marcus?”

  “She worked for him, Michael. Anyway, the exhibit included that Damien Hirst piece, a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine. A fourteen-foot tiger shark, to be exact—‘something big enough to eat you,’ was what Hirst was after. I think Steven Cohen eventually paid eight million for it.”

  Cohen was a hedge-fund superpower who had amassed a collection valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Marcus McVee was kind of a mini-Cohen. For some of these hedge-fund guys, art was a passion. For others, art was simply the new precious metal: a material object that was valuable, available only in limited quantities, and sellable in a recognized market.

  I was still processing all that—including the fact that Ivy had gone to an art exhibit with Marcus McVee—when Mallory’s cell rang, displaying Kevin’s number. I let it ring through to voice mail and dialed Kevin on the landline.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Nana and Papa are missing.”

  That was a jolt I didn’t need. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “I wasted an hour trying to unravel this, and finally it took a friend in law enforcement to get through the red tape. They never got on the plane.”

  “What happened?”

  “I have no idea,” said Kevin. “Did you tell anyone they were on that flight?”

  “Just my regular driver who took them to the airport. I told him to call you if anything went wrong.”

  “Who bought the tickets?”

  “I cashed in miles by phone.”

  Ivy’s warning was suddenly burning in my ear: They must be intercepting your messages! They might even be listening right now!

  “McVee could have gotten the information,” I said, “if his men were eavesdropping on my cell.”

  “Paranoid conspiracy theories are not likely to fly with the police. Especially ones that come from a fugitive and his brother, even if I am your lawyer.”

  “Then you should be the one to deal with the cops. I can’t go to them anyway, unless I want to be locked up. That’s a good division of labor.”

  “What division? What are you going to do?”

  “Find our grandparents. Any way I can.”

  51

  ERIC VOLKE ENTERED THE GLASS SKYSCRAPER VIA THE BOWELS OF THE parking garage through a door marked DELIVERIES. Saxton Silvers’ main entrance on Seventh Avenue was still blocked by hordes of reporters, cameramen, photographers, confused employees, desperate clients, and the just plain curious. Volke wasn’t sure why, but he was thinking of men—boys—like Michael Cantella’s grandfather at the age of nineteen or twenty, storming the beach on D-Day, watching their friends die, carnage all around. Climbing out of his limo and sneaking up the rear service elevator, he felt like a complete coward.

  The bankruptcy lawyers had filed a Chapter 11 petition—the largest in U.S. history—at nine A.M. The CEO was dealing with the firm’s partners and major stockholders. It wasn’t specifically in Volke’s job description to address the employees, but they were owed at least that much. He went from floor to floor, meeting with large groups of dazed traders, managers, and others who slowly came to realize that they were wasting their time listening to management and should have been typing a résumé. A few were loyal to the end. One of the traders gave him a bronze plaque that had rested atop her desk for six years, a quote from Act II, Scene II of Julius Caesar that Eric had referenced in one of his many inspiring speeches: “Cowards die many times before the
ir death; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

  “Hang in there,” was the more common refrain, though many looked at Volke with dagger eyes, as if to say, I’d like to hang you.

  Volke’s last stop was the foreign-exchange traders on the third floor. The open work area was half-empty. Apparently his hollow message had already trickled down from the equity floor above, and many had decided that it wasn’t worth waiting for. Scores of desks had been cleaned out, personal items boxed up and hauled away, row after row of darkened trading screens left behind. Empty coffee cups rested on tables. Suit jackets hung on the ends of cubicles. A platter of bagels and doughnuts was virtually untouched; few employees had the stomach to eat. An open bottle of tequila sat atop a file cabinet, some having found gallowslike solace there. Pairs of traders exchanged sad smiles of resignation and shook their heads in disbelief. One cluster perused a copy of the bankruptcy court papers, astounded by the sheer heft.

  “Good morning,” said Volke.

  “What’s so good about it?” someone fired back.

  An uneasy silence came over the loose gathering, and it stretched all the way across the floor. Some moved closer to listen in. Others stayed where they were, refusing to give up their desk chair, defying the cold reality that it was no longer theirs.

  Volke took a step back, glancing out the third-story window at the crowded street below, where double-parked news trucks and cameramen jockeyed for position outside the building’s front entrance. Saxton Silvers employees, trying to escape with their belongings and at least some of their dignity, had to push through a media gauntlet where everyone from CNN to Internet bloggers begged for “just thirty seconds” of interview time. A young guy wearing a green Saxton Silvers T-shirt carried a sign that read WHARTON MBA, TWINS ON THE WAY: WILL WORK FOR ANYONE.

  “It’s a very tough day in our history,” said Volke, beginning the way he’d begun each of the dreaded morning talks. But the words halted.