“About ten years. He was one of my first clients as an associate here. We’ve done real estate work for him, trusts, wills. And I know him a little socially. He and Helene used to have a place in the Hamptons; Paula and I ran into them a few times out there.” Paula is Mike’s wife.
“Do you think he’s lying?” I asked.
“Clients lie. That’s axiomatic.”
“But this client, in this case?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
We sat in silence a while longer, then I picked up my jacket, the fax, and the file box. Mike walked me to the elevator. The old guard was still on duty, but if he noticed our passage, he made no sign. Mike pushed the button.
“You have Thanksgiving plans?” he asked. “We’re going out to Water Mill and having some people over. Why don’t you come?” I hemmed and hawed and started shaking my head, but Mike went on.
“What else are you going to do? Come on, come out and stay the weekend. Paula would love to see you.”
“Thanks, Mike, and tell Paula thanks too, but I think my family has roped me into something,” I lied. My sisters had tried to talk me into a family dinner, but I’d resisted so far, and planned to keep doing so. It satisfied Mike, though. The elevator came, and I rode down.
Chapter Three
The temperature had dropped and a raw wind had picked up. Rain was on the way. The streets had cleared a little, and I was able to get a cab downtown without bloodshed. It let me out on the corner of Sixteenth and Sixth, because traffic on my street was blocked, as it had been several times that week, by a moving van double-parked in front of my building. I was getting a new upstairs neighbor, who was arriving in stages. I looked up at the fifth floor, at the row of tall, arched windows that ran the width of the building. Light poured out of them, and several were open. I could hear music drifting down, something classical, but too faint to make out.
I climbed the short flight of iron stairs that led from the street to the building entrance. The movers had propped open the heavy glass and wrought iron door with a large cardboard box. Printed in neat, angular letters across the top was “J. Lu-Kitchen.” I looked around. No movers, no one minding the truck. Almost nine at night-the perfect time for a lunch break. I put my toe against the box, shoved it into the entry vestibule, and stepped inside just ahead of the closing door. More boxes cluttered the small lobby and the narrow hallway that led to the elevator. I rang for the elevator and heard the bell clang somewhere up above, but heard nothing else. I rang again, but the elevator stayed where it was- on five, I guessed. I took the stairs.
I lived on the fourth floor, in my sister Lauren’s apartment. She’d gotten married a few years ago, and as far as I knew was very happy in her digs on the Upper East Side, but she’d hung on to this place just in case. I was glad to keep it warm for her. The building is an old one, from the 1890s. For its first hundred or so years it was a factory. Then, in the 1990s, it was reborn as residential space. One big loft on each floor. The building still bore marks of its industrial roots in the oversized elevator and the sixteen-foot tin ceilings, but the individual lofts had been renovated in very different styles. I knew the advertising guy on six had done something with a lot of brushed aluminum that made his place look like the inside of a turbine, and the two women on the third floor had turned theirs into a Craftsman bungalow. Lauren’s place, my place at the moment, was tame by those standards: white walls, bleached hardwood floors, a kitchen area in cherry wood and green granite, halogen lighting, sparse, comfortable furniture in soft leather and wood. I’d told Lauren that if the PI thing didn’t work out, I might open a Banana Republic in there. She’d smiled sweetly and flipped me the bird.
I flicked on the main lights and set the file box on the kitchen counter. My plan was to go for a run, then eat something and read the file. While I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Pierro or his story, I was eager to work. I try to keep the downtime between cases to a minimum. It’s not a money thing. For me, downtime is dangerous. It’s unfocused, disorderly, and open-ended, and too easily filled with memory. Work keeps all that at bay-work and running. They’re cheaper than substance abuse, and ultimately less trouble. I listened to my voice mail on the speakerphone while I changed into my running clothes.
There was a message from Lauren, trying again to cajole me into a family Thanksgiving. “John, it’s me. Call me about Thanksgiving. I promise it won’t be horrible. Ned’s at his best when he’s carving up big pieces of meat, and Janine is sure to get shitfaced, which is always amusing. Seriously, you should come. Everyone wants to see you. We do worry, you know. Call me.” Although she’s just three years younger than I am, Lauren sounds like a breathless sixteen-year-old when she pleads. Ned is my eldest brother; Janine is his well-kempt wife. Maybe I could tell them that I was having Thanksgiving dinner with Mike.
Then there was a message from Clare, calling from a pay phone as always. “Hi. It’s about six-thirty. Look, I’m sorry about Monday. You caught me off guard, and I wasn’t sure if you were kidding or what. It’s hard to tell with you. I’ll try you later. Maybe we can get together tomorrow — I’m free in the morning, around ten.” Clare was.. I’m not sure what. A friend of mine? I couldn’t claim to know her very well, and besides a certain cynical worldview, a high level of aerobic fitness, and intercourse, we didn’t have much in common. Someone I was dating? Can you say that about a woman who’s married to someone else? A woman I’d met a few months ago, running in Central Park, and began having sex with soon after-that, at least, is accurate.
And there was a message from Donald. He spoke slowly, and his deep, gravelly voice filled the room. “Just saying hello. Call when you can. Had a good deer season this year. Got some nice steaks, if you want ’em. Hope you’re okay.” Donald Stennis had been my boss-the Burr County sheriff-and my friend. He’d also been my father-in-law, back when I’d had a wife. I’d phone Donald when I had a long time to spend. It was always good to talk to him, but for the past three years it hadn’t been easy.
I pulled on running tights and a shirt, a wind shell, a reflective vest, my shoes and gloves and hit the streets. It was maybe ten degrees above freezing now, with a nasty wind. Rain, mixed with the occasional snowflake, was being driven sideways. Nice weather for a run. I’d keep it to five miles or so.
I headed west to Ninth Avenue, worked my way south through the quieter streets of the West Village, and then west again to the highway and the piers. I was slapped around by gusts for a mile or two, and it was hard to find a rhythm, but the wind settled into a steady blow from the north as I came to the river and my pace steadied and quickened. For a while I ran along the edge of Ground Zero, and the wide gash of sky there was still disorienting, and somehow oppressive. Even after all this time, a charge of anger and sadness surged through me.
As they often do when I run, my thoughts sprinted away on their own. I thought about Clare, and the last time I’d seen her, on Monday. As always, we were at my place, it being a little awkward to go to hers. I’d fallen asleep and woken up groggy and disoriented at dusk. The last dregs of pale, cold daylight came in through the big windows. The apartment was dark otherwise. Clare had showered and was dressing. I’d watched her for a while in silence-her precise movements as she pulled jeans over her long legs, pulled on socks, laced her shoes, fastened her heavy steel watch, and brushed out her long, pale hair. And as I watched I felt, quite suddenly, as bleak and lonely as I had in a long time. Maybe it was because I was still half asleep, or maybe it was the fading light that brought it on. Or maybe it was that, even watching her familiar ritual of dressing and departure, Clare seemed utterly a stranger.
She had paused to examine the profile of her small, bare breasts and flat belly in the mirror, and saw that I was awake. She smiled and kept on inspecting. When she was satisfied, she pulled on a black turtleneck, bound her hair in a ponytail, and packed all her toiletries into the leather duffle she always brought with her. Time to go.
She’d slip
ped on her coat and was bending to kiss me when I caught her arm and pulled her down to sit. She’d looked puzzled. For no reason I could think of, I’d asked her what she was doing for Thanksgiving and if she wanted to spend it with me. At first she’d thought I was joking. Maybe I had been. I wasn’t sure why I’d asked her, or if I actually wanted to spend the holiday with her at all. Then she’d gotten mad.
“What?” she’d sputtered. She’d pulled her arm away and stood. “That’s… what is this bullshit? That’s not… I thought we had an understanding here.” She’d checked her watch, annoyed and impatient. “I’m supposed to be somewhere. I can’t do this now.” And she’d left.
She was right to be mad, really. The rules, though unstated, were clear nevertheless, from the time we’d started up months ago. We’d see each other once or twice a week, most weeks. The sex was good, athletic and inventive, and with the added frisson of the illicit. We didn’t talk about much, and what we did say mostly amounted to facile observations on current events and on the various urban types we both knew. We most definitely did not talk about her husband or about the lives either of us led outside the confines of my bed. She made small gestures- she’d bring flowers or coffee, pastries or fresh orange juice-but they were the habits of a well-mannered guest more than tokens of affection. We were a convenience to each other, amusing, undemanding, needing zero maintenance. She was right to be mad; I’d crossed a line. And even a couple of days later I wasn’t sure why.
And then I settled fully into my stride. My thoughts ran on to someplace I didn’t follow, and all I knew was the rhythm of my own breathing and the sound of my shoes on the pavement. The rain, the wind, the terrain, even the pumping of my arms and the pounding of my legs were abstractions now. I didn’t feel the cold, and the thinning traffic was irrelevant. I could run all night.
I’d done over six miles by the time I’d completed the loop that brought me home. The moving van was gone, and so were the boxes. The elevator was back, too. Upstairs, I put on some coffee, and while it brewed I stretched, peeled off my running clothes, and stood under a hot shower. Afterward, I pulled on jeans and a polo shirt, poured the coffee, and put on a Steely Dan disk-music to launder money by. Then I opened a can of tuna and started reading.
Mike’s people do excellent research, and their work on MWB was no exception. The file was a compendium of the coverage MWB had received in both the mainstream and the financial press since the first stories had broken about three years ago. It included an overview of MWB’s activities, a who’s who of MWB executives, and a summary of the investigation, with a review of the indictments handed down so far.
I read through it, making notes as I went. Some of the pieces from the trade press were a little heavy going, but I actually know more about Wall Street than what I admitted to Pierro. For three summers while I was in college, I was an intern on the trading floor of a pretty big firm. When I wasn’t too hungover, or busy chasing female interns, I learned a few things. But my exposure to the financial world predated this. It was the world I grew up in, the family business, at least on my mother’s side. My two brothers work on Wall Street. So does my older sister, Liz. My uncles, my mother’s brothers, had worked there too. And my maternal grandfather. And his two brothers. And a hoard of cousins, as well. All in the employ of the small merchant bank started by my great-grandfather: Klein amp; Sons.
Mike’s briefing had hit the high points. The money-laundering operation was extensive, and the file described the wide variety of techniques that MWB had employed. Included in its repertoire was the kind of scam that the fax seemed to implicate Pierro in: arranging loans of clean money to companies controlled by bad guys, who then paid off the loans with dirty money. But MWB had gone beyond just the laundry business. It had leveraged its network of correspondent banks, its vast inventory of shell corporations, and its stable of bought and paid-for politicians and influence peddlers, to become a kind of superstore for shady financial services.
Say you were a hardworking drug lord, being unreasonably harassed by law-enforcement types in your home country. MWB could offer you not only the means to move your wealth offshore, they could provide a squeaky-clean corporate front for you to operate through, and solve your immigration problems, too. Or maybe you were a terrorist, with donations to collect from sympathizers worldwide, and operating cash to distribute to your cells. MWB could be your one-stop shop, aggregating and laundering the in-bound cash, and acting as paymaster virtually anywhere. Or perhaps you were a less-than-honest businessman, looking for help in sidestepping some annoying regulations or a bothersome government probe. MWB had cadres of sympathetic legislators ready and waiting, if the price was right.
That was maybe the scariest part. MWB’s reach was broad, and every place it operated, it corrupted. Its U.S. activities were a good example. Through the firms it controlled, both directly and covertly, and its platoon of gray-haired, heavyweight shills, MWB was a huge donor to politicians at every level-local, state, and federal. Party affiliation was irrelevant; MWB was in the market for access, and it bought in bulk. MWB executives and their proxies were also big charitable contributors, which bought them social access, and influence of a different sort.
The review of the investigation started with MWB’s front man at Southern States buying a couple of pounds of heroin in a San Diego parking lot. A little more than three years after that auspicious event, twenty-eight MWB executives and their proxies were either in jail, under indictment, under investigation, fighting extradition, or on the run. Gerard Nassouli was one of those executives. He had been the treasurer of MWB’s New York branch; but his current title was Fugitive, Whereabouts Unknown. He had last been seen on March 7, three years before.
Mike was right about the investigation-it was a zoo, and a messy one at that. In this country alone, it involved several U.S. attorney offices, the FBI, the Treasury, the SEC, the CFTC, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and several state banking boards. The DEA had chips in the game because of what MWB did for drug dealers. Likewise, the CIA had an interest because MWB counted terrorists and several heads of state among its clients. Ultimately, an interagency task force was created to tame this sack of snakes. An assistant U.S. attorney from San Diego, a guy named Chris Perez, shared the lead with an assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York, a woman named Shelly DiPaolo. They were rumored to be smart, ruthless, and politically ambitious-an ideal partnership.
I was surprised that in nearly three years, with a small army of investigators and what was no doubt a fat budget at its disposal, the task force had so far produced only modest results. There had been an initial spate of indictments, and some convictions-a few wins at trial, a few plea bargains-but not much else after these. Rumor had it that more indictments were on the way. With so much time and money down the drain, there were no doubt plenty of people in New York, San Diego, and Washington who were counting the days.
Running in parallel with the MWB investigation, and nearly as complicated, was the liquidation of the bank itself. MWB had gone under even before the first indictments were handed down, and its legitimate customers had been queued up for years trying to get even some of their assets back. Courts and regulators in several jurisdictions had agreed on a committee to oversee the liquidation, but because of the complexity of MWB’s activities and the ongoing criminal investigation, the committee needed specialized help. They had brought in Brill Associates, a high-end corporate security and investigations firm, and Parsons and Perkins, the big accounting firm. I knew Parsons only by reputation, but I had run across Brill more than a few times. They had some good people, a lot of ex-feds. They had some real bastards, too. But I had a friend there, a guy I’d known since my days upstate. I made a note to call him.
By the time I finished, I had several pages of notes. I knew more about MWB than I had, but no more about who might be trying to squeeze Pierro. I hadn’t expected to. That’s where the investigating comes in. There were several places to start
looking. People with access to the documents in the fax-that could include Nassouli, other MWB employees, people from Textiles, and maybe even people at French Samuelson. Pierro might have some ideas on that front. The list could also include people working on the MWB investigation, or on the liquidation team. My friend at Brill might give me a way in there, though I’d need to tread very lightly. And then there was the fax itself. It had been sent from somewhere, and there was a phone number printed on the top of each page. However thin, it was a thread to pull on.
I went to sleep at around two a.m., to the thump and slide of boxes being moved around upstairs.
Chapter Four
“I don’t know a thing, and I don’t want to know a thing,” the bodega man said. He was a tall, thin Latino in his middle fifties. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, and his graying mustache was neatly trimmed. He wore pressed khakis, a gray sweater, and new-looking sneakers. And he was never still. Just then he was vigorously wiping down the small countertop near the checkout, where an earlier customer had spilled a little coffee. The counter, like the whole store, was clean but thick with merchandise. Combs and painkillers, condoms and CDs, lighter fluid and vitamins and an endless supply of batteries were crowded in dense but orderly displays around the register. His morning rush was over, and for the moment we were alone in the store.
“Look, you’re not the police. I don’t have to talk to you. Besides, who ever got into a hassle because they didn’t talk to somebody?” I could think of a few people, but I didn’t comment. He came around the counter and headed briskly down one of the narrow aisles. I followed, sure that I’d be swallowed in an avalanche of tampons and breakfast cereals.
“And besides, you know how many people come in here every day to make calls or send faxes?” Actually, I had no idea, but I suspected he’d tell me. For someone with nothing to say, he liked to talk. “I get sixty, seventy people in here some weeks, some weeks more. They got no phones, so they come in here and buy cards and make calls. They send faxes, and get them here too. That’s a lot of business. How am I supposed to know anything?” I could appreciate the sentiment.
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