by Bill Vidal
So, Ulm speculated, if we are right in this version of the facts, no doubt this was the last we would hear from the dead man. If, on the other hand the American lawyers believed they had a genuine claim to the money, undoubtedly they would contact UCB again. Technically the letter received referred to an account that no longer existed and so, according to Swiss law, the bank was not compelled to even acknowledge having received it. It was Thomas Clayton’s money and he wanted it left at the United Credit Bank. The bank agreed. As the seven o’clock Zurich-bound train started to pull away from the station, Laforge instinctively looked at his watch and grimaced. It was two minutes past the hour. He would have to get his watch checked.
Back in his office that evening, Laforge took advantage of the time difference and telephoned Columbia University. He asked to speak to Professor Michael Clayton. He was put through to his disconsolate former secretary. Was the caller not aware of the sad news? she asked.
‘I’m sorry, no.’ Laforge feigned shock, adding that he was an old friend from the Sorbonne. ‘When did he die?’
‘November fourth, sir. It was terrible. Took everyone by surprise.’
‘How absolutely awful,’ he said. ‘I must send my condolences. Do you know if his son still lives in Europe?’
‘Yes, sir. In London. Would you like the address?’
‘No, thank you. I have it at home. Thank you very much.’
Conceivably, Dr Ulm was right.
On Saturday morning Caroline Clayton got up early and went to breakfast with Nanny and the children. There was excitement in the air – Caroline’s enthusiasm was contagious.
‘Is it a really nice house, Mum?’ young Patrick asked.
‘You’ll see,’ she replied, smiling. ‘I’m sure you’ll like it.’
At half past eight her mother had phoned for a chat. Caroline told her they’d be setting off for Wiltshire very shortly and happily accepted her invitation to lunch after the viewing. It was only a further twenty-five miles to Stroud.
By nine Tom had joined them. His hair still wet from the shower, he was dressed casually for a day in the country. He had decided not to mention the five million to Caroline. Having kept his covert losses from her, he reckoned the one cancelled out the other. He would, of course, tell her about the thirty-seven million dollars in due course. But not yet. Not until he learnt the truth about his windfall. He could not be sure of Caroline’s reaction.
The estate agent, who was London-based, had given them their keys. He had shown the house to Caroline a few months earlier, but this time he agreed to her request to view it unaccompanied, relieved not to have to drive to Wiltshire on a Saturday. On that earlier occasion the agent had asked some pointed questions, polite probing into a prospect’s financial viability, and subsequently learnt of Tom Clayton’s standing in the City.
The property was currently unoccupied. The agent acted on the instructions of a Lloyd’s syndicate which now held title to it, its previous owners having decamped to a new life in Bermuda after all their British assets had been wiped out by Mid-Western asbestosis.
Within fifteen minutes of leaving their Kensington home, they were on the motorway. Caroline kept to a constant eighty miles an hour, ten higher than the speed limit but five below that at which the police took an interest. It took just over an hour to reach the Chippenham junction, in a typical November light drizzle and moderate traffic. Turning north towards Chipping Sodbury, they drove through the village, then followed a country lane leading up to Corston Park.
The gates were closed: heavy wrought iron between two stone pillars. A chain and padlock proclaimed that the estate had seen better days. Once through the gates, the private road curved between fenced paddocks, now devoid of livestock and starting to look untidy. A few new potholes bore silent witness to the recent decline. When the spring came, thought Caroline, the place would turn into a wilderness. Fifty yards beyond the gates, the road went through a wood, then emerged into a spacious clearing in the middle of which stood Corston House.
It was a substantial mansion, built in Cotswold stone, with two main floors and an extensive attic. The surrounding flower beds showed signs of neglect but might yet be resurrected. They pulled up by the main entrance and Tom busied himself with the front door as the children, released from the restrictions of the journey, ran noisily on the gravel.
The oak creaked slightly and the characteristic stale air of untended houses issued forth. Inside, the first impression was of darkness, but Caroline was at once pulling blinds open and the bland winter daylight nevertheless brought the rooms slowly to life. Allowing for its bareness, the interior was even more imposing than the outside. The square main hall led to five reception rooms right and left and was dominated by a grand staircase, rising first towards the back of the house, then splitting at right angles to double back overhead to the upper gallery. A long corridor on either side provided access to the six main bedrooms and two bathrooms. At each end a simpler staircase climbed to the top floor, once intended to house staff and provide storage.
Caroline opened the double doors to the right of the entrance hall and ebulliently called Tom to join her as she went about rolling up blinds and pulling back tatty curtains.
‘Look at this!’ she shouted excitedly.
It was a magnificent room. Fifty feet long – the entire length of the building north of the front door – and thirty feet deep, with elegantly ornate walls and ceilings. At the far end an enormous fireplace surrounded by Carrara marble bore witness to a gracious past, yet on the floor, incongruously next to it, a pile of dry logs, kindling and newspapers served as reminder that, not so long ago, this mansion had also been a home. Sadly, even the chandeliers had vanished, the former owners having sold everything they could before their ignominious exit.
But for all its sad aspects, the house was sound. A few years back, with the recession and the Lloyd’s debacle, Corston Park might have been bought for half a million. Now the asking price was a million and if someone had bothered to present it better it might have fetched a higher price. But the owners were long gone and the receivers distant in their interest. To them Corston Park was no more than a debtor’s asset that required turning into cash. So a million was a relative bargain and Tom was prepared to pay the asking price.
He heard his wife’s steps as she went through the upstairs rooms one by one, shouting about the need for more bathrooms, and thus pre-empting the most American of objections. Tom grinned and walked under the staircase to the kitchens. There was a vast scullery and a main kitchen devoid of all appliances except a large Aga, too majestic to remove. An open door revealed stone steps descending to the cellars.
The children saw him through the window and banged on a rear door.
‘There’s a tennis court!’ exclaimed Patrick.
‘And a swimming pool!’ added Michael.
Tom joined the boys outside and followed their eager steps. The court had weeds growing through the hard surface and the pool was coated in algae.
‘Well?’ called Caroline buoyantly from an upstairs window. ‘Don’t tell me it isn’t just perfect!’
‘It’s going to need some work,’ replied Clayton lightly, to mask his ongoing worry. Was all that money really his?
‘Oh, we can do a bit at a time. Hang on, I’m coming down.’
She joined them at the back and all four walked down the overgrown footpath towards the lake. The children ran ahead as soon as they caught sight of it, ignoring admonitions to take care.
‘Just think,’ said Caroline. ‘You could invite people to shoot here, instead of always hoping to be asked.’
Caroline’s set had introduced Tom to the English way of shooting and of late he had become a devotee.
He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘You don’t have to sell it to me. I do like it. A lot.’
‘I think we should make an offer,’ she insisted.
‘Okay. Tell them nine hundred. Cash. And ask them to let us keep the ke
ys. We must have a proper survey.’
On the way to Stroud the children asked what would happen to their house in London. Tom explained that it would be kept. He still had to work in the City, and they still had school. So, for a while, Corston Park would be for weekends and holidays. Later it could really become home.
In the next half-hour Patrick and Michael easily spent a further hundred thousand in planning to modernize the house and argued about which room each would have. It began raining again before they reached their destination but Caroline didn’t even turn on the windscreen wipers. She would not allow clouds of any sort to mar this blissful day.
When Dick Sweeney returned to work on Monday morning he felt uneasy. He hoped to find a message on his desk confirming that the expected funds had reached Geneva, but somehow the spectre of Tom Clayton refused to go away. He breezed into his office feigning high spirits – the standard New York pose – and exchanged a few words with the receptionist before following his secretary into his room. She went through Dick’s messages as he hung up his coat, and assured him that all matters arisen in his absence were being dealt with. ‘Also,’ she added, ‘Tom Clayton called from London, Thursday. Said he’d call again today.’
Before the lawyer had time to recover he saw the neatly typed memo from his associate: a Mr Isler from United Credit Bank had called in. Just wishing to verify the details of Professor Clayton’s death and that the firm were indeed executors of the estate. Weston Hall had confirmed those matters that were common knowledge, and suggested Mr Isler should contact Mr Sweeney if he required further information. Mr Isler could be contacted at the Broad Street offices of his bank in Lower Manhattan.
Sweeney sat on his chair and stared at the memo.
‘You okay?’ his secretary asked.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he replied unconvincingly. ‘I just haven’t got over that lousy trip yet. Look, Mary, I need to get into something straight away. Hold all my calls. Or, if appropriate, give them to Weston. No interruptions till I say so. Okay?’
She nodded her understanding and left the room, somewhat perplexed by her boss’s uncharacteristic behaviour.
The lawyer crossed his hands above his head and reclined his chair, pushing it away from the desk. His eyes cast towards the ceiling without seeing it. Now what? He had warned Salazar, but with clients like that one did not say, ‘I told you so.’
Fifteen years ago, when Eamon Sweeney had retired, he had briefed his son on the Salazar account. It earned the firm good money and besides, Joe was a good friend. Not that Dick had any qualms about taking dirty business. He believed that the world ran on corruption and to him words like right or wrong – per se – were meaningless. In business, only outcomes mattered: success was good, the means to it irrelevant.
But Dick did draw the line at murder. And he had feared that if ever Michael Clayton – or now, his son – discovered the deception, Salazar might have no such qualms.
In the late 1930s, when Dick was a child, his father and Pat Clayton had been inseparable. Hardly a weekend passed without one visiting the other’s home, with their families. The two friends would drink Irish whiskey until all hours and listen to Gaelic songs. Clayton was a tough man; his smart clothes did not hide the strong physique made tougher by years of street fights.
New York in the early part of the century had been like an ethnic archipelago, each community drawing strength from looking after its own. Clayton’s building company soon made its mark. Some Irish immigrants were doing well and they wanted their own houses. Clayton persuaded them to give him their business. So he built a house here and a car park there, he courted the Church and got to build some schools. With their fortunes made, some of his fellow-immigrants sought to ingratiate themselves with the Anglo establishment by taking their business elsewhere. Clayton reminded them of the treatment meted out by the English back home and questioned the morality of any man fit to call himself an Irishman giving his business to Protestants. If that failed, he suggested that some of his firm’s money went to help the Patriots’ cause in Ireland and that spurning that crusade would not be well received. In one instance, a social-climbing textile importer had placed the construction of his new warehouse with outsiders; no sooner was the site finished than it had burnt down. In Irish New York people knew Pat Clayton was responsible but, as always, sheltered from justice by Eamon Sweeney & Co.
Then in 1919, Congress passed the 18th Amendment. Cresting a misguided wave of puritanical demagoguery, Congressman Andrew J.Volstead decided that alcohol was bad for America and that the nation should become dry. He courted the support of a motley group of factions: the Anti-Saloon League, the Evangelical Protestant Movement, the Anti-Alien Front. In January 1920 the Volstead Act became law and within days an illegal industry of previously unimagined proportions was born. Satisfying a national need that was only enhanced by Prohibition, it would also lay down the framework for the drug nightmare that would emulate its methods later in the century. Truckloads from Canada, shiploads from Europe and the Caribbean. Countless tons of liquor smuggled in on the backs of bribes. Soon the first booze barons emerged, those who had the guts and the power to organize the distribution. In Chicago the Italians and the Irish fought it out. Literally. There, a certain Mr Alphonse Capone, a Brooklyn gangster, was said by 1927 to have amassed one hundred million dollars. In Boston the Irish led the market in relative peace, but New York was too big for just one faction and the archipelagos became more clearly defined. Clayton had visited Ireland and secured his sources. Soon any household or speakeasy requiring the Emerald Isle’s finest had to deal with Patrick Clayton.
Which was how he came to meet the young Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Joe Salazar was only eighteen and spoke poor English. He lived by his wits, lending money along the lower rungs of the Hispanic community. At the time he worked for his father, Emilio, who had turned to moneylending with a capital of $3,000, proceeds of a daring raid on a Savings & Loan. He went around the neighbourhoods lending ten bucks here, twenty there, to people who could not borrow from banks and at rates that doubled Salazar’s money every thirty days. When his son Joe turned sixteen, Emilio taught him the business. By his eighteenth birthday the young man derived pleasure from dealing with borrowers who failed to repay on time.
One evening, at the height of Prohibition, Joe had gone into an Irish bar. Though not a regular, it was in Salazar’s neighbourhood and he was known. The owner gave him a double Irish on the house, then asked for Joe’s assistance. He needed five hundred for a week.
‘What’s it for?’ Joe asked, and the man pulled a bottle of Bushmills from under the counter.
‘Best stuff money can buy,’ the saloon keeper said, displaying the label.
Salazar made a quick calculation. ‘Thirty per cent, seven days,’ he said, reaching for his inside pocket. The man extended his right hand to seal the bargain and appreciatively took the five one-hundred-dollar bills. Seven days later, Salazar stopped by and collected six hundred and fifty dollars.
‘This stuff?’ Salazar asked, raising the glass he had just been poured. ‘How much you can move?’
‘Right here in this bar?’ the man leaned over to talk to the young man. ‘Ten cases a week, no problem, but –’
‘Not cases,’ interrupted Salazar. ‘Tell me in money.’
‘Two grand a week, no sweat.’
‘Where you buy it?’
‘Hey, Joey!’ the Irishman protested. ‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘You have to,’ said Salazar calmly, ‘if we gonna be partners.’
So O’Malley took Salazar into a booth and they talked business. Next morning they went together to see Pat Clayton and paid cash for five thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey.
By the time the 21st Amendment put an end to Prohibition in 1933, Joe Salazar had long parted company with O’Malley and had taken over the entire Hispanic market in New York, becoming Pat Clayton’s biggest customer. Eamon Sweeney had helped them both. Unlike the impetuou
s Capone who murdered with impunity but ended up locked away for tax evasion, Sweeney taught Clayton and Salazar how to keep books and trade through real and dummy companies. By 1933 they were both rich men. Clayton returned to erecting buildings and Salazar acquired offices in Manhattan, giving moneylending a new dimension.
Then came the war and with it a black market. There was a fortune to be made buying and selling medical supplies, arms and ammunition. Salazar and Clayton joined forces once again, the former putting up the cash – he had lots of outside investors available to him by now – the latter reviving his cross-border smuggling network. And they still had Eamon Sweeney on their side. He warned them about the new federal law enforcers – the FBI could not be bought like local police forces – and against keeping money in America without being able to explain its source. Switzerland was easy in those days. Anyone could open accounts there, no questions asked, and Sweeney had set them up for his two clients. One apiece, different cities, different banks.
Then one day the two men fell out. It was 1944 and America was three years into the war. Tons of morphia were being shipped to the army hospitals in the Pacific and Europe. But morphine was also in high demand as the main ingredient in the production of heroin for the vast recreational and addict markets of New York. Salazar went to Clayton with a business proposition but the Irishman declined. Booze and bullets he did not mind, he had grown up with both in Donegal, but drugs were sold to children. From that moment their differences might have led to conflict. But fate intervened and – nine days after turning down Joe Salazar – Patrick Clayton died of a heart attack.
The following month, when Salazar collected his first payment for shipping morphine, he reflected almost sadly that this was the first time in years he would be sending only one payment to Switzerland, instead of the usual two. Then suddenly the idea came to him: Why not two? Why not keep Pat Clayton’s account going? The Swiss didn’t know he was dead, and Joe had plenty of copies of his former partner’s signature. So he gave it a try: wrote to United Credit Bank on Pat’s stationery, signed Pat’s name, and asked the bank to transfer $5,000 to the account of a small supplier. Three weeks later the morphine arrived. Joe Salazar had discovered the safest way of handling dirty money – do it in someone else’s name. He closed his own accounts everywhere, keeping only those that related to clean funds. For the rest, at first he used the names of dead men, but soon realized it was not even necessary to do that. So he started using real people: dates of birth, occupations, social security numbers if required. He would use these accounts later to bank the illegal proceeds of his clients’ businesses, for Salazar had learnt that the real money lay in letting others do the dirty work as well as bearing the risks. Salazar had returned to his roots. The backstreet moneylender was now a banker in every sense of the word.