Death's little helpers jm-2

by Peter Spiegelman

  I nodded slowly.

  Neary rapped on the table again. “Look. We know you’re interested in Danes, and you know we are, too. Maybe we can cooperate here.”

  Pflug laughed. It was loud and braying, and it went on too long. “Well, that’s very generous,” he said finally. “But I don’t think I could hold up my end of the bargain. I’ve got nothing to say about this Danes, and- truth be told- I’m not really a very cooperative fellow. At any rate, I don’t think John here has his mind on that business anymore. I think he’s got his mind on those photographs.” He turned to me again. “Now, how about telling me a little about what was in those pictures. There was nothing of a personal nature, was there? No pictures of you and that Chinese girl of yours? Because from where I sit, that would be rude.”

  I looked at Neary. “This is pointless.” I sighed. “He isn’t going to help himself.” I shook my head and got up from my seat. Pflug laughed loudly and stood up too, and as he did I whipped my right forearm into the side of his head. He went backward over the top of his chair and came down loud and hard, and before I could do anything else Neary had his hand on my chest. I leaned against it for a moment and then stepped back. My heart was pounding and adrenaline was careening through my veins.

  Pflug rolled to his feet. He came up quickly and gracefully, a step out of my range and with his hands in front of him. His eyes were unfocused for a moment, but he shook it off and bent his legs and balanced nicely. A red welt was growing along the left side of his face. He touched it with his fingertips.

  “Now we’re getting to the point,” he whispered.

  Neary turned to him and put out his other hand. “Right there is fine,” he said softly. He turned back to me. “You done now?” His voice was calm. “You satisfy your inner idiot?” I looked beyond him, at Pflug, and nodded minutely. Neary followed my gaze. “And you?” he asked. Pflug grinned. I was pleased to see there was blood in his mouth.

  “I’m just fine,” he said. He was breathing hard and fighting to control it.

  “Then I think we’re done here,” Neary said to me. I nodded. He moved to the door and Pflug opened it. He stepped aside and made a little bow and started tucking in his shirt. Neary went through and I followed, and as I passed him, Pflug twisted his hips and his left arm snapped out and up at my face. I was looking for it but not at that speed, and he tagged me hard under the eye with the back of his fist. My head jerked sideways and filled with flares of pain and light and I shuffled back. I heard rather than saw him closing and I brought my hands up and tucked my chin down. I turned my body and his boot smacked my right arm, just above the elbow. It was like a brick shot from a cannon, and I staggered back. Numbness spread up to my shoulder and into my hand. I shook my head and my vision cleared and I saw Neary holding Pflug, one-handed, against the conference room wall.

  “I thought we were done, Jer,” he said softly.

  Pflug managed a little smile. “We are now,” he said.

  Neary shook his head and took his hand from Pflug’s throat. “Let’s go,” he said to me.

  I looked at Pflug and didn’t move. My knees were twitchy and so were my arms, and I could barely hear Neary over the rushing sound that filled my ears.

  “John,” he said more sharply.

  I walked out and Neary followed. The reception area was deserted when we passed through, and quiet except for the sound of a vacuum cleaner running somewhere out of sight. The elevator came quickly and we got on. The doors were sliding shut when we heard Pflug’s braying laughter.

  Peter Spiegelman

  JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home

  26

  I banged some cubes from an ice tray and wrapped them in a dish towel and held the towel to my face. Neary popped a can of ginger ale and drank half of it and took the rest to my long table. He sat down and looked at me.

  “What is it with you?” he said finally. “What are you, thirty-something going on fifteen? I should know by now- every time I work with you, I end up with some kind of agita.” It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d left Pflug’s office.

  Cold water ran down my neck and soaked into my shirt. My sinuses were frosting up, and the pain in my cheek was spreading across my face. I didn’t say anything.

  Neary took another long pull and drained the can. He sighed. “Did you somehow miss that this guy was trying to get into your head? Did you not get that he wants your mind on your nephews and Jane- and on him? That he wants it on anything besides who his client is and where the hell Danes went? I know Pflug’s a subtle guy, but did that somehow escape you?”

  “I got it,” I said, from behind my towel.

  “And you thought letting him goad you into a fucking bar brawl was the best way to handle it?”

  “That wasn’t my plan going in.”

  “I think that’s probably bullshit,” Neary said, and he crushed his soda can. “But I won’t argue the point.”

  I wrung my towel into the sink and fiddled with the cubes and held the pack to my face again. I looked at Neary. “Sorry,” I said. There wasn’t much more to say: He was right, and we both knew it. Neary snorted. He tossed his soda can to me. I caught it and dropped it in the trash.

  “Pflug is not a cream puff,” he said. “We’re not going to scare a name out of him.”

  I nodded. “And there’s no one like Stevie in his shop, whose shoes we can squeeze.”

  “Anybody you particularly like, of the people that you’ve talked to?”

  “For hiring Pflug? I don’t know… Not Pratt- she was genuinely freaked by the surveillance and by the breakin at the Pace offices. Turpin- it’s hard to say. I don’t know why he’d do it, and if it was him why the breakin? Why wouldn’t he just give Pflug’s guys the keys? Sovitch and Lefcourt- I suppose they’re a possibility… Of course, it would help to have some idea about what Pflug was hired to do.”

  “You don’t think he’s trying to find Danes?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s trying to make sure no one else does.”

  Neary nodded. “You didn’t mention your Ukrainian buddy.”

  “Gromyko? It’s not him.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  I shrugged. Neary walked over to the windows and looked out on the shadowed rooftops.

  “You think Czerka is typical of the kind of guy Pflug hires?” he asked, after a while.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if Pflug hires a guy like Marty to do his shitwork in New York, you think there’s a chance he hires a similar kind of guy down in DC?”

  I thought about it. “I guess it’s possible.”

  “I guess so too. So maybe we could do what Gerber did: dig up one of Pflug’s ex-freelancers. The guys in my DC office know the local players- including the local versions of Marty.”

  “Even if they can find someone who worked for him- and someone who’s willing to talk- Gerber said Pflug kept the day labor away from the clients.”

  “Maybe. But maybe one of these guys was a little more enterprising than Pflug expected… or a little more cautious. Maybe Pflug wasn’t as careful as he thought.” Neary shrugged. “Hell, maybe one of them has a good guess about who Pflug’s clients are- in which case they’d be one up on us.”

  I took the ice off my face and prodded my cheek. It was numb. “It’s a plan,” I said.

  “Close enough, anyway,” Neary said, and he looked out the window some more.

  I poured a glass of water and drank it down and sat at the table. “As long as we’re speculating, Gerber’s sources said there were a lot of Wall Street people on Pflug’s target list. It’s possible that Greg Danes was one of them. It’s possible that Danes pissed someone off badly enough that they sicced Pflug onto him.”

  “The pissing-off part is plausible,” Neary said.

  “I can go back at Pratt again, and see if she knows of anyone that was particularly angry with Danes. I can try Tony Frye, too. It’s thin, but it’s better than waiting around.
”

  Neary nodded and stretched. He collected his suit jacket from the kitchen counter. “How are your nephews doing?”

  “Fine, last I heard.”

  “And Jane?”

  “Somewhat less fine,” I said. He looked at me but said nothing.

  Neary went back to his office, to start making phone calls. I showered and ate tuna fish from a can, and in between bites I left messages for Tony Frye and Irene Pratt. Then I read for a while from a book by Paul Auster, and then I went to bed and didn’t sleep. The night was filled with shouts and car horns and sirens from the street. From upstairs there was only silence.

  Friday morning was gray, and heavy with rain that never quite fell. I tried Irene Pratt twice more and got her voice mail and no calls back. I drank coffee and read the paper and poked absently at the little purple knot under my eye and at its larger cousin on my arm. Anthony Frye phoned me at noon.

  “Mr. March,” he said, with mock formality. “I was so pleased to get your message. What can I do for you today?”

  “More gossip about your old boss,” I said.

  “Greg still hasn’t turned up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I’m happy to oblige, though it’s fortunate you’re getting me now. I’m rapidly forgetting my days as a lowly analyst.”

  “I’ll talk fast,” I said.

  I asked him again about anyone who might have had an ax to grind with Danes, anyone who might be nursing a grudge. Frye gave it some thought but came up with nothing more than he had the last time I’d asked.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” he said, “but have you spoken with Pratt? She might have an idea.”

  I made a noncommittal noise. “How about people interested in Danes? Has anyone called you lately, asking about him?”

  Frye snorted. “Only you, March, but again, I’d think Pratt would know better.”

  I thought back to when I’d asked Irene Pratt that same question, in the bar at the Warwick. She’d taken a while to respond, and when she finally told me no, her eyes had skittered around the room, looking at anything but me. At the time I’d marked it down to nerves, but was it? I remembered what she’d said when I’d asked what kind of people had been calling about Danes.

  “People we do business with: industry contacts, fund managers, people from the companies we cover- the same people who called before he went away.”

  “You told me last time that Danes wasn’t always adept at dealing with big investors,” I said. “That there were fund managers who got the better of him.”

  “Indeed,” Frye said.

  “Were there any who did it on a consistent basis- any who Danes might have had a gripe with?”

  Frye was quiet for a while. “I suppose there were,” he said. “I don’t know how Greg felt about them, but certainly whenever it would happen- whenever he would find that one of these people had blown smoke up his ass- he’d be angry and as near to embarrassment as he ever got.”

  “Why did he keep dealing with them?”

  “Well, it was a part of his job, after all,” Frye said. “Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

  “No psychological theories?”

  Frye chuckled. “Greg fancied himself a player- someone who could move markets and reshape industries and that sort of thing. Perhaps dealing with those fellows on a regular basis was a part of that fancy; perhaps it helped him to believe his own PR.”

  “The people you’re thinking of are all fund managers?”

  “The three I have in mind ran hedge funds. Three of the biggest, in their day.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “Two of them are out of the markets. Julian Ressler cashed out nearly three years ago, and Vincent Pryor was called to that big investor conference in the sky about eighteen months back.”

  “And the third?”

  “The third is Marcus Hauck. He’s still around and making a bloody fortune again.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Not many have outside the industry.”

  “You know him?”

  “Only slightly, and only over the phone; Greg dealt with him mainly. Hauck runs the Kubera Group- as in the Hindu god- and he’s got over five billion under management, all told. He’s smart and aggressive and very private, both professionally and personally. His funds hit a few bumps in the road at the end of the bubble- late into tech and late out- but over the past year or so he seems to have gotten the old magic back.”

  “And Danes still talks to him?”

  “He did while I was at Pace, though not very frequently- perhaps every few months. You think he might know something about Greg?”

  “I have no idea,” I said honestly. “Is he based in town?”

  “In Connecticut. Kubera’s offices are in Stamford, and Hauck himself has some massive place in Greenwich. Why, are you off to see the wizard?”

  “Maybe he can fix me up with a brain,” I said.

  Frye laughed. “From what I know of Hauck, he’s more likely to set the flying monkeys on you.”

  Frye rang off. I poured myself another cup of coffee and opened my laptop, and after about an hour I found that Frye’s description of Marcus Hauck as very private was an understatement. There was next to nothing about him online: a one-paragraph biography, a brief four-year-old article from a trade rag, and a more recent piece from a business weekly that added little. I learned that Hauck was forty-six, Swiss by birth, and the only child of a banker from Basel. He was educated in the States- at MIT and the Kellogg School- and from there he went to the investment bank of Melton-Peck, where he spent the next five years as the star of its proprietary trading desk. And then he started Kubera.

  His first investors were former Melton colleagues, who’d liked the way Hauck had traded the firm’s money and thought he could do as well with theirs. As it turned out, he did even better. In his first year out he posted returns over 15 percent, and for the next several he matched or bettered that- until the bump in the road that Frye had mentioned. Up to that point, his assets under management had grown steadily, as had his fees and his reputation.

  The Hauck legend revolved mostly around his remarkable intelligence, his voracious appetite for market information, and an obsession with privacy that some said bordered on the pathological. He granted no interviews and refused all speaking engagements, and all of his employees- current and past- were bound by strict nondisclosure agreements, as were his two ex-wives. And that was it. There wasn’t even a picture.

  I read the articles over again, but repetition didn’t make them more informative. I paced around my apartment, in the close gray air, and thought about Marcus Hauck and Jeremy Pflug. And I wondered some more about Irene Pratt and why she’d stopped taking my calls.

  I picked up the phone a few times, to call Neary, and each time I put it down again. Asking him how things were going wouldn’t make them go any faster. I thought about calling Jane at the office, and didn’t. What would I say after I wanted to hear your voice? I pulled on my running shorts and shoes and got the hell out.

  I ran for forty-five minutes through a fine mist that did nothing to cool me down but instead basted me in a sauce of bus fumes and soot. My shirt was soaked through when I turned onto 16th Street, and I slowed to a trot as I came to my building. There was a car double-parked out front, its hazard lights blinking. It was a Volvo sedan. Neary ran the window down.

  “Good run?” he asked.

  “Better than banging my head against the wall upstairs. You have something?”

  Neary shook his head. “Barely. I talked to my guys in DC about tracking down one of Pflug’s freelancers and using their local shitbags to do it. They had some ideas- came up with four or five guys in the Marty Czerka mold- but consensus was that it was going to take some time, a few days at least.” I groaned and Neary held up a hand and continued. “So I switched to Plan B.”

  “Which was…?”

  Neary smiled a little. “I called up George L. Gerber again an
d begged.”

  I laughed. “And that worked for you?”

  “I was just pathetic enough. Gerber gave me one name, a guy called Santos who used to work for Pflug. I got off the phone with him a little while ago.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s where my good news ends. Santos didn’t know much, not much more than what Gerber told us: that his subjects- his targetswere Wall Street people and that Pflug was very private about his clients. Or client, I should say.”

  “Client, singular?”

  “That’s what Santos said. He didn’t have a name, but he was under the impression there was only one of them. And he thought it was some sort of big-deal financial guy.”

  Neary took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I told him about my conversation with Frye and he listened and thought about it.

  “So Danes might have had some sand in his shorts about this guy Hauck- okay- but how do you get from there to Hauck hiring Pflug?”

  “Maybe I don’t,” I admitted. “But Hauck is the name I’ve got to work with, and he qualifies as a big-deal financial guy. I want to try him out on Irene Pratt- assuming I can get her to talk to me.”

  Neary’s eyes narrowed. “Why Pratt? Last night you didn’t think she had anything to do with Pflug; you said the breakin had freaked her out.”

  “That was last night- now I’m not so sure. She wasn’t particularly happy to hear from me when I called her on Tuesday morning. Mostly she told me she had work to do and she’d been overly paranoid about people following her, and she just wanted to forget the whole thing. She hasn’t taken my calls since, and I’d like to know why.”

  Neary smirked. “You have that effect on people sometimes,” he said.

  “This is different. I got what might have been a weird vibe off her when I asked about people interested in Danes’s whereabouts. At the time I wrote it off to nerves, but now I wonder if she had someone in mind.”

  “Maybe Hauck?”

  “I’m hoping she’ll tell me.”

  Neary nodded. “If you can get her to cop to that, there’s something else you can ask.” I looked at him. “I checked in with my guys on the way over here. Nothing’s changed at Nina Sachs’s place or at Danes’s or yours; Marty’s geniuses are still doing their thing. But not at Pratt’s place. At her place, they’ve packed up and left. Maybe you can ask her why.”