by Burton Hersh
“Deal with?”
“Reimburse. Pay. “
“With money, would be the best way. A small donation to the United Native-American College Fund isn’t going to cover it.”
“Wiseass! I mean: How much?”
“We never worked that out. How about ten thousand dollars? He hung his butt a long way over the line for us.”
“Fine. Do you think ninety-five hundred in hundreds would do it? Ten would probably move it into a category where the bank would report it to Uncle Sam. I don’t think Arthur Stillman would be enthusiastic about taking it as a deduction.”
12
Sonny had left me with a warning that virtually any private telephone was vulnerable nowadays to electronic evesdropping. So a day after I had lunch with Dad I stopped by the St. Petersburg Municipal Courthouse, where there was a bank of old-fashioned coin-operated payphones, and reached Ethan Stokes at Humper, Fardel in Philadelphia. Ethan, at one time a nationally ranked squash player, had a forty-year reputation as a bulldog corporate litigator. I indicated that our family needed to recover several blocs of real estate we had been misguided enough to swap into a Miami-area hedge fund. Stokes released that cold, dusty laugh of his that always struck me as closer to a cough. He strongly advised me to show up yesterday with any relevant documents. I told him I would arrive in The City of Brotherly Love the following afternoon. The call took seven quarters.
Then I picked up the $9500 in cash from Dad and headed north toward Clearwater. There I stashed the Cuban letters and the rare earth samples in a safe deposit box I rented in one of the branch banks of the Wells-Fargo system and – nervous, watching my side mirrors – slid into the parking area behind the apartment complex where Linda had told me Sonny was staying. I caught Sonny headed down the back. He led me back upstairs and I handed him the bundle of currency.
I told him how much it was. “Should be enough,” I remarked, tentatively.
“Covers it,” he agreed, soberly. “Definitely covers it.”
For just a moment I thought he might be inclined to smile. “I have another idea,” I said.
Then I went back to my office and started to pull together folder after folder, printouts of judgments from defunct cases, the upshot of several recent discovery motions, a sheaf of newspaper clippings relevant to a very nasty divorce I had unwisely taken on. Once I had enough, I started stuffing a briefcase.
At one point Buckley looked in. “Long time no see, buddy,” Buckley said. “Where you been all week?”
“Miami. Guy down there thought he might want to exchange some property with Dad. I thought it might be worth a look, but it obviously isn’t going to work out.”
“The world, she changes. Two years ago anything in the real estate racket was a slam-dunk. You hear that Wendy is heavy with child?”
“Dad told me.”
“At this point Carol is a little batshit on the subject.” Buckley’s high-posted preppy face looked pinched with strain; he scratched the tight sandy curls of his scalp. Dandruff was a problem. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he burst out, “I’m not the one shootin’ blanks. My urologist checked the numbers in September. He tells me I could get a ball bearing pregnant.”
“Carol is just high-strung,” I said. “You know about the anorexia?”
“Teen-age shit. A stage she went through. The problem is, nobody gets enceinte without a little whoopee on a regular basis. With us now it’s a couple of times a month when the moment is optimum. According to her fucking thermometer! I get so backed up that when I do get the call I’m—“
“Too much information,” I said. “You guys ought to find another hobby.”
“I guess.” Buckley rolled the knuckles of one hand inside the long, bony fingers of the other. “Got something going? Pulling all that together for one of your big-deal clients?”
“Another chore for Dad. That hedge fund you think is so wonderful. Dad wants me to turn over all the deeds and abstracts and anything we can scrounge up after the bombing to some barracuda he knows in Philly at Sullivan and Cromwell and let that bastard unzip the whole mess. While we can still dump the pricier properties.” I snapped the hatch on the briefcase. “I’m on the 10:15 tomorrow morning. Delta.”
“You know,” Buckley said, “the real payoff for all of us is still waiting on that island.” For several months Buckley had been referring affectionately to Cuba as “that island.” His was the kind of dedication only greed can engender.
Buckley made his way back to the other office. I took a moment to check my messages, and just as I was out the door I heard Buckley tapping on his cell phone.
My plane set down a little after one. As I was disembarking a tawny fellow passenger with an unkempt beard slipped me a wink from his aisle seat. I confirmed my return flight for a little after five and headed for the escalator down; that took me out by the baggage carousels en route to ground transportation. The afternoon was damp, overhung by a well-remembered mid-Atlantic chill.
There was a long queue outside waiting for taxis. Across the terminal I took the elevated walkway into a crowd already jamming the platform that served the light rail connection. Several linked cars were approaching on the track; then, just as the train was starting to slow down with a hiss of airbrakes and the mob pressed in around me, I felt a glancing blow against the back of my hand and a corpulent, exasperated senior citizen with a gray frizz defining his jowls stumbled heavily against me, and fell. I grabbed out to clutch his shoulder, and just as he wheezed and staggered for his footing it came to me my briefcase wasn’t there.
“I think I dropped something,” I gasped out; by then the mob was loading into the cars. But once the mob disbursed there wasn’t any brief case. “I’ve got to go report what happened,” I found myself bellowing at the fat man. He looked quite grave -- sympathetic – and lumbered toward the train and squeezed in just as the doors converged. I found myself alone on the platform except for a towering matron with a pheasant feather stabbing up out of her hat and an oversized shopping bag. Shaken, I lurched back into the terminal to leave my name and a description of my briefcase.
By then the passengers from my flight had disbursed and the curbside was empty; cabs were waiting. I took the one in front. I was just about to tell the driver to run me downtown and drop me off at Logan Circle, where Ethan Stokes practiced, when it came to me that somebody had grabbed the cab behind mine. The outline of the passenger was obscure in the smoggy mid-afternoon light. But I could spot the peak of the pheasant feather in silhouette.
“I think you better take me to Broad and Market,” I instructed the driver.
“City Hall, I get that right?”
“On target.”
At City Hall the principal subway systems converged. I caught the escalator down and jumped into a car on the Broad Street line as it was filling up. Just before it moved on I pushed out and hot-footed it down a level and boarded a waiting car onto the Market Street Line and stood by the door until it moved out. No pheasant feather. At the 15th St. Station I took the escalator to the surface and proceeded around JFK Plaza on foot, warily, toward Logan Circle. The executive offices of Humper, Fardle took up a large part of the twentieth floor of the commercial complex that overhung Logan Square.
Ethan Stokes had always reminded me of a semiretired veteran of the British Secret Service, MI6. One of the gray men, weary and insouciant in manner but privately intense, remorseless. What very little silver hair he still had he wore straight back, a testimony to what must once have been a pompadour. He moved now with great circumspection.
“You don’t mind if I include one of our younger associates, Elena Simpson, just to make very damned sure I get everything nailed down as we go along?” Ethan wanted to know – rather, was demanding, if politely. “Ms. Simpson is absolutely top notch, Yale Law ’04.”
“Your shop,” I said, “your ground rules.” I had just seated myself on the couch after excusing myself for a couple of minutes to take advantage of the private
lavatory in Ethan’s suite, where I had pulled off my shirt and managed to reach around and tear off the tape holding the big legal envelope stuck to my back. Shirt tucked in and jacket and tie in place, I slid the heavy packet onto the desk next to the leather-upholstered Eames chair into which Stokes was tentatively lowering himself. A steel engraving of Oliver Wendell Holmes dominated the wall behind him.
Ethan rang for Elena Simpson. “If you need coffee there is plenty in that carafe on the sideboard. If I asked Elena to pass it around she’d probably bring me up on charges before the bar association. The Women’s Movement!”
“I’ll be OK.”
Elena came in and sat down and crossed her short legs to support a legal tablet. She looked around thirty, dressed in a dark brown pants-suit.
Both of them were waiting for me. “I like to hope the documents that I just turned over to Attorney Stokes—“
“Ethan! Michael, you’re no longer darting around these halls looking up precedents and driving the partners to the airport . You are a colleague now. Our Florida counterpart. I was particularly regretful when you left, you had a future with the firm, you know that.”
“Thanks, really.” They were both waiting. I attempted to lay out the history involving our family and the Coral Gables hedge fund. How we got into that. I showed Stokes the side documents conferring on us the option of taking the properties back at such time the hedge fund originators missed the stipulated payments. I explained that several attempts had apparently been made to destroy any records we had in storage pertaining to these arrangements. Fortunately, I indicated, we were recently able to lay our hands on uncompromised backup documents. I did not say how.
“Doesn’t seem that far out of the question, not in any way,” Ethan decided. “Things aren’t precisely working out, and at this point it seems desirable to your people to go ahead and unwind. We’ll want to initiate an immediate action to recover unclouded title on the aforementioned properties. Hedge funds are largely unregulated, so up or down their legal status is basically what some judge decides it is that week.” He lifted himself slowly to his feet. “Arthritis! Nobody mentions arthritis when they rant away about the blessings of the retirement years.”
“Would you think we could get our properties back fairly quickly?” It was an effort not to sound too urgent. “My father is starting to get antsy, he thinks this market is headed for a serious correction.”
“I think we can depend on some kind of speedy resolution. We work with a number of judges on the Dade County bench. We’ll want to get right on the docket. I’d say we hit these jokers with a couple of injunctions next week and you should begin locking up to most of what you turned over in, say, a month? Six weeks? Soon enough? Needless to say, we will need a few days to wring out the empowering documents. Sounds like boilerplate to me.”
“Can’t happen soon enough. My father is really on edge these days.”
“How is your father?” He turned to Elena Simpson. “Michael here has got an old man who is a world-class sensation,” Ethan Stokes said. “A genuine polymath. You name it: economist, professor, biographer, stock market speculator. Everything. And personality? Do you remember Jackie Mason, the Yiddish comedian? Sylvan has always reminded me of that fellow, a wonderful kind of gotcha humor that blindsides everybody—“
“He does sound unique,” Elena Simpson said.
“Quite a character. I remember when he came up for the Philadelphia Club. They told me he was a little apprehensive, but the rest of us couldn’t wait to have him around….”
“I know he appreciated your support,” I said; that had been unexpected.
“Never a qualm!” Ethan was rising slowly to his feet, not moving: That meant the meeting was over. “My best to your mother too,” he said. “What a beautiful woman she was. Honestly, a Dresden figurine moving among us. Splendid.”
I got up. “The thing is,” I felt I had to add in leaving, “the Cuban businessmen we’re dealing with here have been known to play pretty rough. We probably ought to make sure any papers that we get served are accompanied by officers of the court—“
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, son.” Ethan said, walking me unsteadily in the direction of the door. “White-collar gangsters are my meat and potatoes. Elena here will e-mail you a workup of the estimated billable hours. Needless to say, you’ll get the rate we extend to colleagues, you certainly needn’t concern yourself with that.”
* * *
“Flying back here,” I had to concede to Dad,” I felt like the guy who had just lit the fuse.” I remembered that Dad held early evening office hours on Thursday. Fortunately, the one graduate student who showed up had just left.
“Have you eaten today?”
“Just what they give you on the planes.”
“Nothing. Worse than nothing. Should we go out?”
“Maybe later on. I just realized I’d better get back and leave word at Humper, Fardel not to run any correspondence through our office. Buckley. I just wanted you to hear right away how everything went with Stokes.”
“Ethan Stokes! He is definitely the hound you want to turn loose in a situation like this. But on the personal level? Ecked mir a liberal!”
“He’s high on you. He thinks you’re Jackie Mason all over again.”
“Exactly. What’s that old saw, a kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room?”
“I think he meant that with a certain affection,” I said.
“That’s part of the problem. Just stay away from his sister. Besides which, I always thought he had his eye on your mother.”
“You can stop worrying. Right now his arthritis is so bad he probably couldn’t climb into bed.”
As a precaution, Sonny and I had agreed to avoid communicating with each other for a day or so but to meet the following evening in a folk and jazz bar over by the Gulf, The Sloppy Pelican. The handful of Native Americans around town had a way of congregating here; it was a blue-jeans and tank-top crowd, lots of hair and tattoos. Blouses tended to be extremely low-cut. By nine or ten, if one of the chubby young salesgirls or recent college dropouts drinking nearby noticed you noticing her too much, she was liable to pull one breast out and aim the nipple at you. This was not entirely a friendly gesture.
Our table was on a sort of deck that adjoined the bandstand. When the little group performing that night got going the amplifiers made our table vibrate.
“I think I’ve been here once before,” I commented to Sonny just as my Heinekens and his Diet Coke appeared. “Noisy!”
“Better that way. Keeps us from being bugged.”
“Always one step ahead. Flights went off OK?”
“Easy enough. You see me on the flight going up?”
“Couldn’t miss you. The wink was gratuitous,”
“Whatever that means.”
“That beard! It’s becoming a health hazard. How about you get it dry cleaned and put that on the tab?” But I had gone too far; Sonny tipped his head and narrowed his eyes. “OK,” I said, “I retract that, just yanking your chain a little.”
“Don’t yank,” Sonny said. “We got too much to do.”
Just as we arranged, Sonny had been on my flight to Philadelphia and tracked me into the terminal. “Not that you made it easy,” Sonny reprimanded me. “I saw you bolting for the taxis after we landed.”
“Force of habit. It hit me just in time to turn around and try for the light rail. I spotted that mob, and naturally I remembered that that was what you wanted.”
“It wasn’t about what I wanted. There you are, dangling that briefcase like a freaking wedge of cheese. We needed mice.”
“Well, they did hit it.”
“I know. I could have reached out and touched you the whole time. It was the fat man who knocked it loose – very professional moves, perfect bump and run. Before you could turn around he handed it off to the skyscraper with the mink choker, who shoved it into her shopping bag and slid back out of there.”
“The babe with the hat? With the feather?”
“Yeah, I think so. I was pretty busy keeping track of the fat man. I made it into the rail car behind his and followed him back to his hotel. The woman showed up about an hour later.”
“She was on my tail for quite a while. I shook her in the subway system under City Hall.”
“Hey, troop!” Sonny exclaimed. We banged open palms. “It could be you’re not entirely dead white meat.”
“What an ugly thing to say. Is it my turn now to sulk?”
Sonny gave me a long, glowering look. “OK, you got me,” he said finally. “No more prima donna.”
It turned out the fat man and the tall lady were sharing a suite at the Sofitel. Sonny had slipped unnoticed into their packed elevator and spotted their room number. The problem developed when the pair had regrouped and turned up downstairs for drinks in the Liberte Urban Chic Lounge. The door to their suite, fitted out with the latest in magnetic card-key locks, was not to be picked.
“So then what?” I asked Sonny. “Punt?”
“Improvise. I don’t have that much French, but I guess I had enough to convince the Concierge that I was dropping in and out on loan from Paris to spot-check serving staff in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Once he was out of sight I tied on the official Sofitel apron and delivered a decanter of ice water to the fat man and the tall lady where they were having cocktails near the fireplace. Somehow my ice bucket slipped and water splashed up on the fat man’s shoes and the tall lady’s snakeskin purse. Not too much, but I insisted on wiping the shoes down and drying off the flap of the purse. Women generally tuck their cards just inside the flap. She did.”
“So you did get in.”
“I hope for long enough. Besides your briefcase I located a passport case for the fat guy. In it were three or four business cards printed with a name, Cedric Bougalas, and a P.O. Box and what he says he does: Strategic Opportunities. He bills himself as a retired G.S. 16 out of the DEA, Drug Enforcement Authority. There was another passport he had in another name. Both with Sarasota addresses, which I got.
