A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  Jack and Lincoln continued their conversation as they approached the winery’s main building. They stopped at the door, now shadowed in the inky blue of the approaching evening. Link said he needed to check a few things before he broke for the night, slapped Jack on the back with a dusty hand, welcomed him home once more, and jogged back to the barn.

  Jack entered the restored hacienda that served as their tasting room and headquarters. The building was a long, mission-style of yellow stucco with a terra-cotta roof. Three large, raised skylights broke the roof’s silhouette. The rest of the building was wreathed by palms, with large clusters of desert plants at the corners and sides. The tasting room occupied most of the first floor. There was a second story that was about a quarter the length of the first floor that afforded a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the grounds and vineyards. Jack’s office was there. He opened the door to the tasting room and entered.

  The staff was busy preparing to close, sweeping, cleaning glasses, and taking inventory. The tasting room manager, Steve, stood behind the counter with a clipboard running through the checklist of things his team needed to get done. Steve was a retired Air Force officer that had discovered a love for wine during a posting to Italy and decided that after twenty years of military life, the perfect existence was a quiet and happy one in the heart of wine country. He didn’t talk much about his service, and Jack didn’t press. He knew the value of privacy better than anyone. Steve had picked up the trade-appropriate, though entirely unrelated, nickname “Corky” during his service. He had explained once that nearly everyone in the Air Force officer corps earned one, usually for doing something stupid or as an embarrassing twist on their given name. Corky never shared how he’d earned his, but assured Jack it was a good story.

  “Welcome back, boss,” Steve called out when he saw Jack enter the tasting room, sounding genuinely excited to see him. “How was the trip?” Steve still had the traces of a southern accent, the kind of foundational speech patterns that would never go away regardless of how long he’d been away from his birthplace.

  “Meg keep you guys out of trouble?”

  “In as much as she does,” he said. In the south, Corky once told Jack, it wasn’t so much how the words were actually spoken as how those words were approached.

  Jack nodded. “Really good,” he said. “Italy is good for the soul, as you know. Nice to be home, though.” He meant it. The winery made him happy. It was the only time in his life he’d felt like he’d had a home. Jack thought of himself as Frank Fischer. Frank Fisher’s imagined history became his own real history. Fischer’s failures, his triumphs, his lonely existence in the tech world until buying and restoring this old winery, the path that led him here—all that Jack wished was his own and tried every day to make it so. That his other life was some abstract conglomeration of responsibilities that Jack did his best to push to the back of his mind

  Jack looked around the counter. “What’s open?”

  “Got some Osprey left.”

  Jack nodded, and Steve poured him a glass of their cabernet. A brief smile cracked Jack’s lips as the dark garnet wine crashed into the glass and spilled lightly up the side. Steve reserved a quarter glass for himself and poured one, as he usually did, when closing up the tasting room. The stubby ex-Airman with a perpetual smile held his glass up and said, “Saluti,” before going back to work cleaning up the bar.

  Jack took his glass and walked through the tasting room to the stairwell that led to the second floor. Evening light flooded the large, square office that sported windows on three sides. The windows were open, and a soft breeze blew in, gently rustling some of the loose papers on his desk. Megan occasionally used his office, especially when he was traveling, and she usually forgot to close the windows when she was done. Megan McKinney was also the Chief Operating Officer of Kingfisher Wines, though she’d just as likely take his head off as thank him if he referred to her as such, particularly in mixed company. She believed titles were for people who didn’t have dirt on their shoes.

  Jack stood for a few minutes, sipping his wine and looking out over the northern stretch of vineyard, now drenched in the yellow-orange glow of evening that was quickly turning to dark. He turned back to his desk, and the three weeks’ worth of decisions that were waiting for him on it. Jack set his wine glass down on the desk and picked up the first stack of papers, most of which appeared to be invoices. In addition to the paperwork, there would be another couple hundred emails at least.

  The money he’d made in Europe would help.

  At this point, Jack needed everything he could get just to keep them afloat. The winery wasn’t profitable yet and he couldn’t take on outside investors for obvious reasons, so any infusion of cash came from his personal reserves or from jobs. Jack hid their situation from the staff as best he could. Jack didn’t want people worrying about whether or not they were going to get paid. They would, even if that meant taking on more side jobs than he was comfortable doing.

  Someone told Jack once that running a winery was not about making money so much as it was about not losing it. And that was when everything was on an honest footing. In 2008, and after much insistence by Hugh Coughlin, Jack hired an accountant to manage Kingfisher’s books. Jack interviewed several candidates that Hugh presented but eventually decided to go with an outsider. Somehow, to Jack, it felt deceptive to take one of Coughlin’s recommendations because he was a close friend and confidant.

  Hiring an accountant was a dangerous, though calculated risk. The entire purpose behind Kingfisher Wines was to legitimize Jack’s jewelry theft income, and that wouldn’t work if the winery folded. Jack knew that he had neither the time nor the expertise to manage the winery’s finances, so he eventually agreed to hire someone to do so. Jack also knew that if he refused to, particularly with his offshore banking, it would raise too many questions about why.

  Before bringing Sharpe onboard, Jack launched into Frank Fischer’s libertarian rant about denying a government that he didn’t agree with their taxation by offshoring his money as a form of political protest. Sharpe took him on his word, or at least, he didn’t seem to care where Jack stashed his money if some amount of capital could infuse the winery when necessary. But, they got along well and Jack appreciated Sharpe’s business savvy. Not long after hiring him, Jack made Sharpe his CFO.

  Sharpe pushed hard for the Sine Metu acquisition, arguing they could sell much of that harvest at a high premium now as well as supplementing their own cabernet production to make up for what Jack ripped out what he replaced and replanted with the Carmenére. Selling those well-known and highly regarded Sine Metu fruit on the wholesale market would allow them to recoup the initial investment faster and get back to profitability.

  Jack had Sharpe write up the business plan for the Sine Metu acreage while he was in Europe. Jack read through Sharpe’s report, feet on the desk, with the Osprey in the other hand. Sharpe concluded that the idea was fiscally sound, and he strongly advised they move now. The plot wasn’t on the market yet, but because the sellers were old friends of Coughlin’s, they’d agreed to give Kingfisher an early opportunity to buy if they agreed to the full asking price. Sharpe argued that if they waited until it actually was on the market, they’d be subject to a bidding war and likely would get outmaneuvered by one of the conglomerate-backed wineries that had more capital at their disposal.

  The mountains behind him grew dark, and Jack thought of how leveraged he’d be after making the Sine Metu purchase. Almost his entire savings was in this winery, and while the additional income from the jobs he worked was steady, it amounted to about two to three hundred thousand a year. It’d be a long time before he made back the ten million if something went wrong.

  Three

  Reginald had been trying to reach him for several days when Jack finally powered up the phone and checked Cover Me. The last few days were a blur of the kind of crisis management that seemed to loom daily over a small business, and Jack barely made it home to sho
wer and sleep.

  Then, the seal on their cabernet tank blew the previous morning. They’d saved the contents, but they’d still lost a good bit.

  That was the story of Kingfisher. Everything was held together with bailing wire and duct tape. It worked…until it didn’t.

  So, when he finally got to return Reginald’s calls and the old fixer told Jack he’d be in San Francisco the next day, it was an unwelcome distraction. Jack missed his old friend, but now was not the time. There was too much to do and he felt like he’d already been absent from the winery far too much lately. Even though Reginald was just asking for an afternoon, Jack didn’t feel like he should pull himself away. Eventually, Jack relented, deciding that he probably should take an afternoon off. Jack made up a story that he was going to meet some restaurant sommeliers. Hearing this, Megan McKinny, his head winemaker, quizzed him on the tasting notes of the wines he would be taking down. She chastised him—again—when he’d gotten most of them wrong.

  “Meet me at the Embarcadero,” Reginald had said, “around two, two thirty.” Then, Reginald added, “Hog Island. I feel like oysters.”

  Jack’s initial warming to the distraction collapsed in on itself. Oysters meant work. Reginald had this weird, old habit of always pitching a job over oysters. Something in the way his small mind defined irony. Jack had all he could handle with being a winemaker. He didn’t have time to be thinking about another job right now.

  Jack arrived at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero thirty minutes early, found the restaurant, and grabbed a couple of chairs outside. The sky was gloomy, holding that dirty water coloring that resembled third-world laundry and felt basement damp. The Ferry Building struck Jack as out of place against the city skyline. The sprawling blue and white Beaux-Arts style complex sharply contrasted with the towering glass and steel modernism of the Financial District, like some confused god with no sense of aesthetic had placed it there and then forgotten about it. The building itself was an anachronism, and maybe that’s what Reginald liked about it. It was a building out of time. Jack sat facing the Bay Bridge so that he could see Reginald approach. The air was soup thick with the pungent reek of sea lion, fish, and salt water, and Jack honestly didn’t know how people could eat outside. Jack ordered a beer, wishing for something stronger, and waited. Cold, damp air seeped into his bones.

  Reginald LeGrande strode up to the Ferry Building at two thirty-two. LeGrande, now in his late fifties, had a once-muscular build that came more from work and less from the gym, and was slowly fading with time. His thick blond hair was silver-streaked, though it was tarnished silver, like some long forgotten heirloom. It came to rest just above the top of his shoulders as though it had somehow became exhausted and simply stopped. Behind the large aviators were watery blue eyes that tended to squint, even when he was indoors and had the furtive side-to-side dash of one used to constantly checking the corners.

  Reginald wore a camel Mohair sport coat over jeans and cowboy boots.

  Jack stood, and his mood lightened immediately as he shook his friend’s thick hand, his financial troubles and the weather forgotten. Reginald always set Jack at ease. He had a casual gruff voice that edged between “devil-may-care” and “weekend dad.” But it was also the better than twenty years that passed between them, an old friendship that was earned the way rewarding things were, in the hardest of ways.

  Reginald said, “Thanks for the oranges,” as he shook Jack’s hand. “You know Valencias are my favorite kind.” He’d gotten his cut. They sat, and Reginald peered over the top of his glasses to focus on the menu the way people who had poor eyesight and either didn’t know or refused to admit it did. He eventually settled on the same ale Jack was drinking. “You look like something’s bothering you,” he said.

  “I—” Jack began, and then his voice trailed off, unsure of how to begin, how to talk around the problem.

  Reginald picked up on it immediately and held up a hand. “It’s okay. I don’t need to know.”

  The old thief was the closest thing that Jack had to family, but even he didn’t know about the winery or the identity Jack had built. It wasn’t that he wanted to keep anything from Reginald. There were times that Jack felt true guilt at the deception. Perhaps deception wasn’t the right word; it was more like “avoidance.” Still, Jack kept this life separate from anyone who knew him as a thief, as Jack Burdette. He needed that security, even if that meant keeping it from his oldest friend, of all people. When Jack was finally ready to retire, to become Frank Fischer for good, he would tell Reginald. He didn’t want the old thief out of his life. Maybe there was even something Jack could find for him at the winery, or nearby if he could keep his hands clean, but that was a long way off, both in Jack’s ability to retire and his confidence that his old friend would be able to keep his hands off any kind of action for long.

  Reginald settled in Long Beach when he left prison. Long Beach had a workman’s vibe that suited Reginald’s personality, thriving in the criminal underground. Most importantly, he was unknown to the local cops. Jack had spent some time there, making a point of popping down a few times a year so they could commiserate in the privacy of LeGrande’s boat. Reginald respected Jack’s privacy, so he never pushed too far into that other life. He knew Jack did something outside of their work, he just didn’t know what. That was the thing about this life, you learned to appreciate secrets.

  The waitress came by and took their order. Reginald ordered a large plate of oysters for the table. The conversation stayed in social territory. They never discussed business in public. Reginald went through a quiet rundown of current events—who was now in jail and who’d gotten out, who was working, and who wasn’t. They had talk arounds for nearly everything, patterns of speech and phrases that formed innocuous-sounding ciphers they built over decades in the trade. Jack often wondered if it was the same way with spies.

  The server returned and asked if they wanted anything else. She was young and not especially pretty and was obviously going through the “finding herself” stage—purple hair streaked with red and too much ink for such a small frame. She sported a kanji tattoo on each finger that Jack doubted represented anything deeper than “Eastern stuff is mysterious.”

  Jack considered his friend sitting across from him and smiled.

  “We’ll take another round.”

  “Two more, got it. Same?”

  Jack nodded.

  “What are we drinking anyway? I never thought to ask.”

  Reginald looked a little surprised that Jack ordered another round, given how he’d tried to rush them through. Jack felt bad about treating Reginald that way, he was one of the only true friends Jack had.

  “It’s called Back in Black. It’s a black IPA from a local brewery called 21st Amendment.”

  Reginald held up his glass, considering the last swallow’s worth of beer. He squinted and pursed his lips the way De Niro did when he needed to look serious. Reginald killed the last of it, and the waitress showed up with a pair of fresh beers. She grabbed the empties and Reginald’s oyster plate and then disappeared back inside.

  “It’s good to see you, Reg,” Jack said, holding his beer up for Reginald to tap it. “I’m sorry it’s not more often.”

  “Me too, kid.”

  After settling with the restaurant, they made their way through the terminal building to the Embarcadero and walked down the wide concrete way with the gray-green Pacific on their left. The pair walked slowly down the path along the water, watching as a ferry departed the terminal for Treasure Island. When they were finally clear of tourists, Reginald asked, “So, what do you know about Ari Ben Hassar?” There was a devilish glint in the old thief’s eye, a throwback to what Hollywood thought was a mad scientist in the forties.

  Of course, Jack knew who Hassar was. The reclusive Israeli billionaire was a diamond magnate, notable because he controlled the entire distribution chain for his stones from excavation to the storefront window. Hassar was one of the largest whol
esalers in the world of both finished and unfinished stones, and what he didn’t sell through his own chain of stores he sold as branded jewelry available to select chains.

  “Very good,” Reginald said. “This summer, Hassar is holding an invite-only exhibition of his top-grade stones at Cannes. The collection he’s bringing is rumored to be worth upwards of eighty million dollars.”

  Jack’s mouth hung like it had a rusty hinge that no one thought to fix. His pulse quickened, the way it did when Reginald revealed the potential take of any score. Jack’s mind immediately went to the possibilities—the things he could do with that kind of money. His back-of-the-napkin calculations put that around ten million, assuming a four-person crew and forty-five cents on the dollar from a fence, plus Reginald’s cut.

  Jack slowed his pace and stopped, turning to face the water. He placed both hands on the concrete railing and looked out over gray San Francisco Bay. If the quality of the stones was as high as Reginald was talking about, Jack might be able to talk the Turks up to fifty-five cents on the dollar. That would pay for the Sine Metu plot as well as refill his coffers quite a bit from what he’d been pouring into Kingfisher over the years.

  The winery was only good as a money laundering operation when money was actually coming out of it.

  But those thoughts quickly dashed as the cold hand of reality slid its inky arm around Jack’s shoulders. Jack thought of his rules.

  “The security around that would have to be intense.”

  “Not as much as you might think.”

  “What? That’s insane. With that kind of money involved, that place is going to be locked down.”

  “Oh,” Reginald opened, a giddy lilt in his otherwise rock-and-pebble voice. “They’ll have security guards, but they’ll be little better than rent-a-cops. Remember French law. Private security guards can’t be armed.” That was true—one of the most ridiculous things Jack had ever discovered in his career, given the amount of liquid cash that flowed through that part of France.