Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  He couldn’t stand not knowing and pulled up the browser on his phone. Eight yuan to the dollar: eleven million bucks. A lot of disposable income. Fifty mil all told.

  He pulled out his phone and signed into the account online, using the password on the sheet. The account was getting drawn down by ten million yen a day — the outside limit, he guessed — every day for the last twenty days. It was now worth only ten million dollars and change.

  Someone was taking Yuli’s money.

  The passport was in the name of Quentin Compson. It had his passport photo, his date of birth, and an address in Liverpool. Folded into the passport was a picture, printed from a computer, of a Scorpio 72. When had that been added? Who had he talked to about the Scorpio 72? He couldn’t think — maybe Isa? He had bookmarked several of them on different yacht sales sites. Was someone monitoring his internet browsing? Or had he mentioned it to Yuli? He had told her about wanting to buy a sailboat, about wanting to take her sailing, her and the boys, maybe take a trip together — had he mentioned the Scorpio 72? If it was Yuli who knew, who had she told? Had Dmitry left instructions for someone to do it, or was it him, still very much alive, still scheming? If Yuli had been to Japan, it was mere hours ago. But she could have told someone to put it there, someone who had access to this box, and had been in it recently.

  The name “Quentin Compson” was all Dmitry — although Yuli knew the Faulkner novel too. Frank couldn’t figure out what the name was supposed to mean. Was it some reference to the fact that Dmitry had slept with his sister? Was it some dig at him, Frank, being a depressive romantic, a dimwit prizing fuzzy ideals over money? And why the name change? He looked back at the bankbooks. The Swiss and Cayman Islands accounts were in his name. The Bank of China account was in Quentin Compson’s name, again, with the same Liverpool address as the British passport, and again, all Frank’s personal details. If some of the bank accounts could be in his name, why not this largest one? What was going on? Amarya was right. He didn’t have a fucking clue.

  He put everything in his pockets and stepped into the street. Then it occurred to him: maybe this was an elaborate practical joke, some taunting by Dmitry from the grave. He went back in the bank and up to a teller’s window. He handed over the passbook and said, in English, that he wanted five million yen, a bit more than $50,000. The teller bowed to him and went to get her supervisor. He came over and asked Frank to write down the amount he wanted, nodded and walked away with the bankbook and his passport. Might as well go down for fifty thousand bucks as a few nickels, he figured.

  The supervisor came back with a small bag and his bankbook.

  “I have taken the liberty to update your bankbook, sir,” he said. “I hope these denominations are suitable.” In the bag were ten neat, matching bundles of bills, which set off a huge shot of adrenaline.

  “Thank you,” he said, and thought to himself, this must be what high blood pressure feels like. High finance. Like jumping out of a plane.

  He left the bank and got in a cab. The cabbie turned and looked at him, waiting for an address. Frank pointed to the Bank of China bankbook; the driver looked confused, but then nodded and took him to a branch. Frank went in, waited briefly in a line, and then asked the open-faced teller if he might make a withdrawal of five million yen from his account. She took his Quentin Compson passport and the passbook and walked over to talk to a guy who looked like a manager. The manager came over and asked how much he wanted. He told him five million yen. The manager took him over to a desk and explained he could only withdraw three million a day. Frank said OK, no problem, and they filled out some forms. He sat wondering at the strangeness of it all. The man signed off on it and walked away with the teller. He felt like a hundred security cameras were trained on him, but he reckoned there were only a dozen or so. His adrenals kicked off again when the teller returned with three million yen in six bundles of 10,000 yen notes and receipts for him to sign.

  “Thank you,” he said, trying to keep his hand from fluttering as he put everything in the canvas bag the Bank of Japan had given him.

  “We are glad to be of service, Mr. Compson,” she said. “If you have a minute, our manager would like to speak with you.”

  OK, here we go, he thought, and considered running. But it was too late. The manager and another man in a suit had come up, bowed low and motioned him toward an office. He walked in and took the seat they offered.

  “Mr. Compson,” the man who appeared to be in charge said. “We noticed that you have withdrawn very large sums in recent days, and we just wanted to make sure that you were pleased with our service, and whether there was anything we could do in the way of investment management for you.” He felt like singing. “We very much appreciate your business, and would hate to lose it.” He looked at the bankbook the teller had updated and saw that the ninety million yuan had grown, over the last several years, to ten times that, but that in the last weeks it had shrunk back to some forty-two million, less than five million bucks. The dozens of recent withdrawals had been electronic. Each of the last withdrawals had been for three million yuan each, and were happening every day.

  Someone had electronic access to these bank accounts, someone who, right then, was sucking the majority of the funds out.

  “Yes,” he said. “You can help. I’m superstitious. I want to start an entirely new account, and transfer the remaining money into that account.”

  “Right away, Mr. Compson.” He bowed and came back with a form to fill out. Frank did, and five minutes later Quentin Compson had a new account, a new VISA card, a new PIN number, and a new first pet: Fishy.

  “There is a maximum for transfers?”

  “That is for interbank transfers, sir. For same-bank account transfers there is no limit.”

  He asked the man if he could use a computer in the bank, guessing a millionaire had some perqs, and the manager took him to a small, unoccupied office, opened the computer to a browser, and left him alone. Using the information from the different envelopes, he went online and started opening new accounts at each bank, transferring the maximum allowable in each case to them, and setting up new passwords and security questions. The Cayman Island bank was very quick and easy. The Bank of Japan as well. The Cyprus Bank account showed withdrawals of ten thousand euros a day for the last three weeks or more. There were still some six million left, but the bank would let him transfer just a million a day, and he set up recurring transfers for the following days. When he got to the Swiss bank, it was empty, some twenty million Swiss francs moved only minutes earlier. Someone else was moving money. He pulled up the Bank of Japan account. Empty. Thirty million dollars, maybe more, of Yuli’s money, lost forever in minutes. Someone had already figured out what he was up to. Someone out there was watching.

  There was a shredder in the office and he fed the defunct bankbooks into it, the cards and information sheets. He kept just the Compson passport, his new account book, a debit card, and the cash. His accounts for Yuli were worth over $50 million. And he had $80,000 in his pocket — well briefcase — they had brought him a briefcase while he was working and had called him a limousine. He thanked the manager, who along with a half dozen minions bowed almost to the floor, and walked out into a fearsome Japanese sun.

  He got in the limo, but asked the driver to stop and got out a block later. He couldn’t go straight to the hotel. He walked south out of Shinjuku, with its commercial bedlam, its peak neon, its elaborate maze of advertisements plastered over every available surface, and headed toward a green patch on his hotel’s map named Yoyogi Park. He wanted a moment of quiet. But first he stopped in a shop and bought a small backpack. Walking around with a briefcase felt conspicuous — he wasn’t dressed for it. He transferred the cash into the backpack, and left the briefcase, open so nobody would think it was a bomb, on a windowsill.

  A hundred yards into the park he passed under an enormous torii, an ornamental gate made from two perfect, round and straight tree trunks that must have bee
n sixty or seventy feet high, with cross beams above, the top one sweeping up toward the heavens on each end, the bottom one decorated with three golden disks. Hard to say how such a simple structure could be so beautiful, Frank thought, but it was. Families walked the park’s paths, which wound off at random angles through fat old trees. A large Meiji temple complex in the middle was just what the doctor ordered — it kept him from obsessing, and he immersed himself in a simple appreciation of things Japanese. Like the kids on the streets, the Tokyo temples were all of one recognizable type or another, and all were acutely manicured. This temple had bonsai trees, purposely stunted, every twig redesigned, placed around the grounds. All the details accomplished what they were orchestrated to achieve: he felt lifted out of the trials and tribulations of his life. He felt peaceful, calm. For a time, he thought about nothing.

  But that couldn’t last. Confused images of Dmitry and Yuli and Amarya and the Men in Black and the police and the dictators swirled. Whoever else had access to the accounts had taken what, hundreds of millions of dollars or more out of them since the bombing? Who was it? The resurrected Dmitry? Somebody in his office? One of the bad guys? The Cambodians? Russians? Chechens? Were they the same people who blew up the building? Was “his” $50 million safe? Or did he need to change banks a couple more times to erase the traces?

  If Dmitry was still alive, he was in hiding. On his island. Was he monitoring the accounts and grabbing the money from there? Did he blow the building up himself? Not likely, he didn’t cook his own food, clean his own house, or even drive his own car. Did he have someone do it?

  Would Dmitry have innocent people murdered? He was piggish and misogynist and had no conscience, but could he kill a hundred of his own co-workers, on purpose, cold-blooded, like that? Frank thought not. He knew him. No.

  Besides, Yuli would never have let him… He tried to imagine her as an accomplice, but he couldn’t. No way she could have faked the connection they had, no way she could have whispered into his ear such precious, munificent words, and not meant them. He refused to believe it. If Dmitry was a murderer, she didn’t know it.

  Walking through the park, on automatic, he found himself back in front of his hotel. The thought of sitting in his room taking stock — allowing the worry and doubt and fear to creep back in, stewing about what to do next — kept him moving.

  He stepped into a restaurant a few blocks away, chosen because it had pictures on the menu. He ordered a sashimi dish with a whole small fish on a skewer. When it came, the five-inch fish had been filleted, and the cartoon skeleton — the head and tail intact, a set of bones in between — was curved decoratively by a skewer and served as a theatrical backdrop for the pieces of sashimi that had been mined from it. He looked up to see, eight feet away, an aquarium with a few dozen fish exactly like the one he was eating swimming around. His fish had been schooling with them just a flash of the chef’s knife earlier. What was he to make of this? That we murder to live? Eat or be eaten, one creature’s death another’s dinner, death simply another transaction? Is this the way he would become Dmitry, coming to such conclusions?

  Seeing his dinner’s brothers and sisters swimming around flatlined his appetite, but with the help of a large Sapporo he managed to finish eating it. He walked out of the restaurant into Shinjuku and let the never-ending weirdness of the Tokyo streets distract him. He must have walked three or four miles by the time the sun was setting, slowly circling back toward his hotel. A small park with a temple, set in a nook in the busy city, drew him and he tried his new contemplative skills again. They worked for a half hour or so, but then he got antsy and had to move.

  The money he had saved for Yuli and the boys would turn a million and a half dollars a year in a very safe portfolio. Whatever the hell was going on, she was rich enough. Not private-jet secure, but secure.

  As for himself? He was just lost.

  On the far side of the park he stumbled into an odd little neighborhood. Everything about it was the opposite of the neon ultramodern shopping extravaganza a block or two away. It was almost a shanty-town, unlike anything he’d seen in the city, the place hand-sewn together, single-story, low-tech, with a spaghetti of wires here and there, and a general look of dilapidated impermanence. A cobweb of alleys, too narrow for cars, ran through the warren of rickety buildings, which seemed to house nothing but tiny bars. He poked his head in one and saw a half-dozen middle-aged, bohemian-looking men occupying all the available seating. They weren’t actively rude, but they were far from inviting, so he kept going.

  Through the curtains of another bar, under a small blue sign, cracked and faded, with one Japanese character and a big question mark, he saw no one but a young woman behind the bar. He went in and said hello. She said hello back, and her English turned out to be pretty good. He ordered another large beer, wanting to blur out. She was an actor, she said, which made him feel back at home in Los Angeles, where all the bartenders were actors. She told him the neighborhood was called the Golden Gai and was one of the oldest neighborhoods in the relentlessly modernizing city, unimproved since it was thrown up after World War II. By the 1960s, rents low, artists, prostitutes, intellectuals, and other fringe types moved in, and it became the center of Tokyo’s social, political, and artistic radicalism, the Japanese Greenwich Village. Guidebooks talk about the place, she said, so tourists ramble through during the day snapping pictures, but the same guidebooks warn tourists that the neighborhood bars don’t welcome Westerners, and that there is more crime than in most other parts of the city. It was very rare to find a tourist anywhere in the maze after dark — he was her first.

  He was carrying eight million yen in a backpack.

  The bartender was very interested to hear anything he had to say about LA and Hollywood. Her dream, just like the LA bartenders’, was to someday act in a Hollywood film. He answered her questions and recited the requisite celebrity encounters that every LA resident is forced to disclose when out of town, although as usual, even here, anyone he had a work relationship with was off limits, offering instead Drew Barrymore reading a script in a coffee shop, Ted Danson at a Pottery Barn, Jack Nicholson in a men’s room. By the time he finished talking to her he had had a couple beers, and had a significant buzz going. He thanked her, stepped back out into the alley, and felt quite drunk.

  The alley had a noir feel, criminals lurking in the shadows, no one else to be seen. The bars, despite open doors with only bead screens, were disturbingly quiet. After a block or so, he decided, OK, maybe the guidebooks are right, maybe it’s dangerous. He made a U-turn to follow his steps back out of the neighborhood. As he did, across from the Question Mark, a short red-haired guy popped out of another bar. When he saw Frank, he made an awkward swing away, and with the deliberate yet wayward step of a stoned person on a mission, started down the road ahead of him. How odd, Frank thought, that the only other person in the Gai was a foreigner. The man kept forty paces ahead but was starting to slow down. Frank had lost track, watching him, of his own route home, and something started to seem suspicious, almost as if the guy was keeping track of him. He stopped, and the man slowed down and stopped, too, swaying as if drunken, but listening. Frank was poised to run in the opposite direction, maybe back to the Question Mark, at least get off the deserted streets. The guy turned. A cold shiver whiplashed him. It was the Irish guy from Dmitry’s office, the guy who tried to pick a fight with him at the brothel.

  “Hey!” Frank shouted, motioning to him with his chin, but without getting any closer, like gunfighters in the Old West. “You worked with Dmitry at Credit Lyonnais.”

  The guy did a big show of looking over his shoulders, as if to see who Frank was talking to, hand to his chest, eyebrows raised. He wore a heavy metal band’s black t-shirt and jeans, like a sailor on shore leave, but Frank was pretty sure it was the same guy.

  “Me?” he said.

  “Yes, we spent that crazy night in some brothel in Taipei, the day the new guy, the guy from Hong Kong who had lost
all the weight, the night he came to town. I’m Dmitry’s friend from California.”

  “Sorry, mate,” he said, with what sounded like a fake Australian accent. “Wrong bloke.” He started to walk away.

  “You’re kidding me!” Frank said, maybe a little too loud. The guy turned back around. The glint of the sociopathic streetfighter returned to his eye, the very glint he remembered, making him even surer he had the right guy. “That’s right,” Frank said, “Don’t walk away,” imitating someone whose threats should be taken seriously. It had worked for him with the Men in Black.

  That brought the guy closer. Looking Frank in the eye, he said, “OK, mate, then you walk away.” They stood like that for a minute, a cheesy standoff, until Irish shook his head and added, “You have no idea,” turned, and walked away.

  “So I’m told,” Frank said after him.

  The guy ducked into another bar. The sign outside was green but said “Orange.” Frank followed him in. There were two small tables and three seats at the bar. An old Japanese beatnik was playing acoustic guitar. Two guys sat drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A pretty woman was behind the bar — that seemed to be the norm. She was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a woman with half her face ripped off, the muscles and veins exposed. The little Irish guy was standing near the bar, but facing the door as Frank came in. The other four people in the place took no explicit notice of the newcomers.