The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  “Don’t kid a kidder, Dad. We both know you’d still be in the business of laundering money for crooks if you could get away with it.”

  “Why do you say such things?”

  “Why did you bring the bank up again?”

  “You act so superior. Don’t forget that bank has allowed you to be a do-gooder.”

  Sam rolls his eyes. “Oh Christ. Here we go again.”

  “Coño. Don’t be like that. I can’t help it. It hurts. Our family bank has been run by an Álvarez for five generations—and all this now dies with my sons? Imagine how I feel. Like I failed. I can just see my father’s face.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.” Sam stands up. “I am going up to see Mom now. What do you do for lunch?”

  I turn on my side and over my shoulder say, “Don’t trouble yourself. Your mother brings me my lunch.”

  I stare at the ceiling. Shadows are shifting and moving.

  My son despises me. This is my legacy.

  Someone is coming down the stairs. I turn. It isn’t Sam, but Lisa with my lunch tray. She silently and stiffly puts the tray down in front of me.

  Uh oh. You’re in trouble.

  “What?”

  “You know what. He hasn’t been home in eight years and this is what you start with?”

  “He’s too touchy. Still a little boy.”

  Her lips are tight and thin—a bad sign.

  “You never have the good grace to admit when you are wrong, José. Why can’t you just let people be who they are? It’s so sad to see a man reach this age and still not get it. Really.”

  I put my head down and take a slurp of pea soup.

  “I am who I am.”

  “Yes, you are. And Sam is the way Sam is. Why should one rule exist for you and another for your sons?”

  “Joder. You should have been a lawyer.”

  “We have raised fine, strong boys, who are decent and know what they want. I hope you appreciate what you have. Before it is too late.”

  I don’t respond, but her remark, it sits in the pit of my stomach, with everything else that is already sitting there, and for the first time I really let in the possibility that I might have been wrong all this time.

  Maybe this is what this mierda is all about. Perhaps this death is providing me the time to process events and look at things a new way. Maybe I need to rejoice that the boys defied my will, became men in their own right, and found callings that brought meaning to their lives, not mine.

  “Tell Sam I am sorry. I won’t bring up the bank again.”

  “No. I am tired of being your messenger. You tell him yourself.”

  I push the half-eaten bowl of soup away from me. I know I should nibble on a bit of cheese and apple, but my hand won’t reach for the food. I have no appetite. Lisa is sitting on the stool, looking peevishly out the French doors.

  “Take the tray away. I’ve had enough. When are Roberto and Juan arriving?”

  She turns back in my direction. “I told you. They are flying in together tomorrow morning. Remember? We’ve discussed this a few times already. Sam is going to pick them up at the airport. He’ll take the Volvo.”

  “Tell him . . .”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  Green fire is leaping from Lisa’s head, and when she stands to retrieve the tray, the air shimmers around her, like ripples of water lapping out from a lily pad. I don’t know if I should tell Lisa that she is entirely green, wearing armor, and holding a scepter. It might alarm her.

  Lisa is now all frog, and her long tongue is lashing the air. “We’re going to have a special dinner in the dining room tonight, to celebrate the fact our oldest son is home. I don’t want any trouble from you, José. Sister Bertha and Sam will help you get upstairs, and I don’t want to hear anything about how you want to stay down here. You need to use your legs more or your muscles will atrophy.”

  I say OK and look down at the floor.

  Lisa turns, to go back upstairs, and the Frog Queen steps out of her.

  I am so relieved my wife has been restored. I could weep.

  But for the rest of the afternoon, the Frog Queen sits squat and fat in the corner of the room, gulping, her large eyes feasting on me, a sort of embarrassed smile on her face. This I don’t like, and I turn and face the French doors, so I don’t have to look at her. I let the tumors and morphine take me where they like. But after a little while of floating aimlessly, I hear the Frog Queen shuffle closer to the French doors, see her craning around the corner to get a better look at me.

  She is gulping, wide-eyed, somehow letting me know she isn’t satisfied with my progress. This makes me angry and I turn, to talk back at her, when she smacks the scepter up the side of my head, catapulting me out of this world.

  PART IV

  1972

  SAN SEBASTIÁN, NORTHERN SPAIN

  TEN

  Señor Fernando Fernandez, appointed the president of Banco Álvarez after my father died, called me in Zürich at 5:30 a.m. I was half asleep when he told me I needed to come immediately to San Sebastián, for a special board meeting. My former supervisor in accounting, Señor Domingo, had recently retired, and the new head of accounting had discovered his predecessor had systematically embezzled at least 620 million pesetas from the bank over the last decade of his employment.

  The bank was now overrun with investigators from the Department of Finance and subject to a government audit. When the police went to Señor Domingo’s apartment, he was nowhere to be found. But as soon as they opened his closets, they realized he had been living a lavish lifestyle. Bills they found from Church’s on Jermyn Street in London suggested he had spent ten thousand pounds on shoes in the last year alone. Other letters they found indicated Domingo might be hiding with a friend somewhere in Colombia. The San Sebastián police had requested that Interpol issue an international arrest warrant.

  “I will get there as soon as I can,” I said into the phone.

  A lot went through my head as I scrambled to head down to Spain. I had been back to San Sebastián only twice since I left for Columbia University and then moved to Switzerland. Once, to attend my mother’s funeral; the next time, after I had graduated, for the bank’s extraordinary board meeting, when we appointed Señor Fernandez the new president and CEO, after my father dropped dead of a heart attack.

  Spain had no pull or attraction for me. But my absence had come at a price, I now realized. Without an Álvarez on the ground in Spain, looking out after the family’s investment, the bank had been mismanaged and driven aground. I had made a huge mistake and now had to salvage what I could of my inheritance.

  I asked Lisa to pack my bag and told my secretary to book my flights. I informed Herr Albiez, my superior at Swiss Federal Credit Bank, what was happening and why I needed time off. Then I got on the phone, my black address book open by my side, and called in every favor I could think of from New York to Zürich to San Sebastián and Madrid.

  I needed information—the true currency of banking.

  Not too many years ago the staff all greeted me when I walked Banco Álvarez’s marble lobby, but now I slipped in through the glass doors unrecognized. In my father’s day, the bank was alive with the buzz of commerce: discussions with clients, the sound of porters bringing papers in and out of the bank, boxes of cash on trolleys wheeled up from the vault and counted out at the teller stations.

  Managers, with nothing to do, stared blankly at me from their desks. The only activity in the lobby came from a long line of silent and grim customers at the sole open teller, withdrawing their money. Even the giant rubber plants that grew up the walls on either side of the central staircase, once waxy green and jungle-like, were now sickly and yellow and covered in a film of dust.

  I took the central staircase. Papá’s old secretary burst into tears when I stepped into his former office suite. “What have we come to?” Louisa wailed. I hugged her, said something soothing, but also reminded her there wasn’t time for hand-wring
ing since the board meeting was about to start. Louisa got ahold of herself and ushered me upstairs to the main conference room.

  The entire board was waiting for me. Señor Fernandez, pale and dour as sour milk, came forward and ushered me to my seat. There were handshakes all around the boardroom table, somber greetings. I sat next to Alfonso Gorrindo, my father’s trusted lawyer and advisor. I studied him. He was elderly now. His black and curly hair was white, as was the handlebar mustache, now streaked nicotine yellow from his years smoking. But his eyes were still piercingly blue, and, despite his age, he still looked as immovable and solid as the Picos de Europa.

  “It is good to see you again, José, if not under these conditions,” Gorrindo said quietly, kissing me on both cheeks. “A sad day. I keep thinking of your father.”

  “Thank you, Tio,” I said, using the old and affectionate term for uncle, as I used to call him when I was a boy.

  Señor Fernandez stood up to brief us on the bank’s precarious state of affairs. Key customers, who had heard the rumors, were quietly closing down their accounts and withdrawing their money. Worse still, as the lines down below suggested, those in the know were, with every hour that transpired, steadily growing in number. The bank was currently hemorrhaging 250 million pesetas a day, and the central bank in Madrid had two days ago lent Banco Álvarez short-term emergency funds, so we could meet withdrawals in an orderly way.

  But they had also parachuted auditors into the bank, to advise Madrid on next steps, if Banco Álvarez needed to be seized by the state. The forensic accountants were still unraveling Señor Domingo’s fraud, but already they knew it was much bigger and more complex than first thought, with no end yet in sight. As to Domingo’s motive, that, too, was a mystery. It seemed to be a simple case of greed. He had an unquenchable appetite for beautiful things. The amount stolen, so far, was 1.2 billion pesetas and mounting.

  Fernandez cleared his throat and told us that worse was yet to come. That morning he had received a call from a reporter at El Diario Vasco, asking for comment. The reporter had clearly been briefed by someone intimate with the details, had all the facts, and wanted an official response before the newspaper went to press.

  Fernandez had immediately called the paper’s publisher, a member of his church, in an attempt to get the story quashed. But the publisher told him the truth could not be hidden from the public anymore—they had a right to know the bank was in trouble and that their life savings were in jeopardy—and not even God almighty could stop the article from going to the printer at this point. The piece would appear on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. “We were told to brace ourselves,” said Fernandez, his voice quavering.

  At that moment, Louisa came back into the boardroom and announced that Señor Martin of Banco Central de Bilbao was on the phone and wanting to talk with me, the bank’s majority shareholder. Every head turned in my direction. I stood with only one thought going through my head.

  I am not equipped for this. I am too young.

  The board chairman brought down the gavel and announced we would temporarily interrupt the meeting so that I could hear what Emilio Martin Senior had to say. I followed Louisa to her office and picked up the phone.

  “Sí? José María Álvarez de Oviedo aquí.”

  “Buenos días, Señor Álvarez. Thank you for coming to the phone,” said the senatorial voice. “This is Señor Martin of Grupo Central de Bilbao. I am across the park from your office. In the back booth of Café Santiago. With my son. We’d very much like to talk with you.”

  “I am in a board meeting. This is highly irregular.”

  “We live in irregular times.”

  I paused. There was no point pretending. It was clear he knew everything already, even the time and place of this hastily called emergency board meeting.

  “Give me a few minutes. I’ll be there shortly.”

  I put the phone down on the cradle. I had this odd sensation that I wasn’t on terra firma, that everything was unmoored and floating loose before me. But as I had learned to do, when such a thing happened, I closed my eyes and imagined myself standing in a river, fishing, and the bile that bubbled up into my throat, like mercury in a barometer, returned from where it came.

  I strode back into the boardroom.

  “Martin is across the park with his son and wants to meet in person.”

  The chairman suggested, due to my relative youth, I take someone with me to the talks. I looked around the room and settled on my father’s longtime lawyer.

  “I want Señor Gorrindo to accompany me.”

  Señor Emilio Martin de Sánchez wore his thinning strands of olive-gray hair slicked back with pomade. He was waiting in the back booth of the simple café, with his thirty-six-year-old son, also Emilio, who, eight years earlier, had joined the bank’s executive board. He was, by all accounts, more brilliant and dangerous than his father.

  Gorrindo and I slid onto the padded bench opposite them in the booth. Thankfully, there was little appetite for small talk, and shortly after the formal greetings and handshakes, Martin Senior forlornly waved his liver-spotted hand and came around to the purpose of the meeting.

  “Entonces. Let me start by saying how sorry I am about all this. I greatly admired your father. None of this would have happened had he still been alive.”

  “No. He would not have let this come to pass.”

  “I knew that weakling Fernandez would destroy Banco Álvarez, although, I admit, I had no idea he would do so with such thoroughness and so quickly. It’s probably the only thing he has done efficiently in his entire life. He was a terrible choice to run your inheritance, young man.”

  “I see that now. But there is no point in talking about that. It is too late to undo that decision.”

  Emilio Martin Junior looked up and studied me, like he was trying to decide what kind of person I was.

  “No, you are right about that,” said Martin Senior, pursing his lips.

  The room was very warm and Martin Senior was perspiring slightly. The light was catching the film of oil across his face, and I couldn’t stop staring at his thick lips, which looked like brown slugs crawling out onto a leaf in the rain.

  “Then let us talk about the future,” he continued. “We have an offer that will allow you a graceful way out of your predicament.”

  “I am listening.”

  “When the article comes out tomorrow, Banco Álvarez is finished. There will be a run and Madrid will immediately step in, take over, and nationalize the bank. They have all the pieces in place and it will be over in minutes—and you will have lost everything. Poof. Your entire inheritance will be gone.”

  “Yes. I gathered that from this morning’s briefing.”

  “We propose instead that Grupo Central de Bilbao acquire Banco Álvarez. Today, even while there is much uncertainty. We will pay you one peseta for the bank, but assume all its liabilities, known and unknown. If the losses wind up below three point five billion pesetas, and we wind up righting the ship within the next three years, then we will pay you fifteen percent of the revived bank’s net profits, for the first five years following its return to profitability. Your share of profits will be on a sliding scale, of course. If the losses exceed five billion pesetas—you get nothing.”

  “I see.”

  “Listen, young man,” he said, tapping my hand and again adopting his grandfatherly tone. “It’s really not a bad offer. At least this way you stand a chance to extract some money from this mess. I don’t have to tell you, if Madrid takes over, you are guaranteed to get nothing. But you have to agree to sell us the bank in the next two hours. We will have to issue the press release today, before the article comes out tomorrow morning. Or else it’s all over.”

  Martin then glanced sideways at his son, who opened a manila folder that had been resting on the table between us. One paper outlined the basic terms of the offer, as he had just told me, while the other was a press release. Martin Junior slid both papers across the tab
le to me.

  I read the documents quickly and pushed them over to Gorrindo, who stroked his white mustache as he read, never saying a word. The face-saving exit was contained in the press release. It would be the case of one great Spanish banking family selling to another great Spanish banking family.

  I looked out the window for a few moments, to buy myself time. “I remember, how, when I was a teenager, you tried to buy our bank from my father and he politely showed you the door. It was not for sale.”

  “That is quite right. Your memory serves you well.”

  “I believe you were in on those talks, too, Alfonso.”

  “I was.”

  “At that time, Papá said to me, ‘José María, if you ever play poker with the Martins, know they cannot resist lowballing. They never pay top dollar for anything. That is their weakness. Always on the hunt for the bargain, they don’t understand that sometimes an opportunity comes along only once in a lifetime and it is often cheaper, in the end, to pay a higher price for a first-class asset than it is to pay a low price for a second-tier property.’”

  Martin Senior smiled appreciatively. “That sounds like your father. He had a way with words. And he is right. We are hard negotiators. It is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Forgive me, Señor Martin, but the situation calls for straight talk. Banco Álvarez’s retail branches and strong commercial lending unit are jewels in the crown and a perfect fit for Grupo Central de Bilbao. With one stroke, you will have extended your bank’s footprint throughout Northern Spain, which has always been your ambition. This current problem, while I don’t want to dismiss its significance, is short-term in nature. The assets we have—the branch network, alone—are extremely valuable to Grupo Central de Bilbao. All other bank acquisitions in the region will have major overlaps with your bank and force you to sell off valuable assets. We are the only perfect fit for Grupo Central de Bilbao. Let us not forget the value of that.”