by Thomas Perry
It had been impossible to hide the fact that Mary Perkins had been tortured—repeatedly beaten, raped, and starved—so Martha had taken Jane outside into the bare, flat fields behind the trailer and demanded to be told everything. Because Jane had known that those sharp old eyes had seen a lot in seventy-five years and had been horrified but not frightened, she had told the truth. Martha had said, “What’s a Nundawaono girl got to do with that kind of business?”
“It’s what I do,” Jane had answered. “Fugitives come to me and I guide them out of the world.”
“Why?”
“Because if I didn’t, they would give me bad dreams.”
And Martha had said, “I’ll bet a lot of them do anyway.” The words came back now, but they came in her own voice.
Jane tried to think about what she was doing. She concentrated on the charities. There were a lot of resonant names, and she knew intellectually that each one represented thousands of people who were hungry or sick or desperate. But she could not force the charities to fill the space that the truth fit in.
Maybe what had induced her to concoct this scheme was that she had needed a reason to do what Bernie had asked her to. She had known that she could not tell herself that Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus was an innocent victim, so she had thought up a price he would have to pay for her services.
But what was Jane McKinnon doing offering her services at any price? She had been trying to keep herself from thinking about Carey, but here he was again. She had not just been happy with Carey, but also happy about Carey—happy that he loved her above all others, happy to spend time with him, happy to be Mrs. McKinnon. She found herself gazing through the doorway at the telephone in the living room.
She forced herself to look at her computer screen. This time she had to be more cautious than ever. If she made a mistake or simply ran out of luck, there must be no way that the trail could lead to Carey. Delfina had traced Rita as far as Niagara Falls, and that was uncomfortably close to home. If something went wrong in this house, it was likely that someone would obtain a list of the telephone calls that had been made.
It was better if she didn’t try to explain to Carey what she was doing, anyway. It would worry him, confuse him, and offer him no comfort. She had already warned him that she might not be able to call for a long time, and that would have to stand until she had some reason to believe the danger was over.
Carey would get by. She had joked to him that he was a low-maintenance husband, but it had not exactly been a joke. He had already grown up and become a successful surgeon before he had convinced her to marry him. There had been no need for her to provide any of the usual contributions: money, work, even patience. She had moved into the big old stone house in Amherst built on land an ancestor of his had bought from her ancestors in the 1790s. McKinnons had expanded and remodeled it so many times that it had needed no modification to accommodate the marriage.
Carey was like the house: he had been built and improved, and the mistakes had been corrected before she had arrived. He had reached his final form. He was self-reliant and his mind was fully occupied. Carey was a person who knew what his days were going to be from now until he was too old to do anything. No matter how extravagantly Jane wanted to give, there was not even time for him to accept. He left for the surgical wing of the hospital at six-thirty each morning, and returned after his last rounds at eight in the evening. If Jane came to the hospital to have lunch with him, the doctors and nurses he saw every day would come in and join them at the table. In a clannish town like Buffalo, most people couldn’t conceive of a husband and wife wanting to sit alone at lunch, unless they were having a fight.
Jane detected an odd tone in her thoughts. What she had been thinking was not exactly false, but it had started to sound like a too elaborate collection of excuses. It didn’t explain why Jane had not gone home the minute Rita was out of sight, or why she was in a house in New Mexico with this strange assortment of people, engaged in this peculiar scheme.
Jane kept typing and printing while, one by one, the others left the dining room. First Bernie got up and climbed the stairs. Then it was Rita. An hour later, even Henry Ziegler stood and closed his laptop computer.
Jane said casually, “Henry, how long do you think it’s going to take?”
Ziegler shrugged. “It’s up to Bernie, really. It just depends on how much he remembers and writes down.”
“The minute you see the end coming, let me know.”
15
Jane awoke suddenly in the dark. She unwrapped herself from the blanket and sat up on the couch in the living room. A light shone from the crack under the swinging door to the dining room. She listened. The muted, steady clacking of computer keys was punctuated by the rhythmic sound of the printer cycling to roll out pages. She held her watch to her face, and moved it to the side to catch a little moonlight and determine that it was three A.M., then walked to the door and pushed it open.
The rheostat that controlled the dining room chandelier had been turned low, but the light still irritated her eyes. Henry Ziegler’s face was bathed in the eerie phosphorescence of the display on his computer screen. She said quietly, “You never sleep, do you?”
Ziegler started in his chair, then saw Jane and slumped, his shoulders rounding as he took a few breaths to calm himself. “You startled me,” he said. “Sorry if I woke you up. I thought I’d use the time to get the next part of this done. The papers for the corporate foundations I set up are starting to arrive at the hotel in piles.”
“I didn’t ask what you were doing,” she said. “I asked about sleep.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said, but his eyes returned to his computer screen before he said it.
Jane persisted. “I was with you at night in Beverly Hills, then met you the next morning to find you had already done a day’s work. The same thing happened at the hotel downtown after we got here. Now you’re at it again. Is it drugs?”
Henry raised his eyes to her and shook his head. “It’s probably a disease, but I don’t know what kind. I never told a doctor, but it hasn’t killed me yet.”
“How long have you been this way?”
“I don’t know. I think since I was born. My mother always told everybody what a colicky baby I was. From the time I can remember, I would lie in bed on one side until I got stiff and sore, then roll over onto the other until the same thing happened. Around dawn I would doze off for a couple of hours. One night when I was about eight, I got up. The next night I went to sleep right away and woke up after a couple of hours. The next night, the same. It’s been that way ever since.”
Jane’s sleep-dulled brain moved through several thoughts. She remembered George Hawkes saying that twenty-five years ago, when Ziegler had just started as an accountant, he had gone to law school at night. It had not occurred to her that it had been all night. She also had a dim memory of reading somewhere that Napoleon had slept about as little as Ziegler. “Well, I guess I’m awake too,” she muttered. “I may as well put in a few hours.” She sat at her computer and flipped the switch, then watched the screen light up and run its self-test sequence. “What’s next?”
Henry held up a few sheets of paper so she could see the top one. “Write me a form letter for each of these corporate foundations. The number beside each one is the amount they have to give away. Pick a few charities off the list on this other sheet for each one, print the letters, sign them with the name of the president. Then stack them in a pile over here. When I’m done with this, I’ll go through the stack and cut the checks. When Rita gets up, she can print the labels and stuff, stamp and stack the envelopes.”
“Got it,” said Jane. She set to work. After one day, she was already getting used to the work, and it went more quickly. It was like a game. The big charities got a million or more. The small ones got three or four hundred thousand dollars. The surnames of the corporate officers were all common and familiar, ones that she or Ziegler had taken from telephone directories and
given first names and initials at random. Jane signed some with obscuring flourishes, some with illegible squiggles. She had been forging documents for over a decade, and she was good at making signatures that looked real.
By the time she had gone down the list of corporate foundations, Rita was up and working beside her, chewing bubble gum and popping it every few minutes. Jane worked eight hours, then showered and went out to buy another carload of supplies in Albuquerque. This time she went to different stores, but the extra time it took her to find them was bought back by the fact that she knew precisely what she needed. She used credit cards in three different names to pay for them, returned to the house at four with take-out dinners, then worked from five until eleven.
The next day, Jane wrote more letters and filled out checks to universities. Some were donations from corporations, some from foundations, and some from imaginary people with common surnames that allowed Jane to imply a connection without specifying whether they were alumni or parents or grandparents of students.
On the day after that, Jane gave money to tribal councils on Indian reservations. There was a secret pleasure to this day’s work. She had always tried to keep her ancestry to herself while she was working. The only exceptions had been two occasions when she’d had no place to hide a runner except on a reservation and the single admission to Celia Fulham, the social worker in Florida. The secrecy was one of a thousand precautions that she had practiced until they were habitual. If one of her enemies considered her an American woman of unknown ethnicity, he would have to find her among a hundred and fifty million others. If he knew she was on a tribal enrollment list, he could eliminate about a hundred and forty-nine million. As Jane wrote the letters, she found herself straining to make the numbers as large as she could, and three or four times she caught herself making them too large. The reason for big checks was that reservations were starved for money. But the reason she couldn’t make the checks even bigger was that reservations were starved for money. Huge donations of suspicious provenance would shriek for attention.
For the next two days, Jane devoted her time to grants for homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and relief organizations that helped the poor and hungry in cities. The day after that went to training and rehabilitation facilities for the handicapped, the undereducated, and the displaced.
A whole day and night were devoted to hospitals. There were thousands of them, and dozens seemed to have identical names. But hospitals were relatively safe recipients for the odd bits—money that cleared the accounts of an individual or foundation—because they were used to receiving donations of all sizes. Her fund-raising for Carey’s hospital had taught her exactly how the letters should look.
Jane awoke each morning before dawn wondering whether this would be the final day, but each time she would find the insomniac Henry Ziegler up, printing out the lists of imaginary people who were going to be that day’s donors. In the evening, Bernie would hand Ziegler his latest spiral notebook, and Ziegler would leaf through twenty or thirty pages at dinner, all of them crammed with new accounts and locations that had spilled from Bernie’s prodigious memory. Each time the contents of a notebook had been transferred into the computers, Jane would take the pages to the fireplace and burn them.
There was a whole day and night of scholarships. Any organization listed in the Foundation Directory that gave scholarships got a large donation earmarked for its permanent endowment. There were two days of donations to institutions that cared for orphans and unwanted children. Jane was astounded at how many there were. She spent two days on nonprofit homes and relief agencies for the elderly, and there was even a half day for animals.
Jane had begun the work with a cold, composed determination, but as the days went by, she began to feel a dreamlike disorientation. She had tried to keep up with Ziegler, but the lack of sleep was wearing down her certainty, and she began to work from habit. The walls of the garage and the bedrooms upstairs were now lined with boxes of bundled and sealed envelopes, and the living room closets were filling up with the overflow.
One morning when she joined Ziegler in the dining room, he was typing in a series of Web addresses. He would complete one, then wait a few seconds, then nod to himself happily.
“What’s that?” asked Jane.
“I’m looking over our shoulder,” he answered. “Before any check gets into the mail, I want to be sure the money got into the account first. If a check bounces, we’re not going to be around to cover it. Mr. Hagedorn and Mrs. Fuller aren’t going to answer their mail.”
“How does it look so far?”
“No mistakes, no problems with any of the big stuff: the hundred and ninety-two foundations, the fifty-six corporations, and the big trust accounts we set up are all solvent. Now all we’ve got to do is make payday before all these checks get stale and each of these accounts grows too much.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Jane. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t thought about that lately. What can we do about the profits that keep coming in?”
“Zilch,” he answered. “There’s no way to clear off a billion without leaving a few million in uncredited interest that will come in later. It might be what saves us. It takes a bit of time before the federal and state governments realize we’re not going to file tax returns, and the clock doesn’t start until next April. Foundations owe a one percent federal excise tax. The government wants it, but if the account still exists, they don’t get too alarmed. These crumbs and leftovers will probably buy us a year or two after that before the feds start looking for us in any way that matters. After five years, it becomes an unclaimed account. The state confiscates it, pays the feds off, and keeps the rest.”
“It’s like leaving an unfinished drink on the table,” said Jane. “The waiter thinks you’re coming back.”
“Right,” said Ziegler. “I hope giving it to them doesn’t bother you.”
“I’m not a big fan of governments,” said Jane. “But I like them better than gangsters. Wait. If we run out of charities, can we just slip some to governments?”
“Don’t even say it,” said Ziegler. “We’ve got to do everything the way people expect us to. Governments don’t like gifts. They like to snatch the money away from you.”
“Then let them,” she said. “What’s for today?”
“Problem assets.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bernie has been giving us clean, easy money as fast as we could spend it. But there are other things. He bought some land.”
“What’s the problem?”
“By definition, land is not something you can move from place to place, and you certainly can’t disguise it as something else. Converting it to cash isn’t easy. We can’t advertise it. Even if we found buyers in some yet-to-be invented quiet way, we can’t hang around for sixty-day escrows to close on a hundred and twenty pieces of property all over the country. And of course, the original deeds and papers are not at Bernie’s fingertips.”
“That shouldn’t matter. The sales must be recorded in county courthouses. He remembers the names, doesn’t he?”
“He’s Bernie the Elephant. He remembers the dates, prices, and map numbers.”
“Maybe we could put the land in the wills of dead people.”
Henry Ziegler squinted for a moment. “Not bad. We can leave it to organizations that can use it or sell it themselves.”
“What are the other problem assets?”
“He bought foreign bonds and stocks in foreign identities. It’s taken me a few hours to work my way through all of them, but I think I’m finished. I put in sell orders, with direct deposit to local banks. Then I requested that taxes be withheld by the banks before the money is sent to accounts in the U.S. That should take care of it. Then there’s the art.”
“Bernie bought art?”
“Afraid so,” said Ziegler. “Paintings. Mostly it was in the forties and fifties. It was expensive stuff then, so I shudder to think what it’s worth now.”
Jane frowned. “I can’t see Bernie buying paintings.”
“He went through art dealers in Europe—used them as brokers. It’s been done a lot. You can get one canvas that’s two feet wide, one foot high, and one inch thick, and you’ve stored five or six million. And finding an art dealer who doesn’t mind that the money is dirty is not exactly a head scratcher. If you say ‘tax dodge’ above a whisper, we’ll have six or seven of them lined up at the door, and two of them will know where you can get a Vermeer or a Titian that hasn’t been seen since the Allies bombed Dresden.”
“Where are the paintings?”
“In a vault. I can’t see us showing up at Sotheby’s to sell them off.”
Jane remembered the trips Bernie had made to meet Francesca Ogliaro in New York. “Is the vault in New York?”
“Yes,” said Ziegler. “And some of the paintings are stolen. When a painting by a major artist that’s been sitting in a vault for two generations hits the auction block, there are going to be TV cameras. Big players from all over the world will show up to bid. We’ve got about twenty of those. What we ought to do is burn them.”
“Do we know for sure that some are stolen?”
“Bernie thinks seven or eight, so it’s probably more.”
“Good,” said Jane. “We might be able to use that. Are there papers somewhere to show that different people bought them?”
“No,” said Ziegler. “He called himself Andrew Hewitt, set himself up with a few dealers, so the name had clout. They brought the deals to him. The dealers are all gone now—mostly dead.”
“Forget the dealers,” said Jane. “Even if they were alive, they wouldn’t come forward to say they sold stolen paintings.”
“It doesn’t get rid of the merchandise. There’s no way to avoid the publicity.”
“So let’s decide what we want it to be,” said Jane. “The fact that he bought all of them under the name Andrew Hewitt gives us a chance.”
“People are going to want to know all about Andrew Hewitt—where he got his money, where he lived, what he was like,” Henry said. “We can’t invent a person like him on short notice and expect he’ll stand up to the kind of scrutiny he’ll get. They’ll know it’s an alias.”
