by Thomas Perry
“Then what we need is a real person to put behind the alias. Can you get probate records on your computer?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Good. Find a person—man or woman—who left an art collection to a museum.”
“There must be hundreds,” he said. “Thousands.”
“Then be picky. We want one who doesn’t mention any other heirs in the papers. And look for signs that there was a lot of money. If possible, the person died some time ago, so the air will be clear.”
“I don’t see how this helps.”
“Andrew Hewitt was an alias this real art collector used to buy paintings. Who can quarrel with that? It’s true. When the collector died—which the collector we find did—the museums were supposed to get all the paintings, including the ones in the vault. Only he waited too long to tell anybody about them, because some were stolen.”
“But how do we spring the news? Who tells them?”
“Here’s the best we can do. As long as one of the paintings is stolen, there’s a reason for anyone who knew of it to want to be anonymous. The art collector had a friend who knew. The friend will write an anonymous letter to the museum today, explaining everything. He’s old now, and for umpteen years the secret has been weighing on him. He wants to get it off his chest. The museum will notify the authorities in New York, who will get a warrant to open the vault. The seven or eight will go back where they belong. The ones Bernie bought legitimately will go to the museum. The whole process might take years, but it will get sorted out.”
Ziegler gazed at her appreciatively. “It’s not bad. We don’t have to worry about faking an old document, because it’s just this old person writing an anonymous letter now—like he happened to have the missing codicil to his friend’s will.”
“Right,” said Jane. “But don’t you think we should hold off on the assets that have a bizarre side until we’ve gotten rid of the easy stuff? Why fool around with this when we still have stocks and bonds and things?”
Ziegler nodded as he typed some codes into his computer. “I agree.” He stopped and smiled at her. “I think we’re going to hit that point at about eight tonight.” He waited. “You hear what I said? We’ve written checks for fourteen point three billion dollars.”
“That’s why you were checking all those accounts when I came in?” said Jane. Her eyes had a glazed, faraway look. “It’s almost over?”
Ziegler nodded. “Bernie ran dry last night.”
16
Jane drove to Albuquerque the next morning and bought a Polaroid camera and four large soft-sided duffel bags with wheels on the bottoms. Then she stopped at a mailing service to buy thirty collapsed cardboard mailing cartons, labels, and tape. When she returned to Santa Fe she put Rita to work sorting envelopes by the zip codes of their return addresses, and bundling them. Bernie assembled and taped the mailing cartons. When they took a break, Jane posed each of them against the one remaining white wall that was bare, and took their pictures.
Rita watched hers slowly developing and becoming brighter. “That’s so ugly,” she said.
“It’s for spare identity papers—licenses and things,” said Jane. “If they’re not unflattering they don’t look real.” But she relented and took three more.
Jane spent much of the rest of the day at pay telephones making reservations. By the time she was back at the house, the living room walls were lined with tall stacks of boxes. All evening she and Rita filled the boxes, taped, and labeled them. At eleven, Jane made her way down an empty aisle she had left and settled onto the couch to sleep.
For the first time in weeks, Jane didn’t awaken when Henry Ziegler began to work. It was dawn when she walked into the dining room to find him at his computer, scrolling down a long list of numbers and names. He looked up.
Jane asked, “How is it going?”
“Great,” he said. “It’s going great. Bernie is amazing. Not one account I transferred money to has problems. I’ve been through every transfer once, and I’m just checking one more time. He didn’t memorize balances—why should he? But he had a pretty good idea what was where. The signatures he put on the withdrawals all got through. We’re not going to have any rubber checks.”
“You wanted to know how he did it,” said Jane. “That’s how. He’s not remembering numbers. He’s looking at the image of a piece of paper he once saw. He just copies it.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, one more thing. You did the Weinstein papers?”
“Transfers for the insurance premium were done last night. All he has to do is sign.” He looked toward the living room, where the boxes were piled. “Have you figured out how we get all these letters in the mail?”
“We start in two days,” she said. “Want to see your itinerary?”
“Sure.”
Jane found her notes at the other end of the table. “You fly from Albuquerque to Houston. You’ll have two big rolling duffel bags full of letters, which is what one person can handle by himself. You’ll check them at the airport. No letters go into your carry-on bag. We don’t want the security people going through anything and seeing them. When you get to Houston, mail the first pack of letters. Then you fly to St. Louis and mail the second set. The third is Miami. In Miami I rented you a car. You drive north: Atlanta, Charleston, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington. There will be a second shipment of letters waiting at your hotel in Washington, so you can refill your duffel bags. You rest up, or whatever it is that you do, overnight, then keep heading north. Stop in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, a couple of stops in New Jersey, a couple of stops north of New York City. You turn east and make some stops in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and end in Boston. That’s your home base, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” said Ziegler. “But that leaves us with an awful lot of territory.”
“I’m leaving at the same time—actually a little earlier. I’ve got a flight to San Diego with a stop in Phoenix, so I can drop the Arizona letters. In San Diego I have a rental car waiting, so I drive north up the coast—L.A., Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and all stops in between. Then I fly to Seattle with a stop in Portland. By then, my bags will be empty, so I’m mailing more boxes to the hotel there. I fly to Minneapolis, rent another car, and drive the Midwest—Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City, Chicago. I’ll get my second mailing in Chicago, rent another car, and head east through Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York. Then I fly back here with a stop in Dallas. We should both be finished in about a week.”
Henry Ziegler stared down at his computer again, then back at Jane. He said apologetically, “I’ve been so wrapped up in setting this up—the mechanics of it—that I’m having trouble believing it’s almost over.”
“I know,” said Jane. “I keep going over everything to see if we’ve forgotten something.”
“Now are you ready to tell me what you did it for?”
Jane looked down at Ziegler’s computer screen instead of his eyes. It occurred to her that this was part of what computers were for. “Sure,” she said. “I’ve come up with a lot of reasons since we started, and they’re all pretty sly. That’s what I am, you know.”
“I noticed that.”
“And all of the reasons sound okay when you say them to somebody else. I wanted to be sure the money never got to people who want me dead. I thought that maybe, if the money is really, verifiably gone, then it would give them a reason to stop looking for Rita. I wanted to help Bernie keep his son out of trouble. A lot of the time, while we were writing letters and signing checks, I would get pleasure thinking about some charity that had helped someone I know, and how much good a lot of money would do. But when I say the reasons to myself, they sound like excuses somebody made up to account for something she was going to do already.”
“They do?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are too many of them. The charities weren’t the first thing I thought about. I thought of them because I once saw somebody loot a trust fund and make it look as though the
y were giving it all to charities. I noticed that it was hard to sort out afterward. It took the auditors a month or so to even trace how it had been done. I also noticed that when they had, it didn’t bring the money back.”
“That’s what I’ve liked about it since I first heard the idea,” said Ziegler. “Charities are all watched and audited. The IRS knows what they take in and every dime they spend. The IRS knows what each contributor gives, because he’s going to deduct it on his tax return. They think that’s all there is to know.”
“How about you?” asked Jane. “Have you figured out why you did it?”
“I think I know more than I did the first night,” Ziegler answered. “Charities are nice, but I never risked my life for them before, so I hardly think that can be what I’m doing now. I think it must be because I want to be a player—to be near the light and the fire. The side you’re on isn’t up to you. It’s who you are. The only choice you have is to be in the place where big things are going on, or be someplace else.”
Jane hesitated for a moment. It sounded too readily understandable, maybe even familiar. “I’d better get to work,” she said softly. She moved into the living room and began arranging packets of envelopes and packing them in the four big duffel bags.
Jane squeezed her eyes closed and gritted her teeth. She wanted Carey. She wanted to be with him right now. She was tired of measuring her words. She wanted to talk, to tell her old friend everything, to find out what he thought.
As Jane stuffed the four big duffel bags with letters, she became aware that someone was behind her. She turned to see Bernie and Rita watching. Rita said, “Which one is mine?”
“What?”
“You got four bags. We each take one, right?”
“Wrong,” said Jane. “Henry and I are going to mail the letters. I picked four bags because a person can handle two at a time.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Bernie. “You think I can’t mail a letter?”
“It’s not that you can’t do it,” said Jane. “It’s that people might see you doing it.”
“Nobody’s looking for me,” said Bernie.
“But if they see you, do you think they won’t know who they’re looking at?”
Rita scowled in frustration. “We did everything you asked for. We have a right to see this through. People are looking for me, but I dyed my hair, got new clothes … I’ve changed.”
“You look terrific,” said Jane. “But you don’t look like a different person just yet.” Finally, she stood up. She walked through the dining room and muttered to Ziegler, “Come in here.” She walked into the kitchen, and the others followed her. They watched her open the cupboard and take four glasses down, bringing each one to the counter with a clack that made Ziegler wince. She took the newly opened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, filled the glasses, and handed one to each of them.
Jane looked around her at each person in turn. Rita and Bernie stared at her stubbornly. Henry Ziegler just looked confused. Jane said, “Lady, gentlemen, and fellow philanthropists—and I mean all of those words sincerely—you have already accomplished the best thing you could have done with your lives if you had been born with the sense to start out with that in mind. You have given your all. Here’s to you.” She raised her glass and took a drink, then smacked it down on the counter.
“That does not mean, however, that I have joined with you in a brave little democracy. The world works on deals. I still have one with each of you. You have kept your end, and I’m going to keep mine. At the end of this, we are all going to walk away and go live some more. You should know that I’ve been in a few airports since this started, and each time there have been a few more big, ugly men standing around to watch the gates and the baggage claims, looking very hard at each face they see.
“The instant the first batch of checks hits the mailbox, the situation is going to get worse. In a matter of weeks, or even hours, the people who thought that money was theirs are going to start feeling wounded and frantic. They’re already looking hard for Rita. If they see Bernie’s face, it will take them a whole half-second to get over their shock that he’s alive, and another half-second to come after him. This means that Bernie and Rita are going to stay in this house, invisible, while Henry and I mail the letters. End of speech, end of discussion.” She walked out of the room.
Rita stared after her for a moment, her eyes unfocused and thoughtful. Ziegler looked uncomfortably at Rita, then went back to his computer.
Bernie patted her shoulder. “I guess she’s right,” he said softly. “We’ll just lay low. It’ll only be for a while.”
Rita said, “That’s not what you said when this started. You said they’d keep looking for forty years.”
Bernie chuckled. “If they do, so what? You’re a kid. You can do that kind of time standing on your head. I just finished doing fifty.” He waited for Rita to see the humor in it, but it seemed to be lost on her. He left her alone in the kitchen.
The next morning, the men helped Jane load her big suitcases into the car. Jane took Rita’s arm and pulled her aside for a moment. “If nothing goes wrong, I should be back in a week or so. You have everything you’ll need, so don’t show your face if you don’t have to.” Something in Rita’s expression worried her. “Are you all right?”
Rita shrugged. “Bernie and I will take care of each other.”
Jane hugged her and then got into the car. Bernie and Ziegler came close to her window. “Keep her safe until I get back,” she said to Bernie. “And yourself, too.”
Bernie answered, “What can happen—sunburn?”
Jane looked at Ziegler. “Good luck, Henry.”
As Jane drove off, she glanced at the small pile of letters on the seat beside her. She took a deep breath and blew it out. As soon as she mailed those first letters in Albuquerque, it would begin.
17
Paul Di Titulo walked out of the bank building into a dull glow of hazy sunlight. Immediately the humidity settled on his neck and shoulders like a weight. He walked ten steps on the sidewalk and began to feel sweat beading on his forehead. The expensive climate-control system in the fourth-floor conference room of the bank had made him more vulnerable to conditions in real-life Cleveland, where invisible bits of grit settled on the starched collar of a white shirt, and the perfumy smell of half-burned diesel fuel tickled his nasal passages and made him wait for a sneeze that never came.
As he walked down the street toward his car, he tried to think of ways to determine whether he was spending his time pondering nothing. He could call other charities to inquire whether unexpectedly large donations had arrived lately. He could try to find out something about this Ronald Wilmont who had sent the check to the Five C’s. If Wilmont was a legitimate donor to the Cleveland Coalition of Caring Corporations and Citizens, then probably there would be someone in town who knew him, or at least knew what connection he had with Cleveland. If he had been born here, then there would be a birth certificate on file in the courthouse. If he’d once had a business here, then there would be a record of a business license. The archives of the Plain Dealer would almost certainly contain some reference to him. The property-tax rolls might have a deed with his name on it. There had to be some reason why a person would hand four million bucks to Cleveland.
He decided he would have a couple of secretaries at his office start working on Ronald Wilmont today. Di Titulo had to take every step he could to either prove his own suspicion was a daydream or prove it wasn’t before he started making noises.
Di Titulo knew he was one of many people who had been watching whatever parts of the financial landscape were visible to them for the last month. Everybody in the country had been waiting, and by now there had probably been a few false alarms. He was sure that a man who blew the whistle without sufficient evidence would suffer later in prestige. For years, whatever he said or did would be denigrated and discounted. Just because men like him used computers and gold-nibbed fountain pens
instead of cracking skulls with baseball bats didn’t mean that they were exempt from the standards of behavior that being part of La Cosa Nostra implied.
As Di Titulo thought about it, he wasn’t even positive that if he blew the whistle now, he wouldn’t be the first. Being first was dangerous, but it had all the rewards. His job in the Castananza family had been to build himself into a pillar of the community, insinuate himself into the local establishment as a prosperous, astute businessman and public-spirited citizen. Getting himself invited to join the board of directors of the Five C’s had been a verification of how well he had accomplished it. He had no idea how well face men in other families in other cities had done. He decided he was not being arrogant to suspect that few had done as well as he had. And now, because of that success, he had received an odd bit of inside information that might mean something.
Everybody in the country had been waiting for signs of unusual financial activity. If somebody had popped old Bernie Lupus for personal reasons, so be it. But the world seldom turned on things done for personal reasons. So the whole LCN had been waiting quietly to see if money in accounts all over the country was going to start sprouting wings and heading to roost in one place.
The whole story of Bernie the Elephant, the version Di Titulo had heard since he was a kid, had been that he never wrote anything down. But not all stories were true, and almost none of them stayed true forever. It was just possible that, as he got old and weak, Bernie the Elephant had begun to make a ledger. The series of coincidences surrounding Bernie’s death had been mostly shrugged off by the old dons who had known him. People died at stupid times for stupid reasons, they said. But if what Di Titulo had heard was true, then it was not so easy to dismiss. He had heard that after Bernie died, his house in Florida had been searched. Nobody had found any papers, but they had also not found Danny Spoleto, one of his bodyguards. And when one of the families—he heard it was the Langustos, from New York—sent people to Detroit to see what the Ogliaro family there had to say, they had found that the mother of the head of the family had died the same day. Maybe she had been killed because she knew something.
