The apartment was small, low ceilinged, and sterile, like a very tidy waiting room. I stood in a short hallway. On my left was a pocket kitchen, on my right a bedroom and a bath. The living room was a white cube, dead ahead. The furnishings were sparse and cheap. A beige sofa, a matching chair, and a coffee table were arranged in a corner. A low bookcase ran along one wall; a dining table did double duty as a desk along another. An oatmeal-colored rug hid most of the badly laid parquet floor. Across the room, a glass door opened onto one of the balconies I’d seen from the street. It was no bigger from up here.
The walls were empty. The only picture in the place stood on the dining table: a faded, silver-framed photo of a young woman holding a baby. What books there were, were arranged by size on the shelves, so that biographies and histories were mixed with textbooks on real estate, and a thick, black bible with books on low-salt cooking and weight loss. His few knickknacks—a pair of silver candlesticks, a small carriage clock, a red lacquer box—looked out of place, as if they’d lost their way en route to another, better-appointed life.
Burrows motioned me toward the sofa, and I sat. He took a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, wrapping the earpieces behind his ears. They made his eyes bigger, and gave him a scholarly look.
“Something to drink, Mr. March?” he asked. “I’ve got ice tea, juice, water. I could put up coffee if you’d prefer.” His voice was deep and intimate sounding, but there was a stiff, almost formal quality to his speech and manner that made me think he wasn’t used to having anyone in the apartment with him.
“Water is fine,” I said.
He disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with two glasses of water. He gave me one, along with a little paper napkin, and sat in the chair opposite me. He sighed heavily and looked down at his feet on the rug. He held his water glass with both hands and rested it in his lap. I noticed a gym bag and a pair of sneakers parked neatly in a corner by the door. I gestured toward them. “Just back from the gym?” I asked. The question seemed to surprise him, and he paused before answering.
“I am, yes. I go every night, after work.”
“Disciplined,” I said.
“I try to be.”
“What kind of work are you doing, now that you’re out of banking?” I asked.
He didn’t hear my question, or chose to ignore it. “As I said on the phone, Mr. March, I don’t know that I can be much help to you. I wasn’t much help to the federal people when they came to see me, either,” he said.
“When was that?”
“A long while ago. Two and a half years, maybe longer. But there wasn’t much I could tell them.” He took a slow drink from his glass. I smiled my best nonthreatening smile.
“Well, I’m starting with almost nothing on this, so whatever you can tell me I’m sure will help. And, as I mentioned on the phone, this is entirely confidential and off the record. The guy I’d like to talk to you about is Gerard Nassouli. I understand you worked for him.”
Burrows kept looking down at his feet and shook his head a little. “Yes, that’s who the federal people wanted to talk about, too. Where he might have gone to, who he might turn to if he was in trouble, had I heard from him, what did I know about his finances, did I know any of his friends, did I know of any property he kept overseas. They went on and on. I couldn’t help much.”
“They were interested in finding him, so they asked those kinds of questions. But finding him is not my problem. I’m more interested in what he was like. How he did business. How he made deals. I thought maybe you could take me through some that you worked on with him.”
“I’m not sure there’s much I can say.” He took another hit from his glass.
“You did work for him.”
“For seven years, the whole time I was at MWB. I was with the New York office, and Nassouli ran the office.”
“And you ran the correspondent banking department?”
“For six years. The first year, I was the number two person in the department. Then my boss went back to London and I took over.”
“And when you left MWB, you left banking altogether?”
Burrows looked up at me and straightened a bit in his chair. “I thought this was about Nassouli, not about me.”
“It is. But all you say about him is that you have nothing to say. So I figured we could talk about things you can tell me. Like why you left MWB when you did, and why you left banking.” I drank some water and continued. “I figure you must have been around thirty when you joined MWB. And you must’ve come in with a few years’ experience, if they hired you as the number two guy in the department. Even allowing for a couple of years in b-school and my bad arithmetic, you walked away from at least ten years in banking when you quit. That’s a big career investment to leave behind. Why’d you do it?”
Burrows looked at me for a while and shook his head a little. “It was over thirteen years, altogether, and my reasons were personal. Can you understand that?” he said, more tired than angry. “Look, if it’s me you want to discuss, I’m sorry, the answer is no.” He got up and carried his glass to the kitchen and returned with it filled.
“How did you know that I ran correspondent banking?” he asked.
“Research. That’s what I do.”
“And what has your research told you about Gerard so far?”
“Not a lot. That he was a big deal maker. That he was charming, and liked a party. That he liked women, and being seen with them,” I answered.
Burrows snorted. “He liked to be seen with them, and he liked to fuck them, that’s true. I don’t know how much he actually liked them. In fact, I think he hated them.” He stumbled a little over “fuck,” as if he was out of practice with vulgarity. He drank some water. “Deal maker, charming, life of the party—you’ve been talking to people who didn’t know him well.”
Alan Burrows was a paradox. On the one hand, he kept proclaiming that he had nothing to tell me. And, so far, he hadn’t told me much. On the other hand, he hadn’t thrown me out yet. And he kept on talking. There was some heavy conflict there, and that was good news for me. “You know different?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his damp hair and looked into his glass. “Charming, a big deal maker, loved parties—that was the press he put out, and it was true, as far as it went. But there was another story, altogether different.” He stopped and looked up at me again. “Your employer could write a book just on Gerard, but he’d have to do it as fiction, because nobody would believe it as fact.” His voice quavered, like he’d run out of air. He took a noisy swallow from his glass and then was still.
“I’d like to hear that story, and you’re the first person I’ve met who could tell it,” I said.
Burrows shook his head, more vigorously this time. “Tell it . . . Jesus . . . I’ve spent fifteen years trying to forget it,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“How’s that going—the forgetting?” I asked softly.
“Not well,” he said.
The lines seemed to deepen on Burrows’s ruined, handsome face, and his eyes looked moist and more tired than ever. He gathered some breath and asked, “Are you really working for a writer?” So much for my decent story.
“No,” I said after a while. “No, I’m not. I’m trying to help someone who did some business, legitimate business, with Nassouli a long time ago, and who’s run into trouble because of it.”
“Legitimate business—with Nassouli, I suppose that’s theoretically possible,” Burrows said with a small, harsh laugh. “But if your client did any kind of business with Gerard, he may need more help than you can give him. Tell him he should talk to a priest.”
“I’ll be sure to mention it. But right now, I’m all there is in the help department. Me, and maybe you.”
“Is this usually an effective approach for you, Mr. March—lying to people, then asking for their help? Does it build a lot of trust?” Again, Burrows seemed unable to generate much anger. He se
emed gripped, instead, by a powerful, bone-deep fatigue.
“I was acting in what I judged to be my client’s best interests, Mr. Burrows. I thought you’d be more forthcoming talking to someone doing research for a book than you would someone pursuing an investigation. Maybe it was a bad call. I make them sometimes, and I correct them when I can. But I wasn’t lying to you when I said this would be confidential.”
Burrows waved his hand, like he was shooing a fly. “Being lied to doesn’t bother me much, Mr. March. Maybe that comes from working for Nassouli for seven years, or maybe it just comes from working on Wall Street. Whatever—I’ve gotten comfortable with it. I’ve come to expect it.”
He looked at me and looked away. He was poised on a precipice, balanced on the verge of something. His eyes were narrow and clouded, and they roamed aimlessly around the room. The conflict behind them was one I’d seen before. It took me back to cop days, to exhausted suspects caught between fear and the swelling need to speak and be understood . . . and maybe forgiven. I was wondering which way to push him, or if I should push at all, when he stiffened his shoulders and locked his eyes on mine.
He squinted and peered, like a man driving slowly through a fog— searching the opaque air for familiar shadows and looming hazards. He stared for a long time, and I held his gaze. I don’t know exactly what Burrows sought in my eyes and face—some sign of shared knowledge, maybe. A common thread of loss or regret; or a mutual acquaintance with solitary rooms, and the tyranny of memory. Whatever it was, I guess he found it. He made his decision and spoke.
“I think it’s hard for a lot of people to understand evil, believe the reality of it, unless they’ve experienced it firsthand, don’t you? I know it was that way for me, before I met him. ‘Evil’ and ‘corruption’ were just words to me, before him. Gerard Nassouli was the worst man I’ve ever met, Mr. March. He was a fucking monster.” The vulgarity gave him no trouble this time.
“Yes, he loved the deal making and the high life, and you must know from the papers what sorts of things he was engaged in at MWB. But his genius, and his true passion, was corruption. Corrupting people, and then collecting them, like some people collect bugs—pinned and mounted under glass. No deal was a complete success for him unless it involved adding somebody to his little collection. I think that’s why MWB was so perfect for him. It let him marry his vocation with his avocation.” He turned his glass slowly in his hands.
“It sounds strange, I know. It’s hard to understand if you don’t see it for yourself. I worked with the man almost every day for seven years, and I didn’t see it at first. He was smart, and charming, but what he was best at was reading people. He could see into them, how they were put together, what they wanted, what drove them. And whatever it was, he would somehow arrange for them to have it—with no strings attached. Not at first, anyway.” His voice was very soft now, and I was straining to hear. “In the end, it cost them everything.”
When he paused, a palpable silence took hold of the apartment. There was no traffic noise, no whirring of the building’s machinery, no humming of appliances. I kept very still and took slow breaths and focused my eyes on the wall behind Burrows, afraid that, like a deer, any stray motion or sound or even the force of my gaze might spook him and break the spell. Burrows leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, the water glass still before him, held in both his hands. He peered inside, as if into a deep well.
“You’d think he was the best friend you’d ever had—smart, funny, worldly, and infinitely understanding of human failings. If you had a vice, a weakness, a little character tic, well, Gerard had plenty too. And whatever yours were, you’d never get even a raised eyebrow from him. Just a wink and a nod, as if to say ‘It’s no big deal. Go ahead. Enjoy. That’s what men do.’ And he’d sit back and wait and watch. To see the kind of women you liked, or men, to see what you envied, what made you bitter, to see what you liked and hated about yourself, to see what lies you told yourself, and, especially, to see what you most coveted. It could take months, years even. He didn’t care. He was patient. It was like tending a garden, he used to say.”
Burrows looked up, and the motion startled me. His eyes were red. “This is too vague, isn’t it? You want to know what he was like, how he did business. You need specifics.” Burrows’s soft, deep voice was steady now, and it stayed that way through all the stories he told me.
Chapter Ten
“Larry—let’s call him Larry—had just moved to town from somewhere in the Midwest, with his brand-new wife in tow. Larry was ambitious, and lucky. He had the world by the balls. And he had no clue at all of what was about to happen to him.” Burrows found the rhythm of his narrative easily, and I got the feeling he’d waited a long time to tell his stories. His tone was ironical and detached. The irony seemed to come naturally to him. He had to work at the detachment.
“Larry had just landed a job trading currency for one of the biggest FX market-makers on the Street. He’d been a rising star at the regional bank that he’d come from, but, after all, it was just a regional bank—a farm team. This was the big league, and the FX market was hot back then. Larry was poised to make some real money. And that was a good thing, because Mrs. Larry, his pretty new wife, had pricey tastes, lofty social aspirations, and a grim resolve. Of the many things she wanted, at the top of her list was a place to live. But not just any place. Mrs. Larry imagined raising a towheaded brood in just the right sort of Manhattan apartment. Something on Park Ave., say, no higher than Eightieth Street, or maybe on Fifth, with a terrace and a nice view of the park.
“Now, Larry had come to town with what he’d thought was a tidy nest egg. But in New York City, in the midst of the real estate boom twenty years ago, it was chump change. Mrs. Larry had set her sights on only the toniest white-glove buildings, places with the pickiest boards . . . places that required that all apartments be purchased in cash. Much more cash than Larry had on hand, and more than he was likely to see—in the best of circumstances—for nearly a year, when his bonus would be paid. This did not please Mrs. Larry, whose strengths ran more to petulance and pouting than to patience. And Mrs. Larry was generous with her displeasure.
“Enter Nassouli. He had started cultivating Larry on the boy’s first day at his new job. We were active in the FX markets, and Gerard made it a point to keep abreast of the comings and goings of traders at all the big market makers. He was especially interested in new, young traders. ‘Fertile ground,’ he called them.
“It took Nassouli all of a lunch with Larry, a dinner with him and the missus, and a boys’ night out at a strip club to suss out the dynamics of Larry’s domestic scene and the powerful forces at work on him there. Larry was a sitting duck. In short order, Nassouli had set himself up as the Larrys’ Big Apple mentor, showing them the ropes, opening doors, introducing them to all the right people and all the right places. Within a week he’d delivered them into the clutches of a realtor friend of his, who proceeded to show Mrs. Larry only top-of-the-line apartments in top-of-the-line buildings, all of which—wonder of wonders—had strict, cash-only policies. Six weeks and a hundred or so apartments later, they had found the place—Seventy-fourth and Park, ten rooms, terraces, views—the whole ball of wax. Mrs. Larry would not be denied. Larry’s problems came suddenly to a head.
“Ah, but there was his great, good friend Gerard, with such an easy solution to it all: a personal loan to the Larrys for the amount in question. And just to make sure that Larry’s financial statements would pass muster before even the pickiest co-op board, Nassouli would pay the loan into an account—in Larry’s name—at MWB. This account would have a very large balance and would appear, to whoever might ask, to have held this balance for quite some time. On top of all this, for good measure, Nassouli could arrange for some impressive letters of recommendation for the Larrys—from prominent people, famous people even, people who hadn’t a clue as to who the Larrys were, but who owed Gerard some heavy favors.
“Larry offe
red only token resistance, and charming, affable, worldly, plugged-in Gerard blew through it like tissue paper. ‘Not to worry, dear boy, really. You have a cash-flow problem—a timing issue. This is just a bridge loan. Happens all the time . . . this is how things get done here in the big city.’ And as must happen in such cases, Larry was complicit in his own corruption. He believed what Nassouli told him—bought into it all—because Nassouli told him precisely what he’d wanted to hear. And that was all it took to make Larry a party to fraud and conspiracy and violations of who knows how many of his employer’s rules of conduct.
“Two months later, the Larrys had closed on the place. Mrs. Larry was pleased, but it passed quickly. Now she had to grapple with renovation and decoration, and this left Larry, once again, to grapple with his lack of cash. But again, kindly Uncle Gerard came to the rescue. ‘Remember that account at MWB—the one in your name? Just think of it as a credit line, dear boy, draw what you need . . . pay it back later . . . whenever you can.’ Larry didn’t muster even token resistance this time. Then later came.
“Bonus time eventually rolled around. Larry had had a great year, and the FX markets continued to be hot, so his bonus was a big one. But not big enough to settle accounts with Nassouli. Between the purchase of the apartment and his wife’s many improvements, Larry was deep in the hole. But money wasn’t what Gerard was looking for. What he had in mind instead was having a tame FX trader in his pocket, someone on a major market-making desk, someone who, every now and then, could do some little favors for him. Like providing some ‘insight’ into his bank’s positions and trading strategies, or executing the occasional off-market trade. Nine months after his first lunch with Gerard Nassouli, that’s what Larry became.
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