by Peter Israel
My hair is his magic, even dyed. He tugs it, breathes it in, relaxes into sleep. Maybe it doesn’t matter what happens to me, but at the end of the day there’s the kid.
“Happy New Year, Daniel Boone,” I whisper to him.
I hold him a long time that way. His fingers stay entwined in my hair long after he drifts off. I’m still holding him. If I let him go, I’m afraid he’ll wake up again and call for Georgia.
What would she do if she picked up the phone and heard: “Hi, it’s me, I just wanted to wish you a Happy New Year?”
Could I say, “He was in danger, that’s why I took him away, but he’s okay?” And have the courage to hang up before she started asking questions? Before the police could trace the call?
Because if the police could trace the call, so could he.
Could I say, “I didn’t plan it this way, Georgia, please believe me?”
Keep singing, Becca. Eventually you’ll croon the whole world to sleep, and then, when you wake up, it’ll be a brand-new year, and then …
1 January
“Hullo? Hullo?”
“Is this Mr. Lawrence Coffey?”
“Yeah. Who the fuck is this?”
“Never mind. I’m calling to ask if you want your kid back.”
“What? Who is this, goddamn it? For Christ’s sake, it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning! You’ve got—”
“Just answer the question, Mr. Coffey. Do you want your kid back?”
“You’re damn right I want my kid back! What’s more, I’m going to get him back. Now—”
“Then just keep your mouth shut, Mr. Coffey. That’s all you got to do. You don’t talk to anybody about anything, that’s all there is to it. Not a soul. You just keep your mouth shut a little while, and everything will take care of itself.”
Click.
“Who’s this calling? Who is this?”
“Georgie, is that you?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I think he just hung up.”
“But who was it?”
“I don’t have the foggiest. Did you hear?”
“Yes. I’m coming down.”
Georgia Levy Coffey
1 January
The den is totally dark. I click on the overhead lights. Larry is standing next to his Stickley in his socks, no shoes, staring at nothing. I guess he must have fallen asleep there.
He turns to me, blinking at the sudden light.
“Do you know who that was?” I ask him.
He starts to shake his head, then his hand clutches at his temples.
“Oh Jesus, my head.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but right now I don’t care about your head. I hurt too. Do you know who that was?”
He’s staring at me now, bleary eyes in a moon face.
“No,” he says. Then, with a half-laugh, “Probably some crank. Everybody wants to shut me up these days.”
“What does that mean? Shut you up about what?”
“Never mind, Georgie. I think I’m about to throw up. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms, but I don’t care what he feels like. I’m wide awake, and my own insides are churning.
“Larry, was that a crank or wasn’t it? And what are you supposed to keep your mouth shut about? Do you know something you haven’t told me? For God’s sake, this is our son’s life!”
My voice is shrill. I can’t help myself. Somehow this caller sounded real to me.
Larry stares at me some more, his mouth a little open. Thinking, not answering. Now he’s shaking his head slowly from side to side.
“I’m having trouble believing it, is all,” he says finally. “I’m … I mean, Wall Street may be down and dirty, but they’re still not into kidnapping.”
“What are you having trouble believing?”
Once again, the distracted look. It makes me want to scream.
“Oh shit, Georgie,” he begins, and now I can hear the anxiety in his voice. His fist is cupped at his mouth. But he catches himself, sighs deeply. “Okay,” he says, “you want to hear the dirt, I guess you’re going to hear it. I still can’t fucking believe it.” Sighs again. “But I think you’d better make us some coffee. It’s going to be a long conversation.”
I tell him to put the water on, that I’m going upstairs for Zoe. That’s what I’m doing, but I’m so rattled I don’t know what I’m doing.
Three in the morning, the sudden jarring ring of the phone, but we must have had dozens by now, almost always when we’re asleep. Most have been women, including one who keeps calling to vilify Harriet. Mean, awful people. Malicious kids too, who give themselves away by giggling.
But this one was … different.
Older, a male voice. Flat, matter-of-fact, working class. Just keep your mouth shut, Mr. Coffey, that’s all you got to do.
Maybe it was that—the flatness.
But I didn’t expect Larry to agree with me!
For God’s sake, I feel as though I don’t even know him anymore! And just a few hours ago—New Year’s Eve—the most dismal of all the dismal New Year’s Eves—we had a rapprochement of sorts. I’d been upstairs with Zoe, waiting for the phone to ring, jumping every time it did because I thought it might be Harriet. Instead, only people calling to wish us well, Joe and Helen, even Holbrook (for Larry), friends from the city. And then I heard his tread coming up the stairs, heavy, unsteady, and there he was, leaning against the door jamb in a billowing rugby shirt, a bottle of Rémy Martin in one hand, two of my Baccarat snifters in the other, and I had to laugh in spite of myself, because he was trying hard to look like Cary Grant.
He wanted to toast the new year. I declined. But he came in, praising me for the Helga Harris interview—“I’ve got to hand it to you, Georgie”—and teetered over Zoe’s crib, and then he perched on the edge of the bed, drinking, and it all came pouring out of him. His own anguish, his own frustration with the police, his own fear that Justie might be dead, mingled with bitterness over something the Great White had done to him, and how he felt it all coming down on him at once, and for the first time in his life he didn’t think he could handle it, just couldn’t hack it.
I hadn’t, I confess, given that much thought to what he’d been going through, and it shook me to see him that way.
“And there’s us too!” he carried on wildly. “We can’t just stop living, Georgie! Separate bedrooms, for Christ’s sake, that’s one hell of a marriage.” He’s been sleeping in one of the guest rooms, at my insistence. “And now it’s New Year’s and look at us, we’re in fucking mourning! Whatever’s happened, it can’t go on the way it is between the two of us. All that matters is that I love you! No matter what. For Christ’s sake, Georgie, I love you!”
And he’d started to cry, and in spite of everything, I opened my arms to him. I hugged him, patted him the way I would Justin, and the idea crossed my mind, bittersweet, that that’s exactly what he was, a great big boozy needy bear of a child.
And somehow, at least for that minute, that was okay.
But three hours later the phone rang, jerking me out of sleep, the flat voice that wasn’t a crank, and now Larry is going to tell me the “dirt,” and from the sound of it, it’s as though, after seven years of marriage, he’s got a whole hidden life I know nothing about.
My hands are shaking as I pick Zoe up. It’s a miracle she doesn’t awake. It won’t last, I know. I’ll have to warm up a bottle downstairs.
We’ve been talking for a good hour, longer. Larry mostly. I’ve made two pots of coffee and, for him, scrambled eggs, Canadian bacon, English muffins. We’ve had Zoe awake and starving, and eating, and now she’s asleep again, wrapped up in her Kangarocka-roo on the butcher-block counter.
It all started, he says, in 1985, the year he made a million bucks, which was also the year he started selling “Big Bears.” A Big Bear, he explained, was a kind of sandwich, a slice of this, a slice of that—“tranches,” he called
them, but then he lost me in a barrage of initials: CMO’s, IO strips, PO strips, something called “Remics,” it didn’t matter, he said. Because money started coming out of the woodwork, brand-new S&L’s, state-chartered banks, credit unions, accounts nobody ever heard of but all with money to burn and all of them, so it seemed at the time, coming to the Big Bear at Shaw Cross. One new customer leading to another, and none of them too particular about where the money got placed, as long as it got placed.
“You take a guy like Mulcahy. You met him, didn’t you? Came out of real estate. The little Irishman with the hand-painted ties? Sure, I had to work for it. I schmoozed the hell out of him. I talked to him five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—still do—or did—and when he sneezed, who do you think blew his nose for him? But whenever he got stung—and it happened—you know what he said? He said, ‘Not to worry, Bear, there’s more coming.’”
I don’t see what Gerry Mulcahy has to do with the anonymous call, but he waves me off, says he’ll come back to it. Then comes a long digression on Shaw Cross, all about how, after he became a shark himself, he stayed on top of these “gray accounts,” even though he doled out their day-to-day to his guys in the Aquarium. And when the Great White put The Deal to him last October, he thought they were his customer base, that he would continue to sell them Shaw Cross products just as he always had, and make money too, and in fact he’d had them all lined up, ducks in his pond. Until the Great White pulled the plug on him.
“I’ve been such a sap, Georgie. Look, it’s been a crazy time for me, all fall. You were about to drop Zoe, and, well, a lot of shit was going down all at once. I missed the signs. What can I tell you? I missed the fucking signs.”
It all has to do, apparently, with some clause in The Deal that he didn’t get to see until the week I was in the hospital. It prohibits him, he says, from doing business with any of his old customers. Effectively, he says, it puts him out of business before he’s even started. Once he saw it, he stormed the barricades, but it did no good.
“Do you know what the son of a bitch has done now?” he says bitterly. “The Great White called me last week, Leon Gamble himself. Says in view of the awful business with Justie, they’re keeping my old contract in force indefinitely. Till it’s all over, and then we’ll talk again. Says that’ll be one less thing for me to worry about. But do you know what that means, honey? It means that as long as we don’t find Justie, I can still put food on the table! The lousy son of a bitch. How do I know he didn’t pay the guy to call us tonight? How do I know he doesn’t have Justie?”
He’s pacing now in his socks, and twiddling at his hair the way he always does when he’s agitated, but I still didn’t see the connection between his business problems and Justin.
“The big question is why, isn’t it? Why did they do it to me? I mean, look, Georgie, I know I’m no genius, you could even say I’ve been lucky, but I’m also pretty damned good at what I do, and I’ve made The Cross a potful over the years. I put it to Gamble that morning, while you were in the hospital. ‘Leon,’ I said, ‘why are you doing this to me?’ He gave me some bullshit that The Cross couldn’t afford just to give me those accounts. But the real reason—the only one that makes sense—is that they want me out of the loop.”
“The loop?” I say. “What loop?”
“The circuit. The information circuit. The dirty-money circuit.”
“The what?” I say.
“That’s right. Dirty money, funny money, that’s what this is all about.” He half-smiles at me. “I guess I’ve been like a fence, honey. Like a receiver of stolen goods. Hell, I know it. I think I’ve always known it.”
I stare at him, uncomprehending.
“It’s got to be, Georgie,” he goes on. “Look at it this way. Do you have any idea how many S&L’s have gone belly up the last couple of years? It’ll be in the thousands by the time we’re done. Look, we were selling them all sorts of paper, stuff they could book as assets while they spread their losses over umpteen years. The regulators knew it too. It’s been a political hot potato for a decade, more. Only sooner or later, it caught up with them. They ran out of cash. Bad management, fraud, shitty investments, worse investments to cover up the shitty ones, then boom, another one bites the dust.
“But my guys? Not a one, honey. And not because they’re smarter than the next guy either. If there was any logic, Gerry Mulcahy would have been first in line at bankruptcy court.
“So why wasn’t he? Why is he still on his feet? Because the cash kept rolling in. I never asked where it came from, he never told me, but he was dumb enough—this was a few years ago—to let on that they kept double sets of books, and once—maybe he’d had too much to drink or maybe, for all I know, he wanted me in on it in case there was ever trouble—I got a glimpse of their income statement and balance sheet. I mean, the real ones. They showed their losses all right—and they were reserved up the giggy—but their assets were growing so fast, all he had really had to worry about was placing the money. He was a fucking conduit, that’s all.”
“You’re saying it was dirty money?” I ask.
“Look, it was complicated shit. It’d take me a week to explain, and I don’t know the whole of it. He did the same dumb stuff they all did, but underneath it there was always cash. Some of his investments with me came in from the Caymans, Panama, once or twice Switzerland, but a lot of it direct too. I just followed his instructions. I was too busy selling. I mean, we’re talking millions, Georgie. And Gerry Mulcahy was only one of my guys.”
His voice trails off. He’s sitting again, perched on a kitchen stool and draped over the butcher-block counter, tracing a groove in the polished wood with his forefinger.
“I’ve been some asshole, honey,” he says. “All along, I thought I was this hot-shit seller, and all I was was your A-Number-One patsy. I think I was set up from the beginning. I think they needed somebody who was too busy raking in the chips to look too close. Or if he looked, would keep his mouth shut.”
“But even if you’re right,” I ask, “why would they want to shut you up about it now? It makes no sense. You say you’ve known about it a long time. Why now?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s simply shaking his head slowly from side to side, his eyes on the counter.
“But you didn’t do anything illegal, did you?”
He’s still shaking his head. He says he doesn’t know, that he’d have to ask a lawyer if he did anything illegal, and it surprises me, in passing, that he hasn’t already asked a lawyer. Isn’t Joe Penzil his best friend? And what about Holbrook? He never makes a move without consulting Holbrook. But he’s clearly thinking of something else too—the phone call?—and not telling me, and that unnerves me.
“Are you telling me Justin was kidnapped because of what you know?” I manage to ask. “Is that what you think?”
It sounds crazy, even as I say it.
No answer at first. Then: “They’re being investigated, honey. The Cross. It has to be. I bet it’s already started.”
“Investigated by whom?”
He shrugs.
“The U.S. Attorney’s office,” he says, staring at the counter.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve got my grapevine,” he says. “The place is locked up tighter than a drum. Gamble’s suddenly gone apeshit over security, and Schwartzenberg’s got lawyers, auditors from outside, crawling all over the place. They must have known it was coming last October. They must have decided to shut down my whole side of the operation, get rid of the bodies. Why else did everybody stop talking to me? I think the Great White’s scared shitless about how much I know.”
“To the point of kidnapping?”
Again he doesn’t answer. His eyes seem riveted on a groove in the butcher block, and now, crazily, I’m starting to believe it—he clearly does—and I’m panicking.
“But what are we going to do about it?” I cry out. “The man on the phone said you’ve got to keep your mouth shut and we�
�ll get Justin back, but what does that mean? How long are you supposed to keep your mouth shut? Larry, look at me! For God’s sake, what are we going to do?”
He looks up at last, white-faced. His moon eyes stare at me, surrounded now by dark circling shadows, like halos in reverse.
“Shit, Georgie,” he begins. But then he breaks off, a helpless gaze.
“For God’s sake, what are we going to do?” I repeat. “Are we supposed to sit still and do nothing?”
“I guess it’s too late for doing nothing,” he says. Then something like: “Don’t get me wrong, honey, not in a million years … Jesus Christ, had I known what was going to happen … while you were in the hospital … just exploratory, a fishing expedition …”
I stare back at him in disbelief.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” I explode at him.
“I’m trying to tell you, Georgie! I’ve already talked to somebody, but it was before Justie!” His hands are up, palms up, as though in self-defense. “Christ Almighty, I had no way of knowing.”
“No way of knowing what? What are you saying?”
What he is saying, or trying to say, and my hands are shaking, listening to him, is that the week before Justin was kidnapped, while I was in the hospital with Zoe and after his confrontation with Leon Gamble, he already had a conversation about Shaw Cross—preliminary and confidential, he keeps saying—with a lawyer from the Justice Department. Somebody by the name of Joe Richter.
3 January
By the time we went to bed, the first light of 1991 had come up weakly through the bare trees outside. I stood by my kitchen windows, staring at the blue tarpaulin that covers the pool in winter, dirty with sodden leaves and water that ought to have been cleared away.
Happy New Year.
Maybe Larry slept. I didn’t.
A “fishing expedition.”
He keeps saying that. He’s said it to me, he’s said it to Karnishak since and Capriello, everybody. His conversation with Richter (he keeps saying) was very general. He depicted himself as an innocent bystander, a conduit, like somebody who might have witnessed a crime without even knowing it was a crime. He was looking for some kind of guarantee from Richter before he went any further—not just confidentiality but, if it came to that, immunity from prosecution too.
