The Capitalist

by Peter Steiner

  “Do you live here alone?”

  “As you can see.”

  There was nothing St. John could do. The pauses grew longer until the four men lapsed into what seemed like eternal silence interrupted only by the occasional scrape of Nigel’s fork on his plate getting up a last crumb of tarte tatin he had somehow missed. Louis got Nigel another piece.

  The rain had stopped without amounting to much. It was nearly seven o’clock, and the sun came out. “Follow me,” said Louis. He was suddenly on his feet and out into the hallway, walking fast. The other three scrambled to catch up.

  They turned off the hallway and through a door and found themselves in a large salon filled with antique furnishings and worn oriental rugs. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto the rear terrace. The wind was chasing a few dead leaves about in frantic little eddies. The wall opposite the terrace held Louis’s paintings. They were hung high, each one between bookshelves, each advantageously illuminated. The three visitors stopped in their tracks and stared. Hamilton Jones was the first to step forward. He stood under the Cézanne, looking up at it. He turned and looked at Louis.

  “This is as astonishing as I hoped it would be,” he said.

  “I am glad you think so.”

  Larrimer stepped up to the painting and then moved from one to the next. He leaned in close to each painting and then took a step back. He reached up and touched the surface of one of the Matisses. He knew that touching a painting was not allowed, which was why he allowed himself to do it. He was going to own this painting, after all, and he would damn well touch it if he wanted to.

  “I’d like to take it down,” he said.

  “Why?” said Louis.

  “I want to examine it out of the frame. The back isn’t sealed, I hope?” Hamilton Jones sincerely regretted ever teaching St. John to ask these questions.

  “It isn’t sealed.”

  “Let’s take it down, then,” said St. John. “Give me a hand, Jones.”

  “I don’t want you to take it down,” said Louis. “Why do you need to take it down?”

  “I’m concerned about the provenance,” said St. John.

  “We should look at them on the wall first, Mr. Larrimer.” Hamilton tried to sound congenial and relaxed. “The provenance question will resolve itself. But let’s see what we’ve got here purely in the way of paintings. Their condition, how good are they, that sort of thing.”

  But St. John’s appetite had been whetted to the point of his coming undone—first by the photos, then by all the waiting, then by the travel and the pie and this crazy old coot of a collector. Besides, what was this sudden great reluctance? He and Nigel exchanged glances. Nigel nodded slightly. Something funny was going on.

  “I want to see those paintings off the wall,” said St. John. “Or we’re leaving.”

  “If you insist.” Louis shrugged. He walked toward the Derain at the end of the room.

  “Not that one. This one.” St. John pointed at the Cézanne.

  “Of course,” said Louis. “Would you help me?” Nigel stepped forward and helped Louis lift the painting from the wall. They set it down against a bookshelf.

  “Turn it around,” said St. John.

  He stepped forward to examine it. Louis had done the paintings on pale brown linen that could, at first glance, be taken for old canvas. St. John was momentarily uncertain. He stared at the back of the canvas before he summoned Hamilton Jones to his side. He pointed and Hamilton got down on hands and knees with his nose very close to the painting. He touched the inside corner of the stretcher. The two men whispered back and forth a few times. Hamilton continued to examine the painting as he spoke. “Have these paintings been remounted?”

  “No,” said Louis. “Certainly not.”

  Hamilton stood. “We need to see the other paintings off the wall,” he said.

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  All the paintings were on new linen canvas. The stretchers were constructed of new wood in the new manner, with mortise-and-tenon joints and without shims. There was no mistake about that. And when Hamilton Jones stuck his nose up next to each painting, he smelled linseed oil. There were no fissures in the pigment, even where it was thick. The colors were vivid; the whites were white; there was no yellowing. No cleaning in the world could have restored paintings to this pristine condition. “These paintings are new,” Hamilton declared with great indignation in his voice.

  “Yes,” said Louis. “They are. I did them this past winter.”

  St. John Larrimer was unfamiliar with disappointment. And he was certainly unused to being thwarted. When he wanted something, by God, he got it, or somebody paid. Uncharacteristically, he had allowed himself to be enticed into believing there were lost masterpieces to be had and that he could have them. And now these supposed masterpieces turned out to be fakes. To add insult to injury, St. John Larrimer—himself the master of manipulation—had been manipulated. He had been royally conned.

  “What the fuck are you playing at?” He turned on Hamilton Jones. “Any idiot can tell these are fakes!” St. John jumped at Hamilton Jones and threw a punch with sufficient force to knock him off his feet and onto the Cézanne. The painting popped out of its frame.

  “Apparently not any idiot,” said Louis, with the intention of turning St. John’s wrath in his direction. He succeeded in his purpose. Nobody, but nobody, ever spoke to St. John Larrimer like that. St. John’s face went crimson. “What did you say?” It was of course a rhetorical question, and Louis did not feel compelled to repeat himself. St. John launched himself at Louis.

  Louis sidestepped barely in time, and St. John crashed into one of the Matisses, bringing a bookcase down on top of himself. When Nigel pulled out his pistol, Renard emerged from his hiding place and put both Nigel and St. John under arrest for destruction of property, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and illegal possession of a firearm.

  * * *

  It was an excellent story, and Louis told it so well that Maurice de Beaumont insisted on hearing it again. “Never mind about the bookcase.”

  “No, no. I will see that it is repaired. And a chair and carpet may have been damaged.”

  “And were you hurt?”

  “I strained my shoulder and neck somehow, but otherwise I’m fine.”

  “Well, if you do this again, you’ll have to let me know so that I can be there.”

  Renard was less amused than the Comte de Beaumont. He summoned Louis to his office to take a statement. “You knew what I intended,” said Louis.

  “I knew no such thing. I knew you were meeting with a fugitive from justice—an American fugitive from justice for whom no warrant exists in France—but I did not know that you meant for it to get violent. You could have been killed. Nigel, as it turns out, is wanted in France—”

  “So you can hold him.”

  “We can. He’s in Tours while Larrimer arranges for his bond. But—”

  “And will he be released?”

  “That remains to be seen. He shouldn’t be; he has a record. And he’s a definite flight risk. But at the same time, I am getting calls on Larrimer’s behalf.”

  “Lawyers?”

  “Are you kidding? Paris. Ministries of this and that.”

  “So he’s played the system.” This was good news as far as Louis was concerned. If anything was certain to get Renard’s back up, it was some minister in Paris or his own police captain in Château-du-Loir, for that matter, interfering in his business.

  Louis tested the waters. “Maybe I should go to Tours and pay Nigel a visit.”

  Renard gave Louis a baleful look.

  Louis wrote Nigel a note asking to meet, but he got no response.

  XLIX

  LOUIS HEARD FROM PETER SANCHEZ. The telephone call came on a Saturday morning. Although it did not come at mealtime, it was not a friendly call. This pleased Louis. Long experience had taught him that angry and unhappy witnesses were most
likely to give something away, even a professional like Peter.

  Louis considered Peter to be a witness in the case he was building. Without much effort on Louis’s part—in fact Peter had done all the work—Louis had been registering his whereabouts with Peter, in one way or another, every step of the way so that eventually, if it ever came to that, he would have Peter Sanchez as an alibi witness, albeit an unfriendly one. From the moment the Russian had turned up, Peter had people keeping a watch on Louis, hoping to use him to find Larrimer and to discover the money trail.

  While Peter was not at all in agreement with Louis’s methods, he was not above making use of whatever Louis turned up. He had long ago resigned himself to Louis’s loose ways when it came to laws and treaties and other legal niceties. Peter thought of himself as “running” Louis, as he had run agents and double agents throughout his career. Except now Louis had gone off the rails, forging paintings, trying to sell them to Larrimer, and alerting Larrimer to the fact that the law was closing in. Peter suddenly found himself with what amounted to a renegade agent.

  “Oh, really?” Louis was astonished. “Is the law closing in? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “That you haven’t noticed means nothing.”

  “So your people were in Saint-Léon? And you followed Larrimer home to Terre-de-Haut?”

  Peter did not answer.

  “And you’ve been watching him moving money around?”

  Again Peter was silent.

  “And Nigel?”

  “We saw your message to him.”

  “And the Russian?”

  “What about him?” said Peter.

  “Did you know he’s here in Saint-Léon?” said Louis.

  Peter did not answer. He was certain the Russian was not there, or rather he had been certain until Louis had suggested that he was. As soon as he got off the phone with Louis, he would check. Peter had called to discover what Louis was up to and to admonish him to cease his bizarre activities. But he realized in the middle of their conversation that he should not have called. He was not learning anything, while Louis was learning a great deal.

  There was nothing Peter could do to constrain Louis, short of having him arrested. And Peter wondered whether arresting Louis might not play right into his hands. Their conversation had gotten away from him, and Peter could not figure out how to get out of it without giving that fact away. All he could think to do was to warn Louis again to back off and leave things to the professionals. “Or you will find yourself in serious trouble all over again.” Peter regretted the words as soon as he said them. He knew it was an empty threat, and he knew that Louis knew it too. And worse yet: Nothing quite motivated Louis like an ultimatum.

  Louis could sense Peter’s frustration, so he decided to give him a gift. “A lot of Larrimer’s money is with a Caribbean bank—Charter Island National Bank. Charter Island is run by an old friend of Larrimer’s, a man named Richard Smythe. It looks like Smythe is stealing from Larrimer.”

  Peter surrendered entirely. “Charter Island?”

  “National Bank. And Larrimer’s ex is helping him launder the money. Oh, and the Russian is not in Saint-Léon.”

  “I knew that,” said Peter.

  * * *

  Of course St. John did not abandon Nigel to his fate. He could not risk leaving Nigel where he was sure to be questioned and perhaps turned against him. St. John made a few phone calls, delivered some favors, and Nigel was released and allowed to return home. St. John sent the jet to pick him up.

  Another of St. John’s bodyguards met Nigel at the airport and drove him home. Nigel gave St. John a complete account of what had happened to him, including Louis’s message, but St. John barely listened. He sat staring out to sea as though he expected a ship to suddenly appear. He was preoccupied with his narrow escape from Louis’s con game. “Was Jones in on it?” he wondered.

  “He had to be,” said Nigel.

  “But why? Why would he do it?”

  “Why? A hundred million dollars! That’s why,” said Nigel. This was not like St. John, these second thoughts. He should have been figuring out how to get even. Now all he seemed able to do was wonder about why and how. He should stop wondering. “Pay attention, sir,” said Nigel. “Think of all those other suckers. You were almost a sucker yourself.”

  St. John looked at Nigel sharply, then turned his gaze back on the sea. He sat uneasily on the edge of his chair, his arms on his thighs, his fingers interlocked. The breeze rippled through his hair. He unlocked his fingers to sweep the hair back out of his face. He did this again and again without noticing. His drink, the ice melting, sat forgotten on the glass table beside him. Finally Nigel left him alone.

  After a while St. John picked up the portable telephone. He looked in the phone’s directory and found Carolyne’s number. He pressed the Talk button and then pressed it again to stop the call. He did the same thing with Richard Smythe. He laid the phone aside but soon picked it up again. He pressed the Talk button and heard Nigel’s voice talking to someone else. Before St. John could get off, Nigel said, “Sorry, Mr. Larrimer. I was just checking on—”

  “No, no, don’t bother. It’s all right, Nigel.” St. John hung up.

  What Nigel had said was true. In fact he had been suckered. He had gone all the way to that godforsaken place to see a bunch of fake paintings. He ought to be planning the destruction of that fucking weasel, Louis Morgon, and Hamilton Jones, that traitor. And how many others had been involved? He ought to set about finding out. Morgon and Jones couldn’t have done it alone. Yet when St. John thought about bringing them all to ruin, he found he had no appetite for it. He had none of the white heat he needed to make his revenge happen. Where was his rage? Where was his hatred?

  St. John opened the computer lying on the table beside the forgotten drink. He clicked to the Charter Island Web site, then to private banking. After a few seconds the log-in page came up. He punched in his username, his PIN, and the security codes and went into his accounts. He studied the most recent cash movements into and out of the accounts. He went back a month and studied the numbers there, then a month before that. He peered hard at the screen as though he might be able to see bundles of thousand-dollar bills moving from somewhere to somewhere else. Not moving, but being moved.

  Were the numbers right? What was that large withdrawal? That large deposit? Why had he not paid closer attention to those transactions? He had entrusted the safekeeping and movement of hundreds of millions of dollars to Richard Smythe, a fellow thief. He closed the computer and pushed it away.

  St. John stayed out on the deck the rest of the day. Nigel brought him supper on a tray, but he had no appetite. Night fell. He lay on the bare wooden decking with only a chair cushion under his head. He gazed straight up into the darkening sky. The house was dark; the floodlights along the security fence were out of sight on the other side of the house. Soon he lay in total darkness. The new moon—a thin, lightless sliver—hung above him surrounded by a million stars.

  St. John awoke with a start, still lying spread-eagle on the deck. The moon had moved elsewhere, and St. John thought it had taken something of his spirit with it. He felt a lightness, no, an emptiness. He felt as though his body might float up off the deck, or maybe it would collapse into a heap of dust. He wondered whether he was going mad.

  L

  ST. JOHN WAS NOT GOING MAD. He was merely experiencing an entirely unfamiliar set of feelings and sensations. The rage and fury he had expected had never even showed themselves. But something else, something he did not recognize, had. He did not feel doubt or hesitancy exactly, although those two things played a part. It took a while before he was able to give the new feeling its true name. Regret. That was it. He was feeling regret.

  But regret for what? Knowing—suddenly and viscerally—what it felt like to be the sucker, feeling what all the suckers he had stolen all that money from must have felt. Feeling loss and the sense of betrayal had knocked him off track. His assurance that the world
was a sucker-tree ripe for the plucking, that he was smarter and more deserving and superior to his victims, was suddenly in question. His sense of his own cleverness lay in shambles. His self-certainty, which had seemed indestructible one minute, had collapsed into rubble the next.

  Of course St. John’s sense of regret was as tiny and malleable as his senses of entitlement and self-justification were gargantuan. And he immediately set about doing battle with what he feared might be a nascent conscience. Would regret lead to remorse? And would remorse lead to his ultimate ruination? He shuddered to think of it.

  Nigel came out onto the deck the following morning and found St. John talking to himself. After listening for a moment, Nigel stole from the scene. St. John spoke into the morning breeze. “I’m not going to be complicit in making the world seem like a better place than it is. Thomas Hobbes had it right: nasty, brutish, and short. Those are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we’re powerless to change them. I am going to live in the world I’ve been given. I’ll play by its rules. People suffer, that’s true. Some at my hand.” He made a stab at honesty. “Many at my hand. Many lives have been ruined by … what I did. I don’t deny that. But I was acting as life’s instrument in accordance with life’s rules. I feel no regret,” he said as a wave of regret swept over him.

  “I’m no Ebenezer Scrooge,” he said, trying to push the regret away. His was not going to be a Dickensian tale, where cold, hard practicality somehow magically metamorphosed into charity, thanks to a few visiting ghosts. St. John’s main regret was that he had not gotten away scot-free with his fraud, and furthermore, that he was now allowing empathy to cloud his vision. He vowed that the “rot of conscience,” as he called it, would never inhabit and weaken his soul. He promised to keep his regret in check and see to his own survival. And well-being. And prosperity.

  Marlies, the masseuse, came at her usual hour and spent forty minutes working on St. John’s back and neck. “You’re a bundle of tension,” she said. She held the small cotton sheet in place while he turned onto his back. She draped it over his midsection and smiled down at him while he settled in. Some music he had not heard before—she brought her own music—was playing lightly in the background.