Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  “I’m sure it was just slipup,” said Lyudmila.

  “Mistakes happen,” said Briggs.

  “By the time they realized she was gone, they looked high and low but couldn’t find her.”

  “Obviously, they didn’t look low enough,” said Maud with a sly smile. “So what are you going to do now? Remain the loyal bagman for her brother?”

  “Victor knows where his bread is buttered,” said Miles. “Of course he’ll keep hold of the bag.”

  “He would if he was smart,” said Maud.

  “But Victor, he is not that smart,” said Lyudmila.

  “A bagman keeps filling them bags and passing the salad no matter what,” said Miles. “That’s the code.”

  “Indeed,” said Hump.

  “But you were never really one of us, were you, Victor?” said Maud.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Look, I’m not weeping for Colin Frost, the worst client I ever had, but I can’t just walk away from Jessica Barnes and Amanda Duddleman. And there’s something more. The Big Butter needs Ossana to disappear to hide his involvement in murder, but Ossana won’t vanish without her daughter. The only sure way to protect that girl is to shut off Ossana’s money faucet, which means I need to melt the Big Butter.”

  “How are you going to do that?” said Maud with a snort.

  “The question is,” I said, leaning in now, bringing them all close, “how are we going to do that?”

  There was a bemused moment of silence, followed by bouts of rueful laughter—not the reaction I was hoping for.

  “You’re a bit confused,” said Hump.

  “Since you apparently have us confused with missionaries,” said Maud.

  “Even when it comes to sex, laddie,” said Briggs, “we are not missionaries.”

  Lyudmila barked out a Russian laugh.

  “There’s a little girl who needs to be saved from her mother,” I said. “If we stand back and do nothing, Ossana will destroy her soul and devour her future.”

  “You might be right about the girl,” said Miles. “But we ain’t tree huggers.”

  “And our hearts don’t bleed without a knife stuck into our chests,” said Hump. “Pay us and we carry, that’s the end of our story.”

  “We’re bagmen, Victor,” said Maud, “and that’s all we are.”

  “You’re more than that,” I said.

  “No, we’re not.”

  I sat back and looked around the table and saw something they didn’t see. Sure, they were bagmen, each of them, carriers of corruption that clogged the free flow of the people’s business, but they were also more. In the forgotten neighborhoods of the city, when someone needed something from a politician, it was a bagman who carried the request, along with an envelope, sure, but still. And when that politician needed a passel of votes to keep up the fight, it was the bagman who spread his street money among the voters like a Santa Claus two months early. If cash was the beating heart of our politics—and who would deny it?—then bagmen were the red blood cells feeding every organ, every cell, keeping the whole thing alive and in fighting trim. In a world where politics had lost its meaning amidst a welter of lies and stratagems and think tanks full of one-way hacks, bagmen were the last direct link between the politicians and the people.

  And they were going the way of the dinosaur.

  “All right, forget about the girl, or the justice of the thing, or how it will feel to put a psychopath where she belongs. Let’s think about ourselves, for a moment.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Miles Schimmeck.

  “How’s your business been, Miles?”

  “Lousy.”

  “And it’s only getting worse, because the Big Butter is making you irrelevant. What can you do in a courthouse that the fancy lawyers dropping fat pats of butter into every judge’s pot can’t do better? What can you pass out that the one percent can’t top tenfold? The Big Butter is buying the courthouse stone by stone, leaving you with dust.”

  “I get along,” said Miles.

  “Not for long, you won’t. What can you do with your little envelopes, Maud, when the Big Butter can buy City Council for less than a rounding error on its expenses? You can buy a voter here or a councilman there with your envelopes, sure, but the Big Butter can buy television stations, pack the legislature, and bury anyone who gets in its way.”

  “It will swing back.”

  “Hell it will. You’re hiding in the back alleys while the Big Butter spreads its graft, legal as a newborn. And the Supremes in Washington say it’s all sweet and lawful, that the Big Butter has the constitutional right to put its cash on the line anywhere, anytime, without conditions. Listen, when your competitor gets big enough to buy the Supreme Court, you’re screwed. And the Big Butter has bought it, believe it, and you are screwed. It’s not swinging back, it’s never swinging back. All it’s swinging is a wrecking ball. You’ve known the city’s been for sale all along, your whole existence is based on that fact, but now you’re shit out of luck because the Big Butter is bidding ten times higher than you ever could and raking in all your chips.”

  “Man’s got a point,” said Hump.

  “Tell me, Briggs, how’s your boy doing?”

  “He’s a chunk of seared beef on a brittle third-world beach.”

  “And it was the Big Butter that set him on the road to that tropical hell. Stony saw the writing on the wall and decided to sell himself to the highest bidder, but after the Big Butter burned him to the nub, it tossed him to the dirt as casually as you toss off a cigarette butt. And don’t get any ideas that the Big Butter doesn’t have the same plans for you.”

  “What about Rule Five?” said Miles.

  “Fuck Rule Five.”

  “They’re too strong to fight,” said Miles.

  “Oh, they’re big all right, but that just means they’ve got more to lose. The Big Butter who crapped on Stony is the same Big Butter who’s protecting Ossana DeMathis. He’s dirty and arrogant and he thinks he can sit safely back while his minions shit all over our city just to gain some political advantage for himself. The hell with that. We’re going to find out what he’s after and snatch it from his jaws. How much fun would it be to bring him down to size and kick him in the balls?”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting into, laddie,” said Briggs.

  “Sure I do. I’ve been fighting the Big Butter my entire career. And yeah, I lose more than I win, and when I lose, I end up on my ass. But I just get up and do it again with a song in my heart. The sons of bitches want to buy the country; well, fuck them. Maybe I can’t take them all down, but I’m taking this one down, and I’m going to grin like an orangutan when I do it.”

  “My God, Victor,” said Maud, “your eyes are positively glowing.”

  “Want to feel joy in this life? Burn down a bank.”

  “What’s your plan, laddie?” said Briggs.

  “I don’t have a plan. All I have is hate and step one: find the bastard.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” said Maud.

  “That’s where you come in.”

  CHAPTER 52

  THE BIG BUTTER

  The mystics say the way to truth is through suffering and madness, which is an eerily accurate description of the road to Montauk.

  By the time I hit the final leg of my journey, taking the scenic way out on the Old Montauk Highway, with windows down and the fresh salt air whipping my tie, I had already scaled the majestic heights of the Verrazano, suffered the traffic and insanity that skidded by the Five Towns, and felt the edge of my class resentment sharpen keenly as I drove slowly, within a line of trucks and convertibles and black European monstrosities, through Westhampton and Southampton and Bridgehampton and East Hampton, with their neat lawns and exclusive bistros, their obscene castles and airs and pretensions. The sky was clear, t
he breeze was up; it was a bright, sunny day in Richberg.

  The two-lane road I now was on was rustic, rough. The farmers’ stands selling peaches, corn, and early tomatoes had petered out after Amagansett, and there was only the occasional outcrop of lavish estate between me and the Napeague Beach to my right and then the great swells of the Atlantic.

  About a hundred miles from my destination, my phone had started jangling to life every five minutes or so. It was Melanie. I kept pushing the red button on the phone’s screen, declining her calls. She had undoubtedly tracked my location with some illegal technology and caught me rushing ever closer to the tip of Long Island. She was smart enough to know exactly where I was heading. She wanted to know what the hell I was up to and I wanted not to tell her.

  I wasn’t going to Montauk for the beaches, which were supposed to be lovely, or the views of the Sound and the ocean, which were supposed to be spectacular, or the restaurants, which were supposed to be stocked with the freshest bounties of the sea. No, I was going east for something far richer, rich enough to strangle your heart.

  I was going to Montauk to take a bite out of the Big Butter.

  The Big Butter sits on the rooftop aerie of his bungalow, staring out toward the inlet that leads to the Sound. The afternoon sun pounds his floppy face; the frightening brightness of the falling star fills the lenses of his gold-rimmed sunglasses.

  His thighs are grossly thick, his fat feet lay flat in leather slippers, his swollen fingers grip a crystal lowball half-filled with a single malt, the primary flavor of which is its expense. Except for his sunglasses, a gold necklace, and the sandals, he is naked. What need has the Big Butter for clothes? He is swaddled by his money; it embraces him like a mother’s arms. It protects him from the elements, from thwarted desire, from small-time lawyers practicing in distant outposts like Philadelphia.

  Sometimes when he sits naked up here, glistening with sweat and oil under the sweltering sky, one of the girls will climb the metal stairs to the roof and kneel between his thighs and give him a blow job. But the current girl graduated from Wellesley, so that is out.

  His bungalow is no bungalow, at least by common standards. It is a cantilevered masterpiece of glass and steel perched on the side of a rise in the middle of Montauk. The angled planes of the house provide every room a view of the ocean or the lake or the Sound. The structure has been featured in magazines. It is very important that it has been featured in magazines. Five bedrooms, six bathrooms, five fireplaces, one pool, one graduate from Wellesley who won’t suck his cock. For five point five mil you’d think the bungalow would at least come with a graduate from Vassar.

  He knows I am coming. He has undoubtedly been told by Melanie that I am getting close. He knows I’m coming and he is not afraid. He has almost a billion dollars. Did you hear me? Almost a billion dollars. If almost a billion dollars cannot protect him from small-town lawyers with venality in their hearts, then what can?

  Maybe a billion dollars. And don’t you worry, he is working on it. Prisons, that’s his new ticket. He is readying an aggressive move into prisons. Whatever the worth of the poor as consumers, once imprisoned they become exponentially more valuable as a natural resource. With enough money invested, with the right powers bought, fortunes can be extracted. It is like fracking the lower classes.

  The only crime is that he hadn’t thought of it before.

  How did I track him down, the Big Butter, this vile mix of flesh and coin? I didn’t; the Brotherhood did, using my brief and disastrous career as a bagman for a map.

  First Hump found the link between Enrique Flores in old Chicago, the first of my bagman meet-and-greets, and a congressman named Louis Steinberg, a former associate of Flores’s who had mystified pundits and pollsters by coming out of nowhere and winning his district’s primary against better-known opponents.

  “How much of the vote did he get?” I said.

  “Fifty-one percent. In a four-way race.”

  “Funny how that works. I suppose anything more would have been unseemly.”

  “Indeed.”

  Briggs Mulroney had gotten drunk with an old colleague in Washington, a fellow handler of the bag who worked within the hungry maw of the House of Representatives, and learned that DeMathis and Steinberg sat together on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures.

  “Word is,” said Briggs, “a proposal by DeMathis up for consideration in the subcommittee had been facing stiff opposition and then, magically, the opposition just melted.”

  “It’s magic all right.”

  “Apparently, our pal Steinberg had a change of heart and brought the rest of the Democrats on board.”

  “What’s the proposal about?”

  “What do you think it’s about, laddie? What do you think the whole damn game is about?”

  It was up to Lyudmila to explain the specific bill to me in her charming Russian accent.

  “In simple terms that you might comprehend, Victor, there is opinion from Internal Revenue Service about specific tax loophole. It is loophole concerning offshore corporations and transferred dividends, very complicated and very stupid, but it eliminates tax under certain specific conditions. It means nothing except to a very few, but to the very few it means so very much. IRS, it is trying to close loophole. Subcommittee said not so fast and now wants to keep loophole open.”

  “Who benefits?”

  “Not you, Victor. You don’t benefit. Or me. Or average Joe Stalin in street. Who benefits is someone involved in tax-avoidance scheme that buggers the imagination.”

  “You mean beggars the imagination.”

  “Maybe you are right. Maybe I am using wrong word. I was talking of tax scheme so sophisticated that it takes your imagination and bends it over chair.”

  “Lyudmila, I stand corrected.”

  “I have former client who is in tax department of some crazy bank in New York, Sacks of Gold or something. I used to book him special number-one trips to Belarus. He owes me favor. And so he did research on this very loophole. It turns out there are three corporations taking this loophole and ramming their money through it over and over until it bleeds, yes?”

  Yes. Of course. Taxes, taxes. It was almost wearying in its inevitability.

  The intrepid Miles Schimmeck paid a visit to the rehab facility in Virginia that had found a spot for Colin Frost at a moment’s notice and then allowed him to slip in and out at will during his stay. Miles sweet-talked his way into filching the names of the facility’s most important donors.

  “Quite the list,” he said. “I’m going to hit them all up for my favorite charity.”

  “What’s that, Miles?”

  “It’s called GOOMS—Getting Oodles of Money for Schimmeck.”

  “How’s it doing?”

  “Not as well as I hoped.”

  I took everything we had and turned it over to Maud.

  “Who knew,” said Maud, “that the number on a plane’s tail is as distinctive as a fingerprint?”

  “Maybe the guy who took the picture,” I said.

  “The owner of our little jet, Potter Transport, is a wholly owned subsidiary of something called Avia Acquisitions Four, which is owned by a holding company called National Capital Trust Two, owned by another shell corporation the name of which has fled my memory.”

  “There must be gangs of lawyers sitting in offices all over the country,” I said, “churning out corporate names whose only purpose is not to be remembered.”

  “I went down to the Delaware Division of Corporations in Dover to put everything together. It got so complicated I wanted to smash my cigarette into someone’s eye.” Inhale, crackle, long exhale. “But in the end I drew up a diagram of all the names I had and all the corporations I’d found. It looked like a spiderweb. And right in the middle, presiding over everything, like the spider itself waiting for some hel
pless little bagman to fly into its web, is a name, one of the very names of the donors Miles had given me.”

  “And you have an address?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m ready to step on a spider.”

  The Big Butter made his money in commodities. Or was it drugs? Finance or car parts? Real estate or derivatives or dog food, it doesn’t matter. He made his money on his own, dug it out of the dirt with bare, bloody hands. Or he inherited his money from a father who never gave him an ounce of love. Or he stole his money in a stock scheme that still confounds the authorities. Truth is, none of it matters. The how gets swallowed by the how much. He could buy a basketball team if he wanted to, but who the hell would want to. He is no longer a man with a history; he is a number.

  And his number is bigger than yours.

  His name is Norton Grosset, but that is a vestige, like his appendix or coccyx, a name used only for legal matters and corporate documents, a name the banks require he scrawl on the fat checks that purchase bodies, carnal and legislative both. Norton Grosset is the name of a little boy teased on the schoolyard, a fat kid who couldn’t get a date in high school. But the present has slayed the past and sucked its bones. Now he is the Big Butter, now he gets his picture taken with over-the-hill pop stars at charity balls in Manhattan, he meets young princes at charity polo matches in the Hamptons, he plays golf with aging golf pros at charity outings at Shinnecock and Olympic. He is so popular with charities it makes him want to vomit.

  The Big Butter doesn’t just sit naked in the sun, he sleeps naked, too. Even in the winter. Even with the windows open. Even when the girl of the moment is in the city carousing with her college friends and he is forced to sleep alone. He is worth almost a billion dollars, and that is enough to keep him warm at night, at least until the next divorce. It will be his fifth, and his new lawyer has told him the prenup is shaky. What would he be with only half of almost a billion dollars?

  Cold. When the number is all that matters, the number is all that matters.