by Peter Israel
I noticed that he spoke in low tones, as though he was worried about being overheard.
“What is it then, Henry? You’re not looking for another job, are you?”
“Oh no, not that. It’s more in the nature of a personal matter. But it’s important that I see you.”
I looked through my calendar and, in order to get rid of him, suggested a date some two weeks off. This, though, failed to satisfy him. It was a little too urgent, he said. He knew I would agree when I saw him. Finally we settled on 5:30 the next afternoon, but no more than half an hour, which he thought would be long enough, and then I put it out of my mind until 5:25 the next day, when there he was, stooping a little in my doorway, in an ill-fitting brown three-piece suit yet carrying a handsome leather briefcase which might have been Dunhill but looked at least Crouch & Fitzgerald.
At his overture we shook hands. His palm, I remember, was sweating. So for that matter was his forehead even though it was almost winter. He lifted his briefcase to the corner of my desk, opened it with both thumbs, and extracted a thick computer printout bound in blue. This he centered on his side of the desk, lining it up, and then he folded back the blue cover, creasing it with his thumbs to keep it from flipping forward.
There was, it turned out, good reason for him to be sweating. He was carrying a bomb, and, when I found out what it was, I had the presence of mind to turn on my concealed tape recorder.
For the next half hour, perhaps more, Henry Angeletti walked me through the printout. It was his work, he maintained, his work alone, though he had had help gathering the data. On that score, all he’d say (with a self-satisfied smile) was that if you had the right connections on the Street, asked the right questions, got the right access codes, then you could do the rest by telephone, computer talking to computer. The real work, he said, was in sifting through masses of data, manipulating it till it made sense, then drawing the correct conclusions.
He knew only one or two other people who could have done what he’d done, and he himself, he claimed, had almost given up more than once. I’d almost been too clever for him, he said, the way I’d put other people’s money to work for me, spreading their accounts among the brokers, then shifting them periodically from house to house. But Safari, he said, had been my mistake. Safari carried my signature loud and clear. In fact, without Safari he never would have thought to look in the first place.
“What went wrong with Safari?” he asked me at some point. Then, answering himself: “I guess you didn’t count on it creating so much talk on the Street. Or did you think nobody was watching?”
I don’t recall answering.
What Henry Angeletti claimed to have tracked were my trading activities over a three-year period, by account and by stock. (I’ve italicized my for reasons which will become apparent in a moment.) He had done it by using my Safari “signature,” that is, my pattern of buying and selling, complete with dates and numbers of shares and computer-generated graphs to prove the pattern. The companies he had traced (all involving takeover situations) went from Safari back through Jumping Judy Stores to Manderling’s, but then beyond to several I’d never so much as bought a single share of. Similarly, the account list included every last one of mine—the Russell estate, of course, but also Fallowes, Boyd-Rogers, the Lancaster trust, and so on. But these were intermingled on a much longer roster of names, some of which were evidently estates but others partnerships and corporations. Dummy corporations, Angeletti claimed. He admitted he hadn’t been able to link every account to me—in many cases I’d covered my tracks too well—but the “signature” was always mine, and this he insisted on demonstrating, case by case, graph by graph.
Endowed as I was with a pretty fair poker face, I doubt I showed the gamut of my reactions. At first, I simply didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. As far as my so-called Safari signature went, which was the key to his investigation, I had deliberately limited my dealings on Safari to Wanda Russell. But the more Angeletti went on, mixing things familiar to me with others I’d never heard of, the more the truth dawned on me. I couldn’t believe it; then I couldn’t not believe it. Somehow, by some quirk, or accountant’s zeal, or crazy luck, Angeletti had stumbled onto the whole network. The signature he kept talking about clearly wasn’t mine alone. Neither, needless to say, were the profits he claimed for me. By the time he got there, though, I realized that I was gripping the arms of my chair so hard that my knuckles showed white.
“By my calculation,” he said, head down over the printout, index finger rapidly descending a row of figures, “and I’m sure I’ve missed some things, but by my calculation, you have grossed, minimum, over a three-year period, just under a hundred and eighty million dollars in profits.”
A hundred and eighty million dollars. $180,000,000.00. I have no idea whether I thought it in words or digits.
I became aware that he was looking up at me, his narrow face in a half and expectant smile, a little like some hotshot student who, having completed his oral report, now awaited the professor’s gold star.
“Well, Henry,” I said finally. “What, if anything, do you really expect me to make of all this?”
“Make of it? Well, nothing more than what I said. That over a three-year period you made an incredible profit.”
“So? Assuming that’s true, which is a very large assumption, I also assume you didn’t come here just to congratulate me.”
No, he hadn’t, though he did think congratulations were in order. He was filled with admiration for what I’d accomplished. How exactly I’d done it would be interesting too, though less so to him probably than to some other people.
Such as?
Such as the U.S. Attorney, the SEC, the NYSE. He even mentioned the congressional subcommittee that, because it involved national resources, had announced hearings into the Safari affair.
“And yet you’ve come to me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“First?”
“Yes, first.”
“Why?”
“Because, like I say, I admire you for it. Also because you’ve got a great deal to lose by being exposed.”
The heart of the matter, in sum. I suppose, in this era of greed and suspicion, the shakedown can come in any shape or form. Henry Angeletti was as unlikely a practitioner as I could imagine. Yet there he was, unblinking, eyebrows up, leaning forward, telling me what he wanted.
It could go one of two ways, he said. Or one of three, actually, because I could always buy his disks outright. But he’d already rejected that solution, because it would mean I’d have to trust him not to make a duplicate set, and why would I do that? A better way would be for me to give him a percentage of my profits, a sort of finder’s fee. It could be a very small percentage, one I wouldn’t even notice. Say as low as one percent? The best of all, though, from both our points of view, involved no money. He wanted my information, that was all. The same information I was using myself, as soon as I got it, and that way it wouldn’t cost me a nickel.
In spite of everything, I found myself laughing inside at the thought that, somewhere in all of us, even the Henry Angelettis, there flickers the entrepreneurial flame. Outwardly, though, I maintained my poker face. It seemed, moreover, a good time to raise Henry’s bet.
“You mean you want to go into business for yourself?”
“Yes. But only in a small way. Nothing like your scale.”
“My information in exchange for your silence, is that it?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him, unsmiling.
“I don’t know, Henry,” I said, “but it sounds like blackmail to me.”
“Blackmail? Well …”
“What do you think would happen if I took all this to Thatcher and told him everything?”
“To Thatcher?” His eyebrows rose again, this time in incredulity. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not? After all, I’m his aunt’s attorney and one of his most valued clients. Thatch probably wo
uldn’t understand half of all your stuff there. I doubt he’d even try. But if I pushed him on it, I bet I could have you out on your ear within an hour. Do you disagree?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m not saying I’m going to do that,” I went on. “Or anything like that. It might well not be in my best interests. But it’s something you should think about, Henry. And as far as the SEC et al. are concerned, the threats you made—”
“They weren’t threats,” he interrupted.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. They certainly sounded like threats to me.”
As an attorney, I went on, I found all the work he’d done, the material he’d developed, purely conjectural. Presumably I’d made a great deal of money for my clients in the stock market. Presumably I’d done it because I had information, presumably privileged or insider information, presumably illegal. But where, in all these presumptions, was the evidence? He hadn’t produced a single shred of evidence to support his claim, and lacking evidence, what did he think the agencies investigating the market would make of it? The way I understood it, they were already overworked and understaffed, with dozens of leads they didn’t have the manpower to follow up on. What made him so sure he’d even get a hearing?
He said nothing. I was about to remind him, furthermore, that attempted blackmail is a felony, but when I saw him swallow hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing under a paled and narrow face, I stopped short—not out of sympathy, needless to say, but I sensed a risk in cornering him.
“Look, Henry,” I said, “the truth is that I find the work you’ve done absolutely brilliant, if a little quirky. Naturally you want to be compensated for it. It could be that I’ll want to do something for you in that direction. It could also be that I’ll decide to do nothing. There’s no way, though, that I’m going to give you the answer today. The best I can say right now is that I’ll take the matter under advisement.”
Angeletti seemed relieved to hear this. He stood up awkwardly and fumbled with the printout, getting it back into his briefcase.
“When will you decide?” he said.
“I’ll call you Monday.”
“No,” he said. “I’d rather call you. I’ll call you Monday.”
“Good,” I said.
And then he was gone.
And then I, suddenly rubber-legged, sat down again in a state of semishock.
I was due to meet Kitty. I couldn’t bring myself to move, though, and when my phone rang a little later, I let it ring. Any way I looked at my situation, I felt vulnerable. A hundred and eighty million dollars. It did no good to tell myself that Angeletti had made a mistake, that I was responsible for only a piece of it, or that he could clearly be bought. As far as the meeting itself went, I thought I’d performed reasonably well. At least I’d conceded nothing and had bought us time. But who was us? Me? Me and Kitty? Me and Kitty and who else? Furthermore, at the risk of damaging Angeletti’s frail ego, was he really the only one in the world who could perform the same analysis? How did I know that there wasn’t some other gnome, tall or short, sifting data on his. computer screen in some rabbit-warren office, spotting a connection here, a correlation there?
Because he worked for Thatcher, Angeletti had focused on me. Maybe someone else, tracking from a different starting point, would discover the links elsewhere. But what did that matter? In this day and age, the first one caught saved his skin by implicating another, and the second implicated the third, the third the fourth, the fourth the fifth, until the chain stopped and one or more went to jail. Which line of reasoning led to another question I still couldn’t answer definitively: Who, if anyone, knew about me besides Kitty?
Even so, the full impact of what had happened didn’t hit home until, having closed the office and ridden down in the elevator, I reached the street outside my building. It was dark out, and in that brief lull between the workaday crowd and the night people, the sidewalk was largely deserted. High banks of blackened snow, strewn with debris and garbage, hid the gutters, limiting the traffic on the street to a single file, and a cruel wind swept the canyon from west to east. Like most of us, I’d always tended to suppress potential danger, so that while, yes, I had been aware of risk from the time of Manderling’s and the Sprague estate, and while, yes, when I left the firm, I’d known full well that I was crossing a line, I’d never let myself believe I’d ever be confronted, cornered, caught. Somebody else—not me. But that night, making my way toward Kitty’s in the crusted, icy slush, the forces of the city, which I’d always thought indifferent to me, now joined in open and watchful hostility, and the gusting winds that chased me toward the park hissed at my head in scornful mockery, and the people I passed, strangers all—didn’t they already know, hadn’t they already seen the headlines? LAWYER FINGERED IN PROBE, SENATOR’S SON.
Kitty and I had planned to go to the theater that night. Instead we stayed home and listened to the tape recording I’d made.
One thing became clear as a bell: unless he was a very accomplished dissembler, Henry Angeletti had nothing on me, or anyone, beyond the half-right, half-wrong inferences he’d drawn. It didn’t seem even to have occurred to him that anyone other than I had been dealing with the same “signature.”
But who else had been dealing? That was the key question.
Kitty claimed she didn’t know.
What about Thorne? I asked.
Thorne, possibly.
But only Thorne?
Unlikely.
Then who else?
She didn’t know. She claimed, though, that she was going to find out.
Beyond this, I couldn’t budge her. No, she wouldn’t tell me who else was involved in the network. Didn’t the very fact that Angeletti had bungled his analysis prove her point, unpleasant though it had been for me to have to confront him?
But what, I asked, if someone else, not Angeletti, followed the “signature” from another direction?
That, she said, was just what she had to find out.
“You know, darling,” she said to me, “I have to hand it to you. You handled him beautifully.”
“That and a dollar will get me on the subway,” I answered.
“But you don’t take subways anymore, remember?”
Besides, she said, we had until Monday, I had gained us that, and long before Monday, she promised, we would know how to deal with Mr. Angeletti. Meanwhile, I should stop worrying about it.
“My poor darling,” she said, putting her arms around my neck. “You’re a wreck. Come. Why don’t you let Kitten take care of you?”
And so, in her inimitable way, she did.
It would be easy to say, in hindsight, that we should have quit right then, that night, quit while we were ahead and taken the money and headed for the hills. The Costa Rican hills, for instance, or those of Brazil, or any place where life was cheap and extradition treaties nonexistent. But the subject never even came up. And given who we were, I suppose it would have been as easy to stop the clocks of the world, freezing time, while the two of us lay enswathed in each other’s arms, in the warm womb of Kitty’s bed.
The next night she had a party to organize and I my every-other-month poker game. I almost didn’t go, but the prospect of an evening alone daunted me more than the company of Buck Charles et al. As someone observed, my game lacked its usual “intrepid” style. True enough. I simply couldn’t concentrate, folded early and often, and managed to duck out before the last round.
I went home to my apartment, a new and antiseptic four-room condo which had cost a small fortune, and there I found Kitty ensconced in a comfortable chair, her legs tucked under her, watching some movie on television.
A rarity, that she be there at all. Most of the time I myself used the place only to change clothes.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Waiting for you.”
“But I thought you had a party?”
“I didn’t go. I sent Bettina instead.”
Bettina was her Num
ber Two in Katherine Goldmark Enterprises, a frowsy redhead whom Kitty swore by. Still, Kitty herself always at least put in an appearance.
“But how long have you been here?”
She shrugged. “A while.”
I bent over, kissed her.
“How was the poker?” she said.
“Boring.”
I slumped into the matching chair next to hers.
Presently she pushed the off button on the remote, then stood, stretched—in her stocking feet, I noticed—and leaned over me, her hands propped on the arms of my chair, hair down and almost brushing my face.
“Well?” I said. “What did you find out?”
“In a minute,” she answered. “I want to kiss you properly first.”
This she did, licking my lips apart with the tip of her tongue, then, as was her way, opening her mouth wide to me. I reached to pull her to me, but she backed off. Still propped on the arms of my chair, she now stared at me, lips still a little separated, eyes intent on mine.
“I need your help,” she said.
“Your wish is my command, lady,” I replied, smiling up at her.
She shook her head.
“It’s not a joke, Tommy,” she said. She seemed to be measuring me, as though to give herself one last chance to decide if she’d misjudged me. Then: “There’s someone we have to get rid of. I promise you, it’s the only way. You’re going to help me kill him.”
“Who?” I think I answered, and I must have named somebody outlandish because I remember her repeating that it wasn’t a joke.
No, clearly it wasn’t. That much was evident in her impassive expression. Her cheekbones glistened in the light, and her eyes, dark and penetrating, kept me from turning my head one way or the other.
“Who?” I said again, staring back at her.
“Robert Thorne,” she answered.
15
I guess he didn’t have much of a chance, not once he’d agreed to meet her. He had a house way out on the North Shore, and that was where Kitty went that Saturday afternoon with, of all things, a picnic hamper in the back seat of her rented car.
