Of course he had. “Not really,” said McVee.
“It has to do with money.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
“This was a very special kind of money,” Burn said, his Indian accent suddenly more noticeable. “Dowry. It still exists in some parts of my country. If a bride’s family doesn’t deliver as promised, that can be very dangerous for a new wife. The husband might even take her into the kitchen or garage, douse her with kerosene, and burn her alive. Happens about every ninety minutes in India. It happened to my sister.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So was her husband after I caught up with him. That was my first experience with homemade napalm. I got the job done,” he said as he pulled back the hood, exposing his melted ear. “But it didn’t go perfectly.”
McVee sat in silence.
Burn tightened his stare. “Everything since then has gone perfectly. Everything.”
“I’m sure.”
Burn pulled up the hood and put on his sunglasses. “Michael Cantella’s freedom is only temporary. He’s holed up with Ivy’s mother in a motel over in Jersey. Your nephew is watching him as we speak. The minute Cantella makes a move, I’m on him. There is no doubt in my mind that he will lead me to Ivy Layton. Then they’ll both be toast. Literally.”
“You should have just put a gun to Cantella’s head and threatened to blow his brains out if Ivy didn’t show up in thirty minutes.”
“Wouldn’t have worked. Even if we could get a message to her, it’s not like a normal kidnapping. We can’t say, ‘We have your husband, give us a million bucks.’ Ivy knows that what we’re saying is, ‘We have Cantella, now come here and get him so we can burn you both alive.’ She’s not going to walk into that. We need Cantella to lead us to her.”
“There’s logic to that,” said McVee.
“Of course there is. Trust me. This is going to go perfectly.”
The limo stopped. McVee pulled an envelope from his breast pocket. It was filled with cash.
“Money to Burn,” he said, handing over the envelope. “If you don’t wrap this up soon, I may have to create a special expense category on my balance sheet.”
Without a word, Burn opened the door, climbed out, and left McVee alone in the back of the limo.
50
I DIALED PAPA’S CELL FROM THE MOTEL LANDLINE. I GOT HIS VOICE-MAIL greeting:
“I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but I’m either away from my phone or still trying to figure out how to use this damn thing. Please leave a message.”
I waited for the beep. “Papa, I called the airline, and they tell me your plane landed in L.A. an hour ago. The hotel says you haven’t checked in yet. I want to make sure you’re okay. I’ll keep trying, but if you see an incoming call from my old number, don’t answer. Someone stole my cell.” I paused, realizing that my message was sounding a little scary. “Anyway, I’m hard to reach, so just call Kevin and let him know you’re okay. Bye, love you.”
I hung up and looked at Olivia.
“Still can’t reach your grandfather?’ she said.
“No. And the airline won’t even tell me if they were on the flight. It’s some sort of security policy.”
“He probably forgot to turn his cell back on after landing.”
That was more than likely. But with all that had happened, there were less benign possibilities. “I feel like I’m in an information dead zone in this motel. I need to get out of here.”
“We can’t go anywhere. We’re being watched.”
“How do you know?
“McVee’s men let you go last night only because they’re betting that you’ll lead them to Ivy.” She walked to the window and crooked her finger to part the draperies an inch. As best I could tell, we had a view of a graffiti-splattered concrete wall with Tonnelle Avenue beyond.
“They must be out there watching,” she said.
“So you don’t know,” I said. “You’re assuming.”
“It’s why we’re safe-at least for a little while. The cops can’t find us if we stay put, and McVee won’t touch us so long as they think Ivy might show up here, or that we might lead them to her.”
“That means I didn’t hurt anything by telling Kevin to give McVee’s name to the FBI.”
“In the short run, no. In the long run, you pretty much cinched it that they’ll kill all of us. I just hope it’s not at the hands of Ian Burn.”
Burn had told me his name last night, but I hadn’t shared it with Olivia. “How do you know Ian Burn?”
“How do you think?”
“I’m through guessing.”
She put her foot up on the bed and rolled up her pant leg to the knee. The scar on her shin bone wasn’t that big-about the size of a half dollar-but the crater was deep and grotesque, as if the flames had burned into the bone.
“I’ve met him,” she said.
I was speechless. I’d heard that women had a higher pain threshold than men, but napalm burning a hole into your shin had to be even beyond childbirth.
“I’m sorry, Olivia. When did that happen?”
“After Ivy’s memorial service.”
“Burn paid you a visit?”
She nodded. “My decision to cremate Ivy’s remains and scatter them in the ocean made McVee suspicious. He seemed to think that I was trying to close the book on any further DNA testing. He was right, of course. But when Burn couldn’t get anything out of me, that served as confirmation enough that Ivy was really dead.”
“Back up a sec,” I said. “How did you get the first DNA test to come back with a match for Ivy?”
“We’re talking about a crime lab in the west Caribbean, Michael. Think of the Natalie Holloway case-that young girl from Alabama who went to Aruba on a high school graduation trip and vanished from the beach one night. Never found a body, no charges ever stuck. The incompetence on some of those islands is surpassed only by the corruption. Money talks.”
“So…whose body was inside the shark?”
“There never was a body,” she said. “It was two pelicans and a half-eaten dolphin.”
“So the ashes that we scattered were what?”
“Flipper and his flying friends. I know that sounds crazy, but the shark was an afterthought. The plan we originally came up with was for Ivy to disappear, lost at sea. But we were afraid that McVee would never stop looking if there was no body.”
“So the shark with the phony human remains was a way to have a body without having a body.”
“Right. Kind of an interesting story how the shark idea came to her. Ivy attended an art exhibit with Marcus McVee before his suicide.”
“With Marcus?”
“She worked for him, Michael. Anyway, the exhibit included that Damien Hirst piece, a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine. A fourteen-foot tiger shark, to be exact-‘something big enough to eat you,’ was what Hirst was after. I think Steven Cohen eventually paid eight million for it.”
Cohen was a hedge-fund superpower who had amassed a collection valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Marcus McVee was kind of a mini-Cohen. For some of these hedge-fund guys, art was a passion. For others, art was simply the new precious metal: a material object that was valuable, available only in limited quantities, and sellable in a recognized market.
I was still processing all that-including the fact that Ivy had gone to an art exhibit with Marcus McVee-when Mallory’s cell rang, displaying Kevin’s number. I let it ring through to voice mail and dialed Kevin on the landline.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Nana and Papa are missing.”
That was a jolt I didn’t need. “What do you mean, missing?”
“I wasted an hour trying to unravel this, and finally it took a friend in law enforcement to get through the red tape. They never got on the plane.”
“What happened?”
“I have no idea,” said Kevin. “Did you tell anyone they were on that flight?”
“Who bought the tickets?”
“I cashed in miles by phone.”
Ivy’s warning was suddenly burning in my ear: They must be intercepting your messages! They might even be listening right now!
“McVee could have gotten the information,” I said, “if his men were eavesdropping on my cell.”
“Paranoid conspiracy theories are not likely to fly with the police. Especially ones that come from a fugitive and his brother, even if I am your lawyer.”
“Then you should be the one to deal with the cops. I can’t go to them anyway, unless I want to be locked up. That’s a good division of labor.”
“What division? What are you going to do?”
“Find our grandparents. Any way I can.”
51
ERIC VOLKE ENTERED THE GLASS SKYSCRAPER VIA THE BOWELS OF THE parking garage through a door marked DELIVERIES. Saxton Silvers’ main entrance on Seventh Avenue was still blocked by hordes of reporters, cameramen, photographers, confused employees, desperate clients, and the just plain curious. Volke wasn’t sure why, but he was thinking of men-boys-like Michael Cantella’s grandfather at the age of nineteen or twenty, storming the beach on D-Day, watching their friends die, carnage all around. Climbing out of his limo and sneaking up the rear service elevator, he felt like a complete coward.
The bankruptcy lawyers had filed a Chapter 11 petition-the largest in U.S. history-at nine A.M. The CEO was dealing with the firm’s partners and major stockholders. It wasn’t specifically in Volke’s job description to address the employees, but they were owed at least that much. He went from floor to floor, meeting with large groups of dazed traders, managers, and others who slowly came to realize that they were wasting their time listening to management and should have been typing a résumé. A few were loyal to the end. One of the traders gave him a bronze plaque that had rested atop her desk for six years, a quote from Act II, Scene II of Julius Caesar that Eric had referenced in one of his many inspiring speeches: “Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
“Hang in there,” was the more common refrain, though many looked at Volke with dagger eyes, as if to say, I’d like to hang you.
Volke’s last stop was the foreign-exchange traders on the third floor. The open work area was half-empty. Apparently his hollow message had already trickled down from the equity floor above, and many had decided that it wasn’t worth waiting for. Scores of desks had been cleaned out, personal items boxed up and hauled away, row after row of darkened trading screens left behind. Empty coffee cups rested on tables. Suit jackets hung on the ends of cubicles. A platter of bagels and doughnuts was virtually untouched; few employees had the stomach to eat. An open bottle of tequila sat atop a file cabinet, some having found gallowslike solace there. Pairs of traders exchanged sad smiles of resignation and shook their heads in disbelief. One cluster perused a copy of the bankruptcy court papers, astounded by the sheer heft.
“Good morning,” said Volke.
“What’s so good about it?” someone fired back.
An uneasy silence came over the loose gathering, and it stretched all the way across the floor. Some moved closer to listen in. Others stayed where they were, refusing to give up their desk chair, defying the cold reality that it was no longer theirs.
Volke took a step back, glancing out the third-story window at the crowded street below, where double-parked news trucks and cameramen jockeyed for position outside the building’s front entrance. Saxton Silvers employees, trying to escape with their belongings and at least some of their dignity, had to push through a media gauntlet where everyone from CNN to Internet bloggers begged for “just thirty seconds” of interview time. A young guy wearing a green Saxton Silvers T-shirt carried a sign that read WHARTON MBA, TWINS ON THE WAY: WILL WORK FOR ANYONE.
“It’s a very tough day in our history,” said Volke, beginning the way he’d begun each of the dreaded morning talks. But the words halted.
Scanning the room, he avoided making eye contact with any single individual, and his gaze came to rest on some Legos atop a trader’s desk. Someone had decorated his workspace with a toy tower of colored plastic bricks-just like the ones that study teams built on the first day of classes at Harvard Business School. It was a Day One collaborative ritual that Volke knew well, and seeing that playful reminder of his alma mater brought back a flash of memories. The thrill of the acceptance letter. The horror of the first “cold call” in the lecture hall. The “up-yours” letter he could have mailed to the first-year accounting professor who’d told him he wasn’t going to cut it. Volke didn’t fancy himself a historian, but he had lived through “New Yorkonomics,” having arrived on Wall Street when the city was suffering from the exodus of manufacturing to cheaper places. He witnessed a spectacular resurgence fueled by innovations in financial services-everything from junk bonds and leveraged buyouts to mortgage-backed securities and hedge funds. It was all a product of the remarkable concentration of smart people in New York City, each learning from the other how to get rich. Saxton Silvers was once a shining example of success, and it was painful to end up as the poster child of “how not to do it.”
He ditched his prepared words and took an entirely different tack.
“There was a time when the kings of Wall Street were not the commercial banks,” he said, “but entities far less regulated. They controlled ungodly sums of wealth, and the more they controlled, the more investors fed them. The average American still lived off the sweat of his brow, but the rich sure got richer. The Wall Street creed was to make money. Big money. Fast money. Rules were bent. Ethics were relative. Laws were swallowed by loopholes. It was all okay; Adam Smith told us so. It all came crashing down, of course. The stock market suddenly lost almost fifty percent of its value, and banks simply stopped making loans.”
He paused, his gaze sweeping across a sea of perplexed faces.
“That was 1907,” he said. “I guess we didn’t learn much.”
He drew a deep breath, then let it out. “The doors will lock at five o’clock. I’m sorry,” he said, eyes lowered, “especially for you young people. I’m very, very sorry.”
Suddenly a bagel flew across the room and nailed him squarely in the chest.
“Fly home in your helicopter and fuck yourself sideways,” someone shouted. “You and Michael Cantella both.”
A security guard went to the president’s side, but no one else moved. No one said a word. The indignity of silence simply hung there.
Volke brushed the crumbs and traces of cream cheese from his Hermès tie, then turned and left the room.
Ivy Layton rose from the couch as Volke returned to his office on the executive floor.
“Thanks a ton for telling me to go with the 1907 mea culpa speech,” he said as he tossed his stained necktie onto the chair. “Went over like a mink coat at a PETA convention.”
“Maybe the apology didn’t come across as genuine,” said Ivy.
“Maybe I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said.
Ivy didn’t go there. All across Wall Street, it was someone else’s fault.
Volpe went to his closet and found another tie. He spoke with his back to Ivy, using his reflection in the window as he knotted a perfect double Windsor.
“You can’t hide here forever,” he said. “The bankruptcy team will be inventorying my office in about four hours.”
“I know. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent more than one night in any one place anyway.”
He turned to face her, straightening the knot. “Any longer than that and I’d have some explaining to do to Mrs. Volke.”
“I understand. I’ll go. But I need your help.”
“What now?”
“I have nowhere else to turn,” she said. “No one else has the power to bring down Kyle McVee.”
“Don’t you
watch FNN? He’s already kicked my ass.”
“I want you to tell the FBI that it’s him, not Michael, who’s killing the firm.”
“I already have. It’s falling on deaf ears. I know you’ve been away, but now more than ever, Wall Street is like the Wild West, no sheriff in town. Players like McVee do as they please.”
“Then you have to make the FBI understand what kind of man Kyle McVee is. Make them realize that he’s capable of murder.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Ivy paused, then forced out the words. “I want you to tell the FBI about me.”
“Tell them you’re alive?”
“Yes. And why I disappeared.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Have you lost your mind? I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“For starters, I helped fake your death. That’s a felony.”
Helped was almost an understatement. Eric had arranged for payoffs to the Bahamian medical examiner and DNA expert who had linked Ivy’s name to the decomposed “remains” found in the belly of the tiger shark.
“I was just watching television,” she said. “A warrant has been issued to arrest Michael for the murder of Chuck Bell.”
“That’s not my fault. In fact, I protected Michael. The FBI was very interested in knowing what he said to me in our phone conversation before Bell was shot, and quite honestly, Michael’s words could have been used against him.”
“What did he say?”
“Something to the effect that he was going to put a stop to Bell ‘one way or another.’”
“I’m sure Michael didn’t mean kill him.”
“I know he didn’t. That’s why I kept that conversation between us.”
“One of us has to tell the FBI what’s really going on.”
He went to her, his expression deadly serious. “That was not our deal,” he said. “I helped you disappear with the understanding that you would never come back, no matter what.”
“Things have changed, Eric. I tried running, and I’m out of options. If you won’t go to the FBI, I will.”
Money to Burn Page 24
