Blackbird

by Abigail Graham

  I sprawled out on the bed and watched the clock. Around eleven I got up for real, after half-dozing for an hour or so, thinking about having Eve again. I rose, put on something halfway presentable, and grabbed my notebooks. Eve practically took a bookstore to class with her. I carried the bare minimum, the notebooks I needed and some pens. I’d take my laptop if I needed it, but I didn’t today. It was a leadership course, a senior seminar type thing, and I’d spend most of my time listening to the self proclaimed eccentric professor bullshitting. You’ve met the guy, even if you’ve never met him specifically. He liked to mention early and often how he was rich running all these companies and quit to be a business professor instead. He assigned a book because he had to and told the students not to buy it, and half the classes were lectures about shoes or TED talks. He liked this one from a guy that got high with a bunch of different cultures. Once in a great while we actually talked about business ethics.

  You can imagine how much I was looking forward to that. Resigned, I headed out the door. Then my phone rang.

  I didn’t know the number. I leaned against the wall by the door.

  “Hello?”

  “Mister Amsel?” a female voice said.

  I blinked a few times. “Who’s this?”

  “My name is Brittany Andrews. I work at the company.”

  “What company?”

  “Your company,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So, talk.”

  “In person. I’d rather not do this over the phone. I don’t feel safe.”

  I blinked a few times. “Fine. I get out of class this afternoon. I’ll pick up my girlfriend and…”

  “No. It has to be soon, and alone. This is a big deal, Mister Amsel. I’m scared. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Okay. A public place, then. Where are you, anyway?”

  “I’m at work at the company. In Philadelphia.”

  “It’s going to take me over an hour to get there. There’s a coffee shop on the corner outside the office.”

  “Too close. Someone might see me.”

  “Fine. I know a pizza place on Market street, at third. Right on the corner.”

  “That will work. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  She hung up on me.

  I stared at the phone. This was like some next level spy movie shit. I did have class, but no one would care if I skipped and Eve would gladly help me with the homework from my afternoon class. Still, I’d be gone for a while.

  It was a long drive. Eve made me promise to stop getting so many speeding tickets after they threatened to yank my license, so I took it slow and easy. Almost an hour and a half later I was cruising downtown Philly looking for a place to wedge the Firebird into a parking spot. I finally gave up and pulled into a paid lot, and walked down to the pizza place. In the afternoon it had grown warm, t-shirt weather. When I stepped into the pizza place, a woman stood up from a wrought iron table where a half-eaten pepperoni personal pizza sat before her. She saw me and headed over.

  I’m going to admit it. She was hot, very hot. Tall, and shapely in a way that shows under conservative business attire. Long legs that looked great in spiked heels, and curly bright red hair in a frizzy ponytail. She had a kind of no makeup look going, and bright green eyes. High cheekbones, a heart shaped face, the works. A few years ago I’d have already been working on getting her number and getting her guard down, but today I shook her hand. Her attractiveness was a quality that I noted, just something that was there. It wasn’t something I imposed on myself, it wasn’t discipline, it just was. All of a sudden I went from a ladies’ man to a man that could only see two women in the world. Eve, and the other ones.

  I sat down with her at the table and motioned the waitress over. She brought me a Coke and a healthy pile of boneless wings which I greedily slathered in blue cheese as I ate.

  “What’s this about?”

  Brittany swallowed, hard. She put her hand on mine. I quickly pulled it away and gave her a look.

  “It’s not like that. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really scared. I found something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Who are you, exactly?”

  “I’m Mister Ross’s personal assistant,” she said, and swallowed, hard.

  Oh, cute. My mother’s new husband has a ten-out-of-ten redhead personal assistant. I wonder if he introduced them at the company picnic?

  Probably not.

  Brittany drummed her fingernails on the cast iron. I chowed down.

  “Spit it out,” I said, after a choking swallow of Coke. Shit, why did I order the extra hot sauce?

  “I found evidence that your stepfather-“

  “Martin,” I corrected.

  “I found evidence that Martin is involved in some shady things. Do you know what a bust out is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a kind of organized crime scheme. The criminals exploit a company by extending its line of credit until it goes bankrupt, then use the money the company borrowed to buy its own assets and resell them, then hand off the bad debt. An extortion scheme, basically.”

  “Okay. So Martin is involved with this? He’s going to bust out Amsel?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s even possible. The company is huge. Do you have any idea what your net worth is?”

  “It’s my mother’s net worth until I graduate, and yes, I have a rough idea.”

  “Lately the company has been underwriting a lot of mergers and acquisitions. Your father is in charge of them. He has a partner he’s working with.”

  She opened her satchel and slid a folder across the table to me. I wiped hot sauce off my mouth with a napkin and spread the folder open, and sucked down soda to cool the burn. It didn’t help.

  I read through the file.

  “What am I looking at, exactly?”

  “Amsel acquired this office supply company last year. Your step… uh, Martin has been channeling funds from the company into his private accounts. See these loans they’ve taken out?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never heard of this bank before. That’s a lot of money.”

  “I think they’re part of the Russian mob.”

  I gave her an incredulous look and glanced down at the file again. “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s been meeting a lot with somebody named Vitali. They went on a yacht cruise together about six months ago.”

  “He has a yacht?”

  “It belongs to this Vitali.”

  “You have the dates?”

  “Yes.”

  I took a deep breath. “Why’d you come to me? Why not go to the police?”

  “Russian. Mafia.”

  “Right, but what am I supposed to do about this?”

  “It’s your company. You have pull that I don’t. You can go places I don’t. I don’t have proof here, Mister Amsel. Not iron clad proof that will stand up in court and put these men away. If I go public with this, I’m dead. Martin scares me,” she started to choke up. “He’s… he’s not like other people. He’s hollow inside. Dead. I’m nothing to him. He goes through assistants like crazy. I’ve lasted longer than the last three combined. I should just quit, but this is hurting people. This office supply company has thousands of employees and they’re all going to lose their job when the company folds and Amsel sells off the assets. I need access to higher level files and accounts. Access you have. You’re not connected to any of this. You’re the only person I can trust.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “This isn’t going to take a few hours, Mister Amsel. It’s going to take weeks, months even. We need to be very careful. We can’t tell anyone about this. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah. So what now?”

  “I’ll be in touch. I have to get back to the office before I’m missed. Look around and make sure nobody is following you.”

  A few minutes after she left, as I was finishing my chicken, Eve called me.

  I had to figure out what I was going to tell her. I was
n’t going to be telling her that I was working on sending her father to prison.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Victor

  The company was a weird place to me. No matter how old I was, it was still “going to work with Dad” except there was no Dad to go with me. Everyone knew who I was, though, on sight. I wore a conservative dark suit and tie. The sleeves covered my tattoos. I’d designed them that way, to remain hidden in business attire. When I visited, it raised eyebrows. The Heir didn’t often stop by. Maybe once or twice a year. Since I was eighteen I’d been meeting semi-regularly with the management. Amsel is privately held, so no board of directors, only employees. These old men worked for me. I signed in at the front desk. Amsel occupied the top three floors of a center city highrise. The whole building belonged to me, but our offices took up only the three floors. For the most part, when Amsel invested in something, a publicly traded company did the actual work. Amsel itself was only what’s called a holding company, owning the stock and directing with a light touch.

  For the better part of two hundred years, it worked. Amsel prospered by finding men of talent in fields of interest and funding them. Synthetic fibers, explosives, medicine, chemistry, computers. Most people probably never heard of us until Eve took over the company and started making waves, but Amsel owned a piece of everyone’s daily lives, from the food they ate to the clothes they wore to the cars they drove. That’s a lot of money, flowing in and out, year after year, day after day, hour after hour. Somewhere I had a calculation to tell me how much money I made while I was using the bathroom. Tuition was meaningless to me. I could have bought the college if I felt like it.

  There was only one thing that mattered and I was going to lose it.

  I showed the receptionist my driver’s license and signed in at the front desk, and headed to the elevator. I wanted this tedium to be over. Really, I wanted to just stick my head in the sand and deal with this when I took over. Once it was official and I had my degree, the requirements of my father’s will would be satisfied and I would be the sole owner of the company. Then it would be bye bye Martin. As of that moment, my part of the company was held in trust managed by my mother, and my mother put Martin in charge after he managed her portion of the estate successfully for years. That was how they met, years ago now. So far as I knew their marriage was happy. He never laid a hand on my mother and he was hands off with Eve, too, virtually ignoring her during the summers between semesters. We still kept things quiet, leaving the estate when we wanted to spend the night together, but it would take a fool not to realize where we were going and what we were doing.

  Fool that I was, I thought we really were keeping it a secret. I was trying to talk Eve into coming off the birth control after I graduated. She wanted to finish her degree. I respected that. She was starting to budge on coming off after she graduated herself, a year from now. That would work for me. Not like we were going to try for a kid, so much as let nature take its course. If we kept at it like we had been before, nature would take its course pretty quick. When I was younger if you told me that I’d be thinking about marriage and kids when I was only twenty-two years old, I’d have been horrified. Now I could barely think of anything else. The idea of filling the halls of that huge sprawling house with children was starting to appeal to me. Mom wanted more kids with Dad, but it never happened and he was gone when she was so young. If he’d lived I’d have brothers and sisters, I know it.

  My every instinct was screaming at me to Let. It. Be.

  I had to know. If Martin was trying to destroy my family legacy I had to know. I had to be able to take care of Eve.

  Arms folded, I leaned on the elevator wall and sighed, waiting for it to ascend. If it was up to me I’d be fixing cars for the rest of my days. Hell, maybe I’d find a manager -anybody but Martin- and do just that. Be hands off. Dad was like that. He came here maybe two days a week, and didn’t visit at all for long stretches in the summer. Up until around he died, anyway. Something happened then and he was spending hours every day, but he’d leave super early and be home in the middle of the afternoon to spend time with me and then spend the evenings with Mom. That was a happier time, happier than I can remember until I convinced Eve to take a chance on me.

  Eve. If I closed my eyes I could smell that lavender, like tasting a color. I wanted to get this shit over with and get back to her.

  I still hadn’t told her where I was, what I was doing. She thought I was in class right now. If I made it back in time, nothing would be amiss.

  The elevator came to my floor. I stopped in at the receptionist’s desk and signed in again. Yes, twice. Just to be on the safe side.

  Then I went to meet Brittany.

  It didn’t feel like I was ruining my life. Every employee that saw me greeted me pleasantly. Old men slapped me on the back and told me it would be good to have an Amsel at the helm again after so long. One even squeezed my arm and told me my father would be proud of me. That made my day. It was a subtle thing.

  The record’s vault was in the 27th floor, the second floor of the three belonging to the company. That was where I was to meet Brittany. There was no guard or anything. The big vault door opened with a pass code, a unique one assigned to everyone with access. Lots of important stuff was stored in here, and on paper. There were electronic records but Amsel is old fashioned, it’s just how things go. Institutional momentum, my dad called it once. He was talking to my mother when he called it that. I punched in my code and the door popped open with a hollow metal thump and a hiss of escaping air.

  Brittany was already inside. She dressed conservatively, as usual. Her reading glasses were cute, but I noted it as a passing thing, a simple fact like the color of her gray skirt or the heels on her pumps. She was going for a sexy schoolmarm look, I think. I just wanted to get this over with and get out of there. I closed the vault door and sealed it from the inside.

  The implications of this did not come to me at the time. Unfortunately.

  She had a lot of paperwork spread out on the reading table in the middle of the room. Some of it was photocopies. Anything older than six months was put on microfilm and the originals destroyed at a secure facility that specialized in that kind of thing. It was tossed in right in boxes and eaten by a huge, scary looking crosscut machine and the cuttings were incinerated. I think the machine was called an Industrial Macerator. Sounds pleasant.

  “What am I looking at?” I said, leaning over the papers.

  “I started pulling some of the paperwork on the accounts I told you about. Amsel is becoming involved with some very unsavory people.”

  “Show me.”

  “Okay,” she took a deep breath. “Amsel acquired this office supply company last year. Paperclips.”

  “They make Paperclips?”

  “No, that’s the name of the company. Paperclips.”

  “That’s not a very good name.”

  She sighed. “This is serious, Victor. Here’s the kicker,” she slipped me a page. “When Amsel acquired a controlling interest in Paperclips, the company was deep in the hole. They were a quarter billion in debt. Amsel propped up the company on the standard terms, requiring a reorganization and so on. They started to turn a profit. Then this happens.”

  She slid me another paper. I picked it up and skimmed it.

  “The company bought bonds,” I said.

  “Right. When you buy bonds, you’re basically loaning money. The bond is like a bank note. You turn it in when it matures, get paid back with interest.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So, Amsel’s holdings don’t buy bonds. They pay a dividend on stock back to the company itself. To you, basically. They don’t lend money out. The company started taking on debt of its own and loaning it back out on these bonds. So I looked into where the bonds were coming from.”

  She handed me a list. I took it in both hands and skimmed it.

  “I’ve never heard of any of these companies.”

  “Right, and you wouldn’
t. They don’t exist. They all claim to be chartered in Russia, but none of them are real. I checked. The money is just disappearing up its own ass. Pardon my French.”

  “Okay then. Now what?”

  “Now Paperclips is being shuttered. The company is going into bankruptcy. Amsel owns stock, they… you don’t actually own the company, so you’re basically a creditor. Shielded from the debt. I learned about this two weeks ago when an investigator from the securities and exchange commission showed up. Now, look at this.”

  She had more paperwork. I read it, but it was just some stock trades. Very good stock trades. Martin made me quite a bit of money on them, even if he was putting me on the hook for fake debt to Russian shell companies.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “You’ve been insider trading,” she said, sighing.

  “I’ve been what?”

  “Legally, it’s you. Martin manages the account, obviously, so he’s on the hook. Someone has been passing him a lot of information. Corporate espionage stuff, mostly, but he got Amsel into the market before a couple of important pharmaceutical industry bills passed. Netted the company hundreds of millions, and a nice commission for himself. The management agreed to give him a sizeable bonus out of the returns. Most of it went to you, of course.”

  Brittany took the papers and neatly stacked them up.

  “What you see here is an orgy of evidence. There’s enough stuff here to send Martin to prison for the rest of his life, and the SEC does not, pardon my French, fuck around.”

  I nodded slowly.

  Gotcha.