Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

Bears in Mind James L. Ross

“Our post-industrial society supports over a half-billion people in North America,” said the man buying drinks. “How many do you think it can sustain after the economic upheaval we foresee?”

The speaker was Darwin Sneed, black bearded and fat, putting on an accent that was English or Aussie, depending on how careful he was. In a flowered necktie and a good navy suit, he looked almost prosperous as he sipped his wine, tapped a napkin to his lips, and reminded me, “Half a billion people, today.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Ten years into the collapse, our projections show the population in North America will be eighty million. That’s an eighty-four percent reduction. A handful of people will have managed to emigrate. The rest—” He waved a hand, the way you’d consign masses to the chopping block if you were a monarch or a social scientist. “Some will die violently, as the civil order disintegrates. Others will starve as food no longer reaches our population centers. Many, I’m afraid, will simply freeze to death after having to switch from oil or gas to coal to heat their homes, and then to wood, until the land is deforested. And, of course, millions will succumb to common ailments in the absence of hospitals and antibiotics.”

He raised an eyebrow, inviting me to choose my fate.

We weren’t a perfect fit, Mr. Sneed and I, even for an afternoon drink. He was peddling doom and gloom to anyone who would listen. As a stockbroker, I had a vestful of software company shares for sale at optimistic prices. Economic collapse probably wouldn’t be good for software or for much else I traded in.

Sneed went on. “Our models don’t take account of the possibility that more virulent strains of bacteria or influenza will evolve. It’s my horseback estimate that a timely flu epidemic could reduce the surviving population to thirty or forty million.” Another little throwaway gesture: He might look like a country parson, but he would be hard pressed to say mass over all those dead.

I spoke a thought I probably shouldn’t have. “That sounds like bad news for the stock market.”

If he detected sarcasm in my voice, he ignored it. “This is far more serious than stocks and bonds, Mr. McCarthy.”

I would have begged to differ. Nothing to me was more serious than stocks and bonds, except perhaps a good martini at Taleb’s Café and February in the Bahamas. If my mother were alive, she would say I’m not really that shallow. She always had hopes for me.

Darwin Sneed’s business card said he was founder and chairman of Logistics Analytics LLC. I knew what “LLC” stood for; the rest could mean anything. The card mentioned London and Hong Kong, implying he had offices there, but it didn’t list street addresses. I’d have bet anything the phone numbers on the card rang in his pocket.

We were sitting, along with Sneed’s factotum, at a little bar on the third floor of the Plaza Hotel, just down the hall from the conference room where Darwin Sneed and assorted other zanies were predicting the end of Western financial markets. Mountains of bad debt were collapsing all over the world, they warned, and the avalanche was going to take down everything with it: real estate prices, stock prices, corporations, governments. I tried to picture an economic winter lasting generations and decided I didn’t want to. I had a mortgage on an apartment in SoHo, and I was fond of the restaurants around it. But Sneed and eight or nine other speakers had an overflow audience of people who looked like they had enough money to care. The whole traveling show fit right in at the Plaza. Two weeks before Christmas, the place was hopping with charlatans trying to get one more grab at the customer’s wallet before everyone went home. A floor below us, a developer was pitching condos a million or so below last spring’s price.

Sneed’s factotum had been discreetly silent. She had introduced herself as Wendy Blue, nicely packaged in her own navy suit and a mock turtle. Now she spoke up. “The next question you should ask, Mr. McCarthy, is how your clients can be among the survivors.”

“I was planning to,” I said.

She gave me a stern look from sea-green eyes. Wendy Blue didn’t believe anything I said. Most clever women don’t.

“There is physical survival,” she said, “and there is financial survival. We recommend three things for physical survival: First, we like freeze-dried food, supplemented by high-potency vitamins. Second, you should have a store of broad-spectrum antibiotics; if you don’t need them yourself, they’ll be useful for barter. Finally, we advise having a place to which one can retreat safely, away from the storms that will sweep the cities. We have an affiliate in Arkansas that builds cedar log homes for that purpose.”

If the log cabin had a fireplace and she came with it, I was sold. That was why she was on the job. Many would be tempted, no telling how many would be chosen.

Darwin Sneed added, “There’s another asset for physical survival that one should consider.”

“What’s that?”

“Firearms. You should have at least one fifty-caliber rifle for protecting your home’s perimeter.”

They both were good at looking at you squarely. I mean, who wouldn’t want a fifty-caliber rifle to protect the perimeter? Only some pantywaist Pollyanna who thought life might go on as normal after the banks imploded. I hoped Wendy Blue didn’t mistake me for one of those.

Instead of trying to keep a straight face, I said, “What about a fallout shelter?”

Sneed almost went for it. Wendy Blue said, “You should take this seriously, Mr. McCarthy.”

“It’s difficult.”

Ms. Blue and Mr. Sneed were suspecting they had wasted two glasses of domestic bar wine on a loser. Their fault. I had been loitering near their table, flipping brochures and looking thirsty, half listening to the drone from the conference room, when I noticed Ms. Blue. She had the kind of short, rusty-blonde hair that wants to be tousled. A nice round face with eyes and lips in agreeable places. She spoke with a little accent that I couldn’t place. My name tag said HI, I’M DON McCARTHY. That didn’t impress her. Neither did my appearance: buck-toothed, squinty-eyed, sunken-chested, with hair growing out of my nose — reliably described by my most recent ex-wife. The next line on the name tag identified my employer as Magee & Temple, which made sunken-chested sort of cute. Magee & Temple was as close to a white-shoe brokerage firm as you could still find on the foot of Manhattan. We didn’t bother with clients who had to drive their own Bentleys.

She responded appropriately.

Thirty seconds into our chat — while I was thinking there could be a future, or at least an afternoon, for me and Wendy Blue — Sneed arrived at the table, all three hundred pounds of him, a breathless middle-aged bear fattened up for the economic winter. She must have buzzed and he’d come running.

We walked around a couple of corners, and since it was a nice hotel we found the bar. All fiat currencies were doomed, Sneed confided, trusting that I knew a fiat currency was one made of paper. “Inflation could wipe out everything your clients have,” he warned. “Their only real hope lies in owning gold.”

Now I had a fuller picture: freeze-dried food, antibiotics, log cabins, high-powered rifles, and gold.

Sneed and Ms. Blue were mentally packing up their log home when a voice behind me said, “Yo, mate,” and a hand slapped my shoulder. “What’s this about getting wiped out?”

He wasn’t my typical client: twenty-something, spiked black hair, sallow complexion, a mouth full of good teeth, and dumb jargon he’d picked up from late-night movies. But Imre de Wohl was my favorite kind of client. Two months ago, he’d shown up with a reference from a Shanghai bank, asked a few simple-minded questions about software stocks, and wired a few million into his new account the same afternoon. What wasn’t to love, especially the simple-minded part? The first wire came from the Shanghai bank, the next from Israel, then a chunk from Paris. I got the feeling he was tapping pocket change.

I’d dragged him along to the conference to have an excuse for being here myself. Imre had sat rapt through this afternoon’s talks while I played mental Sudoku.

Sneed focused on Imre and asked, “Do you want to be part of the eighty-four percent who perish, lad?”

“Eighty-four percent?”

Sneed bent into it. “Could be well over ninety percent. A veritable human die-off. I was explaining to Mr. McCarthy—”

Imre dropped onto the sofa next to Ms. Blue, who moved a knee close to his. She was probably about thirty but willing to rob a cradle for her boss. Imre said, “A ninety percent die-off? So we’re dinosaurs.”

“Not at all, my boy! Dinosaurs took fate as it came. Thinking men and women take steps.” Sneed’s heavy eyebrows rose above his glasses. “In fact, the culling of the human herd might be a blessing. The survivors will be the brightest among us. The biological heritage they pass along will bring a new dawn for mankind — for those of us who are around to enjoy it.” I was impressed at his delivery: apocalypse and eugenics in one breath. Sneed poked a finger at Imre. “Having gold to buy things with might make the difference.”

“Radical,” Imre said. “I could use some gold.”

“Well, as it happens—”

Imre’s cell phone went off, and he “yeah-yeahed” his way off the sofa and was gone before Sneed could exhale.

“He’s got a short attention span,” I explained.

When Sneed ran off to grab other prospects in the men’s room, I asked Ms. Blue, “How long have you worked for him?”

“Eight months.”

“Getting rich?”

“Getting by. Something else will come along.”

As long as she wore the sea-green contacts and snug jacket, she could bank on it.

“Are you staying at the Plaza?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Want to have dinner?”

“No.”

“Breakfast?”

“Get lost, Mr. McCarthy.”

Definitely clever.

Sneed came back from the bathroom, sized me up, and said, “Mr. McCarthy, you have the look of a man who appreciates candor. What do you think, Ms. Blue?”

“I think he’s a loser.”

“I can offer you ten-percent commission for referrals,” Sneed told me, looking hopeful.

“If I don’t refer them, I get a hundred percent,” I pointed out.

Hope turned to dejection. The conference was breaking up, and he hurried off to inject himself into conversations at the bar.

“Business is slow?” I asked Ms. Blue.

“It’s very competitive.”

“Not enough suckers to go around?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

I bought the next round of drinks. Ms Blue went for a Campari and soda. “We had a pretty good business eight months ago, which is why I signed up,” she said.

“What happened?”

“The idea of buying log homes and gold was edgy. After a couple of bank failures, now it’s commonplace. Darwin is worried.”

“Are you close to jumping ship?”

“I’d like to find something to jump to first.”

“What did you do before this?”

“Danced in Las Vegas.”

I tried to picture her wearing a couple of feathers and sequins. “If you’re tired of working for Sneed,” I said, “I can always use an executive assistant. Pay’s good. You still get to tell lies.”

“And the perks?”

“The main one is I don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”

She smiled faintly. “I’ll think about it.”

“Have you changed your mind about dinner?”

This time she didn’t tell me to get lost. Instead she handed me a business card. “Call me at seven. I’ll know then if I have to accompany Darwin somewhere.”

I started to get up, then sat back down. “About gold,” I said. “How would I buy gold from you and Sneed?”

“You’d write a check that didn’t bounce.” Sassy girl.

“And then?”

“We hold the metal abroad for our investors. What would you say is the safest country to keep money in?”

“Switzerland?”

“Not so much anymore. We prefer Singapore and the Cayman Islands. No matter how bad the upheaval here becomes, your gold will be safe in our insured vaults.”

“And there’s not much record?”

“You’re a quick study, Mr. McCarthy. Our clients’ gold is practically invisible to prying eyes.”

“Including the IRS?”

“Exactly. We’re very discreet.”

I don’t trust people who say “exactly” — as she had done, though only once — because imprecision is part of the stockbroker’s art. The dowager client asks, “Will we make money on this stock?” and I reply, “Almost certainly.” If she doesn’t read the fine print, she doesn’t know that the “almost” covers exceptions from sunspots to slick sidewalks. It’s an uncertain world.

I told Ms. Blue I would call her at seven.

They had a suite on the ninth floor, the people who had me by the short hairs and liked to describe themselves as “the good guys” — set apart from private citizens who failed to pay taxes and were therefore “bad guys.” When he opened the door, Roger Varick was on the phone with someone and motioned me in, shouldering the door closed behind us. The suite held two other agents, young men with polished shoes and white collars that could get them mistaken for missionaries. From dealings with Varick, I knew they would loot the courtesy bar and blame it on the maid.

Finishing his conversation, Roger Varick pocketed his phone. He was in his early thirties, with wire-rimmed glasses and the look of a guy who needed a briefcase in his hand to feel complete. He worked for the Treasury, except on weekends, chasing money.

“Tell me about Ernesto Gutierrez,” he said.

“He’s at the conference,” I said. “He talks to a lot of people. I haven’t been able to get close to him.”

“Why not?”

I thought about telling the truth: that Ernesto Gutierrez didn’t wear sea-green contact lenses so I hadn’t tried. Instead, I said, “He’s got handlers. Your guys have seen them.” I wanted him to know I’d spotted his two missionaries hanging around the periphery. Even with shined shoes, they didn’t look like they had the money the conference crowd had.

“Do you recognize anyone he’s talking to?” Varick asked.

He and I didn’t like each other. Varick thought he owned me. One of my clients had run a hedge fund that had misplaced a lot of its investors’ money. I’d been a mere bystander — so said my lawyer — but the best deal we could get was I wouldn’t be barred from the business if I helped Varick when he asked me to. So I was helping. But not much. I didn’t mention that I’d noticed Gutierrez coming back from the men’s room a dozen feet behind Darwin Sneed.

“What’s Gutierrez up to?” I asked.

The missionaries looked at each other, smiling smugly, as if they’d ever tell me. Varick said, “He imports heroin. He doesn’t pay taxes. We’re trying to find out why he’s come east. And where he hides his money.”

“Haven’t a clue,” I said.

Not many people actually sneer, even good guys who work for the Treasury. But Varick tried. “I didn’t really expect you to learn anything, McCarthy. I just wanted you to jump through the hoops for me. We’ll nail Gutierrez without your help. You can run along home.”

I ran along as far as the first floor. There were several parties in full swing. A dozen refugees from Austria ’38 were eating strawberries and cream while strolling violins played “J’attendrai.” Office workers were tearing up a private room. A corner full of surgeons were swapping liver jokes. And off to the side, a lifeboat’s worth of doomsayers were arguing the issue of the day: Would inflation wreck the world, or would deflation? Several of the arguers had red faces. The hangers-on, mostly older birds with white-knuckle grips on their drinks, looked upset either way.

Working on Wall Street, I’d made pretty good money, but I had a bad habit of spending it. The guys squeezing their drinks would strangle a dollar that fell into their hands. Their money wasn’t meant to be squandered on good times, it was meant to be hoarded, nurtured a little, pumped full of steroids when the opportunity arose. The last thing they wanted was to get buried in a financial collapse. The next to last thing was to pay taxes. If I introduced Roger Varick to this group, a couple of guys looked feisty enough to string him up from a lamp fixture.

Imre de Wohl sat there, toward the back, alone at a table. He had a more cheerful attitude toward money — at least I thought he did; he hadn’t been a client that long. I pretended not to see Imre. Neither Sneed nor Gutierrez was in sight. Fine. I walked around the floor a couple more times, then called Ms. Blue.

“Are you attending Sneed?” I asked.

Her voice was barely a whisper. “No. Meet me at the conference room.”

“The conference room?”

“I left my purse.”

I took an elevator to the third floor. The area was deserted, except for a couple of housekeepers sweeping up. I looked into the ballroom. The tables were stacked on dollies, the chairs folded, the chicken littles fled. When I backed into the hall, Ms. Blue darted from a cloakroom.

“I’ve got a little problem,” she said. “How gallant are you, Mr. McCarthy?”

“Not very. But I make up for it in charm.”

She sighed. She needed a knight and got a wiseass. “That will have to do,” she said.

“You need help finding your purse?”

“I need help ditching an old boyfriend. He’s followed me here.”

I tried a hunch. “From Las Vegas?”

She nodded.

“What’s his name?”

“Ernesto. He’s rich and he’s mean, and he’s obsessed with me.”

Who wouldn’t be obsessed? I’d only known her a few hours and couldn’t count the lies she’d told.

“Does Ernesto have a last name?” I said.

“Gutierrez. He’s Spanish, a nobleman or something. Please, I want to get up to my suite, collect a few things, and blow this dump. This town too. Maybe the whole East Coast. Will you come with me?”

“As far as the suite, you mean?”

“Or the airport. I doubt you’re ready to chuck everything and run off with me.”

“Maybe for a weekend. If Ernesto spots us, what am I supposed to do to protect you?”

“He won’t do anything if I’m with someone. At least I hope not.”

We took an elevator up to the fourteenth floor, and she carded us into a suite that was bigger than the one the Treasury boys had: three large rooms visible from the doorway, Roman columns pretending to hold up parts of the ceiling, brocaded easy chairs. Two large-screen monitors sat on tables, surfaces dancing with red, green, and blue price charts and matrices. Somewhere on the planet there’s always a stock market open, lifting spirits or dashing hopes. Ms. Blue ignored the markets.

“How well does Ernesto know Mr. Sneed?” I asked, following as she dashed for the room on the left. She ignored the wardrobe and went for the safe. I couldn’t see what came out, which she stuffed into a blue flight bag.

“Know Mr. Sneed?” she said, trying to sound puzzled after waiting too long.

“I saw them coming out of the men’s room together.”

“What does that prove?” She stopped, squinted. “How do you know what Ernesto looks like?”

“A little bird told me.”

“Huh.” She dipped into the flight bag and came out with a small gun, black and expensive looking, with a little round hole pointed at my belt. “If you work for Ernesto—”

I raised my hands. “I don’t. I never met the guy. But he’s pretty well known in some quarters as a drug dealer.”

Her nice face pinched up. “He’s no drug dealer! Where did you get that? He owns a couple of hotels in Vegas. Little ones, well off the Strip — where you find toenail clippings in the shag carpet. That kind.”

“The kind of place you danced?”

“I never said it was upscale.”

“So he’s really your boyfriend?”

“Not exactly.”

“Or a Spanish nobleman?”

She wasn’t paying as much attention to the gun, or my belt. “Look, I need to get out of here. Ernesto’s hotels have casinos, you understand? Dumpy, but they’re cash businesses. When Darwin spoke at a conference in Vegas, Ernesto approached him about buying gold.” She raised her eyebrows. “Ernesto had skimmed money and needed somewhere to hide it.”

“Like a vault in Singapore.”

“Well, actually... Darwin told him the vault was in the Caymans. We’ve got one there too.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Ernesto went down to the Caymans Tuesday to visit his gold.”

Today was Thursday.

“And he didn’t find any?”

“The gold bars are there. Ernesto wanted one of them assayed — tested for gold purity, you know? That was the problem. They’re not exactly pure.”

That word again, “exactly.”

“How pure if not exactly?”

“Well, as I understand it — this is just what Darwin told me this afternoon — the gold bars are mostly tungsten. Tungsten weighs almost exactly the same amount as gold — there’s only about a quarter of one percent difference. So you electroplate a tungsten bar with gold, and it costs you maybe five hundred dollars but if it was solid gold it would be worth a hundred times that. Just looking at it, or weighing it, you’d think it’s real.”

“So Darwin Sneed scammed a Vegas casino owner. For how much?”

She almost smiled. “Seven or eight million.”

“How long has Sneed been doing this sort of thing?”

“A while. But I didn’t know, really, until this evening. That’s when Ernesto got the call from the bank with the assay results. Apparently, they didn’t bother actually doing the assay. Someone took a pen knife to one of the bars and cut through the electroplating.” She shrugged. Having decided not to shoot me, she dropped the handgun into the flight bag. “I wouldn’t want to be in Darwin’s shoes if Ernesto finds him.”

“Or your own?”

“He’s liable to think I knew all along.”

“And you didn’t, exactly.”

She shook her head.

I thought about the doom conference downstairs. For some of the patricians, seven million would be a rounding error. Not worth thinking about, unless you took it away from them, in which case they would want to peel your skin off.

“If Sneed’s been doing this a while, he’s made a lot of money,” I said.

“If he can live to spend it. With Ernesto... he really is a Spanish aristocrat, a Hidalgo. The Vegas thing is just a hobby. His family has tons of money. But he also has this Spanish thing about honor. Probably about revenge too.”

I wondered if she’d just happened to be dancing at Ernesto Gutierrez’s place when Sneed came along, or if she’d been with Sneed longer and had prospected Ernesto for him. It didn’t matter to me. It was one of those exactly things.

I asked, “Where do you think Sneed is?”

“Probably on a plane. If the bank called me to say we had trouble, they must have called him too.”

“And he didn’t take you with him?”

“This is the big time, Mr. McCarthy. Everyone looks out for himself.”

“I’ll look out for you a little while,” I said, “as far as the airport.” I sort of liked her, and she would have made a great broker’s assistant. “You can’t take the gun on a plane.”

“I’ll worry about it at the airport.”

We went into the sitting room, and I didn’t remember leaving the hall door open. Didn’t remember seeing ten-ton trucks driving around the room, either, but that was what hit me from behind.

She still looked pretty good, with the-sea green contacts giving a sparkle to eyes that were slightly crossed. The round, pretty face was puffier than it had been when there wasn’t a cord wrapped around her neck. She was right beside me on the carpet, wearing neither her blue suit nor a sequin nor a feather, which would make things look very incriminating for me when someone arrived. And surely, somebody was going to arrive.

I sat up, felt around till I found my head, then got to my knees and finally my feet, all without throwing up. I didn’t remember touching anything in the suite. I headed for the door. No need to wipe door handles or wash drinking glasses or...

I made the fatal backward glance. Something dark brown and shiny peeked from under Ms. Blue’s hip. I went over and saw what it was and pulled it out from under her. My wallet, full of identification. Gilding the lily, I thought, electroplating the tungsten, but what policeman passed up a gift? I turned toward the door and stopped again. Jumped, actually.

There was a man sitting in a chair turned away from me, as if he’d gone over to sit and watch the markets on the big screens on the desk. Boring business. He must have fallen asleep. As I came around the desk, I saw the two big red splotches on his chest. Decided, everything considered, I should have expected that. Dead, Darwin Sneed looked more like the benign country parson than he had alive. A small black automatic pistol lay on the carpet between his feet.

It was a sure bet my prints were all over the gun.

I used Sneed’s pocket square to pick up the weapon, wiped it down, overcame squeamishness to rub the gun against Sneed’s fingers before returning it to the carpet.

Having watched a single CSI episode, I took the pocket square with me.

It was a little before ten when I reached the ground floor and retrieved my topcoat. The place was hopping, but Austria ’38 was forgotten. The violins weren’t strolling. Strawberries and cream were puddling in saucers as customers watched the spectacle of cops marching in. I stood aside as they rushed the north elevators.

The coat check lady was past seventy, but I offered a flirtatious smile that implied that ah, but for the curse of time, we could have had something. “What’s going on?” I asked.

She leaned across the counter, spoke softly. “Apparently we had a gay love nest upstairs. Three young men got naked and shot each other.”

“Three?”

She nodded. “Who’d have guessed they did that at the Plaza.”

“Who indeed.”

“Right up there on the ninth floor.” She shook her head.

I said, “The ninth floor?”

She nodded.

That was the Treasury team’s floor. Couldn’t be, I thought.

“Terrible,” I muttered, picturing Varick and his missionaries without their polished shoes. Whatever he was — drug runner, Las Vegas skimmer, Spanish gentleman — Ernesto Gutierrez was dealing swiftly with his problems. I got a cab downtown, hoping I wasn’t one of them.

My client Imre de Wohl had rented a townhouse up in the east sixties. A week into the new year, his father visited, a man with a white goatee and the manner of a Flemish burgomeister. Imre invited me to dinner. “The boy has told me a lot about you, Mr. McCarthy,” said de Wohl père. His English was better than my Flemish ever would be. If Flemish was a language; I wasn’t sure. For that matter, I wasn’t sure what a Flemish burgomeister should look like, if he didn’t wear a funny hat, but that’s how I thought of him. Old Mr. de Wohl wore a cravat but no monocle. He wagged a pate knife at my chest. “I’m impressed by Imre’s report on your firm as well.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“These are uncertain times, are they not?”

I tried a smile that implied I could handle whatever came along. That included nine-percent drops in the stock market, such as had greeted the new year.

“Families with wealth must preserve it,” the old boy said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I foresee a difficult environment ahead. What are your thoughts, Mr. McCarthy?”

I wondered if he was playing with me, the way I play with clients who don’t know any better. What were my thoughts? My main thought was that if I got his account, I would milk it like a farmer with five hands.

Before I could answer, he prodded, “What about gold? Is that a prudent investment? How would one store it?” He smiled, a sweet old fellow bent on keeping ahead of the starving masses in uncertain times.

I almost told him I never touched gold. His son, filling my wineglass, said, “McCarthy is an expert, Papa.”

If Sneed was right, the little drop in the stock market was a harbinger of bad times. Of course, Sneed hadn’t foreseen his own future too well. But that didn’t mean he was wrong about everything. I could live with starvation in the cities, though not in my own neighborhood.

Papa’s eyebrows rose, and he wore a greedy little grin.

In good times or bad, the investment game was every man for himself.

Wondering how one acquired a supply of tungsten, I told him, “I know a way to buy gold in the Cayman Islands.”