Blood Money

13

Jane’s flight brought her into Miami in the early morning, when she was reasonably sure the watcher she had seen last night would be home asleep, but she found that he had been replaced. The crowds were thin and she could pick out other watchers. There were three men in tight T-shirts along the wall who paid little attention to the arrival of her flight but were very interested in all departures. Their behavior added a bit to her fears for Rita. If Rita had not gotten out of Florida already, this was the airport she would have been most likely to use.

This generation of wiseguys—the ones now in their twenties and thirties—seemed bent on dressing badly. Their fathers had worn suits like salesmen when everyone else had been in jeans and sweatshirts, so they had been easier to pick out. Jane noticed four police officers in the next waiting area. There were two men who wore windbreakers that hid their equipment, and two women who had identical taste in purses. Theirs were made by a company named Galco and they consisted of two compartments designed to surround a center pocket that held a gun.

Jane moved downstairs to buy a ticket to Los Angeles, then went into a ladies’ room to arrange her hair and change clothes before the flight. The pressure had increased over the past few days, and she wasn’t sure why. It looked as though the authorities had noticed the increased Mafia presence in airports and decided to place a few more cops nearby to find out what was up, and then the Mafia had reinforced its complement to spread the police thinner. It was getting to be more dangerous to fly.

When Jane reached Los Angeles, the numbers seemed to have increased again in a few hours. She rented a car at the airport under the name Valerie Campbell and drove it to Beverly Hills to do some shopping. When she had what she needed, she approached the Hotel Bel-Air by a long and circuitous route, then watched the parking lot for fifteen minutes before she went in to register for the night.

It was evening when she picked up the telephone in her room and asked the operator to ring Mr. Ziegler’s room. He answered, “Yeah.”

She said, “A mutual friend—”

“He talked to me,” Ziegler interrupted. “Meet me on the bridge in front where the swans are.”

Jane walked out of her room, down the narrow pathway through the garden, and across the margin beside the tables under the trellis where people were eating dinner. There was a certain absurdity to this spot. She had noticed on another visit to the hotel that the terra-cotta tiles under the patio were artificially heated from beneath. She had set her purse down, and when she had picked it up, the bottom had been warm. A few of the diners looked up as she crossed the little courtyard, but none of the eyes lingered on her for more than a moment.

She was dressed in a black linen dress that she had bought this afternoon, so she could have sat down at any table and looked enough like the other women to be the sister who always arrived late—or the daughter, at some tables. She turned left at the end of the path and came out on the little arched bridge over the pond.

There were still cars pulling up at the end of the bridge. Valet parking attendants got out and expensively dressed guests got in and drove off to claim their reserved tables at other restaurants in other parts of town. Jane stood apart from the other guests and stared over the railing. Two swans were still down there, gliding gracefully across the surface of the water toward the curtain of high reeds that separated them from the parking lot.

“You Jane?” The voice was low and gravelly, with a harsh, edgy quality to it, like a stage whisper.

It carried so clearly that she raised her head and scanned the doorway and the edge of the parking lot before she nodded.

“Me Henry.” He was short and dapper, his suit beautifully tailored to disguise a chubby torso. He seemed to be in his fifties, but his wavy hair had grayed and thinned enough that he could be sixty. He said, “Come on,” and turned back toward the hotel. She followed him through the arch, then up a maze of paths to the doorway of a bungalow with an enclosed garden. He opened the door and let her enter first.

The suite was larger and a bit more lavish than hers, and it had a big couch and a full desk with a fax machine. Open on the desk was a laptop computer that he had not turned off. The display glowed bright sky blue with a rainbow pie chart in the corner and a few lines of print. She noticed the proportions were changing constantly.

He said, “I sweep my rooms for bugs, and put a scrambler on the telephone as soon as I check in.” He gestured at the couch and, when Jane was seated, dragged a straight-backed chair up to sit across from her. “George told me just enough about you so I could place you in the universe. I suppose he did the same about me.”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“We have the same problem,” said Ziegler. “With both of us here, the feds could seal the exits and set fire to the hotel with all those rich bastards still in it, and still come out ahead after the lawsuits.” His eyes never moved from her face. He was studying her. “What’s the business you’re bringing me?”

Jane took a deep breath, then said carefully, “There are two of us. We have control of about ten billion dollars.”

“What do you mean you have control of it?”

“We’re the only ones who know where it is and can get our hands on it. It’s in lots of different places under a lot of different names: domestic and foreign stocks and bonds, bank accounts, real estate, precious metals, cash. It’s been built up over a period of about fifty years.”

Ziegler shrugged. “Anything that’s been invested for more than ten years is safe. If there was going to be trouble with it, the trouble would have come right away. There are a lot of ways to launder money, and you stumbled on the best: time. If you came to me for expert advice, here it is: you don’t need advice.”

“We want to give it all to charities.”

His left eyebrow went up. “Seriously.”

Jane held her eyes on Ziegler’s. After a few heartbeats, his expression changed. He looked more alarmed than puzzled. She supposed she must have undermined his sense of how people behaved. Part of her was pleased, but she had to keep him from taking the next step, which was to silently declare her insane and begin to speed up her departure. “That’s why we came to you,” she said. “We could try to leave it where it is forever. Probably some of the inactive accounts would be confiscated by the authorities. But it’s likely that others would be tracked down and claimed by people we don’t want to have it.”

He squinted, as though he were trying to block out what she was saying and hear something else. “Why don’t you want it?”

Jane said, “A lot of reasons—some practical, some not.”

“Give me a few practical reasons.”

Jane frowned. “Given enough time, these people may be able to trace some of the money. If they trace it to a charity, they’ll be out of luck. If they trace it to a person, that person will be out of luck. You said George told you something about me, so you know I have other reasons not to show a high profile. If I have billions of dollars, I’m not going to be invisible anymore.”

“What about your partner?”

“He has good reasons to stay invisible too. The money is poison.”

Henry Ziegler had his elbows on the arms of the chair, and he rested his chin on his fists as he stared at her thoughtfully. “So you want nothing out of this. You’re just sitting on ten billion dollars and figure it might as well go to good causes.”

“That’s about right.” She paused. “All of it except for your fee—I’m counting on you to identify enough money that’s very old and cold to make helping us worth your risk. You can pay yourself whatever is fair.”

He studied her more closely. “What do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to make this sound easy, or safe. The people we’re up against are about the worst enemies you could have. They’re already looking for anyone who might know the slightest thing about the money. If we make a mistake, the danger won’t ever go away.”

He said, “I respect that. I agree that we should be very careful not to con each other. You and your partner have somehow gotten your hands on the money that Bernie the Elephant was holding for the Mafia.”

Jane hesitated. There was no uncertainty in his expression. “It’s that obvious?”

He shrugged modestly. “I’m probably more up on these things than most people. At least I hope I am.” He leaned forward and spoke in an avuncular tone. “There’s always a certain amount of big money floating. Right now there are a few other chunks that big that could show up any day. But it’s not money you could have gotten your hands on. It’s from treasuries and central banks, and the people who have it also have armies and intelligence services to keep an eye on it.”

Jane asked, “Well, what do you think about this chunk?”

He held up his hands in a gesture meant to announce the obvious. “If you have money, charities will take it. We’ll have to be very careful about it, and do some preparation.” He stood up and paced the room. “It’s an interesting problem.” He stopped and asked, “I assume you want it all to move in a short period, so the Mafia doesn’t have time to figure out what it is, or where it came from—just hit them in the face with it?”

“I think so,” said Jane. “If we give them time to find the address of some building while we’re still in it, we’re dead.”

“It’s going to be interesting,” he said, and resumed his pacing, then stopped again. “And you don’t have any special charities in mind?”

Jane shook her head. “I’d like them to be legitimate. There’s no sense in moving money from one set of crooks to another. Beyond that, no.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “You wouldn’t have much choice beyond that.” He sat down beside her. “Let me tell you what ten billion dollars is. There are roughly forty thousand foundations in the country right now—some for charity, some for art, science, and so on. Ten billion dollars is what all of them put together give away in a year. No matter what we do, this is going to hit the papers—front page. The best we can hope for is that when it does, it’s at the end of the year as a statistic: ‘Charities Report a Good Year for Giving.’ ”

Jane’s brows knitted. “How do we do that?”

“We spread it thin enough, package each donation small enough so it doesn’t make a big splash by itself.” He waved a hand. “And we use a few tricks.”

“What sorts of tricks?”

He grinned. “For ten billion? Everything we can think of.” He turned his wrist to look at his watch. “I’m going to make some calls and clear my schedule for the next couple of weeks. I’ll have a few ideas for you by morning.”

Jane recognized her dismissal. She stood. “Please give some thought to the size of your fee. I’ll have to clear it with my partner.”

He turned to look at her slyly. “If I said it was ten percent—a billion dollars to move ten billion—would you be sure I was cheating you?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll do it for the goodwill.”

“What goodwill?”

“That means I have reasons too, some practical, some impractical. Be here at five o’clock in the morning.”

It was still dark at five a.m. when Jane stepped quietly along the path and knocked on Ziegler’s door. He swung the door open quickly and closed it after her. She noticed that he was wearing the pants from the suit he’d had on the night before and had his white shirt open at the collar and the sleeves rolled up.

Jane said, “You haven’t slept, have you?”

He picked up a piece of paper from the corner of the desk. “Here’s the plan. Phase one: we set up twenty private foundations. I’ve already faxed orders to twenty law firms in different parts of the country to start cutting the papers, but to leave the names blank until I call them in.”

“What does that do?”

“It sets up an impersonal vehicle. If a big donation check says Joe Smith, 101 Maple Street, charities want to know who that is. If the check is from a law firm representing the Smith Foundation, they think they know, so they don’t look. It’s not going to be listed anywhere until next year’s Foundation Directory comes out. By then it’s gone.” He went on. “Then we select a couple of hundred community foundations. You know what those are?”

“Not even vaguely.”

“They’re foundations that already exist for the benefit of some city, county, or state. People donate to them, and they make a budget and give the money to charities. For us, it takes the sting of newness off, mixes our money with other people’s, and puts another barrier of paper between the real contributor and the charity.”

He looked down his list. “We’re also setting up twenty corporate foundations of our own. This does roughly the same thing. The corporations are closely held, with maybe one or two imaginary people owning all the stock. The donation comes from Abadabba Tool and Die Foundation, not a person. If the name and the donation amount get printed on a list somewhere, nobody knows anything. Since they never heard of Abadabba Tool and Die, they don’t know if it’s tiny or huge, or if this is a lot of money for them or peanuts. I’ve already got people printing out articles of incorporation, and after that we’ll cut papers for the foundations.”

“This is beginning to sound like a lot of paper.”

“A blizzard of it, and it’s all meaningless. If it didn’t have to be complicated, you wouldn’t need me. I’m also setting up twenty public foundations. A public foundation is one that can legally solicit donations from the public.”

“Why would we solicit donations from the public?”

“We don’t. But judging from where the money came from, there’s bound to be some that smells like dead fish—too suspicious to slip to a real foundation directly. We run it through one of our public foundations to clean it, then the foundation gives it to a charity. The report of where it came from might set off alarms at the IRS, but who cares? The worst they can do is shut down the foundation, which will already be shut down. They can’t put anybody at the foundation in jail, because they’re not responsible for where the money came from, only where it goes. Since they don’t exist, they’re not in much jeopardy anyway.”

“I have no way of knowing how much of the money is suspicious,” said Jane.

Henry Ziegler set down his paper and shook his head. “Probably not much. Bernie Lupus was a genius of a sort that ordinary people will never be able to appreciate, because you have to know so much just to imagine what he was doing. It’s possible that every dime has been washed, dried, fluffed, and folded so perfectly that it’s unrecognizable. But there’s a problem with trusting a murdered man. We know he made at least one mistake, and it was a big one.”

Jane felt a little uncomfortable, but she said, “I agree: let’s take as many precautions as we can.”

Ziegler picked up another piece of paper from the desk. “There will be some money that looks like some old guy’s fortune. That’s money that Bernie the Elephant invested fifty years ago in some bogus name and left to mature. This is good. All we need is a will for each account leaving it to some charity and a death certificate. We mail one copy to the bank and one to the charity and let them work out the details. They’re good at that, and it takes time, which is good for us.”

Jane let out a breath in a silent whistle. “This is pretty impressive.”

“I’m not anywhere near done.”

“I still have a question that’s on my mind.”

“Let’s get through this first,” he said. “The next tier of donations goes to the giant charities: United Way, Red Cross, Catholic Charities, United Jewish Appeal, UNICEF, March of Dimes, CARE, Salvation Army, and so on. They’re like big clearing houses. Whatever our imaginary people give gets mixed into a big pot. They give it away and account for it later. Then we go to the next level down.”

“What’s that?”

“Slightly smaller charities that specialize. Mostly it’s ‘Name That Disease’: National Cancer Society, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer’s Association, AIDS, et cetera. We’ve got enough to swamp all of them, and they’re still big enough to swallow a few million without blinking. Then we go down another level to the relief agencies and single institutions: homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters, hospices, orphanages. You get the idea.”

“That’s it, right?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not even close. We’ll actually run out of charities at some point. A lot of these places are going to freak out if they get a check for more than a hundred thousand, and we’ll have to give each of them more than that.”

“What do we do?”

“Branch out. We give money to a lot of causes that aren’t charities but get donations now and then. Some universities will have to get funds for scholarships named after made-up people. We give some to Indian reservations.” He looked at her sharply. “Did I see a funny look on your face? Some of the poorest people in the country live on reservations. We make out a check to the tribal council, such and such reservation, right? They decide what to spend it on to help their own community. They may or may not report it to anybody, because it doesn’t happen very often.”

“It wasn’t an objection,” said Jane. “I think it’s a great idea. I guess I’m surprised that you’re … that you’ve figured out so much.”

“Moving money is a talent,” he said. “Knowing how to do it is like being the world’s greatest nose-picker. Most of the time, people would rather you didn’t.

“Anyway,” he went on, “if you’ve been paying attention, you get the idea. We capture the biggest sums by putting them into our sixty foundations. We use the giant charities to sop up the next chunk, and move down from there. We’ll have to pay attention to the size of each gift, so some charity won’t choke on it and reach for the phone to call a press conference. If we still have money left at the end of it, we can start mailing checks to symphony orchestras and museums and arts councils and so on.”

“I still have a question.”

Ziegler put down his sheet of paper and met her gaze. “I know. Why don’t I want to take any money myself. The same reasons you don’t. I don’t really need it enough to die for it.”

“What about the impractical reasons? You could have said no, and been in no danger.”

He smiled sadly. “Bernie Lupus. I wasn’t exaggerating about what he must have been like. With a mind like that, he could have done anything. He could have been a great scientist or something. It’s one of the biggest wastes I ever heard of. It’s as if Einstein spent his whole life disconnecting smoke detectors in airplanes so he could have a cigarette, or rigging pay phones to get free calls. I guess I see this as a chance to change Bernie the Elephant’s life after the fact. If I had listened to your pitch and said no, then Bernie Lupus was just one more dead guy who made the Mafia richer. If I said yes, then it’s a whole different story. Everything Bernie did for fifty years amounts to suckering the worst people in the country into doing good.”

“And you?”

“Me?” Ziegler smiled. “Maybe if I run into him in hell, he’ll tell me how he did it.”

Jane was silent for a moment, then decided. “You’ll get to meet him tonight.”

Ziegler’s mouth dropped open. “Is he alive?” asked Ziegler. “Or am I going to be dead?”

“The first,” said Jane. “Maybe the second too. We’ll do our best to avoid that, though. Are you ready to travel?”