American tabloid

TWENTY-NINE MINUTES ELAPSED.

Elbow pressure snapped the inside pane. Littell kicked the frame glass out to make a crawl space.

He vaulted inside. The fit was tight-glass shards cut him down to the skin.

The library was oak-paneled and furnished with green leather chairs. The side walls featured artwork: one Matisse, one Cezanne, one van Gogh.

Floor lamps gave him light-just enough to do the job by.

He arranged his tools.

He found the safes: wall-panel-recessed two feet apart.

He covered every inch of wall space with triple-thick acoustical baffling. He hammered it down tight-fivepenny nails into highvarnished oak.

He X-marked the sections covering the safes. He put on his goggles and stuffed in his earplugs. He loaded his shotgun and let fly.

One round, two rounds-huge contained explosions. Three rounds, four rounds-padding chunks and hardwood decomposing.

Littell reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired.

Wood chips sliced his face. Muzzle smoke had him retching. Visibility was zero: mulch slammed up against his goggles.

Littell reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired. Forty-odd rounds took the wall and rear ceiling beams down.

Wood and plaster crashed. Second-story furniture dropped down and shattered. Two safes fell out of the rubble.

Littell kicked through it-Please, God, let me breathe.

He vomited splinters and scotch. He coughed up gunsmoke and black phlegm. He dug through wood heaps and lugged the safes over to his duffel bag.

The library was blasted through to the dining room. Forty-odd explosions toppled the artwork.

The Cezanne was intact. The Matisse bore slight frame damage. The van Gogh was pellet-shredded nothingness.

Littell dropped the newspaper clip.

Littell lashed the duffel to his back with curtain strips.

Littell grabbed the paintings and ran out the front door.

Pure air made him go lightheaded. He gulped it in and ran.

He slid on leaves and bounced off trees. His bladder went- nothing ever felt so good. He stumbled, hunched over double- two hundred pounds of steel kept him plummeting downhill.

He fell. His body went rubber-he couldn’t stand up or lift the duffel bag.

He crawled and dragged it the rest of the way. He loaded his car and fishtailed up to the access road, heaving for breath the whole time.

He caught his face in the rearview mirror. The word “heroic” came up short.

o o o

He took switchbacks north/northwest. He found his preselected detonation spot: a forest clearing outside Prairie du Chien.

He lit the clearing with three big Coleman lanterns. He burned the paintings and scattered the ashes.

He crimped the butt ends of six sticks of dynamite and slid them up against the safe dial-housings.

He strung fuses a hundred yards out and lit a match.

The safes blew. The doors shot all the way up to the tree line. A breeze scattered scorched piles of currency.

Littell sifted through them. The blast destroyed at least a hundred thousand dollars.

Undamaged:

Three large ledger books wrapped in plastic.

Littell buried the scraps of money and dumped the safe sections in a sewage stream adjoining the clearing. He drove to his new motel and obeyed all speed limits en route.

o o o

Three ledgers. Two hundred pages per unit. Cross-column notations on each page, squared off in a standard bookkeeping style.

Huge figures listed left to right.

Littell laid the books out on the bed. His first instinct:

The amounts exceeded all possible compilations of monthly or yearly Pension Fund dues.

The two brown leather ledgers were coded. The number/letter listings in the far left-hand column roughly corresponded in digit length to names.

Thus:

One five-letter first name and one seven-letter last name.

The black leather ledger was uncoded. It contained similarly large financial tallies-and two- and three-letter listings in the far left-hand column.

The listings might be: lender or lendee initials.

The black book was subdivided into vertical columns. They were real-word designated: “Loan %” and “Transfer #.”

Littell put the black book aside. His second instinct: code breaking would not be easy.

He went back to the brown books.

He followed symbol names and figures and watched money accrue horizontally. Neatly doubled sums told him the Pension Fund repayment rate: a usurious 50%.

He spotted letter repetitions-in four-to-six-letter increments- most likely a simple date code. A for 1, B for 2-something told him it was just that simple.

He matched letters to numbers and EXTRAPOLATED:

Fund loan profiteering went back thirty years. The letters and numbers ascended left to right-straight up to early 1960.

The average amount lent was $1.6 million. With repayment fees: $2.4 million.

The smallest loan was $425,000. The largest was $8.6 million.

Numbers growing left to right. Multiplications and divisions in the far right-hand columns-odd percentage calculations.

He EXTRAPOLATED:

The odd numbers were loan investment profits, tallied in over and above payback interest.

Eyestrain made him stop. Three quick shots of scotch refueled him.

He got a brainstorm:

Look for Hoffa’s Sun Valley skim money.

He scanned columns with a pencil. He linked the dots: mid ‘56 to mid ‘57 and ten symbols to spell “Jimmy Hoffa.”

He found 1.2 and 1.8-hypothetically Bobby Kennedy’s “spooky” three million. He found five symbols, six, and five in a perfectly intersecting column.

5, 6, 5 = James Riddle Hoffa.

Hoffa laughed off the Sun Valley charges. With valid assurance: his chicanery was very well cloaked.

Littell skimmed the books and picked out odd totals. Tiny zeros extended-the Fund was billionaire rich.

Double vision set in. He corrected it with a magnifying glass.

He quick-scanned the books again. Identical numbers kept recurring-in four-figure brackets.

[1408]-over and over.

Littell went through the brown books page by page. He found twenty-one 1408s-including two next to the Spooky Three Million. Quick addition gave him a total: forty-nine million dollars lent out or borrowed. Mr. 1408 was well-heeled either way.

He checked the black book initial column. It was alphabetically arranged and entered in Jules Schiffrin’s neat block printing.

It was 9:00 a.m. He had five hours of study in.

The “Loan %” subhead tweaked him. He saw “B-E” straight down the graph-the- number/letter code decoded to 25%.

He EXTRAPOLATED:

The initials tagged Pension Fund lenders-repaid at a fat but not brutal rate.

He checked the “Transfer #” column. The listings were strictly uniform: initials and six digits, no more.

He EXTRAPOLATED:

The initials were bank account numbers-repaid mobster money laundered clean. Said initials all ended in B-most likely short for the word “branch.”

Littell copied over letters on a scratch pad.

BOABHB = Bank of America, Beverly Hills branch. HSALMBB = Home Savings amp; Loan, Miami Beach branch.

It worked.

He was able to form known bank names out of every set of letters.

He jumped columns tracing 1408. Right there on the money: JPK, SRJSFNBB/81 1512404.

SFN meant Security-First National. BB could mean Buffalo branch, Boston branch, or other B-city branches.

The SR probably denoted a “Senior.” Why the added designation?

Just above JPK, SR: JPK [1693] BOADB. The man was a piker compared to 1408: he lent the Fund a paltry $6.4 million.

The added SR was simply to distinguish the lender from someone with the same initials.

JPK, SR [1408] SFNBB/811512404. One filthy-rich moneylending-

Stop.

Stop right there.