Black Maps

Chapter Nine

“You’re gonna hurt yourself doing that, honey,” called one of the girls, from the corner. She had a wobbly pile of orange hair, and legs that were bigger than mine. They were covered not at all by a leather skirt the size of a napkin.

“You’re working way too hard,” called another, laughing. “Come on over here, we’ll relax you.” Her eight-inch black stilettos and red vinyl jumpsuit glistened in the streetlight. She had the neck and shoulders of a wrestler.

“Morning, girls,” I said. I waved and kept on running. “Girls” was neither politically nor anatomically correct, I knew, but it was what these guys aspired to, and who was I to argue. I was headed south on Eleventh Avenue in the predawn dark, on the last leg of a six-mile run. I passed the Javits Center and the trucks already lumbering around it, and went back on autopilot, one part of my brain on traffic and potholes, another trying to sort out exactly what I’d found at MWB. So far I had more questions than answers.

I’d seen something of the mess that Brill and Parsons faced at the bank, and how they went about cleaning it up. I’d seen their nifty document system. Slick as it was, it held only one of the items from Pierro’s fax. Was that because the other documents simply hadn’t been in the bank? From what I could tell, once something got into that system, it was hard to remove without leaving lots of footprints. But how hard was it to keep something out in the first place?

The people I’d met last night could’ve told me, no doubt. They seemed to know their business well, and also to know their way around banking, and MWB, and the document system. That kind of knowledge would come in handy if you were running a little side action in blackmail. Mike would call that wild speculation; so would Neary. They’d be right.

I had speculation to spare, and a lot of it was about Gerard Nassouli. His photography collection was an odd one. For the most part, it was vanity wall stuff-cliched trophies that strained to paint the man as mover, shaker, and fashionable rake. All that was missing was the one of him in a smoking jacket and ascot, flanked by a couple of bunnies. Helene’s picture hit the jarring note. Was that the real Nassouli she’d caught there, on that wet, nighttime street? And if it was, why did he advertise it? Did he like the way it recast the fluff photos, in a colder, more sinister light?

And what about Helene? She’d apparently known Nassouli, back in her salad days of modeling and amateur photography. But how had she known him? How well and for how long? And why had neither she nor her husband seen fit to mention it? True, I hadn’t asked, so they hadn’t lied, not exactly. But they hadn’t offered, either. It bugged me, and I was going to talk to her about it.

I had come away from MWB with one hard piece of information: Al was short for Alan. Alan Burrows. There was only one Alan Burrows on my list-the one in Manhattan. I’d called him last night, as soon as I’d gotten home. He’d answered on the first ring.

My story to him was that I was doing background research for a writer who was considering a book project about MWB. It was a decent story, and Burrows hadn’t questioned it. But neither was he eager to talk. His first response had been silence, and only the slight rasp of his breathing told me he was still on the line. Then he’d hemmed and hawed in a well-educated, soft bass about not having worked at the bank in nearly fifteen years, about having no contact with anyone from there since, about having gotten out of banking altogether. I’d pressed. I’d said that if it was more convenient, I could come to his office for a chat. He hadn’t liked that idea at all. Finally, he’d relented. I’d be meeting him tonight, at his place.

Lots of pieces, and maybe not all to the same puzzle. I turned them over and over in my head as I ran, but no two fit together. A pale, pink light was rising in the sky as I headed east on Sixteenth Street.

I put coffee on and stretched while it brewed. I had my first cup standing at the kitchen counter. Then I showered and shaved and dressed, and had a few cups more with breakfast. When I was fully caffeinated, I called Mike and told him about my visit to MWB. He listened in silence until I got to the part about Nassouli and Helene. Then he blew out a long, slow breath.

“I take it Pierro didn’t say anything to you, either,” I said.

“Not word one.”

“Anything to make of that?”

Mike thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said after a while.

We agreed that I would talk to Helene, and that we wouldn’t mention the photo to Rick beforehand. I finished my update, telling him about Burrows and the meeting I’d arranged for tonight. He was about to ring off, but I stopped him, to share my rosy view on the state of this case.

“It’s going nowhere,” I said.

“Is it going that well?” He chuckled sourly.

“There’s just nothing here to grab hold of. Some smoke, some lights in the sky maybe, some wild-assed guesses on my part, but nothing I can call remotely hopeful. If Burrows doesn’t pan out, we’ll need to have a talk with Pierro,” I said.

“I agree,” Mike said.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Fair to middling,” he answered. “He’s working same as usual-long hours, on the road a couple of days a week. And he’s still got this penned up, off to one side. But I think the effort’s getting to him.”

“No more faxes?”

“No more faxes; no contact at all. Makes you wonder-why the wait?”

“To make him sweat, maybe. Soften him up for the squeeze.” Mike thought about that.

“It’s working,” he said.

I spent the rest of the day on paperwork. It was slightly less compelling than watching paint dry, but it was unavoidable. I owed a final report to my last client, a big insurance company, and I needed to bring my case notes on this job up to date. There was no putting it off any longer. I switched off my phone, made more coffee, put Charlie Haden and Norah Jones and Macy Gray CDs in the changer, and opened my laptop.

With only a few breaks, I banged away on it till six o’clock, when the intercom buzzed to tell me that I had a visitor. Seconds later, a grainy image of a woman emerged on the small video unit mounted on the kitchen wall. My baby sister, Lauren. There was no point in not answering. It was her apartment, and she had a key. That’s the way it is with my family; you can run, but you can’t hide.

“You’ve given up on the phone altogether, have you?” she asked, even before she’d crossed the threshold. She hung an arm around my neck and kissed my cheek. At just under six feet, Lauren didn’t need to stand on her toes to do it. Her face was cold from the evening air. She smelled like jasmine.

Jane Lu had been right about the resemblance. Lauren and I share our father’s looks: tall, slim, pale, with the same straight, black hair, the same widow’s peak, the same green eyes, set in an angular face, the same straight, prominent nose. Lauren’s hair was parted down the middle and pulled into a loose ponytail that reached below her shoulder blades. She was wearing a cherry red turtleneck, black jeans, and black loafers. Her black coat was slung over her arm, and on her shoulder she lugged a beat-up gray knapsack. Her briefcase. It looked full, and I figured she’d come straight from the office.

“Checking up on your tenant? What’s the matter, the rent check bounce?” I kissed her cheek.

“If you were just ordinarily rude, maybe ignored only three out of four phone calls, instead of every single one, you could save yourself these intrusions. Got a ginger ale?” She dumped her coat and knapsack, went to the fridge, and started rummaging.

“I’m working. In fact, I’ve got a meeting tonight and I need to go soon.” Lauren found the soda. She popped the top and took a long pull.

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying. I’m having dinner with Keith at that new place around the corner. I just stopped by to confirm,” she pointed at me over the kitchen counter, jabbing the air with her long finger to punctuate each word, “that you are coming to Thanksgiving dinner at your brother’s house.” She took another swig of soda and smiled at me over the top of the can.

I heaved a big sigh and shook my head. “Lauren, look, I appreciate the concern, and the invitation, but I’m fine, really. I’d just prefer to have a low-key day, you know? Let the holiday slip by, fly under the radar.” But Lauren wasn’t having any.

“ ‘Fly under the radar’? What the hell does that mean? You run fifty miles, eat some tuna from the can, and collapse on your bed? That was your last Thanksgiving, right? Sounds like a real blast.”

“Yet somehow more appealing than a day of being lectured to, or treated like a live grenade, or like something the cat coughed up,” I said.

“That’s what you’re expecting?”

“Because that’s what always happens.”

“Oh come on, Johnny-”

I cut her off. “You come on. I’m not in the mood to be improved just now, okay? So give it a rest.” But Lauren was undaunted. Her green eyes flashed, and her voice sharpened.

“I’m your sister, asshole; I don’t care if you’re in the mood or not. Your family’s worried about you, and we have a right to be. I mean, take a look at yourself. It’s over three years since Anne died, and you live like some kind of freaking monk. You work; you run; you work; you run. You never see your family, and besides Mike, I don’t know what you do for friends. And do you ever get laid anymore?” She shook her head. “I guess it’s better than the drinking, but isn’t there some middle ground?” I thought she was finished and I drew a breath to speak, but I was overly optimistic.

“And for the record,” she said more softly, “I’ve never been interested in improving you. I don’t give a shit what you do for a living, or where you do it. I just want you to be happy or, at least, accept the possibility of happiness.”

“Laurie-” I said, but she stopped me again.

“No one’s going to lecture, or look at you funny, I promise. We’re your family, John; we want to see you. Your nephews want to see you.” Lauren was relentless in the pursuit of her own way, willing to pull out all the stops. I saw where this was going and knew it was hopeless. I bowed to the inevitable.

“No mas,” I said. “Enough. I’ll come.” Lauren smiled. She liked nothing better than bending others to her will. I smiled back. “You think maybe that nephew business was a little over the top?” I asked.

“Hey, whatever works,” she said. She took a long swallow of soda and looked at me slyly. “So, I hear you met my boss.” It took me a moment to connect the dots.

“Jane Lu?” I asked. “She didn’t mention being your boss. She just said you two worked together.”

“That’s typical Jane, very self-effacing. But she is definitely the boss. She’s the hired gun the venture capital guys brought in, when they purged the old management team,” Lauren explained. My sister ran marketing and sales for a dot-com that had survived a near-death experience.

“And we’re damn lucky they did-she’s some kind of management genius. We were all pretty burnt out after the market collapsed, those of us who were left, and when the VCs told us they were cleaning house and bringing in some rent-a-CEO, we didn’t take it well, to say the least. Oh, they gave us this big song and dance about how great she was-MIT undergrad, one of the youngest ever out of Harvard B-School, cut her teeth at Goldman and McKinsey, brought a couple of biotech firms back from the brink, blah, blah, blah. We thought it was a bunch of crap. But six months later, there’s actually light at the end of the tunnel, and we would all pretty much run through walls for her-me included. And you know how jaded I am.”

“What did she do, put something in the water cooler?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s that we’ve had our first profitable quarter ever, and we’re on track to beat our year-end targets. Or that she rolls up her sleeves and puts in more hours than anybody else in the place. Or maybe it’s that she’s so fucking smart, it’s scary.”

“Wow. Tell me, are the T-shirt and decoder ring free when you join the fan club, or do you have to pay extra?” Lauren was not amused. She shook her head and grimaced, all to say, wordlessly, “I sometimes find it difficult to believe that an asshole like you is actually my brother.” Then she looked at her watch and headed for the door.

“Enough of your low humor. I’ve got to meet the hubby. See you Thursday. It’ll be just family, plus a couple of strays. I’ll tell Liz and Ned and everybody.” She slipped on her coat, shrugged her knapsack over one shoulder, and was gone.

By then it was time for me to get going, too, to meet Alan Burrows. I turned my phone back on before I left, and checked my voice mail. I had only one message, three hours old, from Clare. She wouldn’t be able to see me this week. With the holiday and all, time had just gotten away. She’d call Monday. Sorry. Somehow, I doubted it, just as I doubted we’d get together next week. And, I found, I didn’t much care. It was time to go.

Burrows lived in a skinny, brick-clad tower at the north end of York Avenue. Tiny cement balconies jutted from its upper floors like bad teeth, and the lobby was awash in veined mirrors and cheap marble. It was a rental building, the kind where the freshly graduated cram three or four to a one-bedroom apartment, and where the freshly divorced try to piece together new lives from the scraps of their old ones. A bored doorman pointed me to the elevators, even before he’d rung upstairs to announce me. I rode alone in a dim car that smelled like old food. Burrows stood in the open door of his apartment.

“This way, Mr. March.”

Burrows was a handsome wreck. He was fiftyish and tall, six foot three or so, and broad shouldered, but thick through the middle-a college athlete fallen into disrepair. What once were stolid, John Wayne good looks had blurred and buckled, and now all the mileage showed. His fleshy face was deeply creased, and the skin around his spent brown eyes was dark, and shot through with a web of lines and veins. Broken capillaries had left a small purple stain, like a brushstroke, on his cheek, and another in a corner of his long, thin nose. His blond hair was mostly gray, and was thinning badly. It was brushed straight back, away from his high forehead, and looked damp, like he had just gotten out of the shower. The collar of his pink button-down shirt was damp too, and his sleeves were rolled back over hairless forearms. He wore soft-looking, brown leather slippers on his feet. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his khaki pants. He stood aside so I could enter, and did not shake my hand.

The apartment was small, low ceilinged, and sterile, like a very tidy waiting room. I stood in a short hallway. On my left was a pocket kitchen, on my right a bedroom and a bath. The living room was a white cube, dead ahead. The furnishings were sparse and cheap. A beige sofa, a matching chair, and a coffee table were arranged in a corner. A low bookcase ran along one wall; a dining table did double duty as a desk along another. An oatmeal-colored rug hid most of the badly laid parquet floor. Across the room, a glass door opened onto one of the balconies I’d seen from the street. It was no bigger from up here.

The walls were empty. The only picture in the place stood on the dining table: a faded, silver-framed photo of a young woman holding a baby. What books there were, were arranged by size on the shelves, so that biographies and histories were mixed with textbooks on real estate, and a thick, black bible with books on low-salt cooking and weight loss. His few knickknacks-a pair of silver candlesticks, a small carriage clock, a red lacquer box-looked out of place, as if they’d lost their way en route to another, better-appointed life.

Burrows motioned me toward the sofa, and I sat. He took a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, wrapping the earpieces behind his ears. They made his eyes bigger, and gave him a scholarly look.

“Something to drink, Mr. March?” he asked. “I’ve got ice tea, juice, water. I could put up coffee if you’d prefer.” His voice was deep and intimate sounding, but there was a stiff, almost formal quality to his speech and manner that made me think he wasn’t used to having anyone in the apartment with him.

“Water is fine,” I said.

He disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with two glasses of water. He gave me one, along with a little paper napkin, and sat in the chair opposite me. He sighed heavily and looked down at his feet on the rug. He held his water glass with both hands and rested it in his lap. I noticed a gym bag and a pair of sneakers parked neatly in a corner by the door. I gestured toward them. “Just back from the gym?” I asked. The question seemed to surprise him, and he paused before answering.

“I am, yes. I go every night, after work.”

“Disciplined,” I said.

“I try to be.”

“What kind of work are you doing, now that you’re out of banking?” I asked.

He didn’t hear my question, or chose to ignore it. “As I said on the phone, Mr. March, I don’t know that I can be much help to you. I wasn’t much help to the federal people when they came to see me, either,” he said.

“When was that?”

“A long while ago. Two and a half years, maybe longer. But there wasn’t much I could tell them.” He took a slow drink from his glass. I smiled my best nonthreatening smile.

“Well, I’m starting with almost nothing on this, so whatever you can tell me I’m sure will help. And, as I mentioned on the phone, this is entirely confidential and off the record. The guy I’d like to talk to you about is Gerard Nassouli. I understand you worked for him.”

Burrows kept looking down at his feet and shook his head a little. “Yes, that’s who the federal people wanted to talk about, too. Where he might have gone to, who he might turn to if he was in trouble, had I heard from him, what did I know about his finances, did I know any of his friends, did I know of any property he kept overseas. They went on and on. I couldn’t help much.”

“They were interested in finding him, so they asked those kinds of questions. But finding him is not my problem. I’m more interested in what he was like. How he did business. How he made deals. I thought maybe you could take me through some that you worked on with him.”

“I’m not sure there’s much I can say.” He took another hit from his glass.

“You did work for him.”

“For seven years, the whole time I was at MWB. I was with the New York office, and Nassouli ran the office.”

“And you ran the correspondent banking department?”

“For six years. The first year, I was the number two person in the department. Then my boss went back to London and I took over.”

“And when you left MWB, you left banking altogether?”

Burrows looked up at me and straightened a bit in his chair. “I thought this was about Nassouli, not about me.”

“It is. But all you say about him is that you have nothing to say. So I figured we could talk about things you can tell me. Like why you left MWB when you did, and why you left banking.” I drank some water and continued. “I figure you must have been around thirty when you joined MWB. And you must’ve come in with a few years’ experience, if they hired you as the number two guy in the department. Even allowing for a couple of years in b-school and my bad arithmetic, you walked away from at least ten years in banking when you quit. That’s a big career investment to leave behind. Why’d you do it?”

Burrows looked at me for a while and shook his head a little. “It was over thirteen years, altogether, and my reasons were personal. Can you understand that?” he said, more tired than angry. “Look, if it’s me you want to discuss, I’m sorry, the answer is no.” He got up and carried his glass to the kitchen and returned with it filled.

“How did you know that I ran correspondent banking?” he asked.

“Research. That’s what I do.”

“And what has your research told you about Gerard so far?”

“Not a lot. That he was a big deal maker. That he was charming, and liked a party. That he liked women, and being seen with them,” I answered.

Burrows snorted. “He liked to be seen with them, and he liked to fuck them, that’s true. I don’t know how much he actually liked them. In fact, I think he hated them.” He stumbled a little over “fuck,” as if he was out of practice with vulgarity. He drank some water. “Deal maker, charming, life of the party-you’ve been talking to people who didn’t know him well.”

Alan Burrows was a paradox. On the one hand, he kept proclaiming that he had nothing to tell me. And, so far, he hadn’t told me much. On the other hand, he hadn’t thrown me out yet. And he kept on talking. There was some heavy conflict there, and that was good news for me. “You know different?” I asked.

He ran a hand through his damp hair and looked into his glass. “Charming, a big deal maker, loved parties-that was the press he put out, and it was true, as far as it went. But there was another story, altogether different.” He stopped and looked up at me again. “Your employer could write a book just on Gerard, but he’d have to do it as fiction, because nobody would believe it as fact.” His voice quavered, like he’d run out of air. He took a noisy swallow from his glass and then was still.

“I’d like to hear that story, and you’re the first person I’ve met who could tell it,” I said.

Burrows shook his head, more vigorously this time. “Tell it… Jesus… I’ve spent fifteen years trying to forget it,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“How’s that going-the forgetting?” I asked softly.

“Not well,” he said.

The lines seemed to deepen on Burrows’s ruined, handsome face, and his eyes looked moist and more tired than ever. He gathered some breath and asked, “Are you really working for a writer?” So much for my decent story.

“No,” I said after a while. “No, I’m not. I’m trying to help someone who did some business, legitimate business, with Nassouli a long time ago, and who’s run into trouble because of it.”

“Legitimate business-with Nassouli, I suppose that’s theoretically possible,” Burrows said with a small, harsh laugh. “But if your client did any kind of business with Gerard, he may need more help than you can give him. Tell him he should talk to a priest.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it. But right now, I’m all there is in the help department. Me, and maybe you.”

“Is this usually an effective approach for you, Mr. March-lying to people, then asking for their help? Does it build a lot of trust?” Again, Burrows seemed unable to generate much anger. He seemed gripped, instead, by a powerful, bone-deep fatigue.

“I was acting in what I judged to be my client’s best interests, Mr. Burrows. I thought you’d be more forthcoming talking to someone doing research for a book than you would someone pursuing an investigation. Maybe it was a bad call. I make them sometimes, and I correct them when I can. But I wasn’t lying to you when I said this would be confidential.”

Burrows waved his hand, like he was shooing a fly. “Being lied to doesn’t bother me much, Mr. March. Maybe that comes from working for Nassouli for seven years, or maybe it just comes from working on Wall Street. Whatever-I’ve gotten comfortable with it. I’ve come to expect it.”

He looked at me and looked away. He was poised on a precipice, balanced on the verge of something. His eyes were narrow and clouded, and they roamed aimlessly around the room. The conflict behind them was one I’d seen before. It took me back to cop days, to exhausted suspects caught between fear and the swelling need to speak and be understood… and maybe forgiven. I was wondering which way to push him, or if I should push at all, when he stiffened his shoulders and locked his eyes on mine.

He squinted and peered, like a man driving slowly through a fogsearching the opaque air for familiar shadows and looming hazards. He stared for a long time, and I held his gaze. I don’t know exactly what Burrows sought in my eyes and face-some sign of shared knowledge, maybe. A common thread of loss or regret; or a mutual acquaintance with solitary rooms, and the tyranny of memory. Whatever it was, I guess he found it. He made his decision and spoke.

“I think it’s hard for a lot of people to understand evil, believe the reality of it, unless they’ve experienced it firsthand, don’t you? I know it was that way for me, before I met him. ‘Evil’ and ‘corruption’ were just words to me, before him. Gerard Nassouli was the worst man I’ve ever met, Mr. March. He was a fucking monster.” The vulgarity gave him no trouble this time.

“Yes, he loved the deal making and the high life, and you must know from the papers what sorts of things he was engaged in at MWB. But his genius, and his true passion, was corruption. Corrupting people, and then collecting them, like some people collect bugs-pinned and mounted under glass. No deal was a complete success for him unless it involved adding somebody to his little collection. I think that’s why MWB was so perfect for him. It let him marry his vocation with his avocation.” He turned his glass slowly in his hands.

“It sounds strange, I know. It’s hard to understand if you don’t see it for yourself. I worked with the man almost every day for seven years, and I didn’t see it at first. He was smart, and charming, but what he was best at was reading people. He could see into them, how they were put together, what they wanted, what drove them. And whatever it was, he would somehow arrange for them to have it-with no strings attached. Not at first, anyway.” His voice was very soft now, and I was straining to hear. “In the end, it cost them everything.”

When he paused, a palpable silence took hold of the apartment. There was no traffic noise, no whirring of the building’s machinery, no humming of appliances. I kept very still and took slow breaths and focused my eyes on the wall behind Burrows, afraid that, like a deer, any stray motion or sound or even the force of my gaze might spook him and break the spell. Burrows leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, the water glass still before him, held in both his hands. He peered inside, as if into a deep well.

“You’d think he was the best friend you’d ever had-smart, funny, worldly, and infinitely understanding of human failings. If you had a vice, a weakness, a little character tic, well, Gerard had plenty too. And whatever yours were, you’d never get even a raised eyebrow from him. Just a wink and a nod, as if to say ‘It’s no big deal. Go ahead. Enjoy. That’s what men do.’ And he’d sit back and wait and watch. To see the kind of women you liked, or men, to see what you envied, what made you bitter, to see what you liked and hated about yourself, to see what lies you told yourself, and, especially, to see what you most coveted. It could take months, years even. He didn’t care. He was patient. It was like tending a garden, he used to say.”

Burrows looked up, and the motion startled me. His eyes were red. “This is too vague, isn’t it? You want to know what he was like, how he did business. You need specifics.” Burrows’s soft, deep voice was steady now, and it stayed that way through all the stories he told me.