Blood Money

15

Jane awoke suddenly in the dark. She unwrapped herself from the blanket and sat up on the couch in the living room. A light shone from the crack under the swinging door to the dining room. She listened. The muted, steady clacking of computer keys was punctuated by the rhythmic sound of the printer cycling to roll out pages. She held her watch to her face, and moved it to the side to catch a little moonlight and determine that it was three A.M., then walked to the door and pushed it open.

The rheostat that controlled the dining room chandelier had been turned low, but the light still irritated her eyes. Henry Ziegler’s face was bathed in the eerie phosphorescence of the display on his computer screen. She said quietly, “You never sleep, do you?”

Ziegler started in his chair, then saw Jane and slumped, his shoulders rounding as he took a few breaths to calm himself. “You startled me,” he said. “Sorry if I woke you up. I thought I’d use the time to get the next part of this done. The papers for the corporate foundations I set up are starting to arrive at the hotel in piles.”

“I didn’t ask what you were doing,” she said. “I asked about sleep.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, but his eyes returned to his computer screen before he said it.

Jane persisted. “I was with you at night in Beverly Hills, then met you the next morning to find you had already done a day’s work. The same thing happened at the hotel downtown after we got here. Now you’re at it again. Is it drugs?”

Henry raised his eyes to her and shook his head. “It’s probably a disease, but I don’t know what kind. I never told a doctor, but it hasn’t killed me yet.”

“How long have you been this way?”

“I don’t know. I think since I was born. My mother always told everybody what a colicky baby I was. From the time I can remember, I would lie in bed on one side until I got stiff and sore, then roll over onto the other until the same thing happened. Around dawn I would doze off for a couple of hours. One night when I was about eight, I got up. The next night I went to sleep right away and woke up after a couple of hours. The next night, the same. It’s been that way ever since.”

Jane’s sleep-dulled brain moved through several thoughts. She remembered George Hawkes saying that twenty-five years ago, when Ziegler had just started as an accountant, he had gone to law school at night. It had not occurred to her that it had been all night. She also had a dim memory of reading somewhere that Napoleon had slept about as little as Ziegler. “Well, I guess I’m awake too,” she muttered. “I may as well put in a few hours.” She sat at her computer and flipped the switch, then watched the screen light up and run its self-test sequence. “What’s next?”

Henry held up a few sheets of paper so she could see the top one. “Write me a form letter for each of these corporate foundations. The number beside each one is the amount they have to give away. Pick a few charities off the list on this other sheet for each one, print the letters, sign them with the name of the president. Then stack them in a pile over here. When I’m done with this, I’ll go through the stack and cut the checks. When Rita gets up, she can print the labels and stuff, stamp and stack the envelopes.”

“Got it,” said Jane. She set to work. After one day, she was already getting used to the work, and it went more quickly. It was like a game. The big charities got a million or more. The small ones got three or four hundred thousand dollars. The surnames of the corporate officers were all common and familiar, ones that she or Ziegler had taken from telephone directories and given first names and initials at random. Jane signed some with obscuring flourishes, some with illegible squiggles. She had been forging documents for over a decade, and she was good at making signatures that looked real.

By the time she had gone down the list of corporate foundations, Rita was up and working beside her, chewing bubble gum and popping it every few minutes. Jane worked eight hours, then showered and went out to buy another carload of supplies in Albuquerque. This time she went to different stores, but the extra time it took her to find them was bought back by the fact that she knew precisely what she needed. She used credit cards in three different names to pay for them, returned to the house at four with take-out dinners, then worked from five until eleven.

The next day, Jane wrote more letters and filled out checks to universities. Some were donations from corporations, some from foundations, and some from imaginary people with common surnames that allowed Jane to imply a connection without specifying whether they were alumni or parents or grandparents of students.

On the day after that, Jane gave money to tribal councils on Indian reservations. There was a secret pleasure to this day’s work. She had always tried to keep her ancestry to herself while she was working. The only exceptions had been two occasions when she’d had no place to hide a runner except on a reservation and the single admission to Celia Fulham, the social worker in Florida. The secrecy was one of a thousand precautions that she had practiced until they were habitual. If one of her enemies considered her an American woman of unknown ethnicity, he would have to find her among a hundred and fifty million others. If he knew she was on a tribal enrollment list, he could eliminate about a hundred and forty-nine million. As Jane wrote the letters, she found herself straining to make the numbers as large as she could, and three or four times she caught herself making them too large. The reason for big checks was that reservations were starved for money. But the reason she couldn’t make the checks even bigger was that reservations were starved for money. Huge donations of suspicious provenance would shriek for attention.

For the next two days, Jane devoted her time to grants for homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and relief organizations that helped the poor and hungry in cities. The day after that went to training and rehabilitation facilities for the handicapped, the undereducated, and the displaced.

A whole day and night were devoted to hospitals. There were thousands of them, and dozens seemed to have identical names. But hospitals were relatively safe recipients for the odd bits—money that cleared the accounts of an individual or foundation—because they were used to receiving donations of all sizes. Her fund-raising for Carey’s hospital had taught her exactly how the letters should look.

Jane awoke each morning before dawn wondering whether this would be the final day, but each time she would find the insomniac Henry Ziegler up, printing out the lists of imaginary people who were going to be that day’s donors. In the evening, Bernie would hand Ziegler his latest spiral notebook, and Ziegler would leaf through twenty or thirty pages at dinner, all of them crammed with new accounts and locations that had spilled from Bernie’s prodigious memory. Each time the contents of a notebook had been transferred into the computers, Jane would take the pages to the fireplace and burn them.

There was a whole day and night of scholarships. Any organization listed in the Foundation Directory that gave scholarships got a large donation earmarked for its permanent endowment. There were two days of donations to institutions that cared for orphans and unwanted children. Jane was astounded at how many there were. She spent two days on nonprofit homes and relief agencies for the elderly, and there was even a half day for animals.

Jane had begun the work with a cold, composed determination, but as the days went by, she began to feel a dreamlike disorientation. She had tried to keep up with Ziegler, but the lack of sleep was wearing down her certainty, and she began to work from habit. The walls of the garage and the bedrooms upstairs were now lined with boxes of bundled and sealed envelopes, and the living room closets were filling up with the overflow.

One morning when she joined Ziegler in the dining room, he was typing in a series of Web addresses. He would complete one, then wait a few seconds, then nod to himself happily.

“What’s that?” asked Jane.

“I’m looking over our shoulder,” he answered. “Before any check gets into the mail, I want to be sure the money got into the account first. If a check bounces, we’re not going to be around to cover it. Mr. Hagedorn and Mrs. Fuller aren’t going to answer their mail.”

“How does it look so far?”

“No mistakes, no problems with any of the big stuff: the hundred and ninety-two foundations, the fifty-six corporations, and the big trust accounts we set up are all solvent. Now all we’ve got to do is make payday before all these checks get stale and each of these accounts grows too much.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Jane. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t thought about that lately. What can we do about the profits that keep coming in?”

“Zilch,” he answered. “There’s no way to clear off a billion without leaving a few million in uncredited interest that will come in later. It might be what saves us. It takes a bit of time before the federal and state governments realize we’re not going to file tax returns, and the clock doesn’t start until next April. Foundations owe a one percent federal excise tax. The government wants it, but if the account still exists, they don’t get too alarmed. These crumbs and leftovers will probably buy us a year or two after that before the feds start looking for us in any way that matters. After five years, it becomes an unclaimed account. The state confiscates it, pays the feds off, and keeps the rest.”

“It’s like leaving an unfinished drink on the table,” said Jane. “The waiter thinks you’re coming back.”

“Right,” said Ziegler. “I hope giving it to them doesn’t bother you.”

“I’m not a big fan of governments,” said Jane. “But I like them better than gangsters. Wait. If we run out of charities, can we just slip some to governments?”

“Don’t even say it,” said Ziegler. “We’ve got to do everything the way people expect us to. Governments don’t like gifts. They like to snatch the money away from you.”

“Then let them,” she said. “What’s for today?”

“Problem assets.”

“What does that mean?”

“Bernie has been giving us clean, easy money as fast as we could spend it. But there are other things. He bought some land.”

“What’s the problem?”

“By definition, land is not something you can move from place to place, and you certainly can’t disguise it as something else. Converting it to cash isn’t easy. We can’t advertise it. Even if we found buyers in some yet-to-be invented quiet way, we can’t hang around for sixty-day escrows to close on a hundred and twenty pieces of property all over the country. And of course, the original deeds and papers are not at Bernie’s fingertips.”

“That shouldn’t matter. The sales must be recorded in county courthouses. He remembers the names, doesn’t he?”

“He’s Bernie the Elephant. He remembers the dates, prices, and map numbers.”

“Maybe we could put the land in the wills of dead people.”

Henry Ziegler squinted for a moment. “Not bad. We can leave it to organizations that can use it or sell it themselves.”

“What are the other problem assets?”

“He bought foreign bonds and stocks in foreign identities. It’s taken me a few hours to work my way through all of them, but I think I’m finished. I put in sell orders, with direct deposit to local banks. Then I requested that taxes be withheld by the banks before the money is sent to accounts in the U.S. That should take care of it. Then there’s the art.”

“Bernie bought art?”

“Afraid so,” said Ziegler. “Paintings. Mostly it was in the forties and fifties. It was expensive stuff then, so I shudder to think what it’s worth now.”

Jane frowned. “I can’t see Bernie buying paintings.”

“He went through art dealers in Europe—used them as brokers. It’s been done a lot. You can get one canvas that’s two feet wide, one foot high, and one inch thick, and you’ve stored five or six million. And finding an art dealer who doesn’t mind that the money is dirty is not exactly a head scratcher. If you say ‘tax dodge’ above a whisper, we’ll have six or seven of them lined up at the door, and two of them will know where you can get a Vermeer or a Titian that hasn’t been seen since the Allies bombed Dresden.”

“Where are the paintings?”

“In a vault. I can’t see us showing up at Sotheby’s to sell them off.”

Jane remembered the trips Bernie had made to meet Francesca Ogliaro in New York. “Is the vault in New York?”

“Yes,” said Ziegler. “And some of the paintings are stolen. When a painting by a major artist that’s been sitting in a vault for two generations hits the auction block, there are going to be TV cameras. Big players from all over the world will show up to bid. We’ve got about twenty of those. What we ought to do is burn them.”

“Do we know for sure that some are stolen?”

“Bernie thinks seven or eight, so it’s probably more.”

“Good,” said Jane. “We might be able to use that. Are there papers somewhere to show that different people bought them?”

“No,” said Ziegler. “He called himself Andrew Hewitt, set himself up with a few dealers, so the name had clout. They brought the deals to him. The dealers are all gone now—mostly dead.”

“Forget the dealers,” said Jane. “Even if they were alive, they wouldn’t come forward to say they sold stolen paintings.”

“It doesn’t get rid of the merchandise. There’s no way to avoid the publicity.”

“So let’s decide what we want it to be,” said Jane. “The fact that he bought all of them under the name Andrew Hewitt gives us a chance.”

“People are going to want to know all about Andrew Hewitt—where he got his money, where he lived, what he was like,” Henry said. “We can’t invent a person like him on short notice and expect he’ll stand up to the kind of scrutiny he’ll get. They’ll know it’s an alias.”

“Then what we need is a real person to put behind the alias. Can you get probate records on your computer?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Good. Find a person—man or woman—who left an art collection to a museum.”

“There must be hundreds,” he said. “Thousands.”

“Then be picky. We want one who doesn’t mention any other heirs in the papers. And look for signs that there was a lot of money. If possible, the person died some time ago, so the air will be clear.”

“I don’t see how this helps.”

“Andrew Hewitt was an alias this real art collector used to buy paintings. Who can quarrel with that? It’s true. When the collector died—which the collector we find did—the museums were supposed to get all the paintings, including the ones in the vault. Only he waited too long to tell anybody about them, because some were stolen.”

“But how do we spring the news? Who tells them?”

“Here’s the best we can do. As long as one of the paintings is stolen, there’s a reason for anyone who knew of it to want to be anonymous. The art collector had a friend who knew. The friend will write an anonymous letter to the museum today, explaining everything. He’s old now, and for umpteen years the secret has been weighing on him. He wants to get it off his chest. The museum will notify the authorities in New York, who will get a warrant to open the vault. The seven or eight will go back where they belong. The ones Bernie bought legitimately will go to the museum. The whole process might take years, but it will get sorted out.”

Ziegler gazed at her appreciatively. “It’s not bad. We don’t have to worry about faking an old document, because it’s just this old person writing an anonymous letter now—like he happened to have the missing codicil to his friend’s will.”

“Right,” said Jane. “But don’t you think we should hold off on the assets that have a bizarre side until we’ve gotten rid of the easy stuff? Why fool around with this when we still have stocks and bonds and things?”

Ziegler nodded as he typed some codes into his computer. “I agree.” He stopped and smiled at her. “I think we’re going to hit that point at about eight tonight.” He waited. “You hear what I said? We’ve written checks for fourteen point three billion dollars.”

“That’s why you were checking all those accounts when I came in?” said Jane. Her eyes had a glazed, faraway look. “It’s almost over?”

Ziegler nodded. “Bernie ran dry last night.”