Numbered Account

CHAPTER 58

Caspar Burki had an appointment to keep. That much Nick knew for certain. The old man walked with his head bowed and his shoulders pressed forward as if fighting a rising wind. The rhythm of his feet assumed a perfect cadence, and Nick fell into his step, matching him stride for stride. He listened to the steady tap of his own feet on the wet cobblestones and remembered learning to march at Brown Field in Quantico, Virginia. He could practically hear the sergeant instructor’s strained voice yelling at him, even now.

What are you, Neumann? A walkie-talkie? Keep your mouth shut and your eyes straight ahead. That’s right, troop. Hands cupped to the crease of your trousers, heels to the ground! Left, left, left right left.

Nick maintained a cautious distance, imagining a taut fifty-foot rope strung between him and Burki. He followed the spindly man down the Niederdorfstrasse toward Central, and from there across the bridge toward the Bahnhofplatz. He was sure Burki was heading for the main station, but then Burki veered to the right toward the Swiss National Museum. His path skirted the Platzspitz, taking him north along the banks of the river Limmat. Nick had no idea where Burki was going.

The city took on an unsettled feeling. Nick passed an abandoned factory, windows broken and doors boarded up, and a deserted apartment building wrapped in colorful graffiti. He hadn’t known Zurich hid such run-down neighborhoods. Clusters of kids, mostly in their teens, cropped up on the sidewalk. Some were headed in the opposite direction, and they stared at Nick, with his short hair and clean clothing, with undisguised contempt. The sidewalk grew dirtier, littered with empty candy wrappers, crushed soda cans, and a million cigarette butts. Soon, he wasn’t able to walk without stepping in a pile of refuse.

“He has to be near the source,” Yogi Bauer had said.

Nick slowed as he saw Caspar Burki cross a wooden footbridge that spanned the Limmat. A ragged assortment of lowlifes crowded the railing. Ill-shaven men wrapped in scarred leather coats, grubby women bundled in frayed sweaters. Burki hunched his shoulders, as if trying to make himself thinner, less obtrusive than he already was, and walked between them. Nick could hear the planks rattle under the old man’s tread, and in their staccato stamp he felt the fluttering of his own hollow stomach. He knew where the bridge led. Letten. The city’s public shooting gallery. Caspar Burki’s source.

Nick crossed the bridge, working hard not to appear as anxious as he felt. A stubby, bearded man stepped in his path. “Hey, Johnny Handsome,” the man said to Nick, “you sure you’re in the right place? We don’t give manicures around here.” He smiled, revealing a dingy set of teeth, then stepped closer. “Fifty francs. That’s as low as I’ll go. You won’t find any better. Not today. Not when there’s a drought.”

Nick jabbed two fingers into the man’s chest, ready to take him down. “I’m already taken care of. Thanks anyway.”

He retreated easily, lifting his arms in surrender. “When you come back, it’ll be seventy francs. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Nick walked past him, concerned that he might lose sight of Caspar Burki. He asked himself what he was doing here. What could he expect to learn from a junkie? He inched by a teenage girl squatting on her haunches at the top of the far steps. She held a syringe in her hand and had just found a vein to slide the needle into. Drops of blood fell from her arm, spattering the cement. He descended the steps at the far side of the bridge and took his first look at the abandoned station.

It was a picture as foreign as the surface of the moon.

A restless tide of shabby men and women ambled back and forth across a wide cement platform. There were around a hundred of them, maybe more, and they were arranged into small encampments of five or six persons. Here and there, fires burned from rusted oil barrels. A swamplike haze hovered between platform and ceiling. Above his head, spray painted in cheap black Krylon, were the words “Welcome to Babylon.”

The place was squalor. It was death.

Nick saw that Burki had reached his destination—a circle of doddering addicts his own age at the far end of the station. A scrawny hen of a woman was preparing a dose of heroin for a man who didn’t look much different from Burki. Shorter maybe, but just as thin and with that same starved look to his eyes. The “nurse” rolled up the man’s sleeve and laid his bony arm across a slapdash wooden table. She tied a short length of rubber tubing around his arm, snapping at his veins to make them stand out more prominently. Satisfied, she popped the needle into his arm. She pulled back the syringe to allow his blood to mix with the opiate, then patiently pumped the drug into his arm. With maybe an eighth of the bloody payload remaining, she withdrew the syringe from the addict’s arm, balled her fist, then jabbed the needle into her own arm. A second later, she pressed the plunger, mixing the addict’s opiated blood with her own. Finished, she tossed the used needle into a white plastic bag with a Red Cross decal on it. The “nurse” raised her forearm to her bicep, as if she had just received her annual flu shot, said a few words to the addict, then leaned over and gave him a polite peck on each cheek. Decorum. The addict lurched away from the makeshift table, and Caspar Burki stepped forward to take his place.

Nick hung back for a long second. He realized that it wouldn’t be any good talking to Burki after he’d gotten his dose and fixed. His only hope was to move quickly and get ahold of the old man before he shot up. He wasn’t sure how to intervene. He’d figure it out when he got there.

Nick crossed the platform as quickly as he could. He tried hard not to look at the hollow-eyed men and women combing their bodies for veins firm enough to fix in. Still, with a fascination he could only label macabre, he was unable to shut his eyes. A teenager had tapped out a vein on his lower neck and was showing his buddy where to put the needle. A middle-aged woman had lowered her pants and sat legs splayed on the cement floor while she shot up in the crook of her thigh. A waifish girl of five or six sat next to her. Helluva place to bring your kid on a Sunday afternoon.

A squad of policemen loitered at the far end of the station—Sondercommandos, by the blue riot gear they sported. They smoked, arms resting easily on the butts of their submachine guns, backs turned to their charges. This wasn’t their battle. The city preferred to gather its addicts in one place where it could keep an eye on them. Containment without confrontation: the Swiss way.

Nick reached the unsteady table just as Burki was taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeve. He took a hundred francs from his wallet and handed it to the wrinkled woman administering the shots. “This is for my friend Caspar. That should be good for two fixes, right?”

Burki looked at him and said, “Who the hell are you?”

The woman snatched the bill from Nick’s hand and said, “Are you crazy, Cappy? The boy wants to buy you a present. Take it.”

Nick said, “I need to talk to you for a few minutes, Mr. Burki. About some mutual friends. It won’t take long, but I’d prefer to speak with you before-” his hands searched the air for the right words, “before you do this. If you don’t mind.”

Burki hesitated for a moment. His eyes shifted between Nick and the scraggly woman. “Mutual friends? Like who?”

“Yogi Bauer, for one. I had a few drinks with him last night.”

“Poor Yogi. Pity what alcohol will do to you.” Burki squinted his eyes. “You’re Neumann’s boy. He warned me about you.”

Nick said yes, he was Alex Neumann’s son, and in a calm voice introduced himself. “I work at the United Swiss Bank. I have a few questions about Allen Soufi.”

Burki grunted. “Don’t know the man. Now run along and get out of here. Be a good boy and go home to your mommy. It’s nap time.”

The “nurse” laughed hysterically. Nick told her to give him his money back and when he had it, grabbed Burki by the arm and backed him up a few steps. “Listen, you either talk to me now and take advantage of my goodwill, or I’m going to drag you over to the boys in the blue and tell them you’re a thief.” Nick crumpled up the hundred-franc note and stuffed it into Burki’s hand. “Understand me?”

Burki spat in his face. “You’re a bastard. Like your father.”

“Believe it,” said Nick, and wiping the saliva from his cheek, he took his first close look at Burki. The man’s skin was a decaying parchment, dotted with open sores and stretched tight across his skull. His eyes were sunken blue orbs. His upper lip was split, and a tooth black with rot shone beneath it. He was a long way down the track.

Suddenly, Burki relaxed and shrugged his shoulders. “Give me a little taste now and I’ll talk to you. I’m afraid I can’t wait much longer. Wouldn’t be any good to you then, would I?”

“You’ve got your hundred. You can wait. Maybe I’ll throw in a little extra because I appreciate what a good memory you have. Deal?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure, go home, take a hot shower, and curl up with a good book. I’ll walk you back to make sure you get there safely.”

Burki swore under his breath, then grabbed his coat from the wooden trestle and put it on. He motioned for Nick to follow him and led the way to the back wall of the station. He cleared away a spot with his feet and sat down. Stifling his every survivor’s instinct, Nick cleared his own small patch and sat down.

“Allen Soufi,” Nick repeated. “Tell me about him.”

“Why do you want to know about Soufi?” Burki asked. “What brought you to me for God’s sake?”

“I’ve been checking some of the papers my father wrote just before he was murdered. Soufi figures prominently in them. I saw that you recommended him as a client to the Los Angeles branch of USB. I thought that you might have known him pretty well.”

“Mr. Allen Soufi. That goes back a ways.” He reached into his jacket and took out a pack of cigarettes. His hand shook as he lit one. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

Burki inhaled for a full five seconds. “You’re a man of your word, are you? You’ll keep your end of the bargain?”

Nick took out another hundred-franc note, folded it, and slipped it into his own breast pocket. “Your reward.”

Burki hesitated, eyeing the bill, then began talking.

“Soufi was one of my clients,” said Burki. “Kept a good-size chunk of his fortune with us. Around thirty million francs, if I’m not mistaken.”

“What do you mean he was one of your clients?”

“I was Allen Soufi’s portfolio manager. Of course, he held a numbered account—but I knew his name.”

Nick thought back to the list of portfolio managers attached to Mevlevi’s file. He could not recall having seen the name Burki, or the more distinctive Caspar.

Burki said, “One day my old boss comes in and asks me to recommend Soufi to your father. Told me Soufi wanted to do business with the Los Angeles branch.”

“Who was your boss?”

“He still works at the bank. His name is Armin Schweitzer.”

“Schweitzer told you to recommend Soufi to my father?”

Burki nodded. “Right away I knew not to ask why. I mean, there could only be one reason for Armin to call me.” He spread his hands in a great arc. “Distance. Separating the old man from the client.”

“The old man?”

“Kaiser. I mean, who else got him out of the mess back in London town? Schweitzer was Kaiser’s boy. He got all the nasty jobs.”

“You’re saying Schweitzer asked you to recommend Allen Soufi to my father just to distance Wolfgang Kaiser from the entire affair?”

“Benefit of my superb hindsight. At the time I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just found it a little strange that Soufi hadn’t asked me for the introduction. He never said a word about Los Angeles.”

Of course, he didn’t, thought Nick. The big plans went through Kaiser.

“Well, I didn’t make a stink of things. I did what I was told and forgot about it. Wrote a letter: ‘Dear Alex, following individual is a client of mine, someone who has worked with the bank in the past, please extend your full services to him. Any questions or references please revert back. Sincerely, Cap.’ End of letter. I was happy to be of service. Loyal soldier, that’s me.”

“And that was the end of it?” Nick asked, knowing full well it wasn’t.

Burki didn’t answer. His eyelids closed and his breathing slowed. Suddenly, he jerked violently and his eyes opened. He brought his cigarette to his mouth and inhaled desperately.

Nick looked away, seized by a profound sense of the absurd. His entire world was off-kilter. Sitting in a decrepit shooting gallery, freezing his ass off, talking to an aging junkie, and actually entertaining hopes that he might get a measure of truth from him. Anna had been right, hadn’t she? He was obsessed. How else could he explain bringing himself to this place?

“If only,” Burki snorted, unaware of his lapse. “Six or seven months passed. One day your father rings me up directly. He was curious if I knew more about Allen Soufi than I had mentioned in my introductory letter. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. ‘He’s doing too much business,’ said your father. I wondered, ‘How could anybody do too much business?’ “

Nick was puzzled, but only for a moment. “My father was referring to Goldluxe?”

Burki smiled queerly, as if displeased that Nick knew so much. “Yes, it was about Goldluxe.”

“Go on.” Dusk was falling. More people streamed into the abandoned station.

“Allen Soufi owned a chain of jewelry stores in Los Angeles: Goldluxe, Inc. He wanted USB to be his bank of record. Take deposits, pay his bills, establish letters of credit to finance imports. Alex asked me what exactly I knew about Soufi, and I told him everything—well, almost everything. Soufi was a Middle Eastern client with around thirty million francs on deposit at the bank. Not a man to toy with. I told your father to do as he says. But, Alex, him listen? Never! It wasn’t long before Schweitzer called and started pounding me for information about your father. ‘What did Alex Neumann say about Soufi? Did he mention any problems?’ I told Schweitzer to get off my back. I said your dad had called once, that was it.”

“What was Goldluxe up to?”

Burki ignored the question. He took out his pack of cigarettes and tried to extract one. He couldn’t. His hand was shaking too violently. He dropped the pack of cigarettes, then looked at Nick. “Kid, you can’t keep me waiting. Now’s the time. Understand?”

Nick picked up the pack of cigarettes, lit one, and put it in Burki’s mouth. “You’ve got to stay with me a little longer. Just till we get to the end of this.”

Burki closed his eyes and inhaled. Buoyed by the blast of nicotine, he went on. “Next time I was in Zurich, Schweitzer and I went out for a night on the town. Armin didn’t have anyone to go home to—that was his choice. My wife had divorced me long before. We started at the Kronenhalle, ran down to the Old Fashioned, and ended the night at the King’s Club, totally bombed, a couple of fancy women on our arms. It was November 24, 1979, my thirty-eighth birthday.”

Nick looked at Burki more closely. The man was only fifty-eight years old. My God, he looked seventy if he looked a day. Despite the cold, a sheen of perspiration matted his features. He was starting to hurt.

“We’d already had a couple drinks when I brought up Soufi. ‘Whatever happened between him and Alex Neumann?’ I asked. I wasn’t really curious one way or the other, just making conversation. Well, Schweitzer turned red, and then green, blew a fucking gasket. Alex Neumann this, Alex Neumann that, arrogant bastard, elitist, above the rules, doesn’t take orders from anyone, out of control. On and on, for an hour. Jesus, did he have a hard-on for your father! Finally, I calmed him down and got the whole story out of him.

“Seems your father met with Soufi once, thought he was okay—no more crooked than the next guy—and set him up with a numbered account. A little later he took on Goldluxe as a standard commercial account. Goldluxe sold gold jewelry, mostly small stuff—chains, wedding rings, pendants, cheap crap. For a while, everything went swimmingly. But soon Alex noticed that these four stores were generating over two hundred thousand dollars a week in sales. That’s eight hundred grand a month, near ten million if they kept it up for the year. I guess your dad went down to the stores, introduced himself, and had a look around. After that, the jig was up PDQ.”

Nick recalled his father’s entry regarding a company visit to Goldluxe. “Weren’t the stores selling jewelry?”

“Oh sure,” said Burki. “They were selling jewelry—a few necklaces here, a bracelet there. But if you want to sell two hundred thousand dollars a week of gold trinkets, you have to move some serious merchandise. These were rinky-dink little stores, maybe a thousand square feet each.”

“So Goldluxe was a front?”

“Goldluxe was a sophisticated operation for laundering large amounts of cash. Now give me my fucking fix, would you? You’re hurting me bad. Just go on up to Gerda and ask her to make me a dose. I can give it to myself.”

Nick was growing cold and impatient. His butt felt like it was frozen to the ground. No way he was going to give Burki a fix now. That would be the end of their conversation. He took out the folded one-hundred-franc banknote and handed it to the heroin addict. “Hold on, Cappy. Keep giving me what I need. We’re almost there. Tell me how the operation worked.”

Burki fingered the crisp note. His dead eyes showed a spark of life. “First you have to realize that Goldluxe was sitting on a mountain of cash that they didn’t know what to do with. They needed a long-term setup that would allow them to deposit all their cash as it came in. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Here’s how it worked: USB opened a letter of credit on behalf of Goldluxe to a supplier of gold in Buenos Aires for, say, five hundred thousand dollars—that means that when the South American company sends the gold to Goldluxe in Los Angeles, the bank promises to pay them for the shipment. The company in Argentina exports the gold all right, but not five hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Oh, no. They only send about fifty thousand worth.”

“But fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold is going to weigh a lot less than five hundred thousand worth,” Nick protested. He remembered seeing the company name El Oro de los Andes.

“Very good,” said Burki, raising a finger as if to say “Point, Neumann.” “To make up the difference in weight for our friends in customs, the company in Buenos Aires threw in some lead. No problem. Shipments of precious metals aren’t normally examined by customs authorities. As long as the papers match, and the receiving party verifies that the shipment is good, the bank is cleared to make payment of the letter of credit.”

“So why does Goldluxe want to pay a company in Buenos Aires five hundred thousand dollars for gold they didn’t receive?”

Burki tried to laugh but ended up coughing violently. After a minute he was able to say, “Because Goldluxe has too much cash. They’re naughty boys. They need a way to clean it up.”

“I don’t exactly follow.”

“It’s actually very easy. Remember what I told you before—Goldluxe is sitting on a million dollars in cash. They start by importing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold. That’s their inventory.”

Nick was beginning to catch on to the game. “But on their books they list the cost of inventory as five hundred thousand dollars. Just like the import documents say.”

Burki nodded. “Goldluxe has to make it look like their stores are selling a million dollars’ retail worth of gold jewelry. So they mark up the value of the inventory to a million dollars and sell it out the door. By selling, I mean they generate a stack of bogus sales receipts a mile high. Remember they only really have fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold at cost. About a hundred thousand at full retail markup. They take the phony sales receipts and record them in the general ledger. With their books showing sales of one million dollars, they can take their cash to the bank and legitimately deposit it.”

Nick shuddered, seeing how simple the plan was. “Where was the money coming from?”

“I’ve only seen two businesses that generate that kind of cash: casino gambling and drugs. I’ve never heard of Allen Soufi in Las Vegas, have you?”

Nick smiled grimly. “So the idea is to piggyback the laundering operation on top of the legitimate business.”

“Bravo,” said Burki. “Once the million dollars is in the bank, USB pays off the letter of credit to the company in Argentina—which Soufi, naturally, controls. And the other five hundred grand is banked as Goldluxe’s profit. Soufi wired as much as he wanted to his accounts in London and Switzerland twice a week.”

“Twice a week?” asked Nick.

“He was a punctual bastard, I’ll give him that much, your Allen Soufi.”

“And my father?”

“Alex blew the whistle. He asked too many questions. When he figured out what they were doing, he threatened to close the account. Two months after my dinner with Schweitzer, your father was dead.” Burki pointed a finger at Nick. “Don’t ever tell a man like Soufi, a professional running a very serious operation all over the world, to fuck off.”

“His name wasn’t really Allen Soufi, was it?” Nick asked, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it, needing to have another human voice tell him he wasn’t crazy.

“What do you care?” asked Burki, pushing himself shakily to his feet. “That’s it, kid. Now get the fuck out of here and let me get on with my business.”

Nick put a hand on his shoulder and brought him back down to the ground. “I mean you said he was my Allen Soufi. You said I could call him that if I wanted to. What was his real name?”

“Cost you another hundred francs. A man’s gotta live.”

Or die. Nick pulled out his wallet and gave Burki his money. “Give me his name.”

Burki crumpled it up into his left hand. “No one you’ve ever heard of. A Turkish thug. Mevlevi was his name. Ali Mevlevi.”