Reversible Error

SIXTEEN

A ringing phone dragged Sid Amalfi up out of a drugged sleep. He checked the bedside clock-three-fifteen in the morning, the pit of the night. He fumbled for the phone, knocking over the bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand. His heart was pounding even before he answered.

"Sid? Dick. We got troubles, man. You gotta meet me now."

Amalfi struggled into a sitting position. "Now? For Chrissake, Dick, it's the middle of the night. What the fuck is going on?"

"I can't talk on the phone," said Manning, his voice tense. "You got to get over here right now."

Amalfi rubbed his face vigorously, trying to push away the urgent need for sleep, trying to straighten out the web of stories that he had told in the past few days, trying to stay alive.

"Ah… Dick, you want to give me a clue about what this is all about?"

"Fulton," said Manning. That was it, then. Amalfi had told Manning that Fulton had simply skipped at the hospital; there had been no opportunity to commit the murder they had planned. Now Manning had either found out that Fulton was not crooked or had discovered another way to get at him. In either case, it was essential for Amalfi to cover himself. Fulton knew all about him; Hrcany and IAD had the tape, so they knew everything too. His only out was to lay everything off on Manning. Then maybe… A plan started to jell in his sleep-addled mind. He said, "OK. Where?"

Manning gave him an address in an industrial area near Kennedy Airport. When Amalfi pulled up in his car thirty minutes later, Manning stepped out of the doorway to a welding shop and got into the passenger side.

"Jesus, I'm glad to see you!" Manning said.

Amalfi yawned hugely. "I'm falling out here. Wanna go get coffee? I can't keep my eyes open."

"No, we don't have time," said Manning. He looked down the street and checked the rear mirror.

"You gonna tell me what this is all about?" Amalfi asked. He yawned again. The sleeping pills were still dragging him down and he fought against their pull.

"Yeah," said Manning. "It's Fulton. He's working undercover."

Amalfi feigned vast surprise. "Jesus! That cocksucker! What're we gonna do?"

"He doesn't know that I know. I got him to come here. He should be here in half an hour. Look, when he gets here, you got to take him out."

"1 got to take him out? Why me?"

"Because I found out where he's got that rucking tape stashed. The one Tecumseh made."

"How the fuck did you find that out?" asked Amalfi suspiciously.

Manning grinned. "I got friends in high places, man. Anyway, I got to pick it up before anybody finds he's dead. That's why you got to do the job and I got to travel fast. Are you cool?"

Amalfi yawned again and nodded. This was moving a shade too quickly, but he thought he was still ahead. It might even work out better. When Fulton arrived, he'd tell him about Manning and they could pick him up with the tape in hand. Good.

Manning nudged him. Amalfi looked over and saw that he was holding out to him a.38 revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. "It's clean," Manning said. "One in the ear and it's all over. After I have the tape, with him gone they got horseshit on us."

Amalfi took the gun and put it in his jacket pocket.

"OK, give me your gun," said Manning.

Amalfi stifled a yawn and looked at Manning in surprise.

"Why the hell do you want my gun?"

"Because I don't have one. Shit, Sid, I'm so fucked up behind all this, I slipped the clean one into my holster and I was halfway here before I remembered. What's the difference? You got the clean one and I'll have yours. You can dump it on your way home. But I'm damned if I'm gonna do what I have to do bone-naked."

Amalfi shrugged and handed him his own.38 Chief's Special.

"When did you say Fulton was gonna get here?"

Manning looked at his watch. "Around twenty minutes. I'll be going now, OK?"

"Sure, Dick," said Amalfi. He settled himself into his seat and leaned back against the headrest. He felt a yawn coming on again, and this time he didn't stifle it.

Manning waited until Amalfi's mouth was all the way open and his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then he reached over and stuck the muzzle of Amalfi's gun into its owner's mouth and pulled the trigger.

Manning waited until the corpse of his former partner had stopped twitching, a surprisingly long time. Then he carefully searched the body and the car for recording devices. Finding none, he removed the clean.38 he had given Amalfi, pressed it into the corpse's right hand, and fired a shot out the open window into the blackness of a large junkyard across the street. Having ensured that Amalfi's hand would bear the microscopic chemical evidence produced by firing a revolver, he removed the clean gun, put it in his pocket, thoroughly wiped Amalfi's own.38, and placed it in the body's limp hand.

Manning left the car and stood in the darkened doorway of the welding shop. Ten minutes passed, then a car Manning recognized came slowly down the street. It parked behind Amalfi's car and Clay Fulton got out. Manning stepped out of the doorway and waved to him.

Clay Fulton saw Manning wave and pulled over to the curb. Fulton was tense and excited, but confident that this meeting was going to break the case open. During the call from Manning that had brought him here, Manning had cast broad hints about introducing him to his main man. He had also complained about Amalfi, that he was acting funny-nervous and distracted.

As well he should be, with a wire on him and hanging around with a cold-blooded shit-head like Dick Manning. Fulton reflected that this would probably be his last night under cover. Whatever happened, he was going to go to Denton in the morning, pull in the IAD team, and see where they stood. Now that IAD was involved, his own role was less necessary, but he felt that the possibility of uncovering Manning's backer was worth hanging on a little longer.

He stepped out of his car and looked around. A good neighborhood for something bad to happen. For the first time he felt a twinge of regret at having come alone. But, of course, that had been the whole point from the start. It was the most plausible thing about him undercover: he really was on his own.

And there was no way Manning could know he was undercover, at least not with enough certainty to act. The only people who could betray him were Denton and Karp. No problem there. And Amalfi. But Amalfi was hooked by IAD. And IAD guys didn't even talk to priests about what they did. So while there could be some additional risk from out of left field, it was a calculated risk that Fulton felt that he had to take.

"What's up?" said Fulton as Manning came toward him.

"What's up is, Sid ate his gun," said Manning, pointing to Amalfi's car. Fulton walked over to the driver's side and bent over to look in the window. It was obvious what had happened, but Fulton instinctively reached out to assure himself that there was no pulse in the man's neck. As he did so, Manning came up silently behind him and hit him as hard as he could on the back of the head with the clean pistol. Karp put the phone down hard, a mixture of annoyance and vague fear roiling his early-morning stomach. He drank some lukewarm coffee and chewed off a chunk of cold toasted bagel, which helped not a whit. Fulton was not to be found: not at the precinct, not at home, not at the various bars and restaurants that Karp knew about. OK, he was undercover, he had dropped from sight before this, but Karp knew that this time he was dangerously exposed.

Karp raised the phone again and dialed Bill Denton's private number, but put it down after the second ring. He was loath to call the chief of detectives, to tell him that the whole elaborate scheme to protect the police was blowing apart, until he had everything nailed down, and he could not do that without Fulton. On the other hand, Fulton might be in there with Denton right now, working on damage control, excluding Karp himself. Karp tried to turn those thoughts aside. Everybody was OK, nobody was screwing anybody, they'd get the bad guys in the end. Period. He decided to give it another day.

But he had to move; he was strangling at this desk, engulfed by the paper shadows of old crimes. He got up and stalked out of his office. Three people, including his secretary, tried to get his attention in the outer office, but he rushed past them, mumbling evasions.

His steps brought him, almost without thought, to the office of V.T. Newbury. This was a small boxlike affair, with a dusty window, tucked away in an obscure corridor of the sixth floor. Newbury was in, as he usually was. A specialist in fraud, and money laundering, and the sequestering of ill-gotten gains, he normally had little contact with the grungy realities of the Criminal Courts Bureau.

When Karp walked in, Newbury was at his desk, half-glasses perched on his chiseled nose, running lengths of the green-and-white-striped computer printout known as elephant toilet paper through his hands, and muttering to himself.

He looked up when he saw Karp, and flashed his perfect smile, then returned to making marks on the printout. Karp sank down in the rocking chair V.T. had provided for his visitors. Newbury had largely furnished his own office: battered wood-and-leather furniture, a worn Turkish rug on the floor, good small framed prints and watercolors on the walls, so that it looked more like the den of a not-very-successful country lawyer than the official seat of a New York assistant D.A. Karp often came here. V.T. was the only person in the building who neither wanted anything from him nor wanted to do anything to him.

"How's the war against crime going?" Newbury inquired, continuing his notations. "Not well, by the way you look."

"The usual shit," said Karp. "What're you doing?"

Newbury wrote down some figures and looked up. "Actually, I'm finishing up that thing you asked me to look into."

"What thing?"

"Oh, terrific! I'm ruining my eyes, not to mention having to entertain Horton for the weekend, and he's forgotten all about it."

"What are you talking about, V.T.? Who's Horton?"

"My cousin Horton. In order to get a look at this material, I've had to let him inveigle himself into a weekend at our place in Oyster Bay. A golf ball for a brain, which means I'm going to have to spend a weekend listening to how he birdied the bogey on the fourteenth hole. He married Amelia Preston, for whom at one time I myself had a moderate sneaker. I can't see how she puts up with it, although perhaps we can polish our relationship while he's out bogeying."

"You lost me, V.T. What does…?"

"Fane," said V.T. "The congressman and the dope murders? Hello…?"

"Oh, shit! Yeah. So what, did you get anything?"

"Yes, I did, although I don't know how useful it'll be to you. First of all, do you know what a leveraged buy-out is?"

Karp did not, and V.T. said, "It's simple in principle, complex in operation. Basically, a group of investors buy up enough of the public stock of a company to give them a controlling interest. They do that because they either think the company can be run better than current management is doing, or, more usually, they see a company that's undervalued on the market. They buy it, and then they sell it for a profit, sometimes a huge one. With me so far?

"The leverage part comes from the way they get the money to buy the stock. Essentially, they borrow it against the assets of the firm they're buying, and pay back the loans from the sale of the firm itself. Or, what they're starting to do, is go on the bond market with high-yield unclassified offerings, but-"

"So Fane has been doing this?" Karp interrupted.

"In a way, in a way. You understand that when a deal like this is going down, when the stock is in play, as they say, its price can go ballistic. And of course if the buyers tender for the stock above market value, you can make a fortune. Fane has been into some very good things. As has our friend Judge Nolan. In fact, in recent months three of the very same deals: Revere Semiconductor, Grant Foods, and Adams-Lycoming."

"That's not illegal, though, is it?"

"Who knows? It depends where they got their information, because they must have had it from somewhere. Insider trading: that's when someone who has advance-"

"I know what insider trading is," said Karp, thinking about Reedy and his lecture. But this thought brought another, and he said, "What about Agromont?"

Newbury cocked his head and regarded Karp narrowly. "Agromont. Well, well. You have been doing your homework." He tossed the printout onto the desk. "You don't need old V.T. anymore, if you're that well-connected."

"All I know is the name. I was at a party when Fane told Reedy that Agromont was a done deal."

"That's also very interesting. OK, the story is this. Agromont is a medium-size conglomerate. They're in food, machine tools, cosmetics, and at the time they also owned a good deal of New York real estate, mostly on the West Side. They had the old American Line pier. In any case, someone made a run on the stock last year-bid it up like crazy-but the company fought them off. Sold off some assets at fire-sale prices. A lot of people were left holding the bag."

"How so?" asked Karp.

"Well, if you've tied up a lot of capital in a big block of stock and you fail to get control of the company, then you can't realize your profits. Some people made a bundle by riding the play and getting out before the showdown. But the main people were left holding a big chunk of overvalued stock. Which has sunk since.

"So they can either take their loss or try again. And Cousin Horton is very much convinced that they are going to try again. Someone has been nibbling at their stock. Little bites from a dozen different buyers: not enough to put it in play, but more than it usually moves. That could have been the origin of your cryptic comment from Fane. Telling a friend that the stock was shortly to go into play and that he should get in long on it."

"So is Fane buying?"

"He's starting to, it appears. But most of his purchases will probably be through someone else. Would you like me to look into it?"

"No, what do I care what stocks he buys? I'm not the SEC. But…" Karp rocked and looked out V.T.'s window at the little park behind the courts building and the low tenements of Chinatown beyond it.

"Yes?" asked V.T.

"But what I'd really like to know is, could someone use this kind of stock manipulation to launder money, maybe dirty money?"

V.T. thought for a moment, sounding the tuneless hum he favored when in deep contemplation of chicanery. He said, "Well, what I'd do is, I'd take the dirty money in cash to an offshore bank in the islands, a bank I controlled. Then I'd lend the money to people who were in a position to rig the market, and who needed liquidity to do it, and were willing to trade information on deals at a very early stage. Having got that information, I would use whatever honest dollars I had to make a killing."

"Very neat, V.T.," said Karp, who could barely balance his checkbook, with sincere admiration. "Would it really work?"

"I don't see why not. Our fictive man is insulated from the dirty money entirely. The offshore bank made the loan. It's not required to tell anyone where its capital came from, which is the true charm of the islands. There'd be a dummy holding the passbook for the actual account, which, of course, would never be tapped directly. And the profits on the market are honest gain, the result of sophisticated analysis of trends guided by vast experience-or so my cousin is always telling me. Our man pays taxes on it too-he's no mobster.

"So he's as safe as the Morgan Bank. And, of course, since he's not paying a premium for the money, he can buy a lot more stock than his competitors in a bidding contest. The people he was backing would be murderous traders.

"The only possible hitch is if someone traces a cash deposit back to him-unlikely-or if whoever gives him his info rats him out as an inside trader to the feds or the Stock Exchange-slightly more likely."

"Uh-huh," said Karp. "Does Fane control an offshore bank?"

"Doesn't everyone? But, if so, it's improbable that the connection is direct. Let me check it out, though." He made a note in his diary with a silver pencil. "Anything else?"

"No, thanks a lot, V.T., this is great," said Karp. He stood up and made to leave, then paused. "Oh, yeah-who was it that tried to buy Agromont?" he asked.

"The main player was a slightly greasy and very wealthy little arb named Sergo. He also bought their West Side property and the pier." He saw the change in Karp's expression and asked, "A friend of yours?"

Karp said glumly, "We've met," waved good-bye, and stalked out. The implications of what he had learned from V.T. were still whirling around his brain when he entered his office again, to find Roland Hrcany waiting with an odd smile on his face. He was sitting at Karp's conference table and he had a cassette recorder placed in front of him.

Karp gestured at the recorder and said, "Is it time for our dance lesson? What're you up to, Roland?"

"It's a little surprise," said Hrcany. "See if you can recognize the lyrics." He pressed the play button and the conversation between Amalfi and Fulton on the fire stairs at Roosevelt Hospital filled the room, their speech hollow and echoing, like the voices of ghosts on old radio shows.

When it was done, Karp asked, "That's definitely top-forty, Roland. You mind telling me where you got it?"

"I got with IAD and wired Amalfi," said Hrcany.

Karp looked out the window and rubbed his face. "Why did you do that, Roland?" he asked in a tired voice.

"I got a tip from an informant that Amalfi and Fulton were both involved in these drug-lord hits," said Hrcany.

"And you didn't tell me about it."

"No," said Hrcany, beginning to feel uneasy. Karp was taking this altogether too calmly. "I thought, you know, you and Fulton…"

"Uh-huh. You thought that I was protecting Clay," said Karp. "That I was, ah, conspiring to cover up a bunch of homicides to protect a friend. No, it's OK," he added when Hrcany protested, "as a matter of fact I guess I was involved in something not too far from that. Good investigative zeal, Roland. I guess you were relieved to find that Clay was working undercover too. You've kept this pretty close, I guess?"

Hrcany nodded. "Just Waldbaum of IAD knows about it." He paused. "And the D.A."

Karp spun around and faced Hrcany, his eyes shooting sparks.

"You told Bloom! Why the fuck did you tell Bloom?"

"Shit, Butch! What was I supposed to do? I thought you were in the bag with Fulton. You said yourself, there's all kinds of serious players involved in this, and…" His eyes widened in horror. "You think the D.A. is…?"

"Great!" said Karp. "The penny drops. As a matter of fact, I don't think Mr. Bloom is working for a bunch of killers. But some of his friends might be, and Sanford Bloom never kept a secret for more than ten minutes in his whole life. He's a mouth on legs."

Karp rose and paced nervously back and forth. "Roland, didn't you think? Clay's out there exposed… Christ! When was this? When did you tell Bloom?"

"At the staff meeting-yesterday morning, about ten."

Karp sat down again and blew out his breath through puffed cheeks. "Then it's too late," he said. "I can't find him anywhere. They've got him."

He sat there for a while, looking out the window, unable to think of any constructive activity. He barely heard Hrcany's embarrassed leave-taking. After some indeterminate time he was roused by a tapping on his door. It was Doug Brenner, his driver. Karp remembered that he had made an appointment to meet Brenner and Marlene outside the building fifteen minutes ago, to run up to the Twenty-eighth Precinct for the sting on Meissner. He made some noises of acknowledgment, put on his jacket, and allowed Brenner to lead him away.

In the car Brenner said, "We'll never make it up to Harlem in time."

"Yes, we will," replied Marlene. "Use the siren."

Which they did, and did arrive at ten past noon, not too far off the appointed moment. Marlene secreted herself in an interrogation room while the two men went to the homicide squad room, to find Alan Meissner being one of the boys with the King Cole Trio.

Karp smiled all around. Maus finished a cop anecdote and everyone laughed. Then Karp said, "Well, we've invited Mr. Meissner here to help us out again. Art, you want to review this case?"

Dugman stood up and began, in a professorial tone quite removed from his usual cynical profanity, to outline a serial murder case. The case was wholly fictitious, having been adapted from a B movie Maus had seen on late TV recently, and cheerfully embellished by the detectives of the Two-eight.

When he had finished, Karp said, "Look, Alan, guys, this is going to take at least an hour-why don't we have lunch? We can order in sandwiches and drinks from that good deli on Amsterdam, my treat."

General agreement: Karp wrote the orders down on a slip of paper-pastrami on rye, corned beef, Cokes, Dr. Brown's. The detectives made themselves appear busy, thumbing through, stacking, and arranging piles of folders. Lanny Maus turned on a small cassette tape recorder, coughed into its microphone, said, "Testing, testing," and sang two bars of "She's So Fine" in a good falsetto. Laughter. He tossed the mike aside, but did not turn off the recorder.

Karp put an apologetic expression on his face and offered the lunch-order slip to Meissner, saying, "Would you mind calling these in, Alan? It'd save some time. The number's up on the wall by that phone."

Meissner was glad to help. He sat on the edge of the desk and dialed the number penciled on the wall. The phone rang twice and was picked up. A man's voice said, "Hello." Meissner thought it sounded vaguely familiar. Meissner said, "Is this the Amsterdam Deli?" The voice said, "Hello, can I help you?"

Meissner slammed the phone down with a bang. The detectives and Karp looked over at him mildly. His face was turning bright red.

"Something wrong, Alan?" asked Karp.

"You fucking son-of-a-bitch!" Meissner yelled. "You tried to trick me."

"I'm sorry?" said Karp. "What's the matter, don't they have any pastrami?"

"That wasn't the delicatessen, you phony bastard! That was him on the phone, the boyfriend. You set me up, you fucker!"

"Boyfriend? What boyfriend, Alan?" asked Karp.

"You know goddamn good and well what boyfriend!" screamed Meissner. He was standing less than a foot from Karp now, and little flecks of foam were jumping from his mouth onto Karp's suit coat. Karp flicked them off with his handkerchief and said, "Yes, I know what boyfriend, Alan, but I wonder how you know. Did you recognize his voice on the phone? From when he called, just before you murdered Ellen Wagner?"

Meissner uttered a strangled cry and leapt for Karp's throat. Karp batted his hands away, and in an instant Jeffers, moving faster than anything that large had a right to move, had Meissner locked in a chokehold with his feet dangling six inches off the floor.

Meissner was struggling wildly, kicking out at everything within reach, like a four-year-old in a tantrum. Jeffers grunted as a heel connected with his shin; he tightened his grip. Dugman moved in, and Karp saw that he had a leather sap in his hands.

"No, don't hurt him," Karp yelled. Dugman grimaced, but put the sap away and brought out cuffs. Working together, the three cops were finally able to get Meissner cuffed and forced down into a chair.

"He feisty, all right," said Jeffers, adjusting his rumpled suit. "Raping all them women must be good training."

Meissner stared up at Karp, his face flushed with exertion and contorted with impotent rage. "You can't do this," he shouted. "This is entrapment."

"No it's not, Alan," said Karp calmly. "It's called a spontaneous expression showing consciousness of guilt. You need to check your law books again. Art?"

Dugman formally rearrested Meissner for the Wagner homicide and read him his rights. Meissner did not take his eyes off Karp's face; the force of his silent hatred at last made Karp uncomfortable and he turned away, to see Marlene come running in.

Marlene looked at Meissner, waved gaily, and called out, "Hi, smarty-pants. Gotcha!"

At this, Meissner began shouting vile obscenities and threats. He continued to do so as two uniformed officers dragged him down to the precinct cells.

"My, he was upset," said Marlene. "And he seemed like such a calm, sophisticated type on the phone. Intelligent too. So, my hero, have we really got him?"

"Yeah, I have a good feeling about it," said Karp. "It's a solid consciousness-of-guilt case now. He just ran on spontaneously, which will be obvious from the tape we made. It's going to be real hard for anyone to defend against, and it'll stand up legally too. If I was his lawyer, I'd advise a cop-out."

"Which we won't accept," said Marlene firmly.

"Uh-uh. We hang tough on the top count. You earned it. Who're you calling?"

Marlene said, "JoAnne Caputo. And the others. They could use a laugh."

While Marlene made her calls, Karp sought out Art Dugman in his tiny cell of an office. Neat, was his first impression, and reminiscent of a former age. Awards on the wall, pictures of PAL teams, photographs of young black patrolmen in the fifties, unsmiling and austere. Pride of place on the wall went to a framed exhibit of four deformed bullets: neatly typed legends beneath them set out the circumstances in which they had been, on separate occasions, shot into and yanked out of the body of Art Dugman.

On the uncluttered desk stood a dozen or so photographs of family members, most of which showed children in graduation gowns representing successive levels of education. Karp had not thought of Dugman as a family man: he seemed rather to have been exuded from the streets, living entirely on the underlife of Harlem, like some beneficent parasite.

After an interlude of stiff conversation about the Meissner case, about the job, and about sports, Karp turned to the subject of his visit, asking, with no great emphasis, whether Clay Fulton's whereabouts were known.

Dugman's deep yellowish eyes narrowed. "Shit, I don't know where the fuck he is. It ain't my turn to watch him. Maybe the Bahamas. Brazil."

Karp took a deep breath, stared briefly into the abyss, and told Dugman the whole story: Fulton's odd behavior, the searing interview with the chief of detectives, the swearing to secrecy, the revelations of Tecumseh, the discoveries about Manning and Amalfi and the suspicions about Fane.

Dugman's face was as impassive as a cypress tree for the duration of the narrative. Then he began to make a peculiar sound deep in his gullet, a rhythmic buzzing that Karp ultimately deciphered as a chuckle, a sound that at last broke out into frank laughter.

He laughed until tears streamed from his eyes, interspersing the roars with exclamations such as "He got over me, that boy," and "Son-of-a-bitch tricky damn mother-fucker," laughed until Karp was made uneasy and said, "I don't see what's so funny, Art. We're in deep shit, here."

Dugman subsided and wiped his eyes with a pearly silk handkerchief. "Yeah, well, whatever, it's better than what I thought it was. God damn!"

"I'm glad you're glad," said Karp, not without asperity, "but Clay's still missing, and I'm getting worried."

"Ah, shit, Karp, don't worry about the Loo," said Dugman. "Man can take care of himself. He's probably cooping it in some damn museum. He done it before. He'll turn up."

Karp shook his head. "He's not cooping. I'm almost certain somebody tipped the bad guys he was working for the chief. He didn't turn up at home last night. Or call in. Martha's real worried."

Dugman's face clouded. "You think somebody snatched an NYPD detective lieutenant?"

"It could happen, with these shitheads. They think they can do what the fuck they want. Let me say this: I hope to God he's just kidnapped."

Dugman snatched up his phone, punched in the familiar number of the Thirty-second Precinct, and asked to speak to Detective Amalfi. He listened for a minute in silence. "When?" he said. Then, "Is Manning around? Uh-hunh. No, no message."

He hung up and when he looked at Karp his jaw was tight and twitching. "Amalfi bit his gun last night. Manning's got a regular day off, but he ain't at home."

"Manning's got him, then," said Karp.

"Not for long, the motherfucker!" said Dugman ferociously. "We gonna turn this whole city upside down."

"I don't think so, Art," said Karp. "I think we're gonna have to do this ourselves, real quiet, and I think Clay would agree."

"You saying what I think you're saying? That the chief'd let a lieutenant go down? Someone like Clay Fulton?"

"I think he'd let a bus full of lieutenants go down on this one, Art. I don't think he's thinking all that straight, if you want to know. Sure, he wants the killings stopped, but after that his first priority is to protect the department. That's why this whole cockamamie business with Clay going under started in the first place."

Dugman took a cigar from his breast pocket, stripped off the cellophane, and lit it. He sat contemplating his blue smoke for a while. Then he said, "OK, let's start that way. Manning's place. Club Mecca. Choo Willis. His boys. We can do that much, just the three of us. But if that draws a blank…"

"If it does, then we'll worry," said Karp. "And, Art, call me anytime you get anything." There was a message from V.T. Newbury waiting for Karp when he got back from Harlem. He went to V.T.'s office and found him virtually unmoved from where he had been that morning, although looking rather more tired.

"I think I have your answer," he announced when Karp had seated himself in the rocking chair.

"That was fast," said Karp. "What's the answer?"

"What's the question?" V.T. shot back with a wan smile. "But really, what you said about Agromont was the key. So I thought of Poppie Foote."

"Poopie what?"

"Poppie Foote. We were at school together. He married my sister Emily's best friend, Anne Kring. Surely I've mentioned Poppie?"

"Not recently, V.T.," said Karp. "But you were saying…"

"Yes, I recalled that he'd touted the stock last year when it was in play. He's a specialist at Bache and he handles Agromont. In any case, here's the story. As I said before, when the takeover bid went sour last year, half a dozen people were left holding the bag in a big way, including Mr. Sergo and your congressman, but it was a lot worse than I thought. Essentially, they had leveraged everything they owned; the notes were coming due, the market was down generally, so even if they sold out, they couldn't get clear. The Street was talking about Sergo going belly-up, in fact.

"But starting about ten months ago, Sergo got cured in a big way. He was flush with liquidity and back in action. I don't have the details on Fane, but my sense is, the same thing happened to him. So the question is, where did the money come from?"

"Where indeed?"

"It came from offshore, as I surmised earlier. A brass-plate operation in the Caymans called Burlingame Imperial, Ltd. The rumors are that it's a way for people in the U.K. to play the American market without their tax people knowing about it. Everyone thought Sergo was very clever for tapping this loot."

"And is it British money?"

"One doubts it. The major British players don't seem to be involved. But it could be the royal family for all I know. The darker streams of international finance flow very deep. Or maybe Sergo started the rumor. Oh, and this too: the place didn't exist a year ago. Poppie knows that for a fact."

Karp nodded. "And who owns this ghost bank?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter who owns it. These places are always owned on paper by secretaries and maiden aunts in nursing homes. The issue is who controls it, and that's terribly hard to discover. That's why they're located offshore. But I can tell you who did the legal work involved in chartering it."

"Who was that?" Karp asked, almost knowing.

"Your new friend Mr. Richard Reedy."