Black Market (10 page)

It took thirty minutes more of cajoling, threatening, and screaming at Marqueza, thirty grueling minutes in which Carroll's voice grew hoarse and his face turned red, thirty minutes during which his shirt stuck to his sweaty body. Finally Isabella Marqueza stood up and shouted at him.

“
Monserrat had nothing to do with it!
He doesn't understand it, either… Nobody understands what the bombing is all about. He's looking for Green Band, too!
Monserrat is looking for them, too!
”

How do you
know
that, Isabella? How do you
know
what Monserrat is doing? You must have seen him!”

The woman clapped her hand across her hollow, darkened eyes. “I
haven't
seen him! I
don't
see him. Not ever.”

“Then how do you know?”

“There are telephone messages. There are sometimes whispers in private places.
Nobody
sees Monserrat.”

“Where is he, Isabella? Is he here in New York? Where the hell is he?

The South American woman shook her head stubbornly. “I don't know that, either.”

“What does Monserrat look like these days?”

“How should I know that? How should I know anything like that? He changes. Monserrat is always changing. Sometimes dark hair, a mustache. Sometimes gray hair. Dark glasses. Sometimes a beard.” She paused. “Monserrat doesn't have a face.”

Now conscious of having said too much, Isabella Marqueza had begun to sob loudly. Carroll sat back and rested his head against the grimy office wall. She didn't know anything more; he was almost certain he'd gone as far with her as he could possibly go.

Nobody had anything concrete about Green Band. Only that wasn't possible. Somebody had to know what the hell Green Band wanted.

But who?

Carroll looked up at the interrogation room ceiling before he shut his sore and heavy eyes.

Faded, yellowing newspapers, at least a dozen different ones dated October 25, 1929, were spread haphazardly across a heavy oak library-style worktable. The thirty- and forty-point headlines were as jarring now as they must have been fifty-odd years before.

WORST STOCK CRASH EVER; 12,894,650-SHARE

DAY SWAMPS MARKET; LEADERS CONFER, FIND

CONDITIONS SOUND.

WALL STREET PANIC! RECORD SELLING OF STOCKS!

HEAVY FALL IN PRICES!

STOCK PRICES SLUMP $14,000,000,000 IN

NATIONWIDE STAMPEDE TO UNLOAD; BANKERS TO

SUPPORT MARKET TODAY.

PRICES OF STOCKS CRASH IN HEAVY LIQUIDATION,

TOTAL DROP OF BILLIONS.

TWO MILLION SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES

SOLD IN THE FINAL HOUR IN RECORD DECLINE!

MANY INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTS WIPED OUT

COMPLETELY!

WHEAT SMASHED! CHICAGO PIT IN TURMOIL!

HOOVER PROMISES BUSINESS OF THE COUNTRY IS

STILL SOUND AND PROSPEROUS!

Caitlin Dillon finally stood up from the worktable and its musty newspaper clippings. She stretched her arms high over her head and sighed. She was on the fifth floor on 13 Wall Street, with Anton Birnbaum from the New York Stock Exchange Steering Committee.

Anton Birnbaum was one of America 's true financial geniuses, a wizard. If anyone understood that precarious castle of cards called Wall Street, it was Birnbaum. He had started, Caitlin knew, as an insignificant office boy at the age of eleven. Then he'd worked his way up through the market hierarchy to control his own huge investment house. Caitlin respected him more than any other man in the money business. Even at eighty-three his mind remained as sharp as a blade, and a mischievous light still burned in his eyes. She knew that now and then Anton Birnbaum looked her over appraisingly, delighted to be in the company of a young, attractive, and undeniably sharp-witted woman.

Once, there had even been a bizarre rumor on Wall Street that Birnbaum might be having a final fling with Caitlin Dillon. The relentless, often ridiculous gossip on the male-dominated Street was perhaps the most difficult business reality for any woman to face or stomach. If a woman broker or lawyer was seen having drinks or dinner with a man, it was assumed they were having a romance. Early on, Caitlin had realized that the sleazy, degrading practice was the way some men reduced the threat women posed to their power base on Wall Street.

Actually, Caitlin had met Anton Birnbaum years before, while she was still at Wharton. Her thesis adviser had invited the financier for a guest lecture during her final year. After one of his characteristically iconoclastic talks, Birnbaum had consented to private sessions with a few of the business school's brightest students. One of them turned out to be Caitlin Dillon, about whom Birnbaum later told her adviser: “She is extremely intense, and quite brilliant. Her only flaw is that she is beautiful. I mean that quite seriously. It will be a problem for her on Wall Street. It will be a serious handicap.”

When Caitlin Dillon graduated from Wharton, Anton Birnbaum nevertheless hired her as an assistant at his brokerage firm. Within a year Caitlin was one of his personal assistants. Unlike many of the people he hired, Caitlin would disagree with the great financier when she felt he was off base. Early in 1978 she correctly called the market bottom and then the top right before the bloody October massacre. Anton Birnbaum began to listen even more closely to his young, and still very intense, assistant after that.

During that period, Caitlin also began to make the Wall Street and Washington connections she needed for the future. Her first job with Anton Birnbaum provided an education she couldn't have paid to receive. Caitlin found the financier totally impossible to work for, but somehow she worked for him, Which proved to Birnbaum that she was as outstanding as he had initially thought she was.

“Anton, who would benefit from a stock market crash right now? Let's make ourselves a complete list, a physical list, as some kind of starting place.”

“All right, let's explore that avenue, then. People who would benefit from a market crash?” Birnbaum took a legal pad and pencil in hand. “A multinational that has a huge discrepancy to hide?”

“That's one. Or the Soviets. They'd possibly benefit-in terms of world prestige, anyway…”

“Then perhaps one of the Third World madmen? I believe Qaddafi is psychologically capable of something like this. Perhaps capable of getting the necessary financing as well.”

Caitlin looked at her watch, a functional, ten-year-old Bulova, a gift from her father one Christmas back home in Ohio. “I don't know what to try next. What are they waiting for? What in God's name happens when the market opens on Monday?”

Birnbaum took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and rubbed the bridge of his bulbous nose, which was reddened and deeply indented. “Will the market even open, Caitlin? The French want it to. They're insisting they will open in Paris. I don't know, though. Perhaps it's one of their typical bluffs.”

“Which means the Arabs want their French banks open. Some toady in Paris wants to take advantage of this awful situation-or hopes to get some of the money out before there's a complete panic.”

Birnbaum replaced his glasses and gazed at Caitlin for a moment. Then he gave one of his characteristic shrugs, a huffy gesture of the shoulders that was barely perceptible. “President Kearney is at least talking with the French. They've never appreciated him, though. We haven't been able to placate them since Kissinger.”

“What about London? What about Geneva? How about right here in New York?”

“They're all watching France, I'm afraid. France is threatening to open its market, business as usual on Monday. The French, my dear, are being carefully, carefully orchestrated. But by whom? And for what possible reason? What is coming next?” He placed his fingertips together, making a small cathedral of his ancient hands. He narrowed his eyes and looked thoughtfully at Caitlin.

Caitlin and the old man were quiet for several moments. Over the years they had become comfortable with long periods of silent thought when they were examining a problem together. Caitlin watched as the financier took out a cigar, his only remaining vice, and stroked and lit it methodically.

Within moments the room was filled with a soft blue fog. Birnbaum studied the glowing tip of the cigar, then set it down in a well-worn brass ashtray.

“I'll tell you something, my dear. In all my years on the Street, I have never felt this apprehensive. Not even in October of 1929.”

Bendel's on Fifty-seventh Street had been open all day Sunday for the usual neurotic rush of Christmas shopping. Store sales were dramatically down, however, affected by the Wall Street panic and the financial uncertainty reigning not only in New York, but all across the United States.

François Monserrat entered the very chic and expensive department store at a little past five that evening. Another snowstorm was darkly threatening outside. Winter skies had descended like a heavy curtain over the entire East Coast.

Monserrat was wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses and an unmemorable gray tweed overcoat. He also wore a matching hat and black gloves, all of which created a monochromatic impression. The wire-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes for observers but didn't distort his view of the world. He'd had them especially made by a lens grinder on the rue des Postes in Bizerte, a city in Tunisia.

Monserrat quietly marveled as he got off a crowded elevator onto one of the upper floors. There was nowhere else, no city he knew of, in which one consistently saw quite so many provocative and stunning women. Even the store's perfume demonstrators were dreamily sensual and exotic. A stylishly anorectic black girl approached and asked if he'd like to experience the new Opium.

“I've already experienced it. In Thailand, my dear,” François Monserrat answered with a shy smile and an effete wave of the hand.

The demonstrator smiled back, slinking off politely, but seductively, to try the next customer.

A thick gallery of shoppers hugging glittering shopping bags from other famous department stores moved slowly before Monserrat's wandering eyes. “Winter Wonderland” played gaily from a hidden stereo system. It was taxing and exceedingly difficult to move through the crowd; it was more like visiting a New York disco than a store at Christmastime.

François Monserrat cautiously made his way toward the rear of the store. With some amusement he wondered how Juan Carlos would have reacted to the blatant outrage of capitalism that was Henri Bendel's… In 1979-because his flagrant need for publicity had finally rendered him ineffective-Ilych Sanchez, “Juan Carlos,” had been quietly retired by the Soviet GRU. Carlos had, in fact, been brought to live in the one capital city where he was reasonably safe from political assassination- Moscow itself.

That same year François Monserrat expanded his tight-fisted control of North and South America to include Western Europe. Carlos's protégés, Wadi Haddad and George Habbash, reluctantly came under Monserrat's widening sphere. A completely new philosophy for Soviet terror had begun: strategic and controlled terror; terror more often than not programmed by Moscow 's sophisticated computers.

By its very nature, the world of the terrorist was a foggy, vaporous place, and information had a tendency to be either sketchy or hyperbolic. The sinewy avenues of communication and news were vague at times; at other times they were overloaded with rumor and innuendo. Given these conditions, it wasn't long before all manner of terrorist acts were being attributed to Monserrat and his people. The murder of Anwar Sadat, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the Provo bombings in central London…

As he strolled through the store, Monserrat reflected on his reputation with a measure of pride. What did it matter if he'd been responsible for this act or that one-when his only real goal, his sole driving force, was the total disruption and eventual fall of the West? A dead Egyptian president. A wounded pope. A few Irish bombs. These amounted to nothing more than a few grains of sand on a beach. What François Monserrat was interested in changing was the direction of the tide itself…

The bubbling crowd inside Bendel's ebbed and flowed. The predominantly female shoppers milled anxiously in all directions around François Monserrat. Finally he saw the woman he'd followed. She was sifting through a long rack of cocktail dresses, always thinking of her appearance, always defining her existence through her beautiful reflection.

Monserrat concealed himself behind a display case of sweaters and continued to watch. He felt a certain coldness in the center of his head, as if his brain had become a solid block of ice. It was a feeling he knew in certain situations. Where other men would experience the uncontrollable rush of adrenaline, Monserrat experienced what he thought of as “the chill.” It was almost as if he'd been born with a chemical imbalance.

Every man who passed checked out Isabella Marqueza carefully. So did several of the chic, well-dressed women shoppers. Her fur jacket was left casually open. As she turned, swiveled left or right, a tantalizing glimpse of her breasts floated deliciously into the cleavage. Of all the striking women in the department store, Isabella was the most desirable, the most visually dramatic, by Monserrat's personal standards.

Now he observed Isabella slink off toward a dressing room. He put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, caught a reflection of himself in a mirror as he moved, then paused outside the dressing room.

He walked past the closed door, studied the throngs around him pursuing Christmas gifts with forced gaiety, and then darted back the way he had come.

Pretending to examine a silk shirt, like a wealthy East Side husband picking out a stocking stuffer, he listened outside the dressing room. Coming closer, he could hear the whisper of clothing as it peeled away from Isabella's body.

In one swift move he stepped inside the tiny room. Isabella Marqueza swung around in astonishment.

Why did she always look so utterly beautiful? Warmth that might have been desire flowed within him. He took his hands from his coat. She was wearing only panties, tight and sheer and black. The cocktail dress she intended to try on hung limply in one hand.