Authors: Thomas Perry
He said, “I respect that. I agree that we should be very careful not to con each other. You and your partner have somehow gotten your hands on the money that Bernie the Elephant was holding for the Mafia.”
Jane hesitated. There was no uncertainty in his expression. “It’s that obvious?”
He shrugged modestly. “I’m probably more up on these things than most people. At least I hope I am.” He leaned forward and spoke in an avuncular tone. “There’s always a certain amount of big money floating. Right now there are a few other chunks that big that could show up any day. But it’s not money you could have gotten your hands on. It’s from treasuries and central banks, and the people who have it also have armies and intelligence services to keep an eye on it.”
Jane asked, “Well, what do you think about this chunk?”
He held up his hands in a gesture meant to announce the
obvious. “If you have money, charities will take it. We’ll have to be very careful about it, and do some preparation.” He stood up and paced the room. “It’s an interesting problem.” He stopped and asked, “I assume you want it all to move in a short period, so the Mafia doesn’t have time to figure out what it is, or where it came from—just hit them in the face with it?”
“I think so,” said Jane. “If we give them time to find the address of some building while we’re still in it, we’re dead.”
“It’s going to be interesting,” he said, and resumed his pacing, then stopped again. “And you don’t have any special charities in mind?”
Jane shook her head. “I’d like them to be legitimate. There’s no sense in moving money from one set of crooks to another. Beyond that, no.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “You wouldn’t have much choice beyond that.” He sat down beside her. “Let me tell you what ten billion dollars is. There are roughly forty thousand foundations in the country right now—some for charity, some for art, science, and so on. Ten billion dollars is what all of them put together give away in a year. No matter what we do, this is going to hit the papers—front page. The best we can hope for is that when it does, it’s at the end of the year as a statistic: ‘Charities Report a Good Year for Giving.’ ”
Jane’s brows knitted. “How do we do that?”
“We spread it thin enough, package each donation small enough so it doesn’t make a big splash by itself.” He waved a hand. “And we use a few tricks.”
“What sorts of tricks?”
He grinned. “For ten billion? Everything we can think of.” He turned his wrist to look at his watch. “I’m going to make some calls and clear my schedule for the next couple of weeks. I’ll have a few ideas for you by morning.”
Jane recognized her dismissal. She stood. “Please give some thought to the size of your fee. I’ll have to clear it with my partner.”
He turned to look at her slyly. “If I said it was ten percent—
a billion dollars to move ten billion—would you be sure I was cheating you?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll do it for the goodwill.”
“What goodwill?”
“That means I have reasons too, some practical, some impractical. Be here at five o’clock in the morning.”
It was still dark at five a.m. when Jane stepped quietly along the path and knocked on Ziegler’s door. He swung the door open quickly and closed it after her. She noticed that he was wearing the pants from the suit he’d had on the night before and had his white shirt open at the collar and the sleeves rolled up.
Jane said, “You haven’t slept, have you?”
He picked up a piece of paper from the corner of the desk. “Here’s the plan. Phase one: we set up twenty private foundations. I’ve already faxed orders to twenty law firms in different parts of the country to start cutting the papers, but to leave the names blank until I call them in.”
“What does that do?”
“It sets up an impersonal vehicle. If a big donation check says Joe Smith, 101 Maple Street, charities want to know who that is. If the check is from a law firm representing the Smith Foundation, they think they know, so they don’t look. It’s not going to be listed anywhere until next year’s
Foundation Directory
comes out. By then it’s gone.” He went on. “Then we select a couple of hundred community foundations. You know what those are?”
“Not even vaguely.”
“They’re foundations that already exist for the benefit of some city, county, or state. People donate to them, and they make a budget and give the money to charities. For us, it takes the sting of newness off, mixes our money with other people’s, and puts another barrier of paper between the real contributor and the charity.”
He looked down his list. “We’re also setting up twenty corporate foundations of our own. This does roughly the
same thing. The corporations are closely held, with maybe one or two imaginary people owning all the stock. The donation comes from Abadabba Tool and Die Foundation, not a person. If the name and the donation amount get printed on a list somewhere, nobody knows anything. Since they never heard of Abadabba Tool and Die, they don’t know if it’s tiny or huge, or if this is a lot of money for them or peanuts. I’ve already got people printing out articles of incorporation, and after that we’ll cut papers for the foundations.”
“This is beginning to sound like a lot of paper.”
“A blizzard of it, and it’s all meaningless. If it didn’t have to be complicated, you wouldn’t need me. I’m also setting up twenty public foundations. A public foundation is one that can legally solicit donations from the public.”
“Why would we solicit donations from the public?”
“We don’t. But judging from where the money came from, there’s bound to be some that smells like dead fish—too suspicious to slip to a real foundation directly. We run it through one of our public foundations to clean it, then the foundation gives it to a charity. The report of where it came from might set off alarms at the IRS, but who cares? The worst they can do is shut down the foundation, which will already be shut down. They can’t put anybody at the foundation in jail, because they’re not responsible for where the money came from, only where it goes. Since they don’t exist, they’re not in much jeopardy anyway.”
“I have no way of knowing how much of the money is suspicious,” said Jane.
Henry Ziegler set down his paper and shook his head. “Probably not much. Bernie Lupus was a genius of a sort that ordinary people will never be able to appreciate, because you have to know so much just to imagine what he was doing. It’s possible that every dime has been washed, dried, fluffed, and folded so perfectly that it’s unrecognizable. But there’s a problem with trusting a murdered man. We know he made at least one mistake, and it was a big one.”
Jane felt a little uncomfortable, but she said, “I agree: let’s take as many precautions as we can.”
Ziegler picked up another piece of paper from the desk. “There will be some money that looks like some old guy’s fortune. That’s money that Bernie the Elephant invested fifty years ago in some bogus name and left to mature. This is good. All we need is a will for each account leaving it to some charity and a death certificate. We mail one copy to the bank and one to the charity and let them work out the details. They’re good at that, and it takes time, which is good for us.”
Jane let out a breath in a silent whistle. “This is pretty impressive.”
“I’m not anywhere near done.”
“I still have a question that’s on my mind.”
“Let’s get through this first,” he said. “The next tier of donations goes to the giant charities: United Way, Red Cross, Catholic Charities, United Jewish Appeal, UNICEF, March of Dimes, CARE, Salvation Army, and so on. They’re like big clearing houses. Whatever our imaginary people give gets mixed into a big pot. They give it away and account for it later. Then we go to the next level down.”
“What’s that?”
“Slightly smaller charities that specialize. Mostly it’s ‘Name That Disease’: National Cancer Society, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer’s Association, AIDS, et cetera. We’ve got enough to swamp all of them, and they’re still big enough to swallow a few million without blinking. Then we go down another level to the relief agencies and single institutions: homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters, hospices, orphanages. You get the idea.”
“That’s it, right?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not even close. We’ll actually run out of charities at some point. A lot of these places are going to freak out if they get a check for more than a hundred thousand, and we’ll have to give each of them more than that.”
“What do we do?”
“Branch out. We give money to a lot of causes that aren’t charities but get donations now and then. Some universities will have to get funds for scholarships named after made-up people. We give some to Indian reservations.” He looked at
her sharply. “Did I see a funny look on your face? Some of the poorest people in the country live on reservations. We make out a check to the tribal council, such and such reservation, right? They decide what to spend it on to help their own community. They may or may not report it to anybody, because it doesn’t happen very often.”
“It wasn’t an objection,” said Jane. “I think it’s a great idea. I guess I’m surprised that you’re … that you’ve figured out so much.”
“Moving money is a talent,” he said. “Knowing how to do it is like being the world’s greatest nose-picker. Most of the time, people would rather you didn’t.
“Anyway,” he went on, “if you’ve been paying attention, you get the idea. We capture the biggest sums by putting them into our sixty foundations. We use the giant charities to sop up the next chunk, and move down from there. We’ll have to pay attention to the size of each gift, so some charity won’t choke on it and reach for the phone to call a press conference. If we still have money left at the end of it, we can start mailing checks to symphony orchestras and museums and arts councils and so on.”
“I still have a question.”
Ziegler put down his sheet of paper and met her gaze. “I know. Why don’t I want to take any money myself. The same reasons you don’t. I don’t really need it enough to die for it.”
“What about the impractical reasons? You could have said no, and been in no danger.”
He smiled sadly. “Bernie Lupus. I wasn’t exaggerating about what he must have been like. With a mind like that, he could have done anything. He could have been a great scientist or something. It’s one of the biggest wastes I ever heard of. It’s as if Einstein spent his whole life disconnecting smoke detectors in airplanes so he could have a cigarette, or rigging pay phones to get free calls. I guess I see this as a chance to change Bernie the Elephant’s life after the fact. If I had listened to your pitch and said no, then Bernie Lupus was just one more dead guy who made the Mafia richer. If I said yes, then it’s a whole different story. Everything Bernie did for
fifty years amounts to suckering the worst people in the country into doing good.”
“And you?”
“Me?” Ziegler smiled. “Maybe if I run into him in hell, he’ll tell me how he did it.”
Jane was silent for a moment, then decided. “You’ll get to meet him tonight.”
Ziegler’s mouth dropped open. “Is he alive?” asked Ziegler. “Or am I going to be dead?”
“The first,” said Jane. “Maybe the second too. We’ll do our best to avoid that, though. Are you ready to travel?”
T
here were still lights visible behind the upstairs window blinds when Jane drove around the last curve. She stopped the car along the road and walked the rest of the way in the darkness, then stepped into the pool of light on the porch and rang the doorbell. She listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and when she heard them they were wrong: too light, too quick for Bernie. Jane slipped to the side of the house and waited. The door swung open, and out on the porch stepped Rita Shelford.
Jane hurried to the porch, dragged Rita inside, closed the door, and bolted it. She leaned against the door and stared at Rita in silence.
Rita struggled to hold her eyes on Jane’s, then tried to avert them, but found that she could not. She took a breath and said, “I … decided … ”
Jane interrupted. “You decided. I guess that’s all anyone has to hear. I showed you your best chance to survive, and
that’s all I could do. You never pretended that it was what you wanted, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.”
“I’m sorry,” Rita said firmly, “but—”
“No, you’re not,” Jane said quietly. “Not yet, anyway. But things are in motion now, and I can’t stop to drag you back across two states and make you stay there. I hope that at the end of this, you still think you made the right choice. Either way, you’re in.”
Rita stepped forward and grasped Jane’s hands. “Thank you. I’ll help you, honest. I’ll—”
“Where is it?” Jane interrupted.
“Where’s what?”
“The gun.”
Rita gaped at her, but said nothing.
“I plan to be here after the lights are out, and I don’t feel like tripping over a shotgun. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
Rita opened the small broom cupboard behind her. Between the mop and the broom was a short-barreled Winchester Defender. She started to close the door again, but Jane stepped past her and held it open. She bent down to the trigger guard of the shotgun and pushed on the safety so the red line went in. “Is there a shell in the chamber? I didn’t hear you pump it.”
Rita said, “I don’t know. I never saw one close up before. Bernie made me take him to garage sales until he found one.”
She sighed. He had done the smart thing, of course. Being smart was what had gotten him into trouble and kept him there.
She stepped back toward the door and turned the dead bolt. “I’m going out to bring in a guest, so be on your best behavior, whatever that is.”
Rita’s face was a mask of fright. “A guest? Oh, God. Look at me.” She gestured in despair at her tank top, shorts, and bare feet. She began to run her fingers through her recently dyed brown hair to straighten it. “What kind of guest? Who?”
Jane said, “You look fine. Your hair looks great. I still like that color, by the way. His name is Henry Ziegler. He already knows about Bernie.”
“What’s he doing here?” she asked suspiciously.