Authors: Thomas Perry
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.”
J
ane drove to Albuquerque the next morning and bought a Polaroid camera and four large soft-sided duffel bags with wheels on the bottoms. Then she stopped at a mailing service to buy thirty collapsed cardboard mailing cartons, labels, and tape. When she returned to Santa Fe she put Rita to work sorting envelopes by the zip codes of their return addresses, and bundling them. Bernie assembled and taped the mailing cartons. When they took a break, Jane posed each of them against the one remaining white wall that was bare, and took their pictures.
Rita watched hers slowly developing and becoming brighter. “That’s so ugly,” she said.
“It’s for spare identity papers—licenses and things,” said
Jane. “If they’re not unflattering they don’t look real.” But she relented and took three more.
Jane spent much of the rest of the day at pay telephones making reservations. By the time she was back at the house, the living room walls were lined with tall stacks of boxes. All evening she and Rita filled the boxes, taped, and labeled them. At eleven, Jane made her way down an empty aisle she had left and settled onto the couch to sleep.
For the first time in weeks, Jane didn’t awaken when Henry Ziegler began to work. It was dawn when she walked into the dining room to find him at his computer, scrolling down a long list of numbers and names. He looked up.
Jane asked, “How is it going?”
“Great,” he said. “It’s going great. Bernie is amazing. Not one account I transferred money to has problems. I’ve been through every transfer once, and I’m just checking one more time. He didn’t memorize balances—why should he? But he had a pretty good idea what was where. The signatures he put on the withdrawals all got through. We’re not going to have any rubber checks.”
“You wanted to know how he did it,” said Jane. “That’s how. He’s not remembering numbers. He’s looking at the image of a piece of paper he once saw. He just copies it.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, one more thing. You did the Weinstein papers?”
“Transfers for the insurance premium were done last night. All he has to do is sign.” He looked toward the living room, where the boxes were piled. “Have you figured out how we get all these letters in the mail?”
“We start in two days,” she said. “Want to see your itinerary?”
“Sure.”
Jane found her notes at the other end of the table. “You fly from Albuquerque to Houston. You’ll have two big rolling duffel bags full of letters, which is what one person can handle by himself. You’ll check them at the airport. No letters go into your carry-on bag. We don’t want the security people going through anything and seeing them. When you get to Houston,
mail the first pack of letters. Then you fly to St. Louis and mail the second set. The third is Miami. In Miami I rented you a car. You drive north: Atlanta, Charleston, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington. There will be a second shipment of letters waiting at your hotel in Washington, so you can refill your duffel bags. You rest up, or whatever it is that you do, overnight, then keep heading north. Stop in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, a couple of stops in New Jersey, a couple of stops north of New York City. You turn east and make some stops in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and end in Boston. That’s your home base, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” said Ziegler. “But that leaves us with an awful lot of territory.”
“I’m leaving at the same time—actually a little earlier. I’ve got a flight to San Diego with a stop in Phoenix, so I can drop the Arizona letters. In San Diego I have a rental car waiting, so I drive north up the coast—L.A., Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and all stops in between. Then I fly to Seattle with a stop in Portland. By then, my bags will be empty, so I’m mailing more boxes to the hotel there. I fly to Minneapolis, rent another car, and drive the Midwest—Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City, Chicago. I’ll get my second mailing in Chicago, rent another car, and head east through Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York. Then I fly back here with a stop in Dallas. We should both be finished in about a week.”
Henry Ziegler stared down at his computer again, then back at Jane. He said apologetically, “I’ve been so wrapped up in setting this up—the mechanics of it—that I’m having trouble believing it’s almost over.”
“I know,” said Jane. “I keep going over everything to see if we’ve forgotten something.”
“Now are you ready to tell me what you did it for?”
Jane looked down at Ziegler’s computer screen instead of his eyes. It occurred to her that this was part of what computers were for. “Sure,” she said. “I’ve come up with a lot of reasons since we started, and they’re all pretty sly. That’s what I am, you know.”
“I noticed that.”
“And all of the reasons sound okay when you say them to somebody else. I wanted to be sure the money never got to people who want me dead. I thought that maybe, if the money is really, verifiably gone, then it would give them a reason to stop looking for Rita. I wanted to help Bernie keep his son out of trouble. A lot of the time, while we were writing letters and signing checks, I would get pleasure thinking about some charity that had helped someone I know, and how much good a lot of money would do. But when I say the reasons to myself, they sound like excuses somebody made up to account for something she was going to do already.”
“They do?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are too many of them. The charities weren’t the first thing I thought about. I thought of them because I once saw somebody loot a trust fund and make it look as though they were giving it all to charities. I noticed that it was hard to sort out afterward. It took the auditors a month or so to even trace how it had been done. I also noticed that when they had, it didn’t bring the money back.”
“That’s what I’ve liked about it since I first heard the idea,” said Ziegler. “Charities are all watched and audited. The IRS knows what they take in and every dime they spend. The IRS knows what each contributor gives, because he’s going to deduct it on his tax return. They think that’s all there is to know.”
“How about you?” asked Jane. “Have you figured out why you did it?”
“I think I know more than I did the first night,” Ziegler answered. “Charities are nice, but I never risked my life for them before, so I hardly think that can be what I’m doing now. I think it must be because I want to be a player—to be near the light and the fire. The side you’re on isn’t up to you. It’s who you are. The only choice you have is to be in the place where big things are going on, or be someplace else.”
Jane hesitated for a moment. It sounded too readily understandable, maybe even familiar. “I’d better get to work,” she said softly. She moved into the living room and began arranging
packets of envelopes and packing them in the four big duffel bags.
Jane squeezed her eyes closed and gritted her teeth. She wanted Carey. She wanted to be with him right now. She was tired of measuring her words. She wanted to talk, to tell her old friend everything, to find out what he thought.
As Jane stuffed the four big duffel bags with letters, she became aware that someone was behind her. She turned to see Bernie and Rita watching. Rita said, “Which one is mine?”
“What?”
“You got four bags. We each take one, right?”
“Wrong,” said Jane. “Henry and I are going to mail the letters. I picked four bags because a person can handle two at a time.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Bernie. “You think I can’t mail a letter?”
“It’s not that you can’t do it,” said Jane. “It’s that people might see you doing it.”
“Nobody’s looking for me,” said Bernie.
“But if they see you, do you think they won’t know who they’re looking at?”
Rita scowled in frustration. “We did everything you asked for. We have a right to see this through. People are looking for me, but I dyed my hair, got new clothes … I’ve changed.”
“You look terrific,” said Jane. “But you don’t look like a different person just yet.” Finally, she stood up. She walked through the dining room and muttered to Ziegler, “Come in here.” She walked into the kitchen, and the others followed her. They watched her open the cupboard and take four glasses down, bringing each one to the counter with a clack that made Ziegler wince. She took the newly opened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, filled the glasses, and handed one to each of them.
Jane looked around her at each person in turn. Rita and Bernie stared at her stubbornly. Henry Ziegler just looked confused. Jane said, “Lady, gentlemen, and fellow philanthropists—and I mean all of those words sincerely—you have already accomplished the best thing you could have
done with your lives if you had been born with the sense to start out with that in mind. You have given your all. Here’s to you.” She raised her glass and took a drink, then smacked it down on the counter.
“That does not mean, however, that I have joined with you in a brave little democracy. The world works on deals. I still have one with each of you. You have kept your end, and I’m going to keep mine. At the end of this, we are all going to walk away and go live some more. You should know that I’ve been in a few airports since this started, and each time there have been a few more big, ugly men standing around to watch the gates and the baggage claims, looking very hard at each face they see.