Numbered Account (35 page)

“They must love you for that.”

“As Rudy Ott said to me a few days ago, “in the best of all possible worlds, of course.”’ She gave Nick a sardonic smile. “Unfortunately, they followed their father’s example and took me absolutely for granted. They thought I didn’t go out on Friday nights because I didn’t want to, not because I was too tired. I think they even believed I enjoyed changing their beds every week.”

“You’re not close to them?”

“Oh, I make the usual efforts, birthday cards, Christmas presents. But I haven’t seen Rolf or Eric in three years. It’s easier that way.”

“And your father?”

Sylvia raised a finger. “Him, I still see.”

Nick nodded his head, reading in her expression that she had gone as far as she would on that subject. He looked away and spotted his briefcase in the hallway. Inside was the faded yellow binder she had given him earlier in the day. He had become so enraptured in his discussion with Sylvia that he had forgotten he’d brought it with him. He smiled inwardly, feeling warm and content. He had forgotten the pleasure of spending time with an interesting, attractive woman. He had missed it.

After dinner, Nick laid the binder on Sylvia’s dining room table and threw open its cover. Inside, filed in chronological order, were monthly activity reports submitted by his father for the period January through June 1975.

The monthly activity report for January 1975 was divided into four sections. First, a summary of fee-producing business; second, an evaluation of new business opportunities; third, a request for additional personnel and office supplies; and last, a section entitled “Miscellaneous Items of Interest.”

Nick read the report.

I. Business Activity Summary for the period 1/1/75-1/31/75
A. Deposits of $2.5 million received, of which $1.8 from new clients (see attached client profile sheets).
1. Fee Services: Trade Financing fees of $217,000 accrued.
2. Pro forma Financial Statements for fiscal 1975.
B. New Business: Swiss Graphite Manufacturing, Inc.; CalSwiss Ballbearing Company; Atlantic Maritime Freight
C. Proposal to increase staff from seven (7) to nine (9) persons.
1. Request for new IBM Selectric Typewriters (4).
D. Miscellaneous: Dinner at Swiss Consulate (see report).

Nick lifted his head from the binder. Nothing in the contents hinted at anything untoward, but he hadn’t expected to find anything of interest in reports written five years prior to Alex Neumann’s death. Still, he was determined to read each and every page of the report. This particular set might not hold the information he needed, but he was on the right trail. More important, he had a willing guide.

The patter of footsteps approached from the hallway.

Sylvia placed her hand on Nick’s shoulder. “What are you looking for?”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You really want to get involved in this?”

“You promised that you’d fill me in on what you were looking for. I mean, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Nick laughed, but behind the smile a tightness gripped his throat. The time for truth had arrived. The time for trust. He knew he couldn’t go any further without Sylvia’s help and deep down, he wanted it. Maybe because with every passing minute he was growing fonder of her golden hair and more dependent on her crooked smile. Maybe because he saw so much of himself in Sylvia: the child forced to grow up too quickly, the tireless striver never satisfied with his accomplishment. Or maybe just because Anna hadn’t given a damn.

“I’m looking for two things,” Nick said. “Mention of a client named Allen Soufi — a shady character who did some business with the bank in Los Angeles. And, any reference to Goldluxe, Incorporated.”

“Who’s Goldluxe?”

“I don’t know the first thing about them. Just that my father’s decision to end a commercial relationship with them caused a small uproar at the head office in Zurich.”

“So they were clients of the bank?”

“For a while, at least.”

“What drew your attention to Mr. Soufi and to Goldluxe?”

“Some things my father said about them. Wait here and I’ll show you.”

Nick walked into the hallway to retrieve something from his briefcase. He returned carrying a slim black book. He set it down on the table and said, “This is my father’s agenda for 1978. It came from his office at USB in Los Angeles.”

Sylvia eyed it warily, sniffing at it as if its contents were as suspect as its odor. “It doesn’t smell like it came from an office.”

“Floodwater,” said Nick, matter-of-factly. He’d gotten used to the smell of mildewy leather a long time ago. “Believe it or not, I found it in a U-Rent-It storage facility. It was on top of a pile of old junk my mother had kept for years. The place flooded twice during the time she rented it. Everything stacked below three feet was completely destroyed. When she passed away, I flew back to take care of her effects and to make the necessary arrangements. That’s when I found this book. There’s one for 1979, too.”

He opened the first agenda and leafed through the pages, stopping to point out several of the entries that had merited his attention. “
Oct 12. Dinner with Allen Soufi. Undesirable.” “November 10 — Soufi in office
.” And beneath it, “
Credit check”
followed by an incredulous “
Nothing
?!” And finally, the infamous notation of September 3, “
Bastard threatened me” —
florid commentary to a twelve o’clock lunch engagement at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with the oft-appearing Allen Soufi.

“There’s more like this in the next agenda. You’ll see.”

“You only have the two of them?”

“They were the only ones I could find. Luckily, they were the last two he kept. My father was killed on January 31, 1980.”

Sylvia drew her arms around herself, as if suddenly chilled. Nick stared into her warm brown eyes. Once he had found them remote and selfish. Now he found them caring and sympathetic. He leaned back in the stiff wooden chair and stretched his arms. He knew what he had to say, knew that he had to tell the whole story. He was suddenly struck by how few people he had actually told about his father’s murder: a few kids from school after it had happened, Gunny Ortiga, and, of course, Anna. Normally the prospect of sharing the story left him antsy and uncomfortable. But tonight, sitting close to Sylvia, he felt calm and at peace. The words came easily.

“The worst part of it was the ride over,” he began softly. “We knew something had happened to him. The police had called. They said there had been an accident. They sent a squad car for us. My father wasn’t living at our house at the time. I think he knew someone was after him.”

Sylvia sat as steady as a rock, listening.

“It was raining that night,” he went on, speaking slowly as the images came back to him. “We drove up Stone Canyon. My mother was holding on to me so tightly. It was late and she was crying. She must have known he was dead. Her intuition, whatever. But I didn’t. The police hadn’t wanted me along, but she’d insisted. Even then she wasn’t very strong. I looked out the police car’s window, watching the rain fall, wondering what had happened. The radio was squelching all the time, that clipped police jargon. Somewhere in there I heard the word
homicide
and the address where my father had been staying. The policemen up front didn’t say a word to us. I expected them to say, “Don’t worry,’ or “Everything’s going to be fine.’ But they didn’t say anything.”

Nick leaned forward and laced his hands in Sylvia’s, bringing them to his chest. He saw that tears had formed in her eyes, and for a few seconds he was mad at her. Seeing another person cry prompted in him a disdain for that person’s weakness. He knew his anger was bred out of a fear of confronting his own emotions and that he was wrong to have it. Still, it sat there for a minute and he had to wait until it played itself out before going on.

“You know what I felt sitting there? That everything was going to be different. I knew
right then
that my world was going to turn upside down and nothing would be the same.”

“What happened?” Sylvia whispered.

“The police figured that someone came to the door of the house at around nine o’clock that night. My dad knew whoever it was. There was no sign of forced entry. No sign of a scuffle. He opened the door, led the killer inside the house a few steps, probably talked to him for a while. He was shot in the chest. Three times from close range, just two or three feet. Someone looked my father straight in the eye and killed him. You’d never know a man has so much blood in him. I mean, that whole entryway was red. The police hadn’t covered him up yet. They hadn’t even closed his eyes.” Nick allowed his own eyes to wander to the broad picture window and stared outside, seeing nothing but darkness. He blew out a breath of air and let go of the memory. “Boy, it was raining that night.”

Sylvia placed her hand on Nick’s cheek. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m all right.” He half smiled, and nodded to show that he was in fact okay, that a marine never cries, that he was hardly deserving of her compassion. “So my father is dead. That’s it, right. That’s the sad part. Obviously, I’m wondering who did it. There’s the regular investigation, but no witnesses, no murder weapon. The police didn’t have a thing to go on. Six months later, case closed. Life goes on. Chalk it up to a random act of violence. The cops will tell you it happens all the time in a big city like Los Angeles.” Suddenly, he pounded his hand on the table. “But goddammit, it doesn’t happen all the time to me.”

Nick slid his chair away from the table and asked if she minded if he stepped outside for a moment. He crossed the living area, then opened the sliding glass door and stepped into the icy night air. A perfect semicircle was carved from the snow so that one could stand on the terrace and look out at the curtain of forest. The night’s cold embrace could not stifle the scent of pine and oak. He breathed deeply and watched as the vapor of his condensing breath cut a swath out of the darkness. He willed himself to think of nothing, to make his mind a blank, to breathe and watch and feel the world around him as if this were all there were.

“It’s beautiful here.”

Nick jumped at the sound of Sylvia’s voice. He hadn’t heard her approaching. “I can’t believe we’re still in the city,” he said.

“Just out the front door and down the street.”

“I feel like I’m in the middle of the mountains.”

“Mmmm,” she agreed. She looped her arms around him and drew herself against his back. “Nick, I’m so sorry.”

He placed his hands over hers and held them tightly against him. “So am I.”

“So that’s why you came here?” she whispered, more answer than question.

“I guess so. Once I found the agendas I didn’t really have a choice. Sometimes I tell myself that there’s no way in the world I’m going to find anything.” He shrugged. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I just know I have to try.”

For a while neither spoke. Gently, he rocked back and forth, enjoying the warmth of her body and the mix of her perfume with the crisp air. He turned to Sylvia and lowered his face toward hers. She touched his cheek and as their lips met, he closed his eyes.

Inside, Sylvia asked Nick what the next step was.

“I need to see my father’s activity reports for 1978 and 1979.”

“There are eight volumes. Four for each year.”

“So be it,” he said.

She replaced a strand of hair behind her ear and nodded as if summing up a daunting task. “I’ll do my best. I really do want to help. But, Nick, it’s been so long. Who knows what your father might have written in those reports? Please don’t expect too much. You’ll only be disappointed.”

Nick made his way around her living room, stopping to examine a picture here, a knickknack there. “Someone once told me that every man and woman could easily choose how happy they wanted to be. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation. Happiness, he said, equaled reality divided by expectation. If you don’t hope for much, then reality will almost surely beat your expectations, therefore you’ll be happy. If you expect the world, you’ll always be disappointed. The problem is for folks who always want to be happy, the dreamers who put a big ten on the bottom of that equation.”

“What do you expect, Nick?”

“When I was young, I wanted the ten. We all do, I guess. After my father died and things took a turn for the worse, I would have been happy with a three. Now I’m more optimistic. I want a five, hell, I’ll take a risk, give me a six. If six days out of ten are good, I’ll be all right.”

“I mean, what do you really expect? What do you want to do with your life?”

“Well, obviously I’d like to put my father’s murder behind me. After that I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll stay in Switzerland for a while. Fall in love. Have a family. Mostly, I want to feel like I belong someplace.” A feeling of intimate complacency fell over Nick as he spoke to Sylvia, almost as if he were yielding to a mild opiate. He barely knew her, yet already he was sharing his innermost feelings, dreams he had held for a future with Anna. Dreams for another world, he reminded himself. And another lifetime. “What about you?”

“I change from day to day, from minute to minute. When I was growing up, I wasn’t very happy. I always wanted my mother to come back. I would’ve taken a four. When I first began at the bank, a nine. Anything was possible. Today, with you sitting in my dining room, I still want a nine. I’d rather be a little disappointed than not have wished at all.”

“What do
you
really want?”

“That’s easy. To be the first woman on the executive board of USB.”

Nick ended his tour of her living room and fell into the overstuffed couch. “A dreamer, eh?”

Sylvia sat down next to him. “Why else would I help you with these binders? They’re darned heavy to carry around.”

“Poor Sylvia, what will we do with her?” Nick rubbed her back. “Bad back?”

She nodded her head. “Uh-huh.”

He lifted her legs onto his lap and massaged her calves. “And your legs. They must be killing you?” Running his hands along her smooth legs sent a current of desire through his body. He had forgotten the touch of a woman’s body, forgotten seduction’s joyous impatience.