Black Friday Read online

  Isabella Marqueza sat with her head hanging. She wouldn’t look up at Carroll for long stretches of time. Her right leg kept nervously tapping the floor, but she didn’t seem aware of it. She looked physically ill.

  “Who the hell is Monserrat?” Carroll kept up his attack.

  “How does Monserrat get his information? How does he get information that no one outside the U.S. government could possibly get? Who is he?”

  Carroll could hear his own loud voice as if it were a foreign sound in an echo chamber. “Listen Listen to.… to me very carefully.… If you talk to me right now, if you tell me about Francois Monserrat—-;just his part in the bombings on Wall Street.… If you do that much, I can let you leave here, I promise you. No one will know you were here. Just tell me about the Wall Street bombings. Nothing more than that Nothing else.… What does Francois Monserrat know about the fire bombings?…”

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

  “Monserrat had nothing to do with it! He doesn’t understand it either.… Nobody understands what the bombings are 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 the palm of one 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 messages. There are whispers in private places. Nobody sees Monserrat.”

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

  The woman stubbornly shook her head. “I don’t know that either.”

  “What does Monserrat look like these days?”

  “How should I know? He changes. Monserrat is always changing sometimes dark hair, a moustache. 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. Carroll sat back and finally let his head rest against the grimy office wall. She didn’t know anything more; he was almost certain he’d gone as far into her as he could possibly go.

  Nobody knew anything about Green Band.

  Only that wasn’t possible.

  Somebody had to know what the hell Green Band wanted

  Who, though?

  Chapter 28

  FADED, YELLOWING NEWSPAPERS, at least a dozen different ones dated October 25, 1929, were haphazardly spread across a heavy oak library-style work table. The thirty- and forty-point headlines seemed 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 NATION-WIDE 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 work table and its musty newspaper clippings. She stretched her arms high over her head and sighed. She was on the fifth floor of No. 13 Wall, with Anton Birnbaum from the New York Stock Exchange Steering Committee.

  Birnbaum was one of America’s financial geniuses. If anyone understood that precarious castle of cards called Wall Street, it was Birnbaum. He had started, Caitlin knew, as an office boy at the age of eleven. Then he’d worked his way up through the market hierarchy to control his own investment house. Even at eighty-three his mind remained as sharp as a blade; a mischievous light still burned in his eyes.

  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 iconoclastic talks, Birnbaum had consented to private sessions with a few of the business school’s students. One of them turned out to be Caitlin, about whom Birnbaum told her adviser: “She is extremely intense. 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 graduated from Wharton, Anton Birnbaum hired her as an assistant at his firm. Within a year, Caitlin was one of his assistants. Unlike many of the people he hired, Caitlin would disagree with the great Financier when she felt he was off base.

  During that period Caitlin also began to make the Wall Street and Washington connections she needed for the future. Her first job with Birnbaum provided an education she couldn’t have paid to receive. Caitlin found the Financier 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 list, a physical list, as some kind of starting place.”

  “All right, let’s explore that avenue. 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 benefit—in terms of world prestige, anyway…”

  “Then perhaps one of the Third World madmen? I believe Qadaffi is 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 happens when the Market opens on Monday?”

  Anton Birnbaum took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He rubbed the bridge of his 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. Perhaps it’s one of their typical bluffs.”

  “Which means the Arabs want their French Banks open. Some toady in Paris either wants to take advantage of this situation—or they hope to get some of their money out, before there’s a complete panic.”

  Birnbaum replaced his glasses. He 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 talking with the French. They’ve never appreciated him tremendously, though. We haven’t been able to placate them since Kissinger.”

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

  “They’re all watching France. France is threatening to open their 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?”

  Both 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.

  “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.”

  Chapter 29

  BERGDORF’S ON 57TH had been open all day Sunday for the usual neurotic rush of Christmas shopping.

  Francois Monserrat entered the department store at a little past 6:30 that evening. Another snowstorm was threatening outside.

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

  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 anorexic blaek girl approached and asked if he’d like to experience the new Opium.

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

  A thick gallery of shoppers hugging glittering shopping bags from other department stores moved slowly before Monserrat’s wandering eyes. “Winter Wonderland” played from a hidden stereo system.

  It was taxing and exceedingly difficult to move forward in certain directions, more like visiting a New York disco than a store at Christmas time.

  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 grains of sand on a beach. What Monserrat was interested in changing was the direction of the tide itself…

  The crowd inside Bergdorf’s ebbed and flowed.

  He finally 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 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 fist of ice. It was a feeling he knew in certain situations. Where other men would experience the uncontrollable rash of adrenaline, Monserrat experienced what he thought of as the Chill.

  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 breach. Of all the 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 changing room. He put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, caught a reflection of himself in a mirror as he moved, then he paused outside the changing room door.

  He walked past the closed door, studied the throngs around him pursuing Christmas gifts with forced gaiety, and then he 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 changing room.

  Coming closer, he could hear the whisper of clothing as it peeled away from Isabella’s skin.

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

  Why did she always look so beautiful? Warmth 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.

  “Francois! What are you doing here?”

  “I had to see you,” he whispered. “I heard you had a little trouble.”

  Isabella frowned. “They let me go. What were they going to hold me for, anyhow? They had nothing but a stupid bluff, Francois.”

  She smiled, but the expression couldn’t conceal a look of worry.

  He pressed one gloved hand lightly against her breasts. He could smell Bal a Versailles. Her favorite perfume. His as well.

  “Are you being followed, Isabella?”

  “I don’t think so. No, of course not.”

  “Good. Good,” he whispered.

  Isabella’s mouth fell open and she suddenly stepped back against the wall. There was really no place to go in the tiny dressing room. “Francois, don’t you believe me? I told them nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Then why did they let you go, my love? I need an explanation.”

  “Francois, don’t you know me any better than that? Don’t you?

  I know you only too well, Monserrat thought and stepped forward.

  The tiny handgun made an inconsequential, guttural spit Isabella Marqueza moaned, then she seemed to faint, collapsing toward the black-and-white checkered tiles.

  Monserrat was already out of the changing room and walking, inconspicuously, toward the nearest exit.

  She’d talked. She had admitted knowing him, and that was enough.

  She’d been broken during the interrogation, skillfully, in a way she might not even have recognized. Monserrat had heard the news not ten minutes after Carroll finished with her.

  He burst into the cold wind raking West 57th Street. He turned a corner, to all intents and purposes a drab ordinary man, losing himself in the crowds that hunted the spirit of Christmas with red-faced eagerness.

  Chapter 30

  “I WANT YOU to have lunch with me, Mr. Carroll,“ Caitlin Dillon had said over the telephone. “Is twelve-fifteen today, okay? It’s important.”

  It was a call that took Carroll by surprise. He’d been going through his back files—sifting through terrorist organizations in his search for some clue to Green Band—when the call came.

  “I want you to meet somebody,” Caitlin had told him.

  “Who?”

  “A man called Freddie Hotchkiss. He’s kind of important on Wall Street.”

  She had a nice telephone voice. Music in a tuneless world, Carroll thought. He’d put his feet up on the desk and tilted his head back against the wall. With his eyes shut, he tried to bring Caitlin Dillon’s face into his mind. Untouchable, he remembered.

  “Freddie Hotchkiss is connected with a man called Michel Chevron,” Caitlin said.

  “The name rings a bell,” Carroll said and tried to place it.

  “The information I have is that Chevron’s a wheel in the stolen securities market and—this is what should really interest you, Mr. Carroll—there are rumors of a link with Francois Monserrat.”

  Carroll loosened his crimson and blue school tie before he took the first inviting sip of John Smith’s Pale Ale in the dining room of Christ Cella on East 46th Street. He found ties uncomfortable, which was one reason he rarely wore them. Actually, he thought neckties pretty much without purpose, unless you impulsively wanted to hang yourself, or get inside some overpriced New York steakhouse.

  Christ Cella required a jacket and tie. Otherwise, it was comfortable enough. Actually, it felt good to be sitting here with Caitlin Dillon.

  Christ Cella’s steaks were sixteen ounces at a minimum, choice prime, and aged properly. The lobsters started at two pounds. The waiters were immaculate and subservient, city cool to a fault. For the moment, Carroll was enjoying himself. For this moment only, Green Band had receded from his mind.

  “One of the first things I learned in New York is that you have to make ‘the steak house’ a ritual if you’re going to survive on Wall Street.” Caitlin smiled across the white linen of the tablecloth. She’d already told Carroll that she was originally from Lima, Ohio, and he could almost believe it, listening to her perspective on New York City living.

  “Even to survive in the SEC, you have to know the conventions. Especially if you’re a young ‘gal,’ as a particular brokerage house CEO once called me. ‘I’d like you to meet the new young gal from SEC.”

  Caitlin said the phrase with such casual, twinkling malice, it almost sounded nice.

  Carroll started to laugh. Then they both laughed.

  Heads turned at other tables, staid faces looked around. Was somebody daring to have fun here? Who?

  Carroll and Caitlin were waiting for the arrival of Duncan “Freddie” Hotchkiss, who was fashionab
ly late, despite the fact that Caitlin had asked him to be on time.

  A shrimp cocktail eventually found its way to Carroll’s place. The fish was perfect and overpriced by at least three hundred percent.

  Carroll asked Caitlin about Wall Street—what it was like from her vantage point at the SEC? Caitlin began regaling him with a few of her favorite horror stories about the Street. She happened to have a treasury of true, mind-bending stories which circulated in the inner sanctums, but were usually not shared with outsiders.

  “Embezzlement has never been easier on Wall Street,” Caitlin said. Her brown eyes sparkled with humor.

  “One economist we prosecuted worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At twenty-seven, he went off and bought a summer house in the Hamptons, then a new Mercedes convertible and a Porsche, then a sable coat for his dear mom. Along the way, he managed to get in debt close to three quarters of a million dollars.”

  “He’s still working for the government?” Carroll finished the second shrimp. “ln your story, I mean?”

  “He quits Treasury right about this time—for a much better paying job. Only he takes with him the security access codes, which allow him to find out enough to buy or sell on the credit and stock markets. A very, very profitable bit of knowledge. He’s got the ultimate on insider’s trading information…. You know how it fell through? His mother called the SEC. She was worried that he was spending all this money without any job she could see. His mother turned him in because he gave her a sable fur.

  “There was an outfit called OPM Financial Services— that stood for other people’s money, I swear to God. Michael Weiss and Anthony Caputo opened their company over a Manhattan candy store in the seventies. Along their merry way, Michael and Anthony managed to defraud Manufacturers Hanover Leasing, Crocker National Bank, and Lehman Brothers for about a hundred and eighty million. Don’t ever feel bad if you lose a little money on the market.”

  “I’m real lucky in that respect—I don’t have any money to lose. Why is it allowed to happen? What about the SEC?”

  Carroll was beginning to feel slightly incensed, though he’d never personally lost a dime on Wall Street.