Black Market Page 11

  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.

  He thought she would have looked very exciting in it.

  “François! What are you doing here?”

  “I had to see you,” he whispered. “I heard you had a little trouble. You must tell me everything.”

  Isabella Marqueza frowned. “They let me go. What were they going to hold me for, anyhow? They had nothing but a stupid bluff, François.” 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. Inwardly, inaudibly, he sighed.

  “Are you being followed, Isabella?”

  “I don't think so.”

  “Are you sure?” Monserrat asked.

  “As sure as I can be Why?” A troubled look clouded her dark eyes again. He could see her wince. From beyond the door of the dressing room he heard the Christmas Muzak, relentlessly bland and empty of all meaning.

  “Good. Good,” he whispered soothingly.

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

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

  “Don't you know me any better than that? Don't you? Please…”

  I know you only too well, François Monserrat thought as he moved closer.

  The tiny handgun made an inconsequential, guttural spit. Isabella Marqueza moaned softly, then collapsed on the shiny black-and-white tiles.

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

  She'd talked. She'd told them too much. She had admitted knowing him, and that was enough.

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

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

  11

  Shiny white cabin cruisers and myriad other expensive ships had begun to haunt the perimeter of lower Manhattan. More than one inflatable rubber boat was tied to the railing of the seawall at the Battery Park City esplanade. In fact, a considerable number of individuals were willing to use the most unorthodox means to return to their Wall Street offices, whether or not such a return was authorized.

  Anton Birnbaum appeared live on the “Today” show. The face of the financier was highly familiar, though few could have matched it with an equally familiar name they'd come upon scores of times in newspapers and magazines.

  “Neither the American nor the New York Stock Exchange will sell a single share this Monday. NASDAQ, the over-the-counter market automated quotation system, will be down as well. The commodities exchange in New York will not open, nor will the metals exchange. This is complete madness,” he told the early morning viewers.

  It got worse.

  The regular Monday auction of the United States Treasury bills wouldn't take place. Among the chipped and pocked tombstones of Trinity Church cemetery, no drug dealers would palm out their usual glassine envelopes of cocaine.

  No messengers would trudge the streets with even more valuable envelopes filled with securities, valuable stock certificates, multimillion-dollar checks, and legal documents.

  None of the all-male luncheon clubs, would serve up their bland, overcivilized fare at Monday noon.

  All the usual activities of the Wall Street community would be stillborn. It would be as if the modern money world had not yet been invented. Either that, or it had been completely destroyed.

  “I want you to have lunch with me, Mr. Carroll,” Caitlin Dillon had said over the telephone. “Is twelve-fifteen today possible? It's important.”

  It was a call that took Carroll completely by surprise. He'd been going through his elaborate back files-sifting through the various terrorist organizations in his search for some clue to Green Band-when the call came. The idea of a civilized lunch with a beautiful woman was the last thing on his mind.

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

  “Who?”

  “A man called Freddie Hotchkiss. He's important on Wall Street.”

  She had a rich telephone voice. Music in a tuneless world, Carroll thought, little symphonies coming out of the impersonal Bell system. He put his feet on the desk and tilted his head back against the wall. With his eyes shut, he tried to bring Caitlin Dillon's face firmly 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, trying to place it. “Several bells.”

  “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 François Monserrat.”

  “Monserrat?” Carroll opened his eyes. “So why can't we go direct to Chevron? Why go through this Hotchkiss?”

  “Do I detect impatience?”

  “When it comes to Monserrat, I'm impatient.”

  Carroll could hear Caitlin exchange quick words with somebody, and then she said, “The point is that we can't get a direct connection with Michel Chevron unless-and this is a big unless-Hotchkiss is prepared to confirm some of our information. When he does, O'Brien will set up a meeting for you and Chevron just as soon as you can get to Paris -he's got the clout. But, Chevron is a French citizen-unless we get some hard data on him, we'll never get the cooperation of the French police.” Caitlin paused. It made sense, Carroll was thinking. “What I'm saying is that you may have to lean on Freddie Hotchkiss a little. Isn't that the expression the police use?”

  “Something like that,” Carroll said, laughing as if there were some intimate conspiracy between them. “I guess I'll see you for lunch.”

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

  The restaurant required a dress jacket and respectable tie. Otherwise it was comfortable enough, with something of the atmosphere of a men's club. Besides, it felt damned 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 the hell out of himself. For this moment only, Green Band had receded from his mind. Wall Street might have been on another planet.

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

  She said the last 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 fashionably late despite the fact that Caitlin had specifically asked him to be on time.

  A shrimp cocktail eventually found its way to Carroll's place. The shellfish 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. In answer, Caitlin began regaling him with a few of her favorite horror stories about the Street. She happened to have a treasury of absolutely true, mind-bending stories that circulated in the inner sanctums but were usually not shared with outsiders… for reasons Carroll soon began to fully understand.

  “Embezzlement has never been easier on Wall Street,” Caitlin said. Her brown eyes sparkled with dark humor. Carroll thought how easy it would be to fall over the imaginary edge, to drown in those eyes-a very pleasant end indeed.

  “The computer makes ‘cooking the books’ an exciting challenge to anyone modestly gifted in the area. Of course, the potential thief has to know the program code and have access to the data bank. In short, he or she must be in a position of absolute trust.

  “One young 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. “In 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 that 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 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. In the seventies, Michael Weiss and Anthony Caputo opened their company over a Manhattan candy store. 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. You're in very good company.”

  “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 already beginning to feel slightly incensed, though he'd never personally lost a dime on Wall Street. Stocks and bonds and securities had always seemed Olympian things to him, arcane matters in which other classes of people dabbled.

  “It's fairly simple, really. As I said in the beginning, these kinds of stories are rarely told outside Wall Street.”

  “I'm honored.”

  “You should be… The Wall Street banks, the brokerage houses, investment bankers, even the computer companies-they know that the success of their marketplace depends on confidence and trust. If they prosecuted all the embezzlers, if they ever admitted how easy it was, how many stock certificates are actually stolen each year, they'd all be out of business. They'd have about the same reputation as used-car salesmen-which some of them ought to have… The point is, Wall Street is more afraid of bad publicity than of the actual thefts.”

  Suddenly Caitlin was silent.

  “Caitlin, will you forgive me? I'm so very sorry.”

  Freddie Hotchkiss had finally arrived. It was one o'clock. He was forty-five minutes late for their business lunch.

  Carroll looked up and saw a man with thinning blond hair and a ridiculous, innocent grin on his face. He had pale, water-blue eyes and a face as round and as expressionless as a pie tin. He would have looked eight years old if it hadn't been for the lines on his face.