Black Market Page 13
“All right, then just shut the hell up now,” Carroll said, raising his voice suddenly. “I don't have time to be civil anymore. You kept me waiting through my polite and civil period.”
The French bank executive broke into a disdainful smile. “Monsieur, you don't seem to understand whose country you're in now. This is not America. You have no authority whatsoever here. I freely consented to see you, in the spirit of international cooperation only.”
Carroll immediately reached into his coat pocket and sent a light tan envelope spinning across Chevron's handsome desk.
“Here's your spirit of international cooperation. A warrant for your arrest. It's signed by the commissaire de police, Monsieur Blanche of the Sûreté. I met with him before I came here. The formal charges include extortion, bribery of public officials, fraud. I'm honored to be the one to deliver the good news to you.”
Arch Carroll couldn't help smiling. His only regret was that Chevron's huffy assistant wasn't there.
Michel Chevron sat down heavily on his chair.
He covered his face, now drained of all color, with his long, elegantly manicured fingers. His features appeared to have imploded, so that the face looked crinkled, like a concertina devoid of air. Carroll loved the look.
“All right, Mr. Carroll. You've made your point. Why exactly have you come here? What information is it that you wish to extract from me?”
Carroll eased himself onto the chair across from Michel Chevron. The Frenchman's voice was still cool and controlled, even if his features had undergone an unflattering transformation.
“For starters, I'd like to know about the European and Middle Eastern black markets. I need specific names, places, specific dates. How the black market is structured, the principals involved. And I want to hear all about Francois Monserrat.”
Chevron cleared his throat hoarsely. “You have no idea what you're saying, what you're asking of me. You have no idea the predicament you're placing me in. We are speaking of billions of dollars. We are speaking of participants of a less than savory nature… The French Corso… the Italian Cosa Nostra.”
Chevron seemed to wipe imaginary crumbs from his fingertips now. He sat back in his chair, and Carroll could see tiny stars of perspiration glistening on the man's forehead. Even the impressive black hair seemed to have lost its color. Carroll felt relaxed and confident for the first time since he'd arrived in Paris.
“I'm listening,” he said. “Keep going. I love stories about the Cosa Nostra.”
But Michel Chevron had already spoken the last words of his life. The oak doors into the executive suite splintered and crashed open.
For one frightening, incomprehensible moment Carroll imagined that what had happened on Wall Street was repeating itself in Paris. He jumped from his chair and turned to face the shattered door.
Three heavily armed men in trench coats had come from the director's reception area. Each had a machine pistol drawn. In the narrow corridor behind them stood Michel Chevron's blond assistant, armed with a small black Beretta.
Carroll's lingering jet lag suddenly left him. He was already diving across the floor. Glass and expensive wood were everywhere around him. Machine pistol explosions slashed through the previously secure and elegant office suite.
The terrifying volley nailed Michel Chevron against the wall. His body arched spastically, then spun to the floor. His blue suit was instantly blood soaked. Particles of bone and flesh floated through ghostly spirals of gunsmoke in the office suite.
The professional assailants now switched their attention to Carroll. Hollow-headed slugs thudded like hammer blows into the oak-paneled walls all around him.
His heart pounding, Carroll crawled beyond the heavy drapes, which fanned the air as bullets ripped through the fabric. Sharp needles of glass and wood pierced his hands.
He scrambled to his feet, the glass slivers slicing deeper with every movement. The outside terrace was a narrow stone catwalk, sixteen stories above the Paris street. The walkway seemed to stretch around the entire length of the floor.
Carroll inched toward the nearest corner of the building, bloodying the ancient stone. He could hear the deafening gunshots, followed by screams of incredulous terror and agony inside the bank offices. Machine pistols coughed and fired repeatedly, insanely.
French terrorists? The brigade? François Monserrat?
What was happening now?
Who had known he was going to be here?
Bullets were whistling past his head, nicking the brooding stone body of a crouching gargoyle. Behind him and to the left, he registered the direction of the gunfire and glanced over his shoulder.
Two of the assassins were closing fast, their leather trench coats flapping. They were the kind of European thugs he thought existed only in French movies. Painfully, Carroll raised his own gun. He fired, hearing the slightly unreal, muted spit of the silencer in his ears.
The man running in front grabbed his chest, then stumbled and fell over the stone wall, somersaulting sixteen stories to the street.
“Oh, goddammit!” Carroll suddenly clutched his shoulder. Blood spread instantly where he'd been shot. He felt sick and afraid. These could be the final seconds of his life. He could hardly breathe as he stumbled around the next stone corner of the building.
He moved now as if he were in a bad dream.
He weakly moved to another clear stretch of stone terrace. The walkway ended abruptly at a gray brick wall topped by severe iron fencing.
He was dizzy. He could taste warm blood in his mouth. Piercing chest pains came with each breath. The wounded arm ached with a deep, searing pain such as he'd never felt before.
To die suddenly here in Paris seemed ironic and appropriate.
To die here surrounded by memories of Nora.
He watched the sky slip away from him. The wintry sun was a hard uncaring disk.
Carroll used his good arm on the restraining wall and vaulted over the side. He saw a spinning flash of cars sixteen floors below. And cold concrete, as gray as a tombstone.
As he landed safely on the terrace six feet below, he struck his wounded shoulder hard against a slab of granite. The pain that exploded was a savage, biting agony. Blinded by it, he forced himself toward a casement door that opened as he leaned into it.
He was bleeding badly now. He could see a package-crowded stockroom, and he stumbled in. Crouched on trembling legs, he waited. Airborne Express mail was stacked all around. There was no possible place to hide if they came through. If they found him now.
He couldn't think clearly. Everything was blurry. His forehead, his cheeks, and the back of his neck throbbed from the splinters of glass embedded in his flesh. He felt dizzy and sick. And he was filled with rage.
Gunshot explosions and horrible screams continued to echo through the Société Générale building. Then warbling police sirens shrieked and howled outside. They filled the air with the sudden news of terrifying disaster. Carroll finally took off his shirt and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding arm.
Michel Chevron would be telling nothing about the powerful black market in Europe and the Middle East now. Nothing about what Green Band might be.
Who was behind this horrifying noonday massacre? What could the French banker Michel Chevron have possibly known?
Carroll was too weak to stand. He slumped against a plaster wall, his head down between his knees.
What could Chevron have possibly known?
What could be worth this terrifying massacre?
What in the name of God could justify this?
14
Queens, New York
It was a magical moment, one that Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew he would never be able to forget. It was like a fantastic movie scene he'd been dreaming about for as long as he could remember.
As dawn edged through soiled, slate-gray skies, Stemkowsky rolled his wheelchair down the concrete ramp he'd built to get in and out of his house in Jackson Heights, Queens. His wife, Mar
y, a former nurse who was ten years older than Harry, sauntered close behind him.
“This is it, sweetheart,” she said in a whisper.
“This is definitely it,” Harry said brightly.
Mary Stemkowsky carefully set down Harry's two new Dunhill travel bags. She glanced at her husband. She couldn't believe how impressive and businesslike he looked in his dark pin-striped suit. His blond hair and beard were neatly trimmed and shaped. He held a soft leather attaché case that looked as if it cost big money, impossible money.
“Excited, Harry? I'll bet you are.” Mary Stemkowsky couldn't control a shy, softly blossoming grin as she spoke. She believed that Harry was truly a saint. You could ask any of his friends at the Vets Cab Company, any of the physical therapists who worked with him at the VA hospital, where she and Harry had originally met.
Mary Stemkowsky didn't know how he'd done it, but Harry seemed to completely accept what had happened to him more than a decade before in Vietnam. He almost never complained about the wounds or the constant pain. In fact, he seemed to live his life for other people, for their happiness, especially her own.
“Tell the truth, I'm a li-li-little scared. Nuh-nuh-nice scared.”
Harry tried to smile, but he looked pale around the gills, Mary thought. She immediately bent and kissed him on both cheeks, then on his slightly bloated lips. It was strange the way she loved him so much, what with his infirmities, his physical limitations. But she did. She truly loved Harry more than she loved the rest of the world combined.
“Sa-sorry you can't go, Muh-Mary.”
“Oh, I'll go next time, I guess. Sure, sure. You better believe I will.” Mary suddenly laughed, and her broad, horsey smile was close to radiant. “You look like the president of a bank or something. President of Chase Manhattan Bank. You do, Harry. I'm so proud of you.”
She stooped and kissed him again. She didn't want him to ruin one minute, not a single heartbeat, of his European trip just because she couldn't go with him this time.
“Oh, here he comes! Here comes Mitchell now.” She pointed up along the row of dull, virtually faceless tract houses.
A yellow cab had turned onto their street. Mary could make out Mitchell Cohen at the wheel, wearing his usual flap-eared Russian fur hat.
She knew that Mitchell and Harry had been working on their business scheme for almost two years. All they would tell her and Neva Cohen was that it had to do with arbitrage-which Mary loosely understood as trading currencies from country to country, making money on discrepancies in the exchange rates-and that this arbitrage scheme was their ticket out of hacking cabs for the rest of their lives.
“He takes two Dilantins before bedtime,” Mary said as she and Mitchell Cohen helped load Harry into the Vets cab.
Harry absolutely cracked up at that remark. He loved the way Mary continually worried about him, worried about dumb things like the Dilantin, which he took regularly every night and three times during the day.
“You have a wonderful trip over to Europe, Harry. Don't work too hard. Miss me a little.”
“Awhh, cah-cah-mon. I muh-muh-miss you already,” Harry Stemkowsky muttered, and he sincerely meant it.
He'd never really been able to understand why Mary had decided to live with a cripple in the first place. He was just happy that she had. Now he was going to do something for her, something that both of them deserved. Harry Stemkowsky was going to become an instant winner in life. And fuck everybody who didn't believe in him.
Tears suddenly welled in his red-rimmed eyes. They continued to roll down his cheeks as the Vets cab slowly bumped up the deserted early morning Queens street. He had wanted desperately to take Mary along-it just wasn't possible. Among other complications, he wasn't going to Geneva, Switzerland, as he'd told her. He and Mitchell Cohen were flying to Tel Aviv, then to Tehran… They were going to be in considerable danger for the next thirty-six hours, danger they hadn't seen since Southeast Asia. But there was another side to the trip, too. There was a whole other perspective both men couldn't help considering…
Harry Stemkowsky and Mitchell Cohen were feeling alive for the first time in almost fifteen years.
The Green Band mission had brought them back to life.
While Stemkowsky and Cohen drove to Kennedy Airport, another of the chosen couriers, Vets 7, was already on board Pan Am flight 311, winging its way toward Japan.
Jimmy Holm was entertaining a first-class stewardess, skillfully recounting the true stories of how he had survived three years in a North Vietnamese prison, then two more years in a Bakersfield, California, VA hospital. Bakersfield, he said, had been much, much worse.
“And now, here I am. This high-and-mighty clipper-class life-style. Europe, the Far East.” Holm smiled and drained his glass of Moët & Chandon. “God bless America. With all the ugly warts we hear so much about, God bless our country. Isn't this the greatest?”
At approximately the same hour, Vets 15, Paul Melindez, and Vets 9, Steve Glickman, were enjoying similar first-class treatment on another Pan Am flight scheduled for Bangkok 's Don Muang Airport. Both Melindez and Glickman had recently worked as private rent-a-cops in Orlando, Florida. Today, December 9, they were personally in control of something over sixteen million dollars…
“Samples.”
Vets 5, Harold Freedman, had already arrived in London. Vets 12, Jimmy Cassio, was in Zurich. Vets 8, Gary Barr, was settled in Rome -where he was sitting on a classically beautiful stone terrazzo terrace that overlooked the dazzling Tiber.
Barr had most recently been a comedy nightclub bouncer for over four years on Sunset Drive in Los Angeles. Now he was thinking that this had to be a dream. Vets 8 finally closed his eyes. He blinked them open again… and Rome along the Tiber was still there.
So was the twenty-two million for his upcoming negotiations.
More “samples.”
Manhattan
In the West Village section of New York, Vets 3 wasn't flying or even living very first class. Nick Tricosas had no four-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He had no leather Dunhill wallet full of fancy credit cards. Vets 3 was wearing a cut-off USMC T-shirt, a greaser's head bandanna, and faded khaki-drab fatigue trousers.
He was playacting that he was in ' Nam again. In a weird way, he figured that he was. Green Band was the unofficial end of Vietnam, wasn't it? It was something close to that.
Tricosas stared around the cramped radio room and felt a rush of claustrophobia tighten his chest. The broom closet was tucked up on the third floor of the Vets garage. The place was bare but for a gray metal card table and matching folding chair, the PRC transmitter-receiver, and a First Blood movie poster taped to the greasy walls.
“Contact. This is Vets Three.” Tricosas's finger finally clicked on the PRC again.
“All right, all you brave veterans of foreign wars, you Purple Heart and Medal of Honor winners… who can handle a pickup at Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street?… A Ms. Austin and her day nurse, Nazreen… Ms. Austin is a very sweet lady with a fold-it-up wheelchair. Fits very nicelike in the trunk of a Checker. She'll be going to Lenox Hill Hospital for her weekly chemotherapy. Over.”
“Over. This is Vets Twenty-two. I'm at Mad Ave and five two. I'll pick up and take Ms. Austin. I know the old chick. Be there in approximately five minutes. Over.”
“Thank you kindly, Vets Twenty-two… Okay, here's another hot one. I have a corporate account at Twenty-five Central Park West. Account T-Twenty-one. Mr. Sidney Solovey is headed for the Yale Club at Fifty Vanderbilt. Mr. Solovey used to work for Salomon Brothers. Before somebody blew the living shit out of Wall Street, that is. Over.”
“Over. Vets Nineteen. I'm CPS and Sixth. I'll take Mr. Solovey to Yale. Listen, Trichinosis, who you like, Knicks and the Philly Sixers? Knicks laying two and a half at home. Over.”
“Contact. Bet your life on the powerful shoulders of young Mr. Moses Malone. Knicks are point three nine one lifetime against the Sixers and the spread. Over and out.”
Nick Tricosas stood up. He stretched another three inches into his body and rubbed the small of his back. He needed a break from the taxi-dispatcher radio clatter, the constant radioman duty since five that morning.
He lit up a cigar, rolling it gently between his thumb and index finger. Then he wandered down the winding back stairs of the Vets building, trailing clouds of expensive smoke. He climbed down another twisting flight of stairs to the main garage.
The basement floor was thick with collected filth and debris. It was a typically rat-infested New York cellar. There was a second dispatcher's office flanked by cabbie waiting benches. Off to the left were rusted candy and soda machines and an unpainted gray metal door.
Tricosas squinted and started down the serpentine, dungeon-type hallway. He sighed. Colonel Hudson had said nobody was to go inside the locked basement room under any circumstances.
Tricosas produced a key, anyway. He turned it into the stout Chubb mortise lock and heard the releasing click-click-click. He pushed the creaking door open. Then he peeked inside Colonel Hudson's forbidden holy of holies…
Nick Tricosas couldn't help smiling, almost laughing out loud. He sucked in his breath. His deep brown eyes doubled in size. His head tensed, felt as if it might actually explode, blow off his shoulders. Right back up three flights of stairs to the claustrophobic radio-dispatcher room.
He had never actually seen so much money! What he was looking at just didn't seem possible.
Billions of dollars. Billions!
Colonel David Hudson did a highly unusual thing-he hesitated before acting. He reconsidered one final time as he waited in the phone booth at the southeast corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue and stared at the condensation on the glass panes. He understood that he was taking an unnecessary chance here, asking for the same girl again.
He lightly tapped a quarter against the black metal box and listened to it drop.
Ding. Ding. Connection made.
Yes, he wanted to see Billie again. He wanted to see her very much.