Blood Money (17 page)

“What are you paying?”

Jane shrugged again. “I don’t know what the going rate is. He would have to devote himself to this for a few weeks, and at the end of it, he never heard of me or my partner.”

“How much money are you moving?”

“About ten billion dollars.”

George stared at her in silence for a moment. “Ten billion. You have it already?”

She said, “We know where it is. Nobody else does.”

She watched George’s eyes narrow. They burned into her for a few seconds, then turned up toward the window of his house where Jane had seen his wife. He shook his head, and it grew into a shiver. “It’s better if you don’t tell me where it came from. I can’t afford to know that kind of thing anymore.” He sighed, as though he were saying good-bye to something. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The answer would be the same. Henry Ziegler, CPA.”

“Henry Ziegler,” she repeated. “I take it he’s somebody you dealt with in the old days?”

He shook his head. “I was never big enough to be worth his time and trouble, but he was a friend, so he helped me out a few times.” He amended it. “More than a few times.”

Jane couldn’t help looking away from George’s face at his house. It was bigger than the high school she had gone to in Deganawida, New York. The walk she had taken from his front gate had been longer than the distance from the end of the track to the girls’ locker room. “That gives me a new worry. There will be some men who start getting very dangerous the second that the money starts appearing. If he’s that big, they might know him.”

“That’s the way it is when you handle money, love,” said George. “The more there is, the more people there are who have an interest in it. But Henry Ziegler is discreet. Even if he passes on the deal, he’ll never mention it.”

“What is he, anyway?”

“The reason you never heard of him is the same reason he
never heard of you: he’s no more interested in getting famous than you are. He’s an accountant. When I met him twenty-five years ago, he was going to law school at night and handling small accounts in the daytime. He wasn’t doing it so he could go argue cases, it was so he couldn’t be called on to testify against any of his clients. So he’s a lawyer, too.”

“Who are his clients?”

“He once told me there are about a hundred. I was one of his first, and he doesn’t forget the people who knew him when times weren’t so good. I’ve known him all this time, but I can’t name any of the others. I just know who they are.”

“Who?”

George looked up through the clear black sky at the stars. “How do I describe them? Picture this: the
Mayflower
arrives and eighty people step on Plymouth Rock, jump down and kiss the ground—the land of religious freedom! This gives the next guy off the ship a chance to pick their pockets while they’re bent over. He uses the money to buy rum and guns to sell to the Indians. He uses the profits from that to buy a ship so he can get into the slave trade. Four hundred years later, the descendants of this guy are still around. Have they changed? They dress better and have bigger houses. They’ve got a few more last names, because the daughters married too—mostly to people just like them. These are the people who got in at the head of the line. If you wanted to build a railroad, have a war, or buy up land and put suburbs on it, they had the capital. Henry’s clients aren’t the current crop of computer geeks from California or discount-chain rubes from the South, people who love to read their names in the papers. Henry’s clients don’t like to be visible, except when it suits them. That’s what Henry does these days.”

“You mean he handles their money?”

“Not just their money, but everything that can be done with money. And he keeps it quiet. Say some foolish citizen sues the family. Does Henry grease this citizen’s palm? No. He knows the senior partner of the law firm representing
this citizen. This lawyer is the fund-raising chairman for the symphony orchestra. He quietly gives the committee a big donation. The law firm advises the client to settle cheap. If the case gets to court, the citizen’s lawyer certainly doesn’t say everything about the other side that he might have. Or, maybe the family has a teenaged son who needs help getting into the right college. Henry goes in politely and has a talk with someone on the board of trustees, someone who knows the family name and might even be distantly related—these people inbreed like chinchillas. He has a talk about new buildings and endowments. If it’s a tough case, he might bring a check with him.”

“How did he help you?”

George shrugged. “He just steered a little business my way. Somebody in one of these families died unexpectedly: he was about forty. Henry needed to make some money disappear from the dead guy’s accounts and get spread to relations before the death got reported. Otherwise there would have been a huge inheritance tax. Another time, he needed to have some money come out of nowhere and land in a politician’s pocket.”

“I don’t suppose Henry Ziegler’s got an ad in the Yellow Pages. How do I get in touch with him?”

George said, “If you’re as hot as you deserve to be, don’t try. He’ll meet you somewhere tomorrow night.”

“Where?”

“Can you get to L.A.?”

“All right.”

“He stays at the Bel-Air Hotel. He’s there now. I’ll tell him to expect you.”

Jane hugged George Hawkes. “Thanks, George.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” She took a step backward. She looked up at the windows of the house, but saw no sign of the woman. “If I were you, I’d go in now. The longer you’re out here with me, the worse it will be for you. You can rest easy, though. No matter how this goes, I’ll probably never see you again.”

George raised his head to stare up at the stars. “Life is a lot weirder than that.” He looked at her again. “You need a ride?”

She shook her head. “People see cars. They don’t see one more tourist out for a walk, and pedestrians don’t have to wear license plates.” She turned away and moved down the long driveway toward the gate. After a few steps, Hawkes could see only the dark shape of her shadow against his lawn. As soon as she was out of the light from the house, he could not see her at all.

J
ane’s flight brought her into Miami in the early morning, when she was reasonably sure the watcher she had seen last night would be home asleep, but she found that he had been replaced. The crowds were thin and she could pick out other watchers. There were three men in tight T-shirts along the wall who paid little attention to the arrival of her flight but were very interested in all departures. Their behavior added a bit to her fears for Rita. If Rita had not gotten out of Florida already, this was the airport she would have been most likely to use.

This generation of wiseguys—the ones now in their twenties and thirties—seemed bent on dressing badly. Their fathers had worn suits like salesmen when everyone else had been in jeans and sweatshirts, so they had been easier to pick out. Jane noticed four police officers in the next waiting area. There were two men who wore windbreakers that hid their equipment, and two women who had identical taste in purses. Theirs were made by a company named Galco and they consisted
of two compartments designed to surround a center pocket that held a gun.

Jane moved downstairs to buy a ticket to Los Angeles, then went into a ladies’ room to arrange her hair and change clothes before the flight. The pressure had increased over the past few days, and she wasn’t sure why. It looked as though the authorities had noticed the increased Mafia presence in airports and decided to place a few more cops nearby to find out what was up, and then the Mafia had reinforced its complement to spread the police thinner. It was getting to be more dangerous to fly.

When Jane reached Los Angeles, the numbers seemed to have increased again in a few hours. She rented a car at the airport under the name Valerie Campbell and drove it to Beverly Hills to do some shopping. When she had what she needed, she approached the Hotel Bel-Air by a long and circuitous route, then watched the parking lot for fifteen minutes before she went in to register for the night.

It was evening when she picked up the telephone in her room and asked the operator to ring Mr. Ziegler’s room. He answered, “Yeah.”

She said, “A mutual friend—”

“He talked to me,” Ziegler interrupted. “Meet me on the bridge in front where the swans are.”

Jane walked out of her room, down the narrow pathway through the garden, and across the margin beside the tables under the trellis where people were eating dinner. There was a certain absurdity to this spot. She had noticed on another visit to the hotel that the terra-cotta tiles under the patio were artificially heated from beneath. She had set her purse down, and when she had picked it up, the bottom had been warm. A few of the diners looked up as she crossed the little courtyard, but none of the eyes lingered on her for more than a moment.

She was dressed in a black linen dress that she had bought this afternoon, so she could have sat down at any table and looked enough like the other women to be the sister who always arrived late—or the daughter, at some tables. She turned
left at the end of the path and came out on the little arched bridge over the pond.

There were still cars pulling up at the end of the bridge. Valet parking attendants got out and expensively dressed guests got in and drove off to claim their reserved tables at other restaurants in other parts of town. Jane stood apart from the other guests and stared over the railing. Two swans were still down there, gliding gracefully across the surface of the water toward the curtain of high reeds that separated them from the parking lot.

“You Jane?” The voice was low and gravelly, with a harsh, edgy quality to it, like a stage whisper.

It carried so clearly that she raised her head and scanned the doorway and the edge of the parking lot before she nodded.

“Me Henry.” He was short and dapper, his suit beautifully tailored to disguise a chubby torso. He seemed to be in his fifties, but his wavy hair had grayed and thinned enough that he could be sixty. He said, “Come on,” and turned back toward the hotel. She followed him through the arch, then up a maze of paths to the doorway of a bungalow with an enclosed garden. He opened the door and let her enter first.

The suite was larger and a bit more lavish than hers, and it had a big couch and a full desk with a fax machine. Open on the desk was a laptop computer that he had not turned off. The display glowed bright sky blue with a rainbow pie chart in the corner and a few lines of print. She noticed the proportions were changing constantly.

He said, “I sweep my rooms for bugs, and put a scrambler on the telephone as soon as I check in.” He gestured at the couch and, when Jane was seated, dragged a straight-backed chair up to sit across from her. “George told me just enough about you so I could place you in the universe. I suppose he did the same about me.”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“We have the same problem,” said Ziegler. “With both of us here, the feds could seal the exits and set fire to the hotel with all those rich bastards still in it, and still come out ahead
after the lawsuits.” His eyes never moved from her face. He was studying her. “What’s the business you’re bringing me?”

Jane took a deep breath, then said carefully, “There are two of us. We have control of about ten billion dollars.”

“What do you mean you have control of it?”

“We’re the only ones who know where it is and can get our hands on it. It’s in lots of different places under a lot of different names: domestic and foreign stocks and bonds, bank accounts, real estate, precious metals, cash. It’s been built up over a period of about fifty years.”

Ziegler shrugged. “Anything that’s been invested for more than ten years is safe. If there was going to be trouble with it, the trouble would have come right away. There are a lot of ways to launder money, and you stumbled on the best: time. If you came to me for expert advice, here it is: you don’t need advice.”

“We want to give it all to charities.”

His left eyebrow went up. “Seriously.”

Jane held her eyes on Ziegler’s. After a few heartbeats, his expression changed. He looked more alarmed than puzzled. She supposed she must have undermined his sense of how people behaved. Part of her was pleased, but she had to keep him from taking the next step, which was to silently declare her insane and begin to speed up her departure. “That’s why we came to you,” she said. “We could try to leave it where it is forever. Probably some of the inactive accounts would be confiscated by the authorities. But it’s likely that others would be tracked down and claimed by people we don’t want to have it.”

He squinted, as though he were trying to block out what she was saying and hear something else. “Why don’t you want it?”

Jane said, “A lot of reasons—some practical, some not.”

“Give me a few practical reasons.”

Jane frowned. “Given enough time, these people may be able to trace some of the money. If they trace it to a charity, they’ll be out of luck. If they trace it to a person, that person will be out of luck. You said George told you something
about me, so you know I have other reasons not to show a high profile. If I have billions of dollars, I’m not going to be invisible anymore.”

“What about your partner?”

“He has good reasons to stay invisible too. The money is poison.”

Henry Ziegler had his elbows on the arms of the chair, and he rested his chin on his fists as he stared at her thoughtfully. “So you want nothing out of this. You’re just sitting on ten billion dollars and figure it might as well go to good causes.”

“That’s about right.” She paused. “All of it except for your fee—I’m counting on you to identify enough money that’s very old and cold to make helping us worth your risk. You can pay yourself whatever is fair.”

He studied her more closely. “What do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to make this sound easy, or safe. The people we’re up against are about the worst enemies you could have. They’re already looking for anyone who might know the slightest thing about the money. If we make a mistake, the danger won’t ever go away.”