In for a Ruble (9 page)

In December it got cold and I was feeling the need for less motion and more human contact, so I decided to test my fate in a city. I drove into L.A. a week before Christmas, found a motel room I could rent by the week for cash, and got a job washing dishes in a restaurant where they didn’t ask about Social Security numbers. I made friends with the Mexicans who worked there—most of them illegal—and we hung out together, drinking beer and playing cards when we weren’t working. They sensed I had something to hide, same as they did, and we all respected each other’s space. I still keep in touch with several of them, and I’ve got standing invitations to visit just about every major city south of the border.

February—time to move on. I drove to Texas, down to Donald Judd’s lonesome, soulful installation in Marfa, which felt a little like the Vorkuta camps without inmates or snow. There’s even one artist’s idea of a Soviet era schoolroom left empty for time and decay to take its toll. Back up north to Dallas and Houston, east into Louisiana and up to Memphis, again taking my time. Sitting by the Mississippi on April Fool’s Day, I decided I’d had enough. I’d made it six months. I found a pay phone and left a message for Foos, “Game over.” I turned on my cell phone for the first time since leaving New York, and it rang a few minutes later. Foos said, “Good thing you got out of L.A. when you did. I have three pictures of your car on the Santa Monica Freeway and two on Wilshire Boulevard. The Basilisk came within two days of having you dragged down to Room 101.” That’s the existential hell on earth George Orwell cooked up—it holds each person’s greatest fear. Funny guy, that Foos.

This is how I knew the beast could find Victoria in a New York minute if I was only allowed to set it loose. No dice, Foos said for the umpteenth time. Stick to business.

With
Suprematist Composition
as an incentive, that’s what I did. I started with Pauline Leitz, missus number one. My questions had received polite nonresponses from her ex-husband. She was a “good woman” and a “good mother” whom Leitz had meet while he was in graduate school. She “hadn’t liked New York” and moved back to Minnesota after the divorce. I inferred, perhaps unkindly, that Leitz had married his grad school sweetheart, thought better of it after meeting Jenny, and paid well for her to go quietly with a lot of sincere reassurances that this was best for their son. I wondered if she knew about the lifestyle she’d missed out on—or cared if she did.

It didn’t take the Basilisk long to fill out a profile. Forty-four years old, living in Minnetonka, Minnesota, an associate professor of English at Hamline College. She’d published two books on Victorian literature, both out of print. She hadn’t remarried and had reclaimed her maiden name—Turner. She and Leitz had been married fourteen years and divorced four years ago. Leitz was just beginning to make it big, he was still a budding billionaire. She came out with $55 million that was now close to $255 million. I wondered if he ran her money. Her house was paid up, as was her car, a two-year-old Volvo. Her credit card bills showed a normal pattern of purchasing at the usual supermarkets and department stores. She had one speeding ticket from two years earlier. Hard to tell from her driver’s license photo whether she was blond or red haired, attractive or plain. She vacationed at spas like Canyon Ranch and ski resorts like Vail. Three trips to New York in the last five years, staying at the Regency, a block from Leitz’s house. Other than that, I guessed her son came to her.

Jenny Leitz, née Jennifer Chao, ABC (American-born Chinese), also from Queens, was thirty-five, ten years younger than Leitz, for whom she’d gone to work after getting her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT. Not clear when they became an item, but she’d married him a little less than three years ago, and they had one daughter who was eight months old. Jenny had been pulling down a multimillion dollar income at Leitz Ahead, but she’d quit work after the birth of their child to lead the life of a quintessential housewife and new mother, at least according to her credit cards. Her spending patterns were normal in all respects, but in the last few months, they showed a concentration in shops and restaurants in the far East Sixties. She hadn’t taken a job. Perhaps she was volunteering—plenty of hospitals and related organizations in that part of town.

Foos programmed the Basilisk to flag anomalies. A person without a gun license who suddenly purchases several boxes of ammunition. Someone, otherwise healthy, who starts charging large quantities of cold remedies. Most times, such breaks from normal patterns indicate a stolen identity. But not always. Two months earlier, four new phone numbers showed up in Jenny Leitz’s records. She’d been calling them, and they her, several times a week. Three belonged to doctors specializing in neurological diseases. The fourth was a medical imaging lab. All were located in the East Sixties and Seventies, the neighborhood around New York Hospital.

Unsure what to conclude from that, except that all might not be well with Jenny Leitz, I turned to her husband’s siblings.

First up, Marianna, number two after Sebastian in the family line. Plenty of anomalies here. For the last few months, Marianna and her husband appeared to be living separate lives—she at their home in Bedford, with their two kids, a boy and a girl aged fourteen and eleven, he at their apartment on Park Avenue. Jonathan Stern was the CEO of Kallon Corp., a medical device maker. He traveled a great deal. His hotel charges showed a fondness for nighttime Champagne from room service. His non-hotel charges included more than a few lingerie stores. Perhaps he was bringing Marianna a souvenir camisole from Chicago, a negligee from Pittsburgh, and a new lace bra-and-panties set from Dallas. My money was on local usage. I asked the Basilisk to line up the Champagne orders and underwear purchases. Big surprise—every date matched.

Marianna appeared to have her own problems. She was buying more booze than most Russians. Her chosen drop was brandy, Cognac (Rémy Martin) in the good days, but since her husband moved out, less expensive, some would say cheap, fare—Fundador from Spain and Presidente from Mexico. I actually like both, but I’ve been known to tipple too much cheap vodka. Their joint checking account provided an explanation. The automatic deposits from Kallon Corp.—$27,000 a month—stopped in November. The account had shrunk from $66,000 to less than $15,000 since. Marianna was feeling the pinch, in more ways than one. A trip to Bedford was in order.

Next in line was the middle sister, Julia, who’d kept the Leitz name when she’d married Walter Coryell fifteen years ago. She and her husband and two kids lived in a loft in Chelsea that had set them back $3.6 million in 2004. They’d financed 50 percent and kept current on both mortgage and monthly maintenance. Julia was a wealthy woman, a bank balance of $50,000 and upward of $8 million in savings and investments. Not in her brother’s league, but rich by everyone else’s standard. She still shopped discount—H&M and Century 21 and the occasional department store when it had a sale, not that she bought that much. Neither did her husband. She had two BlackBerries, both worked overtime. His worked hardly at all. The kids, boys, aged twelve and ten, attended New York City private schools that set the parents back seventy-five Gs a year. They both had cell phones and texted each other and their friends 24-7, including when they were in class. They had PlayStations and Xboxes and iPads, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and all the other accouterments of upper-class life in twenty-first-century America. I’m enormously fond of my adopted country, but as a former member of the CPUSSR, I often think America could benefit from good old Soviet-style centralized discipline, starting with a rule that every kid should not be permitted to have every gadget that Silicon Valley comes up with. I’ve yet to find anyone who agrees with me.

Julia Leitz owned a financial public relations firm with two partners. Her office was on Third Avenue in the Forties. Her husband had an Internet company, an amalgamator of travel options—hotels, flights, rental cars—called YouGoHere.com. It had weathered the dot-com meltdown and seemed to be holding on, if not setting cyber-tourism afire. His office was just over the East River in Queens. Nothing appeared overtly out of kilter in the Leitz-Coryell household, but looks can be deceiving.

Thomas Leitz was the baby of the family, six years younger than Julia. He was thirty-five now and worked for the New York City Department of Education, as he had since receiving his M.A. from City College where he also got his undergraduate degree. He lived alone in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in the Village. He ate out most nights and ran up modest tabs at a few saloons with names that suggested a single-sex clientele. He also had a long-running spending problem—repeated patterns of running up huge credit card debt, carrying it for a few months or more, then paying it off—all at once—canceling the cards and starting again. The Basilisk served up a dozen cycles, going back seven years. Every eight to twelve months, he maxed out two, three, four cards at their $10,000 or $15,000 limits. The damage was done at designer boutiques and the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store—$500 shirts, $1,200 trousers, $2,400 sweaters, and $4,000 jackets—and Broadway theaters. When he went to a show, which he did once or twice a week, he purchased the premium tickets the theaters began selling a few years ago—at $400 a pop. None of which he was buying on his $42,000 teacher’s salary.

Two months earlier, he was carrying $35,000. Debt service alone was running $700 a month. He didn’t appear to have any other assets to speak of, but in late November, his balances were paid off and the cards canceled. At the moment, he had new Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx cards, with an aggregate balance of $8,000. The foothills of the next debt mountain. The timing of the last payoff was too close to the bugging of Leitz’s computers to ignore. Nosferatu, if it was Nosferatu, had his choice of targets.

I went two for six on phone calls. A standard not-here-right-now message from Pauline Leitz. A harried-sounding secretary at Julia Leitz’s office, with the lady in question shrieking in the background. She had no time to talk to me. A high-pitched recording announced Thomas Leitz was “out and about, but don’t pout, leave a message, don’t be a lout.” A slurry-voiced Marianna Leitz answered her phone but had a hard time grasping who I was and why I was calling, which had more to do with the brandy sloshing around her glass than my attempt to explain. It took a few minutes, but she agreed to see me the next morning at nine thirty. Jonathan Stern’s assistant took my name and number without comment. Jenny Leitz had a high, sweet voice. She said, “Sebastian said you might call. He told me I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“I’m trying to help him, Mrs. Leitz. I told him I have to go about my job as I see fit.”

“Yes, he said you said that too. I don’t see how I can help.”

“I don’t either—until we chat.”

Several seconds of silence before, “Sebastian can be very … Especially these days. Are you free tomorrow?”

I said I was, except first thing.

“Best not come here. Let’s see, I have … There’s a coffee shop on First Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. I’ll meet you there at noon.”

I knew the place from her Basilisk file. I told her noon was fine.

It was a start. With a mental nod to Marianna Leitz, I fetched the vodka bottle and two glasses from the kitchen. Foos was tapping away at his keyboard, but he indicated yes when I held up the bottle. I poured two shots.

“Want to get something to eat?” I asked.

“Social invitation? Haven’t had one of those in months.”

“Just trying to butter you up until you let me sic the Basilisk on Victoria.”

“You track her down, she tells you to get lost. What’s the rush?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What about dinner?”

“Can’t. Date.”

“Krisztina?”

“Uh-uh. Izabela.”

“What happened to Krisztina?”

“Nothing lasts forever.”

Or in his case, more than a couple off months.

“Izabela—let me guess. Czech?”

“Close. Slovakian. Bratislava.”

“Six feet, blond, legs up to her ears for a change?”

“Jealous.”

Foos is a certified genius, but a decidedly odd-looking guy with a personality to match. Yet he dates an unending series of models, all tall, most blond, most from Eastern Europe, each more drop-dead gorgeous than the last. It’s a continuing source of mystery—and envy—how he manages.

“You and your pal Leitz ever discuss his family?”

“Uh-uh.”

“They’ve got a lot of issues, as they say these days.”

“Not surprised.”

“Why?”

He looked up. “What family doesn’t?”

The loud “arrrr-oooo-gahhhh” of our door horn echoed through the office. One of Foos’s jokes—he thinks it’s hilarious. So does Pig Pen, who squawks “Boss man!” at full volume whenever it goes off. Two men stood outside holding a solid-looking wooden crate. The return address was Leitz’s. It took half an hour and another glass of vodka to yank out the nails and get it open. When I unwrapped the painting inside, Pig Pen took one look and said, “Russky.”

“That’s right, Pig Pen. Famous Russky. Ilya Repin, painter. How did you know?”

He gave me his ‘I’m not the dope you think I am’ look. “Russky.”

“Takes one to know one,” I said. “Maybe you’re part Russian, Pig Pen.”

“Parrot,” he said definitively, meaning, I suppose, that he’s a citizen of the world.

“You like the painting?”

He took a minute to look it over. “Eldo.”

Eldo’s the top rank in his hierarchy. I’d taken him for a ride once in my car, a 1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible I call the Potemkin, with the top down. We’d toured the 1010 WINS “jam cams” around town, and he thought he’d ascended to parrot paradise. Eldo stuck.

“You have a good eye, for a parrot,” I said. “I’ll hang it here for now, where you can see it.”

Pig Pen seemed happy with that arrangement, but I was thinking Repin deserved a better setting than a sterile office wall. I was at the door, headed for 140 West Forty-eighth Street—a fruitless errand to see if Timid and Bold were still around—when something tugged.