Mortal Bonds (10 page)

T
here’s no money. You’re all dreaming.”

Rose-Marie Welk had agreed to let me come interview her, but she made no bones about it—there was nothing to say.

She was one of two clerks who had worked directly for Von Becker—fabricating the customer documents that maintained the smoke screen of his scam. The other clerk, Ben Tucker, had refused to talk to me at all. “I know nothing,” he had said before hanging up the phone. I couldn’t blame him—either of them—as they’d each served six months in federal prison.

We were sitting in the screened-in back porch of Rose-Marie’s house in East Rockaway, a block off Atlantic Avenue on a street of once-identical homes, now differentiated with fifty years of added colors, porches, stoops, dormers, and lawn statuary ranging from pink flamingos to the Blessed Mother. The devastation of Hurricane Sandy had not reached this far. Mr. Welk brought lemonade in a pitcher, making an awkward attempt at playing the good host. Then he sat in stony silence while his wife and I talked.

“The lawyers asked me this over and over. It’s just not possible. For the love of Mike, the man only got caught because he ran out of money. If he’d had money stashed away, wouldn’t he have used it? I mean, to keep the thing going?”

Mrs. Welk looked more than a few years older than her husband, but otherwise they could have been sister and brother in their early fifties, both a few pounds overweight, with big hands and large features on small frames. The house showed no signs of ever having been inhabited by children, and I didn’t ask.

“Maybe he saw the end coming,” I said.

“Oh, he saw it all right. Benny and I heard him in his office talking to himself, crying, slamming things around. He knew for months.”

“But he never said anything?”

“You’re as bad as those SEC people. Benny and I weren’t his friends. He didn’t confide in us. He told us to prepare reports and we did it.”

“But you also made wire transfers. Offshore. Couldn’t there be some stash somewhere?”

She looked up to heaven for patience. “I’ve been home six days. And this is the third time I get to answer the same questions. Sure, it’s possible. Any fantasy you want to come up with is possible. Mr. Von Becker was moody, paranoid, and very secretive. But is it likely? I don’t think so. You’re all wasting your time.”

“Who else has been here?”

“That creepy guy from the SEC. I forget his name. He left his card.”

She made a move to stand up and look for it, but I waved her back down.

“Please, please, don’t go to any trouble. I’m sure I wouldn’t know him anyway. I’m just curious. The other person?”

“Oh, well, he was very nice. Mr. Castillo, I think.”

Mr. Welk nodded.

“He was Spanish,” she said.

“Puerto Rican,” her husband spoke.

She shrugged. “I guess. He said if I needed any help getting resettled, I should just give him a call.” She looked to her husband. “Help,” she said with a disgusted sigh. “I had all of my money in Mr. Von Becker’s fund.” Then she gave a sad laugh. “He offered matched contributions to me and Benny. Every dollar I put into his fund, the company matched it. Ha! We thought we were lucky. Walter spent all of his savings on my lawyer. We now have two mortgages, no pensions, not a dime in the bank, and I’m an ex-con with the kind of clerical skills that aren’t worth much outside of Wall Street.”

Walter took her hand. “But we don’t need help,” he said simply.

She looked him in the eyes and nodded firmly. “That’s what we told him.”

“Did he say what his connection was to Von Becker?”

“Oh, he was a client,” she said. “Mr. Von Becker always took his calls, and if he was out and missed a call, he’d get right back. A very big client, I would guess. He was very polite.”

This was intriguing. I didn’t remember a Castillo on the lists I had received from Everett.

“Did he happen to leave a card?” I said.

Rose-Marie looked to her husband again, as though to jog her memory. He shook his head.

“No. I think I’d remember,” she said.

No leads, merely a hint of mystery. A polite Puerto Rican. Or Spaniard.

“If you think of anything else . . .” I let the request hang in the air between us.

She shook her head vigorously, as though trying to clear the cobwebs once and for all. “I spent six months up in Danbury and it put ten years on me, Mr. Stafford. I don’t know where Mr. Von Becker stashed anything, and I would have a hard time believing it if you stuck my nose in it.”

Mr. Welk showed me out.

S
aturday morning—yoga.

As with anything new, or out of the normal routine, the Kid had expressed extreme reluctance to try yoga. According to his very expensive Park Avenue doctor, he needed to develop core strength and improve his balance and coordination. Heather and I had then explained to the Kid why yoga would be good for him—a remarkably dumb waste of time on our part and a violation of my father’s first rule of parenting—“It tastes like bacon” always beats “It’s good for you.” But his resistance evaporated at the first class. He was good at it, and he had fun. Two months later, he had graduated out of the special-needs class and was now the star pupil—in my unbiased opinion—of the fours-fives. Mainstream fours-fives.

Tino drew appraising sidelong stares from the group of mothers gathered in the waiting room outside the small gym. Those women with more acute gaydar turned their attention from Tino to me—in questioning reappraisal.

“I think a couple of the women over there are ready to volunteer to help you with your reparation therapy.”

Tino looked over at them and smiled. “It’s been tried before,” he murmured. “It didn’t take.”

We were the only males present—Angie and her mother were having a lie-in before heading out to catch a matinee. Most of the mothers, upon releasing their children to the care of the yogi’s assistants, had immediately broken into groups of two or three and begun exchanging information and opinions on schools, doctors, and after-school arts, sports, and music programs—D-day was planned with less information. It was all a world that the Kid would experience only on the periphery, like an aberrant comet that circles the same sun but rarely crosses the path of any other heavenly body. Nevertheless, I took mental notes—just in case. They managed to conduct these conversations while simultaneously text-messaging nonstop so that I wondered about the future crash of the medical insurance industry, done in, sometime in the next decade, by the tsunami of cases involving crippling tendinitis of the thumbs.

The instructor called the class to order, and everyone’s attention shifted to the wide observation window. Cell phones disappeared, and conversations were cut short, or continued in a hushed, reverent whisper.

Sometime later, Tino leaned to me and said, “You think anybody would notice if I went over and slapped that boy silly?”

The boy in question insisted on making fart noises every time the class went into Stretching Puppy.

“I like the redhead,” I answered. A strawberry-haired girl in pink unitard meandered around the room, following some random route. She had a blissful smile on her face that transformed into evil-looking anger when one of the two assistants approached her. They each tried twice to get her to settle down and do the exercises, but she was obviously much happier when they left her alone.

“Too cute. And I’ve got a dozen clients back home who would name me in their wills if I could give them hair like that.”

“I think that’s her mother.” I gestured with a flick of the eye to a silky-haired redhead across the room. She was wearing jeans just a tad too tight for what Skeli would have called her “Kardashian hips.”

“Ooooh.” Tino winced. “Brazilian. That is so bad for you. I won’t do them.”

Brazilian? “How can you tell?”

Tino looked at me questioningly for a moment, then burst into laughter. The women looked over briefly, then went back to adoring their progeny.

“Not a bikini wax. A blowout.”

“Ah,” I said, feeling proud of my deductive powers. “A hair treatment.”

“You slap enough chemicals on a head of hair and you can just about make it do anything. Stand up, lay down, roll over, or sing Christmas carols in July.” He gave the month the Deep South accent on the first syllable. “But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good for you.”

“The price of fashion?”

“I have a friend in L.A. I visit sometimes. He’s an orthopedic surgeon out there. Anyway, we were walking along Rodeo one afternoon, and as we’re passing Jimmy Choo’s, Laurence stops to stare at the shoes. Well, Laurence is not like that, if you know what I mean. So I teased him about it, saying wouldn’t he rather be looking at the new line at Timberland.”

I chuckled politely.

“Laurence just smiled and said, ‘Tino, it’s shoes like these that paid for the house in Provence and the first-class tickets to get me there and back every summer.’ Shut my mouth.”

The instructor, a children’s nurse from Roosevelt Hospital with a ready smile, stopped next to the Kid, bent down and spoke to him quietly. He grinned. What could she have said?

Tino followed my eyes and looked out toward the Kid.

“He looks just like a cat, doing that.”

The Kid’s animal poses were his best—of course. “They call it Halloween Cat. I think he’s proud of himself. If you’re lucky, you might get to see his Cobra.”

The class ended with the Fallen-Down Tree. The Kid lay flat on his back, totally relaxed—without having to be bound in a tightly wrapped sheet. I didn’t have the words to explain to Tino how proud I felt.

“My yoga teacher tells us that’s the hardest pose of all,” Tino said.

“You have no idea how hard it is for him to relax—anytime. It’s like his whole body is constantly on guard—waiting for something bad to happen.”

Tino sighed. “Too bad Angie couldn’t come.”

Part of me—the part that suffered through cringe-worthy morning dreams—wanted to point out that Angie
could
very easily have come, but that she
chose
to sleep late instead. But another voice told me to listen to Tino and learn. It was too bad. For Angie. She was the loser for not having come. The Kid wouldn’t have noticed or cared. My opinion didn’t much matter to anyone but me. But Angie had missed the chance to see her son do something wonderful—and I found that I could spare a touch of sympathy for my ex.

T
he façade of the Merchants and Traders Club on Fifth Avenue was as shy and understated as the Metropolitan, two blocks south, was ornate and built to impress. There was a simple awning out front, facing the side street, covering an oak-paneled entryway leading to double-hung dark oak doors. Through the doors, there was a cloakroom to the left, a concierge post on the right, and a dark and comfortable bar beyond. It might have been the entrance of an older steak house.

I gave the concierge my name and the name of the member I was visiting, Tulio Castillo.

The invitation had been waiting for me at the desk at the Ansonia that morning. Just a handwritten note on club letterhead. I would finally get to meet the Welks’ mystery man. Von Becker’s “big client.”

“May I ask if you are carrying a cell phone, sir?” The concierge wore a starched wing collar and tails. “Cell phones and laptops are not allowed in the main rooms of the club.”

“Thanks,” I said. I turned it off and handed it to him. He displayed a white linen envelope and, taking out a black Montblanc fountain pen, wrote my name in perfect Catholic grade-school cursive. Then he carefully tucked the phone in and sealed the envelope.

“If you would care to have a drink while you wait,” he gestured, “I will announce you.”

I sat down at the bar and ordered a club soda. The bartender looked like he had never told a joke—and didn’t want to hear one.

There were still one or two bubbles in my glass when an ancient waiter in a dark red jacket whispered my name and gestured for me to follow him. We passed through a curtained archway beside the bar and stepped into a marbled, two-storied hallway. Directly in front of us was a curving staircase that could have held the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with room left over for Scarlett O’Hara to sweep down and make her entrance to the ball. Golden light glowed from a pair of giant chandeliers.

“This way, Mr. Stafford,” my guide whispered. Our steps echoed through the hall as he led me past the staircase to a small wooden door. He held the door for me, and I stepped into an elevator. He joined me, pushed a button, and the elevator slowly rose. Brass plaques on the panel listed the floors—Dining Hall, Conference Center, Library, Gymnasium, Dormitory A, Dormitory B, and Penthouse.

“Dormitory?” I whispered. Whispering seemed to be the preferred method of communication in those environs.

The old man smiled and gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “A euphemism. The rooms are all mini-suites. Quite nice.”

“And the Penthouse?”

“The members’ bar. It looks out over the park. Very popular at sunset.”

We lurched to a stop and the door slid open.

The Library.

Bookshelves climbed three walls twenty feet or more into the air, where a narrow balcony ran around the room and a second set of shelves soared up another ten feet. The fourth wall had a row of windows facing Central Park, which were heavily draped in gauze. Forty watts or so of natural light made its way through. The rest of the room was lit only with low, green-shaded lamps that sat on the desks and small tables around the room or floor lamps that threw a cone of light on dark leather armchairs. Somewhere up in the dim stratosphere was a mural that, as near as I could tell, depicted the history of world trade from pre-Roman Silk Road travelers to the New York Stock Exchange. On the wall above the windows were portraits of prosperous-looking men in suits who all stared down on us with mildly disapproving looks.

A few of the armchairs were occupied by third-generation descendants of the men in the portraits. Gray-haired men in gray suits who examined us over their newspapers as the old man led me down the long room. The room was so big it probably had its own zip code.

The carpet, the drapes, the furniture, and probably the books as well, all sucked up sound. I thought that if I yelled at the top of my lungs I’d have a hard time hearing myself. Sets of eight-foot-tall bookshelves, strategically placed, created a warren of semi-private alcoves.

Tulio Botero Castillo was sitting in one of those alcoves.

The man was in his mid-thirties, impeccably dressed in a fawn-colored suit, white long-collared shirt and handkerchief, and a solid red tie, the color of fresh blood. You could have sliced sashimi with the crease in his pants. He was startlingly handsome, with dark, wavy hair, cheekbones like ax blades, black eyes with lashes so long they were almost feminine, and a nose too long to be pretty but large enough to give character.

“Mr. Stafford?” He rose with an actor’s grace and shook my hand. “Please.” He gestured to a neighboring armchair. “Eamon,” he said to the waiter. “Can we get something for Mr. Stafford?” He addressed me again. “Coffee? A drink?”

“Water would be nice,” I said. “Thank you, Eamon.”

“And coffee for me, if you please,” Castillo said.

Eamon smiled again and disappeared.

We sat, and he gave me a long appraising look. It wasn’t rude; he wasn’t judging. He was just gathering information.

“Does anyone ever come here to read a book?” I asked.

He laughed. “I don’t think so. They probably bought them by the yard. Is this your first time here?” The voice was accentless, the result of much practice, I was willing to bet, but his rhythms and pitch betrayed his Latin roots.

I had been introduced to a senator at a black-tie affair at the Metropolitan Club, and been trounced at backgammon at the Harvard Club. But New York has more private clubs than elementary schools. Despite the name, Merchants and Traders, I had never known a trader who belonged.

“First time. Quite handsome. It’s certainly well hidden.”

“The club claims its roots are in Renaissance Florence. A bit of comic fiction, with a hint of truth. You see, the Church forbade lending at interest in those times, and it was only the Jews and other outcasts who were allowed to profit from what we think of as modern banking. They were the merchant bankers. The word ‘bank’ itself comes from the Old Italian word for ‘bench.’ The moneylenders would place a bench in the piazza and sit there conducting their business.”

“And the traders?”

“Bankers need liquidity. If they become overextended, they may need to sell, or find partners to share the risk. The traders were the risk takers and the intermediaries, as necessary to the system as the letters of credit and futures contracts they traded. But they too were looked down upon. They were gamblers, living by their wits. Not fit company.”

Seven hundred years and not much had changed.

“So the club dates to the 1400s?” I let a touch of incredulity show.

“No,” he said and laughed politely, “1901. The first members were all the outcasts who were not allowed to join the clubs with the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Morgans. Jews and other olive-skinned men. Speculators, private lenders, merchant bankers.”

I looked back up at the portraits on the nearby wall. I had missed it at first because the men were all dressed in period suits, no different in style or form from any group of early-twentieth-century men of business. But looking again, I could see the faces, the skin, the eyes, the hair. There wasn’t a single Anglo-Saxon present.

“But times have changed, Mr. Castillo.” I was enjoying myself. He was a bit in love with himself, and did like to hear himself talk, but he was interesting. Intelligent, cultured, and engaging.

“Maybe.” He tilted his head to one side. “Maybe not so much.”

“And so what are you? A merchant or a trader?”

Eamon reappeared at that moment and placed a silver tray on the end table. A bottle of Evian, a glass of ice, and a linen napkin for me. Then he poured the coffee.

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Castillo?” he murmured.

“Possibly some privacy, Eamon. Can you help us?”

“No one will bother you gentlemen.” He backed out of the little alcove and took up position just out of earshot.

Castillo and I watched him take up his sentry role.

“Is this all part of the service here?”

“Many deals have been struck in this room. Many secrets shared. If anyone strays inadvertently to this end of the library, Eamon will gently encourage them to sit somewhere else. They will understand.”

“So, is this a good time to ask . . . why the invitation?”

“You are impatient?”

“Eager.”

“Touché.” He smiled. “Then I begin. All this week I hear your name. Friends, business acquaintances, even some of my employees. They all think I should know about this Jason Stafford. I hear you are looking for something. Our interests there may coincide.”

“I’m no longer making any secret of it—everyone I talk to seems to know my business. I’ve been hired to see if I can locate some of the missing assets from the Von Becker mess. So far, all I’ve got is a list of angry people.”

“Yet you keep looking. You are here. You do not give up. You are persistent. That is an admirable trait.”

I sipped the Evian. It tasted like water.

“Tulio Botero Castillo,” I said. “Born January 8, 1975, in Bogotá, Colombia. Named for an archbishop. You’re the second son. They shipped you off to the States when you were still in grade school. Dalton. Princeton. You started the MBA program at Harvard, but switched to economics. Finished a doctorate in three years. Your dissertation was on the effects of black markets on productivity as a drag on the multiplier effect.”

“I prefer ‘underground economy.’ ‘Black markets’ has more negative connotations.”

I continued. “The family was very big in coffee production and export. Now banking and politics. They’ve been investigated a dozen times or more for ties to the cocaine and heroin trade—in both Colombia and Honduras—and cleared, but the smell never seems to go away.”

“Congratulations. You can Google.”

I’d hoped to shake him just a little. Let him think I knew things. He wasn’t even mildly annoyed.

He leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. I leaned in. We were close enough to kiss.

“I have read quite a bit of your history as well. I have done my research. I would not wish to hire you without a full background check.”

I sat back. “I’m already employed.”

“Your employer is unreliable.”

I had to smile. Everybody was telling me that.

“I’m here. I’m listening.”

“Good. Then we may begin. My family are bankers—facilitators. We do not produce commodities, though we often act as agent in their distribution. It is a simple business model. But some of these products have unique problems in distribution and payment.”

“We’re not talking about coffee now, are we?”

“You are offended?”

“I want nothing to do with the drug trade, Mr. Castillo. I’m surprised that your research led you to think I would.”

“Mr. Stafford, do not take too much comfort from what you see as the moral high ground. For almost one hundred years, your government has tried to limit the amount of drugs entering this country. They have spent trillions of dollars. And the end result is that more drugs pass through your borders than ever before. Yet your politicians still expect a solution from the supply side. Stop the Afghani or Peruvian farmer from producing! Arrest the importer. The distributor. When will your countrymen accept that the problem is one of demand? Reduce demand and the market goes away. But somehow such a voice in your debate is considered to be ‘soft’ on drugs. What is ‘soft’ is the rigor of intellectual honesty.”

“People aren’t murdering each other over coffee.”

“Do you mean the Mexicans? My Honduran clients? My own countrymen not that long ago? Who sells them their weapons, Mr. Stafford? Or do you mean your own Bloods and Crips? Why do you expect desperately poor men with no other hope of even a marginal existence to behave more ethically than your average American politician? That feeling of moral superiority is nothing more than arrogance and ignorance.”

“Sounds like I’ve struck a nerve.”

He stopped, took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “Perhaps so.”

“I’m not equipped to debate these big issues. I just don’t want anything to do with drugs. If that’s what you want to talk to me about, then we’re done.”

“Give me a few minutes more of your time. What I have to say may yet intrigue you.”

I nodded and forced myself to sit back.

“I mentioned unique problems. Obviously, delivery is a problem. It is what gets all the press. But an even more vexing issue is simple cash management. It is a cash business at the retail level—which is appropriate for such an ephemeral product. But when you move up the supply chain, the dollar amounts become quite problematic. Do you know how much space ten million dollars takes up? How heavy it is? It can be burned, marked, stolen, or counterfeited. Any cash transaction as small as five thousand dollars must be reported to your government. If you attempted to deposit a million dollars in cash into your bank account, you would find yourself and every aspect of your life under a very unpleasant microscope. You see the problem?”

I nodded again.

He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. “The richest country in the world, and yet you insist upon drinking hot brown water instead of coffee.” He put the cup down and shifted position. “Tell me, are you familiar with bearer bonds, Mr. Stafford?”

Everyone on Wall Street is a specialist to some degree—the world of modern finance is too complex to survive otherwise. My expertise was in foreign exchange. But some knowledge of certain basics of other markets is necessary, if for no other reason than to pass the licensing exams. I knew what a bond was, and in my first investigative job out of prison, I had quickly relearned the basics when I was hired to investigate the book of a recently deceased young trader.

A bond is essentially a contract between the issuer—which could be a government or a government agency, or a corporation looking to borrow money through the sale of securities—and the buyer or investor, who might represent a mutual or pension fund, an insurance company, or even an individual. Bonds represent debt, as opposed to a stock, where ownership passes hands. The contract usually states that the issuer agrees to pay some rate of interest to the investor for a certain number of years, and then to return the principal. It gets more complicated quickly—with collateralized bonds, senior and subordinated debt, insured bonds, variable rates of interest or maturity, and so on. I did not pretend to understand much of that. It wasn’t the math that gave me trouble, it was the overwhelming details of each particular bond. U.S. Treasury bonds are near commodities, but most of the millions of different bonds that are out there are closer to unique packages of cash flows. Each one has its own story.