Numbered Account (53 page)

Albert spoke to Gino as if no one else were present. “Here is a real gentleman. He proposes to return to us that which we have not yet lost.” He gave a dyspeptic grunt. “Go on, Al-Mevlevi. We await your proposition with open assholes.”

Mevlevi pretended not to have heard the insult. “I am asking you for a prepayment of forty million dollars for the shipment that is due to arrive Monday. The full amount must be transferred to my account at the United Swiss Bank before the end of business today.”

“Do you expect me to run to my bankers and sit with them while they rush to make this payment?”

“If necessary.”

Gino prodded Albert. “Perhaps, older brother, we should take a moment and discuss the proposition. We do have the cash. It’s only a question of two or three days.”

“Nonsense,” Albert Makdisi spat out. “With such sound advice we would be bankrupt three times over.” He took a step forward and addressed himself directly to Mevlevi. “We will never prepay for a shipment of merchandise. This is forty million dollars we are discussing. If anything should happen to the cargo, then what? Once it is in our warehouse, properly weighed, its quality assayed, payment shall be made. Until then, I am sorry.”

Mevlevi shook his head slowly from side to side. “I thought I might rely on a small favor after our many years of business. I thought I might overlook your indiscretions. Lina? Your poisonous flower.” Finally, he shrugged. “What am I to do? There is no one else with whom I can work in this territory.”

Albert Makdisi crossed his arms over his chest and stared hard at Mevlevi. He dabbed nervously at the corner of each eye.

“Your final word?” asked Mevlevi, clearly hoping that Makdisi might reconsider.

“The very last.”

The Pasha stared back. “The right of refusal is often a man’s final victory.”

“I refuse.”

Mevlevi lowered his eyes and looked over both shoulders. “Cold, isn’t it?” he said to no one in particular. He removed a pair of driving gloves from a pocket and carefully pulled them on.

Gino Makdisi said, “It’s been a miserable winter. Never have we had such weather. Storm after storm after storm. Don’t you agree, Mr. Neumann?”

Nick nodded distractedly, unsure what he was supposed to do. What the hell had Mevlevi meant about the right of refusal being a man’s final victory? Hadn’t Albert Makdisi caught the veiled threat?

Albert looked at Mevlevi’s gloves and said, “You’ll need better than those to keep your hands warm.”

“Oh?” Mevlevi stretched his hands in front of him as if admiring the fit of the gloves, pulling first one and then the other tight. “No doubt you are correct. But I don’t intend to use them for warmth.” He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a silver nine-millimeter pistol. With surprising speed he wrapped his left arm around Albert Makdisi’s shoulder and pulled him near. At the same time, he drove the barrel of the weapon deep into the folds of the man’s overcoat and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The blast of the pistol was muffled, sounding more like a harsh cough than a discharging firearm. “Lina said you had eyes like wet oysters,
habibi
.”

Albert Makdisi collapsed to the ground, his watery gray eyes open wide. A trail of blood fell from the left corner of his mouth. He blinked once. Gino Makdisi knelt at his brother’s side. He put a hand inside the coat and it came away smeared red. His porcine face was frozen in shock.

Nick stood motionless. He hadn’t seen this coming. His senses left him, overloaded by all he had seen and heard that day.

Mevlevi advanced a step toward Albert Makdisi’s corpse. A symphony of hate played across his features. He ground the heel of his shoe onto the dead man’s face until the nasal cartilage collapsed and blood rushed forth. “Stupid man. How dare you?”

A wisp of smoke rose from the barrel of the pistol.

“Here, Neumann,” Mevlevi called. “Catch.” And with that he tossed the gun to his escort.

Four feet, maybe less, separated the two men. Before Nick could stifle his reflexes, he had caught the gun in his bare hands. Instinctively, he placed his finger through the trigger guard and raised the pistol so that it pointed at Mevlevi’s haughty face.

The Pasha spread open his arms. “Now’s your chance, Nicholas. Feeling out of sorts? Seen too much for one day? Not sure banking is the right profession for you? I bet you didn’t think it would be this exciting, did you? Well, here’s your chance. Kill me or join me forever.”

“You’ve gone too far,” Nick said. “You shouldn’t have brought me down into your filthy world. What choice have you left me? Have others seen as much and kept quiet?”

“Worse. Far, far worse. You’ll guard your silence, too. It will be our bond.”

Nick lowered the gun so that it aimed at the Pasha’s torso. Was this the spark Mevlevi had provided Wolfgang Kaiser? Making the Chairman an accessory to murder? “You’re wrong. There’s no bond between us. You’ve pushed me too far.”

“No such place. I’ve spent my life pissing in the darkest corners of men’s souls. Believe me, I know. Now give me the gun. After all, we’re on the same side.”

“What side is that?”

“The side of business, of course. Free trade. Unrestricted commerce. Healthy profits and healthier bonuses. Now let’s have the gun, chop-chop.”

“Never.” Nick allowed his finger to caress the polished metal trigger. He enjoyed its promise of swift and final judgment. The grip was warm and the smell of burned powder tickled his nose. It was all coming back to him now. He tightened his grip on the pistol and smiled. Christ, this would be easy.

Mevlevi lost his jocular mien. “Nicholas, please. The time for games has passed. There is a corpse behind you and your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. You’ve made your stand. As I said before, I am most impressed by you. I see defiance runs in your veins, too.”

Had Kaiser also defied the Pasha? Nick wondered. Or was he talking about somebody else? “I’m taking this gun with me and leaving. Don’t expect to see me Monday
morning. About this” — he motioned his head toward the lifeless body of Albert Makdisi—”there’s only one thing I can do. I’ll have to explain best I can.”

“Explain what?” said Gino Makdisi, who had pulled himself to his feet and taken a position next to Mevlevi. “That you killed my brother?”

Mevlevi said to Gino, “I am so very, very sorry. I did as you requested. I gave him a last chance to apologize.”

“Albert?” scoffed Gino. “He never apologized to anyone.”

Mevlevi returned his attention to Nick. “I’m afraid it appears that you, my friend, killed Albert Makdisi.”

“Yes,” agreed Gino Makdisi. “Two witnesses. We both saw you do it.”

Nick laughed grimly at his predicament. Mevlevi had bought off Gino Makdisi. A wild thought came to him. Fuck it all, then. One man’s death was already on his soul. Why not two? Why not three? He stepped toward the Pasha and firmed his grip around the pistol’s steel butt. He raised his arm and drew a bead on Ali Mevlevi’s face, suddenly absent its smug smile. You killed Cerruti, you son of a bitch. You murdered your partner in cold blood. How many more men have you killed before that? Becker too? Was he snooping around a little too much? And now you want to frame me?

Nick’s world narrowed to a tight corridor. His periphery grew dark. Anger spread through every inch of his being. Unconsciously, he increased his pressure on the trigger. The muscles in his forearm contracted and his shoulder hardened. This is what it feels like to do some good, he told himself.

Do some good.

“Think of your father,” Mevlevi said, as if reading Nick’s mind.

“I am.” Nick extended his arm and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. He pulled it again. Metal struck metal.

Ali Mevlevi exhaled noisily. “Quite some feat. I must admit it requires real courage to stare down the barrel of a gun even when you know it to be empty. For a moment there, I forgot how many shots I had given Albert.”

Gino Makdisi took a snub-nosed revolver from his jacket and pointed it at Nick. He looked to Mevlevi for instructions. Mevlevi lifted a hand and said, “I’m deciding.” Then to Nick, “Please give me the gun. Slowly. Thank you.”

Nick looked away from the men to the river running below them. The dry firing of the pistol had shattered the rage pounding inside his skull. He had expected the gun to buck in his hand, to feel the crack of the bullet, to hear the tinkling of the spent shell as it hit the ground. He had expected to kill a man.

Mevlevi tucked the silver pistol back into his jacket. He knelt and collected the spent shell casings. Standing, he whispered in Nick’s ear. “I told you this morning that I wanted to thank you. What better way to show my gratitude than to make you a member of my family? Cerruti’s passing has left a convenient opening.”

Nick stared through him. “I’ll never be a member of your family.”

“You have no choice. Today, I let you live. I gave you life. Now, you’ll do as I ask. Nothing serious. At least, not yet. For the moment I simply want you to do your job.”

Gino Makdisi said, “Remember the gun, Mr. Neumann. It carries your fingerprints. I may be a criminal, but in court my word is as good as the next man’s.” He shrugged his shoulders as if things weren’t so bad, then twisted his bulk toward the Pasha. “Can you drop me at the Schiller Bank? We’ll have to hurry if we’re to make the transfer this afternoon.”

The Pasha smiled. “Not to worry. Mr. Neumann is an expert at processing late-arriving transfers. Every Monday and Thursday at three o’clock, right, Nicholas?”

Peter Sprecher drummed his fingers on top of his desk and told himself in a stern voice that he must count to ten before exploding. Silently, he invoked Almighty God, the King James variant, thank you, to pacify the jabbering crowd gathered around the hexagonal trading desk adjacent to his own. He heard Tony Gerber, a rat-faced options specialist, rave about the “strangle” he had put on USB shares. If the shares stayed within five points of their current level, he’d take down a two-hundred-thousand-franc profit in just thirty days. “Go ahead and annualize that return,” he heard Gerber brag. “Three hundred and eighty percent. You try and beat it.”

Sprecher reached seven before deciding he could stand it no longer. He slid his chair back and tapped his neighbor Hassan Faris, the bank’s chief of equities trading, on the shoulder. “I know it is a quiet Friday afternoon but if you wish to continue this infernal racket, take your pack of thieves off to another corner of the cave. I’ve another dozen calls yet to make and I can’t hear myself think.”

“Mr. Sprecher,” answered Faris over the continuous buzz, “you are sitting in the center of the trading floor of a bank that derives its entire income from buying and selling financial instruments. If you have a problem hearing, I’ll be happy to order you a headset. Until then, mind your own fucking business. Okay?”

Sprecher grumbled something about not being an operator and slid his chair back to his desk. Faris was right, of course. The place was supposed to be a hive of activity. The more frenetic, the better. A moving market meant someone somewhere was making money. He scanned the floor. Like bumpers on a snooker table, seven hexagonal desks sprang from the green baize floor. Around them, men stood in varied positions of action. He heard someone fire off an order for a thousand OEX contracts at the market. Beside him, Alfons Gruber was whispering feverishly into his handset, “I know Philip Morris is up twelve percent in the last week, but I still want to short the sucker. I hear the jury’s ready to convict. I’m telling you, short it!”

Sprecher felt lost. This was not his world. It was everything he had rebelled against. A trader’s career was nasty, brutish, and short. He did not enjoy phoning ladies and gentlemen with whom he had no prior acquaintance and hectoring them to put in their lot with Klaus Konig and the Adler Bank. It made him feel cheap. In his heart he was still a USB man, and probably would be until the day he died.

Sprecher returned to the task at hand. Officially stated, his job was to rally the votes of those institutional shareholders holding sizable blocks of USB stock to the Adler Bank’s cause. It had been a difficult task, confidential shareholder lists pirated from USB notwithstanding. Holders of Swiss bank stocks tended to be a conservative lot. The Adler Bank was having little luck winning votes based on its past returns. Too risky, too aggressive by half, stammered the stodgy investors. With days remaining until USB’s general assembly, he was convinced that the sole route open to capture two seats on the board of the United Swiss Bank was straightforward share accumulation: cash purchases on the open market.

There was only one problem. The Adler Bank’s cash reserves had dried up. The bank had leveraged its assets beyond any prudent measure to secure its current position of thirty-two percent of USB’s outstanding shares, a stake valued as of yesterday’s close at 1.4 billion Swiss francs. God forbid Konig failed to gain the deciding one percent: the price of USB stock would collapse, and the market value of Adler’s portfolio would drop between eighteen and twenty percent overnight.

Sprecher spotted a tall man waving to him from across the room. It was George von Graffenried, Konig’s number two and head honcho on the bond desk. He waved back and began standing but Von Graffenried motioned for him to stay seated. A few moments later he was squatting by Sprecher’s side.

“I’ve just received another surprise from our friends at USB,” Von Graffenried said quietly, handing him a sheet of paper. “Get on it. A block of one hundred forty thousand shares. Exactly the one percent we need. Find whoever runs this Widows and Orphans Fund of Zurich and get your butt over there as quickly as possible. We have to capture their votes!”

Sprecher picked up the photocopy of USB stationery and brought it closer to his eyes.
The Widows and Orphans Fund of Zurich. Fund manager Mrs. F. Emmenegger
. He smirked. His American friend’s ploy had obviously worked. Such was the pressure to surpass the thirty-three percent vote barrier that neither Konig nor Von Graffenried, despite never having heard of the fund, had bothered to research its authenticity.