Swindlers (2 page)

“Well, that depends on who you decide to
murder,” I replied. I sat back and tossed my napkin on the table.
The question had brought me back to myself, put me in a position in
which I knew what I was talking about, put me in a position to say
something which, let me be honest about it, might make Danielle St.
James think I was something other than a tongue-tied fool. “I make
a rule never to defend anyone who has killed a friend of mine.” I
studied the glass I still held in my hand and smiled back at St.
James. “A close friend, you understand.”

Gathered around that table were some of the
wealthiest people in the country. Like St. James, who grinned his
approval at what I had said, they tended to forget how much their
own success had depended on chance, and believed instead that it
had all depended on them, their ability to see the world as it was,
a place in which everyone who knew what he was doing always looked
to his own advantage.

“Yes, well, business is business,” said St.
James, casting a knowing glance around the table. But then, as if
to raise a doubt, question the validity of what they thought about
themselves, he turned back to me and asked, “Does it ever bother
you? I’m told you don’t lose very often – almost never.” He
searched my eyes, trying before I made one to measure my response.
“No, that’s a stupid question, asking if it bothers you to win a
case you should have lost!” He shot a sharp, almost dismissive
glance at a balding man with small, greedy eyes. “That’s like
asking Darwin here whether it bothers him when some financial
scheme of his puts a few thousand people out of work.”

Richard Darwin had the habit, which must have
started when he was a child, one of nearly a dozen children in his
family, of eating with both hands, and talking while he did it. His
hands, his mouth, were in constant motion, and there was no set
pattern, no accustomed routine; it was purely a question of
expedience. If he used his right hand to butter a piece of bread,
he used his left to shove it into his mouth; if the salt was on his
left, he used that hand to season his soup while he ate spoonful
after spoonful with his right. When he bit down on something, it
was the only mark of punctuation ever heard in one of his endless
run on sentences. It was impossible to imagine him, even when he
ate alone, ever being quiet. But St. James’ remark stopped him
cold. His face turned red and he clenched his teeth so hard his
head began to shudder. He jabbed a stubby finger in the air.

“Some people may lose their jobs when I buy
up a company; but more jobs are created. I make things more
efficient,” he went on, his raspy voice rising with each angry
word. “Creative destruction, that’s what capitalism is all about –
the future is only possible when you get rid of the past!”

Far from troubled, St. James seemed vastly
amused.

“Isn’t that what I just said?” he remarked
quite calmly. “You don’t feel bad about it when you close something
down.”

This was too logical. It missed, for Darwin,
the essential point.

“I do feel bad about it,” he wheezed. “It’s
hard to put people out of work, even when you know that, overall,
it has to be done.”

“I’m sure it’s difficult,” said St. James,
dryly, and then turned again to me. “But as I was saying, the
question doesn’t have relevance. Your job is to win. The real
question is how you do it. What makes you better than the others?
Why do you win cases they say almost anyone else would lose?”

“Look at him!” cried Danielle, laughing at
the blank expressions she saw all around her, laughing because none
of the others had grasped what to her seemed so obvious. “Look at
his face. Who would ever think he could lie? When he gets up to
tell a jury – I’ve never been in court, so I’m just imagining –
when he tells a jury that his client is innocent, don’t you think,
if they have any doubt about it, that they’ll take his word for it
and not what some grim-faced lawyer for the other side tries to
tell them?” She turned to me and smiled. “If I were on a jury, I’d
believe what he said.”

St. James held up his empty wine glass,
studied it with a pensive expression, and then signaled that he
wanted more.

“But beyond that honest face of yours, Mr.
Morrison, don’t you have to have a ruthless ambition, a willingness
to do anything to win?”

I wondered if he meant it literally, or, like
most of us, meant it only in the sense of doing everything you
could within the rules. I had the feeling that he was more
interested in discovering what I thought about it, whether I
recognized any rules I would not break.

“I learned a long time ago,” I explained,
watching the way he was watching me, “that the only way to win is
to know the case inside out, know it so well that you don’t make
any mistakes of your own, know it so well that you’re ready to take
advantage of any made by the other side.”

This did not answer his question, but that
fact, instead of bothering him, seemed to tell him what he needed.
He bent forward, another question, or rather another observation,
on his lips.

“A lot of lawyers must go into court fully
prepared, but they don’t all come out winners the way you do.”

I could not resist a retort, not after
watching Richard Darwin stuff his mouth while he talked about the
hardships of forcing other people out of work.

“A lot of people spend their lives working
very hard, doing everything they can to get ahead, but more of them
die poor than ever get rich. Sometimes, what happens is just a
matter of luck.” Caught up in my own argument, I pressed the point.
“Trials are sometimes won, or lost, by the smallest things: the way
a witness shifts his eyes, or the sudden pause as if he has
forgotten part of the well-rehearsed lie he had wanted to tell.
I’ve seen trials decided because a witness for the other side wore
a dress that was too revealing. Anything can change the outcome,
and the great thing, if you happen to like this kind of work, is
that you never know when a trial begins what it might be.”

CHAPTER TWO

I had too much to drink, and when I woke up
the next morning my head beat like a hammer. I managed to get
dressed and make my way up on deck, and into a blinding noontime
sun. Even with dark glasses, the shoreline was a distant blur. A
steward brought me a Bloody Mary and, clutching the railing, I
tried to steady myself.

“She’s really quite beautiful, isn’t
she?”

I had not heard Nelson St. James come up
behind me. Nodding in dim recognition of what he had said, I tried
to show enthusiasm as I cast a glance of approval at the sleek
lines of his prize possession.

“Not the boat, Mr. Morrison – my wife!
Danielle. You couldn’t take your eyes off her last night. No! Don’t
be embarrassed,” he laughed, slapping me with something like
affection on the shoulder. “Danielle is one of the world’s truly
beautiful women. Only a fool, or a eunuch, wouldn’t want to look at
her.”

He noticed what I was drinking. Smiling to
himself, he kicked at the deck and then shook his head.

“You drank less than any of them, and you’re
the only one who feels the effect. All they do is drink. But then,
who can blame them? If you were as dull as they are, wouldn’t you
try to forget who you are? Or if you had their worries,” he added
with a strange, enigmatic look.

“Then why…?” I blurted out before I could
think.

“Invite them along? Have them as guests?” He
leaned on the railing and stared out at the distant hills, rising
and falling with the swelling current of the sea. “The cost of
doing business, let’s just call it that.” He took a deep breath and
held it for a moment before letting it out. “It’s more than that.
They have a lot of money invested with me. They’re worried now that
it might not be safe.” A look of shrewd malice danced in his eyes.
“We’re out here on this pleasure cruise so I can convince them that
if they take their money out they’ll lose all chance of getting the
kind of returns I’ve been giving them for years. That’s what they
really worry about: not whether they might lose what they have, but
that they might lose the chance to get even more.”

A wind kicked up and started to blow in
gusts. Short, choppy waves began to slap against the hull. The ice
in my glass rattled in my unsteady hand. The wind got stronger, the
boat cut deeper into the sea.

“I’m not much of a sailor, but there’s
nothing like it, being out here on a day like this.” He pointed to
the coast which, seen from this distance, looked like some vast,
uninhabited place still waiting to be discovered. “You can almost
feel what it must have been like, back at the beginning, when the
Spanish, and then the English, came; when all this was there for
the taking, for anyone who had the nerve.”

A look as of someone cheated out of what he
should have had fell across his dark, implacable eyes. He was
genuinely distressed, irritated, as it seemed, for having been born
too late, thwarted of the kind of ambition he might have
enjoyed.

“A whole country waiting to be built, and now
– what?” He turned to me, a rueful expression etched deep with a
peculiar bitterness plain on his face. “What?” he demanded. “Make
money – just keep adding numbers. It’s the world we live in, the
one we never made.” Suddenly, he laughed and threw up his hands in
mock frustration. “Even criminals lack all ambition!”

Still laughing, he took me by the arm and
started walking down the deck. The hard, heavy wind nearly knocked
me sideways, but St. James, more used to it, did not miss a
step.

“You ever defend someone charged with
embezzlement?” he asked, continuing his line of thought. “Wouldn’t
matter if they had stolen millions, would it? It would still be
boring, compared to a single act of piracy.”

He stopped and swung around until he was
right in front of me, a question in his eyes.

“That’s not crazy, you
know. I can prove it. Think back over the last few years, all the
rich guys – I knew a few of them – who went to jail because of the
money they had taken out of the companies they ran, or the
investors they defrauded. Doesn’t that show you how utterly dull
and without imagination they were?”

His eyes were alive with excitement, eager to
show me he was right, and I still had no idea what he was talking
about.

“They were tried and found guilty, and they
went to prison. That’s the way it works.”

He patted me on the arm and started walking,
but just for a few steps.

“Why did they go to trial? That’s one
question. The other question is why did they go to prison after
they were found guilty?”

He started off again, but almost immediately
stopped again. Clasping his hands behind his back he squinted into
the wind.

“You’re too close to it, too much a part of
the system. But what would you do, if you knew you were guilty, and
you had, as they say, all the money in the world?” He arched an
eyebrow and let me know he could scarcely believe how stupid people
could be. “All the money in the world, millions – no, billions –
and they go off to jail like good little boys who have been told to
go their rooms! All they had to do – any one of them – was get on a
private plane and get out of the country. The question is why they
didn’t. Isn’t that what you would do, faced with the choice between
wealth and freedom in some safe corner of the world or twenty, or
thirty, or forty years locked up in a federal prison? Can you
imagine a pirate doing that? Do you know why they did it, just went
to prison when they didn’t have to? – No imagination, no courage;
they were all a bunch of clerks; they didn’t know how to do
anything that wasn’t part of a routine. That’s why they did so well
in business: they just did what everyone else was doing. Trust me,
I know these guys. You could leave their cell doors open, all the
guards could disappear, not one of them would think about
escape!”

St. James shook his head in mockery, and
then, as if to apologize for his rant against the cowardice of
thieves, gave a modest shrug and shook his head once more, this
time with an air of resignation.

“Have another Bloody Mary. I have some dull
business to attend to; nothing like the life of a pirate – it will
probably take all afternoon.”

He walked away, laughing quietly, and then,
suddenly, shouted back. “Maybe that’s what I should do: raise the
skull and crossbones and sail the seven seas!” A large,
irresistible, grin cut hard across his mouth. “But then I suppose
they’d just track me down with a global satellite and take all the
fun out of even that!”

I did not know quite what to make of Nelson
St. James. The more time I spent with him, the less I understood.
But despite my growing confusion, I was starting to like him.
Perhaps because he had so much of it, he seemed to have no interest
in money, and a barely concealed contempt for those who had. It was
all a game to him, money merely the counters, the way you kept
score.

I settled into a deck chair and watched the
long white wake stretch out in the distance, the ephemeral mark of
where we had been. After a while the wind subsided and the sea grew
calm and the only sound was the quiet murmur from the engine room
below. Two couples came up on deck to take the sun and, though I
was not in the mood for conversation – my head still hurt too much
for that – I decided I owed it to my hosts to mingle with the other
guests.

“They’re selling the place in the Hamptons,”
said Pamela Oliver as she rubbed lotion on her long, sleek
legs.

I had met her the night before, but then she
had clothes on and not a bathing suit. She had the air of a
pampered sportswoman, more concerned with how she looked on the
golf course or the tennis court than how well she played the
game.