Swindler & Son Read online

  “What about handmade furniture?” I suggest. “Build the pictures into the rear wall of an armoire. Crate the armoire, put the special pieces in the middle of a shipment of twenty, so the X-ray man gets bored, randomly tests a few and lets the rest sail through.”

  “I don’t know,” Harry finally offers. “How do you ensure they pick the wrong pieces to X-ray?”

  “Half the world’s nuclear radiation detector operators can’t read the damn screen,” Hastings pitches in, “and they’re the cream of the crop. If your painting isn’t flashing neon, they’re not going to pick it up.”

  Beltoise, the Surete man, frowns at this. “It makes no sense to be clever,” he says. “Everything clever has been done. We have seen it all before and we will catch you.”

  “Okay, then how about this?” I say. “We take the paintings out of the fancy frames, roll them in rubber bands, throw them in the back of a cheap hatchback with a couple of boxes of books and send them across the border in a Fiat 500 with Sondra’s idiot cousin and his bombshell girlfriend.”

  Beltoise smiles. “That might work,” he admits.

  “It can’t be that simple,” says Hastings.

  “Simple is the only thing that works consistently,” I tell him. I’m preening a bit but maybe it’ll stir us up some business. At least it might give him something to remember other than Harry’s collapse. “Let’s say I bribe a foreign minister in a foreign country because I want to export a few zebras. The Foreign Minister has a big house and a Mercedes and two mistresses, he doesn’t need my $50,000. Meanwhile, there’s a city full of guys who resent him and want his job, because he’s Foreign Minister and they want their own $50,000 bribes. So they watch his every move until eventually, they catch him and charge him with $370,000 in bribes last year, which seems like a lot of money. He ends up in jail and I end up on a blacklist as a friend of his and can’t get a zebra for years or until that government passes out of office.

  “So in reality, it’s much better if I just bribe Menuhan, my laundress’s cousin’s friend on the loading dock. I give him a thousand bucks, which is more money than he’s ever seen in his life. He gives $150 to the inspector, walks him past the container with the zebras and drives them home, two at a time, in his bakery van. Nobody stops him even if the van whinnies now and then, because everyone knows Menuhan, he’s a nice guy with a wife and six kids to feed. The $850 left after bribing the inspector buys school clothes and pots and pans and a new roof on the house and it’s gone so fast it’s like he never had it. And everyone feels good that Menuhan had a profitable day at work because all he owns is dirt and no one envies him.”

  “As I said, that might work,” Beltoise nods with a smile. I bet he knows a lot of Menuhans.

  Hastings takes all this in, nursing a single malt with his scungili. When he gets up to go, he leans into my ear and says, “When can I drop by tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Christmas—”

  “What better day for a private chat, just the two of us? You don’t have any—” he nods, confused, at Sara alongside me. “I’d heard you didn’t have family obligations anymore.”

  “I don’t,” I say, hearing the bells toll. “One o’clock? Two?”

  “One sounds good,” he says and he’s gone, leaving me with the glare on Sara’s face.

  “You really didn’t think I’d figure out the truth about you?” she says. “This is what I do for a living, finding facts. Maybe you didn’t lie to me directly but you didn’t trust me, you didn’t share with me. You never treated me like a partner.”

  This is her at her best. Offended personally, naked and raw, no mask, no sarcasm, no lawyers. And me with no defense, just the truth.

  “I never felt I was lying to you—I thought you saw through me from the beginning. I figured you had me pegged from the first instant.”

  “I did,” she says, “but you made me reconsider.” And I know we’re thinking of the same moment.

  It was our second date. We’d spent 10 hours wandering Paris, just going whichever way looked interesting. I was convinced I was following her. At some point, I realized she was monitoring me the whole time—which passersby did I size up (almost everyone), which shops did I stop at—and when we’d approach a corner, which direction did I want to turn.

  I stopped dead. “You’re sizing me up,” I complained. “This isn’t a date, it’s another interview.”

  She actually looked like I’d caught her out. “I’m trying to understand what I feel about you,” she said. “When I yelled at you the other night—because you wanted to kiss me—it felt really liberating. With a man, I usually feel my only choice is either to be ‘nice’ or knee him. When I told you off, I assumed it was over. You just shrugged.”

  I shrugged again. “I know I like you. If you don’t like me back, that’s up to you. Maybe you’ve got a point, who knows?”

  “I do like you. I feel like I get to be myself around you. I just don’t understand it—you’re really not my type at all.”

  And, as soon as she said it, I heard a voice inside my head saying, How can I not be your type if you won’t tell me who you want me to be?

  A wave of embarrassment passed over me, like I’d caught myself out, like I’d overheard something I wasn’t meant to hear. I had to replay the line several times in my head before I grudgingly came to accept it.

  So much of my success, over the years, had come from making myself into whatever I thought my date or client or bank manager was looking for. If it was just about making a buck, I’d have come to peace with it, but clearly this went deeper and the thought made me squirm a bit. It sparked something inside me, a disagreeable impulse.

  “So what is your type?” I demanded.

  “I want a warrior,” she answered and that lit the fuse.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “The problem with warriors is, they’re only good in a war.” I said it and meant it. There—I’d said something I meant! “Otherwise, they’re rude, paranoid, overly aggressive, driving like idiots and getting into stupid fights with random bystanders. Women always think they want danger and then can’t understand how they ended up with such assholes.”

  It was pure reaction, striking back without considering the consequences. When I looked over, suddenly concerned that I’d insulted her, she had a smile on her face. “I’ll consider that,” she said, and I could see she meant it. Which was just one more thing to admire about her.

  And so now, six months later—at the Party on Christmas Eve—

  -Thank you.

  —sitting together in D’azur, the memory of that moment summons a last defense out of me.

  “You know where you go wrong?” I tell her. “You ferret out somebody’s weak spot and decide that’s the most important, insightful thing you know about them. And, politicians and generals included, people aren’t their worst impulses any more than their best.”

  She gives me that same once-over, like she’s seeing me again for the first time.

  “Did you really buy me a horse?”

  “You want to see? I’ll take you by the stable.”

  “No, I don’t want to see him. Sell him.”

  “Her.”

  “Fine. Sell her. You should be able to do that.”

  New Business

  And the next morning, Christmas Day, having slept very little and poorly at that, I stumble into the office for our one o’clock meeting.

  So: Return to Paris Christmas Eve. Divorce hearing, Harry’s bonkers, Christmas party, not much sleep, now we have a meeting. Got it?

  -Got it.

  And right after the meeting, I will stumble onto the street, get mugged and find GIGN all around my apartment. Okay?

  -I don’t need everything spelled out, thank you.

  I must have gotten the wrong impression somewhere. Anyway, Diamante hands me strong coffee as I exit the elevator—I don’t care what Hastings says, I don’t take meetings with spooks without a witness. And the way the elevator descends as soon as I
exit and returns in seconds with Hastings and a crew of four only confirms my suspicions.

  “I was going to use the chairs by the fire but I guess it’s the conference room,” I say, waving them in.

  “You brought your support,” Hastings answers. “I brought mine.”

  Some of his are armed, I note, bulges under the armpits they don’t bother to disguise.

  “This is Dieter Miller,” Hastings says, “and this is Mr. Woczynski,” not bothering to introduce the other two and what I hear is No point giving you more names as they’d all be fake anyway.

  Mr. Woczynski is 5”6”, as broad as he is tall, with a face as indebted to wolves as human ancestors. Dieter is a killer, a professional. I’ve seen those dead eyes before. If this was your platoon leader, you’d knife him the first time you had him alone, knowing he’d otherwise lead you to slaughter without a second thought.

  The whole group share the security eye-flick, that roving analytic eye that weighs every corner, window and doorway, as a means of attack or defense.

  “Dieter and I share a professional—”

  “We’re in compliance,” Dieter says, cutting him off short in a vivid Texas accent. Of course it is. “We have a proposition and Millard here says you’ll be interested.”

  “‘Compliance’,” I muse.

  “Sure,” Dieter says. “You know all about that.”

  “I’ve heard the term—”

  “You did your time,” he cuts me off. “I know your history. You shouldn’t have any problems.”

  I always assumed Hastings knew my background, that I was a spook for a short while, before he started working with us. Guys like him appreciate that, it saves having to explain a lot of things out loud. As Ronald Reagan declared, you can’t blame someone for what they haven’t said.

  But Hastings never actually mentioned it. Dieter has made a point of it, in the first ten seconds of our acquaintance.

  “You locate some items for us and get paid a lot of money,” Dieter says. “No need to spell things out.” This has been the basis of our business with Hastings all along, but suddenly I want to know more.

  “Why don’t we spell things out?”

  “Why should we?” Dieter snaps. “We all know the score.”

  That’s it. Dieter’s finished. No discussion. The man talks like he’s got something on everyone in the room. Maybe he’s got something on Hastings.

  -Why do you say that?

  Hastings is generally full of stories, chipper and distant all at once. Today, he’s an elongated lizard, the eyes and tongue moving while everything else remains frozen, watchful and anxious. And these are his people at his meeting!

  Dieter drops a corporate ID on the table and I begin to understand. Laser-engraved logo, barcode ID number and a hologram of his face that, on close examination, is too small for fine detail. All I need, really, to understand the bigger picture is the company name, Parker Meridien.

  Parker Meridien is a beast, a stench from one end of the planet to the other. They guard foreign ministers and corporate chairpersons, build bridges, drones and telemetry systems and manage food service for military bases. Underneath all that, they run spies, of the corporate, military and cyber variety.

  So that explains Dieter but not Mr. Woczynski, who seems to be sizing us up for dinner. Dinner, as in, us on a plate with a cream sauce.

  “What if I still want to talk about the score?” I say, trying to feel out the pecking order here, to locate the source of Hastings’ discomfort.

  “You get money instead of talk!” Dieter says, in a voice hungry for violence.

  “Money!” echoes Mr. Woczynski, like the drunk who suddenly realizes he’s supposed to be part of the conversation.

  “You said he was alright,” Dieter confronts Hastings, who shrinks a bit in his chair.

  “Nicky, where’s your enthusiasm?” Hastings asks, without any of his own. “You have concerns?”

  Yeah, I’ve got concerns. Hastings is no choir boy and he’s nervous, so I am too. And if I’m going to back out of this, I can only do it before I’ve heard the details.

  “My question is, what do you need us for? We’re shippers. You and Dieter don’t need a shipper. You’re already inside the gravy train.”

  “What’s dis Gravy Train?” Woczynski growls.

  I glance at Dieter. Does he want to explain? No—he wants to hear it from me.

  “All I know is professional gossip. First, it’s the charter airlines, supposedly independent businesses that everyone assumes are Pentagon fronts. Parker Meridien should get you unlimited access to them. And for those special packages, there’s the shadow planes that don’t officially go anywhere at all.”

  “’Shadow’ plane?” Woczynski again. All eyes on me for the answer.

  “Military Transport. They’re Pentagon, too, and official—but without flight plans, no log of arrivals or departures, no record whatever of comings and goings. They used to be the rendition planes. The ‘Space-A’, space available flights. With friends like that, why do you need us?”

  This provokes a rustling among the eye-flick crowd. Hastings rushes to suture the damage.

  “Look, Nicky, you’re right—there’s plenty of business out there, but it’s stupid—retail! It’s a wide-open highway and everyone’s running little station wagons. We want to open a trucking line. Short-term but big-mouth. We have a chance at a truly historic haul, over a limited time period, done and done.” He smiles, an almost-convincing replica of his ebullient self. “Besides, you’re not doing the shipping, just a very specific type of procurement.”

  “We deliver to Mr. Woczynski,” Dieter says. “He pays us in some rare stuff we want in exchange. You find the stuff—you know the players and how to convince them—he pays for it, you deliver it to us. Simple.”

  “Now, there is a time window, the whole thing needs to be done quickly,” Hastings clarifies. “And no ripples. Everything has to be discreet, everyone has to be satisfied after purchase. I’ve assured Dieter and Mr. Woczynski that that’s your stock in trade.”

  -So do you have any sense at this point of what they are selling to Mr. Woczinski?

  The only thing I know so far is that they aren’t telling me and that I’m not supposed to ask. Frankly, there’s nothing new in that—it’s how we work with lots of people, including Hastings—but this time, Hastings seems really tetchy about it and Dieter wants to cut off all discussion. So that is what concerns me.

  I hold my tongue for several seconds and, as often happens, am rewarded with a bit more detail. “Mr. Woczynski’s payments come from several accounts in Cyprus,” Hastings continues. “You will have direct computer access to those accounts at all times. Dieter will provide you with a list of items he and his partners want. You’ll pull money from the accounts, acquire the items and deliver them. It’s that simple.”

  This is getting less simple by the moment. The Cyprus address confirms what I’d already suspected—Woczynski’s connections are Russian Mob or Russian oligarchs or just people very very very close to the Kremlin. The kind of people who expect you to twist yourself into a pretzel and eat a hand grenade so that things stay simple for them.

  “So, on paper,” I say, clarifying—fuck what Dieter wants, “we are agents for Mr. Woczynski? Or for Dieter and partners? Who’s paying us to deliver the items from the list?”

  “Since none of this will ever become public, choose whichever answer you prefer.”

  “And we’re not concerned why Mr. Woczynski is feeling grateful?”

  “Correct. Your job is simply to facilitate his gratitude. You will take a ten per cent commission each time he makes a deposit.”

  “Ten per cent of?”

  “The total amount of the deposit.”

  Wow.

  “And, of course, you’ll incur expenses finding and shipping the purchases. Reimburse yourself for those as well. There will be no accounting of these details.”

  Wow wow.

  “And for s
hipping,” Dieter adds, “you can use Military Transport, since you already know how it works.”

  He drops five ID badges on the table, with Parker Meridien ID and hologram, each with a different cover name. He adds five sets of passports—US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand—names matching the corporate ID’s. “Slip a passport photo into the slot,” he shows me how the slot closes seamlessly so the picture looks laminated in place. “Book transport as necessary using these ID numbers. Here is a list of friendly staff sergeants on duty each day at Military Transport bases around Europe and the territory they typically fly. If they have any questions, have them call the number on the card and you’ll be verified. Make sure they call this number.”

  “And in case anything goes South—”

  Dieter shrugs. “We’ll do an investigation and discover our temporary ID system is all fouled up. Someone will probably get fired. But you’re being paid extremely well to make sure nothing goes South.”

  “Every once in a while,” Hastings purrs, “you may find the amount of money deposited may be in excess of what’s necessary to secure the items and delivery. In which case, the funds go into your discretionary fund.”

  Meaning, our pockets. Jesus!

  -So what do you understand at this point?

  Well, it’s pretty obvious—they’re selling contraband to Woczynski, whose money isn’t strictly all that good. They want us to launder the money, convert it into items that will retain their value—or that they can turn over for cash without difficulty—and get those items to them without customs or tax issues.

  This is a slush fund of unbelievable proportions and we’re being offered 10% plus whatever spills off the spoon. Money laundering on a massive scale. Worldly success beyond any dreams I’ve ever had.

  -Congratulations.

  Go fuck yourself. I’m terrified.

  -Isn’t this your business?

  RULE SIX: DON’T GET PIGGY. We’re a boutique operation by design. Big success means big visibility and when you get too visible, someone gets resentful and takes you down. And right now, I’m watching us morph into a fifty-story jewel-encrusted hog. A fifty-story hog it’s too late to back out of.