LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (7 page)

“I guess it was inevitable an idiot like Harold would eventually get sticky fingers. He started wheeling and dealing with the money while it was lying around in the accounts he’d set up at Texas State. He figured he could use the float to make a few bucks playing the foreign exchange markets before he shifted the money out to Jimmy’s offshore accounts.”

“How did Jimmy catch him?” I asked.

“Jimmy didn’t. Wilkins was just unlucky. There was an audit while the stupid prick was off chasing pussy in New Orleans with the rest of the rubes.”

“The auditors were onto him?”

“No, it was strictly some routine stuff. They just started pulling foreign exchange contracts at random. They were spot-checking the bank’s exposure when it occurred to somebody that the number of positions was pretty big for a bank the size of Texas State. It didn’t take long for them to see that almost all of the positions had been opened by Wilkins. That was when the whole fucking thing came unraveled.”

“But didn’t they just close the positions the auditors found? How could the losses have been so big?”

“I told you, Wilkins was an idiot. I don’t think he got the market right even once. Every time a contract went bad he’d cover it by doubling his next position. By the time the auditors got on to him he was so far underwater he was shitting seaweed.”

“How much did he lose?”

Barry hesitated, and I glanced over at him just in time to see a sly look slide across his face. “Just over $60,000,000 according to the auditors’ final report.”

“I still don’t see how it could have been so much.”

“It wasn’t.”

I looked at Barry and shook my head. “You lost me.”

“Wilkins really did piss away a million or so fucking around with foreign exchange futures—that much of the story was true—but that was dog shit to Jimmy. It only mattered because it gave him an idea. He started wondering what would have happened if Wilkins had been thinking bigger? And that was when it came to him.”

“What came to him?”

“That if he could find a way to hang some really big losses around Wilkins’s neck instead of just the lousy million or so he had actually pissed away Wilkins would take the fall for the whole pile of shit. If Jimmy handled it just right, he could waltz away with all the phony losses without the slightest chance anybody would ever work out what really happened. I got to hand it to the guy, Jack. The concept was golden.”

“But not unless—”

“Yeah, that was problem, of course. Jimmy had to have an inside man at the bank to pull that kind of thing off. I’d been put in charge of investigating Wilkins by the rest of the board and given full authority over all the bank’s foreign exchange operations.” Barry turned his head and gave me a rueful look. “I guess I was the obvious choice.”

“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know.

“Jimmy told me he’d put twenty percent of whatever I could scam for him into a Hong Kong bank and give me a fresh start anywhere I wanted.”

Barry kicked at a pebble with his toe. It rattled off a garbage can on the sidewalk and bounced into the gutter.

“That’s the real American dream, isn’t it, Jack? To disappear into some tropical paradise, rich and reborn?”

“I don’t think—”

“Americans have been reinventing themselves since the fucking pilgrims hit the beach,” Barry interrupted. “It’s one thing we’re really good at. Today we just do it a little faster than we used to, that’s all.”

I said nothing, but Barry didn’t seem to care.

“Of course, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to start over again, you want to do it rich, and I was sure as hell going to do that. I knew I could get forty or fifty million out of Texas State without breaking a sweat. That would mean at least eight or ten million for me.”

Barry suddenly brightened and barked a quick laugh.

“You ought to understand starting over better than anybody, Jack. That’s why you walked away from Washington and moved to Bangkok, isn’t it?”

I didn’t bother to argue with Barry. His suggestion that we had both done more-or-less the same thing was so outrageous I just let it pass.

“How did you pull it off?” I asked him instead.

“It was easy. I phonied up a bunch of new contracts for bigger sums than Wilkins had ever dreamed of. Then I slipped them into the system with his trades so they’d look right. After that, I reviewed the trading accounts myself and claimed to have discovered them. How the hell was I going to get caught? Nobody really knew what had been going on but Wilkins, and who the fuck was going to believe
him
when he said most of the contracts I found weren’t his? Hell, the contracts I stuck in didn’t even have to be good phonies since everybody was more than ready to believe that a boob like Wilkins would have made a mess out of his own swindle.”

Barry smiled. It looked to me like it was trying not to, but he just couldn’t stop himself.

“Eventually I gave my solemn opinion to Texas State that legally they had to make good on every one of the contracts I’d found, and they did. When the smoke cleared, I’d creamed off just under $50,000,000 for Jimmy. That meant I’d cleared almost $10,000,000 for myself.”

We were just in front of the Ambassador Hotel when a pudgy local man broke out of the pack of touts that habitually lay in wait there to ambush passing male tourists. He approached us in an odd, crablike gait, scuttling almost sideways.

“Massage, boss? Many sexy girl.” The tout poked a tattered brochure toward Barry. “Take look?”

Barry didn’t say anything, but he turned his head very slowly and looked at the man. The tout didn’t say another word. He just jerked the brochure away and darted back to the safety of the other touts. I could feel the men following us with their eyes as we walked on by and I wondered what the man had seen in Barry’s face that frightened him so badly.

“That was when Jimmy got an even bigger idea,” Barry continued as if nothing had happened. “He was sick of getting screwed by banks, he told me. He had the $50,000,000 I’d just stolen for him already sitting around in offshore banks, less my cut of course, so he told me he figured this was his big chance.”

I just listened.

“Jimmy wanted his own bank. I knew of one that was available and I thought we could get it for close to the $50,000,000 that I’d scammed out of Texas State. Jimmy told me if I’d throw in my $10,000,000 with his $40,000,000 and could do the deal for that amount, he’d give me a free hand to run the bank and a thirty-five percent shareholding.”

Now I was staring so hard at Barry I stumbled over an uneven joint in the sidewalk that jutted up unexpectedly in front of me.

“What are you telling me here, Barry? The Russian mob not only asked you to buy a bank for them, but to put some money into the deal yourself and become their partner? And you
did
it?”

“I didn’t become partners with the whole fucking mob, Jack, just with Jimmy Kicks. Don’t go all hysterical on me here.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Serious as shit, Jack. A chance to own thirty-five percent of an international bank and run it however I wanted to? I’d have been nuts to say no.”

“How could you even
think
of fronting for the Russian mob, Barry?”

“Now don’t get so high and mighty on me, Jack. We both crawled out of the same fucking pile of crap. You took your way out, I took mine. What the hell’s the difference?”

“That’s the second time you’ve tried the say that we both took the same road, and this time I’m not going to let it slide. There’s nothing remotely similar about the choices you and I made, Barry. Not a damned thing.”

“Tell me the difference.”

“The difference is that I didn’t fake a suicide and go into business with a bunch of Russian mobsters.”

“No, Jack, that’s not it.”

Barry produced the faintest of smiles.

“The difference,” he said, “is they didn’t ask you to.”

WE PASSED A
McDonald’s that was closed for the night. Barry abruptly left the sidewalk and climbed the half-dozen stained concrete steps that led up to the darkened entrance. When he reached the last step, he turned around and sat down, looping his arms around his knees and lacing his fingers together.

“Was that Wilkins in the swimming pool?” I asked as I climbed up and sat down next to him.

“Who the hell do you think it was, Jack? The fucking tooth fairy?” Barry sounded genuinely annoyed. “Look, Wilkins was a dead man anyway. You don’t steal from somebody like Jimmy Kicks and then tell your grandchildren funny stories about it.”

“So you let them kill Wilkins to cover for you, and you took off.”

“Jack, I didn’t fucking
let
Jimmy Kicks do anything. Harold was going to get gutted. That’s all there was to it. Jimmy offered to use Harold’s body to fake a suicide for me and give me a clean start if I’d do the bank deal for him. It was just that simple.”

Barry looked off into the darkness and for a moment I wondered what he was seeing there.

“What bank did you buy?” I asked eventually.

“The Asian Bank of Commerce.”

I stared at Barry. The ABC was a very minor Philippine bank that would have been utterly unknown had it not been making headlines over the past few months with sensational allegations of corruption on a grand scale. The cast of characters rumored to be involved was colorful if a touch familiar: the usual contingent of corrupt government officials, fabulously wealthy sheiks, shady arms dealers, out-of-control intelligence agencies, and Asian criminal gangs. In fact, about the only international villains who
hadn’t
been getting press in connection with the ABC were Russian mobsters.

“How could you buy control of the ABC for the Russian mob without anyone finding out?” I asked.

“It was no big deal. I set up a string of shell companies to hold the stock and some corporate cut outs that kept anyone from tracing its real ownership. I used a private investment fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, a venture capital group in Luxembourg, a Panamanian shipping line, two Hong Kong insurance brokers, and a whole bunch of companies that owned companies that were in partnerships that owned other companies. Hell, Jack, you know how it’s done. You’re better at putting together that sort of stuff than anyone I ever knew. Except maybe me.”

“You sound like you’re proud of what you’ve done, Barry.”

“A little, I suppose. It was a cute deal. I did a hell of a job.”

I just shook my head and said nothing.

“Oh for God’s sake, Jack, lighten up. You know the old saying. Every man loves the smell of his own farts.”

In spite of myself, I had to laugh. “Did you just make that up?”

Barry shrugged. “Old Icelandic proverb.”

I chuckled again and shifted my weight on the step. I knew I should just keep my mouth shut, but I was curious.

“So how did you deliver the bank to Jimmy?” I asked.

“It wasn’t too tough. When the peso went down the toilet a few years ago, the ABC was fucked. They tried to sell some convertible bonds to raise capital, but the market just laughed. My shell companies scooped up most of the bonds for a couple of cents on the dollar, then we converted them all into common stock.”

“And that gave you control of the Asian Bank of Commerce.”

“Only nobody knew it because we used about thirty different companies to buy and convert the bonds. It looked like a whole bunch of different companies each had a small piece.”

I doubted that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked that way if anyone was paying attention. On the other hand, Manila wasn’t much of a financial center and Barry had probably struck on one of the best places in the world to find exactly the right combination of credibility, stupidity, and greed he needed to make his deal fly. What passed for the banking authorities in the Philippines were mostly local politicians, none of whom would have particularly cared what Barry and his friends were actually doing with the ABC as long as they were taken care of.

The gist of the story that Barry had told me was beguilingly simple, but the implications were breathtaking. On the surface, he had just bought a broken-down bank that was operating in a reasonably respectable place and used a string of untraceable shell companies to control it. As a practical matter, however, Barry had done nothing less than hijack an entire country as a front for a gang of Russian mobsters.

“It sounds to me like you and your new pals are on the train to glory, Barry. So why are we having this conversation? I can’t believe you’ve discovered a sudden need to confess your sins.”

“Well…” Barry rolled some words around in his mouth for a few moments, but he didn’t seem to like the taste of any of them. “It’s this way, Jack. The bank’s wiped out. Somebody scammed us.”

He said it exactly like he was pronouncing a death sentence. For Barry, it probably was.

“In the last three months we’ve lost more deposit money than we can cover from capital. I swear to God I don’t know who took it, but eventually Jimmy’s going to decide it was me.”

I could feel a chill coming off Barry. He glanced past me toward the street and I turned and followed his eyes. The tall woman was standing on the sidewalk about fifty feet away. She was looking into some shop windows and seemed to be paying no attention to us at all.

“They’ll get me, Jack. If I can’t fix this, they’ll get me; and it doesn’t matter a fig how many people I have out there protecting me.”

“This is going a little fast for me, Barry.”

“Yeah, it went a little fast for me, too. But listen up now. Once you know what I’m about to tell you, there’ll be no turning back.”

“It’s not a question of turning back. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Barry shrugged. “But you’ll know what I know, and that will make you a threat to them.”

“I’m not a threat to anyone, because in just about a minute I’m going to get up and walk off.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“Not a chance, Jack. I know you. You wouldn’t miss the rest of this for the world.”

I sighed and motioned vaguely for Barry to continue. What could it hurt just to listen?