Mortal Bonds (21 page)

T
hanks to something or other to do with air density off Nova Scotia, the flight landed in Zurich twenty minutes early. I went straight to the Swiss First lounge for a shower and to change into spare underwear and a fresh shirt. Other than those items, my five-thousand-dollar Valextra briefcase—a bit of self-indulgence from my previous incarnation—held only a well-thumbed paperback copy of Temple Grandin’s
The Way I See It
, the Dr. Spock for the autistic crowd—representative of a very different Jason Stafford.

The concierge provided me a fresh amenities kit, complete with razor, toothbrush, comb, and enough gels, liquids, and scented semisolids to clean, freshen, and invigorate a baseball team, including the designated hitter—I took a pass on the complimentary champagne. The towel was on the small side, but it was clean, and by the time I finished shaving I felt ready for anything. Almost anything.

They were waiting for me just after passport control.

“Ah, Mr. Stafford,” a short man with a sparse comb-over and a bristly salt-and-pepper mustache addressed me. “We had almost given up on you.” His English was flawless and so neutrally accented, he might have been born in Omaha. “Would you step this way, please?” He held up an ID holder.

I focused on the light blue writing. Interpol. Police.

Police had never caused me any anxiety—before I went to prison. I felt my chest tighten.

“I thought we were to meet up at the bank.” I checked my watch. “Not for another hour or so.”

He smiled briefly—grimly. “There are some things to go over before we get there. We will escort you.” There were two men in uniform with him. “Shall we?” He gestured for me to follow him. It was not a request—but it was polite.

The Interpol policeman handed me his card once we were seated in the smallish backseat of the BMW 1 Series hatchback; the two uniforms were up front. It was good I had no more luggage than the briefcase—it wouldn’t have fit.

Michel Guelli, Zurich.

That’s all it said. I guess if you needed to know more, you should already know it. The car pulled out into traffic with a single polite but insistent blast of the siren.

“I looked over your file, Mr. Stafford. You are an unlikely candidate to have friends in the FBI.”

Friend. Singular.

“How nice to hear that Interpol has a file on me. Should I feel special? Or does everyone have one these days?”

There had been a trader in my group, when I was running the foreign exchange desk at Case, who would, when he was deep in his cups, transform from a pleasant, dry-humored father of three blond young girls into a muttering, conspiracy-imagining, delusional paranoid. He would quote Glenn Beck—without irony; whisper intensely about the New World Order and black helicopters; and decry that teachers were destroying our society. It was all relatively harmless, until one night in Basel at a client dinner, three vodkas ahead of the rest of the pack, he let it all come pouring out in purple vitriolic prose, horrifying the three proper bureaucrats from the International Monetary Fund. I wrestled him into a cab and told the driver to keep circling the hotel until he slept it off.

But there was one thing the guy got right—the part about the International Police. Interpol answers to no centralized body, only a consortium of its 190 member countries. In the U.S. they’re embedded in the Justice Department, but they’re outside the chain of command. They have all the investigative powers of the FBI and the CIA combined and none of the responsibility. Their methods, personnel, and files are exempt from any interference from any domestic agency. They cannot be subpoenaed, arrested, or sued. And they’re hiring.

“What I found to be intriguing is the reference to your assistance in various ongoing investigations for both the FBI and the SEC. Have you switched sides, Mr. Stafford? Or have you become a professional snitch?”

Switzerland is a beautiful country, but you don’t see much of it on the ride in from Zurich airport—I was having a hard time pretending to be interested in the view.

“I work for anyone who will pay my going rate, but I try to stay on the good side of people who have the power to put me in jail. Been there.”

Michel Guelli smoothed his few overlong hairs into place. “I am curious, though. Your interest here in Zurich, and with the private bankers Doerflinger Freres et Cie, has to do with an investigation for the Von Becker family. The FBI has already made requests for any and all information relating to bank accounts here—and the Swiss have complied. But now you arrive. What do you expect to find that we seem to have missed?”

“A safe-deposit box.”

He gave a sideways tic of his head. “Hmm. You don’t think we would have checked already?”

“Let’s see.”

He gave that quick, unamused smile again. “And indulge me, please, as long as we are being so frank with each other, why does an FBI agent assigned to a multiagency task force on
drugs
show an interest in Mr. Von Becker and his Ponzi scheme—an investigation being conducted by an entirely different department?”

Why? Because there was only one FBI agent in the world who might take my phone call.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the FBI. I’m working for members of the Von Becker family in cooperation with federal authorities.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes. I could see the flash of sunlight reflecting off the lake in the distance.

“Tell me,” he said in a less aggressive tone, as though we were acquaintances who might one day be friends. “Do you enjoy your work?”

I gave the question some thought. When I got out of prison, there had been few opportunities open to me. The fact that I had become very good at what I did in a short period of time was of less consequence.

“I didn’t choose it,” I finally said.

“I enjoy my work,” he admitted. “I help to maintain order in a chaotic world. And I am good at it.”

“Then you are in the über-class, Inspector. The one-percenters. The rest of humanity no longer has such luxuries as enjoying their work.”

“You are a cynic.”

“Do you know that there is a school of thought that in ancient hunter-gatherer societies, people spent no more than twenty hours a week hunting and gathering? Everyone did it, of course, making the culture very egalitarian by our standards for both men and women. It wasn’t until mankind began farming that the concept of wealth—ownership—became part of our makeup. Then you developed strata—castes. Rulers owned the wealth—and if they were capable rulers they worked at it; those who didn’t invented the leisure class. Full-time warriors were needed to protect the wealth. Serfs or slaves to work the fields and create the wealth. Traders—tradesmen—took the place of the hunter-gatherers, swapping one commodity for another, and living on the margins that the wealthy allowed. Those who couldn’t make the transition became outlaws or pirates.”

“And every cynic is a disappointed idealist,” he said.

“You’re the idealist. I just want to work twenty hours a week and spend the rest of my time caring for my son, loving a woman, and learning how to use some new apps on my iPhone.”

“Not a very Swiss outlook. Not very New York, either, I would think.”

“I’m still trying it on.”

The car pulled off the highway at the river, down Wasserwerkstrasse and across the bridge into a warren of one-way streets. If I had been forced to retrace our path, I would have been lost before the second turn. Finally we turned onto Bahnhofstrasse. Traffic was slow and orderly. Very Swiss. Zurich never seems to change. As many times as I have been there, for foreign exchange meetings, monetary conferences, and client dog-and-pony shows, it always looks like the most understated financial center on the planet. You will see more Rolls-Royces in Hong Kong, but in Zurich the police drive BMWs. Hong Kong doubles in height almost annually; in London, the City continues to sprawl, gobbling whole blocks at a time; and New York—New York will always be unique. There is new construction—all cities sprawl or die, it seems to be an immutable rule—but Zurich manages to maintain the look of a medieval town holding back the barbaric hordes of modernism. In Hong Kong and Singapore, everyone’s a capitalist, whether a coolie or a communist. In New York and London, you can almost feel money changing hands in electronic bursts at the speed of light. In Zurich, you get the feeling that money has been there for a thousand years and is very content to remain right there until the next millennium.

“Two blocks up on the right,” Guelli said to the driver. “Don’t make the turn. We’ll walk. Wait for us there.”

Guelli led me down the block. The near corner building was a gray stone structure with no windows on the ground floor. The door was polished brass, and a tiny plaque next to it read
DOERFLINGER FRERES ET CIE
. I stopped and turned around. Directly across the intersection was a café with twenty or so outdoor tables. Most of the tables were empty—it was late for breakfast, even for tourists, and too early for lunch. I could picture Castillo’s agent and Von Becker’s lawyer meeting there in near anonymity.

We must have been on CCTV because the door swung open mere seconds after Guelli touched the buzzer. A man with the size and build of a New York nightclub bouncer, but without the shaved head and black turtleneck, waved us in. We were immediately greeted by an elegant and attractive woman in her late fifties. With typical Swiss good manners, she welcomed us in four languages, pausing briefly after each in case we wanted to respond. Guelli, in deference to me, I imagined, held out through French, German, and Italian before responding in English.

“Thank you. Mssr. Guelli and Stafford. We have an appointment with Herr Gassner.”

She was delighted to take us to him.

We were buzzed through another metal door, passing a room where a smiling young man at a handsome mahogany desk nodded at us. If the setup here was similar to other Swiss private banks I had been to, he was the sole teller—there on the remote chance that a client needed change of a tenner, or wanted to deposit a suitcase full of gold. Then we passed down a hallway, the solid gray walls broken only by solid-looking heavy wooden doors. There were no paintings, no adornments, not even name plaques on the doors. The space spoke of security and efficiency. And anonymity.

The woman ushered us into a windowless room with an oblong black granite table, surrounded by leather chairs.

“Herr Gassner will be with you momentarily. May I get you coffee? Tea? Something else?”

“Water,” I said. “I’m still a bit dried out from the flight.”

“Certainly, Mr. Stafford. Still or sparkling?”

“Still is fine. Thank you.”

She ducked out and returned almost immediately with a small silver tray. A tall glass of water sat on a solid white doily, inscribed along the circumference with a fine gold circle and the words
Doerflinger Freres et Cie, bella gerant alii.

Let others make war.

I preferred a T-shirt I once saw on Nantucket.
Omnes in mare.
Everyone into the water.

“Gentlemen.”

Herr Gassner was a trim, athletic-looking man in his forties. He wore rimless glasses held together with a silver thread of titanium, and exuded the faintest scent of a spicy, expensive cologne. He carried an iPad, which he set on the table with the reluctance of an alcoholic relinquishing his grip on the bottle.

He and Guelli exchanged cards, and I smiled in rueful apology—I didn’t carry any. Any of my own, at any rate. I could have dug out one of Roger’s old cards for his clown business.
Jacques-Emo and Wanda the Wandaful.

“I am sorry that you have come so far on your errand, Mr. Stafford. As I explained on the telephone, Mr. Von Becker did not have an account with the firm. I don’t know what I can do for you.”

“Is it possible that he had an account, and you simply don’t know about it?”

Gassner exchanged a quick look with the policeman. “You are speaking of numbered accounts, I think? Swiss secrecy laws have changed over the years. Numbered accounts still exist and ownership is secret, but only to the public and lower-level employees. Any senior officer has access to such information. We must. And we must provide that information upon the request of a wide variety of governmental bodies.” He chuckled. “When Mr. Von Becker was arrested, every private banker in Switzerland received notice to turn over information on any accounts of his, his companies, and for members of his family. As we had nothing to provide, this made the firm quite suspect in the eyes of some of your regulators. They became disruptive.”

I could imagine. I’d seen the Feds in action when they thought they were being stonewalled.

“We call it a shit show.”

“How poetic. Both a metaphor and alliterative. I will remember it.”

“Do you provide safe-deposit boxes for clients?”

“We do, but the same issues would apply. I wouldn’t know what was in the box, but I would know who owned it, and there would be a record of every visit anyone made to it, and that record would be made available to the police upon request.”

They both looked at me pityingly—I was an idiot, and while they felt bad for me, they also sincerely hoped it wasn’t communicable.

“We came in the door facing the café—is there another entrance?”

Now they shared another quick look. Did they have an idiot on their hands or a madman?

“There are two other entrances—on the side streets. Employees tend to use them more than clients,” Gassner answered with the politeness one employs when conversing with the insane.

I nodded. “But clients use them as well. You have the same security arrangements there?”

Guelli cleared his throat as though to interrupt. I shot him a quick glance. Stick with me for just a minute more.

“Yes,” Gassner replied, turning it into a question.

“How long do you keep the CCTV images? I’m assuming they’re digital.”

“I wouldn’t know. The cameras are only active when someone pushes the button for entry, so it could be months. I really don’t know.” He had given up and was shaking his head in bewilderment as he spoke.