Numbered Account (11 page)

On Monday, Nick had demanded to listen to their notorious client. Though initially opposed, Sprecher had relented, knowing that he wouldn’t be in the office next time the Pasha called. “Wait until you hear him,” Sprecher had said. “The man is cold.” And so while speaking to him on the telephone, he had broadcast his client’s voice from a tinny speaker.

The Pasha’s voice was low and rough, Nick remembered. Like an empty cardboard box being dragged across a gravel lot. Demanding but not angry. Intonation a tool, not an emotion. Listening to the voice, he had felt a shiver growing at the base of his spine, at that tiniest of nubs where intuition signals the arrival of an unwelcome event.

Now, seated at his cramped desk, he stared at the Internal Account Surveillance List and felt the same curious tingling, the same frisson of anxiety itching at the base of his spine. From all exterior appearances the list was an innocent sheet of USB stationery, “Strictly for internal use” printed in bold letters across the upper left corner, its body sullied only by the four-word heading, the six account numbers below, and an admonition stating “All transactions regarding above accounts must be reported immediately to your superior and/or directly to Compliance, ext. 4571.”

In seven hours, the holder of account 549.617 RR would phone. He would inquire as to the balance in his account, then he would ask that it be transferred to several dozen banks around the world. Should Nick transfer the money as asked, he would deliver the Pasha into the hands of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Should he delay the transfer, the Pasha would have escaped their grasp — at least for now.

Schweitzer’s admonition reverberated in his head: “
One of your clients might be on this list . .
.” And then? Nick asked himself. Would he contact Schweitzer in conformity with the bank’s directives? Would he tell him that a client whose account number was on the surveillance list had executed a transaction that required the bank to “voluntarily” inform the United States DEA?

Nick’s mind shot back to the Keller Stubli, to Peter Sprecher’s wild accusations.
The Pasha: thief, smuggler, embezzler
. Why not add “murderer” and cover all the bases? Four weeks ago, Nick had defended his reputation, and by extension, that of the bank. But hadn’t he always suspected, if not the worst, well, then, at least something worse? Something marginally at odds with the laws of Western society?

“The Pasha,” he mused. “International criminal.” Why not?

Few at the bank even knew the man’s identity. One of them, Marco Cerruti, was currently suffering from, and here Nick chose the official terminology, “chronic stress-related fatigue.” So much prettier than saying the poor guy had suffered a force-ten nervous breakdown. It was Cerruti who had given the Pasha his nickname; Cerruti who for years had personally handled the account. Had he in his choice of sobriquet provided a clue to the identity of his client? Could he have been referring to the man’s nationality, or perhaps, more pointedly, hinting at his character?

Nick rolled the word around in his mouth.
The Pasha
. It oozed a familiarity with corruption. He envisioned a slowly turning ceiling fan scattering clouds of blue cigarette smoke, a whispering palm brushing against a shuttered window, and a crimson fez with a braided golden tassel.
The Pasha
. It recalled the slutty elegance of a once great empire, now tired and dilapidated, and gliding toward the devil with a wicked nonchalance.

The phone rang, waking Nick from his anxious reverie.

“Neumann speaking.”

“Hugo Brunner, chief hall porter, here. An important client has arrived without an appointment. He wishes to open a new account for his grandson. Your name has been posted as duty officer. Please come down immediately to Salon 4.”

“An important client?” This worried Nick. He wanted to pawn him off on somebody else. “Shouldn’t his regular portfolio manager handle it?”

“He is not yet on the premises. You must come immediately. Salon 4.”

“Who is the client? I’ll need to bring down his dossier.”

“Eberhard Senn. The Count Languenjoux.” Nick could practically hear the porter’s teeth gnashing. “He owns 6 percent of the bank. Now hurry.”

Nick forgot all about the surveillance list. Senn was the bank’s largest private shareholder. “I’m only a trainee. There must be someone more qualified to meet with Mr. Senn — uh, the count.”

Brunner spoke slowly and with a fury that brooked no excuse. “It is twenty minutes before eight o’clock. No one else has arrived. You are the duty officer. Now move it. Salon 4.”

My grandfather was a close friend of Leopold of Belgium,” bellowed Eberhard Senn, the Count Languenjoux. He was a chipper man of eighty dressed in a neat Prince de Galles suit and a sprightly red bow tie. “Do you remember the Congo, Mr. Neumann? Belgians stole the whole damned country. Hard to do that nowadays. Take that tyrant Hussein: Tried to steal the postage stamp next door and got his cheeks waxed.”

“Soundly defeated,” translated Hubert, the count’s grandson, a blond waif of twenty swallowed by a three-piece navy pinstripe. “Grandfather means that Hussein was dealt a crippling defeat.”

“Ah yes.” Nick nodded, feigning little knowledge of this minor imbroglio. Tactful ignorance was an important component of the successful banker’s repertoire. Not to mention speed.

After receiving Hugo Brunner’s call, he had raced down the corridor to retrieve Senn’s file from his official portfolio manager’s secretary. In the two minutes required to reach the ground floor and find Salon 4, he’d reviewed the client’s dossier.

“But not to our entire disadvantage, eh Hubert?” continued the count. “Fools lost all their weaponry. Tanks, machine guns, mortars. All of it. Gone. It’s a gold mine for us. The secret is Jordan. You’ll need a strong business partner in Jordan to ferry the weapons in.”

“Of course,” said Nick in firm agreement. Senn remained silent a few moments longer, and Nick worried that
he
was being asked to supply the name of such a partner.

“Belgians haven’t done a damn thing since they took the Congo,” said Senn. “I’m still hoping they’ll take it back. Do the place some good.”

Nick and Hubert both smiled, each bound by a separate duty.

“And that, Mr. Neumann, is how my grandfather received his title.”

“By helping Leopold conquer the Congo?” Nick ventured.

“Of course not.” The count guffawed. “He imported European women to make the damned place habitable. Leopold’s mistresses wouldn’t go near it! Someone had to look after the king’s pleasures.”

The count’s express purpose that morning was to alter the signatures on his
existing accounts. His son, Robert, had recently passed away. Nick recalled
seeing a few lines in the paper:
  Robert Senn, 48, president of Senn Industries, a Swiss manufacturer of light firearms, pressurized aerosol containers, and ventilation systems, died when the plane in which he was traveling, a Gulfstream IV belonging to Senn Industries, crashed shortly after takeoff from Grozny, Chechnya
. No speculation was made on the cause of the crash or for that matter on the purpose of Mr. Senn’s visit to the war-torn area. Recent history was littered with the corpses of arms merchants cut down by credit-poor warriors. Now the dead man’s signature must be replaced by Hubert’s. Another generation to be welcomed into the bank. The entire business would take only a few minutes.

Nick opened his leather folder and placed two blank signature cards on the desk. “If you’ll kindly sign the bottom of these forms, we can have the account transferred to Hubert by the end of the day.”

The count stared at the cards, then lifted his eyes to the young banker across the table. “Robert never wanted to stay in Switzerland. He preferred traveling. Italy, South America, the Far East. Robert was an excellent salesman. Wherever he journeyed he sold our products. There are Senn pistols and machine guns in the armed forces of over thirty nations and territories. Did you know that, Mr. Neumann? Thirty nations. And that’s only the
official
tally.” Senn directed a conspiratorial wink at Nick, then shifted in his chair to gaze at his irresolute grandson. “You know, Hubert, I told your father, “Stay away from these funny new countries, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Ossetia.’ “New frontiers, Papa. New borders’, he said. Robert loved our clients.”

No doubt best those that paid cash, Nick said to no one.

A cloud passed over the count’s wrinkled face. He leaned forward as if puzzling over one last question. His eyes filled and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Why was he so terribly bored, my Robert? Why was he so bored?”

Hubert took his grandfather’s hand and gently patted it. “We’ll be all right, Grandfather.”

Nick kept his eyes on the polished tabletop.

“Of course we’ll be all right,” the count roared. “The Senns are like this bank: solid, indestructible. Did I tell you, Neumann, that we have been clients of USB for over one hundred years? That Holbein on the wall behind you is a gift from my father. My
Opa
, the first count, started his business with loans from this bank. Can you imagine? The first Senn weapons built with money from this institution. You’re part of a great tradition, Neumann. Don’t forget that. People rely on this bank. On tradition. On trust. Not enough of it left in the world.”

Hubert motioned in the banker’s direction, signaling to move on to the business at hand. Nick placed the signature cards in front of his clients. Eberhard Senn signed the two cards and passed them to his grandson. Hubert freed his elbow from the constricts of his jacket and added his signature to one card, then the other.

Nick collected the cards and thanked the gentlemen for coming. He stood to show them the way out. Senn shook his hand vigorously. “Trust, Mr. Neumann. When you get older, it’s the only thing that really matters. Not enough of it left in the world today.”

Nick escorted Senn and his grandson to the entry, then took his leave. Crossing the lobby he thought about the count and what he had said. Eberhard Senn was an unrepentant arms merchant, the grandson of a white slaver — after all, what woman went peaceably to the Congo, the “heart of darkness,” way back in 1880? — a man whose entire family fortune had been
amassed through the conduct of morally ambiguous commerce, and here he was going on about the importance of trust and how he relied on the unimpeachable integrity of the United Swiss Bank.

Nick’s mind rocketed to the sheet of paper that waited on his desk: the Internal Account Surveillance List. What about every other client who had put his trust in the bank? he asked himself. Didn’t they also depend on the bank’s guarantee of confidentiality? In a country where absolute secrecy was a bank’s defining characteristic, trust meant everything. Surely, Wolfgang Kaiser would not take exception to that sentiment. What had he said to the collected bankers after Sterling Thorne’s remarks?“
. . . while Mr. Thorne may search far and wide for his rogue males, he shall never find what he is looking for within the walls of the United Swiss Bank
.”

Why wouldn’t Thorne find them? Because they didn’t exist? Or because Kaiser would do everything within his power to prevent their discovery?

Nick reached the bank of elevators and pressed the call button. He could see Hugo Brunner lecturing a young woman dressed in a neat blue business suit. For some reason he just knew that this was her first day of work at the bank. He imagined himself through her eyes: a serious executive in a charcoal suit traversing the lobby with his head bowed, a “Do not disturb” sign practically flashing above his head. He found the picture amusing. He spun the picture on its axis and his amusement faded. In six short weeks, he had become one of the brooding gray bankers scuttling to and fro he had seen on his arrival. What would happen to him after six years?

Nick stepped into the elevator and punched his floor. Don’t worry about six years down the road, he told himself. Worry about today. The Pasha’s account number is on the bank’s Internal Account Surveillance List. He heard Peter Sprecher’s voice telling him to “
mind the consequences. To the bank. And to yourself
.”

The uncovering of the Pasha as a criminal pursued by the DEA would not portend well for USB. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. Just the suggestion of a relationship would send the press into a feeding frenzy. An actual investigation would tarnish USB’s precious public image, regardless of the results. Given Klaus Konig’s announcement that the rival Adler Bank was moving to gain control of a large block of USB shares in advance of the bank’s general assembly, now just a few weeks away, USB could under no circumstance afford any hint of scandal.

Nor could Nick’s career.

He could hardly expect a promotion for turning in the Pasha, even if technically he was complying with the bank’s directives. On the contrary. Turn in the Pasha and he could expect a lateral move to an eminent position in office supplies management. See how far he’d get with his investigation then.

The Swiss did not lionize the whistle-blower. Eight years ago, in an unprovoked fit of morality, the government had amended its legal tomes to allow any banker to report, without recourse to his superior, acts of an illegal nature he had witnessed during the hours of his employ. In those eight years, hardly more than a dozen individuals had noticed an act of criminal intent or questionable nature that necessitated a call to the authorities. The grand majority of the one hundred seventy thousand employed by the Swiss banking industry chose to remain comfortably silent.

Such a statistic spoke volumes on the politics of the Swiss people but did not begin to describe the reasons that cold-fired in Nick a notion toward willful disobedience. Those reasons could be found in the pages of his father’s calfskin agendas, now lying less than two miles away on a top shelf in his small apartment. The agendas had given Nick a way to account for the vagaries of a turbulent life, to say “the Fall” did not come because of a random act of violence. The words were brief, terse even
— Bastard threatened me! I must comply. Man is a crook, out and out —
and they illuminated not only his father’s miseries but his own, for Nick was unable to dwell upon his father’s death without brooding on the consequences it had unleashed on his own life. The shuttling from town to town. The new schools every five months — ten in six years, if you wanted to count. The battles to ingratiate himself with a revolving slate of classmates, the constant efforts at fitting in, until one day he just gave up and decided that he didn’t need any friends.