Spygirl (23 page)

I was making calls on my Case of the Eurotrash Pulp-Peddlers. My number-one target was Anna Vinka, the recently departed CFO of the publishing division. I called her at home. She was brusque and uncomfortable.

“I can't talk about it.”

“Ms. Vinka, our client is considering a major investment with the Norrskens, and frankly, I would like to know if there is any reason they might not be a safe investment. I think you're in an ideal position to help our client—”

“Miss Gray,” she interrupted. “I worked at KNUT for three weeks, and I signed a confidentiality agreement not to talk about it.”

“I understand,” I said hesitantly. These are tricky situations. “Let me ask you if there are any of your predecessors I might contact who would have more … flexibility about speaking about KNUT.”

She paused. “Tord Ostgaard left about three months ago. He's working at Lloyd's of London now. Ring him. He might be more helpful.”

I did some preliminary research on Ostgaard. He also had been at KNUT for less than a month. Before he started there, however, he had been a trustee of another Norrsken-owned business, a property-management arm called Pickwick Property Management. There were literally thousands of KNUT-controlled companies, shelters, and trusts. I'd seen Pickwick's business filings, but hadn't done news or litigation searches for all of the thousands of KNUT affiliates, excepting the ones that were directly related to the KNUT Publishing division. Even more disconcerting, I discovered a recent article that said Ostgaard was under investigation by the Swedish regulatory arm called the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) for “misappropriation of pension funds for Pickwick.”

I called Mr. Ostgaard, and he, like Ms. Vinka, was unhelpful.

“I can't talk about this,” he barked, and as it sounded like he was about to hang up on me, I yelled into the phone, “Mr. Ostgaard, I am trying to protect my client from getting fucked over by these people.” I didn't know what I meant by that, even as I said it, but he paused.

“I understand you don't want to talk about Pickwick,” I said, trying to sound soothing, “but can we talk about KNUT?”

“That's the problem. You can't separate them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Miss Gray, tell your client to stay as far away from KNUT, the Norrskens, and any of their business as possible.” “I will.” “Now that's all I can say.”

I e-mailed Sol and George right after the calls and wrote the whole thing up. I also did some more news searches, looking for KNUT-related entities and any kind of pension fraud. In fact, the pension managers and several trustees of four other KNUT-owned companies were being investigated for fraud. I sent my bosses everything. The database searches I was doing were long and grueling. With thousands of related company names, the potential search for material was almost endless. Before I knew it, it was eight-thirty and Gus was the only one left in the office with me. No e-mails from Dan.

Gus came by my desk.

“Wassup?” He poked me in the head.

“This case is giving me a headache.”

“Well, it can wait until tomorrow,” he said.

“I know.”

“But this Wild Turkey can't.” He pulled a bottle out of his pocket and we sat and swigged it until 11
P.M.
I told him all about Dan. And Edward. And Elliott. And Ben. He laughed and said, “Shit, just ain't the same as when I was datin’.”

“Gus, you're only thirty-two.”

He laughed. “Yes, I guess it's not that different.”

It was eleven-thirty and I didn't trust my tipsy self on the subway, so I decided to call a car home. Since I moved to New York I've
been using Lucky Car Service. I don't take cars often, usually at night or when I'm incredibly late.

I called them. Mussah, the owner, answered, “Hellooo, Ameee. Of course, my loveleee. No problem.” I packed up my laptop and walked down the back stairs (the elevator was stuck in the basement—again) and sat on the small concrete fleur-de-lis pedestal curling along the stoop.

Originally, when I first went to Lucky, it was run by a guy named Mustafah, and one night he followed me home, calling after me, “Let me take you out on a date. Come on! Let me take you for dinner, meese. Let's go!” I told him I had a boyfriend and he stopped and looked dejected. “He a lucky guy, this boyfriend, eh?” Then he brightened. “We don't have to tell him, eh?”

I still had to walk past the Lucky Car Service every day on the way to the subway, and he'd give me creepy, dark stares. Months later, I walked down the block to get a car and saw a dozen cop cars in front of Lucky and what looked like forty guys on the ground with their hands behind their heads, including Mustafah, a pained look on his face, his flabby arms twisted back into metal cuffs. He was wailing. I felt a swelling in my throat. I ran back in the other direction.

The storefront was boarded-over that night and the company reopened two months later, a block closer to me, with a whole new set of guys running it: Mussah (a former Iranian army general), Moez (who was Tunisian), Sammeh (Lebanese), Muhammed (Egyptian), Mumar (Iraqi), Nasir (Turkish). “What's up with these ‘M’ names?” I asked them once when I was waiting in the dispatch room for a car to the Lower East Side.

“I dunno. We are Muslims. There are a lot of Muslim names that start with ‘M,’ you know?” Mussah told me, “You don't have Jewish name—why not?” I reddened.

“That's true, Amy isn't a Jewish name. How do you know I'm Jewish?” I asked.

“Oh, c'mon!” He laughed, clapping his hands together. “That is what all the guys at the base calls you. You are the nice-looking Jewish girl.” I remembered once telling one of the drivers I was Jewish after he asked if I was Swedish. I laughed.

“Nope. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

“You are Christian?” he asked.

“Nope, Jewish.”

“Ah, Jewish,” he said, pausing. “But I like you. You see: Muslims and Jews can be friends, see.” Evidently, word spreads fast.

I would arrive at the base to get a car and I was always in a major rush. “Ameee!!! My loveleee!!” Mussah would sing.

There was one driver, Moez, on whom I had a little crush. I'd go into the dispatcher's office and Mussah would smile and say, “I go call Moez. He is off now, but he will come back for you.” Or he'd say, “He's on a call now, but I know he like you to wait for him.” When he finally returned to the office, all the other guys would say things to him in Arabic and slap his back, and he'd look embarrassed and sheepishly wave to me before he quickly prayed.

Now, sitting on the stoop at work, I saw Moez pull up in a cream-colored 1989 Lincoln. (He drove a vast rotation of long out-of-repair Town Cars.) I tried to pull open the back door. He rolled the back window down. “Is stuck. Hold on.” He reached back from inside and released the door.

“Good safety measures,” I joked.

“Piece of shitty car,” he conceded.

We sat in silence for a while. I relished staring at the back of his neck. He was tall, probably six-two, with strong, large hands and a ropy, thick soccer player's build.

I studied the mirror image of Moez's eyes. Frontalis muscles tensed. Mastoid muscles relaxed. Indicating anxiety. Insecurity. Puzzlement.

When he pulled back onto the road again, I tried to memorize
his face. I hoped to be able to decipher this particular arrangement of signs in the future. I saw his mouth framed in the reflection of the interior rearview mirror, and a tiny smile crept onto either side of his mouth. We were right at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge, and he seemed to be laughing to himself.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked him, thinking that I'd done something to embarrass myself.

“I am happy,” he said. I reddened. “To be with you.”

EIGHTEEN             

“Hey, Sol, did you get what I sent you last night?” I asked.

“You mean that abortion job you call a case?” He looked up, his headset cocking, his mouth twisted into an on-the-verge-of-hysterics half-smile. “Yeah, there have been some complaints about your performance. You're really slacking off here, A. Gray.”

He waved me over to discuss the case some more.

“The client is really happy with the calls you got, and I think they have a pretty good sense that they're not going to touch anything those Norrsken slugs have their grimy little hands in.”

“Okay.”

“I think, to close this up, they'd like to see something that
links KNUT Publishing to these incidents. Otherwise, they won't be totally comfortable that this impacts their investment, and I'm telling them it will.”

“How do you know that?” I asked him.

“I don't. I just have a feeling here, and that's what people pay me for. I have a feeling, and then I prove it's right.”

“Well, none of those people are going to talk to me. I think they all had termination agreements that had confidentiality clauses.”

“Here's what I want you to do. There are two people I want you to get in touch with. One is the former lawyer for the indicted pension-fund manager at KNUT Trust V” The lawyer had sued for nonpayment, which meant that he didn't legally have to honor the attorney-client privilege. The other call was to Nars Norrsken's former parents-in-law.

“Norrsken and his American wife, Anne Wallinghurst, divorced six months ago. Call his former in-laws and find out if they'll talk about him.”

“Why would they?”

“The divorce was sealed, but the dockets show her parents testified on her behalf. I have a feeling that he might have alienated them.”

“Why wouldn't we just call the wife?”

“They've been spotted together in the last couple months, and there's some speculation that they've rekindled the marriage.”

The plan was to call the in-laws, be very laid-back, ask about their son-in-law, pretend like we didn't know about the divorce. With these kinds of situations we take a slow approach, and ask something like, “Is there anything you know about Mr. Norrsken's character that our clients should know about before they engage him in business?” It's important, I'd learned in my time at the Agency, to let the interviewee lead the conversation. If they seem to
be reluctant, lead them gradually to negatives. If they're bursting with bad information, be sympathetic and encourage them to spill it. If they're anxious and don't seem willing to talk, let it go. The situation we most wanted to avoid was Norrsken finding out about the work we were doing.

I located the parents, who were living in New York, just off Central Park in the Eighties. Sol told me to call them and try to get an interview. Mr. Wallinghurst answered the phone. When I asked about Nars, he said, “Well, you know, he and my daughter are separated.”

“No, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that,” I said quickly.

“Well, maybe I'm not the best person to ask about him,” he continued. “I'm not his biggest fan.”

“No, Mr. Wallinghurst,” I said, my pulse quickening, “I think you could be extremely helpful.” He agreed to meet, and we set up a rendezvous for Friday.