The Trust (34 page)

Ricardo took the phone away from his ear. I could hear the other side ringing. He looked at me with an amused expression, curious what I had to say. For a moment, the mailbox relaxed his pressure on my chest. “And why’s that?”

“So they can study what happens when a maggot disguised as sperm finds its way into the gene pool.”

The call connected.

Ricardo looked at Jake. The pilot’s eyes were crazy, like his LSD flashback had finally arrived. “Bong, why don’t you take the left. I’ll take the right, and we’ll kick the shit out of him.”

For a split second I thought,
Mission accomplished.
They’d focus on me and forget JoJo. But no such luck.

Ricardo rattled off some Spanish into the receiver, his tone gruff. Every once in a while, he said, “Bueno.” But there was nothing “good” back at Rafter’s.

He bent over and held the cell phone over my ear. I heard slapping, the sound of leather. Blows rained hard and fast, vicious every one of them. And there was JoJo’s voice. Agony with every strike. She wailed and pleaded until I thought my head would explode.

Bong dug his sandal deeper and deeper into my chest. But that’s not where I felt the pain. It was in my ears, in my head, me processing the scene at Rafter’s. “No,” I gasped, arching my back and twisting.

“You like to play?” Ricardo pushed down ever harder.

I managed to dislodge his foot and tried to sit up. But he was too fast, too alert, too strong. He dropped, and his knees pinned my arms. And holding the phone with his left hand, he slapped me open-palmed with his right. Back and forth, one after another, keeping time to JoJo’s screams.

“Please stop.” She was begging, bawling, the blows raining on and on, both hers and mine.

“That’s enough, Bong.” Jake pulled him off.

My face was already swelling, the pain searing my cheeks, forehead, ears, everything.

Ricardo jabbered something unintelligible into the cell phone. And almost at once, the screams stopped. The whipping was over. “You ready to call Claire with the wire instructions?”

“And what?” I shot back.

“We let her go.”

“You’ll kill her.”

“We have two hundred million reasons to let her go.”

Ricardo eased off my chest. I sat up and stared at him blankly, raging, seething, wanting to feed his face through a shredder.

“What’s it going to be, O’Rourke?”

*   *   *

A woman takes a beating.

The sounds are hellish over a camcorder, more so over the phone in real time. Smack of leather, moans and labored gasps—it feels like your head is wedged inside a shop vise. Bones are breaking. Flesh is tearing. But you can’t do shit, because the attack is going down ten thousand miles away.

It’s worse because you’re the idiot who drew the line in the sand and refused to pay. You flay yourself from the inside out. You try to remain tough through the whimpering. You keep thinking,
It’s the only way.
But upstairs, you know. The bleating and mewling were a decision. Yours. This one’s on you.

What could I do?

If I cooperated, Ricardo would kill JoJo. It was that simple. Claire would follow my instructions and wire the money, which made JoJo expendable, which made me expendable.

Game over. As we like to say in my business, “That’s all she wrote.”

I had never faced anything this dire back at the office. But fourteen bosses in ten years had presented me with some monumentally stupid options. More than I care to remember.

When there are no answers and the outcomes are unacceptable, there’s only one thing to do:

Negotiate.

*   *   *

“You watch the details,” I told Ricardo. “I’ll give you that.”

“Glad you approve.” He kicked me in the gut, a painful exclamation point to his sarcasm. Something cracked and poked against the walls of my side.

“Ugh,” hissed the air from my lungs. It took me a moment to recover. “So why are you dragging your feet?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nobody knows we’re down here in the Turks and Caicos except you, me, and dumb ass.”

“Hey,” snapped Jake.

“And my guess,” I continued, “is that you have the mother of all sweep accounts here. I give the instructions. Claire wires two hundred million. The money arrives for a nanosecond. And then it’s automatically whisked off to five different banks.”

“Ten countries,” he said. “Twenty million dollars to Russia. Twenty to Liechtenstein. Twenty to Nauru and so on until all two hundred million is gone. And the receiving banks all have sweep accounts on their end. You’ll never untangle my spaghetti.”

“Sweet. Too bad you’ll never see the money.”

Ricardo was cool. For a moment, I was unsure whether he would bite. “And why’s that?”

“I’m the only thing between you and two hundred million. And as long as you have JoJo, I’m never calling Claire. You got that or do I need to walk you through the facts one more time?”

The pilot’s eyes widened every time he heard “two hundred million.” He said nothing. But I assumed there was something behind the expression, his lips pursed as though he were whistling without making a sound.

Ricardo didn’t scare. And at first, he didn’t negotiate. “It’s time we take JoJo’s other pinkie. Make her hands match. Know what I’m saying?”

“You’re stressing me out. It’s Bong, right?”

He said nothing.

Nor did I wait for the answer. “The thing about pressure, Bong, it’s hard to hide. I wear feelings on my sleeve. Can’t keep secrets worth a damn. And that’s a problem for you.”

“You mean JoJo,” he interrupted.

“Claire and I have known each other since we were kids. She knows when I’m upset. She knows, Bong. I make your money call and hesitate even for a second, the time it takes to blink, and her antennae pick up the vibes. She calls the police, which is no problem from a safety point of view. Nobody knows where the hell we are. But your two hundred million, well that’s another story. It’s gone, and you’re back on the Jersey Pike choosing between Lysol and Mr. Clean.”

I glanced over at Jake. Eyes bulging. Lips like an upside-down U. What was eating him? I assumed Ricardo had promised him a piece of the action. He was worried about his cut.

Ricardo said nothing at first. He was deliberating, evaluating a tough decision. “O’Rourke makes any trouble,” he told Jake, “and I want you to make him a soprano.”

“Got it.”

Ricardo disappeared from the room.

I sat up on the floor and raised myself slowly to the bed. “What’s your cut? Is Bong paying you enough to replace that crap plane parked out in the harbor?”

“Shut up.”

My fishing expedition ended as quickly as it started. Ricardo returned a second or two later. He checked a paper once, twice, and handed it over to me. I took a quick look and asked, “What are these for?”

“Don’t you recognize wiring instructions, bright boy?”

“Claire already has them.”

“Change of plans. These are different from the ones you already received.”

I looked down and inspected the instructions more closely. The receiving bank was different, the Bahamas Banking Company. No big deal. But my eyes bugged at the receiving account:

Palmetto Foundation.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

TURKS AND CAICOS

I read and reread the wire instructions three different times. The recipient never changed. Palmetto Foundation. We were wiring money to ourselves. It made no sense.

At first I felt confusion, which shortly gave way to profound anger. Which took me back to bewilderment in a vicious cycle of conflicting emotions. I guess that’s what happens when you’re struggling to find answers and your demigods start to tumble.

Paragons. Heroes. I mean the guys you trust. The guys you model, because they figured out how to make money and do the right thing. The guys you believe in, until their secrets get exposed and your marrow gets bone-sucked dry of all hope and enthusiasm.

Take it from me, a guy on the Street. I’ve seen my share of double-dealing, and there are no antidotes. Betrayal breaks your spirit. It steals part of your soul. The wounds leave you with open sores, the unforgettable knowledge that your friend is dirty and all the veneration was a sack of crap. It took me less than two seconds to convict Palmer Kincaid, my mentor, and hang his memory forever.

Ricardo got to him.

*   *   *

The Palmetto Foundation didn’t need a bank account in the Turks and Caicos. None of our donors were funding philanthropic projects anywhere in the Caribbean. Nor did we operate a captive insurance subsidiary, a risk-management technique for which the islands are known. Claire, JoJo, and the people in accounting never mentioned a financial relationship with the Bahamas Banking Company.

The bank account served no legitimate purpose, which is why my thoughts returned to Ira Popowski, the trust and estate lawyer from New York City. After my visit to Maryknoll headquarters, he said, “It sounds to me like you stepped on a pile of tax fraud. And the FBI is building its case.”

If there’s one thing my clients hate, it’s taxes. They throw thousands of dollars at lawyers and accountants, a no-expense-spared vendetta against payments to Uncle Sam. Deductions are like free money. And nobody, not even a guy with $200 million, turns down free money.

I’m not proud of my initial reaction.

Ira Popowski, it seemed to me, was right. Palmer had pushed the envelope a little too far. I understood why. In my business, I see the extreme anti-IRS mentality all the time. Some people don’t know when to stop. That’s why you read crazy stories about Swiss wealth managers checking through airport security with toothpaste tubes packed full of diamonds. It’s all about cutting the IRS out of the picture.

But I didn’t understand how. For one, my knowledge of the Turks and Caicos as an offshore haven was limited. I suspected their charitable foundations could disburse funds with far less scrutiny than they would attract in the United States. But that was just a guess. For another, I wondered how a fake priest fit into a tax scam.

Ira’s words came roaring back. “The money’s going around in circles, which sounds like a tax scam if you ask me.” How could the Palmetto Foundation have opened a bank account in the Turks and Caicos without Palmer’s signature and, therefore, his approval?

Didn’t matter. I decided my mentor had slept with a dog and woken up with fleas. His partnership with Ricardo soured. He became expendable. And here I was, racing to defend his family, getting sucked in deeper and deeper.

There was only one problem. I was mostly wrong, which is why my snap conclusion haunts me still.

“Big Mr. Wall Street,” Ricardo scoffed with mock disapproval, his eyebrows arched, his mouth a righteous button. “You call yourself a fiduciary? Me. If I’m elected to a board, I’d investigate the banking relationships first thing. Where they’re located. Money transfers. Everything. But that’s just me. I watch the details.”

Ricardo was sounding more like a banker all the time, using the word “fiduciary” rather than “trustee.” I asked him, “Did Palmer open this bank account?”

“Amazing what people do before they die.”

“Answer the question.”

“They go glassy-eyed,” Ricardo continued, ignoring my protest. “Some guys sob. Some negotiate. Palmer got down on his knees and begged like a mama’s boy.”

“Makes me wonder what you’ll do.”

Ricardo inspected his fingernails, oblivious to my threat. “Now, JoJo—she made me proud. The girl chomped down on a tablecloth and took it like a man. You ask me, that’s some stoic shit.”

Who is this guy?

In that moment I was struggling with a strange mix of conflicting emotions. Relief—Palmer was clean. Guilt—I was kicking myself for the rush to judgment, however brief. Rage—I wondered what abominations had taken place aboard
Bounder,
how my friend spent the last few minutes of his life.

Temper flaring, I was sitting on the bed. The leverage was all wrong for a quick strike. I wanted to jump up and get in Ricardo’s grille, violate his body space. I’d ram my palm against his nose until nostrils were the last things to go through his mind.

But Jake remained vigilant. Any move would have ended the same way as before: more lumps and me counting sheep. That’s if I was lucky. The pilot was crazy-sick enough to cut me with that damn black knife of his.

Rather than throw a punch, I did the next best thing and started to trash-talk. “Why don’t you send your boy to the next room? We can work things out, man to moron.”

Jake made a move.

Ricardo raised a hand for him to halt. “You ask me, the bank account is fucking inspired. Every detail traces back to Charleston, South Carolina. The officers. The philanthropic mission. The Palmetto Foundation, as far as the world knows, has a subsidiary in the Turks and Caicos.”

“And you have signing authority?”

“Of course.”

“Why use our name?”

“You’re the Wall Street wizard. You tell me.”

Now it was my turn to ratchet up the sarcasm. “There you go again, Ricardo, always missing the big picture. I keep asking questions, and you keep replying with riddles. Which is unfortunate, because you’re starting to piss me off. And I don’t know how we’ll ever get you two hundred million dollars.”

Jake touched the tip of his knife blade. “Maybe I can help you figure it out.”

“Not yet.” Ricardo cracked his knuckles again. The sound was giving me arthritis.

“You work with me, and I work with you.”

Ricardo’s coal eyes shimmered. He must have been thinking,
The nerve of this guy.

Of course, I interpreted the expression as license to continue. “Tell me why it’s so important to send money from the Palmetto Foundation to the Palmetto Foundation.”

That’s it.

By stating the question aloud, I understood. Banks relax their scrutiny when money goes same name to same name. It’s when funds go to a third party, John Smith to Jane Doe, that anti-money-laundering units, AMLs for short, kick into gear.

The ruse was brilliant, elegant in its simplicity. Few organizations would prevent a charity from wiring funds to an overseas branch. Somebody’s AML division might raise a question or two. But most shops, including mine, were fairly relaxed about organizations they had already vetted. And Charleston bankers, who had wrangled for decades to win the Kincaid business, would never challenge the Palmetto Foundation.