Whipping Boy (35 page)

“Am I in it?”

The question throws me. “In the book? Yes, Cesar, you’re in the book. In a certain sense, you
are
the book.”

“Wow,” he says, chuckling the same way he chuckled when recalling the nice fat girl he enjoyed punching at school. As he’s chuckling and I’m remembering the nice fat girl, an alarm goes off on my phone. I glance down and see that the screen is telling me:

The prompt isn’t necessary.

“I don’t think I’ve told you this, Cesar, but I spent my first four Christmases in Villars. My dad was alive then. After he died, I never returned—until I went to Aiglon, until I was ten years old, rooming with you at the top of Belvedere. One of the first things I recall you saying is that if a fire broke out in the dorm, you’d have to throw me out the window. After—”

Cesar cuts me off. “Remember the fire drills we had?”

“Sure. But what I’m trying to say is that the threat of—”

“It was near the showers.”

“That’s possible, but I—”

“That’s really all I remember about that, Allen. Like I’ve said before, I only recall bits and pieces.”

“Do you remember calling me Nosey?”

“Nosey?” Cesar chuckles.

“Nosey,” I confirm.

“Why? For what reason? Is it because you
were
nosy? Because of the kind of inquisitive person you are now?”

For the first time, I hear the tiniest hint of aggression creep into Cesar’s voice. I ignore it and barrel ahead. “Well, I guess I was nosy. And obviously, I still am. I’m also still Jewish, which might have had something to do with the nickname.” I curve my thumb and index finger around my nose.

Cesar looks at me blankly. He appears to have no recollection of the gesture he invented to silence a pesky roommate.

“And at one point, you and Paul—I’ve tried to bring this up before—you guys tied me to the bedpost and pantomimed a whipping sequence from
Jesus Christ Superstar
.”

Cesar titters and slaps the table with his palm.

“You can laugh, Cesar, but it was fucking traumatic for me!”

“Sorry,” he says. “I
do
remember the song. It was a big deal at the time.”

That’s something, I suppose. Previously, he had no memory of it at all.

“But I don’t remember any of the other stuff.”

“You performed ‘The Thirty-Nine Lashes.’”

“And you were Jesus Christ?” Cesar says, unprompted, suggesting that he might recall at least some tiny portion of the incident.

“Yeah, Cesar. And I was Jesus Christ.”

I have the song cued up on my cell phone but resist the urge to play it. There’s something more important I need to say before Cesar bolts. “The worst thing that happened to me at Aiglon wasn’t
Jesus Christ Superstar
or the nicknames. Do you remember what I told you about my watch?”

Cesar shakes his head.

“What happened was I left the watch under my pillow and went to take a shower. When I returned, it was gone. I cherished that watch. It had been my father’s. It was by far the most meaningful thing I inherited from him after he died.”

“Wow, that stinks,” Cesar says. “Do you know what happened to it?”

“I do. Paul tossed it out the window.”

“Paul? That doesn’t sound like him. My memory of Paul is of protecting him from getting bullied.”

“You’re joking! Paul didn’t need protection. He was huge.”

“Huge but weak,” Cesar says.

“I don’t—”

“Hold on! Something makes me think it might have been Winn who took your watch. He stole money from me. I don’t know how I remember this all of a sudden, but I do.”

“Winn
was
bad news. He was always calling me Kikewheel. But he had nothing to do with my watch getting stolen.”

“I remember blaming Winn,” Cesar insists.

“You may have blamed Winn, but Winn didn’t swipe my watch. It was Paul.”

“Are you sure? Did he confess?”

“He told Group Captain Watts that he launched it out the window on a dare. He left Aiglon soon afterward.”

“I thought he was kicked out because he didn’t have the grades. Or because he just wasn’t mentally all there.”

I shrug. “I don’t know the specific reason for his departure.”

“Was the watch found?”

“Nope.”

“But what does your missing watch have to do with
me
? That’s what I want to know.”

“
Stolen
watch,” I correct. “Paul only ever did what you told him to do. He was your henchman. You were his—”

“So you’re saying
I
had something to do with it?”

I give a nod. “You made my life hell.”

Cesar’s jaw tenses. His brow furrows. “So, basically, I’m being blamed for your memories? That’s what’s happening?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re writing about
me
. This is really only
your
interpretation based on
your
recollection of events.”

“I wouldn’t disagree. But that doesn’t change the fact my father’s Omega was hurled out the window.”

Cesar turns pensive. “Well, all I can say is I’m sorry you remember losing your watch or whatever it was that happened.”

“It wasn’t lost. It was stolen,” I say testily.

“If you wanna blame me, that’s fine,” Cesar says. “I don’t remember any of this. But clearly, you do.”

The back-and-forth continues for a few more minutes, but try as I might, it’s next to impossible to grab a bullshitter by the horns.

“Look, Allen. We see things the way we want to see them. Especially when it comes to memory. We put things together that have absolutely no relation to one another. We take one plus one and we get a hundred. I know. It’s like that with me and Badische. It’s easy to draw negative conclusions after the fact, but I know that what I did for my clients, I did with good intentions.”

“And at Aiglon? Were your intentions ‘good’ there, too?”

“You shouldn’t focus on Aiglon. Think about the good times
before
you went there.
That’s
where you should target your energies. Let the positive memories overwhelm the negative ones. Don’t harp on the bad stuff. That’s what I try to do.” Cesar’s tone turns conciliatory. “I’m glad we’ve had a chance to clear the air. I’m just sorry I don’t remember more.”

“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I remember enough for the two of us.”

Our conversation doesn’t end there. After working through my shortlist of juvenile complaint, I turn again to Badische. But before the gloves come off, I tell Cesar I know far more about his criminal career than I’ve been letting on. That I am, in fact, thoroughly versed in the details of the fraud.

My disclosure doesn’t seem to rattle him. And whatever the reason—obtuseness, chutzpah, friendship, nostalgia, amnesia, confidence, naïveté, delusion—he has no qualms answering a whole new set of questions about his ties to the Trust.

I jump right in. After recapping what I know about his client Barbara Laurence, I ask if she complained to him directly before reaching out to the authorities.

“Sure. Many times.”

“And what did you do?”

“What can I do?” Cesar says, again privileging the present tense to describe a decade-old crime. “I’m not in control. Barbara Laurence is the one who started the whole thing. She can’t meet the conditions of the loan agreement, so she complains to the prosecutor. The next thing I know, the prosecutor goes after me.”

“You’re saying he made you the fall guy?”

“Exactly. They needed to fry me to prove conspiracy.”

“Yeah, about that, Cesar. That’s not how things work.”

“Yes, it is,” he insists. “When you have five defendants, the government can ignore legal procedure. Rules get thrown out the window. That’s why I was indicted.”

“No, it’s not.” I resist the urge to quote
Black’s Law Dictionary,
which defines
conspiracy
as “a combination or confederacy between
two
or more persons.”

“What about Quilty?”

“Quilty. Quilty. Quilty,” Cesar says. “I know that name.”

“Dennis Quilty. The investigator who helped put you in jail.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I ask Cesar if he realized Prince Robert was a career swindler.

“He wasn’t a swindler when I first met him.”

“Yes, Cesar, he was. Do you know about Colonia?”

“What’s Colonia?”

“An imaginary micronation Robert helped establish three hundred miles from Manila.”

“Sorry, Allen. I’m pretty good at geography. I’ve never heard of the place.”
*

“It was part of a passport mill he operated around the time he began claiming to be the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta.”

“Wow. You know a lot.”

“Guilty as charged,” I say. “Oh, and while we’re discussing Manila, I’ve been meaning to ask. What was it like living under the specter of an eighteen-year lawsuit?”

“What lawsuit?”

“The lawsuit caused by the fire.”

“What fire?”

“The one that broke out next to your family’s beauty school. The one that took the lives of four students.”

“This is the first I’ve heard about a fire or a lawsuit.”

I move on. “Were you aware that the Badische scam was an exact
blueprint of a fraud that Brian Sherry’s father pulled off in Europe?”

“What? When?”

“In the mideighties. The earlier version was called the Nikon Trust. It used the same loan agreements as Badische and required the same performance guaranties. It even included a guy claiming to work for Barclays.”

“I don’t know anything about that. But I can tell you what I
do
know. I reviewed all the Trust agreements signed by my clients.”

{© Rob Walker}

Before Robert served as the figurehead of the Badische Trust Consortium, he helped run a passport mill associated with the Kingdom of Colonia, a nonexistent micronation located three hundred miles from Manila.

I ask about Richard Mamarella.

“Who?”

“The Mob-connected fixer Prince Robert hired. The guy who broke his wife’s arm, swindled a New Jersey bank out of $22 million, and underwrote a life insurance policy on a drug dealer who then got whacked.”

“Mamarella wasn’t part of Badische.”

“Yes, he was.”

“I never met him.”

I ask Cesar if he feels bad about his clients’ losses.

“Look. You’re always going to have people who will say good things about you and people who don’t have positive things to say.” I’m reminded of Laurence’s less than positive assessment: “A schmucky, nebbishy lying sack of shit.”

I ask if he still thinks about Badische.

“Sure. All the time. Like three days ago, I’m lying on my couch,
trying to rest, and my wife says she’s going on a trip for business and staying in a six-hundred-dollar-a-night suite. And I start thinking, wow, six hundred bucks! That’s how much my room was in Zurich when I was with the Badische thing. And then my minds starts in with, what if I had testified?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Are you kidding? I would
love
to have testified! I was
dying
to testify! But my lawyers and my family all told me not to. They said that I’m too emotional. That I’m too defensive.”

I ask about his drug-smuggling troubles.

“Norway had nothing to do with Badische, but they would have used it against me.”

I ask about his longtime friendship with Brian Sherry. “Do you think he was a colonel?”

“That’s how he was introduced.”

“Maybe. But it was total bullshit. I have a copy of his military records. Sherry was discharged from the army for ‘financial hardship.’ He was a private first class.”

Cesar shrugs.

“Is it possible that Sherry lied to you?”

“Sure, it’s possible.”

I ask Cesar how his home address found its way on to the retainer check Sherry wrote to Rogers & Wells, the law firm absorbed by Clifford Chance.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you know that Sherry ripped off John Kearns while his wife was dying of multiple myeloma?”