Good morning, Kid,” I called from the door to his room. I had once made the mistake of creeping in and giving my beautiful six-year-old son a soft kiss on the forehead as a way of waking him. It woke him. He sat up screaming, almost colliding with me in the process, and rubbing at the spot with his pajama sleeve so hard that he still had a bright red mark there when I dropped him off at school.
I waited the agreed-upon ten seconds and called again. “Good morning, Kid.” It was a ritual—or a formula. A slow count to ten following the first and second greetings, and he would answer on the third. It had taken me three months of trial and error—which translates as fights and screaming fits—to come up with a way of getting him out of bed that was both gentle and effective.
“Good morning, Kid.”
“Good morning, Jason.” He sat up and checked the alignment of his cars on the shelf over the bed. None had moved overnight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and bent forward to look down. The floor had not disintegrated while he slept. He hopped down and shuffled past me and out to the table.
It was Thursday. Cheerios and milk. A thimbleful of no-pulp orange juice, a large glass of water, and a chewable vitamin—artificial banana–flavored.
On the advice of his tutor/minder/shadow—the usually infallible Heather—we had spent a week that winter experimenting with a gluten-free, dairy-free, casein-free diet. As far as I could tell, the Kid had not actually swallowed anything other than water and his vitamin pills all week. He didn’t rant, or cry, or spit things out. He just opened his mouth and let the soy milk, nondairy cheese, and wheatless bread spill out onto the table. Then he would take a second bite, chew a few times, and repeat the openmouthed drool. I don’t know how either of us lasted the week.
While he finished the Cheerios, I laid out his clothes. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday were the easy days. Colors were allowed. They didn’t even have to match. Blue pants and a red shirt. Or a yellow shirt. Or green. Monday was blue. Wednesday and Saturday were beige or khaki. Fridays were black—all black and only black.
“Do you know what I did yesterday?” I said, coming back into the room.
The Kid looked thoughtful for a minute. “No,” he finally answered.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, speaking more to myself than to him. Of course he didn’t know what I had done yesterday. “I got to ride in a helicopter.” Which had left me feeling nauseated, weak-kneed, and feverish. “It was cool.”
The Kid had learned that this kind of vocalization from another person was called conversation and that some response was expected.
“Why?” he said after a long pause.
Heather had taught him a few stock phrases—“That’s nice,” “Sounds good,” and others—but he was still uncomfortable with them. “Why?” was his old reliable.
“I had to go to Newport. On business. They picked me up in the helicopter.”
He thought about this for another long time. “That’s nice,” he said.
Too bad it wasn’t a twenty-year-old Ford Pinto or an old Gremlin, I thought. Then we’d have something to talk about. The Kid lit up only for cars.
“Okay, get yourself washed and dressed, my man. Then we’ll do flash cards.”
“Stupid,” he said. But he padded off to the bathroom.
Despite his comment, the Kid was ready and back in record time. I got the flash cards, and we sat down across from each other.
The cards had photographs on one side—of people interacting, or of faces in differing emotional states. On the back was a one- or two-word description of each. The subtleties of emotional communication, which most children pick up almost osmotically, were a mystery to my son. His school recommended the cards—maybe they helped. Some days the Kid scored one hundred percent; other days he was lucky to get one out of three.
“Happy.” The Kid was supporting his head with one hand on his cheek, the elbow on the table, and his whole body slumped at a thirty-degree angle. If there had been a picture for it, the word on the back would have been “Bored.”
“Very good.” I always gave him “Happy” first. He never got it wrong, and I thought it helped for him to get an easy one to start. I flipped up the next card—a snarling, red-haired little girl.
His eyes flicked to the card and then rolled up to the ceiling. “Angry.”
“Very good. Why would she be angry? Can you think of any reason?”
He thought for a moment and then tapped his free hand to his cheek in imitation of a slap. The Kid had been slapped once by my ex-wife’s second husband. Once.
“Okay. Maybe she got slapped. I guess that would make her angry.”
He gave one emphatic nod. We were making great progress.
“Okay. Next.” I held up the next card. It said “Worried” on the back.
The Kid blew air out through tight lips.
“Come on. You remember.”
He mumbled.
“No fair. No mumbling.” Mumbling led to humming, which led to stimming and thence to a trance and so on. The key was to keep him engaged.
“Jared.”
“What?”
“Jared,” he repeated, and pointed at the picture.
I flipped it around and looked at it. There was a Jared in his class, but he looked nothing like the picture. Jared was white, for one thing, and the picture showed a very concerned black boy.
“No, Kid. This is not Jared. Try again.”
He rolled his eyes back to the ceiling again. “Stupid.”
“What’s stupid? The game?”
He pointed at me.
“I’m stupid. Maybe so, but this is not Jared. Come on, you can do it.”
He blew air out again. He pointed to the picture. “Jared.”
And it hit me. He was right. Jared was the most timid, anxious child in the class. He was near the top of the class in communication and was obviously very bright, but he wore a constant mask of worry. The Kid saw what I had missed in the picture. He was doing better than I was. I saw a black kid first and a frowning one second. The Kid saw it as a frowning kid, no matter the skin color.
“Kid, I’m sorry. I see what you’re saying, and you’re right. I’m stupid. You teach me something every day.”
I put away the cards.
“Let’s hit the road.” His look of confusion stopped me. “Sorry. Let’s get on our way to school. Shoes on.” I pulled on my running shoes and tied the laces. He worked his Velcro straps. I noticed that his feet were outgrowing his shoes. Again. One more thing for my to-do list. “I’ll give you today’s big news on the way.”
He ran and stood by the door. If he’d had a tail, it would have wagged. While I locked up, he ran ahead and called for the elevator.
I waited until he had pressed the button for the lobby and we were on our way down. “I spoke to your Mamma last night.”
The Kid’s eyes stayed focused on the elevator doors.
“She wants to come visit us. You. She’s coming to New York.”
He may have grunted.
“Mamma and Tino are coming, too.” Angie’s mother was also “Mamma.” The Kid refused to be called by his name, Jason, because, he insisted, I was Jason, so there couldn’t be two. On the other hand, he had no trouble keeping track of which Mamma was being referred to at any given time. Tino was Angie’s brother, Antoine. He ran Lafayette’s most upscale beauty salon, with his own line of products—L’Affaire pour Elle. Angie had stayed with him after her accident and all through her rehab. The guy topped my list for Most Deserving of Sainthood.
The doors opened and the Kid jumped out onto a white tile. We walked on only the white tiles.
“Help me out here, son. How do you feel about your Mamma coming to visit?”
He made a face just like the angry girl in the cards.
“Great,” I said. “That makes two of us.”
• • •
I TOOK the long way home after dropping the Kid at school, cutting over and running through Central Park, once around the reservoir, then down the drive past Belvedere Castle and out on Seventy-seventh Street. Pounding along at an even eight-minute mile allowed me to work up a sweat and still think about the Kid.
The Kid hadn’t said another word to me the whole twenty blocks up to school. I hadn’t pressed the issue, even when he refused to sniff hands with me—the usual conclusion of our morning ritual when I dropped him off at school. I was a bit surprised that he was taking the news about his mother’s visit this way. He had not seen her since December, and before that, October—and things had certainly been bad at those times—but they spoke on the phone every Sunday morning. He answered her in monosyllables, but that was a big step up from the grunts or growls he used on most of the human race. Something would break. Patience was my gold standard. Eventually, he would talk to Heather or Skeli, or my Pop, when he was ready. Maybe he would even speak to me.
“Package fuh you at the desk, Mr. Staffud.” Raoul, the day-shift doorman at the Ansonia, was never one to waste his breath on any unnecessary r’s.
The information from Everett Payne. Time to put away my concerns for the Kid and my fears about his mother coming to visit. Time to solve the puzzle that had confounded hundreds of trained financial forensic investigators over the past ten months. Then I’d think about getting lunch.
The plain cardboard box held various loose papers, and a six-inch-thick manuscript, bound in plastic, with a nondescript gray cover. Emblazoned on the front in bold font were the words REPORT OF THE JOINT TASK FORCE FBI/SEC TO SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK, U.S. ATTORNEY PETERSON—ONGOING INVESTIGATION “HOUSE OF CARDS”—NOT FOR CIRCULATION. Below this was a line in much smaller type: Document #6 of 12. Return to Document Library, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 26 Federal Plaza, New York, NY. It was a nice touch of bureaucratic optimism.
I scanned the loose pages—lists of friends, employees, and contacts at other firms and the various subsidiary companies in the Von Becker empire. I put them aside and started on the government report.
In my experience, the federal Justice Department was plodding, verbose, and lacking in finesse or subtlety. But very thorough. If they had been landscapers, they’d have used steamrollers. The report had all of those attributes.
There was a twenty-three-page introduction, which held only three vital pieces of information. First, William Von Becker had been running a classic Ponzi scheme for at least the past ten years, and likely for many years before. This was not news, but the case was clearly laid out. Von Becker reported consistent paper profits to his investors without ever actually investing the money they entrusted to him. When a client asked for a payout, he got it. The payouts came from new investor money. Meanwhile, Von Becker used the funds on hand to maintain a lavish lifestyle and to provide philanthropy to a range of causes.
Carlo Ponzi had not bothered with the philanthropy.
Second, the number of transactions within the funds—money moving in and out, sometimes for as quickly as a day or two—was circumstantial evidence of money laundering. Millions, sometimes fifty or a hundred at a clip, would come in from one account. A day or so later, a similar amount, less a small haircut, would be wired out—to an entirely different account. Most of the transfers were for foreign clients, but they still fell under the reporting umbrella. Some official body should have taken notice—the Fed, the SEC, or Homeland Security. But no one had shown any interest until after the fact. The report, having been produced by the FBI and the SEC, blamed everyone else for this failure to oversee.
I scanned the pages detailing these transactions. It was the smallest evidentiary section, but the amounts involved dwarfed everything else by billions. And it was here that the third and final important point was revealed. As Virgil had said, when you crunched all the numbers, there was about three billion unaccounted for. It would take me days to run through it all on my own, but I saw the pattern right away.
There was someone I knew who could help. I dialed the number in Vermont.
“Spud, what are you up to?” Fred “Spud” Krebs had been a lowly trading assistant on Wall Street until he was laid off last year after helping me with an investigation. When it came to wading through mountains of trade reports, he was the go-to guy.
“Hello, Jason. I’m leaving the end of the month. Two months backpacking around Europe. Then it’s back here to start law school in the fall. So what’s up?”
“Do you have time for a small project before you go? Usual rates?” Last time I had paid him a thousand dollars and a bonus for what had turned out to be a few minutes’ work.
“What have you got?” He was hooked.
I explained what I wanted and arranged to overnight the materials to him.
“You’ll have it by ten. Call me with any questions.”
I copied the pages I wanted him to see, boxed them up, and ran them down to the mailroom. I had just got back when my cell phone buzzed and began to hop around the table. The caller ID read “Pops.” My father.
“Hey, what are you doing?” I said, enormously glad as ever to talk with him.
“I’m talking to my son, I think. What are you doing?”
“Looking for a missing three billion dollars.”
“I’ll check all my old suit pockets.”
“Still taking the Kid on Sunday?”
“Yeah, I was thinking we take a ride out to Riverhead, out on the Island. They’ve got a nice aquarium. I think he’ll love it.”
“Do the fish drive cars?”
“They’ve got sharks. All kids love sharks.”
“My boy is one in a million,” I said. “But best of luck.”
“I’ll pick him up at nine.”
“That’s a long drive to go to an aquarium. Isn’t there one in Brooklyn?”
“Well, I thought we could go to the outlet mall while we’re out there.”
“Pop. Why would you want to go to an outlet mall?” He worked behind a bar. He wore a white shirt and black pants six days a week.
“Not me. I’m bringing a friend.”
“You have a friend who likes to hit the outlet malls?”
“A female friend.”
My father had a girlfriend. Holy crap. I mean, why not? But still. Holy crap.
“Pop. Is this a serious friend?”
“Define ‘serious.’”
“Meet-the-family serious. Go-shopping-at-the-mall-together serious. As in how long has this been going on and you haven’t told me until now? That kind of serious.”
“Son, you’re a grown-up. I don’t have to report to you anymore.”
“Spoken like a true rebel. That’s great. I’m happy for you. What’s this gold digger’s name?”
“Estrella. And besides being good-looking, kind, and recently widowed, she is also loaded. Her husband was Paulie Ramirez. He owned half the Laundromats between here and Astoria. They were regulars at my place—Dewar’s and soda and Bacardi and Diet Coke—until he got the cancer.”
I remembered the couple. They’d been coming in to my father’s bar once a week for thirty years or more. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, well, he was a good bit older, and he went quickly. In the end, that’s what we all hope for.”
“And for a first date, you’re going to test how well my son behaves at a shopping mall. You are either a masochist or a sadist. I thought you liked this woman.”
“It is not a first date, and my grandson is always perfectly behaved when he’s with me. You make such a fuss. He’s a good kid.”
I thought the single grandparent’s bands of what was considered acceptable behavior were considerably wider than mine. Or maybe he just kept the Kid well bribed. New toy cars and plenty of vanilla ice cream could work wonders in the right setting.
“He’s a great kid. Just don’t spoil him too much, okay?”
“Hah! Do you spoil him? If I don’t, who will?”
I quietly ceded the point.
“Are you ready for a challenge?” I said.
He chuckled. “What do you need?”
“Not me. The Kid. Buy him some new sneakers while you’re at the mall.”
“With the flashing lights?”
I never knew what the Kid was going to like and what would send him into screaming fits. He might be so fascinated with the little light show, he would try to watch his own heels when he walked and trip over his own feet.
“White ones with Velcro. After that, take your lead from him.”
“I can handle this one, big fella. Thanks for your confidence in your old man.”
“Want to go for the grand prize?”
“Where did you learn pushy? I never taught you,” he grumbled, half in jest. “All right, what else?”
“Bathing suits. Solid colors only, and at least one all black.”
“They sell kids’ bathing suits in black? For all the little Goth kids who like to swim, I guess.”
“And no logos or writing.”
“I’m taking notes. What else are you up to? Doing anything fun?”
“I heard from Angie last night.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Yeah. She’s coming to visit. Wants to connect with the Kid.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Uh-huh. She also wants to talk with me. She says she has some things she wants to clear up.”
“Wonderful. Can’t she just e-mail you like a normal person?”
“I told the Kid this morning.”
“Yeah? How’d he take it?”
“He’s not speaking to me. I think he’s scared.”
“We should all be scared. She’s a scary lady. What does your girlfriend say?”
“I haven’t told her yet.”
“Oh, boy.”
“No, it’s okay. I haven’t seen her. I’m going to her graduation this afternoon, though. I’ll tell her later. I don’t see it as a problem. She won’t have to meet Angie.”
“You don’t see a problem?”
“No.”
“God, forgive me. I raised an idiot.”
“Pop, you don’t know Skeli.”
“Yeah, I do.”
He rang off, leaving me with a slight buzz of anxiety. I shook it off and went back to work. This time I focused on the lists Everett had included.
I recognized scores of names of clients, many of the friends, and a few of the employees. But one name leaped off the page.
Michael Moskowitz. Individual Client. Total investment $1.2 million.
“Mickey the Mouse” had been in the markets for years when I was starting out, having traded foreign exchange for the old Franklin National Bank until they went under. He managed not to be indicted and resurfaced a few months later as a foreign exchange broker working for one of the shops that acted as intermediary between the big players. For a few months he had been my broker, while I was learning the ropes. We would chat every day, do some business when it suited, and he would buy me dinner every couple of weeks. Then he went away to rehab and we lost touch. I knew he drank—too often—it was practically part of his job description. I hadn’t known about the cocaine. When he came back to work, they assigned him to a different desk to keep him from slipping back into old habits. It hadn’t worked—the old habits had become new again. We hadn’t spoken in almost twenty years.
But the thing that had made the Mouse special was his love of market gossip. Mickey had the skinny on everything. You could not scoop the man. If Goldman Sachs was hiring away Solomon’s sterling trader, Mickey knew which wine they were drinking with dinner the night they agreed on the contract. If anyone had a handle on where Von Becker had stashed three billion dollars, my money was on Mickey.
I checked the online directory. He still lived out on Long Island. Rockville Centre.
“Hello?” he answered, sounding both sadder and frailer than I remembered.
“Mickey?”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Jason Stafford, Mick.”
There was a short pause. “Out of the past. You ever see that movie? Robert Mitchum. The best. You should rent it sometime.”
“How ya been?”
“Truth? Not so good. Not where I thought I’d be, at any rate. How you making out?”
“I’m good, actually,” I said. “As you say, not where I thought I’d be, but good.”
“I thought I’d be hearing from you.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re working for them.” He said the word “them” like it was something toxic. “I figured you’d find my name.”
He still had his ear. It was what I needed.
“What have you been up to?” I asked.
“The last year? The last ten years? I’ve been out of the market for at least that long.”
“I guess I knew that.”
“Yeah. Third time back from rehab; I guess they got the message. They made me take a disability. Funny thing. It was the right thing to do. I’ve been clean ever since.”
“How did you get wrapped up in this Von Becker mess?”
“That prick. It was Binks. The son. He introduced me. Binks partied a lot when he first started out. He and I had some times together. He’s into other stuff these days, what I hear. Anyway, when I got laid up on the beach I talked to him about some ideas I had of trying to work from home. Desperate stuff. It was never going to work. Binks put me together with the old man.”
“Helping you out?”
“I was fifty-six and getting four grand a month from disability. The wife was still teaching, but she had her thirty in and wanted to retire. The old man said we could make twelve percent and still have some upside of principal. I jumped at it. We emptied all our accounts. Seven hundred and fifty thou. He said we would earn ninety grand a year—minimum. It wasn’t Wall Street money, but we were okay.”
“You didn’t think it was too good?”
“No. Remember, this was ten years ago. Stocks were still going up and he had a good line, how he used covered calls and hedged leverage and I don’t know what else. What do I know about stocks, anyway? It sounded good. And then, after a while, you get used to those checks coming every month. You get those statements every quarter and you see the principal edging up. Not by a lot, but still, you feel good about it. Then the market started falling apart and you look at the statement and you think, this guy’s really a genius—he’s still making me money. You get comfortable and you’ll believe anything.”
“What do the lawyers say?”
“Oh, we’re fucked. No doubt. Our account said we had a million two. Of course, that was just a piece of paper. But over the years we got paid out more than that. The Feds count back ten years. Whatever you put in minus whatever you took out. We’ll get nothing. Zip. I don’t think they’ll come after us, though. I hear some people are being told they’re going to have to pony up.”
“There was a piece in the Journal a week or two ago about that.”
“Yeah? I don’t read the papers anymore.” He laughed. “I never read the Journal. None of that shit. I look at Newsday once in a while. The wife gets it.”
“You manage to stay well informed.”
Mickey laughed. “My sources didn’t tell me what you’re supposed to be doing for the family. But I can guess. The middle kid, whose name escapes me right now, he’s trying to hold the firm together. How am I doing?”
“Who’s your source? Binks?”
“That junkie prick. I plan on being around to piss on his grave.”
“Junkie?” I said. This was news.
“Last I heard. He went from coke to crank to heroin. China White. He thinks he’s a fucking connoisseur.”
The too-laid-back attitude of Virgil’s older brother now made sense—he was stoned.
“A guy I met in prison said it one time. ‘Notice how you never meet an old junkie?’ I think you’ll get your chance.”
“Yeah, I knew you went away for a while,” he said, almost apologetically. “You take one for the team?”
There had been a conspiracy. I just wasn’t part of it. I had been both the patsy and the crook. “If I’d known the words, I would have sung them an aria or two. I had nothing to give. I did two of the five and now I report to my parole officer once a month for the next couple of years. I’m on my third in eight months. They pass me around. I’m like a tofu salad at Luger’s. Nobody knows what to do with me.”
“They better learn. It seems the Feds are finally going after people. I haven’t seen them this tough since the early nineties. Another few years and there’ll be lots of white-collar guys sitting where you are.”
“Mid-level execs. The big guys will just have their firms pay a fine.”
“It’s the American way,” he said.
“The great wheel grinds slowly,” I said in my best Confucian impersonation.
“When it grinds at all,” he said. “So, what do you want from me? Tell me a story.”
“Well, I can’t say what I’m working on. I’m taking the man’s money; I probably owe him that at least. But I need to find out where to start. There’s more than a thousand individual investors, almost three hundred institutions—central banks, hedge funds, pension funds, charities. Who had the inside on Von Becker? I need to understand his whole operation. I need to know it cold.”
“Besides Binks?”
“I thought he was just a trader—and happy that way.”
“He should’ve been indicted. Only he never signed a thing. No paper trail. But I’m sure he knew.”
“Well, I doubt he will talk to me. He’ll know it’s going right back to Virgil.”
“Virgil! That’s his name. I must be getting old. They’re all named for the Earps, you know. James, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan. The old man had a thing about the Earps. The O.K. Corral. All that crap. Guy had memorabilia all over his office.”
“The great lawmen of the Old West on Von Becker’s wall? That’s funny.”
“Read your history. The Earps were gamblers, land speculators. They were only lawmen when they couldn’t make money doing anything else. Doc Holliday was probably a psychopath.”
“So give me a name. Where do I start? I can’t interview them all.”
“Only if you’re willing to trade.”
I knew what he wanted. “I’m not going to tell you why I was hired.”
“Then I’ll guess and you tell me if I’m wrong.”
“I’m promising nothing,” I said.
“There’s big money missing,” he began, pausing briefly to see if I wanted to deny it. “The Feds know and they can’t find it. Virgil thinks you can find it. Right so far?”
I let it sit there untouched for a minute. “I will not confirm that.”
“But you would tell me if I was wrong.”
I thought for a long time.
“I would.”
“And?”
I didn’t say anything.
“So, I got my answer.”
I still said nothing.
“You were always buddy-buddy with Paddy Gallagher, weren’t you?”
I rose to the bait. “I haven’t seen Paddy since before I went away—more than three years now.”
“This would be a good time to reacquaint yourself,” Mickey said.
“The paper said they were best friends. I didn’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” he replied.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Keep me posted.” He was telling me that I still owed him. I wasn’t so sure, but it paid to keep him in my camp.
“I will.”
“Good enough.” He let it go. “How’s family? You’ve got a kid, right? Living down South somewhere with his mother. Right?”
“My son lives with me now. Since I got out.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And here I thought you knew everything,” I said with a grin.
“Yeah, well, now I do.”