I GUESS I HAD ALREADY looked at it from most of the possible positions. No matter how you looked at it I didn’t look good. No matter how I tried to dress it up, it was not going to win me any gold Oscars for liberal humanitarianism.
You had to have some kind of code. The only code I had ever found that worked was that as long as you worked for him and took his money, the client was right. If you didn’t think the client was right, or if you didn’t like what he wanted you to do, you didn’t take the job.
Tarkoff’s case was simple enough. Tarkoff had a lot of money invested in Greece. A part of it was handled for him by a wealthy Greek attorney. The Greek had power of attorney. With it, he embezzled $130,000 of Tarkoff’s money in a year, put all his own property in his wife’s name, and absconded from Greece, all Tarkoff’s money spent. On women and high living, apparently. This did not keep him and his wife from sticking together, when it came to his own estate. Tarkoff, unable to get anything out of the still wealthy wife, had the Greek traced and found him to be living in Paris, broke and working as a concierge in a cheap hotel in the rue Amsterdam in Pigalle. A hard situation. The Greek was out of the country safe. The wife refused to assume responsibility for his debts. Nothing could be done in the Greek courts.
It was a pretty slick job. I was a graduate lawyer myself; so was Tarkoff. We could both appreciate the cheap, sniveling, very crooked, very shrewd, lawyer’s dexterity of it. Undoubtedly, the Greek put it together after the money was already spent, in order to save his family.
Tarkoff was not the kind of man to accept such crooked treatment passively. He was not known as one of the young Turks of Wall Street for nothing. My job was to find the Greek and somehow, no matter by what means, get the money back, or as much of it as possible.
Clearly the money must be squeezed from the wife some way. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t have the job and go over there and do it,” Tarkoff said. “Instead of my paying someone else. Some international type. In fact, you’re probably the only one who can swing it. I don’t think any ordinary guy could.” Freddy liked to make a tin hero out of me. He would pay me a lot of money, and expenses.
I accepted the case. I accepted it because I agreed with Tarkoff’s analysis of it. He said the Greek was depending on human decency to let him off the hook. There was no question I was working for the right side. He had embezzled other people too, it turned out, for smaller sums.
I had known Freddy about five years by then. He was probably the richest man I knew in New York. He had looked me up first because of his secretary. Some satisfied client gave him my name. The lady was being blackmailed by a former boyfriend turned small-time hood, and Freddy hired me to get the guy off her back. He liked the way I handled that and we became friends. He found it funny that a graduate lawyer with a degree could be a private eye. So did I, sometimes. I did a couple of mainly research investigations about business deals for him. I never asked him why he was so interested in protecting his secretary. He was married, very socially, to a very social girl, but he liked to hang around with me on my beat in the hood bars. A lot of my time was spent hunting lost kids down in the East Village and Freddy liked to tag along with me down there.
I do not know if our friendship had very much to do with my accepting. I could try that on for size as an excuse, but I won’t. He was offering me an awful lot of money. And right then I needed it badly. My divorce had gone through, and I was having to pay through the nose. Though it was my wife who had wanted the divorce. That plus two teen-age daughters going to ritzy schools made a considerable lump I was having to lay out every month. Freddy knew all this, of course.
I left for Europe prepared to do anything I had to do to complete my assignment. In New York, where except for professionals like myself it’s not safe to walk the street at night, and where even for us it sometimes isn’t, I was feeling more and more like a displaced person. I was glad to get away.
But when I stepped off the plane in Europe, I felt more displaced. Standing in the Orly Airport I realized suddenly that all Europeans were displaced persons. They had lived like that for a hundred generations. There was no security and they didn’t expect any and it showed in their faces. They looked as though they were born knowing at birth that even their own relatives would screw them. I felt right at home.
In Europe, I took an exploratory trip down to Athens, and looked up the wife. She had a town house in Athens, an imposing seaside villa, and a lot of valuable farm land. There was no knowing what she had put away in cash. But she had a lot more than enough to pay back Tarkoff.
Back in Paris I hunted down the Greek. He was still there in the same sleazy hotel in the rue Amsterdam. He was a fat little man with a mean smile. He was willing to admit everything. He would even sign a paper admitting everything. But he couldn’t pay any of it back. He had no money. We both looked around the damp little room. How could he pay? And there was no use trying to get anything from his wife. She hated his guts. “Naturally enough,” he smiled. “Wouldn’t you, sir? If you were she?”
He smiled his shrewd, mean smile at me. He had it all figured out. He had had his fun while it lasted. And he had given everything up for it. And here he was. There wasn’t anything more to do to him. He had forgotten one thing. A man named Freddy Tarkoff, who never forgot anything.
I hadn’t talked much. There wasn’t much point. I had just made my points, carefully. Without any warning I hit him. Then I proceeded methodically to beat him up. As he probably expected me to. I didn’t honestly know what he expected. That I would go away and leave him alone, maybe. But he knew the underworld rules as well as I did.
I knew all the tricks. You picked them up. I did it carefully so as not to cause any serious damage or break any bones. He didn’t yell. He didn’t fight back. When I left, he was just about unconscious on his flavorsome bed.
There was nothing to fear from the police. The French police knew all about him already. They didn’t like him, either. Neither of us was going to any police.
When I went back next night, there was a new man on the desk. The Greek was in his room sick, he said. When I went in, he was there. Only now he was black and blue. He put on his nasty smile like a threadbare trenchcoat. For a lawyer, he pleaded quite a case. Beating him up wouldn’t change his wife. I could kill him, and it would not help. I would get nothing. And I could go on beating him up forever, he pointed out.
He was almost eloquent.
I nodded grimly. “Quite true. And I may. Do you have any children?” I’d already checked.
His eyes widened. “You wouldn’t . . . ?”
I didn’t answer.
“You would never do that,” the Greek said.
“What you need is some incentive,” I said. “And don’t forget, I can go on doing this forever, too.”
Talking, I gagged him. I didn’t even bother to tie him up. I kept telling myself I was doing this for good old Freddy Tarkoff. Then methodically I broke one of his fingers.
He screamed, or would have if it hadn’t been for the gag. For a moment I thought he was going to faint. But he didn’t. Instead, he fell back on the bed and his eyeballs rolled up white and his eyelids fluttered down over them.
When I ungagged him, he groaned. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “And we’ll discuss it more. Maybe you won’t need any more incentive. Don’t bother to try running away. I’ll follow you.” I left him moaning.
Outside in the street I was sweating. My hat felt as if it didn’t want to stay on straight. This kind of work just wasn’t my best thing. I hoped I had hidden that from the Greek. Because I knew I could never do it again.
It was a chilly spring night in that awful, evil part of Paris. There was a steady French mist falling and the street cobbles were slick and dank and shone. Hookers were standing in the doorways of other sleazy hotels, with their teased hair high and their big purses hanging on shoulder straps. For a second I thought of going up with one of them, to forget about the whole thing, and then wanted to gag. I stopped myself from slamming my fist into the clammy brick wall. Melodramatic self-indulgence. I didn’t want to damage my hand. And the hookers were watching. I walked away.
Down at the first lighted corner I stopped in a little cafe-bar filled with pimps to have a couple of stiff drinks.
The only real thought I had in my mind at the time, as I remember, was that I thanked my good luck that I was not him. I would not have wanted to be him, in that sour-smelling, awful, evil, lonely area of Paris, for anything in the world. If I had been him, I would have been totally terrorized.
I suppose he was. When I returned, he was willing to talk to his wife, anyway. He had his hand in a cast. I was as polite as hell to him. A meeting was arranged with the wife in Zurich.
Talk about a displaced person. He had it over me. But he, at least, had gotten to squander $130,000 for his. I had gotten to take care of a wife and two kids for mine.
The wife was about as sorry a human specimen as the husband. After a long talk with him in a cafe, shadowed by me, she asked to see me. Was I the man who was threatening to kidnap her children? I didn’t know what she was talking about; I was only a friend. She snorted and said $80,000 was all she could scrape together. I asked about her seaside villa. “Not my seaside villa!” she cried. Anyway, she would have to sell it, and that would take time. I pointed out it wasn’t mortgaged; borrow money on it now and sell it later. I wouldn’t give her an inch. Inside of a week, the full sum was transferred from the wife’s Swiss account to a Swiss account I opened, the little Greek was back in Paris, and I was back in Athens arranging transfer of the money to Tarkoff the way he wanted it.
He congratulated me profusely on the phone. He suggested the Tsatsos vacation. I had told him I had no desire to go back to New York just yet. I suppose he thought it had to do with my divorce. Well, maybe it did: Too: In a way. It also had to do with my whole life.
Sitting on Sonny Duval’s boat, and moving with the delicious motion as he quartered the swell, I clamped down the lid on my mind, and blocked off the other two items. My divorce. And my life. I had already let one of my imps out of the box.
I was sweating in the heavy sun. The motion of the boat was delicious. We were just about to come in. I put my shirt back on.
The thing that kept coming back was the way his eyeballs had rolled back, and how his eyelids fluttered down over the whites, when I broke his finger.
The terrible thing was I could do it again if I had to. If I ever got myself into the same situation. I intended never to get myself into the same situation.
You did their dirty work for them, and then you were supposed to take your money and shut up. That was part of the contract. They didn’t want to hear the gory details. Well, hurray for them.
We were just coming to the end of the long concrete jetty which protected the Port from the swell. The long swell slapped against it and splashed white water as high as its floor, and ran rolling down its length to the shore.