Dance for the Dead (9 page)

When
the plane began to descend, the pressure on Jane’s ears
increased and she woke up. The engines changed their tone, and she
pushed the button to let her seat back pop up again. The sleep had
left her feeling stiff in the shoulders, but she was alert. The Old
People believed that the place to obtain secret information was in
dreams. Sometimes a dream would be an expression of an unconscious
desire of the soul, and at other times a message planted there by a
guardian spirit. Those were two ways of saying the same thing. If
there were such a force as the supernatural, then the soul and the
guardian both would be supernatural. If there were no such force,
then the soul was the psyche, and the guardian spirit was just the
lonely mind’s imaginary friend.

This time Jane could not
remember any impression that had passed through her mind in three
hours. Maybe that was the message from her subconscious: enough. She
had stored enough tragedy and violence in her memory during the past
few days to trip the circuit breaker and turn the lights out. The
rest had helped: she was thinking clearly again. As they walked into
the terminal at O’Hare she glanced up at a monitor that had the
schedule of arrivals and departures on it.

“More tag?” asked
Mary Perkins.

Jane kept her moving. “Once
a game starts, you have to play to win. That means remembering all
the moves. We sent two men to New York with a stop in Chicago. The
two we left in Las Vegas can look at the schedule and see that a
plane left for Chicago about the time we did. When you start sending
the chasers across your own path, it’s time to get off the
path.”

They walked along with the crowd
heading for the baggage claim until it passed the car-rental
counters, and then Jane led Mary Perkins aside. Within minutes they
were in a white Plymouth moving along the 294 Expressway toward Route
80.

Jane drove fast but kept the
pace steady, always in a pack of cars that were going the same speed.
She counted as she drove: two men fooled into boarding the flight to
New York, three left at the gate in L.A. two following the wrong
woman in Las Vegas. Seven. The one who had made a phone call before
he had boarded the plane to New York must have been reporting to
somebody, so it was more than seven. Who were they, and why was Mary
Perkins worth all this trouble?

“Where are we going?”
asked Mary Perkins.

“Detroit,” said
Jane. “It’s about three hundred miles.” She turned
her head and pointedly studied the right-hand mirror to check for
headlights coming up in the right lane. “In the airport you
said you didn’t have time to tell me anything and I didn’t
have time to listen. We’ve got about five hours.”

Mary Perkins sat in silence for
a long time. They passed an exit where a blazing neon sign towered
above a building much bigger than the gas stations around it. Mary
gave a little snort that was the abbreviation for a laugh. “Jimmy
Fugazi’s End Zone Restaurant. Did you ever notice that all
those guys who get too old to play buy restaurants?”

This time Jane did look at her.
Mary was probably in her thirties, but she was already paying too
much attention to her hair and skin and clothes. “I guess they
have to invest their money somewhere,” she said.

“All professional athletes
want to own restaurants,” Mary Perkins pronounced. “It
doesn’t have to do with money. It has to do with not being able
to give up having people look at them and pay attention. Even the
dumbest jock in the world knows he can do better by putting bets on
any ten mutual funds, but all professional athletes want a
restaurant. Every crook already has one. What he wants is a casino. A
crook is basically lazy, and that way people come to him to get
robbed, and they bring it in cash so he can take it and screw the
government at the same time. There’s only one game bigger than
that.”

Jane could sense that Mary
Perkins was backing closer to whatever she had been concealing, so
she waited patiently.

“What happened to me,”
said Mary Perkins, “well, not exactly to me – but what
happened was that one day in 1982 Congress passed the Garn-Saint
Germain Act. It pretty much got rid of all the rules for savings and
loan companies. They could charge what they wanted, pay what they
wanted, buy and sell what they wanted, take deposits in any amount
from anywhere, and then lend it to whomever they wanted, or even
forget about lending and invest it themselves. I could see that this
was maybe the first great opportunity in American life since the
discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, so I jumped at it.”

She glanced at Jane to see if
her expression had changed, but it had not, so she went on. “It
wasn’t only that the rules had changed, but that there was
nobody to enforce them. That was part of the program. If you don’t
have regulations, you don’t have to hire regulators. Reagan was
cutting the size of the government payroll.”

Jane had finally learned
something true about Mary Perkins. She was a thief. But until she
knew more about what Mary Perkins had stolen, there would be no way
to know who was after her. “‘What did you have to do with
savings and loans?”

“I started working in one
right out of college. When I got there, the regulators still knew all
the players and all the rules were fifty years old. The money coming
in was all from local people with passbooks, and the money going out
was for mortgages on local one-family houses.”

“I take it you were one of
the ones who changed all that?”

“No, not little me. I just
came to the party. That’s what it was like – a party. You
have to understand what was happening. One day the rules change, so
each savings and loan sets its own rates. The next day, deposit
brokers start taking money from everywhere in the world, breaking it
down into hundred-thousand-dollar chips and depositing the chips in
whatever institution anywhere in the country had the highest interest
that day. So if Bubba and Billy’s Bank in Kinkajou, Texas,
gives an extra quarter point, suddenly it’s got millions of
dollars being deposited: Arab oil money, skim-off money from
business, drug money from L.A. and Miami, Yakuza money from Japan,
money the C.I.A. was washing to slip to some tyrant someplace, and
lots of tax money.”

“Wait. You did say ‘tax
money’?” Maybe Jane had been wrong about the men in the
airport. If they were federal agents of some kind, they might be
prepared in advance to follow a woman like this.

“Sure. You think they keep
it in a big box under the president’s bed? Say there’s a
billion-dollar budget for some program. It’s got to be in
short-term CDs so they can use it when they need it. A loan broker
pops it in wherever the interest is highest. Haifa year’s
interest on a billion dollars at eight percent is forty million,
right?”

“If you say so.”

“And this is money that
can’t rest. It can’t stay put if there’s another
bank that’s offering higher interest. One point of interest on
one billion is ten million dollars. There were all kinds of
city-government funds, college budgets, whole states that got their
money a few months before they spent it. They counted on the timing
and figured the interest in as a way to stretch it. And it didn’t
matter if the money was in the Bank of America or the Bank of
Corncob, Iowa, because it was all insured.”

“How did this create an
opportunity for you?”

“Forget about me for a
minute. A few other things had to change first. Glockenspiel City
Savings is suddenly a happening thing.”

“What’s Glockenspiel
City Savings?”

“You know, the little
storefront with a million in assets built up over twenty years. One
day they offer a nice rate on their CDs; the next week they’ve
got four hundred million in deposits. That happened a hell of a lot
more often than you’d think. There are little pitfalls, though.
They’re offering, say, nine percent. That means they’ve
got to turn maybe ten, even twelve to make a profit. There’s
very little in Glockenspiel City that you can invest in that pays ten
percent, and nothing at all that you can invest four hundred million
in. So you’ve got to invest it the way you got it. in the great
wide world outside Glockenspiel City,”

Mary Perkins was telling all
this with relish, as though she weren’t sitting in a car
speeding across the dark Midwest to keep her alive. She seemed to be
calming herself by wandering in territory that was familiar to her, a
place that was filled with numbers. Jane let her talk.

“Glockenspiel Savings is
run by a guy named Cyrus Curbstone. He goes along for years and
years, paying three percent on savings, charging six percent on
loans. He knows his limits because they’ve been written down in
a law since the thirties. He’s honest. He was born there, and
he’s got two plots in the cemetery for him and Mrs. Curbstone,
right behind Great-grandma and one row over from Colonel Curbstone,
who got shot in the ass at Gettysburg. But I know Cyrus Curbstone is
vulnerable.”

“You said he was honest.
What’s his weakness?”

“One day Cyrus wakes up
and finds himself on another planet. He’s got to pay nine
percent and charge twelve. His million-dollar bank suddenly has four
hundred million in deposits. He can’t invest it fast enough in
the usual way to make the forty or fifty million he needs to turn a
profit. In walks a nice person: maybe me. Maybe I’ve been
referred to him by a deposit broker who’s been putting lots of
those hundred-thousand-dollar chips in the bank. Or I simply happened
to meet one of his regular customers socially. Anyway, I’m a
developer, or the general partner in a limited partnership. I’ve
got a piece of land that’s been appraised for twenty million, I
want to develop it as a resort, and I need a loan of ten million to
finance it.”

“Is the land real?”

“Sure. That doesn’t
mean I own it, or that it’s worth anything like twenty
million.”

“Didn’t they look at
deeds?”

“Sure. The owner is
Pan-Financial Enterprises of San Diego, or Big Deals of Boca Raton.
I’m an officer.”

“How did you make it look
like it was worth twenty million?”

“In those days there was
no licensing law for appraisers anywhere in the country. So I’d
get an appraisal that said what I wanted. Then we’d do a
land-flip.”

“What’s that?”

“Buy it for a million.
Sell it to your brother-in-law for six million. He sells it back to
you for ten. You sell it to Big Deals, Inc. for twenty.”

“That worked?”

“Of course it worked.
They’ve been doing it since the Romans.”

“If it was that stale,
wasn’t it risky?”

“You’ve heard of the
term ‘motivated seller’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the day after Cyrus
Curbstone starts getting these brokered deposits, he becomes a
motivated lender. He’s got four hundred million to lend out. If
he makes ten percent, that’s forty million a year. He pays his
depositors nine percent, or thirty-six million, pays his overhead,
and he’s got maybe two million left in profit. He’s part
owner, or at least a big stockholder. The others are local people,
friends of his. He wants that profit. But if he lets the deposits sit
in the vault, he’s losing three million a month. That’s a
hundred thousand a day. That’s almost forty-two hundred an
hour. I mean, it’s costing this guy thirty-three thousand
dollars to sleep eight hours.”

“You’re saying Cyrus
fooled himself.”

“No. Cyrus had never
played for big numbers before, but he wasn’t stupid. I was a
nice, personable businesswoman. I dressed well. I smelled good, I
smiled, I had money. I had a hot business and I wanted to expand. Hot
businesses need banks. Banks need hot businesses. He got fooled
because he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do: for the
first few years, a great company looks exactly like the company I was
showing him. So he cut a check.”

“But what if – ”

“What if he said no? If
Cyrus didn’t bite, I’d leave him to somebody who had a
pitch he liked better, and I’d go after his buddy Homer in the
next town, who by now has five hundred million to move. But we hardly
ever had to do that. Cyrus would have had to hunt pretty hard for a
reason to turn me down, and he knew he didn’t have time to
hunt. He had to find jobs for his dollars.”

“So you got a loan. What
then?”

“Big Deals, Inc. got a
loan. Big Deals spent it: building expenses, salaries, et cetera. But
Big Deals neglected to pay the interest.”

“What did Cyrus do about
it?”

“I’ll skip a few
phone calls, meetings, and threats. Usually that went on for months.
At some point Cyrus sees that he’s got a problem. He can do
several things. One is to foreclose on the land. Fine with me. I just
sold a one-million-dollar chunk of Manitoba for ten million. Another
is to accept my excuses and roll over the loan into a new one that
includes the interest I owe him. Now it’s a new loan for eleven
million. Some of these banks carried loans like that for five years.”

“What for?”

“Because Cyrus hasn’t
lost any money until he reports the loan as nonperforming. If he
makes a new loan, he not only hasn’t lost the ten million, he
can put out another million as an asset. This satisfies the
regulators, if any should ever get around to Cyrus with all the work
they’ve got. It keeps the bank looking healthy, so Cyrus has
breathing space.”

“Why does he need such
expensive breathing space?”

“Because he didn’t
make the forty million he needed to turn a profit. If he was a very
quick learner, he made maybe thirty-five million: eight and
three-quarters percent. He’s still got to pay nine percent to
the depositors, so he’s maybe a million in the hole at the end
of the first year. From one point of view that’s not bad. It
cost a million dollars to make his bank four hundred times as big as
it was last year. But now he’s on a treadmill that’s
going faster and faster. He needs to attract more brokered deposits
so he can make more loans. If he gets another two hundred million, he
can bring back maybe fifty or sixty million next year and easily
absorb the million dollars he lost. As I said, he’s not stupid.
He knows that he looks great on paper as long as he’s moving
fast. But if somebody takes a photograph – that is, stops the
action and studies it – his bank is insolvent. So now he’s
interested in keeping the system in motion.”