Need You Now (4 page)

4

I
emerged from the subway in TriBeca, a few blocks from my apartment. The northbound train would have taken me to the Midtown office, but word was probably out that I was officially the first FA to get slapped down by Joe Barber, and the last thing I needed was to return to work with the burn marks of muzzle blast on my neck, as if I’d spent the lunch hour trying to shoot myself—and missed. Talk about unbearable.

“Hey, it’s Patrick Paradeplatz, Super FA.”

“Really, dude, suicide hasn’t been the Wall Street way since 1929. Now we resign in disgrace and go buy a vineyard.”

I was making light of it, but I was pretty shaken. I stopped on the sidewalk to examine my neck and lower jaw in a plate glass window. Nothing serious, but it was plenty ugly—a red, black, and purple combination of a bruise, a burn, and a scrape. Somewhere in my closet was one of those black mock turtlenecks that Steve Jobs had made acceptable, if not exactly fashionable. That was just what the doctor ordered, at least until I decided what to do. It would have been easy to lose all perspective, and I reminded myself that people got assaulted at gunpoint every day in New York. Some of those victims were close friends of mine. It wasn’t fun, but it was important to keep your wits about you. The most troubling part was that I’d been warned not to contact the police, and this had the feel of something that was bound to get bigger. The trick was to figure out who was in the best position to help me.

It was chilly in the shadows of Tribeca’s iron-facade architecture of another century, and after a brush with death and a ride on the subway, the fresh air felt good on my face. The Irish immigrants who built the Romanesque Revival–style gem near the Franklin Street subway station could hardly have imagined that, someday, a four-bedroom apartment there would go for 12 million bucks—no extra charge for the quaint cobblestone street. Hell, it had even given my boss sticker shock. My much smaller condo was down the street. I passed a flower shop and a Jewish bakery on the way. Across the street was a coffeehouse with free Wifi for people who didn’t mind sharing personal information with every two-bit hacker in Manhattan. The familiar haunts of my old neighborhood were comforting. Singapore had never felt anything like home, and if my assault had happened there, I might have been too shaken to think straight.

“You probably should see a doctor.”

I said it aloud to see if the flesh wound on my neck made it painful to talk. Not bad. I’d felt much worse pain after flag football games in Central Park.

My iPhone rang. I let it go to voice mail, but the intrusion had me thinking about that funny noise again—the ping I’d heard moments before landing in the back of an SUV with a gun to my head. I stopped at the corner and tried to duplicate it. I couldn’t. My guess was spyware. Before the attack, it would have been paranoia to think so. But now the only question was
who
was tracking me. BOS Corporate Security? The gentle folks who had hired a professional hit man to come within a half inch of blowing my brains out?

Footsteps sounded behind me. As I looked up I caught a glimpse of a woman fast approaching.

“Stay cool,” she said.

On some level I recognized the voice, but before it could fully register, her arm locked with mine and she was pulling me along. It took only a step or two to feel the familiarity of her body against mine.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said, still moving. “Don’t react.”

I felt her hand slip into my pocket, and she removed my phone.

“It’s bugged,” she whispered, and she dropped it into a trash can on the sidewalk. “It picks up conversations even when you’re not on the phone.”

Lilly’s grip tightened around my forearm as she led me into the bar at the corner.

We found the darkest booth available, and I stared at her from across the table, trying to absorb both the surprise of her return and the change in her appearance. She’d cut her hair to a stylish length that barely covered her ears, and it was dyed much darker, more of a chestnut color. It suited her, but what a different look it was.

“What the hell is going on, Lilly?”

“Do you mean what am I doing here?”

“That’s only the beginning. Do you have any idea what just happened to me?”

“Yes, I do.” She turned her head slowly, offering her profile. In the dim glow of a neon beer sign on the wall, I noticed the swelling on her neck, just below the jawbone. Her makeup was hiding the remnants of a flesh wound just like mine. It was an upsetting sight, and given our personal status, I probably cared too much and in ways that I had no business caring.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She drew a breath, and on the exhale offered a weak response. “For a while, I suppose. Until they figure out that I decided not to hang around for the mock execution to turn into a real one. I cut my hair and got on a plane out of Singapore so fast that I barely had time to pack a bag.”

“Who are
they
?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Well, so far today I’ve learned that you may have hidden God only knows how many billions in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme, that the bank fired you for trying to access information about numbered accounts, and that a professional hit man has promised to send both of us the way of Gerry Collins if you don’t tell him where the Cushman money is. How much worse can it get?”

She looked away, presumably in shame, but my sympathy had its limits. “That thug who threatened me said not to call the police,” I said, “but I’m in serious need of some answers, Lilly.”

Her eyes welled, and she was suddenly on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure why I was apologizing. I didn’t deal well with tears in general, and the fact was that, until our breakup, my previous record for staying mad at Lilly had been about eight seconds.

“I don’t blame you if you can’t stand the sight of me,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

“I wanted to call or text you, but there’s no such thing as a secure electronic communication. I was even going to send a handwritten letter by old-fashioned snail mail, figuring that was the only way to make sure they wouldn’t intercept it. But I was afraid you wouldn’t open it.”

My head was starting to spin. “Every time the conversation starts to sound slightly normal, you throw in another layer that sounds completely crazy. Why would anyone intercept your calls and texts to me?”

“Bad stuff is going on. Has been going on since . . . we talked on the beach.”

“Must be why that bird shit on my head.”

My sarcasm made her smile a little, and I almost regretted the fact that I’d elicited a glimpse of the old Lilly. Almost.
Love that smile.

“No,” she said, turning serious again. “This is bad, Patrick. It started when we were together, and I knew it might come to the point where it would hurt you. I tried to tell you more on the beach, but . . . I couldn’t. I chickened out, I guess. I opted for the clean break.”

“So, you dumped me . . . to protect me?”

“I could lie to you and say that I’m the best person on earth and was just trying to insulate you from all this. But my thought process wasn’t that clear. I needed out. With everything that was going on, you were . . . it was too much to handle.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to seem too deflated. “Honesty is good. Not good for the ego, but overall—in a cosmic, utopian, Judeo-Christian, don’t-get-your-hopes-up kind of way—good.”

“Stop,” she said. “All I’m saying is that it was not black and white. Of
course
I was afraid something might happen to you. That’s why it almost killed me when I found out they had you.”

“But how did you find that out?”

“They called me and said, ‘We have your boyfriend.’ Then they tapped me into some kind of eavesdropping device they’d planted on your iPhone.”

That explained the strange ping I’d heard. “If you knew I was in danger, how about calling the cops?”

“Then they really would have killed you.”

Again I recalled the thug’s warning to me:
Don’t even think about calling the cops.
“How did you know they weren’t going to kill me anyway?”

“They told me.”

“They
told
you?”

“If I’m going to find the money, they know I need a helper inside the bank, now that I got fired. I’m sure you heard about that.”

“Yes, I just heard. But hold on a second. Is that why you’re here—to ask me to help you find the money?”

“No. I’m here because I’m sorry you had to become a part of this. But you need to understand the message they are sending me. What happened to you today . . . they want me to know that they can—and will—hurt people I care about if I don’t meet their demand.”

Part of me wanted to follow up on “people I care about,” but I stayed on task. “By ‘demand,’ do you mean handing over the money you put in Cushman’s hands?”

She nodded.

“How much are we talking about?”

“Two billion.”

“Whoa. I didn’t know it was
that much
.”

She leaned across the table, held my hand, and looked me in the eye. “Patrick, I had no idea Abe Cushman was running a Ponzi scheme. I wish I knew what happened to all that money, but anyone who thinks I do is flat wrong.”

Her hand felt nice in mine, but old feelings weren’t the way to the truth. I withdrew and said the same thing Joe Barber had said to me. “I’d like to believe you.”

“You have to believe me.”

“You’re going to have to explain an awful lot.”

“All right. Where do you want me to start?”

She was touching my hand again, and despite my effort not to get caught up in old memories, my mind pulled up a funny one. Lilly and I shared a passion for old movies, and we’d rented
The Sound of Music
after working late one night at our Swiss bank, only to laugh our way into bed upon realizing that the DVD was entirely in Chinese and that the original story was set in Austria, not Switzerland anyway. It was one of my favorite nights with Lilly—sort of the standard by which our future lovemaking would be measured.

“We could make like von Trapps and start at beginning,” I said in a lame Chinese accent.

The
Do-Re-Mi
allusion seemed to trigger the same pleasant memory for her, even if she did screw up her line:

“Not a bad place to start.”

5

“I
met Gerry Collins about four years ago,” said Lilly. “At a conference in Maui.”

I was massaging behind my ear as she spoke. The ringing had stopped, but even with a suppressor, a gunshot at such close range was enough to cause serious discomfort.

“It was more than business,” she said.

That was enough detail for me. “How long did it last?”

“I was working in New York then, and he came to the city on business pretty regularly. We probably saw each other eight or ten times over the next few months.”

“Then what?”

“Then it just sort of fizzled out. No big dramatic breakup, no speeches.”

“No seagulls.”

She gave me a weak smile.
Enough with the jokes about the breakup.

“We completely lost touch until I was in Singapore. He called me. This time, it was purely business.”

“What kind of business?”

A waitress came by, but there was no pressure to order. Puffy’s Tavern is one of the few remaining places on lower Hudson Street where you can sit as long as you like and not feel obligated to buy a fifteen-dollar bottle of sparkling water to justify your stay. Amid a spate of trendy restaurants and pricy bars, Puffy’s is a blue-collar throwback to old Tribeca, a shot-and-a-beer haven for artists and truck drivers alike, still with its original tile floor and an old-fashioned bar that dates back to Prohibition. Lilly ordered a diet soda. I could have used a couple of aspirin, but I went for a shot of tequila. To each his own, I say, when it comes to pain management.

Lilly continued when the waitress stepped away.

“Gerry had a client roster that read like a social register of south Florida—professional athletes, Grammy-winning singers, all high-net-worth individuals. You have to remember that Cushman was very clever. One reason his operation didn’t look like a Ponzi scheme was that he didn’t accept every client who threw money at him. Gerry was able to draw in heavy hitters with guaranteed access to the Cushman fund, but not all of them wanted to be a hundred percent in Cushman. Gerry was too busy networking to manage the non-Cushman part of the investment portfolios, so he needed someone else to do it. I was someone he trusted not to steal his clients away. The fact that I was on the other side of the world and would never meet his clients was actually a plus. I handled the non-Cushman part of the portfolios from BOS in Singapore.”

“So Collins matched you up with clients you never met?”

“There was always an introductory conference call.”

Like most banks, BOS abided by the KYC rule: “know your client.” But in this business, KYC didn’t require anything nearly so onerous as actually
knowing
your client. Perfunctory conference-call introductions—“intro-functories,” we called them—made Lilly no different from any of the other private wealth managers in the Singapore branch.

“But if you were helping these clients invest outside Cushman, how does that connect you to the Ponzi scheme?”

“That came later. Gerry had other clients. Super-high net worth. Some with numbered accounts in Zurich, some with funds in other systems. I don’t know all the details, but over time, the relationship with Gerry was working very well for me and BOS. That was when he asked me to arrange for one of his super clients to meet with the head of our numbered account services in Singapore.”

“Surprise, surprise. The link to Cushman is bank secrecy.”

“The flag wasn’t nearly so red at the time.”

A burst of cold air brushed my face, and I looked past Lilly to see who had entered the tavern. Puffy’s wasn’t exactly a Wall Street hangout, but you could never be too careful when discussing bank secrecy. The guy making a beeline to the bar seemed harmless enough. He actually looked ridiculous, a little fortysomething white man wearing one of those flat-billed rapper caps.

“Who was the client Gerry wanted you to assist?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I arranged for the meeting, but the identity of the account holder was known only to Gerry and the manager of numbered accounts.”

“You had no other involvement?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Our drinks arrived, and the waitress left us alone. Lilly sipped her soda. I belted back my tequila, but I should have known better than to order without specifying a brand. The man at the bar pretended not to notice, but he was clearly amused by my reaction to Puffy’s firewater. Lilly waited for my face to unwind, then continued.

“After the account was created, Gerry wanted me involved. We had to jump through some administrative hoops in the bank, but we finally got it approved so that I could deal directly with his client.”

“A client with no name.”

“Or face,” she said. “Only the top brass knew who he was. To me, he was just a voice on the phone with a personal identification code. I was getting a glimpse into the private banking business that had put BOS on the financial map. I was excited, actually, but after a while it was fairly routine. Gerry’s client would call me, identify himself through the proper codes, and tell me what to do with the money.”

“So you moved funds from a numbered account at BOS/Singapore to Cushman Investment.”

“I didn’t physically push the buttons to make it happen, no. I filled out the transfer-of-funds paperwork and personally walked it over to one of the guys in Payments Traffic. They did the actual wire transfers.”

“But the wiring instructions had your name on them?”

“Yes.”

“And the transfer slips showed that the money was routed to Cushman Investment?”

“Usually to offshore accounts, and then it went to Cushman.”

“How do you know it actually went from the offshore accounts to Cushman?”

“The transfers were done in a very compressed time frame, usually the same business day. I spoke to Gerry every day to make sure there was no glitch in the pipeline. He gave me verbal confirmation when the money hit Cushman Investment.”

“How big were the transfers?”

“On average, about ten million dollars. A day.”

“For how long?”

“Like I said: It came out to just over two billion. You do the math.”

Math was something I was good at. Two hundred days. “And that’s the same two billion that my Times Square tour guide wants back.”

“That would be correct.”

“So the two-billion-dollar question is . . .”

“Who was Gerry’s client,” she said, finishing for me. “The bank, of course, won’t divulge that information. The secrecy laws in Singapore are just as tight as Switzerland’s. Unless there’s evidence that the client used a secret account to assist in the commission of a crime, the bank itself violates the law by revealing any information about the account. Bankers in Singapore actually face more jail time than bankers in Switzerland for violations of bank secrecy. As far as BOS is concerned, their client isn’t a criminal. He’s a victim of Cushman’s fraud.”

“I’m guessing that’s how you got yourself fired—trying to attach a name to the numbered account?”

“I was desperate. With the threats I was getting, I wanted to know who I was up against.”

I looked down into my empty shot glass, thinking. “What if we went up to the BOS executive suite right now and told the general counsel that we’ve both been threatened?”

“First of all, we can’t prove that it’s a BOS client who is threatening us.”

“Who else would it be? It’s either him or someone working for him.”

“It’s him,” she said. “I heard his voice every day on the phone. There’s no doubt in my mind that I heard the same voice when he had the gun to my head, and when he called to tell me you were in the back of that SUV.”

“Then we have to go to the bank,” I said.

“Forget it. I’ve already taken it all the way to the Zurich headquarters. I flew six thousand miles from Singapore to meet with two stuffed shirts in Finanz Kundenbetreuung Abteilung,” she said, mangling her pronunciation of the German equivalent of Financial Client Management. “It was like talking to the wall. Trust me, Patrick: the bank is never going to help on this.”

“Maybe you just didn’t find the right set of ears.”

“Listen to what I’m saying. Eight figures a day moved into that secret account in Singapore. It was my job to execute the transfer orders going out, but I never knew who put the money there in the first place, or where it came from. It’s clear to me that if we go through the proper institutional channels,” she said, using her fingers to put
proper
in quotation marks, “the bank will do everything in its power to make sure that no one ever finds out.”

I rested on my elbows, running my fingers through my hair. “How did you allow yourself to be put in this position?”

“What was I supposed to do—forget where I worked and become one of those people who automatically assumes that anyone who’s rich and has a Swiss bank account is a criminal? I respected the lines of authority at the bank. You would have done the same thing, and you know it.”

She was right. I would have—with the exception of sleeping with Gerry Collins, of course. “Have you . . .”

I stopped without even realizing I was in midsentence. That guy at the bar was pretending not to notice me again, but this time I hadn’t choked on my tequila or done anything else to draw his attention.
What’s so damn interesting over here, buddy?

“Have I what?” asked Lilly.

I regained my train of thought. “Have you tried going to the authorities? The FBI, Interpol, whoever?”

“Patrick, has one shot of tequila gone straight to your head?” she said as she took my empty shot glass away from me and put it aside. “The message to me was crystal clear: call the cops, die an instant and unpleasant death.”

Like a reflex, I rubbed my neck. “Ditto. But let’s not rule it out.”

“It’s not an option. Law enforcement won’t help.”

“How can you say that?”

“This arrangement with Collins has put me dead center in the hunt for the Cushman money. Treasury thinks I’m hiding the money, the same way these thugs think I’m hiding the money.”

“You can’t assume that.”

“I’m not just assuming. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Seen what?”

She paused, and her voice lowered a notch, as if we were moving into an area of heightened sensitivity. “I’ve seen an internal memo written by someone high up at Treasury.”

“How’d you get that?”

“I don’t actually have it. I said I’d seen it. The guy who attacked me in Singapore showed it to me.”

“How did he get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did he let you see it?”

“After about the tenth time I told him I knew nothing about the Cushman money, he got fed up, said he knew I was lying. He stuck the memo right under my nose. It says it in black and white: Treasury’s most promising lead as to concealment of proceeds from the Cushman fraud remains Gerry Collins’ banking activities at BOS/Singapore. And the memo identifies me
by name
as the point person for those activities.”

“But you were feeding money into the Cushman Fund, not taking it out.”

“To them, it must be like the law of gravity: what goes up, must come down; what goes in, must come out. My point is that if I go to law enforcement, you can bet they’ll be happy to protect me, but only if I give them information I don’t have: what happened to the money I funneled to Cushman.”

She was definitely in a box, but my focus had drifted again to the guy at the bar. Even though he was on his cell phone, I was still feeling watched.

“Lilly, don’t be obvious about it, but when you get a chance, glance toward the bar and tell me if that guy looks familiar to you.”

“What?”

“Just take a look,” I said as I brushed her napkin off the table. She took my cue, picked up the napkin, and stole a glance in the process.

“Not anyone I know,” she said. “I think I’m making you paranoid.”

I wasn’t so sure.

“Stay with me on this,” said Lilly.

“Sorry. You were saying?”

“I was going to say that calling the FBI or whatever agency is not only dangerous, but pointless. Even if they wanted to help, the simple fact is that the bank isn’t willing to give up any information about the account holder. They fired
me
for trying to get it. How quickly do you think government lawyers can get into court and force the Singapore arm of the biggest bank in Switzerland to give up the name on a numbered account? These thugs gave me two weeks to come up with the money.
Two weeks.
”

“That’s a short fuse.”

“And it’s even shorter now.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .”

“Because
why
, Lilly?”

“I didn’t want to say this before. I’m not the kind of person who gets people in trouble and then looks for a pat on the back for getting them out of it. But that’s the deal I struck when I was freaking out on the phone, listening to what they were doing to you in the back of the SUV in Times Square. I promised to deliver their money in one week, instead of two, if they didn’t hurt you.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s done. So if the bank won’t help us, we have to find someone inside the bank who will. Someone who can work around the regular institutional channels and tell us what we need to know about numbered account 507.625 RR.”

“Why would anyone stick his neck out like that?”

“Because not everyone who works for BOS is interested in protecting organized crime. You just have to find him.”

“Me?
”

“I don’t work for BOS anymore, remember?”

I could have used another shot of tequila; any brand would do. “Do you have any proof that the money flowing to Cushman was from organized crime?”

“I’ve done some digging. Do you remember the name of the man who murdered Gerry Collins?”

I felt another puff of cold air. That guy at the bar was heading out the door, leaving a full beer untouched.

“I’m sure I heard it in the news,” I said, “but the name escapes me.”

“A semiretired guy in his late fifties who lost his entire life savings in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme. Never stood trial. He entered a guilty plea in order to get a life sentence instead of the death penalty. His name was Tony Martin.”