The Scarlatti Inheritance (16 page)

The
T.
of the
W.T.
was ragged and slanted downward on the month of August. The same was true for September, October, November, and December.

She pulled out the August carton and shook it. Then she ripped the wire apart and the wax crest cracked and fell away.

The carton was empty.

She replaced it and drew out the remaining months of 1927.

All empty.

She replaced the cartons and opened the file for 1928. Every thin carton had the
T.
of the wax crest ragged and slanting downward.

All empty.

For how many months had Ulster carried out his extraordinary charade? Going from one harried banker to the next and always, always—at the last—coming down to the vaults. Document by document. Security by security.

Three hours ago she wouldn’t have believed it. It was only because a maid sweeping her front steps had triggered the memory of another maid sweeping steps. A maid who remembered a short command given by her son to a cabdriver.

Ulster Scarlett had taken a subway.

One midmorning he could not take the chance of a taxi ride in traffic. He had been late for his session at the bank.

What better time than midmorning? The initial placing of orders, the chaos of early trading in the market.

Even Ulster Scarlett would be overlooked at midmorning.

She hadn’t understood the subway.

Now she did.

As if performing a painful ritual she checked the remaining months and years of the first cabinet. Through December, 1931.

Empty.

She closed the drawer on 1931 and began at the bottom of the second cabinet 1932.

Empty.

She had reached the middle of the cabinet—1934—when she heard the sound of the metal door opening. She quickly closed the file and turned around in anger.

Jefferson Cartwright entered and shut the door.

“I thought I told you to remain outside!”

“My word, Madame Scarlatti, you look like you’ve seen a dozen ghosts.”

“Get out!”

Cartwright walked rapidly to the first cabinet and arbitrarily pulled out one of the middle drawers. He saw the broken seals on the metal cartons, lifted one out, and opened it. “Seems as if something missin’.”

“I’ll have you dismissed!”

“Maybe.… Maybe you will.” The Southerner pulled out another drawer and satisfied himself that several other cartons whose seals had been broken were empty also.

Elizabeth stood silently, contemptuously, next to the banker. When she spoke, it was with the intensity born of disgust. “You have just terminated your employment at Waterman Trust!”

“Maybe I have. Excuse me, please.” The Virginian gently moved Elizabeth away from the second cabinet and continued his search. He reached the year 1936 and turned to the old woman. “Not much left, is there? I wonder how far it goes, don’t you? Of course, I’ll make a complete breakdown for you as soon as possible. For you and my superiors.” He closed the drawer on 1936 and smiled.

“This is confidential family business. You’ll do nothing! You can do nothing!”

“Oh, come now! These cabinets contained open-faced securities. Bearer bonds negotiable subject to signature.… Possession is ownership. They’re the same as money.… Your disappearin’ son took a whale of a hunk of the New York Exchange! And we haven’t even finished look-in’ around. Shall we open a few more cabinets?”

“I will not tolerate this!”

“Then don’t. You go on your way, and I’ll simply report to my superiors that Waterman Trust is in one hell of a pile of manure. Forgettin’ very sizable commissions due the bank and puttin’ aside any thoughts of the companies involved gettin’ nervous over who owns what—there might even be a run on some stocks—I possess knowledge which I should report immediately to the authorities!”

“You can not! You must not!”

“Why not?” Jefferson Cartwright held out the palms of both hands.

Elizabeth turned away from him and tried to marshal her thoughts. “Estimate what’s gone, Mr. Cartwright.…”

“I can estimate as far as we’ve looked. Eleven years, approximately three and a half million a year comes to something like forty million. But we may have only just begun.”

“I said … prepare an estimate. I trust that I don’t have to tell you that if you say a word to anyone—I shall destroy you. We’ll arrive at mutually agreeable terms.” She slowly turned and looked at Jefferson Cartwright. “You should know, Mr. Cartwright, that through an accident you’re privileged to information that lifts you far above your talents or abilities. When men are so fortunate, they must be cautious.”

Elizabeth Scarlatti spent a sleepless night.

Jefferson Cartwright also spent a sleepless night. But it wasn’t in bed. It was on a monk’s stool with reams of papers at his feet.

The figures mounted as he cautiously checked the file cabinets against the Scarlatti trusts reports.

Jefferson Cartwright thought he’d go mad.

Ulster Stewart Scarlett had removed securities worth over $270 million.

He totaled and retotaled the figures.

An amount that would cause a crisis on the exchange.

An international scandal, which could—if known—cripple the Scarlatti Industries.… And it would be known when the time came to convert the first missing securities. At the outside, barely a year.

Jefferson Cartwright folded the last of the pages together and stuffed them into his inner jacket pocket. He clamped his arm against his chest, making sure that the pressure between his flesh was stopped by the paper, and left the vaults.

He signaled the front guard with a short whistle. The man had been dozing on a black leather chair near the door.

“Oh, m’God, Mr. Cartwright! Y’startled me!”

Cartwright walked out onto the street.

He looked at the grayish white light of the sky. It was going to be morning soon. And the light was his signal.

For he—Jefferson Cartwright, fifty-year-old ex-football player from the University of Virginia, who had married first money and then lost it—held in his pocket carte blanche to everything he had ever wanted.

He was back in the stadium and the crowds were roaring.

Touchdown!

Nothing could be denied him now.

At twenty minutes after one in the morning, Benjamin Reynolds sat comfortably in an armchair in his Georgetown apartment. He held on his lap one of the file folders the attorney general’s office had sent Group Twenty. There had been sixteen in all and he divided the stack equally between Glover and himself.

With congressional pressure, especially New York’s Senator Brownlee, the attorney general’s office wasn’t going to leave a single stone unturned. If the Scarlatti son had disappeared into a void, at least the AG men could write volumes explaining the fact. Because Group Twenty had touched—briefly—on the life of Ulster Scarlett, Reynolds, too, would be expected to add something. Even if it was nothing.

Reynolds felt a trace of guilt when he thought of Glover wading through the same nonsense.

Like all reports of investigations of missing persons, it was filled with trivia. Dates, hours, minutes, streets, houses, names, names, names. A record of the inconsequential made to seem important. And perhaps to someone, somewhere, it might be. A part, a section, a paragraph, a sentence, even a word could open a door for someone.

But certainly not for anyone at Group Twenty.

He’d apologize to Glover later that morning.

Suddenly the phone rang. The sound in the stillness at such an unexpected hour startled Reynolds.

“Ben? It’s Glover.…”

“Jesus! You scared the hell out of me! What’s wrong? Someone call in?”

“No, Ben. I suppose this could wait until morning, but I thought I’d give you the pleasure of laughing yourself to sleep, you bastard.”

“You’ve been drinking, Glover. Fight with your wife, not me. What the hell have I done?”

“Gave me these eight Bibles from the attorney general’s office, that’s what you did.… I found something!”

“Good Christ! About the New York thing! The Socks?”

“No. Nothing we’ve ever connected with Scarlett. Maybe nothing but it could be …”

“What?”

“Sweden. Stockholm.”

“Stockholm? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I know the Pond file by rote.”

“Walter Pond? The securities?”

“That’s right. His first memorandum arrived last May. The initial word about the securities.… Remember now?”

“Yes, yes, I do. So what?”

“According to a report in the sixth file, Ulster Scarlett was in Sweden last year. Would you like to guess when?”

Reynolds paused before answering. His attention was riveted on the almost unimaginable amount of thirty million dollars. “It wasn’t Christmas, was it.” It was a statement spoken softly.

“Now that you mention it, some people might have looked at it that way. Perhaps Christmas in Sweden comes in May.”

“Let’s talk in the morning.” Reynolds hung up without waiting for his subordinate to reply or say goodnight. He walked slowly back to the soft armchair and sat down.

As always Benjamin Reynolds’s thought processes raced ahead of the information presented. To the complications, the ramifications.

If Glover had made a valid assumption, that Ulster Scarlett was involved with the Stockholm manipulation, then it had to follow that Scarlett was still alive. If that were true, then thirty million dollars’ worth of American securities had been illegally offered by him for sale on the Stockholm exchange.

No one individual, not even Ulster Stewart Scarlett, could get his hands on thirty million dollars’ worth of securities.

Unless there was a conspiracy.

But of what kind? For what purpose?

If Elizabeth Scarlatti herself were a part of it—she had to be considered in light of the magnitude of the capital—why?

Had he misread her completely?

It was possible.

It was also possible that he had been right over a year ago. The Scarlatti son had not done what he had done for thrills or because he’d met unsavory friends. Not if Stockholm was pertinent.

Glover paced the floor in front of Reynolds’s desk. “It’s there. Scarlett’s visa shows he entered Sweden on May tenth. The Pond memorandum is dated the fifteenth.”

“I see. I can read.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do? I can’t do a damn thing. There’s really nothing here at all. Simply a statement calling our attention to some rumors and the date of an American citizen’s entry into Sweden. What else do
you
see?”

“Assuming there’s a basis for the rumors, the connection’s obvious and you know it as well as I do! Five will get you ten that if Pond’s last communication is right, Scarlett’s in Stockholm now.”

“Assuming he’s got something to sell.”

“That’s what I said.”

“If I remember, somebody’s got to say something’s stolen before somebody else can yell thief! If we make accusations, all the Scarlattis have to say is they don’t know what we’re talking about and we’re strung up on a high legal tree. And they don’t even have to do that. They can simply refuse to dignify us with an answer—that’s the way the old lady would put it—and the boys on the Hill will take care of the rest.… This agency—for those who know about it—is an abomination. The purpose we serve is generally at odds with a few other purposes in this town. We’re one of the checks and balances—take
your choice. A lot of people in Washington would like to see us out.”

“Then we’d better let the AG’s office have the information and let them draw their own conclusions. I guess that’s the only thing left.”

Benjamin Reynolds pushed his foot against the floor and his chair swung gently around to face the window. “We should do that. We will if you insist on it.”

“What does that mean?” asked Glover, addressing his words to the back of his superior’s head.

Reynolds shoved his chair around again and looked at his subordinate. “I think we can do the job better ourselves. Justice, Treasury, even the Bureau. They’re accountable to a dozen committees. We’re not.”

“We’re extending the lines of our authority.”

“I don’t think so. And as long as I sit in this chair that’s pretty much my decision, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Why do you want us to take it on?”

“Because there’s something diseased in all this. I saw it in the old woman’s eyes.

“That’s hardly clear logic.”

“It’s enough. I saw it.”

“Ben? If anything turns up we think is beyond us, you’ll go to the attorney general?”

“My word.”

“You’re on. What do we do now?”

Benjamin Reynolds rose from his chair. “Is Canfield still in Arizona?”

“Phoenix.”

“Get him here.”

Canfield. A complicated man for a complicated assignment. Reynolds did not like him, did not completely trust him; But he would make progress faster than any of the others.

And in the event he decided to sell out, Ben Reynolds would know it. He would spot it somehow. Canfield wasn’t that experienced.

If that happened Reynolds would bear down on the field accountant and get to the truth of the Scarlatti business. Canfield was expendable.

Yes, Matthew Canfield was a good choice. If he pursued the Scarlattis on Group Twenty’s terms, they could ask no more. If, on the other hand, he found different
terms—terms too lucrative to refuse—he would be called in and broken.

Destroyed. But they would know the truth.

Ben Reynolds sat down and wondered at his own cynicism.

There was no question about it. The fastest way to solve the mystery behind the Scarlattis was for Matthew Canfield to be a pawn.

A pawn who trapped himself.

It was difficult for Elizabeth to sleep. She repeatedly sat up in bed to write down whatever came into her head. She wrote down facts, conjectures, remote possibilities, even impossibilities. She drew little squares, inserted names, places, dates, and tried to match them with connecting lines. At about three in the morning, she had reduced the series of events to the following:

April, 1925. Ulster and Janet married after only three-week engagement. Why?… Ulster and Janet sailed Cunard Line to Southampton. Reservations made by Ulster in February. How did he know?