JM01 - Black Maps (14 page)

“What did she do, put something in the water cooler?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s that we’ve had our first profitable quarter ever, and we’re on track to beat our year-end targets. Or that she rolls up her sleeves and puts in more hours than anybody else in the place. Or maybe it’s that she’s so fucking smart, it’s scary.”

“Wow. Tell me, are the T-shirt and decoder ring free when you join the fan club, or do you have to pay extra?” Lauren was not amused. She shook her head and grimaced, all to say, wordlessly, “I sometimes find it difficult to believe that an asshole like you is actually my brother.” Then she looked at her watch and headed for the door.

“Enough of your low humor. I’ve got to meet the hubby. See you Thursday. It’ll be just family, plus a couple of strays. I’ll tell Liz and Ned and everybody.” She slipped on her coat, shrugged her knapsack over one shoulder, and was gone.

By then it was time for me to get going, too, to meet Alan Burrows. I turned my phone back on before I left, and checked my voice mail. I had only one message, three hours old, from Clare. She wouldn’t be able to see me this week. With the holiday and all, time had just gotten away. She’d call Monday. Sorry. Somehow, I doubted it, just as I doubted we’d get together next week. And, I found, I didn’t much care. It was time to go.

Burrows lived in a skinny, brick-clad tower at the north end of York Avenue. Tiny cement balconies jutted from its upper floors like bad teeth, and the lobby was awash in veined mirrors and cheap marble. It was a rental building, the kind where the freshly graduated cram three or four to a one-bedroom apartment, and where the freshly divorced try to piece together new lives from the scraps of their old ones. A bored doorman pointed me to the elevators, even before he’d rung upstairs to announce me. I rode alone in a dim car that smelled like old food. Burrows stood in the open door of his apartment.

“This way, Mr. March.”

Burrows was a handsome wreck. He was fiftyish and tall, six foot three or so, and broad shouldered, but thick through the middle—a college athlete fallen into disrepair. What once were stolid, John Wayne good looks had blurred and buckled, and now all the mileage showed. His fleshy face was deeply creased, and the skin around his spent brown eyes was dark, and shot through with a web of lines and veins. Broken capillaries had left a small purple stain, like a brushstroke, on his cheek, and another in a corner of his long, thin nose. His blond hair was mostly gray, and was thinning badly. It was brushed straight back, away from his high forehead, and looked damp, like he had just gotten out of the shower. The collar of his pink button-down shirt was damp too, and his sleeves were rolled back over hairless forearms. He wore soft-looking, brown leather slippers on his feet. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his khaki pants. He stood aside so I could enter, and did not shake my hand.

The apartment was small, low ceilinged, and sterile, like a very tidy waiting room. I stood in a short hallway. On my left was a pocket kitchen, on my right a bedroom and a bath. The living room was a white cube, dead ahead. The furnishings were sparse and cheap. A beige sofa, a matching chair, and a coffee table were arranged in a corner. A low bookcase ran along one wall; a dining table did double duty as a desk along another. An oatmeal-colored rug hid most of the badly laid parquet floor. Across the room, a glass door opened onto one of the balconies I’d seen from the street. It was no bigger from up here.

The walls were empty. The only picture in the place stood on the dining table: a faded, silver-framed photo of a young woman holding a baby. What books there were, were arranged by size on the shelves, so that biographies and histories were mixed with textbooks on real estate, and a thick, black bible with books on low-salt cooking and weight loss. His few knickknacks—a pair of silver candlesticks, a small carriage clock, a red lacquer box—looked out of place, as if they’d lost their way en route to another, better-appointed life.

Burrows motioned me toward the sofa, and I sat. He took a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, wrapping the earpieces behind his ears. They made his eyes bigger, and gave him a scholarly look.

“Something to drink, Mr. March?” he asked. “I’ve got ice tea, juice, water. I could put up coffee if you’d prefer.” His voice was deep and intimate sounding, but there was a stiff, almost formal quality to his speech and manner that made me think he wasn’t used to having anyone in the apartment with him.

“Water is fine,” I said.

He disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with two glasses of water. He gave me one, along with a little paper napkin, and sat in the chair opposite me. He sighed heavily and looked down at his feet on the rug. He held his water glass with both hands and rested it in his lap. I noticed a gym bag and a pair of sneakers parked neatly in a corner by the door. I gestured toward them. “Just back from the gym?” I asked. The question seemed to surprise him, and he paused before answering.

“I am, yes. I go every night, after work.”

“Disciplined,” I said.

“I try to be.”

“What kind of work are you doing, now that you’re out of banking?” I asked.

He didn’t hear my question, or chose to ignore it. “As I said on the phone, Mr. March, I don’t know that I can be much help to you. I wasn’t much help to the federal people when they came to see me, either,” he said.

“When was that?”

“A long while ago. Two and a half years, maybe longer. But there wasn’t much I could tell them.” He took a slow drink from his glass. I smiled my best nonthreatening smile.

“Well, I’m starting with almost nothing on this, so whatever you can tell me I’m sure will help. And, as I mentioned on the phone, this is entirely confidential and off the record. The guy I’d like to talk to you about is Gerard Nassouli. I understand you worked for him.”

Burrows kept looking down at his feet and shook his head a little. “Yes, that’s who the federal people wanted to talk about, too. Where he might have gone to, who he might turn to if he was in trouble, had I heard from him, what did I know about his finances, did I know any of his friends, did I know of any property he kept overseas. They went on and on. I couldn’t help much.”

“They were interested in finding him, so they asked those kinds of questions. But finding him is not my problem. I’m more interested in what he was like. How he did business. How he made deals. I thought maybe you could take me through some that you worked on with him.”

“I’m not sure there’s much I can say.” He took another hit from his glass.

“You did work for him.”

“For seven years, the whole time I was at MWB. I was with the New York office, and Nassouli ran the office.”

“And you ran the correspondent banking department?”

“For six years. The first year, I was the number two person in the department. Then my boss went back to London and I took over.”

“And when you left MWB, you left banking altogether?”

Burrows looked up at me and straightened a bit in his chair. “I thought this was about Nassouli, not about me.”

“It is. But all you say about him is that you have nothing to say. So I figured we could talk about things you can tell me. Like why you left MWB when you did, and why you left banking.” I drank some water and continued. “I figure you must have been around thirty when you joined MWB. And you must’ve come in with a few years’ experience, if they hired you as the number two guy in the department. Even allowing for a couple of years in b-school and my bad arithmetic, you walked away from at least ten years in banking when you quit. That’s a big career investment to leave behind. Why’d you do it?”

Burrows looked at me for a while and shook his head a little. “It was over thirteen years, altogether, and my reasons were personal. Can you understand that?” he said, more tired than angry. “Look, if it’s me you want to discuss, I’m sorry, the answer is no.” He got up and carried his glass to the kitchen and returned with it filled.

“How did you know that I ran correspondent banking?” he asked.

“Research. That’s what I do.”

“And what has your research told you about Gerard so far?”

“Not a lot. That he was a big deal maker. That he was charming, and liked a party. That he liked women, and being seen with them,” I answered.

Burrows snorted. “He liked to be seen with them, and he liked to fuck them, that’s true. I don’t know how much he actually liked them. In fact, I think he hated them.” He stumbled a little over “fuck,” as if he was out of practice with vulgarity. He drank some water. “Deal maker, charming, life of the party—you’ve been talking to people who didn’t know him well.”

Alan Burrows was a paradox. On the one hand, he kept proclaiming that he had nothing to tell me. And, so far, he hadn’t told me much. On the other hand, he hadn’t thrown me out yet. And he kept on talking. There was some heavy conflict there, and that was good news for me. “You know different?” I asked.

He ran a hand through his damp hair and looked into his glass. “Charming, a big deal maker, loved parties—that was the press he put out, and it was true, as far as it went. But there was another story, altogether different.” He stopped and looked up at me again. “Your employer could write a book just on Gerard, but he’d have to do it as fiction, because nobody would believe it as fact.” His voice quavered, like he’d run out of air. He took a noisy swallow from his glass and then was still.

“I’d like to hear that story, and you’re the first person I’ve met who could tell it,” I said.

Burrows shook his head, more vigorously this time. “Tell it . . . Jesus . . . I’ve spent fifteen years trying to forget it,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“How’s that going—the forgetting?” I asked softly.

“Not well,” he said.

The lines seemed to deepen on Burrows’s ruined, handsome face, and his eyes looked moist and more tired than ever. He gathered some breath and asked, “Are you really working for a writer?” So much for my decent story.

“No,” I said after a while. “No, I’m not. I’m trying to help someone who did some business, legitimate business, with Nassouli a long time ago, and who’s run into trouble because of it.”

“Legitimate business—with Nassouli, I suppose that’s theoretically possible,” Burrows said with a small, harsh laugh. “But if your client did any kind of business with Gerard, he may need more help than you can give him. Tell him he should talk to a priest.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it. But right now, I’m all there is in the help department. Me, and maybe you.”

“Is this usually an effective approach for you, Mr. March—lying to people, then asking for their help? Does it build a lot of trust?” Again, Burrows seemed unable to generate much anger. He seemed gripped, instead, by a powerful, bone-deep fatigue.

“I was acting in what I judged to be my client’s best interests, Mr. Burrows. I thought you’d be more forthcoming talking to someone doing research for a book than you would someone pursuing an investigation. Maybe it was a bad call. I make them sometimes, and I correct them when I can. But I wasn’t lying to you when I said this would be confidential.”

Burrows waved his hand, like he was shooing a fly. “Being lied to doesn’t bother me much, Mr. March. Maybe that comes from working for Nassouli for seven years, or maybe it just comes from working on Wall Street. Whatever—I’ve gotten comfortable with it. I’ve come to expect it.”

He looked at me and looked away. He was poised on a precipice, balanced on the verge of something. His eyes were narrow and clouded, and they roamed aimlessly around the room. The conflict behind them was one I’d seen before. It took me back to cop days, to exhausted suspects caught between fear and the swelling need to speak and be understood . . . and maybe forgiven. I was wondering which way to push him, or if I should push at all, when he stiffened his shoulders and locked his eyes on mine.

He squinted and peered, like a man driving slowly through a fog— searching the opaque air for familiar shadows and looming hazards. He stared for a long time, and I held his gaze. I don’t know exactly what Burrows sought in my eyes and face—some sign of shared knowledge, maybe. A common thread of loss or regret; or a mutual acquaintance with solitary rooms, and the tyranny of memory. Whatever it was, I guess he found it. He made his decision and spoke.

“I think it’s hard for a lot of people to understand evil, believe the reality of it, unless they’ve experienced it firsthand, don’t you? I know it was that way for me, before I met him. ‘Evil’ and ‘corruption’ were just words to me, before him. Gerard Nassouli was the worst man I’ve ever met, Mr. March. He was a fucking monster.” The vulgarity gave him no trouble this time.

“Yes, he loved the deal making and the high life, and you must know from the papers what sorts of things he was engaged in at MWB. But his genius, and his true passion, was corruption. Corrupting people, and then collecting them, like some people collect bugs—pinned and mounted under glass. No deal was a complete success for him unless it involved adding somebody to his little collection. I think that’s why MWB was so perfect for him. It let him marry his vocation with his avocation.” He turned his glass slowly in his hands.

“It sounds strange, I know. It’s hard to understand if you don’t see it for yourself. I worked with the man almost every day for seven years, and I didn’t see it at first. He was smart, and charming, but what he was best at was reading people. He could see into them, how they were put together, what they wanted, what drove them. And whatever it was, he would somehow arrange for them to have it—with no strings attached. Not at first, anyway.” His voice was very soft now, and I was straining to hear. “In the end, it cost them everything.”