19 Purchase Street Page 13

  “Minor things add up,” Darrow cautioned, and to impress the point, tapped with his second finger on Hine’s upper arm.

  Hine reacted as though burned, jerked his arm out of range.

  Darrow had done it purposely, knowing full well about Hine. Hine would rather shove his fist into a public toilet bowl than shake hands with anyone. He avoided crowds so as not to have others brushing against him.

  Sweet came back with the bulging trash bag the garbage men had left. He put it down on the scale, untied it and spread it open.

  Sheaves of hundreds.

  The electronic scale registered a fraction over one hundred and twenty-two pounds. “Six million, one hundred thousand,” Sweet quickly figured, evidently very accustomed to converting weight into sums. It was one of the few things he was mentally quick at.

  “Don’t just weigh it, count it.” Darrow ordered. “There may be fifties in there.”

  Sweet nodded and went about it. He would count until Darrow left and then, as usual, he and the others would randomly go through the heaves for fifties.

  The man in gardener’s clothes pardoned himself to Darrow, who moved aside so the man could get at the suitcases under the counter. He brought up a two-suiter of leather that was considerably soiled and scarred, much traveled but still sturdy. He placed it on the counter, unbuckled and zipped it open.

  Darrow observed as the man packed the bag with individual banded sheaves of twenty-five thousand dollars. Eighty of them, neatly placed to make two million dollars altogether. There was room to spare. The man distributed small white-peanut shell shaped styrofoam around the edges and a layer on top to fill out the bag. He closed it and checked to make sure the red and white identification tag was securely attached to its handle. He set that bag aside and went to work on another.

  They were two of the thirteen carries that would be made that week. That was the weekly average, thirteen.

  There were one hundred and twelve carriers on the active roll and twenty on standby.

  Each carrier made about six carries a year.

  At an average of two million a carry, the yearly wash of Number 19 was one billion, three hundred forty-four million.

  Carriers worked on commission. One and one-half percent.

  On two million, that was thirty thousand. In a year, six times thirty was one hundred and eighty thousand to the carrier, in cash and paid overseas.

  The high pay was not because of high risk. It was to make it seem that way. When a carrier felt he was in a precarious legal situation, his mind would more likely be on that rather than on thoughts of running greedy. Besides, who would bite the hand that fed so well? During Darrow’s eleven years as Custodian, only two carriers had tried to make off. Both had made elaborate preparations, changed identities and headed for remote places. It had taken Hunsicker’s people less than a week to find them. And deal with them.

  Take the dirty cash from here to there. Nothing more was expected of a carrier. No transactions, no receipts, merely deliver to a particular bank in Zurich or Geneva or Lucerne, in Lichtenstein or Andorra, or most recently, in Vienna, since Austria had gotten into secret banking. Numerous banks were owned by the High Board, fronted for them by nationals of the country in which they were located. The cash a carrier brought to those banks was converted into gold and held, or it came back clean, as bank-to-bank loans.

  Darrow watched the packing of another two million in another bag. Enough, he decided. He had displayed his conscientiousness for the day. Surely they believed he was too interested and aware of what was going on to try to get away with anything. It was a small matter that every day the two housekeepers folded two of the newest hundred dollar bills into a three-quarter inch square that they placed beneath their tongues like wafers and stole away with. As long as they limited it to that, Darrow was not concerned. When they stopped it would mean they were filling their bodies. Then he would call for a physical inspection. It was something he had had to contend with every now and then.

  He left The Balance, went with Hine down the wide upper hall. They paused on the landing above the main stairway. A dark-haired young woman was coming up, taking the steps two at a time, not so much in a hurry as to satisfy her energy. She had on silk evening pajamas of a pale peach shade that made them look all the more like lingerie. The pajamas were wrinkled, the bottoms especially creased around the crotch, and the cuffs were dragging and getting underfoot, too long for her now because she’d taken off her four inch high gold evening sandals, had them slung by their ankle straps over the first finger of her left hand.

  She was Hine’s wife, Lois. Her maiden name was Whitcroft, which was a High Board name.

  Lois was very pretty without trying. A fortunate look with fine bones in perfect place. Blue eyes with a drowsy quality to them. An aggressive mouth, not tight, but soft and slightly forward and parted.

  At the moment her lipstick was fresh, her eye make-up was not. She said one good morning for the two men and made it sound like more than they deserved. Went right past them, headed for her room in the south wing.

  Hine caught up with her, stopped her with: “Where were you?”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  Lois shrugged one shoulder.

  She’d been away three nights running but Hine was concerned only with the last. Because they were supposed to have had dinner in Greenwich with one of her Whitcroft relatives. Hine had gone alone and lied for her, and felt he’d gotten nothing out of it. Certainly he hadn’t made points.

  “You cunt,” he said, down to her, and repeated it more gutturally, as though it was a bad taste he had to get from his mouth.

  She agreed with a small smile.

  He had to turn from her.

  She started for her room, had a second thought. Noiselessly, crept back to him. From behind, careful not to give herself away, she thrust her hand in between his legs, around and up. Got his genitals, the flaccid bunch of them, gave them a quick squeeze.

  Not nearly enough of a squeeze to cause pain.

  Hine screamed. Like he’d been terribly wounded. It threw him off balance, and he barely avoided sprawling over a nearby bergere. He was drawn with rage, an animal violated.

  Lois anticipated his fury, which didn’t faze her. She continued on down the hall with an insouciant, barefoot gait, and she spun once slowly all the way around to let him see the mockery on her face.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN Zurich the day was practically over when Flight 101 landed at Flughafen Floten.

  Norma came from the plane feeling the twelve hours she’d spent in it. Her face was stiff from those many hours of recycled air and her feet felt large for her shoes. She had managed to help her appearance to some extent, brushed and reorganized her hair, freshened over her make-up, but there was nothing she could do about her dress, the pale green cotton that was so terribly wrinkled.

  There was the possibility that she might be met. She hoped not, wanted to feel and look better, go straight to the hotel and repair.

  At the baggage claim area it was ten minutes before the conveyor started presenting bags from Norma’s flight. Her two smaller bags were among the first to come, so she expected the thirty-incher would not be far behind. She kept her eyes on the opening from which the baggage was being tossed up. Vuittons and Guccis and Fendis rubbing sides with Samsonites and American Touristers. People pressed for position at the conveyor to grab and heft up what was theirs, using the bags like bumpers to make way through the crowd.

  Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. Norma’s thirty-incher still hadn’t appeared and now there were not nearly so many bags on the conveyor. Some, Norma noticed, were coming around for the fourth or fifth time. Could that mean there were no more to come from Flight 101?

  The thought caused a clutch of panic in her.

  That precious thirty-incher might have been misplaced, she thought. Put aboard the wrong flight, was this moment in Dakar or Bahghazi or someplace even more remote whe
re it would stand aside unclaimed until a baggage agent got tired of seeing it there and took it home for whatever might be in it.

  Norma imagined how Darrow would react to the explanation lost. Three million. She wondered if anyone had ever tried to pull that off.

  Or, possibly this time someone who was not involved had looked into the thirty-incher, some straight authority back in New York who had the power to seize it. If so, would Darrow and his people have the weight to extricate her? Would they even try? They had never promised that much, and she had always thought if ever it came to such a situation, she would be expected to take the fall and keep her mouth shut. No doubt, the three million would be regarded as drug money, and she would have to pay accordingly, doing time inside.

  Hold on. Why such premature concern? It wasn’t like her to be paranoid. Perhaps, she thought, this was a remnant of her talk with Gainer about quitting, or it could just be the late flight over had thrown her off. All sixty-four of her previous carries had been relatively uneventful.

  Her bag with the red and white name tag.

  It bucked up and out of the conveyor opening as though anxious to come to Norma’s relief. Her fears were at once chased. Everything was again routine.

  She put the thirty-incher and her two other bags into a wire cart that she pushed out and down the passageway to “Immigrations.” Her passport was good for two more years, but she needed a new one. It contained so many entries and departures that now the Swiss Immigration Office had to settle for the lower right hand corner of page seventeen, where the blue ink of his stamp partially overlapped the red of one that had been pounded at DeGaulle months earlier.

  At customs there were four pass-throughs in operation, a line at each. Norma did not immediately commit to a line. She sought out the faces of the customs inspectors, couldn’t recall having seen any of the men before. Usually, she went through in the morning when the inspectors on duty could be relied on to recognize and acknowledge her in some small, reassuring way.

  She got into line at pass-through four. It was the longest line and the slowest moving, but it was intuitively her choice. Looking ahead, she noticed the customs inspector was, as usual, asking only Swiss nationals to open their luggage for examination.

  Just then, pass-through five opened and the customs inspector there was beckoning Norma to it. She couldn’t ignore him. A fair-haired younger man in a newish uniform. His gesture was emphatic, his eyes right at her, almost as though he had singled her out.

  She placed her bags on the counter and was asked if she had anything to declare. Her reply of no would settle it, she thought.

  The inspector told her to open her smaller bag. He felt around inside it without much disturbing it.

  The medium-sized bag. The same. And then the thirty-incher.

  Norma unzipped it, didn’t flap it open as she had the other two. She reminded herself there was no restriction on the amount of currency one could bring into Switzerland. She would not be taken into custody or even detained, but she was about to attract three million dollars worth of attention that would mark her everywhere from then on.

  The customs inspector’s hand froze when, for the first time, he noticed the red and white name tag. He tried not to show that he had come within an instant of making an expensive error. Methodically he zipped the thirty-incher closed and chalked a Z-like stroke on the ends of all three of Norma’s bags. He dismissed her by taking his attention to the person next in line.

  AT that moment two “middlemen” were in room 438 of Zurich’s Dolder Grand Hotel.

  The one with the waxy complexion, the taller, bony middleman, was Eugene Becque. He was forty-seven, had brown thinning hair and large, unpleasing features. The sunken bruise-colored circles beneath his eyes pronounced the sockets, made him appear both tired and cadaverous. There were patchy networks of burst capillaries on the skin over his cheekbones, on the bulb of his nose and behind his ears. Becque wore a black-on-gray woven pinstripe suit that he had bought less than two weeks ago on the Boulevard Malesherbes. He did not seem comfortable in it. He’d had the trouser bottoms cut off too high so when he was standing, his socks showed. His black tie was carelessly knotted, pushed up unevenly into the shirt collar that was a full size large. The collar hit so low Becque’s Adam’s apple stood out like something sharp stuck in his throat.

  The other middleman was in his late thirties but looked ten years older. Emil Ponsard. He was in charge. His hair was fuzzy and flying from his temples to his ears and his overgrown brows had no particular direction. He could have been taken for a doctor or perhaps a professor. He was a little less than medium height, thick in the chest, shoulders and neck. His round face and fall-away chin added to the impression that his heaviness was fat. Actually, he was rock solid.

  Ponsard was seated on the yellow damask-covered sofa, hunched forward on the edge of it with his forearms on his knees. He was using his fingernails to clean beneath his fingernails.

  “Keep watching,” he told Becque.

  Becque had taken his eye away from the peephole in the door. He was tired of having to squint, being alerted to everyone who passed down the corridor. He disregarded Ponsard, and went over to a room service tray on the dresser. The coffee had gone cold hours ago and the cream in the pitcher had a scummy yellow coat on it. Becque was hungry again. They hadn’t planned on eating there. Perhaps he’d call down again, have something more sent up. He shoved what was left of a poppy-seed roll into his mouth and drank the cream, was still chewing when he went into the bathroom to urinate. He didn’t bother to close the door.

  Ponsard lighted a cigarette with the half-inch stub of the one he’d been smoking. His brand was Galoise, the strongest. He smoked with his mouth far more than his hands, kept the cigarette between his lips and sometimes between his teeth so that he was inhaling to some extent with every breath. His clothing, such as the dark blue wool twill suit and vest he was wearing, was permeated with the odor of burned black tobacco. Ponsard was surprised to hear Becque in the bathroom washing his hands. It irritated him a bit that Becque was not even that predictable.

  Becque came out and lay on the bed with his shoes on. No respect for the fresh white linen coverlet.

  “Off the bed,” Ponsard motioned. “Get off.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “We can’t mess up this room.”

  The room was registered to a reputable man and wife from Stockholm who had motored to Lugano and would not return until they got word that it was all done.

  Becque remained as he was. From his jacket pocket he took a folded half page that he’d torn from the Paris newspaper, Le Matin. From the sports section. A listing of that afternoon’s entries at Longchamp racetrack. Becque had circled a horse in the eighth race with such emphasis that the paper was perforated. He believed that horse owed him. He’d bet and lost on it three times, but today he’d not been there to bet and now the eighth had been run and that horse was the winner. Becque didn’t actually know the results of the eighth but he believed that was the way luck would treat him if he gave it such a chance.

  This “order”, Becque thought. If it had come off on time he would have been back in Paris at Longchamp. He crumpled the piece of newspaper and tossed it at the wastebasket beside the dresser. It fell short.

  “Pick it up,” Ponsard said.

  Becque’s expression said fuck you.

  Ponsard let it pass. He puffed up a cloud around him. There was already a layer of smoke in the contained atmosphere of the room, like an elongated phantasmagoric tissue made visible by the window light. “Can you think of anything we’ve overlooked?” He put the question to himself more than to Becque.

  Becque shook his head irritably.

  “Let’s go over it again.” Ponsard opened a black leather satchel that was on the low table in front of the sofa.

  Becque said no. He just wanted to do the order and leave. He didn’t like Ponsard just as he hadn’t liked the middleman he’d worked with on his most r
ecent order in Nice. He preferred doing any order alone. He’d never seen or heard of Ponsard until they’d joined up yesterday at the airport, and he probably would never see him again. He did not even wonder what Ponsard did on the outside. He rolled over and used the other pillow to shield his eyes.

  Ponsard went to the door, sighted through the peephole. He carried the desk chair to the door. Sat there for Galoise after Galoise. Whenever he heard someone in the corridor he stood and peeked out.

  Nearly an hour passed.

  Ponsard shook Becque awake.

  It was time.

  They put on white cotton gloves. Ponsard picked up the black satchel and they went out.

  The room directly opposite was Number 450. Ponsard stood to one side of the door to that room, Becque across from him, both out of view of its peephole.

  Becque gave the door two official raps.

  “Yes?” From within. Norma’s voice.

  “Message,” Becque said in an appropriate voice.

  “Slip it under the door,” Norma instructed.

  Becque slipped an authentic sealed hotel message envelope under the door and said, “There is also a package.”

  Norma turned the knob.

  As soon as the door was unlatched Becque shouldered it all the way open. In nearly the same motion his hand went to Norma’s throat, driving her backward. His powerful bony fingers clutched, squeezed her windpipe and voicebox.

  Ponsard stepped in and closed the door.

  Norma was in panties and bra.

  Becque shoved her against the wall, his arm straight out, keeping his hold on her throat.

  They did not want a struggle, no lamps or anything else broken.

  Norma couldn’t scream. She flailed, her fist beat futilely on Becque’s arm and shoulder. She couldn’t reach his face, and the way he was standing, sideways, his crotch was out of range of her barefoot kicks.

  “Be quiet,” Becque said.

  Norma told herself they were thieves. After the money. When they didn’t find it they would run.

  Becque told her: “Don’t struggle and we won’t kill you. Okay?”