My mouth opened, but no words came. “Uhhhh,” was all I could say. My invitation had been for tonight only. Although I wasn’t dead set against her staying longer, there was still too much left unsaid between us to know where we were headed.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I think my head is starting to throb from all that tequila.”
“I hope it doesn’t explode on the airplane.”
“What airplane?”
“The one you’re trying to catch.”
“Right. That one. I’d better get going.”
She pulled me toward her, looking me in the eye. “It’s true what I told you at Puffy’s,” she said. “When I found out I was under investigation for helping Cushman hide his money, my biggest fear was that they’d lock me up in a third-world jail and throw away the key before I was even charged with a crime. I had to get out of Singapore.”
“I understand.”
“What I’m trying to say is that I couldn’t stay in Singapore. But I didn’t have to come to New York.” She blinked twice, as if to underscore, in a tender way, what she was telling me. “Now I’m glad I did.”
I was tempted to climb right back into bed with her. “Me, too,” I said.
We kissed good-bye, and I slipped away. I grabbed my overnight bag, gave Lilly one last look, and went downstairs. My coat was on a hook in the foyer, along with an extra key to the apartment.
“Lilly,” I said in a voice loud enough to carry upstairs, “there’s an extra key right by the-”
“I saw it,” she called out.
“Hurry back,” she said.
I made sure the door was locked when I left. My thoughts and emotions swirled as I headed down the hall to the elevator. I was glad to have Lilly back, and it was good that she’d filled in some of the biggest blanks for me at Puffy’s. At that particular moment, however, I was mostly relieved that Lilly hadn’t asked too many questions about my trip.
That 7:00 P.M. business flight had been a complete fabrication, and I wasn’t on my way to LaGuardia. I hated lying to Lilly, and if she’d pressed for details, I would have been forced to come up with an even bigger one.
No way could I have told her that I was going to see Tony Mandretti.
7
J oe Barber watched the eleven o’clock financial report from bed. Even with the volume blasting, he could barely hear the television over the noise of his wife pounding the treadmill.
She’d been fitness crazed since her fortieth birthday, but the late-night routine hadn’t begun until after her husband’s first infidelity. It was the same drill every day: start drinking at noon, go to bed at ten, lie awake calculating the staggering number of calories in a bottle of Chardonnay, freak out, jump on the treadmill, and punish her body until midnight. Of course their seven-bedroom estate in Greenwich had an exercise room, but after three years in Washington, Vanessa was still getting reacquainted with her old house. Their first night back, Vanessa had been so drunk that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was a miracle that she hadn’t broken her neck. Moving the treadmill into the master suite was easier than caring for a quadriplegic wife, even if he did have to stomach the nauseating smell of alcohol exuding from her pores every night.
“Joe, that’s your new bank they’re talking about!”
Barber raised the volume. A further expected drop in the price of BOS stock in tomorrow’s markets was the lead story on Financial News Network. “Investors are clearly wary,” the FNN reporter stated, “seemingly unconvinced that the bank’s settlement with the Department of Justice marks the end of the assault on bank secrecy.”
“Oh, my God,” Vanessa said as she stepped off the treadmill. “I told you not to take that job.”
Barber shushed her, and the report continued: “This is just more bad news for Switzerland’s largest bank, which last quarter reported a fifty-three percent drop in earnings, due to a slowdown in its trading and investment banking businesses.”
“Damn it, Joe. You could have written your own ticket. Goldman, JPMorgan. They all wanted you. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Will you please just listen,” he said.
The telephone rang. The “news” had digressed into pointless speculation and rumor, the raison d’etre of real- time financial reporting. Barber lowered the volume with the remote control and took the call. It was the general counsel of BOS/America.
“Yes, I’m watching FNN,” said Barber.
“That’s not what I’m calling about. I have an update on Patrick Lloyd.”
“Anything of interest?”
“Yeah. Patrick Lloyd is not his real name.”
Barber’s wife had reverted to treadmill mania, and the noisy machine forced him out of bed and into the bathroom, behind a closed door, where he could hear.
“What are you talking about?” he said into the phone.
“The bank’s normal prehire background check goes back to college. Everything on Patrick Lloyd checked out that far. But when I asked Corporate Security to take it back earlier, there’s nothing on this guy.”
“There’s nothing,” said Barber, “or they just couldn’t find it?”
“Swiss banks are nothing if not secure. Trust me: if it existed, our security department would have found it. The Patrick Lloyd who went to work on Wall Street simply didn’t exist before he enrolled as an undergraduate at Syracuse University.”
“Then who the hell is he?”
“We don’t know. Security has just scratched the surface.”
Barber fell silent, thinking. His general counsel asked, “Do you want me to prepare the paperwork to support his termination?”
“No,” said Barber. “We stick to the plan.”
“I still don’t agree. You know my view from this morning’s meeting: we should have fired him on the spot. Keeping him around now is playing with fire.”
“He’s a snot-nosed junior FA. Not for one minute do I believe that he and his girlfriend cooked up this kind of trouble alone. They’re working for someone. Lilly Scanlon is gone, but Patrick Lloyd-or whatever his name is-is still under my thumb. Let him run, and see who he leads us to.”
“The lack of clarity as to his true identity makes me very uncomfortable.”
“Then we’ll get some clarity.”
“I’ll instruct Corporate Security to continue looking into it.”
“Things can get really dirty when you dig deep, and I don’t want BOS fingerprints on the shovel. Let in-house security try its usual contacts, but if nothing pans out, outside security is the way to go here.”
“Do you have someone specific in mind?”
“I do.”
“Who?”
Barber returned to the bedroom. His exhausted wife had collapsed on the bed, and the treadmill was silent. The FNN assault on BOS continued, working in file footage on the “billions in bailout money” that the troubled Bank of Switzerland had received just two years earlier “in order to avert financial disaster.”
“Someone who will give the boy just enough rope to hang himself,” Barber said into the phone.
