would find the insomniac Henry Ziegler up, printing out the lists of imaginary people who were going to be that day’s donors. In the evening, Bernie would hand Ziegler his latest spiral notebook, and Ziegler would leaf through twenty or thirty pages at dinner, all of them crammed with new accounts and locations that had spilled from Bernie’s prodigious memory. Each time the contents of a notebook had been transferred into the computers, Jane would take the pages to the fireplace and burn them.
There was a whole day and night of scholarships. Any organization listed in the
Jane had begun the work with a cold, composed determination, but as the days went by, she began to feel a dreamlike disorientation. She had tried to keep up with Ziegler, but the lack of sleep was wearing down her certainty, and she began to work from habit. The walls of the garage and the bedrooms upstairs were now lined with boxes of bundled and sealed envelopes, and the living room closets were filling up with the overflow.
One morning when she joined Ziegler in the dining room, he was typing in a series of Web addresses. He would complete one, then wait a few seconds, then nod to himself happily.
“What’s that?” asked Jane.
“I’m looking over our shoulder,” he answered. “Before any check gets into the mail, I want to be sure the money got into the account first. If a check bounces, we’re not going to be around to cover it. Mr. Hagedorn and Mrs. Fuller aren’t going to answer their mail.”
“How does it look so far?”
“No mistakes, no problems with any of the big stuff: the hundred and ninety-two foundations, the fifty-six corporations, and the big trust accounts we set up are all solvent. Now all we’ve got to do is make payday before all these checks get stale and each of these accounts grows too much.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Jane. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t thought about that lately. What can we do about the profits that keep coming in?”
“Zilch,” he answered. “There’s no way to clear off a billion without leaving a few million in uncredited interest that will come in later. It might be what saves us. It takes a bit of time before the federal and state governments realize we’re not going to file tax returns, and the clock doesn’t start until next April. Foundations owe a one percent federal excise tax. The government wants it, but if the account still exists, they don’t get too alarmed. These crumbs and leftovers will probably buy us a year or two after that before the feds start looking for us in any way that matters. After five years, it becomes an unclaimed account. The state confiscates it, pays the feds off, and keeps the rest.”
“It’s like leaving an unfinished drink on the table,” said Jane. “The waiter thinks you’re coming back.”
“Right,” said Ziegler. “I hope giving it to them doesn’t bother you.”
“I’m not a big fan of governments,” said Jane. “But I like them better than gangsters. Wait. If we run out of charities, can we just slip some to governments?”
“Don’t even say it,” said Ziegler. “We’ve got to do everything the way people expect us to. Governments don’t like gifts. They like to snatch the money away from you.”
“Then let them,” she said. “What’s for today?”
“Problem assets.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bernie has been giving us clean, easy money as fast as we could spend it. But there are other things. He bought some land.”
“What’s the problem?”
“By definition, land is not something you can move from place to place, and you certainly can’t disguise it as something else. Converting it to cash isn’t easy. We can’t advertise it. Even if we found buyers in some yet-to-be invented quiet way, we can’t hang around for sixty-day escrows to close on a hundred and twenty pieces of property all over the country. And of course, the original deeds and papers are not at Bernie’s fingertips.”
“That shouldn’t matter. The sales must be recorded in county courthouses. He remembers the names, doesn’t he?”
“He’s Bernie the Elephant. He remembers the dates, prices, and map numbers.”
“Maybe we could put the land in the wills of dead people.”
Henry Ziegler squinted for a moment. “Not bad. We can leave it to organizations that can use it or sell it themselves.”
“What are the other problem assets?”
“He bought foreign bonds and stocks in foreign identities. It’s taken me a few hours to work my way through all of them, but I think I’m finished. I put in sell orders, with direct deposit to local banks. Then I requested that taxes be withheld by the banks before the money is sent to accounts in the U.S. That should take care of it. Then there’s the art.”
“Bernie bought art?”
“Afraid so,” said Ziegler. “Paintings. Mostly it was in the forties and fifties. It was expensive stuff then, so I shudder to think what it’s worth now.”
Jane frowned. “I can’t see Bernie buying paintings.”
“He went through art dealers in Europe—used them as brokers. It’s been done a lot. You can get one canvas that’s two feet wide, one foot high, and one inch thick, and you’ve stored five or six million. And finding an art dealer who doesn’t mind that the money is dirty is not exactly a head scratcher. If you say ‘tax dodge’ above a whisper, we’ll have six or seven of them lined up at the door, and two of them will know where you can get a Vermeer or a Titian that hasn’t been seen since the Allies bombed Dresden.”
“Where are the paintings?”
“In a vault. I can’t see us showing up at Sotheby’s to sell them off.”
Jane remembered the trips Bernie had made to meet Francesca Ogliaro in New York. “Is the vault in New York?”
“Yes,” said Ziegler. “And some of the paintings are stolen. When a painting by a major artist that’s been sitting in a vault for two generations hits the auction block, there are going to be TV cameras. Big players from all over the world will show up to bid. We’ve got about twenty of those. What we ought to do is burn them.”
“Do we know for sure that some are stolen?”
“Bernie thinks seven or eight, so it’s probably more.”
“Good,” said Jane. “We might be able to use that. Are there papers somewhere to show that different people bought them?”
“No,” said Ziegler. “He called himself Andrew Hewitt, set himself up with a few dealers, so the name had clout. They brought the deals to him. The dealers are all gone now—mostly dead.”
“Forget the dealers,” said Jane. “Even if they were alive, they wouldn’t come forward to say they sold stolen paintings.”
“It doesn’t get rid of the merchandise. There’s no way to avoid the publicity.”
“So let’s decide what we want it to be,” said Jane. “The fact that he bought all of them under the name Andrew Hewitt gives us a chance.”
“People are going to want to know all about Andrew Hewitt—where he got his money, where he lived, what he was like,” Henry said. “We can’t invent a person like him on short notice and expect he’ll stand up to the kind of scrutiny he’ll get. They’ll know it’s an alias.”
“Then what we need is a real person to put behind the alias. Can you get probate records on your computer?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Good. Find a person—man or woman—who left an art collection to a museum.”
“There must be hundreds,” he said. “Thousands.”
“Then be picky. We want one who doesn’t mention any other heirs in the papers. And look for signs that there was a lot of money. If possible, the person died some time ago, so the air will be clear.”
“I don’t see how this helps.”
“Andrew Hewitt was an alias this real art collector used to buy paintings. Who can quarrel with that? It’s
