say, to be a better man. She wore a brooch once that especially pleased him, a large ruby-colored stone in the middle and a lot of antique filigree, but usually she ended up declining anything, which led naturally to many quarrels when he'd had something to drink.
I talked to my mother about what was happening on a single occasion. I was sixteen then and full of opinions.
'He's no worse than everybody else,' she told me.
'They're thieves.'
'Everybody's a bit of a thief, Mack. Everybody's got something they're wantin to steal. It just takes the rest of us watching to make most folks stop.'
She was not so much trying to defend him, I thought, as standing a parent's high ground. Either way, I didn't buy it. I was still at the age when I wanted to be a better man than my father. It was a thirst in me. Unquenchable. One of those many appetites I tried to sate thereafter with the fiery taste of liquor. I never wanted to see a woman regard me with the blighted disappointment he saw from my mother. But, you know, life is long, and I loved my old man too, all those moody Irish songs and his hapless affection for me. He never told me to be better than he was. He knew what life was like.
I fell asleep upright on the sofa, briefcase in my lap. Brushy's searching about woke me. Even groggy, I recognized from the fretful way she inspected me that this was a woman who had awakened before to discover herself disappointed and alone, and I was quick to comfort her, having had some lonely mornings of my own. We had a fine time together, in bed and on the terrace, where we eventually took breakfast squinting and sweating in the unremitting sun. Around 11:00,1 stood.
'I'm going to meet that lawyer,' I said.
Still in her robe, Brushy asked me to wait for her.
'You stay,' I answered. 'Get some snorkel gear from the beach attendants. Go look at the fishies. It'll make the trip.'
'No, really,' she said. 'I knew there was work to do.' 'Hey. You don't want to know. Remember?' 'I lied.'
'Listen.' I sat down beside her. 'This whole thing's turning mean. Just stand clear.'
'Mean in what way?' she asked. Her face became absorbed in lawyerly precision. She wanted to ask more, but I held her off. I kissed her quickly and headed downtown with my briefcase.
B. Foreign Banking
The International Bank of Finance, whose block stamp appears on the back of each of the eighteen checks cut to Litiplex from the 397 escrow account, is a little tiny place, almost a storefront, except for the grand mahogany interiors. Since my days in Financial Crimes, it has been known as reliable. Ownership, as ever, is a mystery, but there are impressive correspondent relationships with some of England's and America's biggest banks, and rumor always had it that it was one of the American royal families, Rockefeller or Kennedy, somebody like that, with an ancient knowledge of the relationship between wealth and corruption, who was really behind it. I don't know.
I said I wanted to open an account, and in the cordial Luan way the manager presently appeared, an angular black man in a blue blazer, Mr George, an elegant fellow with that peculiar Luan accent, an island lilt fugued with the patois still spoken by the coastal peoples. George's office was small but richly paneled, with wooden columns and bookcases. I told him I wanted to discuss a seven-figure deposit, US funds. George didn't even twitch. For him stuff like this is every day of the week. I hadn't told him my name yet and neither one of us thought I was going to. This is an entire city where nobody's ever heard about ID. I want to be Joe Blow or Marlon Brando, that's fine. Bank passbooks down here all have your photo pasted inside the cover, no name.
'After deposit, if I want to transfer the funds while I'm Stateside,' I asked, 'what's the procedure?'
'Telephone,' he said. 'Fax.' Mr George wore round black glasses and a bit of mustache; he had long fingers which he raised in a steeple as he spoke. For phone transfers, he said, a customer was required to give an account number and a password; prior to the transaction the bank would telephone to confirm. I considered it unlikely that Jake was sitting in his office at the top of the TN Needle taking calls from bankers in Pico Luan. I asked about fax.
'We must have written instructions, including a handwritten signature or other withdrawal designation,' he said. Very artful, I thought. Withdrawal designation. For all those who didn't like names.
'And how long before the transfer takes place?'
'We wire to Luan-chartered institutions within two hours. If we receive instructions before noon, we promise good funds in the US by 3:00 p.m. Central Time.'
I reviewed all of this thoughtfully and then asked him for whatever I would need to open an account and whether I could do it by mail. George replied with an enigmatic Luanite gesture: white man can do what he likes. He opened a drawer for the papers.
'The account holder should kindly supply two copies of a small photo. One for the passbook, one for our records. And here, in this space, we should have the account holder's handwriting, whatever designation will be used to authorize withdrawals.' 'The account holder,' he said, surmising that I was a stand-in for somebody too important to be seen in C. Luan. And of course he never used the words 'signature' or 'name'. It struck me then that Martin had to have spoken to this guy. His description was dead on. 'Like trying to grab hold of smoke.'
In the office there was a small window, discreetly shaded by jalousies, through which you could see the street traffic passing. There was no screen, since on this side of the mountains there is nothing as troublesome as a bug. At that moment a bird landed on the windowsill, a little wrenny-looking thing, no make I recognized. He, she, it hopped around and finally took an instant to look straight at me. It made me laugh, I must admit, this birdy scrutiny, the thought that you didn't even have to be a mammal to wonder what gives with Malloy. George whisked the back of his hand and told it to shoo.
With the papers, I returned to the street. The sun was high now, savagely bright and thrilling after the indoor weeks in the Middle West. Down here I always understood how people could worship the sun as a god. The business district is only a few blocks, close-set buildings, three and four stories each, stuccoed in Caribbean pastels with roofs of Spanish tile. The tourists roamed among the business folk. Good-looking gals in straw hats and beach coverups, their legs tanned and fully revealed, strode among the suits with their briefcases.
I looked around for more banks, the names of which were unobtrusively displayed on the building sides in English and Spanish, both of which are official languages. Many of the great names in world finance are present, with Luan affiliates housed in pocket-sized spaces like the International Bank's. In this modest fashion a $100 billion economy thrives, Luan-chartered corporations and trusts, funded with fugitive dollars, borrowing and buying and investing around the world, money without a country, as it were, and happy to stay that way.
I found the office of one of the big banks from Chicago, a name I knew — Fortune Trust — and told them I wanted to open a personal account. Same drill as across the street, except this time I wasn't just fishing and did it. I put down $1,000 American in bills and they took my picture twice with one of those machines. When the photos dried, they pasted one in my passbook and the other to their signature card. I elected to keep all deposits in dollars — I could choose from a menu of fourteen currencies — and said I wanted no statements, which saved me from the need to provide an address. Interest would be posted whenever I showed up to present my passbook. I checked a box on a form authorizing them to debit the account $20 US any time money was wired.
'And what will be the designation for purposes of identification?' asked the smashing young woman assisting me. By her accent I took her for an Aussie, here to scuba and be free of something, parents or a guy or the throttling force of her own ambitions. The whole place was free, with the gorgeous fish that decorated the warm waters, the sun, the rum, the sense that many of the world's rules were disregarded. I eventually realized she wanted my code word.
'Tim's Boy,' I answered. She asked if I cared to write it, and I did that as well. I was now free to transfer money in and out, to check my deposits by phone.
According to my prior calculations, I still needed one more account. For that, I did not even have to leave the building. There was a Swiss bank on the second floor, Zuricher Kreditbank, and I listened to the lecture on their procedures, which included access to funds out of either Swiss or Pico facilities and the full benefit of the secrecy laws of both nations. I deposited another thousand. I had two new passbooks now in my briefcase.
Outside, I stopped a guy on the street and asked if he knew of a secretarial service, somewhere I could have
