Thick as Thieves (7 page)

They’re desiccated and yellowed behind their smudged panes—ancient-looking, like bugs in a collection. His grandparents—his father’s parents—starched, pale, and unsmiling beside a long, dark sedan. His father, young and smirking amid a group of distant cousins. They are gathered by a pine-edged lake, all in dark shorts and white shirts, like
campers or a Bible study group. His father again—older, taller, in cap and gown and an already bitter smile, the Battell Chapel and a bit of New Haven street behind him. And then, in the most tarnished frame, the photo he is looking for, of his mother, her black hair loose, her eyes shining, her white teeth and a curl of smoke visible between her parted lips.

He called the picture by different names as a child, because he didn’t know where it was taken or what she was doing in it, and so he made up different stories about it.
En el jardín. En la fiesta. En el baile. In the garden
, because his mother stands before well-tended hedges, with a bed of blue flowers visible over her shoulder, and a vine with red blossoms winding up a trellis.
At the party
, because she wears pearls and a floral dress, and holds a champagne flute, and because she might be laughing.
At the dance
, because her hair is sweeping past her shoulder, her neck is long and curved like a dancer’s, and she might be looking at someone—a partner—outside the frame. He still doesn’t know which of those stories was the right one. Maybe all of them.

His father says something from the dining room, but Carr can’t make out what. He waits for more, but nothing comes. After a while he sweeps a pile of magazines from the sofa and lies down.

The phone, burring in his pocket, wakes him from a clammy sleep. It’s dark now and he turns on the porch light as he steps outside to answer. The air is like a cool cloth on his face. Mr. Boyce, who almost never calls, is calling.

“You’re not in California,” he says. His voice is heavy and smooth, an amber syrup. “You’re supposed to be in California today, and you’re supposed to be out here tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there. I’m flying out of Boston first thing.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No. No problem.”

Backlit on the fourteenth tee, Mr. Boyce is a slab of granite escaped from the quarry, or spare parts from Stonehenge. Carr walks up the cart path, and from fifty yards features emerge in the monolith: massive arms and shoulders, a corded neck, a shaved head, black and gleaming against the blue sky.
Rockefeller Center
, Carr thinks,
the statue of Atlas
. He thinks it every time he sees Boyce. Carr stops walking as Mr. Boyce sets up over the ball. The driver is like a blade of grass in his hands, and though Carr has seen him play many times before, he is always amazed that the heavily plated torso can coil and release with such ease. There is a slashing noise, a gunshot, and Mr. Boyce looks down the fairway and nods. Then he beckons to Carr.

This is the twenty-second time they have met, and their twenty-second meeting on a golf course, though never on the same course twice. Today they are in Wisconsin, just outside Madison, at a private club set beside a lake, amid hills drenched in green. As he was the first time Carr saw him, in Atlanta, under a punishing August sun, Mr. Boyce is wearing tailored black. And, as always, he is golfing alone, walking the course, and carrying his own bag.

Which isn’t to say he is without retainers. There are two of them today, trailing behind in a golf cart: a large man in khakis and sunglasses, with short red hair, whose name Carr has never learned but who drives Mr.
Boyce’s cars, and next to him Tina, who is slim and white-blond, whose oval face is as smooth and empty as a mannequin’s, and who, Declan once told him, kills people for Mr. Boyce. Tina looks up from a glossy magazine through dark, rectangular glasses and smiles.

A frisson of tension ripples through Carr’s gut as he walks down the fairway and cuts through the dull throbbing in his head. Ahead, Mr. Boyce seems too large for the landscape. It’s an illusion, Carr knows, though not of the light off the lake, nor even of Boyce’s considerable mass. Rather, it’s the aura he casts—of power barely controlled, of destructive potential contained, but just for now.

“Like a chainsaw,” Declan said that first time in Atlanta, “or a crate of blasting caps. You want to walk careful around him, young Carr. You want to keep a little distance.”

The menace is palpable, but always implicit. In all their meetings, Mr. Boyce has never been other than exact, economical, and watchful. Still, he’s the only man Carr knows of who made Declan nervous.

It was a long drive, three hundred yards at least, and the ball sits on the right side of the fairway, at the bend of a dogleg left, not far from the rough. The green is uphill, 150 yards away, and ringed by bunkers. Mr. Boyce walks slowly around his ball. In person his voice is even deeper—the rumbling of an earthquake.

“I expected you earlier,” he says, “by the ninth hole.”

“My flight was delayed.”

Boyce nods. “Thunderstorms over New York, I know.” The wind is gusting off the lake and Boyce studies the treetops and the distant flag. He scatters bits of grass from his fingertips and watches them fly.

“What do you think—blowing left to right, about twenty miles an hour, a little less on the green with that stand of trees. You make it a seven iron from here?”

“You know I don’t play,” Carr answers.

Mr. Boyce shakes his head. “Too bad. There’s a lot you’d like about it. The precision, the planning—everything just so.”

“Maybe in my retirement.”

Boyce chuckles, which sounds like an air horn. “I admire your optimism.” He pulls a seven iron from his bag and takes an easy practice swing. “Everything fine with your father?”

“Sure,” Carr says quietly.

“Sure,” Boyce repeats, and then all his attention is on the ball. Again there is the slash, the gunshot, an arc of cut grass in the air, and the ball bounces on the green—once, twice, now rolling toward the pin. Boyce turns back to Carr. “So tell me how you’re spending my money.”

And for the next two holes Carr does exactly that, pausing only for Boyce to strike the ball. On the seventeenth tee he finishes, and Boyce asks questions.

“Where are the stones now?”

“Here.”

“On you?”

“They’re in the trunk of your Benz, in the first-aid kit, underneath the cold packs.”

A rueful smile crosses Mr. Boyce’s face. “You broke into my car?”

“I’ll need them in the Caymans. I need you to hold them for me till then.”

“And what about the cash?”

“I’m using it for expenses.”

“I want receipts,” Boyce says.

“You’ll get them.”

Boyce looks down the fairway. It’s a short par four, 330 yards, and he takes the driver from his bag. “You think three’s enough to buy you in?” he asks.

“More would be better, but the right references and the right introduction should convince him there’s a steady supply.”

“And Bessemer is the guy to introduce you?”

“He’s the best bet.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Of course not. But he’s known Prager for years, he’s been referring clients to him, one way or another, for a while, and he’s approachable. He’s the best bet.”

“It’s your call,” Boyce says, and tees up his ball at the tips. “And what about the woman—Chun?”

“Valerie has a good feeling about her.”

“
Good feeling
? I like to base my investments on a little more than that.”

“If we want to add six months to the timetable, then we can look elsewhere. If not, then Chun’s our girl.”

Boyce shakes his head. “Let’s hope it’s a
great
feeling,” he says, and
another gunshot echoes across the lake. The ball hits the fringe and bounces onto the green. Boyce nods slowly as it rolls, then he turns to Carr and leans his hip against his driver, as if it were a cane.

“So Valerie’s doing all right?” he asks.

“She’s doing fine.”

“And Mike and Bobby, and the kid?”

“Dennis. They’re fine too.”

“Must be an adjustment for them, not having Deke there. A different rhythm for them—a different style.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been around the block together.”

“But you’re not part of the crew anymore. You’re the boss now. Management.”

Carr pinches the bridge of his nose and looks at Mr. Boyce, whose eyes are like black stones. “It’s all good.”

Boyce taps the toe of his golf shoe with his driver. “Deke ran a tight ship—very firm, very hands-on. He wasn’t worried about being liked—”

“He didn’t have to worry—everybody liked him.”

“Regardless, that wasn’t his focus. His focus was on having his orders followed. He was a good soldier that way—a good platoon leader. It’s not an easy job, and not everyone’s built for it. Some people need to be liked; some people get lazy or stupid.”

“Which one of those do you think is my problem?” Carr says.

The wind subsides for a moment, and the smells of grass and loam and trapped heat rise up, as if the ground has opened. Mr. Boyce straightens, and Carr takes a step back. “You’ll know when I think you have a problem,” he says, and Carr can feel the bass rumble in his chest. Boyce looks at him for a while, sighs, and drops his club into his golf bag.

“You have anything for me?” Carr asks.

Boyce points at Tina, who is already headed for the tee with something tucked under her arm. “She’ll fix you up,” Boyce says, and he turns toward the green.

Carr and Tina sit on a bench off the cart path, in the heavy shade of an oak. The air is cool here, and Tina’s legs shine white in the shadows.

“The new stuff’s at the last tab,” she says, and she opens the latest British
Vogue
while Carr opens the latest edition of Curtis Prager’s dossier.

Carr remembers the first time he read it, six months back, in a hotel bar in Panama City, and remembers Declan’s whiskey-furred voice as he slid it across the table.
Last job of work we’ll need to do, boyo. It’s the feckin’ sweepstakes
. The lined red face split in a grin. Carr has read and reread it countless times since then—all but memorized it—but still he looks at every page.

A picture comes first, Curtis Prager years ago, emerging from the back of a black car. He is lithe, tanned, and shiny, his features finely sculpted, his hair like blond lacquer on his neat head, his shoulders square. An Apollo of finance, Carr thinks—a gilded man for a gilded age. All that’s missing is a laurel wreath.

After the photo are the puff pieces about him that appeared in financial trade rags in the United States and Europe with great regularity before the crash. In tone they run a narrow gamut from fawning to sycophantic, and they all tell the same tale: of the tow-headed prodigy, home-schooled in Cincinnati until age sixteen, then off to Princeton, Harvard B-school, and Wall Street after that. By age twenty-five, he was the youngest managing director in the history of Melton-Peck; by twenty-eight he was the head of all trading there; and by thirty he was out the door—off to seek his fortune as a hedge fund manager, with a very large fortune in bonus money already in hand, and a flock of investors following behind him, all eager to pay for the privilege of having the wunderkind manage their money.

And so the birth of Tirol Capital, which from the first charged staggering fees, made a mania of secrecy, and cultivated an air of exclusivity to rival any Upper East Side co-op or private school. The formula worked well for Prager and, along with the outsize returns he reported year after year, helped make Tirol one of the fastest growing funds of the new century.

Besides the money, and the truckloads by which it arrived at Tirol’s Greenwich, Connecticut, doorstep, the articles discuss Prager’s many good works. There are lists of scholarship funds, endowed chairs, research laboratories, and hospital pavilions that bear his name, and pictures of Prager and the missus—tall, blond, disdainful—at an endless series of charity events. Black ties, white ties, polo shirts and sunglasses—the dress code varies, but never the smiles, which are tight and entitled. Smiles of any sort are in short supply in the next set of clippings—the ones from the trials.

There were two of them, the first just before the markets collapsed, the second just afterward, and despite the torch-and-pitchfork temper of those times, both ended in hung juries. The press attributed this to the complexity of the government’s case against Prager—the difficulty of making money-laundering and conspiracy charges stick, the arcane financial instruments involved—though some in the U.S. Attorney’s office grumbled darkly, and not for attribution, about jury tampering.

The feds were about to have a third go when their only witness, a former Tirol compliance officer named Munce, drove his Lexus off a dark road in Litchfield County, and through the frozen skin of the Housatonic River. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and there was ice on the roadway, but still the feds had both Munce and his car stripped down to their frames. The autopsies found nothing, though, and the most they could do to Prager were a dozen stiff fines for a dozen obscure record-keeping violations.

But the mere fact of his indictment, along with the implosion of the markets, had already dealt much worse punishment to Prager and his firm. Tirol was losing investors at a slow bleed before the first trial began, and like a broken hydrant afterward, and by the time the feds imposed their fines, the firm was down to a measly billion or so in assets under management, and a handful of clients in Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

News coverage of Curtis Prager dropped off sharply four years back, after the fines—a mention in the
Greenwich Time
of the sale of his North Street estate, another in the
New York Post
of his divorce and exodus to the Cayman Islands. After which the press had bigger, more blatant frauds to cover, and the entries in the dossier switch from press clippings to what Carr recognized on first reading as intelligence reports.

“Where does Boyce get this stuff?” he’d asked Declan at the time.

Declan had shrugged and, typically, answered a different question. “He likes to keep an eye on the competition.” Carr stopped asking about what other lines of business Mr. Boyce was in, though he’s never stopped wondering.