Thick as Thieves (8 page)

About Curtis Prager’s business, the reports leave little doubt. With a labored dispassion typical to the genre, and with no mention of sources or methods, they describe how Prager, having relocated to the Caymans, closed down what was left of Tirol Capital and established Isla Privada Holdings, a firm whose ostensible business is the acquisition, consolidation,
and management of small banks and trust companies in the United States, but whose actual purpose is to deliver financial services to organized criminals.

A comprehensive list of services too, according to the reports, especially for a relative newcomer to the field: bulk cash processing, foreign exchange, electronic funds transfer, access to a network of overseas correspondent banks, provision of fully documented shell corporations, asset management, even tax consultation—everything a crime syndicate might require to launder large sums of money, move them around the world, invest them, and bring them home clean.

The reports say that Prager is still building his business, and that his client base is still small—a Mexican drug cartel, a Colombian cocaine syndicate, a smuggling ring out of Panama, and a Salvadoran private army that expanded from death-squad work into regional arms supply. But he has grander things in mind, and his marketing efforts have recently spread beyond the Caribbean and Latin America to Central Europe and Asia. The list of Prager’s clients stopped Carr in his tracks the first time he read it. He peered across the table through the smoke from Declan’s Cohiba.

“We know some of these guys,” Carr said. “We hit them twice, they’re going to take it personally.”

“It’s not them we’re hitting, boyo, it’s their banker. Deposit insurance is his problem.”

“You’re thinking about a cash shipment?”

Declan shook his head. “Keep reading.”

The lightbulb went on two paragraphs down, in the midst of a dry discussion of the common back office used by the banks that Isla Privada owns. The centralized processing system gives Curtis Prager ready access to all of the accounts in all of the banks in Isla Privada’s portfolio, and—with the help of an obedient, well-paid, and meticulously incurious operations and accounting staff—makes it a simple matter to commingle licit and illicit cash and hide dubious funds transfers in a forest of legitimate ones.

Carr had looked up at Declan, who was grinning like a shot fox. “That back-office system of his is a fecking magic lamp,” Declan said. “The great Prager rubs away, wishing for some clean money, it spews a bit of smoke, and
poof
—out pops a wire transfer! Any given time, he can move a hundred
million at least with that lamp, boyo. I say we do a bit of wishin’ of our own.”

“You say something?” Tina asks him. She’s lifted her glasses off her nose, and her gray eyes are motionless. Carr shakes his head. “You sure you’re okay?” she asks. “ ’Cause you look like a fucking ghost.”

“I’m fine,” Carr says. He flips past the profiles of Prager’s staff—his security chief, his tame accountants and auditors—and leafs through the technical section. Floor plans of Isla Privada’s offices on Grand Cayman and of Prager’s beachfront compound, the makes and models of alarm systems, registry listings for Prager’s sloop and his motor yacht, the tail number of his G650—Boyce’s people are good at this sort of thing, and it goes on for pages.

Carr squints at a column of figures and rubs his head. He turns to the last tab and scans the latest updates.

There are pictures of a party by a long swimming pool, at night—men in linen trousers, women in gauzy shifts, waiters in starched jackets, and in the background a line of luminous surf. Carr recognizes it as Prager’s Grand Cayman beachfront.

“These are from his party last week?” he asks. Tina doesn’t look up from her magazine, but nods. “You bought yourself one of the caterer’s people?”

“Rented,” she says.

“Another fund-raiser?”

Tina nods again. “For a local grade school.”

“Prager schedule the next one?”

“Just before Labor Day—right before he leaves on his prospecting trip.”

“Still off to Europe?”

“And Asia now. Lot of money to be washed out there. He’ll be gone about five weeks.”

“So, Labor Day—that’s about eleven weeks.”

“Ten,” Tina says, and turns another page of her magazine. Carr keeps studying the party photos.

“I don’t see Eddie Silva here.”

“Next picture,” Tina says.

It’s a photo of a fifty-something man, thick, with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. It’s a daytime shot, and he’s coming out of a bar. His eyes are
smeared and his face is like pitted pavement. “He’s off the wagon?” Carr asks.

Tina nods. “Again.”

“That’s what—the third time in five months?”

“That’s what I make it.”

“Hell of a thing for the head of security.”

“Nice for you though.”

There are more photos at the back of the folder, and the very last one stops Carr. It’s another shot of Curtis Prager, and like the first picture in the file it shows Prager climbing from a car, though this car is a Bentley, and the street, sunny and white, isn’t in New York, but in George Town, on Grand Cayman. Prager is wearing jeans and a guayabera. His hair is long, curling, bleached from the sun, and his mouth is open, as if he’s about to speak.

Carr flips to the front of the file and then to the back again. There can’t be five years between this photo and the first one, but in the interim Prager’s face has aged fifteen years at least. His skin is hide brown, seamed, and pulled too tight over the fine bones. The cords of his neck are like rigging, and his eyes are adrift in a sea of lines and shadows. His mouth looks wider and hungrier—weathered, but avid too, Carr thinks. Prager’s thrown off the collar and found himself some appetites to indulge—found that indulgence agrees with him. So, more a pirate than ever; more Bacchus than Apollo now. Carr shakes his head. They hated this kind of thinking at the Farm, and his trainers dinged him for it more times than he could remember. Projection, they called it.
Don’t impose a narrative, for chrissakes—let them tell their own stories. An agent gets an idea there’s something particular you want to hear, all he’ll do is sing it to you. He’ll have you chasing your tail right up your backside
. Still, he looked like a pirate.

Tina is holding a flash drive and looking at him. “File’s on here,” she says.

Carr closes the dossier and pockets the drive. “You have anything else for me?”

“Anything like …?”

“It’s been four months, for chrissakes.”

“I told you, it’s slow going. We don’t have a lot of friends down there.”

“So four months of digging and nothing to show?”

Tina closes her magazine and places it on her lap. “Not exactly nothing,” she says.

Carr draws a hand down his face. He is awake now, fully, for the first time today. “Exactly
what
, then?”

“Not a hundred percent sure. A guy one of our few friends knows met another guy who pilots for a vineyard down there. He flies in and out of an airfield near Mendoza. His brother works part-time at the same field, doing maintenance on the prop planes. The rest of the time, the brother works at a private field northwest of town, a dirt strip on an
estancia.
”

“Bertolli’s place.”

Tina nods. “Works there on Tuesdays and Fridays. And word is he told his big brother that one Friday morning, four months back, before he could even get his truck parked, the foreman waved him off. Told him
hasta la vista
—go home, no work today. No explanation besides there was a party going on at the ranch that night, which seemed weird to the mechanic because he knew that Bertolli was away in Europe for two weeks. But the foreman gave him a day’s pay anyway, for doing nothing, so he didn’t ask questions. He did notice something as he was driving out the gate that morning, though: a truckload of men driving in.”

“What men?”

“He’d seen some of them around the ranch before, but they scared him and he always kept his distance. Bertolli’s hard boys. The mechanic tells his brother they looked like they were there to work.”

Carr stands slowly and puts a hand on the back of the bench. “Which Friday morning was this?”

“Four months back, the second Friday of the month. That makes it the morning of the twelfth.”

After a while, Carr clears his throat. “That’s the morning of the day before,” he says.

“Mr. Boyce says not to read too much into it.”

Carr looks down at Tina, and at his own face, black in her black lenses. “It doesn’t take any reading,” he says quietly. “They knew he was coming. They were waiting for him.”

At 9:35 a.m. Howard Bessemer will leave his blue, Bermuda-style cottage, turn right on Monterey Road, turn right again on North Ocean Boulevard, and drive south, past the Palm Beach Country Club, to the Barton Golf and Racquet Club, there to meet Daniel Brunt for a ten o’clock court. He will play no more than two sets of tennis with Brunt, and afterward drink no more than two iced teas, and then he will shower, dress, get in his car, and drive across the Royal Park Bridge for lunch in West Palm Beach. This is Howard Bessemer’s routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this being 9:33 on a Tuesday, Carr knows that Bessemer will soon appear. Because if Carr, Latin Mike, Bobby, and Dennis have learned anything in the weeks they’ve been watching him, it is that Bessemer is a man of routines.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: tennis and lunch. Mondays and Wednesdays: golf and cocktails. Friday mornings: sailing. Friday afternoons: more cocktails. And Friday nights straight through Sunday afternoons: high-stakes poker, cocaine, and whores—two, sometimes three, at a clip—all in a basement below a Brazilian restaurant, not far from the medical center. They can set their watches by Bessemer, and they love him for it.

The garage door opens, and the blue BMW pulls out. Bessemer has the top down, and his thinning blond hair is a tattered pennant in the breeze. Right and right again, and Bobby waits another fifteen seconds
before he pulls the gray painter’s van away from the curb. Carr calls Latin Mike.

“We’re gone,” he says into his cell.

“We’re in,” Mike replies, and in the side mirror Carr sees Bessemer’s front door swing shut.

This stretch of Ocean Boulevard is flat and straight—a corridor of stucco walls, hedges, and gated drives, whose usual quiet is deepened by a sense of off-season abandonment. Traffic is sparse, and Carr can see Bessemer’s BMW blocks ahead, shimmering in the heat. The Atlantic appears to their left in flashes, in the alleys between properties—white, heaving, covered in sunlight.

Bobby tugs his painter’s cap lower. “Got another doughnut?” he asks. Carr hands him a powdered sugar, rolls down his window, and lets in the salt breeze and the smell of ripening seaweed.

Bessemer is nimble for a thickset man. He tosses his keys in a neat arc to a valet in a pink polo shirt, hitches his tennis bag on his shoulder, trots up the steps of the Barton, and disappears into its Spanish colonial facade. The valet slides into the BMW and wheels the car around the crushed shell drive. On another Tuesday he would head due west, fifty yards down a service road to the club’s parking lot—but not today. Today, half of that lot is being resurfaced, and only the cars of Barton members are being parked in the other half. The cars of staff, and of guests like Howard Bessemer, go around the corner, to the unattended lot of an Episcopal church. Carr and Bobby are parked across the street when the BMW arrives.

The valet drops it into a slot next to a Porsche and sprints off toward the club. Carr takes a black box smaller than a deck of cards from the backpack at his feet.

“Two minutes,” he says, but he doesn’t take that long. When he returns he has another small box in his hand, like the first but caked in mud and dust.

“Korean crap,” Bobby says, disgustedly. “Second one that’s died on me this year. The fucking Kia of GPS trackers.”

Bobby drives around another corner and down an alley. They park beside a dumpster and Carr takes a camera from the backpack. He sights through the viewfinder, and through a gap in the green court windscreen, and finds Bessemer and Brunt on their usual court. He has plenty of pictures
of Bessemer—the benign, round face, the watery, perpetually astonished blue eyes, the ingratiating smile—and of the tanned and simian Brunt, but just now Bessemer is talking to someone Carr hasn’t seen before, a tall, knobby man, awkward and embarrassed-looking in tennis whites. Carr takes half a dozen photos and checks the results on the camera’s little screen.

Bobby picks through the doughnut box. “Used to be, a guy like Howie did a little time, laid low awhile, then hooked up with a charity board,” he says. “Raised money for cancer or something. Now he can’t even get membership in a fucking tennis club—has to be like a permanent guest. Fraud and embezzlement—you’d think he was skinning live cats. I guess that fucking Madoff really queered it for guys like him.”

Carr smiles and passes the camera to Bobby. “Do we know this guy?” he asks.

Bobby looks at the screen and speaks through a mouthful of Boston cream. “Howie had a lunch and a dinner with him last week. I call him Ichabod. Don’t know his real name.”

“Time to find out,” Carr says.

Time, in fact, to pick Howard Bessemer’s pockets and rifle through his sock drawer, down to the lint and the last stray pennies. The dossier from Boyce has given Carr and his crew a head start: the basics of Bessemer’s story. The early chapters are straightforward enough: a young man of mediocre intellect and even less ambition—not to mention a DWI arrest on his eighteenth birthday—finds a spot at the university that generations of his family have attended, and where his grandfather has recently built a gymnasium. Not much new there.

The middle passages are similarly predictable: a degree after five and a half years, a record distinguished only by his term as social director of his fraternity and three more DWI arrests—though no convictions—and yet Howard still wangles a place in the training program at Melton-Peck, where his great-uncle was once a board member. A job as an account manager in the private bank follows, as does a marriage, a promotion or two, a co-op on the Upper East Side, a baby, and finally a rancorous, pricey divorce. Again, nothing novel, except that it is during this period that Bessemer met Curtis Prager. They overlapped at Melton-Peck by two years, and when Prager started up his first hedge fund, Bessemer referred clients to him—and eventually became one himself.