JM01 - Black Maps (22 page)

He looked good, too, though perhaps not as good as his suit. His shiny black hair still held its obedient sweep back from his forehead, and his smile was still broad and bright and affable, but his dark eyes were tired and smudged-looking, and his olive skin was tinged with yellow. The flesh above the knot of his deep blue tie seemed to sag. Still a sleek bear, and still well dressed, but a little off his feed. The grip was as firm as ever, though.

“Good to see you, John,” he said. Pierro sat and looked around the room. He had wanted to meet someplace out of the way, and I figured Black Cow fit the bill. It’s in SoHo, just off Prince Street, a small place with a glass front, a high, tin ceiling, and some small black tables along one wall, opposite a massive ebony bar on the other. We were late for the breakfast crowd and early for lunch, and besides a pair of skinny women who’d come from the gallery next door, a bored waitress, and a guy behind the bar who looked like a junkie, we were alone in there. Pierro seemed satisfied with his anonymity, and turned to me, smiling.

“How was your Thanksgiving? Get your fill of turkey and ball games?” he asked. I made a noncommittal noise, and he continued. “I think it’s my favorite holiday. I like having the whole family together, and my kids are still young enough to love the parade. My folks were up from Boca, and Helene’s mom and sister were up too, and they went crazy in the kitchen.” He patted his middle. “I got a little more here than I did last week,” he said. In fact, it looked like he had a little less. The waitress wandered over, but Pierro raised a hand before she spoke.

“Nothing,” he said. She shrugged and looked at me.

“More coffee, please.” She wandered off to get some. Pierro looked at his watch.

“Sorry I don’t have a lot of time, John. I’m on my way to a lunch uptown.” I nodded.

“I won’t keep you. I had a long talk with Al Burrows last week, and I got an earful about Gerard Nassouli. Maybe Helene mentioned it?” Pierro stared at a point around my left ear and nodded vaguely. “Burrows went into gruesome detail, but the long and short of his story was that Nassouli was the devil—not just a money launderer, but a corruptor and a blackmailer—and that you’d have to look hard to find someone he did a straight deal with.” Pierro fixed his eyes on mine. He snorted.

“Is there a question there someplace—another version of
are you a
crook,
maybe? I thought we’d settled this bullshit already.” His voice was hoarse and rumbling. Mr. Nice-Bear was fast disappearing into the woods. I held his gaze but didn’t speak. His big hands fiddled with the flatware.

“I guess you need to hear it again,” he said. “Fine—my dealings with Gerry were legitimate. Okay? That do it for you? Can we get back to work on my problem now?” I looked at him some more.

“What do you make of what Burrows had to say?” I asked. He snorted again.

“How the hell should I know? How is it my place to make anything of it?” Pierro took a deep breath and forced a smile onto his face, but it was faint—a twitch away from a scowl. He sighed, and his shoulders sagged a little.

“I guess it’s like what the government is saying about Gerry—I’ve got no reason to doubt it, but my dealings with him had nothing to do with any of that. So maybe Burrows is right—what the hell do I know?”

“Any reason why he would make up this kind of stuff?” I asked. Pierro turned a fork over and over. He shrugged.

“I barely knew the guy; I don’t know what he’d do or wouldn’t do,” he said. I nodded, then I tried out the five names I’d gotten from Burrows: Whelan, Bregman, Welch, Lenzi, and Trautmann. He looked at the tabletop and listened to the names and said no five times.

Pierro checked his watch and looked up. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed again.

“I’m being a prick, aren’t I?” he said. His voice was softer. “Sorry about that. I’m a little tired today. You get what you need here?”

“I asked my questions—you gave your answers.” He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“And my wife—you get what you need from her, too?” The edge was back in his voice. I nodded. “Did you really have to talk to her about all that . . . crap? It’s ancient history, for chrissakes. How the hell does dredging that up help with anything?”

“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “But I couldn’t know unless I asked, and I had to ask. I’m sorry if it was uncomfortable for her.”

“It bothered her a lot less than it did me,” Pierro said. He shook his head. “I’m getting pissy again—sorry. It’s just that . . . Helene’s a good person, John . . . better than I deserve. She shouldn’t have to air her dirty laundry for no reason.”

“It wasn’t for no reason, Rick. And as dirty laundry goes, I’ve heard a lot worse.” Pierro’s lips pursed.

“So now what?” he asked. I explained my plans to find the five people Burrows had named. He nodded.

“And if someone else has gotten a fax too, then we know something?” he asked.

“Then we know something.” Pierro looked at his watch again, and I figured we were done. But we weren’t.

“I didn’t realize you were Ned March’s brother,” he said. I looked at him. “I know him by reputation, and I heard him speak at a conference a couple of years back—your brother David, too. Smart guys, the both of them. And Klein’s a hell of a firm—one of the last of its kind.” He chuckled. “I did a little research of my own,” he said.

“So I gather.” There was a trace of pleasure on Pierro’s face, at having taken me by surprise. And there was something more—curiosity.

“Tell me if I’m out of line here, John, but I’ve got to ask—coming from a family like that, shouldn’t you be running part of Klein or something? How the hell did you end up in this line of work?”

How did you end up in this line of work? Why do you do it?
I’ve been asked those questions enough over the years that I should have some answers handy by now—but I don’t. Instead, I’ve got some vague crap that I mutter about aversion to desk jobs and not being cut out for banking. I trotted a little of that out for Pierro. He smiled and shook his head, incredulous.

“Christ, if I’d had that kind of family juice when I was coming up, I’d have been CEO at French ten years ago.” He looked at his watch and rose. “Got to get to getting, John. It was good to see you. And thanks, again, for everything you’re doing,” he said. And he and his good-looking suit strode out the door. I headed downtown.

“You’re not in here,” she said, and she stared deeply and with some consternation into the monitor that stood on her small metal desk. “If you’re not in here, you don’t have an appointment.” She was maybe twenty, and had a gold stud in her nose and another in her tongue, and was made up like she’d just escaped from the road company of
Cats.
She was tiptoeing her fingers gingerly across the keyboard, careful that no harm should come to her immaculate French manicure, in an excruciating attempt to locate me in Michael Lenzi’s appointment calendar. She wore one of those campy retro necklaces that had her name on it, rendered in gold-plated script.
Brie.
I stood a better chance with the cheese.

“Why don’t I just rest here while you look,” I said. She ignored me and continued her glacial typing. I sat down. I watched water drip from my umbrella. I looked at the wet leaf stuck to my boot. I listened as, every minute or so, Brie tapped a key. If she had to answer the phone, too, I’d be here till Christmas.

Arroyo Systems occupied part of a low floor in an anonymous building on Broadway, near Fulton Street. The reception area was windowless and small, furnished with a black leather chair, a matching love seat, a chrome and glass table, Brie’s command center, and a dead plant in a large plastic pot. The sheetrock walls were scuffed, and the carpet was worn and stained. A couple of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs were out, and the working ones buzzed annoyingly. Some dusty photos of canyons hung on one wall. There were a half-dozen old banking and software trade magazines on the glass table, along with last Friday’s
Post
and a few brochures about Arroyo Systems. These were filled with colorful but indecipherable diagrams, photos of smartly dressed people staring raptly at computer screens, and gobbledygook like “object-oriented n-tier message-based architecture.” It was impossible to tell from them what Arroyo Systems did. I started reading the
Post.

“You sure it was today—Tuesday?” Brie asked without looking up.

“I set it up with Mr. Lenzi yesterday morning—for one o’clock today. Why don’t you just call him?” She looked at me like I was speaking Urdu, then turned back to the monitor. She was still delicately pressing keys and gazing uncomprehendingly at her screen when a wiry, intense-looking man opened the interior door and spoke to her.

“I’m expecting a guy around one.” He paused and looked at me. “Maybe that’s you. You March?” I nodded. “Mike Lenzi.” He gave me a hard handshake. I followed him inside. Brie noticed none of this, and we left her pondering her screen, pristine nails poised above the keyboard.

“How long she keep you out there?” he asked.

“No more than a week,” I said. He snorted.

“I don’t know where we get them from—Mars, maybe. And we can’t keep them longer than a month or two. We had one a while back— didn’t make it through lunch. Went out on her break and that was it, never saw her again. Took a laptop and a couple of wallets with her.”

I followed Lenzi down a short hall, past a conference room and a kitchen, to a warren of cubicles with shoulder-high partitions. We picked our way through them and headed for a row of offices along the back wall. The cubicles were densely packed with computer hardware and wild tangles of cabling, and every surface was covered with a thick, unstable sediment of paper, technical manuals, CDs, takeout food containers, candy wrappers, soda cans, coffee cups, and other stuff too deeply buried or decomposed to identify. The space was cramped and chaotic and smelled like a dorm room, or an airport transit lounge after a week of canceled flights.

I heard Russian being spoken, and another language that I didn’t recognize. Most of the people I saw were young and male. Nearly all of them were casually dressed, some in suit pants and dress shirts, some in jeans and T-shirts, and others in what could have been pajamas.

Lenzi was the exception to the dress rule. He wore the pants to a navy suit, a blue-and-pink-striped shirt with cuff links, and a blue tie with a red geometric pattern. He was short, about five foot five, with dark, curly hair that had begun to gray and recede. His face was thin, and his dark eyes were deep-set. The skin beneath them looked soft and loose. He was clean-shaven, but the faint shadow on his jaw meant he had to work at it. I put his age at forty-five.

His office was small and had too much stuff in it. The grimy window, with its view of an airshaft, only made things worse. He ushered me into one of the guest chairs and shut the door. He edged around me and slid behind his big, dark desk.

“Lots of all-nighters?” I asked, gesturing out toward the cubicles.

“Programmers,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. They’re a fucking mess—excuse my French. If you were a client, I wouldn’t take you past the conference room.” Lenzi shifted restlessly in his seat. He picked up a paper clip and started playing with it.

“What kind of software do you guys make?” I asked.

“Trading systems. For FX, money markets, and derivatives. We do pricing, trade capture, position keeping, some risk. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.” I shrugged.

“How big a company is it?”

“Small. We’ve been around almost two years, got sixty people or so, most of them out there,” he cocked his thumb toward the door. “Couple of sales guys in London. But we’re getting there.” His optimism sounded more habitual than sincere.

“You’ve been here from the start?”

“Not from the start, but soon after.”

“You’re not a programmer, though,” I said.

He snorted again. “Me? No, I do sales.” He’d unbent the clip and wound it into a spring shape. Now he straightened it again. His hands were large and pale, with black hair and blue veins on the backs. His movements were quick and a little twitchy, like he’d had too much coffee.

“And before this—you were in banking?” I asked.

Lenzi bristled. “Whoa, buddy, before we start in on my résumé, how about you filling me in on what the hell this is about?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Ever hear of Merchant’s Worldwide Bank?” Lenzi blanched, and paused in his torture of the paper clip.

“I’ve heard of it,” he said.

“Your name came up in some work that I’m doing that’s tangentially related to MWB—”

Lenzi cut me off. “Came up how?” He was quite still now.

“Only in the vaguest way. Just that you did some business with them a while back, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago.” Lenzi placed his palms flat on the desk. His face was immobile except for a small, pulsing vein high on his forehead. I went on. “That you dealt with a guy there named Gerard Nassouli.”

It was like I’d spit in his face. Lenzi pushed back from the desk and gripped the arms of his chair. His hands were white, and the veins in them stood out like blue wires. The skin of his face seemed to contract around the muscle and bone underneath, and two red patches flared at his cheeks. His mouth was a taut furrow, and his whole body seemed to coil. I had at least seven inches on him, and probably fifty pounds, but the guy was ready to come across the desk at me.