Swindlers (31 page)

The steward nodded toward one of the empty
places, held the chair while I sat down, and then, before I
noticed, disappeared, vanished so completely that it left a doubt
whether he might have been a mirage, an insubstantial thing created
by the heat.

A chilled bottle of wine sat uncorked in the
middle of the table, and, right next to it, a golden bowl filled
with purple grapes. On opposite sides of the table, the two places
were set with crystal glasses and the finest china, alive with
color, I had ever seen. The silverware, engraved with the letter O,
the insignia for the House of Orsini, had the feel and the luster
of a priceless, ancient heritage. The linen napkins felt like silk
to the touch. I picked up a knife and turned it around in my hand,
marveling at the perfect balance and the perfect fit. Everything
was perfect, one of a kind, and nothing more expensive.

“I’m glad you were able to join us,” said a
voice from just behind me. Taken by surprise, I jumped to my feet
and turned to meet Danielle’s new husband, Niccolo Orsini.

And then, to my amazement, I was face to
face, not with Niccolo Orsini but with an impossibility.

“You - !” I cried, staggered by what I
saw.

It was the same man I had seen the day
before, a brief glimpse through a pair of small binoculars - the
same jet black hair, the same mustache, the same bronze skin – but
how different the impression, how different the effect, seen, not
from a distance, but close enough to touch. I was staring into the
eyes of a dead man, murdered by his wife, his body lost at sea.
Nelson St. James was alive! And the sight of him almost killed me.
I struggled to catch my breath, to somehow get my bearings, to find
some stability in a world that had gone insane.

“You’re alive - ! But how? Why?”

He treated me like a convalescent, which in a
sense I was, having lost the ability to distinguish what was real
from what was not. He placed a comforting hand on my shoulder and
smiled sympathetically.

“I know it must be a shock, seeing someone
you thought was dead. But I’m afraid I’m very much alive. I’m only
sorry you had to find out.”

“Sorry…that I had to…?”

He guided me back to my chair and stood next
to me for a moment, as if in doubt how he wanted to proceed.

“Danielle won’t be joining us,” he said
finally.

There was no explanation given for her
absence, nothing said in words; but the look in his eyes suggested
that there were important matters to discuss and that the
discussion should be between the two of us alone.

“Perhaps later,” he added vaguely.

The same steward who had met me earlier,
reappeared, waiting unobtrusively off to the side. The moment St.
James reached for his chair, he was there, pulling it out for him.
With a deft movement of his smooth, dark hands, he placed a napkin
on his lap. St. James then said something to him in what may have
been Arabic. Immediately, the steward looked at me.

“What would you like to drink?” asked St.
James. “I’m having ice tea, but there’s wine on the table, and
anything else you might like, I’m sure we have it on board.”

I heard the question, but I could not think
of an answer. I don’t mean that I could not decide; I could not get
beyond the words to what they meant. I knew what he said, I knew
what he asked, but I had the uncanny sense that I was observing
something that was happening to someone else. I did not say
anything; I did not know how. Nelson St. James seemed to
understand. He dismissed the steward with a few more words in that
exotic language that was almost as unintelligible to me as English
had suddenly become.

“I thought we might talk for a while before
lunch – unless you’re hungry, of course; in which case we can….”
His voice trailed off and he glanced down at his manicured hands
clasped together in his lap. Dressed all in white –his pants, his
jacket, even his shirt and shoes – his face looked even darker than
it had before and his eyes more alive than I remembered them.
Though he did not make a sound, he seemed to be laughing at some
colossal, private joke.

“Tell me,” he said, slowly lifting his eyes,
“how exactly is it that you come to be here?” But almost before it
was out of his mouth, he dismissed the question with an abrupt and
emphatic movement of his head. He bent forward, his hands on the
table. “You didn’t know I was alive, did you? No, I could tell from
your reaction. You came looking for Danielle. Yes, of course; that
makes sense. Or did you have a suspicion, a doubt, that the story
she told you wasn’t quite true; something she may have let slip
late one night while the two of you were in bed?”

I began to recover my senses; the world began
to take on a definable shape. St. James was only guessing about
what had happened.

“Is that what she told you?” I replied,
pretending indifference as I sipped on the ice tea. “That we slept
together?”

I wondered if he would press the point, admit
his ignorance and ask directly. He said nothing, and we sat there,
in the breathless silence of the summer heat, trying to read what
was going on in each other’s minds.

“You must be angry, Morrison - given the way
you were treated. But then, it wouldn’t have made any sense to tell
you the truth, would it? And really, when you think about it, what
do you have to be angry about, except perhaps a little injured
pride.”

“Injured pride!” I exclaimed bitterly. “You
and your wife made me party to a fraud, a massive deception;
destroyed everything I believed in – and for what?”

“For what?” he laughed. He
looked at me to make sure I was serious. “Don’t you understand?
They’re still talking about it – ‘the perfect murder’ – How
Danielle St. James murdered her husband and, thanks to that
brilliant attorney, Andrew Morrison, got away with it. But it’s
really much better than that, isn’t it?” he asked, with a knowing,
ruthless grin. “People have gotten away with murder before, but no
one has ever done this – no one ever had the wit or daring even to
try! Try? – No one in their right mind would even think of it.
That’s why it worked – Because it’s the last thing anyone would
ever suspect. Think of it, Morrison – You can’t help but admire the
sheer audacity of it!” He was full of excitement, thrilled by his
own achievement. “Have your own wife stand trial for a murder that
never happened, stage your own death, and do it all in a way so
that after she’s acquitted everyone will be so certain that she
really did it, so convinced that she got away with murder, that no
one will ever think to wonder whether you might still be
alive!”

Pushing back from the table, St. James folded
his arms across his chest and stared down at the deck. He swung his
foot, back and forth, over and over again, until, gradually, the
triumph in his eyes began to give way to a different judgment. When
he finally looked at me he seemed almost apologetic.

“No one was hurt; no one was killed. You
defended a woman charged with a crime she didn’t commit – and you
won. Are you going to quarrel with the result?”

He lifted an eyebrow in tribute to what he
wanted me to admit had been a perfect scheme: no one killed, no one
punished, and the whole world fooled into thinking he was dead.

“And instead of going to prison, or spending
your life a fugitive, you get to keep all the money you ever
stole!” I spat out in contempt.

“Sent to prison, made a fugitive, for doing
nothing but what everyone does every day!” he said with scorn for
what had, unfairly as he thought, been done to him. “They call it a
Ponzi scheme, but what is that except what everyone on Wall Street
– everyone in business – does: paying what you owe to some with
money you get from others? You don’t believe me? – What do you
think would happen if everyone owed money by a bank asked for it
back? The bank doesn’t have that much money – most of it has been
loaned out. That’s what no one seems to understand: in business you
either grow or die! As long as I kept making profits – as long as I
brought in more business, more clients – as long as they stayed
happy with the money I made them – no one complained.”

I took off my dark glasses so I could look
St. James straight in the eye. I wanted to preserve at least that
much of my self-respect.

“I was used, and I don’t like it; I don’t
like it one bit.”

With a knowing shrug, St. James threw up his
hands.

“Everyone gets used, Andrew! It’s the way of
the world.” Furrowing his brow, he bent his shoulders and searched
my eyes, looking for something he was convinced I could not quite
hide. “And if you were….I wonder – did you really mind it?”

It hung in the air, this second allusion to
what he suspected, but apparently only suspected, I might have done
with Danielle, while he continued to watch, daring me to search my
own conscience for how much I may have been the willing victim of
deceit.

“Used,” I insisted, staring back hard. “Lied
to, told something that never happened.”

St. James would have none of it. His eyes
gleamed with eager malice.

“You can’t tell me that it’s never happened
before, that no one has ever asked you to take their case because
they’re innocent and you’re the only one who can save them. How
many times? How many times did you believe them, and then because
you were the only one between them and a life in prison – or their
execution – work yourself into a state of sheer exhaustion, only to
realize, after you had won, after the jury had set them free, what
you had really known all along: that they were guilty and that
because of you they had gotten away with it, got away with murder!
Used? – I think not.

“Danielle told you she was innocent, told you
she hadn’t committed murder; and she was telling the truth – she
didn’t murder me, she didn’t murder anyone. You did what you always
do – what you were paid a great deal of money to do – you defended
someone charged with a crime. She was charged with a crime,
remember, before she ever asked for your help. Your job was to hold
the government to account, show that the evidence wasn’t sufficient
for a conviction. And you did that; you did it very well. You
aren’t going to complain that the verdict wasn’t the right one, are
you? You surely aren’t going to say she should have been found
guilty!”

I turned on my hip, shoved one leg over the
other, and wrapped both hands around the wooden corner of the
canvas chair and held it tight. What he had done, the way he now
tried to defend it, was so outrageous, so astonishing in its open
duplicity, I was afraid I might hit him.

“What would you have done if she had?” I
asked suddenly. “What would you have done if this well-planned
fraud of yours hadn’t worked, if she had been convicted? – Let her
go prison? Waited until you read in the papers about her execution
and then dismissed it as just another deal gone bad!”

His eyebrows, dyed black like his hair, shot
straight up, acknowledging the possibility. He lowered his head,
and with the back of two fingers scratched the side of his smooth
shaven cheek, considering, as it were, whether in retrospect he
might have underplayed the risk.

“There was never any real chance of that –
not with you as her lawyer,” he said with the blithe assurance of
someone who knew nothing about the real hazards of the
courtroom.

“I haven’t always won.”

“You’ve never lost with someone
innocent.”

“The whole world thinks she’s guilty,” I
reminded him.

That was the last thing he cared about. The
world could think what it liked.

“The whole world thinks I’m dead,” he
remarked, with an impervious sneer. “But I’m still alive. And
Danielle, the woman the world thinks is so guilty – she doesn’t
exist anymore. We’ve both become other people. Nelson St. James is
somewhere the bottom of the Pacific; Danielle St. James has
disappeared. Niccolo Orsini and his wife Gabriella now sail around
on a yacht – the Midnight Sun, the Blue Zephyr painted black –
making rich people even richer, those lucky enough to invest in one
of the Orsini enterprises, the profitable parts of this new, global
economy of ours. Yes,” he added with gloating satisfaction, “thanks
to you, my friend, Danielle and I now lead new and different
lives.”

“Lead different lives! – You’re living the
same life all over again, the same game with different
players.”

I meant to offend him, call him the hypocrite
he was; but he took it, if not as a compliment, then as a
reasonable description of the only reality he knew. It was, for
him, what it had always been: a game about money; or rather a game
about winning and losing in which money was a way to count. It was,
when you got right down to it, when your eye was not dazzled by all
the beautiful people and all their fine clothes, by their shiny
fast cars and their expensive houses, nothing but the ancient and
much despised war of all against all, but without the violence, and
with none of the courage.

St. James snapped his fingers, the steward
materialized out of thin air and we ordered lunch. For the next
hour, as course after course was served, St. James spoke with
ruthless candor about what he had done; not just how he had staged
his own death, but what he planned to do next. He seemed to enjoy
it, the chance to tell someone, to have an audience. He thought he
was the only one smart enough to figure out that the perfect murder
would be the one in which the murder itself was a fiction. It was
sleight of hand, the cunning trickery of a great magician. The
analogy was his, and a source of pride. Everyone he had dealt with,
whether the Wall Street tycoons he had forced into bankruptcy or
the government officials who had come after him with a vengeance,
all were a type he despised: privileged and overeducated, the kind
who hung their framed degrees and credentials on the walls of their
offices and thought them proof of their competence.