“How much do you know about what happened at Texas State Bank, Jack?”
“A little bit. I did some research after you called.”
“Then you know who Harold Wilkins is?
“The other director. The one who disappeared.”
“Harold Wilkins had been fronting for Russian mobsters for years. At first it was just some nickel-and-dime money laundering, but eventually Harold started thinking bigger and somehow he managed to cut a deal with Jimmy Kicks. Jimmy had a soft spot for banks in crappy, middle-sized shitholes like Dallas because he didn’t like dealing with sophisticated people. He always figured that sophisticated people were the most dangerous, and yokels were the greediest. Me, I’m not so sure. It might be exactly the other way around.”
I just listened and kept my mouth shut.
“Jimmy’s mules delivered bags of cash to Wilkins from the big Russian drug operations in the Northeast. Then Wilkins would see that all the money was booked to legitimate bank depositors, companies whose names he’d used to set up dummy accounts without them knowing anything about it. He always picked companies that were big cash operations, of course. Pawn shops were his favorite, but he liked restaurants and motels, too.”
“A lot of people like motels.”
Maybe Barry didn’t get the joke or maybe he didn’t think it was funny. Either way, he ignored me and went on talking.
“After the deposits were booked and a decent interval had passed, Wilkins would start funneling them out of Texas State and into Jimmy’s foreign bank accounts in a series of small transactions so they wouldn’t attract any attention.”
Two backpackers, a boy and a girl in their twenties who looked Scandinavian, passed us on the sidewalk. They were trudging doggedly in the opposite direction, bent forward under the weight of two massive yellow and black nylon packs. Barry fell silent until they were both out of earshot, then he went on talking.
“I guess it was inevitable an idiot like Harold would eventually get sticky fingers. He started wheeling and dealing with the money while it was lying around in the accounts he’d set up at Texas State. He figured he could use the float to make a few bucks playing the foreign exchange markets before he shifted the money out to Jimmy’s offshore accounts.”
“How did Jimmy catch him?” I asked.
“Jimmy didn’t. Wilkins was just unlucky. There was an audit while the stupid prick was off chasing pussy in New Orleans with the rest of the rubes.”
“The auditors were onto him?”
“No, it was strictly some routine stuff. They just started pulling foreign exchange contracts at random. They were spot-checking the bank’s exposure when it occurred to somebody that the number of positions was pretty big for a bank the size of Texas State. It didn’t take long for them to see that almost all of the positions had been opened by Wilkins. That was when the whole fucking thing came unraveled.”
“But didn’t they just close the positions the auditors found? How could the losses have been so big?”
“I told you, Wilkins was an idiot. I don’t think he got the market right even once. Every time a contract went bad he’d cover it by doubling his next position. By the time the auditors got on to him he was so far underwater he was shitting seaweed.”
“How much did he lose?”
Barry hesitated, and I glanced over at him just in time to see a sly look slide across his face. “Just over $60,000,000 according to the auditors’ final report.”
“I still don’t see how it could have been so much.”
“It wasn’t.”
I looked at Barry and shook my head. “You lost me.”
“Wilkins really did piss away a million or so fucking around with foreign exchange futures-that much of the story was true-but that was dog shit to Jimmy. It only mattered because it gave him an idea. He started wondering what would have happened if Wilkins had been thinking bigger? And that was when it came to him.”
“What came to him?”
“That if he could find a way to hang some really big losses around Wilkins’s neck instead of just the lousy million or so he had actually pissed away Wilkins would take the fall for the whole pile of shit. If Jimmy handled it just right, he could waltz away with all the phony losses without the slightest chance anybody would ever work out what really happened. I got to hand it to the guy, Jack. The concept was golden.”
“But not unless-”
“Yeah, that was problem, of course. Jimmy had to have an inside man at the bank to pull that kind of thing off. I’d been put in charge of investigating Wilkins by the rest of the board and given full authority over all the bank’s foreign exchange operations.” Barry turned his head and gave me a rueful look. “I guess I was the obvious choice.”
“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know.
“Jimmy told me he’d put twenty percent of whatever I could scam for him into a Hong Kong bank and give me a fresh start anywhere I wanted.”
Barry kicked at a pebble with his toe. It rattled off a garbage can on the sidewalk and bounced into the gutter.
“That’s the real American dream, isn’t it, Jack? To disappear into some tropical paradise, rich and reborn?”
“I don’t think-”
“Americans have been reinventing themselves since the fucking pilgrims hit the beach,” Barry interrupted. “It’s one thing we’re really good at. Today we just do it a little faster than we used to, that’s all.”
I said nothing, but Barry didn’t seem to care.
“Of course, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to start over again, you want to do it rich, and I was sure as hell going to do that. I knew I could get forty or fifty million out of Texas State without breaking a sweat. That would mean at least eight or ten million for me.”
Barry suddenly brightened and barked a quick laugh.
“You ought to understand starting over better than anybody, Jack. That’s why you walked away from Washington and moved to Bangkok, isn’t it?”
I didn’t bother to argue with Barry. His suggestion that we had both done more-or-less the same thing was so outrageous I just let it pass.
“How did you pull it off?” I asked him instead.
“It was easy. I phonied up a bunch of new contracts for bigger sums than Wilkins had ever dreamed of. Then I slipped them into the system with his trades so they’d look right. After that, I reviewed the trading accounts myself and claimed to have discovered them. How the hell was I going to get caught? Nobody really knew what had been going on but Wilkins, and who the fuck was going to believe him when he said most of the contracts I found weren’t his? Hell, the contracts I stuck in didn’t even have to be good phonies since everybody was more than ready to believe that a boob like Wilkins would have made a mess out of his own swindle.”
Barry smiled. It looked to me like it was trying not to, but he just couldn’t stop himself.
“Eventually I gave my solemn opinion to Texas State that legally they had to make good on every one of the contracts I’d found, and they did. When the smoke cleared, I’d creamed off just under $50,000,000 for Jimmy. That meant I’d cleared almost $10,000,000 for myself.”
We were just in front of the Ambassador Hotel when a pudgy local man broke out of the pack of touts that habitually lay in wait there to ambush passing male tourists. He approached us in an odd, crablike gait, scuttling almost sideways.
“Massage, boss? Many sexy girl.” The tout poked a tattered brochure toward Barry. “Take look?”
Barry didn’t say anything, but he turned his head very slowly and looked at the man. The tout didn’t say another word. He just jerked the brochure away and darted back to the safety of the other touts. I could feel the men following us with their eyes as we walked on by and I wondered what the man had seen in Barry’s face that frightened him so badly.
“That was when Jimmy got an even bigger idea,” Barry continued as if nothing had happened. “He was sick of getting screwed by banks, he told me. He had the $50,000,000 I’d just stolen for him already sitting around in offshore banks, less my cut of course, so he told me he figured this was his big chance.”
I just listened.
“Jimmy wanted his own bank. I knew of one that was available and I thought we could get it for close to the $50,000,000 that I’d scammed out of Texas State. Jimmy told me if I’d throw in my $10,000,000 with his $40,000,000 and could do the deal for that amount, he’d give me a free hand to run the bank and a thirty-five percent shareholding.”
Now I was staring so hard at Barry I stumbled over an uneven joint in the sidewalk that jutted up unexpectedly in front of me.
“What are you telling me here, Barry? The Russian mob not only asked you to buy a bank for them, but to put some money into the deal yourself and become their partner? And you did it?”
“I didn’t become partners with the whole fucking mob, Jack, just with Jimmy Kicks. Don’t go all hysterical on me here.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as shit, Jack. A chance to own thirty-five percent of an international bank and run it however I wanted to? I’d have been nuts to say no.”
“How could you even think of fronting for the Russian mob, Barry?”
“Now don’t get so high and mighty on me, Jack. We both crawled out of the same fucking pile of crap. You took your way out, I took mine. What the hell’s the difference?”
“That’s the second time you’ve tried the say that we both took the same road, and this time I’m not going to let it slide. There’s nothing remotely similar about the choices you and I made, Barry. Not a damned thing.”
“Tell me the difference.”
“The difference is that I didn’t fake a suicide and go into business with a bunch of Russian mobsters.”
“No, Jack, that’s not it.”
Barry produced the faintest of smiles.
“The difference,” he said, “is they didn’t ask you to.”