Peter Spiegelman - Black Maps

“Tom,” I said, extending my hand, “thanks again for this.”

“Always happy to have you owe me another large favor. But I still think this is mostly a waste of time.”

Neary led me through a glass door to a reception area. It was small, windowless, and unlovely, furnished only with a steel desk and a swivel chair. Set in the wall to the left of the desk was a gray metal door, and mounted beside it was a card-key reader. A uniformed guard manned the desk. He was a black man in his early fifties who, even sitting down and nearly motionless, managed to look tough, competent, and entirely humorless. He gave me the once-over with eyes like stones.

“Hi, Chet,” Neary said, and flashed an ID card.

“Hello, Mr. Neary. This is your guest?” Chet asked.

“This is him,” he answered. Neary wrote in the logbook and had me sign in too. He walked to the metal door and ran his ID card through the reader. The door gave a click, and he pulled it open.

We were in a corridor that extended to the right and left. Across from us, arranged end-on to the corridor, were row upon row of steel shelves. They reached almost to the ceiling, like library shelves. But the effect was more warehouse than library, as they were stacked not with books but with large, green filing boxes.

I followed Neary off to the left and around the corner. The floor was laid out like a square doughnut, and the four sides were mostly open space, given over to the rows of metal shelves. The aisles between the shelves were narrow, and as we walked past I saw windows at the other end, with dim views of buildings and airshafts. At each of the four corners was a cluster of offices, and in the central core were bathrooms, a kitchen, a room with copy machines, and access doors to the fire stairs and freight elevators. We passed maybe half a dozen people along the way, mostly young, mostly male, all casually dressed. They all knew Neary and greeted him.

The shelves aside, the floor was nicely fitted out. The carpets were coffee-colored and thick, and the walls were covered in a beige fabric. There was dark wood molding at the baseboards and the cornices. But the place had an abandoned, deserted feel nonetheless, and the ranks of high, metal shelves, stacked boxes, and narrow aisles made me slightly claustrophobic.

“We’ve got this floor and the one above,” Neary explained. “They used to be MWB’s back-office operations. We put in the security out front, pulled out the cubicles, and put in the shelves. Upstairs is set up just the same. Come on, I’ll introduce you to someone.”

“Any particular story you’ve told, about who I am and why I’m here?” I asked.

“I’ve been vague, and I intend to stay that way. Busman’s holiday is all I’ve said. It’s alright. My people are mostly ex-feds-they’re used to not being told shit. And the Parsons people are all accountants-they expect even less.”

Neary headed for one of the corners, and I followed. We walked into a small office that had been stripped down to the picture hooks. All that remained of furniture was a metal desk, two worn chairs in front of it, and a swivel chair behind it. A woman sat in the swivel chair, gazing at a computer screen. Her fingers were poised over the keyboard, and she had a pen between her teeth. She did not look up when we entered.

“Is now good?” Neary asked.

“Give me a sec,” she answered, without moving. She had several windows opened on the screen. A browser was running in one, and she was reading a document displayed in it. She made some notes on a legal pad.

“There,” she said to herself, and swiveled in her chair to face us. She stood and stuck out her hand. “Cheryl Compton,” she said.

Cheryl Compton was an early thirty-something, maybe five feet tall on her tiptoes and one hundred pounds soaking wet. She had cafe au lait skin and thick, shoulder-length hair the color of dark chocolate. Her face was broad, and her features an attractive mix of African and Asian. Her eyes were large and pitch black, and they flashed with an impatient intelligence, despite the fatigue that lay over them just now. She had a small, square chin and a sharply etched jawline, marred by a little knot of muscle working on one side. Her full lips were pursed. Compton was casually dressed, in gray wool pants and a black sweater. Her only jewelry was a black plastic watch. She pushed a wave of hair behind her ear and sat. We sat too.

“Cheryl joined us about three years ago, from IRS,” Neary began. “And most of her time with Brill has been on this account. Early on, she worked with the Parsons people and the technical guys, setting up the document management system, and now she’s our senior investigator at MWB. And whatever we pay her, it’s probably not enough, because she’s the one who really knows what’s going on around here.” He smiled. Compton rolled her eyes elaborately, but some of the tension went out of her jaw. She turned to me.

“He tells me you’re looking for some background stuff on what we’re doing and how we do it. I can give you the ten-thousand-foot overview, and you can tell me where you want to go from there. I’m assuming you know the basics about MWB.”

“I think so. I’ll call out if you lose me,” I said. She took a deep breath and began.

“Basically, there are three kinds of work going on here.” She ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke. “There’s liquidation analysis, litigation support, and document management. It sounds like consulting gobbledygook, I know, but it actually means something.

“Liquidation analysis is what the Parsons people are mostly engaged in, with some help from us. What they’re doing, essentially, is reconstructing the bank’s balance sheet-on the one hand determining what assets the bank still has, and on the other figuring out what it owes, and to whom. They’ll take you through all the grim details.

“Litigation support is Brill’s responsibility, and it’s just a fancy name for sending documents to people. As you probably know, there are a bunch of criminal proceedings underway against former MWB employees, and more are coming. On top of that, a slew of civil actions are gearing up. That means that every day, day in and day out, the MWB liquidation committee gets requests-orders, really-to produce documents. Task force investigators, the U.S. attorney, defense counsel, civil plaintiffs, you name it-they all want documents-lots of them. If the liquidation committee agrees to the requests-and they don’t usually have much choice in the matter-then we make sure that the orders get filled.” Compton spoke quickly. She’d done this spiel before, and her delivery was practiced. She paused to see if I was still with her. I was.

“Central to these two activities is the third thing we do here: document management. It was the first task we had when we started, and none of the other work can go on without it. When we came on the job, it was like boarding one of those ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle. You know, where everything looks normal but all the people are missing. Senior management was in jail or on the run, and the people who actually did the work, the traders, operations people, and accountants, had all been let go. And we couldn’t call any of them back, since they were all potential defendants. So we had an empty bank on our hands- a ghost ship. The only things that could tell us what the hell had been going on were the documents they’d left behind.

“But it was a huge mountain of paper, and organized filing was not MWB’s strong suit. To get-and keep-control of the documents we use a set of procedures and a computer system. The procedures are straightforward, even if the work itself isn’t. Every document we find on MWB premises is assigned a unique identification number, and is scanned in to a central documents database. Then, someone reviews it, classifies it, and writes an abstract of its contents, and all that goes into the database too. After that, the physical document goes offsite, to a warehouse out in Jersey we use as a storage center. From then on, any research we or the Parsons people need to do involving that document is done using the document database.” A chiming sound came from her computer, and Compton paused to glance at the screen. She clicked something and continued.