Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

“No comment,” he says. “I can’t talk about that.”

“Give me a break,” I tell him. “Can’t you at least give me something? I assume you don’t want Alex to go to prison?”

“I don’t,” he says. “He’s a good reporter. Dogged. I like him. I like him a lot.” Graves looks like a man who’s trapped. Worried and perhaps feeling like a heel at this moment, at least I hope so, anything would help. “Let me think,” he says. He wheels around in his swivel chair, turns his back to me for a moment, and looks out the window, the wall of glass behind him toward the buildings across the street.

When he turns back, the fingers of both hands are steepled under his chin as if he is deep in thought. “I don’t know a lot about the law or copyright,” he says. “But I assume that if you were to discover what I know on your own, from other sources independent from any information we have here at the Gravesite, without any assistance from me or my staff, that Haze would have no claim against the Gravesite .”

Of course, this ignores what Alex has already told me. I nod. “That’s true.”

“Did you ever read the Bible?” he asks.

“I have.”

“Then you know that Jesus spoke in parables.”

I nod again.

“I make no pretense to be the Son of God,” he says, “but listen to my parable and see what you can draw from it.”

“Can I take notes?”

“No! Do you remember Abscam?”

“I remember the movie.”

“That was American Hustle. This was the real thing,” he says. “It may be that’s where they first got the idea.”

“Who?”

He gives me a face and shakes his head like that’s out of bounds. “You wanted a clue. I’m giving you one. Abscam was a political scandal back in the late seventies, early eighties. It started as an FBI undercover sting involving stolen property and corrupt business types in the Big Apple. It lasted for two years.

“Then in the last few months somebody at the FBI got the bright idea to take it in a different direction. It morphed into a probe of political corruption and migrated from New York to Washington. By the time it got here it had grown into a couple of mustachioed Arab oil sheiks throwing money to members of Congress willing to do official favors in return. In the end, by the time the FBI pulled the plug and shut it down, they had netted six members of the House and one US senator. There was one member of Congress who, when offered the money, actually said ‘No’ and another who mumbled sufficiently so that they couldn’t bring charges.

“When they finally went public, the FBI got hammered from every side. Some claimed it was a setup, that otherwise ethical politicians were induced to commit crimes because they were entrapped. Others said the FBI folded their tent and shut down the show because of fear that the political class, those who survived, would get their revenge by crushing the bureau when the dust settled. The FBI’s official version is that it all came to a sudden end because one young lawyer at the Justice Department who was privy to the details left his briefcase containing sensitive undercover information on a train. You can take your pick. I like the second one,” said Graves.

“You’ll notice that was thirty-five years ago and there hasn’t been another sting aimed at politicians in Washington since. That tells you something. The rumor was that had they let it go on for a few more months, they might not have been able to find a quorum for either house under that great big dome. The place would have been empty.” With this, the story stops and he looks at me.

“Your point is?”

“If you look closely, you’ll see there are several lessons here. One,” he says, “is that most politicians are oversize. They have massive egos and appetites to match. They are always testing to see if they can game the system. And monkeys learn from past mistakes.”

“OK.” I have no idea where he’s going with this.

“You don’t get it, do you?”

I shake my head.

“If people are getting stung, sent away for acts of corruption committed here, what’s the answer?” he says.

“Go straight?”

“Remember these are people with big egos,” he says.

“Do it offshore?” I say.

“Bingo.”

“OK, but I still don’t get it.”

“Second parable,” he says. “A lesson from J. Edgar. Very brief. Then I gotta run. Got a meeting and I’ll see you to the door,” he says.

“You remember back in the seventies, maybe before your time, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI? He died in ’72, I think. But he was director for almost forty years. They couldn’t get rid of him. They tried, believe me. Several presidents wanted to fire his ass. He was an irascible bastard with a lot of vices. Years after he died, we found out that the mob had been paying his gambling debts at racetracks for years. So according to Hoover’s Bureau, the official position of the FBI was that there was no such thing as organized crime in America. The next time somebody looks at today’s FBI and tells you this ain’t your daddy’s FBI, you tell them you sure as hell hope not.

“Anyway, they couldn’t fire the son of a bitch. Hoover had a card catalogue in his closet at home filled with all kinds of embarrassing information. For years he’d been using the bureau’s agents to dig up dirt on politicians all over this city. Not only here but back in their home states. If you were an aspiring politician with some dark skeleton under your bed you could be sure J. Edgar would find it and take pictures of it for his files. Anybody who was anybody had a file in Hoover’s closet. If you were important, you had two or three. And if you even dreamed about making a move on him, he let it be known that your life story with every wart highlighted in headlines would spread out all over the wires and in every newspaper in the country by the next morning. As you can imagine, he didn’t need to do a lot of arm twisting on Capitol Hill when it came to the bureau’s budget. Some people call it extortion. But I once heard a very wise man refer to it as ‘the Hoover Effect.’ Now you go home and you think about it, these two parables. Put ’em together and see what you come up with. I’m sure it will come to you.”

He opens the center draw of his desk, takes something out. Something small, because when he closes his hand it’s gone, I can no longer see it. Instantly he’s out from behind his desk, easing me out of my chair, his arm around my shoulder, guiding me toward the door while I’m still trying to close up my briefcase. “It was nice talking to you,” he says. “Perhaps we can do it again sometime under happier circumstances.” He waltzes me out through the computerized rock pile in the boiler room outside, past the receptionist, through the smoked glass doors, and into the public corridor outside.

He reaches out to shake my hand, then looks down as he does it. “You dropped something,” he says.

Before I can say anything Graves reaches down to pick it up. Without looking at it he hands it to me. Then he shakes my hand, smiles, and before I can say a word he is gone back into his office.

He disappears behind the counter and through the sea of workstations beyond. I look at the item in my left hand. It’s a business card, very stiff, raised lettering, something expensive: “Gruber Bank, A.G.” The information on the card appears to be printed in German, telephone numbers, a street address in Lucerne, and the name “Simon Korff, Auslandskonten.”

We know where he is. We know the general area. And we’re on top of it. Give us twenty-four hours, we should have him.” They had located Alex Ives.