Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“Here.”

“On you?”

“They’re in the trunk of your Benz, in the first-aid kit, underneath the cold packs.”

A rueful smile crosses Mr. Boyce’s face. “You broke into my car?”

“I’ll need them in the Caymans. I need you to hold them for me till then.”

“And what about the cash?”

“I’m using it for expenses.”

“I want receipts,” Boyce says.

“You’ll get them.”

Boyce looks down the fairway. It’s a short par four, 330 yards, and he takes the driver from his bag. “You think three’s enough to buy you in?” he asks.

“More would be better, but the right references and the right introduction should convince him there’s a steady supply.”

“And Bessemer is the guy to introduce you?”

“He’s the best bet.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Of course not. But he’s known Prager for years, he’s been referring clients to him, one way or another, for a while, and he’s approachable. He’s the best bet.”

“It’s your call,” Boyce says, and tees up his ball at the tips. “And what about the woman-Chun?”

“Valerie has a good feeling about her.”

“ Good feeling? I like to base my investments on a little more than that.”

“If we want to add six months to the timetable, then we can look elsewhere. If not, then Chun’s our girl.”

Boyce shakes his head. “Let’s hope it’s a great feeling,” he says, and another gunshot echoes across the lake. The ball hits the fringe and bounces onto the green. Boyce nods slowly as it rolls, then he turns to Carr and leans his hip against his driver, as if it were a cane.

“So Valerie’s doing all right?” he asks.

“She’s doing fine.”

“And Mike and Bobby, and the kid?”

“Dennis. They’re fine too.”

“Must be an adjustment for them, not having Deke there. A different rhythm for them-a different style.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been around the block together.”

“But you’re not part of the crew anymore. You’re the boss now. Management.”

Carr pinches the bridge of his nose and looks at Mr. Boyce, whose eyes are like black stones. “It’s all good.”

Boyce taps the toe of his golf shoe with his driver. “Deke ran a tight ship-very firm, very hands-on. He wasn’t worried about being liked-”

“He didn’t have to worry-everybody liked him.”

“Regardless, that wasn’t his focus. His focus was on having his orders followed. He was a good soldier that way-a good platoon leader. It’s not an easy job, and not everyone’s built for it. Some people need to be liked; some people get lazy or stupid.”

“Which one of those do you think is my problem?” Carr says.

The wind subsides for a moment, and the smells of grass and loam and trapped heat rise up, as if the ground has opened. Mr. Boyce straightens, and Carr takes a step back. “You’ll know when I think you have a problem,” he says, and Carr can feel the bass rumble in his chest. Boyce looks at him for a while, sighs, and drops his club into his golf bag.

“You have anything for me?” Carr asks.

Boyce points at Tina, who is already headed for the tee with something tucked under her arm. “She’ll fix you up,” Boyce says, and he turns toward the green.

Carr and Tina sit on a bench off the cart path, in the heavy shade of an oak. The air is cool here, and Tina’s legs shine white in the shadows.

“The new stuff’s at the last tab,” she says, and she opens the latest British Vogue while Carr opens the latest edition of Curtis Prager’s dossier.

Carr remembers the first time he read it, six months back, in a hotel bar in Panama City, and remembers Declan’s whiskey-furred voice as he slid it across the table. Last job of work we’ll need to do, boyo. It’s the feckin’ sweepstakes. The lined red face split in a grin. Carr has read and reread it countless times since then-all but memorized it-but still he looks at every page.

A picture comes first, Curtis Prager years ago, emerging from the back of a black car. He is lithe, tanned, and shiny, his features finely sculpted, his hair like blond lacquer on his neat head, his shoulders square. An Apollo of finance, Carr thinks-a gilded man for a gilded age. All that’s missing is a laurel wreath.

After the photo are the puff pieces about him that appeared in financial trade rags in the United States and Europe with great regularity before the crash. In tone they run a narrow gamut from fawning to sycophantic, and they all tell the same tale: of the tow-headed prodigy, home-schooled in Cincinnati until age sixteen, then off to Princeton, Harvard B-school, and Wall Street after that. By age twenty-five, he was the youngest managing director in the history of Melton-Peck; by twenty-eight he was the head of all trading there; and by thirty he was out the door-off to seek his fortune as a hedge fund manager, with a very large fortune in bonus money already in hand, and a flock of investors following behind him, all eager to pay for the privilege of having the wunderkind manage their money.

And so the birth of Tirol Capital, which from the first charged staggering fees, made a mania of secrecy, and cultivated an air of exclusivity to rival any Upper East Side co-op or private school. The formula worked well for Prager and, along with the outsize returns he reported year after year, helped make Tirol one of the fastest growing funds of the new century.

Besides the money, and the truckloads by which it arrived at Tirol’s Greenwich, Connecticut, doorstep, the articles discuss Prager’s many good works. There are lists of scholarship funds, endowed chairs, research laboratories, and hospital pavilions that bear his name, and pictures of Prager and the missus-tall, blond, disdainful-at an endless series of charity events. Black ties, white ties, polo shirts and sunglasses-the dress code varies, but never the smiles, which are tight and entitled. Smiles of any sort are in short supply in the next set of clippings-the ones from the trials.

There were two of them, the first just before the markets collapsed, the second just afterward, and despite the torch-and-pitchfork temper of those times, both ended in hung juries. The press attributed this to the complexity of the government’s case against Prager-the difficulty of making money-laundering and conspiracy charges stick, the arcane financial instruments involved-though some in the U.S. Attorney’s office grumbled darkly, and not for attribution, about jury tampering.

The feds were about to have a third go when their only witness, a former Tirol compliance officer named Munce, drove his Lexus off a dark road in Litchfield County, and through the frozen skin of the Housatonic River. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and there was ice on the roadway, but still the feds had both Munce and his car stripped down to their frames. The autopsies found nothing, though, and the most they could do to Prager were a dozen stiff fines for a dozen obscure record-keeping violations.

But the mere fact of his indictment, along with the implosion of the markets, had already dealt much worse punishment to Prager and his firm. Tirol was losing investors at a slow bleed before the first trial began, and like a broken hydrant afterward, and by the time the feds imposed their fines, the firm was down to a measly billion or so in assets under management, and a handful of clients in Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

News coverage of Curtis Prager dropped off sharply four years back, after the fines-a mention in the Greenwich Time of the sale of his North Street estate, another in the New York Post of his divorce and exodus to the Cayman Islands. After which the press had bigger, more blatant frauds to cover, and the entries in the dossier switch from press clippings to what Carr recognized on first reading as intelligence reports.