Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

Nixon had signed the photograph, in his knifelike script, “With deepest thanks for doing your part to keep the election honest.”

I loved that.

“Great job on that Traverse Development thing,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’re good. Sometimes I forget how good.”

“It was easy.”

“You only make it look easy, Nick. You’ve got sprezzatura . You know what that means?”

“I’m on Zithromax,” I said. “Supposed to get rid of it.”

He glanced at me, then chuckled. “ Sprezzatura ’s an Italian word. Means the art of making something difficult look easy.”

“Is that right?” I said.

As we entered his office, I mentioned the name of the big oil company we’d all just been talking about, and I said, “That’s an awful big contract to turn down, Jay. I’m impressed.”

He looked at me. “Come on, man – you think I’m letting that one slip through my fingers? In this economy? The house on Nantucket needs a new roof.” He winked. “Always cover your ass, Nicky. Sit down. We gotta talk.”

Visitors to Jay Stoddard’s office were always surprised. They expected the standard ego wall of framed photographs of Stoddard with the rich and famous and powerful. But those he’d banished to the hallway. Which was either modest or clever – or just his way of putting his fingerprints all over our offices.

Instead, the walls of his office were lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were first editions – Victor Hugo and Trollope – but mostly there were big picture books on architecture. Strewn artfully across his glass coffee table were magazines like Architectural Record and Metropolis and a big orange book called Richard Meier Architect.

He was an architecture nut. Once, over his fourth glass of single malt at the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, he confessed to me that, as a young man, he’d desperately wanted to go to the Yale School of Architecture. But his father, who’d been in the OSS during World War II, forced him to join the CIA. Jay wasn’t morose about it, though. “Dad was absolutely right,” he said. “I’d have starved to death. I thought all architects were rich!”

He shrugged off his suit jacket and hung it on a mahogany valet in the corner. Over his threadbare blue button-down shirt were bright red suspenders – which he called “braces,” because he was an Anglophile – with little pictures of golfers on them.

“You need a cup of coffee,” he announced, pushing the intercom button on his desk phone. “Intravenous, looks like. Hungover, Nick?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I never drink on plane flights.” It was true. One of the secrets of business travel, I’d learned. That and always fly first class. “No coffee, thanks.”

His assistant’s voice came on: “Yes?”

“Sorry, Heather, cancel that,” he said to the speakerphone as he sat behind his desk. He never drank coffee, himself. He said he didn’t need it, which made it hard to trust him. I don’t need a lot of sleep, but this guy was almost an android. He was incredibly energetic. He played squash, I was told, like a Roman gladiator on speed.

Jay leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, propping up his head, staring off somewhere behind me. This made him look bored and disengaged.

He often came off as casual and shambling and loose-jointed, but his desk told you everything you needed to know: It was always perfectly clean. Nothing marred the wide polished expanse of mahogany. He was a Type-A personality, an obsessive-compulsive, a clean freak. He was great at banter, never seemed to take anything seriously, sometimes even appeared to be muddleheaded. But he missed nothing. His mind was a steel-jaw trap: Once you got caught in its teeth, you’d have to chew off your own limb to escape.

“So you got in to the office early today?”

I shrugged.

“Looking into Traverse Development, huh?” he said. His blue eyes seemed to have gone gray.

“I like to know as much as possible about my clients,” I said. I’d run Traverse Development through our standard corporate registration databases and found nothing. I’d also run a search on the cell-phone number that Woody gave me back in L.A., the emergency contact number for whoever had hired him. But no luck. It came back as “private.”

Did someone tell Stoddard I’d been searching? Or did my computer search trigger some kind of notification?

“Maybe not the best use of your time.”

“Don’t worry, I did it on my own time.”

He paused. “And?”

“It doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Strange,” Stoddard said. He was toying with me. “The check cleared.”

“No business registration in the city of Arlington. Or Arlington County. Nothing in SearchSystems. The address on that shipment turns out to be bogus – a rented mail drop. A place called EasyOffice, which is one of those business suites you can rent by the hour or by the week. The rent was paid in cash. So obviously it’s a front.”

“Oh, please. Don’t be so suspicious. Companies use fronts for all kinds of legitimate reasons. Like avoiding taxes.”

“You know what was in that container, don’t you?” I said. “What was being shipped out of Bahrain?”

“I didn’t ask.” Jay was too skilled to look evasive.

“But you know anyway,” I said.

He laughed. Sometimes talking with him was like fencing. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I think you know damned well what was in those boxes.” I said it in a good-humored way, not wanting to come off as confrontational. Confrontational rarely worked with him.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, which was always the giveaway that he was trying to decide whether to tell a lie. The “tell,” as they say in poker. Stoddard was practiced in the art of deception, but my skill at reading people is better. I give full credit for this to my father, who was a liar the way some people are alcoholics. He lived and breathed dishonesty. It was a useful education for a kid.

“If you opened a sealed shipment, Nick, you don’t want to brag about it. You could get the whole firm in trouble. If you’re going to break the law, you do it for the client. Not to work against the client.”

“It was a messy recovery, Jay. A couple of boxes broke open.”

“Why do I doubt that? Point is, whatever you found, that’s outside of the scope of our work. They hired us to do a very specific job. Nothing beyond that. In addition to which, as you well know, anything we come across in the course of an investigation that might be detrimental to a client we always keep confidential. Otherwise, we’d go out of business in a week. I don’t need to tell you this.”

This was one of the things I didn’t love about my job. Often, a client would hire us to investigate some alleged wrongdoing inside the company, and later, after we found it – embezzlement or fraud or bribery or whatever – we’d discover that what the client really wanted was to see if it could be found. Sort of like a game. A scavenger hunt. If we couldn’t find it, neither would the Justice Department. And they always insisted that we bury our findings. Clean up the mess for them and keep our mouths shut. If you didn’t go along with them, they might refuse to pay. And the word would get around that you were, well, maybe a little too fussy. A pain in the ass. Not the kind of firm you could really be comfortable with.

This sort of thing happened far more than we or anyone else liked to admit. Which was why you had to be careful about who you signed up to work for. You didn’t want to find yourself complicit in covering up someone else’s crime.

“This has the potential to blow up in our faces,” I said. I lowered my voice. “There was close to a billion dollars there in cash. Sealed in bricks by the U.S. Treasury.”