Christopher Reich - Numbered Account

Nick turned his face upward, allowing the bristling water to massage his eyelids and tickle his nose and his mouth. Suddenly, a memory stirred deep inside his confused brain—a souvenir from earlier that afternoon. He closed his eyes and concentrated. A word or two flickered—something sparked by his interest in the activity reports. He tried to coax it out, sure for a split second that he had a letter or two. But no, it kept itself hidden, swimming just below the surface. He gave up. Still, he knew something was there, and its presence fired in him a fierce desire for its discovery.

A dinner of veal scaloppini and spaetzle went mostly to waste. Nick couldn’t find his appetite. He told Sylvia that plain fatigue had caused him to fall asleep outside her apartment. He just couldn’t keep up with the Chairman. She accepted the explanation without comment, or for that matter, interest. She was too busy replaying her colleagues’ reactions to Marco Cerruti’s suicide. No one could begin to understand why he had taken his own life.

Nick did his best to share her feelings of bewilderment and anguish. “He must have been a brave man. Shooting yourself requires a helluva lot of courage.”

More than Cerruti had, that was for certain.

“He’d been drinking,” Sylvia explained. “Drink enough and you’ll do anything.”

Cerruti drink? The hardest stuff he touched was classic Coke. “Where did you hear that?”

“That he’d been drinking? Nowhere. Someone at the bank mentioned it. Why?”

Nick pretended as if his conscience had been offended, not his memory. “It’s a nasty thought, isn’t it? As if that explains it all. The guy juiced himself up and capped himself in the noggin. I’ll buy it. Now we can forget he even existed. Our consciences are spotless. None of us to blame.”

Sylvia frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about the poor man like that. It’s tragic.”

“Yeah,” Nick agreed. “A crime.”

A heap of yellow folders covered the dining room table. Each one contained three monthly activity reports submitted by Alex Neumann. Nick selected the folder dated July through September 1978 and drew it toward him. Sylvia slid a chair from the table and sat down. She held the agenda from 1978 close to her chest. “I checked our personnel records on Mr. Burki, first initial C—the executive at USB London who referred Soufi to your father. His name is Caspar Burki. He retired from the bank as a senior vice president in 1988.”

“Still alive?”

“I have an address in Zurich. That’s all. I can’t tell you whether it’s current.”

Nick took his father’s agenda from Sylvia and opened it to the month of April. He turned to the fifteenth of the month and found the first mention of Allen Soufi. Suddenly, the hidden recollection shot to the surface. He saw himself walking alongside Ali Mevlevi in the Platzspitz earlier in the day. He heard the Pasha’s voice complaining about his father: I could never be a derv. The spinning, the chanting. I was only interested in this world.

Nick stared for a moment at his father’s handwriting. “A. Soufi.” He repeated the name several times and felt a jolt of adrenaline fire through his chest. The elusive memory was close. Mevlevi’s voice echoed louder.

“Sylvia, do you know anything about dervs? You know, whirling dervishes?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Are you serious?”

“Humor me. Do you?”

Sylvia put her hand to her chin in a pose of classic cogitation. “Not a thing. Except that they wear some very funny hats.” She lifted her hand high above her head to indicate the height of a fez.

“Do you have an encyclopedia?”

“Just one on CD-ROM. It’s in my p.c. in the bedroom.”

“I need to look at it. Now.”

Five minutes later, Nick was seated at a desk in Sylvia’s bedroom. He stared at the opening screen of the encyclopedia and under “Search” typed in the word dervish. A short definition appeared. “A monastic sect founded by the disciples of Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, considered the greatest of Islamic mystic poets, who called themselves whirling dervishes. The basis of Islamic mysticism, called Sufism in Western languages, is to attempt by meditation to capture the nature of…”

Nick stopped reading. His eyes returned to the top of the screen, rereading the entry. His eyes stopped again at the same place. “The basis of Islamic mysticism, called Sufism in Western languages…”

Taking a breath, he ordered himself to review everything he knew about Ali Mevlevi. The man was a Turk. He had chosen the code word Ciragan Palace for his numbered account—the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul being the home of the last Ottoman sultans during the late nineteenth century. He carried an Argentinean passport that gave his family name as Malvinas and just that afternoon had admitted to living in Argentina. Malvinas, of course, was the Argentinean name for the Falkland Islands. He used the first name Allen as an alias. Allen was the anglicization of the Muslim Ali. And finally the last piece. Mevlevi’s father was a whirling derv, and the dervs belonged to the Sufi sect of Islam, ergo the name Soufi.

Nick swallowed hard. Keep cool, he told himself. You’re not there yet. Still, he could discern a pattern emerging. Ali Mevlevi constantly wove elements of his real life into his fictitious one. Allen Soufi. Allen Malvinas. Ali Mevlevi. The behavior fit. Hadn’t the Pasha also mentioned that he had lived in California? Throw all the facts together in a blender, stir violently, and what came out? Could Nick conclude that eighteen years ago Alexander Neumann had entertained Allen Soufi, better known as Ali Mevlevi, as a client of the Los Angeles branch of USB? Or was it simply a whole lot of coincidence?

It was nothing, Nick told himself. You’ve never believed in coincidence. But for once his skepticism deserted him. He ran the facts through his head one more time, daring himself to believe it. Strangely, part of him was scared to accept his own hypothesis. It reeked of fate and karma and all the things he had fought against his whole life. It was just too improbable.

But was it? If he really thought about it, no. Many clients work with a single bank their entire lives. Many sons work for the same company as their father. He stared at the name written in his father’s script and tossed aside his remaining doubts. “Sylvia,” he said excitedly, “we’ve got to keep looking for this Allen Soufi.”

“What is it? What have you found?”

“Confirmation that he’s our man.” Nick paused to temper his certainty. Humility demanded a modicum of doubt. “At least, I think. It’s still a little iffy. Let’s get back to the monthly activity reports. The answers we need are in there.”

Nick and Sylvia returned to the dining room table. He pulled her chair close to his, and together they scanned the contents of the remaining reports. Each report began with a mention of deposits made by new and existing clients. A description of corporate loan facilities granted and those under consideration followed. Third came logistical questions: salaries, personnel reports, office expenses. And last, a section for miscellaneous information. It was in this final section of the March 1978 activity report that Nick had first found mention of Soufi. He scoured his father’s reports, praying to find further word of the mysterious client. There had to have been a sound reason, a business necessity, that Soufi wished to work with USB Los Angeles.

Nick read through the June report. No mention. July, no mention. August, no mention. He reached for the next dossier. September, nothing. October. He slammed his hand on the table. “There. We’ve got him,” he cried. “Sylvia, October 12, 1978. What does the agenda say?”