Pleading Guilty

  With the acceleration of the offshore economy and the vast riches of today's pirates in neighboring Latin nations, who trade in powder rather than pieces of eight, Pico has gone through startling development in the last three decades. All the dough that's stashed here goes untaxed, and for that reason is not apt to leave. There's a $100 airport tax, a $10 tariff for every wire transfer, and a flat 10 percent VAT on everything that's bought or sold. Burgers for the family in a restaurant in C. Luan can cost one hundred bucks. But the combination of no income tax and financial privacy means there is steady commerce and plenty of jobs. The Luanders remain remote, cordial, even, as British discipline made them, correct, but confident about the native way of wanting less. Fast-paced and ham-fisted, white people are regarded with whatever good nature as freaks.

  Our hotel, at the far end of the beach, three or four miles outside C. Luan, was terrific. We had two little thatch-roofed cabanas side by side, self-contained units, each with a kitchen, a bar, and a bedroom that looked out on the water. Brushy had to reach her secretary at home to rearrange tomorrow's appointments, and I stepped outside on the small terrace of my unit as her voice rose in occasional frustration over the difficulty of getting a US connection.

  The sun was heading down now, a great rosy ball burning away in the clear sky. We'd been traveling all day most companionably, doing crosswords on the plane, holding hands, gossiping about our partners and items in the Sunday Times. Out on the beach, various mothers, weary at the end of the day, called for their kids with fading humor. Pico, originally the haven either to guys who stepped off planes with wraparound shades and a firm grip on their valise, or a few archaeologists drawn by the enormous shrines the Mayas had built high in the mountains in sight of the ocean, is, after decades of promotion by TN, taking hold as a family vacation spot. By air, it's an hour farther than the islands, but it's less overrun and sports more notable sights. I watched kids scramble around between the legs of their parents, the little ones flirting with the waves and running screaming up the beach. One boy was lugging coconuts, still in their smooth brown husks, so that it looked a little like he was mounting a collection of heads. The sailboats were still out, but the water was losing its color. In the blazing sunlight it was a radiant blue, the result perhaps of copper deposits on the coral floor, a hue you thought existed solely in ads for color film.

  'All done.' Brush was off the phone. She'd put on a kind of sundress and we walked up to the hotel and had dinner on the veranda, watching the pink fingers take hold of the sky, the water licking down on the beach. With my blessing she had a couple of drinks while I knocked down iced teas. She was looking happy and loose. Halfway through dinner a native band started playing a few rooms away in the bar inside, and the music and laughter came through the open french windows. The rhythm and themes were haunting, that Central American sound, pipes and flutes, sweet melodies like an echo out of the mountains.

  'What a place.' Brushy looked with yearning at the sea.

  'I kind of think this is charming,' I said. 'Your following me.'

  'Somebody had to do something,' she told me.

  I was as ever dishonorable, and pretended to have no idea what she might mean. She peered into her drink.

  'I thought a lot about that conversation. In your office yesterday? People are entitled to change, you know.' When she raised her eyes, she had that look again, all pluck and daring.

  'Naturally.'

  'And you're right about me. But I don't have to apologize for that. It's a natural thing. The older you get, the more you wonder about things that are -' She faltered.

  'What?'

  'Enduring.'

  I flinched. She saw me. She put a hand to her eyes.

  'What am I doing?' she asked. Even with the candle guttering on the table, I could see she had flushed suddenly, maybe the liquor, maybe the heat adding to the effect of the strong emotion. 'God, what do I see in you?'

  'I'm honest,' I told her.

  'No, you're not. You're self-deprecating,' she said. 'There's a difference.' I gave her the point. 'You deserve better,' I told her.

  'You're not kidding.'

  i mean it.' I was as resolute as I could be. It was not, I swear, easy for me. But I was having one of those lucid moments when I could tell just how it would go. Brushy would always blame me for not being better and herself for not wanting more.

  'Don't tell me what's good for me, okay? I hate when you do that, like you're Lazarus, who crawled out of his cave just to do Ann Landers's column for a week.'

  'Jesus Christ,' I said. 'Ann Landers?'

  You try to make people dislike you, Mack,' she told me. 'You lure them in, then drive them away. If that's supposed to be some form of winning Irish melancholy, I want you to know I don't find it charming. It's sick,' she said. 'It's nuts.' She threw her napkin in her plate and looked out to the sea to gather herself.

  After some time she asked if it was too late to swim.

  'Tide's out. It's shallow for a quarter of a mile. The water is 83 degrees year round.' I tried smiling.

  She made a sound, then asked if I'd brought a suit. She held out a hand as she stood.

  The path to the beach was carved through the high ragged weeds and Bermuda grasses and lit by little fixtures on stanchions at the point of each stair. Sunday night, even in Pico, was quiet. There was action on the beach, but that was closer to C. Luan, where the big hotels were clustered. Down here, where it was mostly condos, there was a deserted, summery air, except for the band that struck up periodically a few hundred yards off in the hotel bar. We swam a little, kissed a bit, and sat there while the water washed around us. Middle years and acting like eighteen. Every time I thought about it, I wanted to groan.

  'Swim with me,' Brushy directed, and she splashed out a bit to a deeper point. Closer to shore the gathered shells were hard on the feet, but about fifty yards out the sand was soft and she stood lolling against me. The moon had been up for a while but was growing brighter, a blue neon glow spilling down like an apron beneath a few boats moored for the night. The hotel and its little outbuildings and the giraffe-like coconut palms hulked on shore, dark on darker.

  'There are fish in these waters,' I told her. 'Gorgeous things. Stoplight parrot fish, and sergeant majors trimmed in yellow, and whole schools of indigo hamlets with colors more intense than you see in your dreams.' The thought of this great beauty, below, unseen, moved me.

  She kissed me once, then placed her face on my chest and swayed to the band that had struck up again. The small swells rose and fell about us.

  'Wanna dance?' she asked. 'I think they're playing our song.'

  'Oh yeah? What's that?' 'The hokey-pokey.' 'No shit.'

  'Sure,' she said, 'don't you hear it?'

  She left her bikini top on, but she removed the bottom and then wrestled off my trunks. She held our suits in one hand and with the other grabbed hold of the horn of plenty.

  'Salve work?' she asked.

  'Miracle drug,' I said.

  'And how do you do the hokey-pokey?' she asked. 'I forget.'

  'You put your right foot in.' 'Right.'

  'You put your right foot out.' 'Good.'

  'You put your right foot in and you shake it all about.'

  'Great. What's next?' she asked and kissed me sweetly. 'After the foot?' She boosted herself up on my shoulders and with the slow controlled grace of a gymnast parted herself in the dark water and settled upon me so that I was somehow reminded of a flower.

  'I don't think this'll work.'

  'It'll work,' said Brushy with all her familiar confidence in matters sexual.

  So there we were, Brushy Bruccia and me, hokeying and pokeying, cruising through the tropical waters among the beautiful fish, with the silver of the moon spilled out like glory around us. In and out and shaking it all about.

  Mon, it was something else.

  TAPE 5

  Dictated February 1, 1:00 a.m.

  Monday, January 30

  XX
II.

  BANK SECRECY

  A. Staying Alone

  With a woman beside me, I suppose I should have slept well, but I was away from home and near the heart of darkness and I could not pass through the portal to my troubled dreams. A high-voltage anxiety coursed through me, like some grid from which the tortured lightning seems to leap. I sat on the edge of the bed with my face screwed up in the dark and begged myself not to do what I had a mind to, which was head to the bar, where the band was still tootling, to get one of those five-dollar shots of rye. It is not really an illusion that liquor makes you brave. It does, because it is so much harder to be hurt. I have a catalogue of significant injuries inflicted while I was crocked - second-degree burns from cigarettes and boiling liquids which went awry; twisted ankles; sprained knees; and some walloping insults from an angry wife that were hurled with the force of a cannonball. I survived them all with only a little Mercurochrome or an occasional trip to the emergency room. I had a right to think that was what I'd need.

  I got up and, for comfort, like a child who fixes on a blanket or a teddy bear, went back across the veranda to my cabana, and found my Dictaphone. I spent an hour telling my story to myself, my voice hushed but still seeming to travel on the sweet evening wind so that I worried that Brushy might hear.

  It was my father I thought about, my father and mother both, actually. I tried to figure how it settled with her, his being a thief. Many of the little treasures he carried off in his pockets were offered to her first. Perhaps I flatter her memory to say that she never seemed at ease. 'We don't need this stuff, Tim.' Encouraging him, I would say, to be a better man. She wore a brooch once that especially pleased him, a large ruby-colored stone in the middle and a lot of antique filigree, but usually she ended up declining anything, which led naturally to many quarrels when he'd had something to drink.

  I talked to my mother about what was happening on a single occasion. I was sixteen then and full of opinions.

  'He's no worse than everybody else,' she told me.

  'They're thieves.'

  'Everybody's a bit of a thief, Mack. Everybody's got something they're wantin to steal. It just takes the rest of us watching to make most folks stop.'

  She was not so much trying to defend him, I thought, as standing a parent's high ground. Either way, I didn't buy it. I was still at the age when I wanted to be a better man than my father. It was a thirst in me. Unquenchable. One of those many appetites I tried to sate thereafter with the fiery taste of liquor. I never wanted to see a woman regard me with the blighted disappointment he saw from my mother. But, you know, life is long, and I loved my old man too, all those moody Irish songs and his hapless affection for me. He never told me to be better than he was. He knew what life was like.

  I fell asleep upright on the sofa, briefcase in my lap. Brushy's searching about woke me. Even groggy, I recognized from the fretful way she inspected me that this was a woman who had awakened before to discover herself disappointed and alone, and I was quick to comfort her, having had some lonely mornings of my own. We had a fine time together, in bed and on the terrace, where we eventually took breakfast squinting and sweating in the unremitting sun. Around 11:00,1 stood.

  'I'm going to meet that lawyer,' I said.

  Still in her robe, Brushy asked me to wait for her.

  'You stay,' I answered. 'Get some snorkel gear from the beach attendants. Go look at the fishies. It'll make the trip.'

  'No, really,' she said. 'I knew there was work to do.' 'Hey. You don't want to know. Remember?' 'I lied.'

  'Listen.' I sat down beside her. 'This whole thing's turning mean. Just stand clear.'

  'Mean in what way?' she asked. Her face became absorbed in lawyerly precision. She wanted to ask more, but I held her off. I kissed her quickly and headed downtown with my briefcase.

  B. Foreign Banking

  The International Bank of Finance, whose block stamp appears on the back of each of the eighteen checks cut to Litiplex from the 397 escrow account, is a little tiny place, almost a storefront, except for the grand mahogany interiors. Since my days in Financial Crimes, it has been known as reliable. Ownership, as ever, is a mystery, but there are impressive correspondent relationships with some of England's and America's biggest banks, and rumor always had it that it was one of the American royal families, Rockefeller or Kennedy, somebody like that, with an ancient knowledge of the relationship between wealth and corruption, who was really behind it. I don't know.

  I said I wanted to open an account, and in the cordial Luan way the manager presently appeared, an angular black man in a blue blazer, Mr George, an elegant fellow with that peculiar Luan accent, an island lilt fugued with the patois still spoken by the coastal peoples. George's office was small but richly paneled, with wooden columns and bookcases. I told him I wanted to discuss a seven-figure deposit, US funds. George didn't even twitch. For him stuff like this is every day of the week. I hadn't told him my name yet and neither one of us thought I was going to. This is an entire city where nobody's ever heard about ID. I want to be Joe Blow or Marlon Brando, that's fine. Bank passbooks down here all have your photo pasted inside the cover, no name.

  'After deposit, if I want to transfer the funds while I'm Stateside,' I asked, 'what's the procedure?'

  'Telephone,' he said. 'Fax.' Mr George wore round black glasses and a bit of mustache; he had long fingers which he raised in a steeple as he spoke. For phone transfers, he said, a customer was required to give an account number and a password; prior to the transaction the bank would telephone to confirm. I considered it unlikely that Jake was sitting in his office at the top of the TN Needle taking calls from bankers in Pico Luan. I asked about fax.

  'We must have written instructions, including a handwritten signature or other withdrawal designation,' he said. Very artful, I thought. Withdrawal designation. For all those who didn't like names.

  'And how long before the transfer takes place?'

  'We wire to Luan-chartered institutions within two hours. If we receive instructions before noon, we promise good funds in the US by 3:00 p.m. Central Time.'

  I reviewed all of this thoughtfully and then asked him for whatever I would need to open an account and whether I could do it by mail. George replied with an enigmatic Luanite gesture: white man can do what he likes. He opened a drawer for the papers.

  'The account holder should kindly supply two copies of a small photo. One for the passbook, one for our records. And here, in this space, we should have the account holder's handwriting, whatever designation will be used to authorize withdrawals.' 'The account holder,' he said, surmising that I was a stand-in for somebody too important to be seen in C. Luan. And of course he never used the words 'signature' or 'name'. It struck me then that Martin had to have spoken to this guy. His description was dead on. 'Like trying to grab hold of smoke.'

  In the office there was a small window, discreetly shaded by jalousies, through which you could see the street traffic passing. There was no screen, since on this side of the mountains there is nothing as troublesome as a bug. At that moment a bird landed on the windowsill, a little wrenny-looking thing, no make I recognized. He, she, it hopped around and finally took an instant to look straight at me. It made me laugh, I must admit, this birdy scrutiny, the thought that you didn't even have to be a mammal to wonder what gives with Malloy. George whisked the back of his hand and told it to shoo.

  With the papers, I returned to the street. The sun was high now, savagely bright and thrilling after the indoor weeks in the Middle West. Down here I always understood how people could worship the sun as a god. The business district is only a few blocks, close-set buildings, three and four stories each, stuccoed in Caribbean pastels with roofs of Spanish tile. The tourists roamed among the business folk. Good-looking gals in straw hats and beach coverups, their legs tanned and fully revealed, strode among the suits with their briefcases.

  I looked around for more banks, the names of which were unobtrusively displayed on t
he building sides in English and Spanish, both of which are official languages. Many of the great names in world finance are present, with Luan affiliates housed in pocket-sized spaces like the International Bank's. In this modest fashion a $100 billion economy thrives, Luan-chartered corporations and trusts, funded with fugitive dollars, borrowing and buying and investing around the world, money without a country, as it were, and happy to stay that way.

  I found the office of one of the big banks from Chicago, a name I knew - Fortune Trust - and told them I wanted to open a personal account. Same drill as across the street, except this time I wasn't just fishing and did it. I put down $1,000 American in bills and they took my picture twice with one of those machines. When the photos dried, they pasted one in my passbook and the other to their signature card. I elected to keep all deposits in dollars - I could choose from a menu of fourteen currencies - and said I wanted no statements, which saved me from the need to provide an address. Interest would be posted whenever I showed up to present my passbook. I checked a box on a form authorizing them to debit the account $20 US any time money was wired.