Avenger (12 page)

"You were still single?"

"No, I had married my first wife. We had three children."

"They are still there?"

"No, all dead."

"Disease?"

"B fifty-twos."

"Go on."

"Then the first Americans came. Under Kennedy. Supposedly as advisors. But to us, the Diem regime had simply become another puppet government like the ones imposed under the Japanese and the French. So again, half my country was occupied by foreigners. I went back to the jungle to fight."

"When?"

"Nineteen sixty-three."

"Ten more years?"

"Ten more years. By the time it was over, I was forty-two and I had spent half my life living like an animal, subject to hunger, disease, fear and the constant threat of death."

"But after 1972, you should have been triumphant," remarked Dexter. The Vietnamese shook his head.

"You do not understand what happened after Ho died in 1968. The party and the government fell into different hands. Many of us were still fighting for a country we hoped and expected would have some tolerance in it. The ones who took over from Ho had no such intention. Patriot after patriot was arrested and executed. Those in charge were Le Duan and Le Due Tho. They had none of the inner strength of Ho, which could tolerate a humane approach. They had to destroy to dominate. The power of the secret police was massively increased. You remember the Tet Offensive?"

"Too damn well."

"You Americans seem to think it was a victory for us. Not true. It was devised in Hanoi, wrongly attributed to General Giap, who was in fact impotent under Le Duan. It was imposed on the Vietcong as a direct order. It destroyed us. That was the intent. Forty thousand of our best cadres died in suicide missions. Among them were all the natural leaders of the South. With them gone, Hanoi ruled supreme. After Tet, the North Vietnamese Army took control, just in time for the victory. I was one of the last survivors of the southern nationalists. I wanted a free and reunited country; yes, but also with cultural freedom, a private sector, farm-owning farmers. That turned out to be a mistake."

"What happened?"

"Well, after the final conquest of the South in 1975 the real pogroms started. The Chinese. Two million were stripped of everything they possessed; either forced into slave labour or expelled, the Boat People. I objected and said so. Then the camps started, for dissident Vietnamese. Two hundred thousand are now in camps, mainly southerners. At the end of 1975, the Cong Ang, the secret police, came for me. I had written one too many letters of objection, saying that for me, everything I had fought for was being betrayed. They didn't like that."

"What did you get?"

"Three years, the standard sentence for "re-education". After that, three years of daily surveillance. I was sent to a camp in Hatay province, about sixty kilometres from Hanoi. They always send you miles from your home; it deters escape."

"But you made it?"

"My wife made it. She really is a nurse, as well as being a forger. And I really was a schoolmaster in the few years of peace. We met in the camp. She was in the clinic. I had developed abscesses on both legs. We talked. We fell in love. Imagine, at our age. She smuggled me out of there; she had some gold trinkets, hidden, not confiscated. These bought a ticket on a freighter. So now you know."

"And you think I might believe you?" asked Dexter.

"You speak our language. Were you there?"

"Yes, I was."

"Did you fight?"

"I did."

"Then I say as one soldier to another: you should know defeat when you see it. You are looking at complete and utter defeat. So, shall we go?"

"Where had you in mind?"

"Back to the Immigration people of course. You will have to report us."

Cal Dexter finished his coffee and rose. Major Nguyen Van Tran tried to rise also but Dexter pressed him back into his seat.

"Two things, major. The war is over. It happened far away and long ago. Try to enjoy the rest of your life."

The Vietnamese was like one in a state of shock. He nodded dumbly. Dexter turned and walked away.

As he went down the steps to the street, something was troubling him. Something about the Vietcong officer, his face, the expression of frozen astonishment.

At the end of the street passers-by turned to look at the young lawyer who threw back his head and laughed at the madness of Fate. Absently he rubbed his left hand where the one-time enemy's hot nut oil in the tunnel had scalded him.

It was 21 November 1978.

Chapter TEN

The Geek

BY 1985 CAL DEXTER HAD LEFT HO NEYMAN FLEISCHER, BUT NOT for a job that would lead to that fine house at Westchester. He joined the office of the Public Defender, becoming what is called in New York a Legal Aid Lawyer. It was not glamorous and it was not lucrative, but it gave him something he could not have achieved in corporate or tax law, and he knew it. It was called job satisfaction.

Angela had taken it well, better than he had hoped. In fact, she did not really mind. The Marozzi family were close as grapes on the vine and they were Bronx people through and through. Amanda Jane was in a school she liked, surrounded by her friends. A bigger and better job and a move up market were not required.

The new job meant working an impossible amount of hours in a day and representing those who had slipped through a hole in the mesh of the American Dream. It meant defending in court those who could not begin to afford legal representation on their own account.

For Cal Dexter poor and inarticulate did not necessarily mean guilty. He never failed to get a buzz when some dazed and grateful 'client' who, whatever else his inadequacies, had not done what he was charged with walked free. It was a hot summer night in 1988 when he met Washington Lee.

The island of Manhattan alone handles over 110,000 crime cases a year and that excludes civil suits. The court system appears permanently on the verge of overload and a circuit blow-out, but somehow seems to survive. In those years part of the reason was the 24-hours-a-day conveyor belt system of court hearings that ran endlessly through the great granite block at 100 Center Street.

Like a good vaudeville show the Criminal Courts Building could boast "We never close'. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that 'all life is here' but certainly the lower parts of Manhattan life showed up.

That night in July 1988 Dexter was working the night shift as an on-call attorney who could be allocated a client on the say-so of an over-busy judge. It was 2 a.m. and he was trying to slip away when a voice summoned him back to Court AR2A. He sighed; one did not argue with Judge Hasselblad.

He approached the bench to join an Assistant District Attorney already standing there clutching a file.

"You're tired, Mr. Dexter."

"I guess we all are, your honour."

"No dispute, but there is one more case I'd like you to take on. Not tomorrow, now. Take the file. This young man seems to be in serious trouble."

"Your wish is my command, judge."

Hasselblad's face widened in a grin.

"I just love deference," he rejoined.

Dexter took the file from the ADA and they left the court together. The file cover read: "People of the State of New York versus Washington Lee'.

"Where is he?" asked Dexter.

"Right here in a holding cell," said the ADA.

As he had thought from the mugshot staring at him from the file, his client was a skinny kid with the air of bewildered hopelessness worn by the uneducated who are sucked in, chewed up and spat out by any judicial system in the world. He seemed more bewildered than smart.

The accused was eighteen years old, a denizen of that charm-free district known as Bedford Stuyvesant, a part of Brooklyn that is virtually a black ghetto. That alone aroused Dexter's interest. Why was he being charged in Manhattan? He presumed the kid had crossed the river and stolen a car or mugged someone with a wallet worth stealing.

But no, the charge was bank fraud. So, passing a forged cheque, attempting to use a stolen credit card, even the old trick of simultaneous withdrawals at the opposite ends of the counter from a dummy account? No.

The charge was odd, unspecific. The District Attorney had laid a 'bare-boned' charge alleging fraud in excess of $10,000. The victim was the East River Bank, headquarters in midtown Manhattan, which explained why the charge was being pursued on the island, not in Brooklyn. The fraud had been detected by the bank security staff and the bank wished to pursue with maximum vigour according to corporate policy.

Dexter smiled encouragingly, introduced himself, sat down and offered cigarettes. He did not smoke but 99 per cent of his clients dragged happily on the white sticks. Washington Lee shook his head.

"They're bad for your health, man."

Dexter was tempted to say that seven years in the state pen was not going to do great things for it either, but forbore. Mr. Lee, he noted, was not just homely, he was downright ugly. So how had he charmed a bank into handing over so much money? The way he looked, shuffled, slumped, he would hardly have been allowed across the Italian marble lobby of the prestigious East River Bank.

Calvin Dexter needed more time than was available to give the case file full and proper attention. The immediate concern was to get through the formality of the arraignment and see if there was even a remote possibility of bail. He doubted it.

An hour later Dexter and the ADA were back in court. Washington Lee, looking completely bewildered, was duly arraigned.

"Are we ready to proceed?" asked Judge Hasselblad.

"May it please the court, I have to ask for a continuance," said Dexter.

"Approach," ordered the judge. When the two lawyers stood beneath the bench he asked: "You have a problem, Mr. Dexter?"

"This is a more complex case than at first appears, your honour. This is not hubcaps. The charge refers to over ten thousand dollars, embezzled from a blue-chip bank. I need more study time."

The judge glanced at the ADA who shrugged, meaning no objection.

"This day week," said the judge.

"I'd like to ask for bail," said Dexter.

"Opposed, your honour," said the ADA.

"I'm setting the bail at the sum named in the charge, ten thousand dollars," said Judge Hasselblad.

It was out of the question and they all knew it. Washington Lee did not have ten dollars, and no bail bondsman was likely to want to know. It was back to a cell. As they left the court, Dexter asked the ADA for a favour.

"Be a sport, keep him in the Tombs, not the Island."

"Sure, not a problem. Try and grab some sleep, huh?"

There are two short-spell remand prisons used by the Manhattan court system. The Tombs may sound like something underground but it is in fact a high-rise remand centre right next to the court buildings and far more convenient for defence lawyers visiting their clients than Riker's Island, way up the East River. Despite the ADA's advice for a bit of sleep, the file probably precluded that. If he was to confer with Washington Lee the next morning he had some reading to do.

To the trained eye the wad of papers told the story of the detection and arrest of Washington Lee. The fraud had been detected internally and traced to Lee. The bank's Head of Security, one Dan Witkowski, was a former detective with the NYPD and he had prevailed on some of his former colleagues to go over to Brooklyn and arrest Washington Lee.

He had first been brought to, and lodged in, a precinct house in midtown. When a sufficient number of miscreants were gracing the cells of the precinct house, they were brought down to the Criminal Courts Building and re lodged there on the timeless and unvarying diet of baloney and cheese sandwiches.

Then the wheels had ground their remorseless course. The rap sheet showed a short litany of minor street crime: hubcaps, vending machines, shoplifting. With that formality complete, Washington Lee was ready for arraignment. That was when Judge Hasselblad demanded that the youth be represented.

On the face of it, this was a youth born to nothing and with nothing, who would graduate from truancy to pilfering and thence a life of crime and frequent periods as a guest of the citizens of New York State somewhere 'up the river'. So how on earth had he sweet-talked the East River Bank, which did not even have a branch in Bedford Stuyvesant, out of $10,000? No answer. Not in the file. Just a bare-bones charge and an angry and vengeful Manhattan-based bank. Grand Larceny in the 3rd Degree. Seven years' hard time.

Dexter grabbed three hours' sleep, saw Amanda Jane off to school, kissed Angela goodbye and came back to Center Street. It was in an interview room in the Tombs that he was able to drag his story out of the black kid.

At school he had shone at nothing. His grades were a disaster. The future offered nothing but the road to dereliction, crime and jail. And then one of the school teachers, maybe smarter than the others or just kinder, had allowed the graceless boy access to his Hewlett Packard computer. (Here, Dexter was reading between the lines of the halting narrative.)

It was like offering the boy Yehudi Menuhin a chance to hold a violin. He stared at the keys, he stared at the screen, and he began to make music. The teacher, clearly a computer buff when personal machines were the exception rather than the norm, was intrigued. That was five years earlier.

Washington Lee began to study. He also began to save. When he opened and gutted vending machines, he did not smoke the proceeds, or drink them, or shoot them into his arm, or wear them as clothes. He saved them until he could buy a cheap bankrupt-stock computer in a closing-down sale.

"So how did you swindle the East River Bank?"

"I broke into their mainframe," said the kid.

For a moment Cal Dexter thought a jemmy might have been involved so he asked his client to explain. For the first time the boy became animated. He was talking about the only thing he knew.

"Man, have you any idea how weak some of the defensive systems created to protect databases really are?"

Dexter conceded it was not a query that had ever detained him. Like most non-experts, he knew that computer-system designers created fire walls to prevent unauthorized access to hyper-sensitive databases. How they did it, let alone how to outwit them, had never occurred to him. He teased the story out of Washington Lee.

The East River Bank had stored every detail of every account holder in a huge database. As clients' financial situations are regarded by most clients as very private, access to those details involved bank officers punching in an elaborate system of coded signals. Unless these were absolutely correct, the computer screen would simply flash the message "Access Denied'. A third erroneous attempt to break in would start alarm signals flashing at head office.

Washington Lee had broken the codes without triggering the alarms, to the point where the main computer buried below the bank's HQ in Manhattan would obey his instructions. In short, he had performed coitus non-interruptus on a very expensive piece of technology.

His instructions were simple. He ordered the computer to identify every savings and deposit account held by clients of the bank and the monthly interest paid into those accounts. Then he ordered it to deduct one quarter from each interest payment and transfer that quarter into his own account.

As he did not have one, he opened one at the local Chase Manhattan. Had he known enough to transfer the money to the Bahamas, he would probably have got away with it.

It is quite a calculation to ascertain interest due on one's deposit account because it will depend on the ambient interest rate over the earning period, and that will fluctuate, and to get it to the nearest quarter takes time. Most people do not have that time. They trust the bank to do the maths and get it right.

Not Mr. Tolstoy. He may have been eighty but his mind was still sharp as a pin. His problem was boredom, whiling away his hours in his tiny apartment on West 108th Street. Having spent his life as an actuary for a major insurance company, he was convinced that even nickels and dimes count, if multiplied enough times. He spent his time trying to catch the bank out in error. One day, he did.

He became convinced his interest due for the month of April was a quarter short. He checked the figures for March. Same thing. He went back two more months. Then he complained.

The local manager would have given him the missing dollar, but rules are rules. He filed the complaint. Head office thought it was a single glitch in a single account, but ran random checks on half a dozen other accounts. Same thing. Then the computer people were called in.

They established that the master computer had done this to every checking account in the bank and had been doing so for twenty months. They asked it why.

"Because you told me to," said the computer.

"No, we didn't," said the boffins.

"Well someone did," said the computer.

That was when they called in Dan Witkowski. It did not take very long. The transfers of all these nickels were to an account at the Chase Manhattan over in Brooklyn. Client name: Washington Lee.