Clawback (10 page)

“You can groom
my
poodle.”

Et cetera. What can I say? Goldfinger had skills and access unavailable to the rest of the world—at least, the world outside legitimate law enforcement. I had to put up with him. And he wasn’t a terrible guy, if you could ignore the affect.

His real name was Ernie, but we called him Goldfinger on account of the absurd collection of rings on both hands. He said it
was instead of brass knucks, so he could at any moment seriously damage someone in the face. Fourteen-carat knuckle dusters. That was all bullshit, he just liked the Gambino look, but what the hell.

The pair of CZ .45s he kept under his jacket were more of the same.

A car squealed down the ramp to the lower level, just outside the door. Fumes drifted in. No natural light penetrated this far, just the buzzy fluorescents.

Last night, on my way home, I’d left the baton in a plastic bag tucked behind the dumpster at Amir’s. This morning the bag had still been there, wet but undisturbed. I had planned on finding a permanent disposition today, but now I had a better idea.

“I need this printed,” I said, showing Goldfinger the baton inside the bag.

“Yeah.” He didn’t reach out to take it.

“And run through IAFIS.”

“Uh-huh.”

“In the next thirty minutes or so.”

“What? Get the fuck outta here.”

“Come on. You’re the
man
. Help me out.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ask for the fucking moon, why don’t ya?”

And so forth. The dickering was going to take as long as the actual job, but that was Goldfinger for you. I noticed he’d installed his technical equipment on a table by the desk—hood, lighting, tool rack, dirty unlabeled jars.

See, he hadn’t always been a parking clerk. Not long back he’d been a forensic technician—sorry,
criminalist,
he gets annoyed if you disrespect him like that—for the Manlius County sheriff’s office.
Despite a personality that any normal person would find tedious at best, he apparently made plenty of friends among other forensi–
criminalists
throughout New York and, more important, the FBI. He’d be there still, despite an inclination to drink, except that Goldfinger was a really lousy drunk.
Really
lousy. Even your friends will overlook only so many D&Ds. Pissing all over the sheriff’s shiny new Interceptor one night was the last straw.

For a while he’d done okay as an independent consultant—serving as an expert witness in criminal cases, with a nice sideline in freelance forensics. Here’s the thing: anybody can learn to take fingerprints or sample DNA. That’s the easy part. But to find a match, you need access to the databases, and those are firewalled, quite securely, by the Department of Justice.

Goldfinger’s stroke of genius was to get himself deputized. Because he’s not a “peace officer,” no matter how broadly defined, it wasn’t easy. The loophole he used came from Section 654 of New York County law, allowing sheriffs to deputize “agents of societies incorporated for the purpose of prevention of cruelty to animals.” It’s trivial to sign up with the New York SPCA. God knows how much the bribe was, but when he emerged from the smoky back room of the sheriff’s office, Goldfinger was now Deputy Dawg, and he’d parlayed that into a remote subscription to the FBI’s fingerprint repository.

Over time his consulting dwindled away, ruined by too many missed court dates, fucked-up reports and incoherent, raging phone calls. The alcoholic’s usual trail of wreckage. But he kept a few clients like me—not choosy, off the record, cash paying.

“Are you sure there are latents on here?” Goldfinger had removed the baton from its damp plastic bag, holding it gently with purple nitrile gloves. Sober, he was as good as anybody.

“Mine, for sure. I’m more interested in the original owner’s.”

“It’s not a half-hour job.” He looked up. “Tell you the truth, more like a day. They’re not fast, in Washington. And it’ll cost.”

Ganderson was paying, but still. I sighed. “As soon as you can.”

He opened it, slowly, and examined the entire length. “No blood.”

“Not for lack of trying. They beat up a girl pretty good, but this didn’t come out until I arrived, and I took it away.”

“Nice.”

For a moment my chest had hollowed out. I wasn’t about to let Goldfinger know about Clara, but I shouldn’t have mentioned her.

“If it’s there, you’ll find it,” I said.

We agreed on a price, and I gave him a dead-drop email address—one I’d signed up for anonymously, and would use once. I always keep a few on tap, for convenience at times like this. I didn’t want to have to chase him down if he decided to go on a bender.

When I left, Goldfinger was at his desktop vacuum chamber. The baton rested on two wire supports, to prevent further degradation of what prints might be there, and he had begun to fume it with cyanoacrylate. He looked comfortable, at home in his dank cinderblock cave.

“What should I do with it when I’m done?” he asked.

“Send me the results.”

“No—the baton. Is it evidence?”

Hardly. I’d completely mucked up the chain of custody. “I’m not
building a court case,” I said. “Scrub it clean and sell it at the pawn shop.”

Outside, the morning’s off-and-on rain had slowed. Puddles shifted and flowed, rippled by occasional drops, gray under a lowering sky. Still, after Goldfinger’s underground burrow, it felt like freedom. I set off for the Deaconess branch library, happy to walk the six blocks in open air.

I wanted to check my email. As usual, the operative constraints of my profession—that sounds better than paranoia, doesn’t it?—turned a mundane task into a notable pain in the ass. Casual news reading is one thing, but I couldn’t access personal accounts on any of my mobiles. Not without throwing them away afterward, because none had proxy routers installed and I didn’t much trust the carriers anyway. Home had a laptop running up-to-date anonymizing software off encrypted memory, but that was too far in the other direction.

So I had to rely on that fading memorial to the printed word, the public library.

Deaconess was a small, vertical, brick-faced nonentity tucked between two apartment blocks. The tables were more than half filled, and I had a half hour wait for a computer. Browsing in the periodicals—for a small branch, they had a surprisingly well-stocked collection—I noticed the
Post
’s headline: “I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE: AVENGER TARGETS BANKSTERS.”

Whether from Clara or not, the story had come to life. I wondered what the mood was like on Wall Street that morning.

I finally got a computer around eleven. Too many job seekers and people who could no longer afford high-speed home internet, so the library terminals were always crowded. But there’s no better place to borrow a connection that no one’s paying attention to, and isn’t recorded, and therefore even if subpoenaed is useless to prosecutors on fishing expeditions.

Librarians—the final defenders of our liberty.

I ended up with a homeless guy on one side, checking out spring fashion at
neimanmarcus.com
, and a junior high-schooler researching homebuilt bongs. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be there long, just a few minutes to check my various addresses.

A hectoring email from Ganderson: “CALL ME NOW!!!!!” I guess he’d seen the papers, or maybe even read Clara’s blog. Delete. Other useless messages, delete. Too much spam. Delete, delete, delete. A short message from Johnny—him I’d call back as soon as I could.

And finally, the one I was really looking for: “doing better. out of hosp tonite 7 they say. pick me up?? -c”

Absolutely. I sent back a simple “yup” and signed out.

Somehow, Clara had won me over. She was a looker, no denying, and smart, too. But this is the big city—four million women to meet every day, and plenty of them are sharp. Certainly I’d never had to go far whenever the room began to seem too empty.

Of course, few of them ever learned about the other half of my life. Maybe it was simply that Clara had been the first to get damn near all the way in. A relief, I had to admit, not to be constantly managing the lies and evasions and misdirection that made up my interaction with the civilian world.

But it was more than that. Clear-eyed, independent and making her own way in a difficult world—I’m not much for introspection, but Clara reminded me of, well, myself.

Minus all the deadly force stuff, presumably.

Leaving the library, I had a positive bounce in my step.

“A
kelman wasn’t an accident,” Johnny said.

“We knew that.”

“But it wasn’t anarchists, either. Not the kind who despise personal property, anyhow.”

I looked up from my burrito. “You know something, don’t you?”

“If the government has any halfway-smart investigators, they’ll be on it too.”

“So we can count that out. What’d you find?”

We were outside, walking through Battery Park after buying lunch at the burrito cart parked across from MTA headquarters. The rain had stopped, replaced by another fine mist that dampened the tortilla no matter how I tried to keep it sheltered in its foil. The temperature hadn’t budged past forty. The park was nearly deserted, except for soggy tourists near the ferry terminal.

“Akelman was a commodities trader,” Johnny said. “Specializing in obscure metals. Like you said, last spring he bought up all the neodymium he could find.”

“High-tech motors.” I scoured my memory for details from the article or two I’d read at the time. “Disk drives.”

“And lasers.” Johnny took a huge bite but kept talking. Kind of disgusting. “And that’s all I know, except that demand was strong and growing. Akelman could have come out quite nicely, but for the Chinese.”

“Who announced a major new find in Inner Mongolia, about the same time.”

“Right. Suddenly, supply wasn’t tight at all. The price plummeted. Akelman lost his shirt.” He was more than half done with his burrito already. “Or his investors did, anyway. They weren’t happy.”

“That was months ago. Long before he got hit by a car.”

“Not so long. But Akelman sold mostly to second-tier institutional investors—midwestern pension funds, small-school endowments, that sort of thing. Bad news for them, of course, but you wouldn’t expect a manager to jump up in a rage, drive two thousand miles, and run him over.”

I rubbed my forehead, wet from the drizzle. “What are you telling me? It really was an accident?”

“Maybe not.” Johnny fell silent for a moment while we passed one of the few other people in the park, a man in a Burberry raincoat glaring at his iPhone. “Akelman almost went under, and he seems to have made one last, big gamble, trying to win back the table.”

“On what?”

“Cobalt.”

I thought about that. “If he lost so much money on neodymium,
he wouldn’t have had the scratch to take a big position—and a small position wouldn’t save him. I don’t see it.”

“That’s true if he were buying the actual metal.” He paused. “Is cobalt really a metal? I don’t even know.”

“Who
cares
?”

“Not me. The point is, cobalt was over the counter only, until a couple of years ago. The London Metal Exchange introduced futures in 2010, and there’s a liquid market. That’s where the action took place.”

“Aha.” Futures were simply a contractual promise to buy or sell product later—not the product itself. The advantage was leverage; using borrowed money as a multiplier, Akelman would have been able to place a dangerously large bet without having to stump up the entire purchase price at the beginning.

“So he went long on cobalt.”

“Very, very long.”

“How do you know this?” The exchanges report aggregate trading data at almost real-time intervals, but the names of the traders are concealed behind high walls of secrecy.

“It wasn’t easy. They don’t
want
people knowing this shit.”

He wouldn’t tell me, of course. Probably he paid someone off. We all have our sources, our cloaks of mystery.

“Okay, whatever. Akelman had bought up a huge stake in cobalt.” I stopped. “Wait a minute, I see where this is going.”

“Exactly.”

“When he died, unexpectedly—did his fund really have to close it out?”

“Looks that way. Akelman Advisers, LLC, ran on the bone. No
other partners, hardly any analytic staff, just a couple of accountants, a secretary and Akelman’s nephew, who’d taken a leave of absence from Carleton College last semester. When he died, no one was around to pick up the reins. They pretty much had to shut it down, and quick. Fiduciary duty. If it were the S&P 500, maybe they could have let it ride, but the cobalt was pure speculation. A huge liability if it tanked while nobody competent was in charge.”

“They sold it
all
off? At once?”

“Yeah.” Johnny shook his head. “At the opening bell, next business day. Every last contract, in one go. It started a minipanic, and cobalt went straight off the cliff.”

I could see that. “Algos?”

“Mostly.” Algorithmic trading, done entirely by computers at microsecond speeds, dominated every market now. Every program was different, conjured up by secretive teams of quant PhDs, but they had broad similarities. One was an extreme aversion to unusual or unexpected developments. When the Akelman fund’s sell orders hit, hundreds of microprocessors simultaneously took that as a sign that something was wrong in cobalt, and they all must have immediately issued their own exits.