Jake & Mimi (33 page)

“Please,” she says, “You have to —,” but her words are lost as I hold the cloth with one hand over her nose and mouth. She
struggles, and now is still. I take the cloth away, and her face falls softly to her breast and rests there. I remove my gloves.
I touch her hair. I look down at her bosom, at her dress, at the two inches of smooth leg above her socks. I touch my fingers
to her cheek.

Something in the wind reaches me, and I turn.

In the distance a set of headlights break the darkness, just beginning their slow approach down the exit ramp. I must work
quickly. I open the back door and untie her hands, then ease her into the backseat, as I did at the motel, covering her with
the same quilt. I return the soaked cloth and gloves to the black bag, close the trunk, and step to my door. The twin headlights
are just now reaching the rest area proper.

I slide behind the wheel. I pull out from behind the brick restroom and start across the lot, our refrain playing for its
final time now. Music from another age — measured, graceful. I accelerate onto the ramp and gain the Thruway again, merging
into the well-spaced, northbound lights. In five minutes we will be safely through the toll plaza.

In fifteen we will be home.

T
he cowbell over the door chimes as I walk into Aquarius, an old-time sixties bar on Seventy-eighth and Broadway. Acoustic
guitar pours from speakers mounted in the ceiling corners. Any song that played at Woodstock is on the jukebox in here. I
look to the back and see that the wooden booths are all filled, so I take a window seat along the rustic bar. The bartender,
his hair pulled into a graying sixties ponytail, makes his way down to me. I order two Guinnesses and watch as he pours them
the right way, in stages, taking other orders as the dark ale settles.

Jeremy will be here any minute with the copy of the Brice file that I took to his place a month ago, the night he prepped
me on financial instruments.

“What’s going on?” he asked me on the phone.

“Just meet me,” I told him.

The bartender returns and puts two pints of Guinness in front of me. I watch the heads settle, the foam cascade in layers
to the bottom. At the Knicks game, Jeremy said something about the Brice file. He said something about it not being clean.
I didn’t want to hear it at the time. The cowbell rings again, and I look up to see him walk in the front door. Even in Armani,
and with a sharp leather briefcase under his arm, he still looks like a high-school senior. He takes the barstool beside me
and lifts his pint of Guinness to mine.

“Cheers,” he says, his eyes sparkling the way they used to on the morning of a big exam. He pulls a manila folder out of his
briefcase and lays it on the bar. “I wondered when this would pique your interest, Jake. Is he in trouble?”

“I don’t know. What did you mean at the Garden, Jeremy, when you said his file wasn’t clean?”

He taps it with the bottom of his pint glass.

“You’ve read it, right?” he asks.

“We aren’t at TDX anymore. I do some of my own work now.”

He puts up a hand. “Just asking.” He pauses. “You remember it?”

“Brice inherits a pile from his dad. Liquidates everything, except for a… farm upstate somewhere.”

“A winery. In Albany.”

“Right. Which he sells a year ago.” Jeremy watches me, nodding intently. He waits for me to go on. “That’s pretty much it,”
I say.

He shakes his head sadly. “You missed it, Jake,” he says softly. “The red flag.” He opens the folder and hands me a sheet
of paper. I squint to read it in the low light. It is the deed of sale, transferring ownership of the winery from Andrew Brice
to the Iliad Corporation. I look it over, then back at Jeremy.

“See anything wrong with that?” he asks.

I examine it again. “The price,” I say finally.

“What about it?”

“Too low.”

“Bingo.” Jeremy takes off his glasses and hooks them into his shirt pocket. “Thirty acres outside Albany,” he says, “With
a winery on the grounds. Worth fifty grand when he inherited it in 1970. Thirty years later, he sells it for two hundred.”

“A third of what he could have gotten. A quarter.”

Jeremy nods.

“So he’s a bad businessman,” I say. “Where’s the crime in that?”

Jeremy sits quietly for a few seconds, as if with a little time it might all become clear to me.

“You’ve seen his portfolio,” he says finally. “What there is of it. Don’t you think Brice is too cheap to be that bad a businessman?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so, too. So I did some digging.” Jeremy puts his glasses back on and leafs through the papers in the folder. “Brice
sold the winery to the Iliad Corporation. Six months later the Iliad Corporation sold it to Seine, Incorporated. Six months
later they sold it.” He holds up copies of the three sales deeds. “It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.” He lays
them back on the bar and looks at me again, expectant.

“You lost me,” I say.

Jeremy sips his pint again, then rests it carefully on the bar.

“Have you ever heard of a nesting scheme, Jake?”

“No.”

“It’s named after those Russian nesting dolls. You know the ones — you take the head off, there’s another one just like it
inside. You take that one off, there’s another one. Then another one.”

“Sure.”

“Here’s how it works. You have a piece of property, right? You sell it to a dummy corporation that you’ve set up. A short
time later, that dummy corporation sells it to another dummy corporation. That one then sells it to another. And so on. We
studied this in b school. It was all the rage in South America in the eighties among the drug lords. Anyplace they had something
big going on, they’d pull a nesting scheme. That way, if the drug lab blew up, they’ve got a piece of paper saying they sold
the property years ago.”

“And the paper trail back to them is a wild goose chase.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I get it. What’s it have to do with Brice?”

Jeremy takes off his glasses again and holds them against his leg.

“I think Brice has a nesting scheme going.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the companies that bought the winery are dummy corps that he made up. He never really sold it at all, Jake. The winery
is still his.”

I reach for the manila folder, slide it in front of me on the bar, and page through it until I find the piece of paper I’m
looking for. “Only one problem with that theory, Jeremy.” I hold up the paper. “Canceled check. Seventy grand to the IRS.
And right here, on the memo line:
Sales tax on winery.
”

Jeremy doesn’t even look at the canceled check. He looks at me. Patiently, until he sees in my eyes that it’s starting to
sink in.

“That’s why a nesting scheme works, Jake,” he says quietly. “Because you pay the IRS. Who would ever think to question it?
Remember, it’s not money you’re trying to hide. It’s ownership. And you pay to hide it.”

“That’s why the sale price was so low.”

He nods. “Brice made it as low as he thought he could get away with.”

“But he’s out seventy grand,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Jeremy sighs. “I have to admit, the ‘why’ got me.” He looks at me. “I had Pardo swing by the place last week.”

I laugh. “You bulldog. Pardo?”

“He’s in Albany half the time, right? Ten minutes away. Well, every nesting scheme I’ve ever seen, it’s because the owner’s
up to something on the property. So I had Pardo drive over and take a look.”

“What did he find?”

“Nothing. The place is overgrown, abandoned. The winery itself is crumbling.”

“So there goes your theory.”

“Down in flames. Still, Jake, it’s strange. Three different companies own the property in one year. What are the chances that
none of them would do anything with it? But that’s what happened. Iliad buys it — does nothing. Seine buys it — does nothing.
Lessing Winery buys it — again, nothing.”

I look at him.

“What winery?” I ask.

“Lessing Winery. The last dummy corp. The one who owns it now.”

I pick up the three sales deeds from the bar and shuffle through to the last one. There it is, under buyer:

LESSING WINERY

I look for the sale date.

MAY
1, 1999

“Jesus.”

“What is it, Jake?”

I stare at the deed again.
LESSING WINERY
.
Mimi Lessing
. I stare at the type until it starts to blur. In my head I hear again Mr. Stein’s words to Mimi.
You made a stronger impression on our legacy than he did on you
.

“Jake?”

“One second.” I open my wallet and take from behind my license the scrap of paper with Mimi’s phone numbers on it. I take
my cell phone from my jacket. I hesitate, then dial her home number. Three rings, and then her machine. I dial her cell phone.
It rings. Twice. Three times. Four, five, six. I cut the call.

“I need one more favor, Jeremy.”

“What’s that?”

“Your car.”

T
he Spanish town of Cagaya once served the Crown by providing interrogators for the Inquisition. It was a profession passed
down within families through generations, and there is still an alley off Cagaya’s main square that the residents call Torturer’s
Lane. At the end of it is a redbrick building that pays grim homage to the town’s place in history. It is a leather-goods
store, but on its walls hang working replicas of the devices that wrung confessions from the damned three centuries ago. None
are offered for sale to the public, but if a passionate collector should make his way to the store, he would find the proprietor
to be a man of business.

I stand inside the front door of the winery my father purchased in 1968. It lies in ruins. In one corner stand the rusted
press and crusher, in another the collapsed bottling machine. Beside the weathered front door is a gnarled pile filled with
woven picking baskets, steel trellises, and field boots. Nothing in it has been touched in three decades. Along the side wall
are two 500-gallon stainless-steel tanks, meant to ferment the wines my father would craft in his retirement. They have stood
empty for thirty years now, casualties of the cancer that struck him down.

I lean my shoulder against the heavy, rusted front door and push it closed, sealing out the moonlight and the intermittent
sounds of the country night. The 5,000-square-foot winery is quiet now, and most of its expanse lies in darkness. But not
all of it. Ten yards in front of me is a large circle of light. I start toward it across the packed earth floor. The light
emanates from within a ring of barrels. Forty-four barrels of white French oak, double-stacked to a height of five feet and
arrayed in what would be a perfect circle except for the opening in front of me. Each barrel is filled with cabernet sauvignon,
and together they give off the damp aroma of wood and wine that permeates the air of the winery.

I stop in the opening and touch one of the rough, stained barrels with my fingers. Within this ring of barrels, facing one
another in two rows of three, are six standing heaters, each sending its heat down and toward the center. Within these rows
of heaters, across from each other, are two 300-watt lamps, each again training its bright light into the center of the circle.
And in that center is Miss Lessing.

Three hours ago I found her spread wide and stripped to her barest lace. She is again. I enter the ring of barrels and walk
to her side. She is starting to stir, starting to break free of the narcotic pull of the chloroform. Her brow is clear and
relaxed, and now she wets her lips, imagining maybe that she is as before, bound lightly on a motel-room bed, awaiting the
soft touches of Jake Teller.

As her senses return, she will realize that she is not lying on a bed at all, but on a table of hard canvas. And when she
tests the binds that secure her, she’ll find that instead of the soft silk that inflamed her imagination, her hands are fitted
now into gloves of coarse, strong, old-world leather. And closed tight around each ankle is a heavy strap of the same hide.