The Wolf of Wall Street (17 page)

I ran that one through my mind and had to admit it was clever. But this strategy seemed even riskier than the debit card. If I were to put a mortgage on my home, it would be recorded by the Town of Old Brookville, which meant all the FBI would have to do is go down to the town and request a copy of my deed—at which point they would see that an overseas company had funded the mortgage. Talk about your red flags! Apparently, this was the more difficult part of the game. Getting money into a Swiss bank account was easy, and shielding yourself from an investigation was easy too. But repatriating the money without leaving a paper trail would prove to be difficult.

“By the way,” Jean asked, “what is the name of the woman you will be bringing to the bank?”

“Her name is Patricia; Patricia Mellor.”

Saurel smiled his conspirator’s smile once more, and he said, “That is a fine name, my friend. How could a woman with such a name ever break the law, eh?”

An hour later, Saurel and I had stepped out of the hotel elevator and were walking down the fourth-floor hallway on our way to Danny’s room. Like the lobby, the hallway’s carpet had the look of the retarded monkey, and the color scheme was the same sad mixture of dog-piss yellow and regurgitation pink. But the doors were brand-spanking new. They were dark-brown walnut, and they gleamed brilliantly. An interesting dichotomy, I thought. Maybe that was what they meant by Old World charm.

When we reached Danny’s gleaming door, I said, “Listen, Jean—Danny is quite the party animal, so don’t be surprised if he’s slurring a bit. He was drinking scotch when I left him, and I think he’s still got some sleeping pills in his system from the flight over. But, whatever he sounds like, I want you to know that when he’s sober he’s sharp as a tack. In fact, he lives by the motto ‘If you go out with the boys you gotta wake up with the men.’ You understand, Jean?”

Saurel smiled broadly and replied, “Ah, but of course I do. I could not help but respect a man who lives by such a philosophy. This is the way of things in much of Europe. I would be the last man to judge another based on his desire for the carnal pleasures.”

I turned the key and opened the door, and there was Danny, lying on the hotel-room floor, flat on his back, wearing nothing at all—unless, of course, you consider naked Swiss hookers clothing. After all, he was wearing four of those. There was one sitting on his face, backward, with her tight little butt smothering his nose; there was a second mounted upon his loins, thrusting up and down. She was engaged in a ferocious kiss with the girl sitting on Danny’s face. There was a third hooker holding his ankles down in a spread-eagle position, and the fourth hooker was holding his arms down, also spread eagle. The obvious fact that two new people had entered the room hadn’t slowed them down a bit. They were still going strong—business as usual.

I turned to Jean and took a moment to regard him. His head was cocked to one side and his right hand was rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as if he were trying to make heads or tails of what each girl’s role was in this sordid scene. Then, all at once, he narrowed his eyes and began nodding his head slowly.

“Danny!” I sputtered loudly. “What the fuck are you doing, you deviant?”

Danny wriggled his right arm free and pushed the young hooker off his face. He lifted his head and tried his best to smile, but his face was nearly frozen. Apparently he had gotten his hands on some cocaine too. “Ize zgezzing zcrummed!” he muttered through clenched teeth.

“You’re getting what? I can’t understand a word you’re fucking saying.”

Danny took a deep breath, as if he were trying to muster up every last ounce of manly strength, and he snapped in a staccato beat: “I…get…ting…scru…ummed!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I muttered.

Saurel said, “Ah, I do believe the man has said that he is getting scrummed, as if he were a rugby player of some sort.” With that, Jean Jacques nodded sagely and said, “Rugby is a very popular sport in France. It appears that your friend is, indeed, being scrummed, but in a most unusual fashion, although one I entirely agree with. Go upstairs and call your wife, Jordan. I will take care of your friend. Let’s see if he is a true gentleman and will be kind enough to share the wealth.”

I nodded and then went about searching Danny’s room—finding and flushing twenty Quaaludes and three grams of coke down the toilet. Then I left him and Saurel to their own devices.

A few minutes later I found myself lying in bed, contemplating the insanity of my life, when all at once I got a desperate urge to call the Duchess. I looked at my watch: It was 9:30 p.m. I did the calculation—4:30 a.m., New York time. Could I call her that late? The Duchess loved her sleep. Before my brain could answer the question, I was already dialing the phone.

After a few rings came the voice of my wife: “Hello?”

Gingerly, apologetically: “Hi, honey, it’s me. I’m sorry I called so late, but I’m really missing you bad, and I just wanted to tell you how much I love you.”

Sweet as sugar: “Oh, I love you too, baby, but it’s not late. It’s the middle of the afternoon! You got the time change backward.”

“Really?” I said. “Hmmm…well, anyway, I’m missing you really bad. You have no idea.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” said the luscious Duchess. “Channy and I both wish you were home with us. When are you coming back, my love?”

“As soon as I can. I’m flying to London tomorrow, to see Aunt Patricia.”

“Really?” she said, slightly surprised. “Why are you going to see Aunt Patricia?”

All at once it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone—and then all at once it occurred to me that I was getting my wife’s favorite aunt involved in a money-laundering caper. So I pushed those troubling thoughts aside and said, “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I have other business in London, so I’m going to stop in on Aunt Patricia and take her out for dinner.”

“Ohhh,” answered a happy Duchess. “Well, send Aunt Patricia my regards, okay, sweetie?”

“I will, baby, I will.” I paused for a brief moment, then I said, “Honey?”

“What, sweetie?”

With a heavy heart: “I’m sorry for everything.”

“For what, honey? What are you sorry for?”

“For everything, Nae. You know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I flushed all my Ludes down the toilet, and I haven’t done one since the plane flight over.”

“
Really?
How does your back feel?”

“Not too good, baby; it hurts really bad. But I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there’s anything I
can
do. The last surgery made it even worse. Now it hurts all day long, and all night too. I don’t know—maybe all the pills are making it worse or something. I’m not really sure anymore. When I get back to the States, I’ll go see that doctor in Florida.”

“It’ll work out, my love. You’ll see. Do you know how much I love you?”

“Yes,” I said, lying. “I do. And I love you back twice as much. Just watch what a great husband I’m gonna be when I get home, okay?”

“You’re already great. Now go to sleep, baby, and come home safe to me as soon as you can, okay?”

“I will, Nae. I love you tons.” I hung up the phone, lay down on the bed, and began pushing in the back of my left leg with my thumb, trying to find the spot where the pain was coming from. But I couldn’t find it. It was coming from nowhere, and everywhere. And it seemed to be moving. I took a deep breath and tried to relax myself, to will away the pain.

Without even knowing it, I found myself saying that same silent prayer—that a bolt of lightning would come down from out of a clear blue sky and electrocute my wife’s dog. Then, with my left leg still on fire, the jet lag finally got the best of me and I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 15

THE CONFESSOR

H
eathrow Airport! London! It was one of my favorite cities in the world, save the weather, the food, and the service—the former of which was the worst in Europe, the middle of which was the worst in Europe, and the latter of which was the worst in Europe too. Nevertheless, you still had to love the Brits, or, if not that, at least respect them. After all, it’s not every day that a country the size of Ohio, with a natural-resource base of a few billion pounds of dirty coal, can dominate an entire planet for more than two centuries.

And if that wasn’t enough, then you had to be awed by the uncanny ability of a few select Brits to perpetuate the longest-running con game in the history of all mankind, namely—royalty! It was the most fabulous scam ever, and the British royals had done it just right. It was utterly mind-boggling how thirty million working-class people could come to worship a handful of incredibly average people and follow their every move with awe and wonder. Even more mind-boggling—the thirty million were actually silly enough to run around the world calling themselves “loyal subjects” and bragging about how they couldn’t imagine that Queen Elizabeth actually wiped her own ass after taking a dump!

But in reality none of this mattered. The simple fact was that Aunt Patricia had been spawned from the very marrow of the glorious British Isles. And, to me, she was Great Britain’s most valuable natural resource.

I would be seeing her soon, right after I cleared British Customs.

As the wheels of the six-seat Lear 55 touched down at Heathrow, I said to Danny, in a voice loud enough to cut through the two Pratt & Whitney jet engines, “I’m a superstitious man, Danny, so I’m gonna end this flight with the same words I started it with: You’re a real demented fuck!”

Danny shrugged and said, “From you, I’ll take that as a compliment. You’re not still mad at me for keeping a few Ludes off to the side, are you?”

I shook my head no. “I expect that sort of shit from you. Besides, you have this wonderful effect of reminding me how truly normal I am. I can’t thank you enough for that.”

Danny smiled and turned his palms up. “Heyyyy—what are friends for?”

I smiled a dead smile back at him. “That aside, I’m assuming you don’t have any more drugs on you, right? I’d like to pass through Customs uneventfully this time.”

“No, I’m clean—you flushed everything down the toilet.” He lifted his right hand up in the scout’s honor mode. Then he added, “I just hope you know what you’re doing with all this Nancy Reagan crap.”

“I do,” I replied confidently, but deep down I wasn’t so sure. I had to admit that I was slightly disappointed that Danny hadn’t squirreled away a few more Ludes. My left leg was still killing me, and while my mind was dead set on staying sober, the mere thought of being able to numb out the pain with even one Quaalude—
just one!
—was a fabulous prospect. It had been more than two days since my last Quaalude, and I could only imagine how high I’d get.

I took a deep breath and pushed the thought of Quaaludes back down below the surface. “Just remember your promise,” I snapped. “No hookers while we’re in England. You gotta be on your best behavior in front of my wife’s aunt. She’s a sharp lady and she’ll see right through your bullshit.”

“Why do I even have to meet her? I trust you to look out for me. Just tell her that if something should happen to you—God forbid—she should take instructions from me. Besides, I wouldn’t mind roaming the streets of London a bit. Maybe I’ll go down to Savile Row, get a few new custom-made suits or something. Or maybe I’ll even go down to King’s Cross and check out some of the sights there!” He winked at me.

King’s Cross was London’s infamous red-light district, where for twenty British pounds you could get a blow job from a toothless hooker with one foot in the grave and a raging case of herpes. “Funny, Danny, very funny. Just remember that you don’t have Saurel here to bail you out. Why don’t you let me hire you a bodyguard to take you around?” It was a phenomenal idea, and I was dead serious about it.

But Danny waved me off as if I had a screw loose or something. “Stop with the overprotective crap,” he exclaimed. “I’ll be
juuuust
fine. Don’t you worry about your friend Danny! He’s like a cat—with nine lives!”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. But what could I do? He was a grown man, wasn’t he? Well, yes and no. But that was besides the point. I needed to be thinking about Aunt Patricia right now. In a couple of hours I would be seeing her. She always had a calming influence over me. And a little bit of calming would go a long way.

“So, love,” said Aunt Patricia, strolling arm in arm with me along a narrow tree-lined path in London’s Hyde Park, “when shall we get started on this wonderful adventure of ours?”

I smiled warmly at Patricia, then took a deep breath and relished the cool British air, which at this particular moment was thicker than a bowl of split-pea soup. To my eyes, Hyde Park was very much like New York City’s Central Park, insofar as it being a tiny slice of heaven encircled by a burgeoning metropolis. I felt right at home here. Even with the fog, by ten a.m. the sun was high enough in the sky to bring the entire landscape into high relief—turning five hundred acres of lush fields and towering trees and well-trimmed bushes and immaculately groomed horse trails into a vision so picturesque it was worthy of a postcard. The park was favored with just the appropriate number of sinuous concrete walking paths, which were all freshly paved and hadn’t a speck of litter on them. Patricia and I were walking on one of them at this very moment.

For her part, Patricia looked beautiful. But it wasn’t the sort of beauty you see in a sixty-five-year-old woman in
Town & Country
magazine, the supposed barometer of what it means to age gracefully. Patricia was infinitely more beautiful than that. What she had was an inner beauty, a certain heavenly warmth that radiated from every pore of her body and resonated with every word that escaped her lips. It was the beauty of perfectly still water, the beauty of cool mountain air, and the beauty of a forgiving heart. Physically, though, she was entirely average. She was a bit shorter than I and on the slender side. She had shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, light blue eyes, and fair white cheeks, which bore the expected wrinkles of a woman who’d spent the greater part of her adolescence hiding in a bomb shelter beneath her tiny flat, to avoid the Nazi Blitz. She had a tiny gap between her two front teeth that revealed itself whenever she smiled, which was often—especially when the two of us were together. This morning she wore a long plaid skirt, a cream-colored blouse with gold-colored buttons running down the front, and a plaid jacket that matched her skirt perfectly. Nothing looked expensive, but it all looked dignified.

I said to Patricia, “If possible, I’d like to go to Switzerland tomorrow. But if that’s not good for you, I’ll wait in London as long as you like. I have some business here, anyway. I have a jet waiting at Heathrow that can have us in Switzerland in under an hour. If you want, we can spend the day together there and do some sightseeing or some shopping.

“But, again, Patricia”—I paused and looked her dead in the eye—“I want you to promise me you’re going to spend at least ten thousand pounds per month out of the account, okay?”

Patricia stopped in mid-stride, unhooked her arm from mine, and placed her right hand over her heart. “My child, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to spend that much money! I have everything I need. I really do, love.”

I took her hand in mine and began walking again. “Perhaps you have everything you need, Patricia, but I’m willing to bet you don’t have everything you want. Why don’t you start by buying yourself a car and stop taking those double-decker buses everywhere? And after you get a car, you can move to a bigger apartment that’s got enough room for Collum and Anushka to sleep over. Just think how nice it would be to have extra bedrooms for your two grandkids!”

I paused for a brief moment, then added, “And within the next few weeks I’ll have the Swiss bank issue you an American Express card. You can use it to pay all your expenses. And you can use it as often as you like and spend as much as you like, and you’ll never get a bill.”

“But who will pay the bloody bill?” she asked, with confusion.

“The bank will. And—like I said—the card will have no limit. Every pound you charge will bring a smile to my face.”

Patricia smiled, and we walked in silence for a while. But it wasn’t a poisonous silence. It was the sort of silence shared by two people who’re comfortable enough not to force a conversation ahead of its logical progression. I found this woman’s company to be incredibly soothing.

My left leg was feeling somewhat better now, but that had little to do with Patricia. Activity of any sort seemed to diminish the pain—whether it was walking, playing tennis, lifting weights, or even swinging a golf club, the latter of which seemed rather odd to me, considering the obvious stress it placed on my spine. Yet the moment I stopped, the burning would start. And once my leg caught fire, there was no way to extinguish it.

Just then Patricia said, “Come sit down with me, love,” and she led me toward a small wooden bench, just off the walking path. When we reached the bench we unhooked arms and Patricia sat down beside me. “I love you like a son, Jordan, and I am only doing this because it helps you—not because of the money. One thing you’ll find as you grow older is that, sometimes, money can be more trouble than it’s worth.” She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, love, I’m not some silly old fool who’s lost her marbles and lives in a dream world where money doesn’t matter. I’m well aware that money matters. I grew up digging myself out of the rubble of World War Two, and I know what it’s like to wonder where your next meal is coming from. Back in those days we weren’t sure of anything. Half of London had been blown to smithereens by the Nazis, and our future was uncertain. But we had hope, and a sense of commitment to rebuilding our country. That was when I met Teddy. He was in the Royal Air Force then, a test pilot, actually. He was really quite dashing. He was one of the first people to fly the Harrier jet. Its nickname was the Flying Bedstand.” She smiled sadly.

I reached my arm around the back of the bench and gently placed my hand on her shoulder.

In a more upbeat tone, Patricia said, “Anyway, the point I was trying to make, love, is that Teddy was a man who was driven by a sense of duty, perhaps too driven. In the end, he let it get the best of him. The higher he climbed, the more uneasy he became about his station in life. Do you see what I’m saying, love?”

I nodded slowly. It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but I assumed her point had something to do with the perils of chasing a preconceived notion of what it meant to be successful. She and Teddy were now divorced.

Patricia soldiered on: “Sometimes I wonder if you let money get the best of you, love. I know you use money to control people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the way of the world, and it doesn’t make you a bad soul to try to work things in your favor. But I’m concerned that you allow money to control
you
—which is not all right. Money is the tool, my child, not the mason; it can help you make acquaintances but not true friends; and it might buy you a life of leisure but not a life of peace. Of course, you know I’m not judging you. That’s the last thing I’d do. None of us is perfect, and each of us is driven by our own demons. God knows I have my share.

“Anyway, getting back to this whole caper you’ve cooked up—I want you to know that I’m all for it! I find the whole thing rather exciting, in fact. I feel like a character in an Ian Fleming novel. It’s really quite racy, this whole overseas-banking business. And when you get to my age, a little bit of raciness is what keeps you young, isn’t it?”

I smiled and let out a gentle laugh. “I guess, Patricia. But as far as the raciness goes, I’ll say it again: There’s always a slight chance that some trouble might arise, at which point the raciness might get a bit racier than old Ian Fleming might’ve liked. And this won’t be in a novel. This’ll be Scotland Yard knocking at your door with a search warrant.”

I looked her directly in the eye, and I said in a tone implying the utmost seriousness, “But if it ever comes to that, Patricia—and I swear this to you—I’ll come forward in two seconds flat and say that you had no idea what was going on with any of this. I’ll say that I told you to go to the bank and give them your passport and that I promised you there was nothing wrong with it.” As I said those words I was certain they were true. After all, there was no way that any regulator on the planet would believe this innocent old lady would take part in an international money-laundering scheme. It was inconceivable.

Patricia smiled and replied, “I know that, love. Besides, it would be nice to spoil my grandchildren a bit. Perhaps they would even feel indebted enough to come visit me while I’m doing time in prison—after the bobbies have carted me away for international bank fraud, right, love?” With that, Patricia leaned forward and started laughing raucously.

I laughed right along with her, but inside I was dying. There were certain things that you just didn’t joke about; it was simply bad luck. It was like pissing in the fate god’s eye. If you did it long enough, he was certain to piss right back at you. And his urine stream was like a fucking fire hose.

But how would Aunt Patricia know that? She had never broken the law in her entire life until she met the Wolf of Wall Street! Was I really so awful a person that I was willing to corrupt a sixty-five-year-old grandma in the name of plausible deniability?

Well, there were two sides to that coin. On one side was the obvious criminality of the whole thing—corrupting a grandma; exposing her to a lifestyle she’d never needed or wanted; placing her liberty at risk; placing her reputation at risk; perhaps even causing her a stroke or some other stress-related disorder if things ever went awry.

But on the flip side—just because she’d never needed or wanted a life of wealth and extravagance didn’t mean it wasn’t better for her! It
was
better for her, for Chrissake! With the extra money, she’d be able to spend the twilight of her life in the lap of luxury. And (God forbid) if she ever got sick, she would have access to the finest medical care money could buy. I had no doubt that all that British nonsense about their egalitarian utopia of socialized medicine was nothing more than a bunch of happy horseshit. There had to be special medical treatment for those with a few million extra British pounds. That would be only fair, wouldn’t it? Besides, while the Brits might not be as greedy as the Americans, they weren’t fucking commies. And socialized medicine—
real
socialized medicine—was nothing short of a commie plot!