The Wolf of Wall Street (39 page)

I shook my head in disagreement. “No more boots, John. We’re done with fucking boots. And it’s got nothing to do with whether or not they’ll get marked down. It’s about running our business with a certain discipline. We’re going in eighteen different directions at the same time, and we need to stick to our business plan. We’ve got three new stores opening; we’re rolling out dozens of in-store shops; we’re about to pull the trigger on the unbranded business. There’s only so much cash to go around. We gotta stay lean and mean right now; no huge risks this late in the season, especially with some leopard-skin fucking boot.”

The Drizzler took this opening to do some more drizzling. “I agree with you, and that’s exactly why it makes so much sense to move our shipping department down to Flor—”

The Spitter cut the Drizzler right off, using a word with a double-
P,
the Spitter’s second-deadliest consonant. “That’s fucking
preposterous
!” spat the Spitter. “That whole fucking concept! I have no time for this shit. I gotta get some fucking shoes made or else we’ll be out of fucking business!” With that, the Spitter walked out of the office and slammed the door behind him.

Just then the phone beeped. “Todd Garret’s on line one.”

I rolled my eyes at Steve, then I said, “Tell him I’m in a meeting, Janet. I’ll call him back.”

Janet, the insolent one: “
Obviously
I told him you’re in a meeting, but he said it’s urgent. He needs to speak to you right now.”

I shook my head in disgust and let out a great sigh. What could be so important with Todd Garret—unless, of course, he had managed to get his hands on some Real Reals! I picked up the phone and said in a friendly yet somewhat annoyed tone, “Hey, Todd, what’s going on, buddy?”

“Well,” replied Todd, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but some guy named Agent Coleman just left my house and told me that Carolyn is about to get thrown in jail.”

With a sinking heart: “For
what
? What did Carolyn do?”

I felt the world crash down on me when Todd said, “Did you know that your Swiss banker is in jail and he’s cooperating against you?”

I clenched my ass cheeks for all they were worth and said, “I’ll be there in an hour.”

Like its owner, Todd’s two-bedroom apartment was mean-looking. From top to bottom, the whole place was black, not an ounce of color anywhere. We were sitting in the living room, which was completely devoid of plant life. All I could see was black leather and chrome.

Todd was sitting across from me, as Carolyn paced back and forth on a black shag carpet, teetering atop some very high heels. Todd said to me, “It goes without saying that Carolyn and I will never cooperate against you, so don’t even worry about that.” He looked up at the pacing Swiss Bombshell and said, “Right, Carolyn?”

Carolyn nodded nervously and kept on pacing. Apparently Todd found that annoying. “Will you stop pacing!” he snarled. “You’re driving me fucking crazy. I’m gonna smack you if you don’t sit down!”

“Oh,
fahak
you, Tahad!” croaked the Bombshell. “This no laughing business. I have two kids, in case you forget. It is all because of that stupid pistol you carry.”

Even now, on the day of my doom, these two maniacs were determined to kill each other. “Will you two please stop?” I said, forcing a smile. “I don’t understand what Todd’s gun charge has to do with Saurel getting indicted.”

“Don’t listen to her,” muttered Todd. “She’s a fucking idiot. What she’s trying to say is that Coleman found out what happened in the shopping center, and now he’s telling the Queens District Attorney not to plea-bargain my case. A few months ago they were offering me probation, and now they’re telling me I gotta do three years unless I cooperate with the FBI. Personally, I couldn’t give a shit about that, and if I gotta go to jail I gotta go to jail. The problem is my idiot wife, who decided to strike up a friendship with your Swiss banker instead of just dropping off the money and not saying a word like she was supposed to. But,
nooooo,
she couldn’t resist having lunch with the fuck and then exchanging phone numbers with him. For all I know she probably fucked him.”

“You know,” said a rather guilty-looking Bombshell, in her white patent leather go-to-hell pumps, “you got nerves upon nerves, dog-man! Who be you to throw stones in my direction? You don’t think I know what you do with that steel-cage dancer from Rio?” With that, the Swiss Bombshell looked me directly in the eye and said, “Do you believes this jealous man? Will you please tell
Tahad
that
Jean Jacques
not like that? He is old banker, not ladies’ man. Right, Jordan?” And she stared at me with blazing blue eyes and a clenched jaw.

An old banker? Jean Jacques? Jesus Christ—what a tragic turn of events! Had the Swiss Bombshell fucked my Swiss banker? Unreal! If she had just dropped off the money like she was supposed to, then Saurel wouldn’t have even known who she was! But, no, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and, as a result, Coleman was now connecting all the dots—figuring out that Todd’s arrest in the Bay Terrace Shopping Center had nothing to do with a drug deal but with the smuggled millions of dollars to Switzerland.

“Well,” I said innocently, “I wouldn’t exactly characterize Saurel as an old man, but he’s not the sort of guy who’d have an affair with another man’s wife. I mean, he’s married himself, and he never really struck me as being that way.”

Apparently they both took that as a victory. Carolyn blurted out, “You see, dog-man, he is not like that. He is—”

But Todd cut her right off: “So why the fuck did you say he’s an old man, then, you lying sack of shit? Why lie if you have nothing to hide, huh? Why, I…”

As Todd and Carolyn went about ripping each other’s lungs out, I tuned out and wondered if there was any way out of this mess. It was time for desperate measures; it was time to call my trusted accountant Dennis Gaito, aka the Chef. I would offer him my humblest apology for having done all this behind his back. No, I had never actually told the Chef that I had accounts in Switzerland. There was no choice now but to come clean and seek his counsel.

“…and what will we do for money now?” asked the Swiss Bombshell. “This Agent Coleman watch you like bird now”—
Did she mean hawk?—
“so you can no more sell your drugs. We will starve now for sure!” With that, the soon-to-be starving Swiss Bombshell—along with her $40,000 Patek Philippe watch, her $25,000 diamond-and-ruby necklace, and her $5,000 clothing ensemble—sat down in a black leather chair. Then she put her head in her hands and began to shake her head back and forth.

How very ironic that, at the end of the day, it was the Swiss Bombshell, with her bastardized English and gigantic boobs, who’d finally cut through all the bullshit and distilled things down to their very essence—it all came down to buying their silence. And that was fine with me; in fact, I had a sneaky suspicion it was fine with them too. After all, the two of them now had a pair of first-class tickets on the gravy train, and they would be good for many years to come. And if somewhere along the line the heat in the kitchen grew too hot, they could always apply for exit visas downtown, at the New York Field Office of the FBI, where Agent Coleman would be waiting for them with open arms and a smile.

That evening, in my basement in Old Brookville, Long Island, I was sitting on the wraparound couch with the Chef, playing a little-known game called Can You Top This Bullshit Story. The rules of the game were simple: The contestant spewing out the bullshit would try to make his story as airtight as possible, while the person listening to the bullshit would try to poke holes in it. In order to achieve victory, one of the contestants had to come up with a bullshit story that was so airtight that the other contestant couldn’t poke a hole in it. And since the Chef and I were Jedi Masters of unadulterated bullshit, it was pretty obvious that if one of us could stump the other, then we could also stump Agent Coleman.

The Chef was boldly handsome, sort of like a trimmed-down version of Mr. Clean. He was in his early fifties and had been cooking the books since I was in grade school. I looked at him as an elder statesman of sorts, the lucid voice of reason. He was a man’s man, the Chef, with an infectious smile and a million watts of social charisma. He was a guy who lived for world-class golf courses, Cuban cigars, fine wines, and enlightened conversation, especially when it had to do with fucking over the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which seemed to be his life’s foremost mission.

I had already come clean with him this evening, baring my very soul and apologizing profusely for having done all this behind his back. I started bullshitting him even then, before the game had officially started, explaining that I hadn’t brought him into my Swiss affair because it might’ve put him at risk. Thankfully, he’d made no effort to poke any holes in my feeble bullshit story. Instead, he’d responded with a warm smile and a shrug.

As I told him my tale of woe, I found my spirits sinking lower and lower. But the Chef remained impassive. When I was done, he shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Eh, I’ve heard worse.”

“Oh, really?” I replied. “How the fuck could
that
be possible?”

The Chef waved his hand dismissively and added, “I’ve been in much tighter spots than this.”

I’d been greatly relieved by those words, although I was pretty sure he was just trying to ease my worried mind. Anyway, we had started playing the game and now, after a half hour, we’d been through three evolutions of unadulterated bullshit. So far, there was no clear winner. But with each round our stories grew tighter and cleverer and, of course, more difficult to poke holes in. We were still hung up on two basic issues: First, how had Patricia come up with the initial $3 million to fund the account? And, second, if the money was really Patricia’s, then why hadn’t her heirs been contacted? Patricia was survived by two daughters, both of whom were in their mid-thirties. In the absence of a contraindicating will, they were the rightful heirs.

The Chef said, “I think the real problem is the outgoing currency violation. Let’s assume this guy Saurel has spilled his guts, which means the feds are gonna take the position that the money made it over to Switzerland on a bunch of different dates. So what we need is a document that counteracts that—that says you gave all the money to Patricia while she was still in the United States. We need an affidavit from someone who physically witnessed you handing the money to Patricia in the U.S. Then, if the government wants to say different, we hold our piece of paper and say, ‘Here ya go, buddy! We got our own eyewitness too!’”

As an afterthought, he added, “But I still don’t like this business with the will. It smells bad. It’s a shame Patricia’s not alive. It would be nice if we could parade her downtown and have her say a few choice words to the feds, and, you know—
bada-beep bada-bop bada-boop
—that would be that.”

I shrugged. “Well, I can’t raise Patricia from the dead, but I bet I could get Nadine’s mother to sign an affidavit saying that she witnessed me handing the money to Patricia in the United States. Suzanne hates the government, and I’ve been really good to her over the last four years. She really has nothing to lose, right?”

The Chef nodded. “Well that would be a very good thing, if she would agree to do it.”

“She’ll do it,” I said confidently, trying to guess what temperature water the Duchess would be pouring over my head tonight. “I’ll talk to Suzanne tomorrow. I just need to run it by the Duchess first. But, assuming I get it taken care of, there’s still the issue of the will. It does sound kinda hokey that she wouldn’t leave any money to her kids…” All at once a fabulous idea came bubbling into my brain. “What if we were to actually contact her kids and get them involved? What if we had them fly over to Switzerland and claim the money? It would be like hitting lotto to them! I could have Roland draw up a new will, saying the money I’d loaned Patricia was to come back to me but all the profits were to go to her children. I mean, if the kids went and declared the money in Britain, then how could the U.S. government make a case that the money was mine?”

“Ahhhhh,” said a smiling Chef, “now you’re thinking! In fact, you just won the game. If we can pull this whole thing together, I think you’re in the clear. And I’ve got a sister firm in London that can do the actual returns, so we’ll have control of things the whole way through. You’ll get your original investment back, the kids’ll get a five-million-dollar windfall, and we can move on with our lives!”

I smiled and said, “This guy Coleman is gonna flip his fucking lid when he finds out Patricia’s kids went over and claimed the money. I bet you he’s already tasting blood on his lips.”

“Indeed,” said the Chef.

Fifteen minutes later I found the soon-to-be-doleful Duchess upstairs in the master bedroom. She was sitting at her desk, thumbing through a catalog, and by the looks of her she wasn’t just in the market for clothes. She looked absolutely gorgeous. Her hair was brushed out to perfection, and she was dressed in a tiny white silk chemise of such fine material that it covered her body like a morning mist. She had on a pair of white open-toe pumps with a spiked heel and sexy ankle strap. And that was all she wore. She had dimmed the lights, and there were a dozen candles burning, giving off a mellow orange glow.

When she saw me, she ran over to shower me with kisses. “You look so beautiful,” I said, after a good thirty seconds of kissing and Duchess-sniffing. “I mean, you always look beautiful, but you look especially beautiful tonight. You’re beyond words.”

“Well,
thank you
!” said the luscious Duchess in a playful tone. “I’m glad you still think so, because I just took my temperature and I’m ovulating. I hope you’re ready, because you’re in big trouble tonight, mister!”

Hmmm…
there were two sides to this coin. On the one side, how mad could an ovulating woman get at her husband? I mean, the Duchess really wanted another child, so she might shake off the bad news in the name of procreation. But on the flipside, she might get so angry she would throw on her bathrobe and go to fisticuffs. And with all those wet kisses she’d just showered on me, a tsunami of blood had gone rushing to my loins.