Whipping Boy (10 page)

The Swiss time capsule Max found in the bottom of a trunk.

“Jesus Christ!” I blurted out. I couldn’t have cursed more relevantly if I’d chosen my words with care. What the hell was
that
doing in the box?

“Uh, Dad?”

Did I swipe it to stop the performances?

“Dad?”

Was it given to me as a sadistic going-away present?

“Yoo-hoo. Earth to Dad.”

Did I buy it, like a brainwashed hostage who forms a pathological attachment to his abductors?

“Dad? You okay? You look funny.”

Max was around twelve—old enough to receive an unedited account of my alpine terrors.

As usual, he was full of questions. “Did Cesar really whip you, or was it just pretend?”

“A bit of both.”

“What kind of belt did he use?”

“A normal belt.”

“Did you tell?”

“Kids didn’t tell back then. Not at that school.”

“That sucks.”

“Not as much as when he and another kid swiped my dad’s—your grandfather’s—watch.”

“What a douche!”

A few days later, I decided to play the ancient tape. In the graveyard of electronics that clutters our attic, I found a cassette player minus its power cord. After a futile attempt to match some dozen adaptors to the obsolete device, I pried open the battery compartment, removed the leaky C-cells, cleaned the heads, popped in three new batteries, reinserted the audiotape, and pressed
PLAY
.

I barely made it through the overture before I was overcome by nausea and hit
STOP
. I tried more than once that day to listen to “The Thirty-Nine Lashes.” I couldn’t. I tried a week later and failed that time, too.

Despite my persistence certain stuff remained off-limits. Why was that? What caused me to swing between compulsion and revulsion? It was hard enough to ask questions like that. Finding answers was all but impossible.

I like treachery, but I cannot say anything good of traitors.

Caesar Augustus
, in Plutarch’s
Life of Romulus

If you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Jon Ronson
,
The Psychopath Test

Until Max found the cigar box, evidence relating to my search fit comfortably in the slim journal bearing Cesar’s name and a couple of manila folders. (Given the subject’s birthplace, manila folders seemed an appropriate storage solution.) The new cache of materials demanded a bigger container, so I consolidated the materials and placed them in a document box, which I labeled the Cesareum.

The title was wishful. Although I had surveyed an impressive pantheon of imperial impostors, my ex-roommate—the
real
Cesar—remained at large, his whereabouts and personal history a complete and total mystery.

Once more I was standing at a crossroads: abandon the inquiry or pull out all the stops. The choice was obvious.

My revived efforts began in 2005 at a major research institution that subscribed to a broad range of licensed news sources. When I explained at the reference desk what I was after, a sympathetic librarian overlooked the institution’s user restrictions and slipped me a password that allowed access to dozens of proprietary databases. When I thanked him, he said, “No problem. I had a Cesar when I was growing up.”

Most of the digital records proved useless. They either duplicated material I had already obtained or supplemented information about irrelevant Cesars. Only one fresh lead emerged, but boy, was it a doozy! A passing reference to a new Cesar appeared in a 2001
New York Post
article bearing the headline: ‘
KNIGHT FALLS
’
AS FEDS BUST UP A ROYAL RIPOFF
. Here’s how the story began:

A trio of American fraudsters posing as fake European royalty were busted on charges they swindled more than $1 million out of unsuspecting investors, authorities said yesterday.

The three allegedly posed as a British knight, a Serbian prince and a German prince to pitch bogus “medium-term notes” to investors in a scheme dating back to 1997.

The article went on to allege that the three con men duped dozens of sophisticated investors into entering loan agreements with the Badische Trust Consortium, a sham investment house claiming to manage some $60 billion. According to the
Post,
the fake financiers rented suites in Switzerland, traveled on diplomatic passports issued by the Knights of Malta, and adhered to a fourteen-point dress code that required the use of walking sticks, homburg hats, and Montblanc fountain pens.

The names of the crooks were equally preposterous. The chairman of the bank was identified as Prince Robert von Badische (rhymes with
baddish
), his chief lieutenant called himself the Baron Moncrieffe, and their youthful “administrator” was known as Colonel Sherry. And how did the man whose name matched my roommate’s figure into the cockamamie con? “Cesar A. Viana” was one of two so-called independent project consultants who, according to a federal prosecutor, “lured [the victims] in with false promises of big money.”

It’s my guy!
I told myself.
It’s
got
to be!

The Badische fraud, with its reliance on theatricality, manipulation, and misdirection, was a perfect sequel to the juvenile spectacles Cesar staged in the tower. In fact, it was the apotheosis of all things Cesarean, even going so far as to exploit my nemesis’s preferred brand of fountain pen. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to unearth such exquisite corroboration of childhood villainy. Max had been right all along. Once a bully, always a bully.

For the next five hours, I sat glued in front of the library computer, greedily downloading every reference to the crime I could find. The
pinch-me feeling only grew when I learned that all the defendants (except for Prince Robert, who only eluded prosecution by skipping town) were tried, convicted, and sent to federal prison.

Given the outlandish nature of the fraud, it was puzzling that the news coverage hadn’t spread much beyond New York. (The AP, for example, limited its reporting to a brief arrest bulletin.) Still, the local tabloids had a field day with the headlines. The
Daily News
was partial to forced rhyme (41
MOS
.
IN SLAMMER FOR PRINCELY SCAMMER
and
PRISON FOR SCAMMIN
’
BARON
), whereas the
Post
had a weakness for puns:
THRONE FOR A LOOP
and
ROYAL FLUSHED
.

The reporting itself was pretty perfunctory. I did, however, pull up one lengthy piece about the crime, but it was written in Dutch. I forwarded the story to a translator I’d met years before at a literary festival, along with this melodramatic note:

               
Nadine, I’m contacting you with a sense of dire (but thrilling) urgency. I believe I’ve located a despicable boy who tormented me during a miserable year (1971) at an English boarding school in Switzerland. . . . Details of his postgraduate crime spree are (in part) chronicled in an article I cannot read. Do you think you could supply a translation? (See attachment.)

I was on a high, confident that the Dutch article would amplify the perfunctory local coverage. But that
Gotcha!
feeling vaporized when I came across a photograph of the criminals in a
New York Post
article headlined
CON JOB
“
KINGDOM
”—
EX
-
GI ON TRIAL IN
$50
B FANTASY
-
NATION SCAM
.

None of the men in the group portrait resembled my former roommate, which raised doubts I was trying to ignore: How could I be sure the convicted shill was my childhood bully? Maybe I had stumbled upon another false positive.

Only two concrete biographical details about Cesar the shill emerged from the news reports: (1) he resided in San Francisco, and (2) he was forty-four years old at the time of trial, in 2002.

The first fact was of little significance. Although a quick search confirmed that nearly one in five residents of San Francisco claim Filipino ancestry, that hardly explained how a Manila-born kid educated in Switzerland had relocated to the Bay Area.

The second fact was more encouraging. The ages of the two Cesars matched. The forty-four-year-old criminal would have been twelve when I was ten.

So where did that leave things? Was I confident
my
Cesar was the San Francisco con man? Yes. Was I certain? No.

I told Max about the scam.

“Cesar’s a crook? Cool!”

“He
might
be a crook. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

“Same first and last name? Same age? What are the chances?”

I pulled out the Belvedere house photo. “Compare this kid”—I tapped the face of a frowning schoolboy—“to the guys in the newspaper photo. None of the con men have the kid’s eyes or nose. And the smile is
completely
different.”

“Where is he now?” Max asked.

“In prison.”

“Forever?”

“No, not forever, kiddo. He got thirty-seven months.”

“That’s all? When will he be out?”

“I’m guessing in about a year.”

“What happens then? What if he tracks us down? What if he steals all our money like he did those other people’s?” Max was no longer young enough to believe that his father was invincible. The prospect
of facing a
real
criminal who had stolen
real
money from
real
people made my son anxious. Hell, it made me anxious. All the more so when I realized Max was the age I had been when the Cesar saga began.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’s probably not the same guy. And even if it is, the guy knows nothing about us, and there’s no reason he ever will.”

“So you won’t try beating him up?”

{© New York Post}

The photo in the
New York Post
identified only Colonel Sherry (seen standing on the left) by name. Was the fellow on the far right my former roommate?

“I have no interest in beating him up,” I assured my son. But Max’s question raised a deeper issue. What
would
I do if I ever crossed paths with Cesar? I had invested so much energy looking for him, and yet neglected to consider the consequences of actually finding him. In fact, I had actively
avoided
confronting the consequences of confronting Cesar. Doing otherwise would have forced me to face feelings of vengeance and anguish roiling just below the surface of the search.

Max’s concerns were echoed by Françoise. “What do we know about him?” she said. “Maybe he is violent.”

I tell her what I told Max. “It’s probably not even the same person.”

“Whether he is or isn’t, promise me you won’t make contact.”

I felt torn. Françoise was right to worry. Still, I wasn’t willing to abandon the search. Not now. Not before confirming that I’d found my fugitive. “You’re the one who first pushed me to look for Cesar, remember?”

“That was before I knew he was dangerous.”

“
Might
be dangerous,” I corrected before adding, foolishly, that the criminal revelations only made the search
more
compelling.

“You find danger compelling?”

“Part of me does,” I acknowledged.

Two weeks after receiving my translation request, Nadine replied. In my giddy haste to learn what the article said, I had misremembered her nationality. Nadine is Belgian, not Dutch. Graciously overlooking my stupidity, she fed the story through a virtual translator and emailed back the results. The computerized conversion wasn’t entirely coherent, but fluent enough to amplify the charges mentioned in the New York tabloids. It turned out that some Badische associates were tied to acts of “deception, forgery, fraud, and assassination.” Assassination?

The Dutch update prompted me to conduct a criminal background check on the San Francisco Cesar, a decision I didn’t reach lightly. It’s one thing to Google a long-lost roommate. It’s another to pay a website to tap into law enforcement databases. It felt slimy. I knew what my former roommate would have said had he known: “Don’t be so nosy, Nosey.”

Even after I overcame my moral misgivings, I still faced some practical obstacles. Criminal background checks, to be done thoroughly, require the subject’s date of birth and a social security number. I had neither. That meant the search results would omit information from all California archives, as well as most federal databases. Given those limitations, it seemed unlikely that I’d get much on a
San Francisco
con man prosecuted by the
United States
Department of Justice. Still, the report would, at a strict minimum, provide basic data on everyone in the country who shared Cesar’s first, middle, and last name.