Whipping Boy (13 page)

“Like your father,” Françoise interjects.

“I know. Eerie.”

“So I guess Cesar’s father didn’t torture people for a living.”

“Guess not. He left that to his son. It also says the dad was a severe alcoholic and that he died of a heart attack when Cesar was nineteen.” I read Françoise a key paragraph:

Although the defendant suffered no physical abuse or neglect at the hands of his father, the emotional impact of his father’s
deterioration was crushing to him. . . . Cesar “has spent much of his life seeking appropriate male role models to fill the void left by his father’s illness and eventual passing,” as his sister documents in her letter to the Court. See letter annexed hereto as Exhibit C.

I flip to Exhibit C, the letter from Cesar’s sister, and read part of that submission to Françoise as well:

Cesar’s school, Aiglon, was a mountain away from my school, and essentially he was all on his own through puberty. I imagine he must have been quite lonely, and this and the lack of a male parental role model made him unusually susceptible to peer pressure from his male classmates . . . he would go to great lengths to have his schoolmates like him, doing their work for them, despite my phone calls to him to be his own person.

This was a pattern that I believe caused his present difficulties and if he has one fault it has been to not possess a proper sense of discrimination. . . . In his desire to belong to this present group of people with whom he was charged he showed poor judgment and I believe they took advantage of him. To my knowledge, in the over 40 years I have known him, Cesar has never knowingly taken advantage of any individual, although he suffered many incidents of being on the receiving end of abuse.

“
C’est pas possible!
She’s saying
he’s
the victim?”

“Yup, that’s
exactly
what she’s saying.”

Françoise’s shock pales in comparison to mine. The bizarre professional overlap between our fathers—that they were both inventors—is mildly annoying. Far worse is the suggestion that Cesar is a blameless casualty of the boarding school that brought us together. But the detail that
really
kneecaps me, the thing that hits way too
close to home, is that all of Cesar’s problems are tied to the absence of his father.
Join the club, buddy.

With time to kill before heading to Penn Station, I gather together the most compelling discovery documents and arrange them in nine discrete piles:
SWINDLERS
,
VICTIMS
,
BADISCHE BANK DOCS
,
LAWYERS
,
KNIGHTS OF MALTA
,
TRANSCRIPT
,
CELEBS
, and (the biggest pile)
CESAR
/
BARCLAY
. Then I take a few pictures of the reconstructed ziggurat before dialing Diane’s extension to say that I’m done with the files, at least for now.

“Mark wants to know if you found your smoking gun,” she says.

“I did.”

“We’ll be right over.”

A few minutes later, the pair enters the conference room to review the newly uncovered evidence. I show them the relevant sections of the sentencing memo.

“See, I told you,” Diane tells her boss. “What goes around comes around.”

Goodman leafs through the brief. “This
is
more convincing,” he acknowledges.

I could have ended my search there and then. After all, I had proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that “my” Cesar was a convicted felon. Yet the notion of wrapping things up never occurred to me. Over the course of the weekend the focus of my obsession had broadened to include the fraud that had put my ex-roommate behind bars. The completionist in me needed to know a little more about the Badische Trust Consortium. No, that’s not accurate. The completionist in me needed to know
everything
about the Badische Trust Consortium.

Which explains why I turn to Goodman and Diane and say, “I’m hoping I can come back and review some of these files more closely.”

Diane frowns. “Does that sound convenient, Mark?”

“During the holidays?” Goodman shakes his head. “
Way
too much of a hassle.”

Their rebuff unsettles me. What if I can’t return to the firm? Over
the last three days, documents have been passing through my hands like envelopes through an optical mail sorter. There’s no way I’ll remember what I’ve looked at.

“Is that the stuff you’re hoping to go through?” Goodman asks, motioning to the nine stacks of paper.

“That, plus the trial transcript and some briefs.”

Goodman thumbs through the documents, pausing occasionally to pull an item. He says nothing as he conducts his review.

“I could come back at the beginning of the year,” I say, doing my best not to sound desperate.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Or maybe I—”

Goodman raises his hand like a cop halting traffic.

I snapped this picture an hour after I found proof that my roommate worked for the Badische Trust Consortium.

In the silence that follows, I find myself wondering once again why I’m so intent on looking through the trial documents. I know for
certain that Cesar is a crook. Isn’t that enough? Not by a long shot. The bank fraud that landed him in jail remains a total mystery. Ditto his role in the crime. The journalist in me can’t let go of the story. At least that’s what I tell myself.

“You really need to review all these documents?” Goodman asks after completing his examination.

“I really do.”

“Then we’ll just have to send you duplicates.”

“Excuse me?”

“Merry Christmas.”

I look over at Diane. She says nothing, but the smile stretching across her face betrays what she’s thinking:
What goes around comes around.
*

The night before the night before Christmas, I have dream in which the Badische files get lost en route to Providence. The mix-up compels me to return to the law firm, where a mailroom clerk informs me that my shipment has been dispatched to Bermuda. While he’s detailing the weight limits of parcels posted to US protectorates, the law firm is bombed, and I find myself plunging down a stairwell under a shower of construction debris.

I don’t need help unpacking the significance of the stairwell tumble. It seems pretty obvious that I have linked the fraud to memories of Aiglon, although the nature of the connection remains vague.

Christmas arrives. I make out like a bandit. Max has put a copy of
How to Be a Villain
in my stocking. Françoise has wrapped up a printer/scanner in anticipation of the care package I’m expecting from New York. My sister and brother-in-law present me with a first edition
of
Forty Years a Gambler,
the late-nineteenth-century memoir of a notorious flimflam man named George H. Devol.

It’s a bit unnerving to receive so many gifts tied to a kid I haven’t seen since I was eleven, especially since they call attention to the undelivered gift I want most of all: the legal files from New York. I spend much of Christmas day moping about like an ungrateful brat.

On December 26, my sister and her husband, Max, and I drive to Vermont, for three days of skiing. (Françoise, a devotee of the desert, forgoes all winter sports.) Perfect conditions on the slopes improve my mood. When not skiing just a little faster than I’d like (in a futile effort to keep up with my daredevil son), I immerse myself in the hotel pool, after which I immerse myself in free nachos, after which I immerse myself in the ostentatious reflections of George H. Devol, who, the title page of his memoir proclaims, cheated at cards by the time he was eleven, stacked decks by fourteen, “bested soldiers on the Rio Grande during the Mexican War; won hundreds of thousands from paymasters, cotton buyers, defaulters, and thieves; fought more rough-and-tumble fights than any man in America; and was the most daring gambler in the world.”

{Illustration from the title page of
Forty Years a Gambl
er by George H. Devol, 1887}

This memoir of a riverboat cheat was one of the fraud-themed gifts I received for Christmas.

On the last day of the ski trip, while stuck with Max on a stalled chairlift, I feel my chest start to tingle. At first I assume it’s some midstation chili con carne asserting itself. Only when the tingle returns do I realize my cell phone is
vibrating. I extract the device from the inner pocket of my parka—no easy matter when one is wearing mittens and holding ski poles—to check the incoming messages.

“They arrived!” I shout.

The pronoun needs no clarification. Max holds out a clenched glove, and we fist-bump while rocking back and forth twenty feet in the air.

That night we decide to eat at a steak joint halfway down the Killington access road. The guy taking reservations informs us there’s a forty-minute wait. We don’t care. We’re in no hurry. After Max puts our name down, we head over to a nearby sports bar in search of a foosball table and return to the restaurant just as the maître d’ is calling out, “Cesar, party of four? Cesar, party of four? We’re ready for you.”

“Very funny, Max.”

Very funny and also very true. I don’t know it at the time, but Cesar is about to be served.

On December 30, 2005, I lug the two heavy cartons Françoise has parked under the Christmas tree to my third-floor office, and slice through a thick skin of reinforced packing tape. I spread the contents of the cartons—the handiwork of a duplicating service called Prints of the City—on the carpet next to my desk. Amazingly, every item I set aside at the law firm, right down to the Post-its, has been perfectly reproduced and placed in labeled folders. This makes it a snap to replicate the organizational logic I applied to the documents during my frenzied weekend of triage. Yet I soon realize there’s no point in rebuilding the nine paper piles. Doing so obliterates the chronology of the scam, thus making it impossible for me to figure out who did what when. Plus, the categories are way too broad. The
LAWYERS
stack, for instance, lumps together documents produced
by the corporate attorneys who worked for the “bankers” when they appeared to be legit with memos generated by criminal defense attorneys working for the indicted con men.

Only one of the stacks is worth preserving:
TRANSCRIPT
. The twenty-four hundred pages of trial testimony, though reduced to four hundred double-sided sheets of paper, are so unwieldy that I make a trip to Staples and buy the fattest three-ring binder I can find. While I’m there, I splurge on a box of tab folders, some hanging files, and four interlocking milk crates complete with carpet-friendly casters.

Back in my office, I hole-punch the transcript and feed it into the oversized binder and arrange the rest of the papers in the milk crates. I set the massive transcript binder on one side of a comfy reading chair and roll the freight train of discovery materials to the other.

Christmas came a little late for me in 2005.