“Not really.”
He blinked owlishly behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “You don’t understand what a huge scandal would result?”
“Oh, sure. It’ll be huge, all right. Lots of people are going to wonder how you stole all that money from the Pentagon.”
He smiled uneasily.
111.
Because I’d finally learned the real story in a hotel suite at the Mandarin.
“You must realize,” Roman Navrozov had said, “how frustrating it is to sit on the sidelines with billions of dollars and billions of euros at my disposal, ready to invest in American industry, and yet every single one of my deals is blocked by the U.S. government. While America sells itself off to every country in the world. Including its sworn enemies.”
“I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” I’d said.
“Ten percent of America is owned by the Saudis, do you know this? And look what they did to your World Trade Center. The Communist Chinese own most of your Treasury bonds. Some of your biggest defense contractors are owned by foreign conglomerates. But when I try to buy an American steel company or an energy company or a computer company, your government refuses. Some anonymous bureaucrats in the Treasury Department say it would harm national security.”
“So you wanted the Mercury files for leverage? To force the U.S. government to rubber-stamp all of your deals?”
He shrugged.
“Then there must be something in the Mercury files that a lot of powerful people want kept secret.”
He shrugged.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
NOW, I leaned back in my fragile antique wooden chair. It creaked alarmingly. Schechter winced.
“Turning a slush fund into a hedge fund to funnel secret payments to some of the most powerful people in America for three decades,” I said. “That’s genius.”
I glanced pointedly at his ego wall. At all those photographs of him doing the grip-and-grin with former secretaries of Defense and secretaries of State and four former vice presidents and even a few former presidents. “But what was the point? Your own self-aggrandizement? What could you possibly have wanted? How much influence did you need to buy? For what?”
“You don’t have the slightest idea, do you?”
“About what?”
He paused for a long time, examined his immaculate desktop, looked back up. “You’re probably too young to remember that there once was a time when the best and the brightest went into government work because it was the right thing to do.”
“Camelot, right?”
“Now where do the graduates of our top colleges end up? Law schools and investment banks. They go where the money is.”
“Can you blame them?”
“Precisely. The CEO of Merrill Lynch pockets a hundred million dollars for driving his company into the ground. The guy who almost destroyed Home Depot gets two hundred and ten million dollars just to go away. Yet a hardworking public servant who helps run the fifteen-trillion-dollar enterprise called the United States of America can’t afford to send his kids to college? A general who’s fought all his life to keep our country safe and strong spends his retirement in tract housing in Rockville, Maryland, scraping by on a pension of a hundred thousand bucks a year?”
“This is good,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better rationalization for graft.”
“Graft?” Schechter said, red-faced, eyes glittering. “You call it graft? How about calling it retention pay? Stock options in America? The whole point of Mercury is to make sure that the best and the brightest aren’t punished for being patriots. Yes, Nick, we diverted the money and built a goddamn moat. We guaranteed that our greatest public servants would never have to worry about money. So they could lead lives of genuine public service. This sure as hell is about national security. It’s about rewarding heroes and statesmen and patriots-instead of bankers and swindlers who’d sell out their country for two basis points.”
I could see the veins on his neck pulsing.
“Well,” I said softly, “you make a good argument. And I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to make it before a jury of your peers.”
“I’ll deny we ever spoke about it,” he said with a cruel smile.
“Don’t bother,” I said. I got up and opened the door to his office. Gordon Snyder and Diana Madigan were standing there, flanking Marshall Marcus. Behind them were six guys in FBI Windbreakers. “Marshall is cooperating.”
He shook his head. “You son of a bitch.” He pulled open his desk drawer and one of the FBI guys shouted, “Freeze!”
But it wasn’t a gun Schechter was after. It was a breath mint, which he popped in his mouth.
“Gentlemen,” he said with a beatific smile. “Please enter.”
He didn’t rise, though, which wasn’t like him.
“David, I’m sorry,” Marcus said.
I turned and saw that Schechter was staring at me, his eyes fixed. His mouth was foaming. I could smell almonds.
I shouted, “Anyone have a medical kit?”
A couple of the FBI agents rushed in. One of them checked Schechter’s pulse, at his wrist and on his neck. Then he shook his head.
David Schechter liked to brag that he always had all the angles figured out.
I guess he was right after all.
112.
Early in the fall I took Diana out for a drive. She wanted to see the New England foliage. I’ve never cared much about foliage, though the fiery red maples were impressive.
She had no itinerary in mind; she just wanted to drive. I suggested New Hampshire, where the leaves were further along.
Neither one of us spoke about the last time we’d been in New Hampshire together.
After we were on the road a while, I said, “I have something for you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Look in the glove box.”
She gave me a puzzled look, then popped open the glove compartment and took out a small box, badly gift-wrapped.
She held it up and pretended to admire the wrapping job. “Aren’t you a regular Martha Stewart,” she teased.
“Not my skill set,” I said. “Obviously.”
She tore it open, gasped.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, staring at the octagonal black perfume bottle. “Where the hell did you get Nombre Noir? And a full ounce? And sealed? Are you out of your mind?”
“I meant to give it to you years ago,” I said.
She reached over and gave me a kiss. “I’m almost out, too. I thought I’d never have it again. Last time I checked eBay, a half-ounce of Nombre Noir was selling for more than seven hundred dollars. Where’d you get this?”
“Remember my friend the Jordanian arms dealer?”
“Samir?”
“Right. Sammy found it for me. One of his clients is a sheikh in Abu Dhabi who had a stockpile in an air-conditioned storeroom.”
“Thank Samir for me.”
“Oh, I did. Believe me, I did. You’d have thought I asked him for a nuclear warhead. But by the time he handed it to me, you were gone.”
“You could have sent it.”
“I don’t trust the mail,” I lied.
Diana once explained to me that Nombre Noir was one of the greatest perfumes ever created. But it was impossible to find now. Apparently the company that made it ended up losing money on each bottle. Then the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, decided to ban one of its main ingredients, something called damascone, because it causes sun sensitivity in some tiny percentage of people. The company recalled every bottle they could and then destroyed each one by running a steamroller over them.
As soon as she told me it was impossible to find, of course, I made a point of tracking some down.
“Well, that serves me right for leaving without letting you know,” she said.
“Yeah, so there.”
“So, um, speaking of which? They’ve offered me a supervisory special agent job in Miami,” she said.