We were just in front of the Ambassador Hotel when a pudgy local man broke out of the pack of touts that habitually lay in wait there to ambush passing male tourists. He approached us in an odd, crablike gait, scuttling almost sideways.
“Massage, boss? Many sexy girl.” The tout poked a tattered brochure toward Barry. “Take look?”
Barry didn’t say anything, but he turned his head very slowly and looked at the man. The tout didn’t say another word. He just jerked the brochure away and darted back to the safety of the other touts. I could feel the men following us with their eyes as we walked on by and I wondered what the man had seen in Barry’s face that frightened him so badly.
“That was when Jimmy got an even bigger idea,” Barry continued as if nothing had happened. “He was sick of getting screwed by banks, he told me. He had the $50,000,000 I’d just stolen for him already sitting around in offshore banks, less my cut of course, so he told me he figured this was his big chance.”
I just listened.
“Jimmy wanted his own bank. I knew of one that was available and I thought we could get it for close to the $50,000,000 that I’d scammed out of Texas State. Jimmy told me if I’d throw in my $10,000,000 with his $40,000,000 and could do the deal for that amount, he’d give me a free hand to run the bank and a thirty-five percent shareholding.”
Now I was staring so hard at Barry I stumbled over an uneven joint in the sidewalk that jutted up unexpectedly in front of me.
“What are you telling me here, Barry? The Russian mob not only asked you to buy a bank for them, but to put some money into the deal yourself and become their partner? And you did it?”
“I didn’t become partners with the whole fucking mob, Jack, just with Jimmy Kicks. Don’t go all hysterical on me here.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as shit, Jack. A chance to own thirty-five percent of an international bank and run it however I wanted to? I’d have been nuts to say no.”
“How could you even think of fronting for the Russian mob, Barry?”
“Now don’t get so high and mighty on me, Jack. We both crawled out of the same fucking pile of crap. You took your way out, I took mine. What the hell’s the difference?”
“That’s the second time you’ve tried the say that we both took the same road, and this time I’m not going to let it slide. There’s nothing remotely similar about the choices you and I made, Barry. Not a damned thing.”
“Tell me the difference.”
“The difference is that I didn’t fake a suicide and go into business with a bunch of Russian mobsters.”
“No, Jack, that’s not it.”
Barry produced the faintest of smiles.
“The difference,” he said, “is they didn’t ask you to.”
ELEVEN
We passed a McDonald’s that was closed for the night. Barry abruptly left the sidewalk and climbed the half-dozen stained concrete steps that led up to the darkened entrance. When he reached the last step, he turned around and sat down, looping his arms around his knees and lacing his fingers together.
“Was that Wilkins in the swimming pool?” I asked as I climbed up and sat down next to him.
“Who the hell do you think it was, Jack? The fucking tooth fairy?” Barry sounded genuinely annoyed. “Look, Wilkins was a dead man anyway. You don’t steal from somebody like Jimmy Kicks and then tell your grandchildren funny stories about it.”
“So you let them kill Wilkins to cover for you, and you took off.”
“Jack, I didn’t fucking let Jimmy Kicks do anything. Harold was going to get gutted. That’s all there was to it. Jimmy offered to use Harold’s body to fake a suicide for me and give me a clean start if I’d do the bank deal for him. It was just that simple.”
Barry looked off into the darkness and for a moment I wondered what he was seeing there.
“What bank did you buy?” I asked eventually.
“The Asian Bank of Commerce.”
I stared at Barry. The ABC was a very minor Philippine bank that would have been utterly unknown had it not been making headlines over the past few months with sensational allegations of corruption on a grand scale. The cast of characters rumored to be involved was colorful if a touch familiar: the usual contingent of corrupt government officials, fabulously wealthy sheiks, shady arms dealers, out-of-control intelligence agencies, and Asian criminal gangs. In fact, about the only international villains who hadn’t been getting press in connection with the ABC were Russian mobsters.
“How could you buy control of the ABC for the Russian mob without anyone finding out?” I asked.
“It was no big deal. I set up a string of shell companies to hold the stock and some corporate cut outs that kept anyone from tracing its real ownership. I used a private investment fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, a venture capital group in Luxembourg, a Panamanian shipping line, two Hong Kong insurance brokers, and a whole bunch of companies that owned companies that were in partnerships that owned other companies. Hell, Jack, you know how it’s done. You’re better at putting together that sort of stuff than anyone I ever knew. Except maybe me.”
“You sound like you’re proud of what you’ve done, Barry.”
“A little, I suppose. It was a cute deal. I did a hell of a job.”
I just shook my head and said nothing.
“Oh for God’s sake, Jack, lighten up. You know the old saying. Every man loves the smell of his own farts.”
In spite of myself, I had to laugh. “Did you just make that up?”
Barry shrugged. “Old Icelandic proverb.”
I chuckled again and shifted my weight on the step. I knew I should just keep my mouth shut, but I was curious.
“So how did you deliver the bank to Jimmy?” I asked.
“It wasn’t too tough. When the peso went down the toilet a few years ago, the ABC was fucked. They tried to sell some convertible bonds to raise capital, but the market just laughed. My shell companies scooped up most of the bonds for a couple of cents on the dollar, then we converted them all into common stock.”
“And that gave you control of the Asian Bank of Commerce.”
“Only nobody knew it because we used about thirty different companies to buy and convert the bonds. It looked like a whole bunch of different companies each had a small piece.”
I doubted that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked that way if anyone was paying attention. On the other hand, Manila wasn’t much of a financial center and Barry had probably struck on one of the best places in the world to find exactly the right combination of credibility, stupidity, and greed he needed to make his deal fly. What passed for the banking authorities in the Philippines were mostly local politicians, none of whom would have particularly cared what Barry and his friends were actually doing with the ABC as long as they were taken care of.
The gist of the story that Barry had told me was beguilingly simple, but the implications were breathtaking. On the surface, he had just bought a broken-down bank that was operating in a reasonably respectable place and used a string of untraceable shell companies to control it. As a practical matter, however, Barry had done nothing less than hijack an entire country as a front for a gang of Russian mobsters.
“It sounds to me like you and your new pals are on the train to glory, Barry. So why are we having this conversation? I can’t believe you’ve discovered a sudden need to confess your sins.”
“Well…” Barry rolled some words around in his mouth for a few moments, but he didn’t seem to like the taste of any of them. “It’s this way, Jack. The bank’s wiped out. Somebody scammed us.”
He said it exactly like he was pronouncing a death sentence. For Barry, it probably was.
“In the last three months we’ve lost more deposit money than we can cover from capital. I swear to God I don’t know who took it, but eventually Jimmy’s going to decide it was me.”