I took a sip of the tea, dark and biting. “Pretty much everything, I’m afraid.”
“Well, let me see. Perhaps I’ll begin at the beginning, a novel idea, no? It started with Babbage, Bradley Babbage. A noted entrepreneur, young and successful and much the hit with the ladies. You must have seen his picture in the paper at the time. He was a star at all kinds of political and civic functions.” His eyebrows rose with a genuine merriment. “He raised money for Rizzo, Specter, and then for Reagan.”
“Unless he was in Highlights for Children, which was all I was reading at the time, I would have missed him.”
“Well, too bad then, he put on quite the spectacle. But things in the Babbage empire were not entirely as they seemed. There were questions about the profitability of a building he owned, and another enterprise he ran, a limousine service actually, and about a small publishing house he had purchased that was slow in paying its royalties. It was the complaining authors that put us on the track, imagine that? Babbage was claiming losses in everything, so no taxes were paid, and yet he was constantly buying and expanding. It seemed, well, peculiar. It seemed to deserve looking into, yet it seemed also to be an avenue not so interesting for the agency to vigorously pursue. And, because of the administration then in power and the subject’s connection to it, not an investigation designed to enhance the career of any agent who took it on. So they gave it to me.
“I was with the department then, of course, but I was mostly considered a mid-level drone, ushered into a corner cubicle and ignored. A bit of excess waste kept on by civil service regulations,” he said, his eyes trying to twinkle but unable to hide the angry pride underneath, “not up to normal department standards. You see, I was never one of those agents who charged about with my gun drawn. It is the hero types who get the press, the big cases, who rise to heights in the department. Yes, I understood that, but that didn’t always make them the most effective agents, despite their swaggered steps and deep voices.
“Do you know how Rockefeller became the richest man in America?” he asked. “He kept his books more carefully than anyone else. He bought and sold things, that is all, but he knew to the penny the profit on each and every transaction and made his decisions accordingly. You can change the world with an eye on the books, you see. I am an accountant by training. I was not thought much of by the hierarchy or the heroes, but I could read the books better than anyone. And when they gave me the Babbage case I started with the books and that’s how I discovered him.”
“Discovered who?”
“The secret investor. There had to be a secret investor. Babbage was losing money, but he was still buying businesses. So slowly, carefully, I traced the money that was keeping Babbage afloat, traced it back from one account to the next, the whole trail. I found the checks, the shifting accounts, the wired deposits, traced it all back to the source. Cash deposits, you see. Some were made by Babbage himself, receipts from his business, he told the bank. But the receipts didn’t match the books, they were higher than his cash flow could have possibly allowed. Something was wrong. And then there were others, from other accounts, cash deposits straight into the bank, all less than ten thousand dollars, the amount that triggered financial reporting, but adding up, when you took them as a whole, to far far more. That is a crime, you know, Mr. Carl, dividing up a single cash deposit into many to avoid reporting requirements. So it was a snap to get the warrant to find the name behind it all, the hidden investor who was laundering his money through Babbage. And there he was, as if his picture itself was painted in the various columns of the various ledgers.”
“Tommy Greeley?” I said.
“Yes, of course. He was a law student, that was all. His family was once firmly middle class but it had fallen on hard times, so you would expect him to be struggling to pay even his tuition. But tuition was paid, he had a condominium apartment, a fancy car, a beautiful girl, a huge circle of friends. He took his friends on vacations in Hawaii, was well known in the casinos at Atlantic City for throwing lavish and risqué parties. It was all too obvious to ignore. When I brought it to my superiors, they added three agents and a prosecutor to the case, three hero types and a lawyer with a fetish for free publicity, all of whom tried to elbow me out. That is the way that type works, but you see I wasn’t so easy to get rid of. They began presenting the case to the grand jury, they thought they could do it themselves, but they were wrong. You see, I had something they needed. I had the books.
“More tea, Mr. Carl?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I watched Telushkin carefully as he poured himself another cup, dropped in one sugar cube, then another, swirled in the milk. Something about him riled me. Maybe it was his utter fatuousness, or maybe it was the way his voice colored judgmental as he talked about everyone else in his story. There was a not-so-hidden subtext to all his comments, as if he assumed, for some reason I could very well imagine, that he and I were so ideologically simpatico that much of what he wanted to express need not be said. His very discretion seemed to put us in the same jolly conspiracy. His self-satisfaction was so evident, I wanted to knock his glasses off.
“I brought in Babbage and his lawyer,” Telushkin continued. “His understandable position was to say not a thing, to plead the Fifth. He was there only to listen, said his lawyer. So I showed them both what I discovered in the books, the raw numbers that had told me everything. Page by page, entry by entry, I went through it all, and when I was through, both he and the lawyer realized with absolute certainty that Babbage was caught. Tax evasion, of course, and money laundering, yes. But then, when I told him in my quiet way that there was more, that I could twist my reading of the books to tab him with being an integral part of whatever Tommy Greeley was part of, and when the penalties of that became clear, he blanched. And he turned. And he exposed everything that had been going on.”
“And what was that, Mr. Telushkin?” I said.
“Call me Jeffrey. Please. I insist. And I’ll call you Victor, is that all right?”
I smiled at him like we were in a league together and nodded and gripped my teacup ever tighter.
“It was drugs, of course,” he said. “Cocaine. Massive amounts brought up from Florida and distributed through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, as far north as Boston, as far west as Phoenix. It was more than a business, Victor, it was an empire. We thought we were seeing all the enterprise’s profits being run through Babbage, but he was only working with some of the money from only one of the participants, from Tommy Greeley. But there was another leader too, and others were taking out huge amounts of money. They were selling sixty million dollars a year of drugs, Victor. Sixty million dollars. A year. And it had been going on for half a decade.”
I put down my cup because it had started to shake atop its saucer. This was big, bigger than I had ever imagined, and it fit perfectly with what Joey had told me, about what Tommy was carrying when he was killed, and the cool way he handled the threat before Joey’s first swing with the bat. And something else, the thing that made my cup shake on the saucer. There was suddenly more than the suitcase at stake. Only Tommy Greeley’s money had gone through Babbage. Where was the rest of it, and was that the reason Tommy was killed? And was that the reason Joey too, twenty years later, was killed? My contingency fee agreement with Mrs. Parma began to glow with a fabulous heat.
“But, as could be expected, Victor, even with all that business, the heroes were having trouble breaking into the organization, the heroes were finding themselves stymied. This was more than a business organization, all the participants were friends, comrades. They had, all of them, made each other rich. And they weren’t talking, not a word. The grand jury was getting nowhere. They couldn’t prove up the drug charges. We would get some of them for tax evasion, yes, but it was looking like only a tax case. Until I brought Babbage into the grand jury room.