“Right.”
“Okay, let’s say somebody like Quinton figures out a way so it doesn’t look so obvious.” Charters leaned in again, stretching his arms out on either side of his plate. “He sets up a regular finance company somewhere in the Caribbean-”
“So the premiums go into the insurance company, then to the finance company, and then back to the States as loans?”
“Boom. Boom. Boom. And the IRS is blind to the whole thing… Beautiful. Just beautiful. And there are about as many Americans who understand how offshore insurance works as there are people who understand how a black hole does what it does.”
“When did they add the third step?”
“About six, seven years ago.”
“Is that how Anston got hooked up with Quinton?”
“I don’t know. I just know they’re hooked up somehow.”
S o how’d you get onto this trail?” Charters asked Gage as he pushed his plate away and wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“I’d rather not say.”
“Let me guess. We talked about Anston. We talked about Quinton. We talked about Meyer. We talked about Cayman Exchange Bank. Let’s see
… let’s see… whose name could be missing?” Charters smiled. “Who could it be? Maybe Charlie Palmer? My dear investigator. Or, shall we say, Anston’s dear investigator, may he rest in peace.”
“Why ‘my dear investigator’?”
“I paid him fifty grand for nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because Anston told me to. He said we needed some investigation done. I think I just paid for Palmer’s summer vacation in the islands. I never got any benefit from it. He didn’t need to go down there and talk to people in Quinton’s firm or at the bank. By the time you and the FBI were done, everybody knew what happened and it wasn’t like I had a defense.”
“I take it you paid him offshore, too.”
“Yeah. It was to Pegasus.”
Charters took a sip of coffee, then said, “I don’t know where you’re going with all of this, and I don’t want to know. But I’d be careful if you’re thinking about taking on Anston. The way his mind works scares the hell out of me.”
Charters set his cup down.
“Anston figured it might help if I started going to church in case he wanted to put on a character defense. You know, get some minister to come in to say how I wouldn’t cheat people or, if I did, it was unintentional or maybe the devil made me do it. Anston took me with him one Sunday to get me hooked up with a preacher. The sermon was about the Book of Job, and the suffering God had inflicted on the guy. Real graphic. Skin lesions and flesh falling off. I felt like throwing up.
“As we’re driving away, Anston gives me this matter-of-fact look and says about the spookiest, most megalomaniacal thing I ever heard a man say. He says:
“ ‘The minister has it all wrong. The real lesson of the Book of Job wasn’t that God tortured Job and killed his wife and his kids and destroyed all his animals and crops. It wasn’t that at all.’ Then Anston does a long pause, and says, ‘It’s that Job made God come to him.’ ”
Chapter 62
I hate this place,” Boots Marnin complained in his third international call to Marc Anston. “Everything is filthy and noisy. I can’t even sleep at night, between the imams calling the rag heads to prayer and horns honking and those goddamn Bollywood soundtracks blaring out of sidewalk speakers. And every day there’s another idiotic Hindu festival for some god who looks like a mutant animal.”
“Then find Hawkins and get out of there.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing? You know how big Hyderabad is? Seven million dirty, sweaty, smelly people.”
“Are you even sure he’s there?”
“Positive. Some girl in his house overheard him tell a cop in town that’s where he was going.”
“Why do you believe her?”
“Because I gave her enough money to buy her folks two of them Brahma bulls and told her I’d come back and slit the throats of the cattle and her parents if she was lying to me.”
“How are you going to find him?”
“I’m hoping he’ll come to me. I hired some ex-cops to watch the dhabas. They’re food shacks along the highway where the hookers work. It’s the only place around where you can get teenage girls easy, and that’s what he’s into. Sometimes two, three at a time. Costs him about seventy-five cents each. Sneaking out to the dhabas is safer than bringing his own girls from Gannapalli. They might talk to neighbors and give him away.”
“And when you find him?”
“My guess is he’ll have a heart attack the moment he looks at me.”
“Get it done. I need you back here. We’re going to have to do something about Gage. He’s been cozying up to Porzolkiewski. Been to see him a couple of times.”
T he mob of Indian truck drivers surged like an amoeba as the fighting cocks jabbed and clawed and pursued one another in the trash-strewn dirt patch behind the row of food stalls and shacks along the Hyderabad Highway.
Despite the setting sun and the gray-brown haze of the dusty road, Boots Marnin caught flashes of rooster wings rising above the screaming men. He was hunched low in the rear sleeping seat of the tractor cab parked to the east, hiding his face from the drivers passing by and from the prostitutes trolling for customers.
The circle surged again as the cocks tumbled toward the legs of the men standing close to the rear of the nearest shack. Boots heard the thump of sweaty backs slamming against the wooden wall as the men dodged the razor-sharp spurs cinched to the roosters’ legs. They re-formed the circle as the birds rolled the opposite way, toward the mango trees bordering the lot to the north.
Diesel fumes pumping out from the dozens of trucks parked around him once would have reminded Boots of his father’s garage, but now they merely choked him and engendered not thoughts of Houston, but fantasies of escape. The only break came in the form of the wind-driven odor of reused coconut oil, deep-fried samosas, chickpea balls, burned wheat chapattis, and cumin and coriander and turmeric and a dozen other spices that made Boots want to reach for a gun. For the few days of his surveillance, Boots would look at the cows wandering along the highway or grazing in the fields, then daydream about a T-bone steak. Now the thought turned his stomach because he knew the meat would taste like India.
Boots heard a cheer and saw triumphant brown hands raise the victorious cock above the crowd. He then watched men separate into groups and exchange rupees before wandering back to their trucks or to the small wooden tables spread along the front of the dhaba.
The skies darkened as he watched them eat, then disappear into the shacks, and drive off twenty minutes later, making room for a continuing stream of other drivers stopping to eat at the tables or screw on the dirty cots or sleep in their trucks.
Boots leaned forward toward the ex-cop sitting in the driver’s seat of the tractor cab.
“You sure this the right place?” Boots asked. “We’ve been here a long time.”
“I am still believing this is the only dhaba he is visiting along the Hyderabad Highway.”
They sat without speaking for another hour watching trucks, cars, and vans arriving and leaving, men cooking rice and lentils in stainless steel pots over open gas flames, women chopping vegetables and mincing herbs.
The ex-cop tapped Boots’s shoulder, then pointed at a yellow, canvas-topped auto-taxi pulling to a stop along the side of the nearest shack.
The taxi walla remained seated inside the three-wheeled, open-sided vehicle while a potbellied man slipped out the far side, into the shadows along the wall, then disappeared around the back of the shack.
“That is Mr. Wilbert, yes?” the ex-cop said.
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
W ilbert Hawkins, beer in hand, bald head illuminated by the shack’s dangling lightbulb, pants around his ankles, stared down at the naked teenage girl on her knees before him. He grabbed her hair and rocked her head back and forth-