“Come to think of it, when we met, I was quite amazed to hear bold criticism from him of the Islamic regime. He probably did it to provoke me to say something incriminating, or hint at a recruiting possibility, which would make him a double agent.”
“I have no doubt of that,” said Casey.
“I suspected him at the time,” I said, knowing I sounded like a Monday-morning quarterback. “No Iranian would dare be so critical of his government to a complete stranger. I intended to check him out later. But it didn’t occur to me he was dangling bait to make me attempt to recruit him.”
“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” said Casey matter-of-factly.
I tried to think of other people I’d met, but my excitement was impairing my focus.
Two days later I was in New York. After three days of debriefing, spending time with my children, and getting used to civilization again, which included taking three hot showers every day, I felt I had to complete my mission. As if on cue, Benny called.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In New York,” he answered.
“Good,” I said. “I need help on the case.” I was back in business.
“Is that a way to speak to an old friend? You don’t say hello, how are you, and more specifically you don’t tell me how it was?”
Jewish guilt games again? Well, he had a point. I hadn’t even thanked Benny yet for his role in saving my life.
“Sorry, you’re right. First and foremost, thank you for your role in getting me out. I know it was your men who whisked me out.”
“A small contribution to the case,” he said. “That’s nothing among friends.”
“Not so small, given the other stuff. Let’s have lunch.”
I made reservations at a kosher restaurant right off 47th Street in Manhattan that caters to the heavily Jewish Diamond District, and met him there. We spoke for a few minutes on the case. The Chameleon was very much on my mind, and the time I’d spent in the stinking hole underneath the textile factory did help in cracking the mystery to its end. We lapsed into quiet as the waiter placed a plate on the table loaded with cold cuts, rolls, and deli mustard.
Benny smiled. “Let me guess, you’ll have a double helping of everything.”
I was eager to dig in, but first I said, “Well, it takes quite a bit of this kosher food to fill me up.”
“You’ll survive,” said Benny drily.
“The way I see it,” I replied, “I don’t smoke, do drugs, gamble…so food is my one concession to vice.” I got back to business. “Benny, I need your help.” I’d had a lot of time to plan my next move while idling in hiding.
“What is it this time?” he said, pretending, just pretending, to be annoyed.
“I need access to Tempelhof Bank’s records.”
“Access?”
“Yes, I need to look up the bank’s contacts with McHanna Associates.”
“Who are McHanna Associates?”
“I already mentioned them to you. A New York-based financial corporation run by McHanna, who was the Chameleon’s victim in South Dakota.”
“What do you expect to find out?”
“I want to see the level of cooperation between McHanna Associates and Tempelhof Bank.” I decided not to broaden Benny’s horizons yet, nor complicate the request any further by telling him I also wanted to see whether the bank played a role as intermediary between McHanna and Al Taqwa. When I saw Benny’s expression I asked, “Is there a problem? You own the bank!”
“Dan. We own it, but management doesn’t know it, and obviously the Swiss government doesn’t either. I can’t just go there and start snooping.”
“Then how do you control the bank?”
“Through nominee directors. Distinguished businessmen. Even the instructions concerning the bank’s marketing efforts in Iran through the reunion were suggested to management by one of our nominee directors.”
“So management doesn’t know who they really work for?”
“You got it,” said Benny. “They believe oil billionaires from the Gulf States own the bank.”
“How did you manage to do that and survive the Swiss regulators’ scrutiny?” I asked curiously.
“Don’t ask,” said Benny. “But it works fine. Now you can understand my difficulty, not to say inability, to let you have access to the bank’s records.”
“I don’t need current records,” I said. “I need to go back to 1980 or 1981 through, say, 1995.”
“It’s possible that the records for the earlier years are archived or even shredded. But that I can find out.”
Later on in the afternoon Benny called. “These guys are so meticulous, they never destroy anything. The documents are stored in”-he paused, and I heard pages turning-“Manheim Document Storage, in Bern. Does that help you?”
“In a way. I’d either need to break in or get a court order.” “Get a court order under some pretext,” suggested Benny. “We don’t need the media attention if a break-in is discovered.”
I returned to my office and found in the day’s mail Mrs. Nazeri’s power of attorney that I had had sent to her earlier, marked The Law Offices of Dan Gordon, Esq. She had executed it before the Swiss consul in Tehran and faxed me an advance copy. This was the original. As I instructed my assistant to messenger it to the surrogate’s court downtown, I reflected that at last, I was practicing law again. Well, not exactly. I wasn’t expecting to be paid, and my motive went beyond the need to serve a client. Also, the pleadings had been drafted and filed by a discreet Agency lawyer, not by me.
No matter. I was the one who’d signed the petition seeking my appointment as the administrator of the estate of the late Philip Montreau, aka Christopher Gonda. Wasn’t that enough?
A week later the surrogate’s clerk called me. “You have indicated in the petition a Swiss address of the decedent.”
“Yes.”
“Did the decedent have any assets in Switzerland?”
“I think he just had bank accounts.”
“You will most probably need ancillary letters of administration for a Swiss court. The Swiss banks will not honor a New York court’s order. You’ll have to convert it to become a Swiss court order as well.”
Nonetheless, he said, my appointment had been confirmed, and he faxed me a copy. In short order, I dispatched a locksmith to meet me at Nazeri’s apartment. The locksmith opened the door, replaced the lock, gave me a key, and left.
I entered the spacious three bedroom apartment. Nazeri had spent a lot of money on decor. Not to my taste, all these pink figurines and lace, but still expensive. I searched the apartment. It was clean. Too clean. I put on plastic gloves and looked around. I opened drawers and closets. Nothing. It was like a model apartment in a development for people of middling taste. There was nothing personal in the apartment, and there were no documents whatsoever, not even an old phone bill. The apartment was neat and tidy, as if the maid had just left, removing everything personal or made of pulp. I sighed. I’d have to send lab people to search for fingerprints.
I returned to my office and wrote a report to the file. Two days later the surrogate’s court issued the additional documents to be sent to Switzerland. After we had them approved with an apostille, that antiquated but still-necessary method of authenticating documents for transmission to foreign authorities, I sent them to Switzerland by registered mail. Boring, formal, but necessary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A week later Dr. Liechtenstein, our Swiss attorney, faxed me the court’s decision. It took me some time to decipher the archaic German they used. I read it again and again until I understood that in fact the Swiss court had authorized the request of the New York City Surrogate’s Court to order Tempelhof Bank to open their archives and provide the New York Surrogate Court’s appointed Administrator Herr Dan Gordon with copies of records of deposits and other transactions of the late Philip Montreau, also known as Christopher Gonda, who resided in Wehntalerstr. 215, CH-8057 Zurich, made or occurring between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 2005, at Tempelhof Bank, or for which Tempelhof Bank acted as a banking correspondent.