If the lower floors had had an abandoned feel, this one seemed vandalized. The offices were nearly bare, with only some scarred furniture and the occasional moving box remaining. The blinds and drapes that had covered the glass walls lay in heaps in some offices, and in others hung twisted and askew. The carpeting was stained and torn in many places, and in many places was missing altogether. Rows of acoustical tile were missing from the dropped ceiling. The light fixtures that weren’t mangled on the floor were mostly dark. The forest of technology- screens, keyboards, elaborate phone consoles-that usually covers any trading desk had been cut away from these, leaving behind a tangle of exposed cable and some cleaner patches on the filthy desktops. The trading desks themselves were like junked cars, gutted and left for scrap. The air was cold and stale and smelled vaguely like a bus station.
We picked our way across the trading floor to a big corner office. It had its own little waiting area and a glass-walled conference room adjoining it. Neary found a key on the ring and unlocked the door. This office was in better shape than the others. The drapes and carpets and light fixtures were intact, and the furniture that remained-a massive teak desk, topped in polished stone, two huge credenzas, and a set of teak bookshelves-looked undamaged. Neary stepped to the windows to take in the view.
It was spectacular. To the north, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the sweep of FDR Drive running along the East River, and a chunk of the Brooklyn waterfront-all glittered in the clear night. To the east there was more of Brooklyn, the shadowed mass of Governor’s Island and the distant lights of the Verrazano, across a dark expanse of harbor. We looked out in silence.
“Nice views, but not much else,” Neary said after a while. I looked around the office. A large moving box stood, unsealed, on one of the credenzas.
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
“Stuff Nassouli left behind when he split. Desk doodads, those Lucite tombstones from some deals they’d done, and a bunch of pictures that were hanging on the walls, mostly of himself at parties.” Neary reached into the box and took out an eight-by-ten color photo, nicely mounted between glass plates. It showed people at a party, a high-end one. The men were in black tie, the women in shimmering, gauzy things. I recognized the Temple of Dendur, at the Metropolitan, in the background. In the foreground was a man I took to be Gerard Nassouli.
He was handsome and, in that picture, could have been anything from thirty-five to fifty. The photo showed him from the waist up, and he seemed heavily built, but not fat. He had a broad face, with heavy-lidded, slightly almond-shaped eyes, a straight, prominent nose, and a wide mouth with full lips and lots of white teeth. His skin was dark, and his glossy, black hair and brows were thick. He wore a mustache and a Van Dyke beard, both closely cropped. He was smiling in the photo, and seemed to be speaking with someone outside the frame. In one hand he held a champagne flute aloft, his arm raised in mid-toast. His other arm was wrapped around a willowy blonde, slightly taller than he, who looked barely legal. She smiled faintly, her eyes closed and her head inclined toward his. His large, manicured hand rested proprietarily on her hip.
There was something sleek and ursine in Nassouli’s immaculate hair and dark features and well-fed bulk, and I realized that he reminded me a bit of Rick Pierro. But where Pierro projected an open, what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality-a kind of friendly, regular-guy bear-there was something vaguely menacing and slightly leering about Nassouli- a piratical bear. A bear from the Hellfire Club.
“Here he is with an ex-mayor at a Knicks game. And here he’s with a model at-what, the Belmont? And here he’s with the girl from that game show, at some other black-tie thing.” One by one, Neary took photos from the box and placed them on the tabletop. “Nassouli at some club; another black-tie party; here he’s at Lincoln Center. At the Guggenheim. At the Garden.”
The photos were identically mounted, between glass plates, and in all of them Nassouli was in the foreground. While he never looked directly into the camera, I got the sense he was always aware of its presence. The events in the photos spanned a couple of decades, and you could trace the passage of time through the changing fashions worn by the people in them. Only Nassouli himself seemed changeless. Perhaps slightly thicker, a bit fuller in the face in the more recent ones. Otherwise he seemed not to age. Dorian Gray bear.
“This looks like an old one… here he is at the Odeon.” Neary laid another photo on the tabletop.
This one was black-and-white, and it was the only photo in which he seemed to have no awareness of the camera, the only truly candid picture in the bunch. It was a street scene, at night, taken from the backseat of a car, through a partially open window. It must have just rained, as the street was shiny and water was beaded on the window glass. Nassouli had just come out of the Odeon-part of the restaurant was visible behind him. He was coming toward the car and the camera. One hand was reaching out, as if to grasp the door handle. There were figures behind him, blurred, dark shapes, their faces white smears. Only Nassouli’s face was in focus. And it was chilling.
The other pictures had hinted at something a little dangerous beneath the attractive, well-groomed facade. This photo left no doubt. This was no stylish rogue; this was evil-and all the scarier for its handsome packaging. In the photo Nassouli’s broad face was infernal, his dark, hooded eyes gleaming, his thick lips pulled into a leering, satisfied grin. It was the look Torquemada might have worn after a busy day at work, or the smile the snake had worn, when he’d sold his first apple. It was a wonder he had hung it on his office wall.
The composition of the photo, its stark contrasts and heavy shadows, were familiar to me, and I didn’t need to see the name, penned in tiny letters at the bottom right corner of the matte paper, to recognize the work of H. Barrie.
Chapter Nine
“You’re gonna hurt yourself doing that, honey,” called one of the girls, from the corner. She had a wobbly pile of orange hair, and legs that were bigger than mine. They were covered not at all by a leather skirt the size of a napkin.
“You’re working way too hard,” called another, laughing. “Come on over here, we’ll relax you.” Her eight-inch black stilettos and red vinyl jumpsuit glistened in the streetlight. She had the neck and shoulders of a wrestler.
“Morning, girls,” I said. I waved and kept on running. “Girls” was neither politically nor anatomically correct, I knew, but it was what these guys aspired to, and who was I to argue. I was headed south on Eleventh Avenue in the predawn dark, on the last leg of a six-mile run. I passed the Javits Center and the trucks already lumbering around it, and went back on autopilot, one part of my brain on traffic and potholes, another trying to sort out exactly what I’d found at MWB. So far I had more questions than answers.
I’d seen something of the mess that Brill and Parsons faced at the bank, and how they went about cleaning it up. I’d seen their nifty document system. Slick as it was, it held only one of the items from Pierro’s fax. Was that because the other documents simply hadn’t been in the bank? From what I could tell, once something got into that system, it was hard to remove without leaving lots of footprints. But how hard was it to keep something out in the first place?