He was flicking his upper lip with his fingernail. He looked deceptively sleepy. With quiet brevity he said, “How much?”
“To buy the aviation company and pay the packing and shipping and incidental costs I figure one million nine hundred thousand. I’d rather call it two million in case I run into a snag somewhere — it’s better to have a cushion. It’s a bargain actually — the Government paid upwards of fifteen million for that stuff.”
“Maybe. But what condition is it in now? It could be rusty or obsolete or both.”
“Obsolete for the U.S. Air Force, maybe, but not for a South American country. And it’s all serviceable. It needs a good dusting, that’s all. I’ve had it checked out.”
“How much profit do you expect to realize?”
“That’s classified. Let’s just say I intend to put a floor under the bidding of three million five.”
“Suppose you can’t get that much? Suppose you don’t get any bids at all?”
“I’m not going into this as a speculation. I’ve already made the contacts. The deal’s ready to go down. All I have to do is name the time and place for the auction — but I’ve got to own the facilities before I can deliver them.”
“Suppose we made you a loan, Mr. Ballantyne. And suppose you put the money in your pocket and skipped out to Tahiti.”
“All right. Suppose we draw up contracts. If I don’t pay the interest and principal you forclose the company. The assets will remain right here in Arizona until I’ve sold them and received the cash down payment, which will be enough to repay your loan. If I skip out with the money you’ll have the assets — and with them a list of the interested governments. Fair enough?”
“We’ll see. Two million is a great deal of money.”
“Did I ask you for two million? I’ve got my own sources of private capital who want to buy in for small shares. I’ve raised six hundred thousand on my own. The loan I need is for one million four.” That was elementary psychology: scare him with a big amount, then reduce it attractively.
Then I dropped the clincher on him. I said, “I’ll need the money for no more than six weeks. I’ll pay one percent a day, no holidays, for six weeks. That works out to just short of six hundred thousand dollars interest. You lend me one million four, you get back two million.”
“I’ll have to check this out first. The name of the company?”
I knew I had him.
Margaret looked tired but she covered the strain with her smile. She set out cheese and biscuits in the living room while I mixed the drinks.
She said, “They haven’t found any internal bleeding. He’s going to be all right.” She cut me a wedge of cheddar. “He’s a foolish man sometimes but he didn’t deserve this. Money’s only money. Eddie — he’s like a kid playing games. The money’s just a counter, it’s the way you keep score. If you lose a game you don’t kill your opponent — you just set up the board and start another game.”
“Foran doesn’t play by those rules, Margaret. Eddie knew that.”
She drank; I heard the ice cubes click against her teeth. “Did Foran go for it?”
“I won’t know for a while. He’s checking things out. But I think he’ll buy it. He’s too greedy to pass it up. The easiest mark for a con man is another crook.”
“If he’s checking things out, is there anything for him to find?”
“I doubt it. Most of what I told him was true. My boss set up the Nassau shell corporation for me. It’ll be there when Foran looks for it. The Arizona Charter Company exists, it’s on the Government’s books just as I told him it was, and the assets and facilities are exactly as I described them to him.”
“If you pull if off, Charlie, they’ll come after you.”
“I don’t think they’ll find me. And I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep over it.” I smiled to reassure her. People had been trying to kill me for more than thirty years and many of them were far more adept at it than the brand of thugs that Foran and his kind employed.
I knew one thing. If Foran didn’t fall for this scam I’d just get at him another way. In any case Foran was all finished. Eddie and Margaret didn’t know it but they had pitted the most formidable antagonist of all against Foran. I’m Charlie Dark. I’m the best there is.
The results of his investigations seemed to satisfy Foran. His lawyers drew up the most ironclad contract I’d ever seen. Not a single item of Arizona Charter Company equipment was to be moved off its present airfield location until every penny of the loan had been paid back. The only thing the contract didn’t include was the vigorish — the actual usurious interest rate: on paper we had an above-board agreement at 16 % annual interest with a foreclosure date six weeks from the date of signatures.
The money was in the form of a bank cashier’s check and I endorsed it over to the Government in exchange for the deed to all outstanding stock in the Arizona Charter Company. I flew back from Washington to Tucson with the deed and stock certificates in an attaché case chained to my wrist. Twelve hours later they were in a safe deposit box to which Foran had the second key, so that if I skipped out without paying, he would have possession of the documents and stock certificates. If I didn’t repay him within forty days he would be the legal owner of the company and all its assets.
We shook hands at the bank and I departed for the airport, whence I flew to Phoenix and rented a car. By midnight I was on the desert airfield that belonged to me. I dismissed the night watchman and took over the premises. As soon as I was alone I began setting the demolition charges.
There was nobody to prevent my destroying my own property. I had canceled all the insurance policies the day before, so that I was perpetrating no fraud. It was my own property: I was free to do whatever I pleased with it.
The explosions would have thrilled any twelve-year-old war movie fan. When the debris settled I drove to the hospital to say goodbye to Eddie and Margaret.
Eddie’s eyes twinkled. “Mainly I regret he’ll never know I had anything to do with it.”
“Keep it that way. If he ever found out he’d finish you.”
“I know. I’m not that much of a twit — not any more.”
Margaret said, “What will happen to Foran?”
“Nothing pleasant,” I said. “It can’t have been his own money, not all of it. He’s not that rich. He must have laid off a good part of the loan on his Mob associates. At least a million dollars, I’d guess. When he doesn’t pay them back they’ll go after him the way he went after Eddie.”
Then I smiled. “And that, you know, is what they call justice.”
Challenge for Charlie
This took place several years ago; I must make that clear.
Normally Helsinki is one of my favorite towns but this time I was reluctant to return there because the job was the toughest one Myerson had yet put into my ample lap and the adversary was Mikhail Yaskov, who was — bar one — the best in the business.
Yaskov and I had crossed paths obliquely several times down through the Cold War desades but I had never been sent head-to-head against him before and the truth is I was not eager to face this assignment, although — vanity being what it is — I believed I probably could best him. “Probably” is not a word that gets much of a workout in my lexicon; usually I know I can win before I start playing the game; but with Yaskov I’d be dead if I became overconfident.
The job was simple on the face of it: straightforward. As usual the assignment had come to our section because of the odd politics of international espionage which sometimes can cause simple jobs to become sensitive ones. If it’s a job that would embarrass anybody then it usually gets shoveled into our department.