“Preparation,” I said, and shook his hand firmly. “Look into it.”
TWO
Very early the next morning I had breakfast at the Harvard Club in Boston with my boss, Bill Stearns. Which was when I learned I was suddenly in some serious trouble.
Stearns had breakfast there every morning: Mrs. Stearns, a wan Wellesley housewife, apparently did little else beside serve as a volunteer for the Museum of Fine Arts. I imagined that she slept late, with an eyeshade on, and that since the time their two kids had left the nest for their foreordained lives as junior Boston Brahmins (Deerfield, Harvard, investment banking, alcoholism), he hadn’t had a single breakfast at home.
His table at the Harvard Club was always the same, against the plate-glass window overlooking the city. Invariably he’d have the Harvard Club’s special shirred eggs (Stearns considered the late twentieth-century aversion to cholesterol an evanescent fad, like the sixties). Sometimes he’d eat by himself, with The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe, sometimes with one or more of the senior partners, to discuss business and golf.
Every once in a long while I’d join him. In case you suspect we engaged in conspiratorial, old-boy-network chitchat about the Central Intelligence Agency, I should make it plain that Bill Stearns and I normally talked about sports (which I know just enough about to banter) or real estate. Occasionally-this morning, for instance-there was something of gravity Bill wanted to discuss.
Stearns is the sort of person who’s considered avuncular by those who don’t know him. He’s in his late fifties, gray-haired, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, somewhat potbellied. His two-thousand-dollar suits from Louis of Boston look, on him, as if they came off the wrong rack at Filene’s Basement.
The truth is that after those two nightmarish, violent years of clandestine CIA work, I found the very safeness of my legal career at Putnam & Stearns deeply reassuring. But it was my service at CIA that got me recruited to Putnam & Stearns. Bill Stearns was formerly Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency under the legendary Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961.
When I was hired at Putnam & Stearns nine years ago I made it very clear that my intelligence background notwithstanding, I would refuse to have anything to do with the CIA. My brief CIA career was the past, I told Bill Stearns, and that was that. Stearns, to his credit, had shrugged theatrically and said, “Who said anything about CIA?” There was, I’m convinced, a twinkle in his eye. I think he figured that in time I’d relent, that it would be easy business for me. He knew that the Agency feels much more comfortable in dealing with its own, that there’d be all kinds of pressure on me to do whatever legal work the Agency wanted, and that I’d give in. Why else would an ex-field officer like me come to work for an old-boy firm like Putnam & Stearns? The answer, of course, was the money, which was substantially more than any other firm was offering me.
I didn’t know why Bill Stearns had invited me to breakfast that morning, but I strongly suspected something was up. I busied myself with my blueberry muffin. I’d had way too much coffee already, and I figured a little solid matter in my stomach would anchor me. I’ve always hated business breakfasts; I believe Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
As our food arrived. Stearns pulled a copy of The Boston Globe from his briefcase.
“You read about First Commonwealth, I assume,” he said.
His tone immediately alarmed me. “I didn’t see the Globe this morning,” I said.
He slid it across the table.
I scanned the front page. There, just below the fold, was a headline that made me feel immediately queasy.
INVESTMENT FIRM CLOSED BY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT it read. And in smaller letters: FIRST COMMONWEALTH ASSETS FROZEN BY SEC.
First Commonwealth was a small money-management firm based in Boston which managed all my money. Despite the grandiose name, it is a tiny place, a boutique firm run by an acquaintance of mine, with fewer than half a dozen clients. It was the firm that paid my mortgage each month, the place where virtually all my money was stashed.
Until this morning.
Unlike Stearns, I am not rich. Molly’s father left an insignificant amount of cash, some stock certificates and bearer bonds, and the title to his house in Alexandria, which was mortgaged to the hilt. He also left her, curiously, a document he’d signed and notarized, giving her full and absolute right of beneficiary to all accounts in his name foreign and domestic under the laws of blah blah blah… The details would numb your brain, as would most details pertaining to the law of estates and trusts. I say “curiously” because, as Harrison Sinclair’s only surviving heir, she was automatically entitled to beneficiary rights. No piece of paper was necessary. All right, so maybe Sinclair was the overly cautious type.
Me, he left exactly one item: an autographed copy of the memoirs of CIA director Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence. It was a first edition, and it was inscribed “For Hal, With deepest admiration, Allen.” A nice bequest on Sinclair’s part, but hardly a fortune.
When my father died some years back, I inherited a little over a million dollars, which after estate taxes immediately became half a million. I transferred all of it to First Commonwealth because of its good reputation. The head of the firm, Frederick “Doc” Osborne, I knew from various legal dealings, and he always struck me as shrewd. Was it Nelson Algren who said, Never eat at a place called Mom’s and never play cards with a guy named Doc? And that was before the days of money managers.
You may wonder, of course, why someone as shrewd as I’m supposed to be would put all his money in one place. I have often wondered the same thing myself, to be frank, and still do. The answer, I suppose, is twofold. Doc Osborne was a friend, and he had a terrific reputation, and therefore it seemed unnecessary to diversify. And I had always treated my inheritance as a nest egg, a chunk of money I preferred not to touch, since I was making a decent salary. And I suppose, too, it’s like that old saw about the shoemaker’s children never having any shoes: the guys who work with money are often pretty mindless about their own.
I dropped my fork, felt sick to my stomach. Rapidly calculating, I realized at once that unless I could somehow wrest my money back from First Commonwealth, I would immediately go bankrupt-my salary, generous though it was, wouldn’t even cover my mortgage. In the present soft real estate market in Boston, I’d be unable to sell my house except at a tremendous loss.
The veins at my temples throbbed. I looked up at Stearns.
“Help me out here,” I said weakly.
“Ben, I’m sorry-” Stearns said through a mouthful of shirred egg.
“What does this mean? This stuff isn’t my expertise, you know that.”
He took a swallow of coffee and set down the cup noisily in the saucer. “Here’s what it means,” he said with a sigh. “Your money’s frozen, along with that of all other First Commonwealth clients.”
“By whom? Who has the authority to do that? And for what?” I ran my eyes wildly up and down the Globe article, trying to glean some sense from it.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission. Plus the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.”
“Frozen,” I said dully, disbelieving.
“The U.S. Attorney’s office isn’t saying much-they said it’s a pending investigation.”
“Investigating what?”
“All they said was something about securities law violations and RICO statutes. They said it might take at least a year to release the assets, pending the outcome of the SEC’s investigation.”