"Harmon jumped at it," Bruno told him. "Len met him down in Palm Beach and said the guy had greed written all over him. So we cut a deal."
"The same kind of deal Ron LaSalle wouldn't go along with."
Bruno nodded.
"And what went wrong?" Reggie asked. "What happened?"
"You get in business with a rattlesnake, you can't be surprised when he bites you. And then you really can't be surprised when the bite turns out to be poison."
"Which side are you referring to as the snake?" Justin asked.
"I'll give you your point, but I'm talkin' about Harmon. He was the rattler."
"Give us the specifics," Justin said.
"It started out as a sweet deal. He did a lotta business with the Chinks. Family ties, business ties, all that shit. He was investin' a lot of money for 'em. And he knew what they were gonna be investin' in. He said the Chinese car business was gonna take off. The numbers were amazin'. I mean, we're talking huge. Puts us to fucking shame. I saw the numbers. They more than tripled the number of cars over there in the last five years-from somethin' like six million to twenty million. And that's gonna keep goin' up like crazy. They're sellin' a thousand new cars a day in Beijing. A thousand a day! I didn't even know that was a city! And you know what's gonna happen over here? We're fucked and Europe's fucked and the Japs are fucked most of all. I'm talkin' good passenger cars for ten grand and an SUV for under twenty."
"Okay," Justin said. "You're hired. You can do the infomercial."
"I'm just sayin', this is a business that had our name all over it. Harmon said he could move a few things around, take our money and invest in platinum, which had to keep goin' up because all of a sudden China needed it-and needed a lot of it. They had to have it for all those fuckin' cars! It's makin' me crazy just to fuckin' think about it!"
"Try to keep your head in the game, Bruno."
Bruno did his best to calm down. "Yeah, yeah, all right. So Harmon said that if we put money in with his fund, he could arrange it so that we always made a profit. Other people could go up and down but we'd always stay up. He'd keep us strictly in platinum and slant cars."
"Why was he so willing to make that deal?" Reggie wanted to know. "His fund had plenty of money."
"It wasn't just our money," Bruno said.
"What was it?"
"It was our… expertise."
"Let's hear it," Justin said.
"Again… off the record. But it's not so complicated. Harmon's tied into China big-time. China doesn't want to just import cars and import car parts, they want to make their own fuckin' things, right? That's what they do. They take things over. They make 'em themselves 'cause that's where the money is. They're takin' over the whole world! So Harmon's helpin' them. He's shippin' parts to them on the sly. 'Cause Ford and Chrysler and nobody in the fuckin' U.S. governments wants to be helpin' them take over the whole car industry. So the exportin' is a little, let's say, dicey. I mean, they're gonna do it, you don't stop the Chinks once they get rollin', but the good ol' USA wants a share, right? They don't want 'em makin' all the parts we know how to make 'cause then what do they need us for?"
"So he lets you into his fund, he promises that you'll make a steady profit, and in exchange you provide a little smuggling expertise. For which you also get a share off the top?"
"Hey, we're a business just like everybody else."
"And where'd you smuggle the parts to?" Justin asked.
"Mexico. There was a plant there. Auto parts. The Chinese would fly their planes in there and Harmon could ship 'em whatever he wanted to ship 'em as long as he could get it to the plant."
"And how about your profits in the fund? Did they stay up?"
Bruno nodded. "Until recently."
"What happened?"
"He said that some of his other investors had gotten unhappy. And he said that a couple of people had gotten suspicious of the way he was playing fast and loose with their dough. I mean, I don't know exactly how he was working it, but he was basically taking profits from someone else and giving them to us."
"Did he say what people were suspicious?"
"He tried to keep things quiet but, you know, we're very inquisitive. I got the kind of face people eventually open up to."
"You are a charmer," Justin said.
Bruno shrugged. "He said it was his father. And a hotshot Wall Street guy. A guy who threw a lot of money his way, a guy connected big-time to China."
"Lincoln Berdon?"
Bruno nodded. "The guy who runs Rockworth and Williams, yeah. Berdon had put a lot of Chinese people, including the Chinese government, into the Ascension fund. He had a lot of Rockworth dough in it, too. And he wasn't happy with the results of his investments. Or the investments Harmon was making for his Chinese connections."
"Because a big chunk of the profits were going to you."
"Hey, he was givin' the Chinks what they needed-the platinum and the auto parts. He was just chargin' 'em top dollar and makin' a profit."
"So what did Evan propose to do about it?" Justin asked. "How was he going to deal with the pressure from his father and Berdon?"
Bruno raised an eyebrow. "He wanted to back off our deal for a while. Make sure a few other people got their big returns. He said he'd make it up to us in a few months. He swore it'd be bigger than ever. He said he had a scheme that would bring us into the whole Chinese car market, make us more than we'd ever dreamed about."
"And your reaction?"
"I told him we were capable of dreamin' pretty big. And I said, hey, it wasn't anything personal, we could talk about Chinese cars and shit all he wanted but we had a deal. Not for the future but for the here and now. And I explained that the people I work for like other people to respect their deals."
"So what happened?"
"I'm not exactly what you call a financial expert. But I know people. Harmon thought he could negotiate a deal with anyone. He was pretty surprised when he ran into someone who had a different kind of negotiating technique."
"Meaning you."
"Meaning me. And my technique is pretty effective. But I knew this guy Harmon was going to try to cheat us. And once that-how should I say this-once that bond of trust is broken, then we're not big on doing the repair work, you know what I mean?"
"Yes," Justin said. "I do. So what happened then?"
"We knew he'd invested us big-time in platinum. So before we… let's say severed our relationship with him…"
"You thought you'd make a killing. At least a figurative one. And drive the price of platinum way up."
Bruno nodded. "That's pretty much it."
Reggie stared at him openmouthed. "You sunk a ship with how many people on it? Fifty? A hundred? More than that? Just so you could make some money?"
Bruno didn't look as if he was offended. "I do what I'm paid to do," he said. "If you wanna know the truth, if things had gone right, nobody woulda died. I didn't know about that kid who'd hidden out."
"If you had, would you have cared?"
"You got me there," Bruno said. "I'm not really a sensitive kind of guy."
She couldn't sit still, couldn't look at the huge man sitting on the couch with a can of beer. Reggie got up, began pacing.
"Okay," Justin said. "You sunk the ship Hades, drove the price of platinum up, made whatever percent profit you made, and pulled your money out of Ascension."
"That's where it gets complicated," Bruno said. "We didn't get our money out."
"Why not?" Reggie said from across the room.
Before Bruno could answer, Justin said, "Because Evan sold all your platinum to someone else. He used you the way he'd been using his other investors. You didn't own it anymore because he'd shorted it so somebody else could make the profit."
Bruno quietly applauded. "Very good, Sherlock."
"Who'd he sell it to?"
"The bastard sold it to himself. He fucked us. We were buyin' the platinum and making money. But he'd bought the fucking company that was using all the platinum. The one we were selling to."