All very well, at least superficially. A closer look revealed that most of it was either misdirection or an outright lie. According to his Google search after logging on to one of the library’s computers, he had discovered a great deal about both Frederick Grange and his foundation. Grange had indeed been shanty Irish and the son of a cop, but he had never been an entrepreneur, brokerage owner, investment banker or railroad tycoon. He had, in fact, been a clerk in the firm of Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting, where McSkimming had been a junior partner.
Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting basically dissolved at the close of the war with the blasting away of half its partners and even more of its younger associates, although the firm still existed in corporate fact. It was purchased in 1945 by several unnamed partners and hired its own lawyers-and it was this group of lawyers who created the Grange Foundation and the McSkimming Art Trust, purportedly given family trust tax status by the use of the institutionalized heir, Robert McSkimming.
In 1956, following the death of the boy at the age of sixteen, the foundation was quietly reincorporated as a tax-deductible charity while retaining its name. It was no longer a family trust or a foundation; it was the shell of one, run from behind the scenes by several directors, who, under the charter of the organization were not required to identify themselves. Nowhere did there seem to be any record of the names of those directors, since the directors of the public board were all the newly recruited lawyers now operating under the defunct Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting banner. By 1956 all traces of the original participants in what had to be a completely fraudulent operation had vanished. But the foundation remained, on its way into the early part of the next century, still in existence after sixty years. It didn’t make any sort of sense; an elaborate, complex and very expensive hoax, but to what purpose and what eventual end?
Since the regular audit statements filed of their grants to other institutions with the IRS had never been a cause for suspicion, that meant that the three or four hundred million dollars’ worth of assets held by the Grange Foundation were real enough even though they obviously had not come from bequests made by Frederick Grange or his wife.
The Grange Foundation was a front to disperse funds that had no real source. It was money laundering on an enormous scale, and it had now been going on for more than half a century. It was quite extraordinary, and remarkably simple. But where was the money coming from that needed laundering, and how was a small boy spirited away from a convent in the north of Italy involved? The Grange Foundation was a small part of his quest here in America. According to his contact in the Vatican, the boy from the past and his present whereabouts were crucial. He scrawled his name on the pad:
Frederico Botte
He knew that once, the boy had been given another name-a dangerous name-and it was his job to make sure it would never be revealed. He wrote the second name below the first:
Eugenio
He glanced at his watch. It was well into the afternoon but there was probably time to get back to the hotel and change into his Father Gentile garb before going off to his meeting with the good friars at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.
While checking out the Grange Foundation on the Internet he’d run a quick check on the staff at the Community of Sant’Egidio and discovered that there was no one working there who went back as far as Frederico Botte’s arrival in their care, but he knew he could probably find out something of use.
He switched off his lamp and left the football field-sized room, the clouds in the frescoes far above him frozen in a perpetually blue and sun-drenched sky. Unfortunately real life wasn’t quite that simple. He went across the main lobby, his footsteps echoing on the shiny marble floor, then pushed out through the main doors and discovered that in real life it was raining hard. Ducking his head he ran down the steps, paused to buy an umbrella from one of the enterprising vendors who always seemed to forecast the weather better than the weathermen, then headed for his hotel.
30
Carl Kressman eased weary old bones out of bed at his normal early hour, then went up into the tower of his Florida-style beach house to take a look at the day. As usual, the weather was nearly perfect: cloudless sky, limitless azure Gulf, gentle breeze and a temperature that was somewhere in the eighties already.
Kressman went down to his bedroom again, slipped into his bathing suit and gave himself a quick once-over in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. At seventy-five he still had most of what he’d had at twenty, except now some of it was chemically or mechanically enhanced. Viagra and a couple of other potions kept his pecker up when it was necessary-which wasn’t all that often, if truth be told-and a pacemaker that looked like a pack of cigarettes stuck under the skin of his chest kept his ticker tocking. For some reason, unlike most of his friends, he still had all his hair-white, now, of course-and trifocal contact lenses kept his vision twenty-twenty. He was tanned, fit and in good spirits, completely in command of his senses and rich as Croesus. What else could a man want?
The tanned old man took the circular staircase down to the main floor, went to the all-white kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic machine. Standing by the sink and looking out at the big swimming pool at the back of his lot he shook his head, savoring the rich flavor of the brew. Life was certainly a strange thing; there was a time when he had counted his life in minutes. The thought of living out the last of his long life in a place like this, with beach houses, swimming pools and machines that made coffee for you before you woke was almost too much to comprehend. He had come through wars, hurricanes and untold other disasters and had more than just survived-he had prospered. He laughed out loud at that. At twenty years old he had barely heard of shrimp let alone tasted one, and in the end the wonderful little morsels had made him rich.
Kressman finished his coffee, rinsed out his mug at the sink, then put it in the rack to dry. He crossed the tile-floored living room, went out through the screen door onto the covered porch and then down the steps to the pool. More than one person had made fun of him for having a pool when his house was only fifty feet from the Gulf of Mexico but he enjoyed the convenience. The pool was filled with saltwater pumped in from the Gulf, filtered and heated to eighty degrees, night or day. There was no surf to get in the way of his exercise and no currents or riptides to deal with.
He walked down the concrete apron around the pool, slipped out of his slippers at the foot of the diving board and picked up his goggles out of the little plastic basket he kept there. He went out to the end of the board, bounced twice, lightly, then arced into the air, slicing into the breeze-rippled water with the near professional ease of long practice.
Kressman began his regular laps, his mind clearing as he went through his routine of alternating crawl and breast stroke. As he swam he let his mind go free, memory skittering over his life, his happy years with his wife-dead now after a short, painful battle with cancer-his two children, boy and girl, one a doctor now, the other a professor in New York. He thought of his businesses, taking half a dozen old shrimpers from Fernandina Beach, refurbishing them and putting them to work, half a dozen becoming a hundred, a hundred becoming a freezing and packaging depot, the depot station becoming one of the biggest seafood companies in the south. Investing in Alabama coast real estate and getting even richer.
All so he could wind up swimming in his pool in the early morning, all by himself with his memories. He reached the end of his routine, did one more lap just for the hell of it, then floated on his back for a minute or two, staring up into the young morning sky, thinking about having a big breakfast down the road at the new and improved Nolan’s, recovered from the hurricane now, and back in business better than ever. Steak, eggs and pan fries and to hell with his cholesterol for once. “Liegt der Bauer unterm Tisch, war das Essen nimmer frisch!” as his papa used to tell him.