“I think I see where this is going. You couldn’t tell your investors they’d lost all their money. Right?”
“Some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with me. What was I going to tell them, I screwed up? I couldn’t face that. You know I never had a single losing quarter, all those decades? No one’s ever had a record like that. I mean, the sainted Warren Buffett lost almost ten percent a few years back.”
“So what’d you do, Marshall? Dummy up statements like Bernie Madoff?”
“No! I needed cash. Lots and lots of it. Massive infusions. And no bank in the world would lend me money.”
“Ah, gotcha. You took in new money. So you could make it look like you hadn’t lost anything.”
He nodded, shrugged.
“That’s still fraud,” I said.
“That wasn’t my intent!”
“No, of course not. So who’d you take money from?”
“You don’t want to know, Nickeleh. Believe me, you don’t want to know. The less you know, the better.”
“At this point I think you better tell me.”
“Let’s just say you’re not going to run into any of these guys at the Union League Club, okay? These are bad men, Nicky.” A twitch had started in his left eye.
“Let me hear some names.”
“You ever hear of Joost Van Zandt?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Van Zandt was a Dutch arms dealer whose private militia had supported Liberia’s murderous dictator, Charles Taylor.
“Desperate, more like,” he said. “How about Agim Grazdani? Or Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman?”
Agim Grazdani was the head of the Albanian mafia. His portfolio included gunrunning, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. When Italy’s top prosecutor issued a warrant for his arrest a couple of years ago, the prosecutor and his entire family turned up in the meat locker of the justice minister’s favorite restaurant in Rome, their bodies dismembered and frozen.
Since then Italian prosecutors have been too busy with other cases to go after him.
Juan Carlos Santiago Guzman, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel, was one of the most violent narcotics traffickers in the world. He’d altered his appearance through repeated plastic surgeries, was believed to be living somewhere in Brazil, and basically made Pablo Escobar look like Mister Rogers.
“And the damned Russians,” he said. “Stanislav Luzhin and Roman Navrozov and Oleg Uspensky.”
“My God, Marshall, what the hell was the idea?” I said.
“I thought I could get the ship righted with all the new cash and I’d be back on my feet. But it wasn’t enough to meet all the margin calls. My whole firm went down the crapper anyway.”
“The new money with the old.”
He nodded.
“Guzman and Van Zandt and Grazdani and the Russians,” I said.
“Right.”
“You lost all their money too.”
He winced.
“You know, when Bernie Madoff’s investors lost everything the most they could do was cry in front of a judge. These guys aren’t the crying type. So which one of them took your daughter?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m going to need a list of all of your investors.”
“You’re not walking away? Thank you.” Tears sprang to Marcus’s eyes. He gripped my forearms in his bear paws. “Thank you, Nick.”
“A complete list,” I said. “Every single name. No omissions.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“I also want a list of all your employees, past and present. Including household staff, past and present. Personnel files too.”
There was a knock on the door.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dorothy said, “but the live feed’s back up.”
“The feed?” Marcus said, confused.
“It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”
28.
We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.
“It just started up,” Dorothy said.
The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.
Then Alexa’s face appeared again. That same extreme close-up. Eyes brimming with tears.
“Dad?” she said. She wasn’t looking straight at the camera but slightly off to the side, as if she didn’t know for sure where the lens was. “Dad?”
Marcus said, “Lexie? Daddy’s right here.”
“She still can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.
“Daddy, they’re not going to let me go unless you give them something, okay?”
The picture was sort of stuttery and jittery. Not very high quality. Like TV reception used to be in the days before cable.
“Um … first, they say if you contact the police or anything they’re just going to…”
She blinked rapidly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shuddered.
“I’m so cold and I’m so afraid that I’m too weak and I can’t change,” she said