A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror Page 3

  In the pit of his stomach, the ulcer induced by the stress of the last four years sent his old friend, pain, careening around the lining as if on a skateboard. He could sometimes dull this aching hollow with sleep; fuzzy logic told him that he could anesthetize it with scotch. When they got home, he tried a tumbler of Dewar’s on top of a hot shower, but at eleven o’clock, he and Maggie still sat upright in bed, talking low.

  Chapter Two

  “Patty. That’s a cute little name.”

  “Not Patty, Mag. Jeez. Not Pat. Just Patricia. Remember the little tap dance I went through when I first met her?”

  “Your first interview at Pierson Browne.”

  “Right. Still at Fort Dix with three months till discharge and masterfully orchestrating some very serious discussions with Manufacturers Hanover, only the fourth biggest bank around...”

  “And you’re masterfully shown the door.”

  “Hey! Not before they’d agreed that my vast management experience and demonstrated ability to organize and expedite were just what they needed.”

  “What was it again, global something or other?”

  “The global custody business. It’s big, Mag, very big.”

  “Never mind that you’d never heard of it.”

  “Wait a minute. Management is management. The details of the business are incidental.”

  “What a crock.”

  “Listen, girl. Leadership is a scarce commodity, even on Wall Street. Those were Maggiore’s exact words.”

  “Well, you almost had it.”

  “I was sure it was in the bag.”

  “It was too good to be true.”

  “It was three hundred people. Hell, I commanded three thousand.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Big jobs bring big money.”

  “Big jobs you don’t know anything about?”

  “There I am, in Tim Maggiore’s corner office with the wraparound windows, the big shiny desk, and the little brown water carafe. The last interview. Hallelujah.”

  “Stop. You’re killing me,” Mag protested.

  “He says, ‘Lou, I’m sorry, but certain people up the line have expressed some doubts about anyone’s ability, let alone yours, to pick up on the complexities of the global securities business right out of the blocks, so to speak. It’s a very tricky arena, and with someone coming to it with no experience at all...’”

  “Don’t start,” Mag injected. “You’ll be thinking about it all night.”

  “And I say, ‘Ted, let me at least talk to these certain people.’ And then he starts in on forward foreign exchange, and zero coupon bonds, and I could just feel it slipping away, Mag.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, fighting a yawn.

  “I can still feel his hand on my back as he ushered me out. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Lou. Here, look up Patricia Buck over at Pierson Browne. I told her I was sending you over.’”

  “Maybe it would’ve been better if he’d just thrown you out, instead of being so nice about it.”

  “‘Colonel Christopher, your résumé is very impressive. Very.’ Patricia’s exact words, Mag. Then she copped a sneak at the shoes, barely suppressing a laugh. I should’ve invested in a pair of Guccis before I saw anyone. ‘Although we don’t have anything for you here in headquarters right now, I know Calvin Swisher out in the Paramus branch is looking,’ she said.”

  “Well, Swisher was impressed even if Patty wasn’t. Look at it that way, darling. You’re too ready to beat yourself up.”

  “Yeah. Well, I only waited a minute or two in the lobby, and then Swisher’s calling me into his office. I was impressed. Why not? The place was posh. Calvin was smooth.”

  “I remember the sour little look you had on your face as you headed over there to interview with him.”

  “Okay, so I was cynical. I didn’t let it show, even though there wasn’t one person in the bunch that could’ve handled my brigade. I can still picture it: Swisher rocking in a big chair, his tasseled loafer perched on the waste basket. Cufflinks flashing. Fingers fidgeting with the knot of his power tie.”

  “You really don’t like these people, do you, Lou?”

  “Oh, Swisher’s a bag of wind, Mag. I already told you how he bragged about his tour of duty on a cruiser in the South China Sea in the sixties. Somebody tipped me off, so I knew, going in, that if I showed any interest at all in his bilge water, I was golden.

  “So, first thing out of his mouth was: ‘How the fuck do you think you can sell stock when you never sold a goddamn thing in your life, Christopher?’ To which I fired back, ‘Are you telling me that Napoleon didn’t have to sell his Army? Walking all the way back to Paris, in the coldest Russian winter in a hundred years? Pickett didn’t have to sell his division? Charging across a wheat field into the mouths of cannon at Gettysburg?’

  Imitating Swisher: “‘What a magnificent load of horse shit. You’re a fucking natural.’ Verbatim, Mag,” Lou said. “No kidding. I don’t know why I didn’t just pick up and walk out the door. ‘Sell, baby, sell.’ Those were his exact words.”

  Mag looked at him seriously. “It’s what brokerage is, darling. You knew that. You didn’t have to jump at the first thing that came your way. We had time.”

  “The quietness of the place was, I don’t know, seductive—almost like a library, if it weren’t for the ticker tape rattling in the corner.”

  “And, of course, playing with money always seems to be such serious business. It would be unseemly to make any noise.”

  “Mag, please. It’s investing, not playing. It can be fun, sure. And why not? Actually, it has a little bit of a professorial feel to it. You have to know something.”

  “Lou, honey, let’s stop talking about it. It was a mistake. Give it a rest.”

  “You make your own luck, Mag. I actually thought I could work it as a sort of information service. I do the research, come up with the ideas, and get paid for it.”

  “Too bad that’s not what a broker does, darling.”

  “I thought it’s what this broker would do. Tweed jackets and elbow patches. Quietly talking to my clients.”

  “You let yourself in for disappointment, Lou.”

  “Beggars can’t be....”

  “You’re not a beggar. Let’s try to sleep. You’ll be ragged in the morning, if we don’t.”

  “You sleep, Mag. I can’t stop the wheels from turning. Turn off the light. It’s all right with me.”

  “You’re assuming this is bad news. Maybe it’s good news,” Mag said, settling her head onto the pillow.

  “How could I have sunk so low? It was like taking basic training over.”

  “It was mandatory. You didn’t need it.”

  “I needed some of it, to tell the truth.”

  “Very little.”

  “You never met Borchard, did you? Clarence met me at the door of training at 14 Wall and led me through all this brass and cherry paneling. He was kind of a round, pink man. I think his contacts were scratching his eyeballs, the way he blinked all the time.

  “He said, ‘Louis, you’ll see right off that most of the people here in training are as much as ten or fifteen years your junior. Fact is, they’ve in all probability jumped between two or three jobs by now. And to them, this is just another shot in the dark. Now you...you’ll seem a little mysterious to them. They don’t understand baggage, Louis.’ He poked the air with his finger when he spoke and flicked away at the spit that collected at the corners of his mouth.

  “I said, ‘I’ve been called a lot of things...’

  “‘You come with baggage, Louis. A history. You look like you might be a big hitter from another firm somewhere, coming in here with a big book. But, you just might find it to your advantage, in the beginning, to let these young hotshots here think whatever they want. Keep quiet. Smile.’

  “So I did. Then, maybe three weeks into training, Patricia came around to meet the new blood. By this time the other train
ees had thoroughly trashed the big hitter theory. She remembered me. Played it perfectly, completely neutral, like we were colleagues, if not equals, meeting for a chat. No way is she going to remember me now.”

  Lou looked over at Mag and saw that her eyes were closed. He reached for the light and flicked it off. He slid down under the sheets, turned to his side, and closed his eyes, but sleep still eluded him and the movie projector in his mind rolled on.

  Clarence had continued, “I want to be completely open and honest with you, Louis. It would be stupid of me not to. This training—all of it—well, it’s not really something that you, or anybody else for that matter, couldn’t bring off just fine without devoting all of this intensive study to it.

  “You’ll pick up the gist of the whole thing pretty quickly, I’d say. The ancient science of reading a sucker’s body language, for instance, is not all that tricky.”

  “Okay,” Lou had said, glancing at the ceiling.

  “Play along, Lou. It’s only six weeks.”

  Right from the start, the training’s emphasis had been on salesmanship. Straight away, they had him practicing a cold call spiel on the telephone and working out a technique on closed circuit television for snaring a husband and wife on a good mutual fund story. Where had all the investment theory gone, he mused.

  “The key to this game is imagination and balls,” Clarence Borchard had announced to the assembled training class in the fourth week.

  Twelve trainees lounged around a horseshoe-shaped table littered with paper coffee cups, copies of the Wall Street Journal, ashtrays, briefcases, legal pads, and felt-tipped pens.

  “And our illustrious leader, Patricia Buck, has them both in spades.”

  She couldn’t have been more than forty, Lou recalled¬—a tall woman with a proclivity for short, dark skirts and white silk shirts. She spoke with assurance, mostly thrown over her shoulder like her dazzling scarves, striding through the office with a trail of underlings in her wake.

  “Her career could be thought of as something of a model, ladies and gentlemen. If success in business resulted only from steady, unrelenting application and sheer doggedness, she would have wound up sweeping floors.

  “But no, she’s a home-run hitter. It permeates everything she does. An hour never passes in which she isn’t on the prowl for the great idea, the ultimate sale.

  “When she started as a broker in seventy-eight, her first four months in the office resulted in zero sales. Then she hit it big. She swung fifteen percent of the state pension fund to us on a promise of a hot line to the head of the research department, before she even knew who that was. That’s balls.

  “I’m not saying emulate her—you’d be out on your ass in ten minutes if you did—but do learn from her, okay? The lesson is this: go for it.”

  And to Lou, side by side at the urinals on a break, Borchard went on more about Buck. “Don’t pass this around, Lou, but Patty Cake’s little stratagem, born of either complete ignorance or sheer brass cojones, would’ve brought down a ton of shit on you or me. But it went down as brilliant with the powers that be. It was something only this cocky broad would do. You heard it here, but I’d deny it to my grave if it ever came back at me.”

  Patricia Buck actually had too much energy for her job, he recalled. Since she wasn’t married (there had been a divorce and a daughter somewhere), she spent all her time thinking about the business and the ways in which she could improve her power position in it. She was apt to show up in any one of the branches anywhere in the country on any given day. But, over the course of the last couple of years, she had also taken to politics in a big way. She was a fund raiser without equal.

  “After bringing in the state of New York, she never saw a month under thirty thousand gross, ladies and gentlemen,” Borchard had said, continuing his monologue to the training class. “Not bad. And nothing like what you’re going to take home.”

  Raising money led to access. Access led to a little power in the beginning, a little something to say about things in some of the national campaigns. And that little something grew to be real power within the national administration on questions of political strategy and campaign policy.

  “Boys and girls,” Borchard crooned, “I’m sure you’ve been following me on this. It’s the corporate hero story and the moral is: the way to get ahead at Pierson Browne is to forget about conventional wisdom and org charts and find a way—any way—to land the account. Balls.”

  Finally, the weight of the hour began to press on his eyelids. So, Patricia Buck wants to talk infantry to Lou Christopher out of the Paramus office. It was his last conscious thought before he slept and the second feature rolled.

  * * *

  Jagged clumps of mist float above the forest canopy. Thunder rumbles. Heavy drops of rain pepper a muddy camp. Nearby lies a fire base, ringed with barbed concertina wire, its center lacerated by trenches linking sandbagged bunkers and the parapets of three 105mm howitzers.

  Tall, dark, gaunt, and moving as if he were underwater, Lou inspects his patrol. His eyes glisten through the lampblack covering his face and neck. Sweat beads cover the bridge of his nose. Staring down a boyish private, he flips the young man’s AR-16 rifle over and over. He sniffs, and then claps the side of the private’s helmet.

  “You missed your ears with the lampblack. Lose the Right Guard. Tape the sling.”

  Accompanied by stocky platoon sergeant, Mulrane, he stalks the line of six soldiers. His eyes rove over the next man. He takes his rifle in a swift, snapping grab; turns it over easily in his hands; thrusts it back; rips the hard pack of Marlboros from the soldier’s helmet band; skids it into the mud; and then jerks his dog tags out onto his chest.

  “No smoking. None. Understand? Tape those tags to keep them quiet. Five minutes, sergeant.”

  He inspects his own two grenades, ammo clip, and rifle sling. He pulls a flare pistol out of his shirt, clears it, and shoves it back home. Then he snatches the demolition generator from a pouch on his belt and spins the handle. Blue threads of lightning leap between the poles. He glides to the head of the column.

  Private Thomas Holt—Tommy, radioman—(taller than he, thinner, with thick glasses) runs a commo—communications—check: “Eagle three this is Fuzzy Delta, over.”

  For a full week—straining to see through a screen of tangled leaves during the day and listening at night for phantom clicks—they have stayed in position. No more, though. Against orders, and to keep their nerve, the ambush patrol steals out the gate of Fire Base Eagle.

  Blackness occupies the bamboo thicket where the men are hiding. All is quiet except for their frightened, labored breathing.

  On a stretch of footpath glistening in the gray night, Lou bends over a Claymore mine, fingers working expertly. He clips a long string of wire onto its curved back, and then threads the wire through the poles of the hand-held generator. Finished, he slides into the clump of wood stalks, touches Mulrane, and starts the silent signal rippling through the line of men.

  A platoon of NVA, one by one, glides by as if levitating over the hard-packed dirt trail, their AK-47 rifles and B-40 rocket launchers slung across their chests at the ready, their faces gleaming, wet and waxy.

  His heart thumps audibly. A sharp, scared ache clutches his trachea.

  He spins the handle of the generator. The night erupts in flame and chaos—the staccato chop of AR-16s, the thump of grenade launchers, screams of confusion and fear.

  On their bellies, the soldiers rattle through the bamboo to the rear of their position—all except Holt, who writhes in pain, ugly, purple holes dug in the flesh of his torso.

  “Where’s Holt!” Lou shouts.

  “He’s hit, lieutenant!” Mulrane shouts over the noise.

  “Get the men back to rendezvous, sergeant. Give me ten minutes, then go!”

  “No way, lieutenant! We circle the wagons right here until you get back!”

  “Ten minutes, sergeant. Go! Now!”

  The fronds and b
ranches of the jungle reach out to grab Lou as he runs, then crawls back. The enemy, what’s left of it, searches methodically.

  “Can you move?” he whispers to Holt.

  “Lieutenant. I can’t feel anything.”

  From the harness of his rucksack, he extracts a grenade. He pulls the pin and heaves. Crunch! Another. Crunch! On his feet, he empties his AR-16 into the bamboo thicket, throws the weapon aside. He hauls Holt to his shoulders. The night flashes with NVA small arms fire.