By now, Stern had limited this rivalry to golf. Stern had more feel for this game; he was better on land than sea. But, as usual, he did not play often enough to offer any serious competition for Dixon, who was virtually a scratch golfer. Dixon was a daring trouble player; he loved the shots where he had to rest one foot in the crotch of a tree or fade the ball around a light pole, and he was particularly reckless here on his home course. The Greenwood Country Club was cut a century before into these rolling hills, nearly forty miles from the city. This was horse country, with hills deep in elm and oak, poplar and pine. Easton University was no more than ten minutes away. Here, with Lake Fowler, the well-to-do breathed cooler air and pretended that the city that kept them rich was nowhere near. Dixon adored this life, like every other badge of status, and had his principal home nearby, a huge stone house which sat on twenty acres on the lakeshore.
They played from an electric cart, accompanied by a forecaddy. Dixon usually had one or two favorites, high-school-age boys, hardscrabble types with whom Dixon could josh about their sex lives, offering them his golfing theories after each successful shot. Dixon treated these boys kindly and tipped them shamefully well. Today they were accompanied by a young man named Ralph Peters, a black kid who lived in DuSable and traveled nearly an hour and a half by train to reach the Greenwood Club on the weekends. Next year, Dixon was going to get a golf scholarship for Ralph, who was the caddy champion. With Dixon, this was not just talk. If need be, he would endow the scholarship himself. But he would also expect a chorus of appreciation and various acts of reverence befitting a beneficent king.
Stern waited until the third tee to talk about the investigation.
“I visited with Margy.”
“So I heard,” said Dixon. He was practicing his swing, but Stern thought he detected something whimsical in Dixon’s expression. On the other hand, he could not doubt Margy’s discretion.
This hole, like most at Greenwood, was short and narrow, a little dogleg cut into the woods, about 330 yards. The green was set to the right of the fairway, so that the hole, sketched on the back of the scorecard, looked like a lowercase p. Dixon waggled his driver mightily over the ball, then pulled his shot deeply into the trees.
“Shit. Well, Ralph will find it. There.” He pointed the driver toward the hollow below where Ralph had emerged from the woods to indicate that the ball had been located.
Stern took the ground on his drive, but the ball hopped down the fairway. With the angle, Dixon would be away. He floored the cart and they zoomed down the hill together. Stern, wearing a tam, held it and yelled a bit over the wind.
“I looked at the records the government wanted, before turning them over. And I also examined what I presume the agents assembled at Datatech.”
“And?”
“And I am concerned.”
Dixon glanced back, very briefly. He drove the cart up to Ralph.
“Right there, Mr. Hartnell. You better punch out.”
Dixon tromped in and out of the bushes. Stern could not see the lie, but had no urge to follow. He’d seen it before: Dixon making faces, muttering, conferring with Ralph with the gravity of a general.
“I’m going for broke,” Dixon yelled.
What else was new? Ralph could be heard quarreling. He was telling Dixon he could never do it. The sun gleamed through the foliage behind the two figures.
The shot, bedded on dried leaves and twigs, sounded cleanly, but a second or two on in its course took a tree with the round musical sound of marimbas. The ball rattled around in the wooded heights, breaking branches, then suddenly fell heavily to earth, like a gift from heaven, only twenty or thirty yards from the green. Dixon came crashing out of the bushes in time to see the ball drop. He turned back to Stern with a magnificent smile.
“Member’s bounce.”
Ralph followed along, carrying the club and shaking his head.
Watching Dixon march across the fairway toward the cart as he continued congratulating himself, Stern was taken by an intimation, soft as a whisper, of the young soldier he had met decades ago, during basic training in the desert at Fort Grambel. They had encountered one another somehow—in the barracks or the latrines. At this point Stern would have preferred some auspicious recollection of their meeting, but he remembered little, only the predictable bad judgment of youth. He had liked Dixon; worse, he had admired him. Dixon was one of those large commanding figures that Stern could never be—a shrewd country boy, a good talker with a distinct, twangy hill accent, who looked like a million in his uniform, square-shouldered and jut-jawed, with wavy dark blond hair. With the advent of war and the death of his mother, Dixon, full of red-hot ambition, had joined up. The service, with its grand traditions, its medals, its legends, was like a cast for an ingot. Dixon saw himself as an American hero in the making.
Stern had enlisted, too, but with ambitions less grand. When he was honorably discharged, he would automatically become a citizen and thus put to rest the family’s perpetual concerns about their outdated visas. He was twenty years old and already a college graduate, having raced through school, a dark sunken-cheeked sort with heavy black hair, much slimmer than today’s model. He had done better in the service than those who knew him now might expect; he had scaled the walls and carried the packs without relish, but he was dull to discomfort of most kinds in those days. His hungers inspired him.
Stern was never certain what there was about him that had drawn Dixon’s interest—probably the fact that Stern was college-educated and quickly marked for OCS. It mattered not. The alliances of a soldier’s life were easily founded, and in 1953 a hillbilly, or a Jew with a Latin accent, picked from limited entrees on the American social smorgasbord. There was a night when he and Dixon had sat on a bunk, passing back and forth a smuggled bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a pack of Camels, talking. About what? The future, Stern believed. They both had plans.
For Stern, the future was nearer than he imagined. One day, at the end of basic training, as he was readying to ship out for Officer Candidate School, his major announced that Stern was required at home. The officer did not explain, but the orders Stern was handed had a typical military brusqueness. In a blank was written, “Hardship furlough—mother critical.” She had had a stroke. In the hospital, he found her paralyzed and unable to speak. Her dark roaming eyes seemed to search his face meaningfully, but he was never certain that she recognized him. She was dead within a week, and Stern, now Silvia’s sole support, was honorably discharged. He never returned to Fort Grambel. All of it was left behind, his kit and duffel bag, the sadistic sergeants, OCS—and Dixon Hartnell. By now, over thirty years later, Dixon had as many faces to Stern as a totem pole—Silvia’s husband, an important client, a local powerhouse in the avenues of commerce, one of the few men Stern knew well whose accomplishments he thought of as markedly overshadowing his own. He seldom remembered that yearning young man who had attached himself to him in that vaguely supplicating fashion.
Dixon hopped back in the cart, still radiant at his miracle shot. He would never willingly return to the subject of the investigation. Like someone who learned in his sleep, however, he expected Stern to force him to listen. They were at the stage now where Dixon—any client—had to recognize he was in mounting jeopardy.
“Dixon, this is a grave matter. These records are very damaging.”
“Maybe I should have taken a look at them before you turned them over,” said Dixon. “Some of the problems might have disappeared.” He smiled tersely.
“Dixon, I suggest you abandon such thoughts. If you follow that course, you may as well walk straight to the penitentiary and skip the intervening steps. Too many people have seen your business records. The company that put them on microfiche. Margy. Me.” Stern let that sink in. “Not to mention the chatty fellow who told the government to look for them in the first place.”
Dixon looked at Stern directly, full face. His eyes were greenish, gray, a color hard to name.
“My th
ing get there?” Dixon asked. Eventually, Stern realized he was referring to the safe. He decided not to ask why the present discussion brought it to mind.
“Quite secure,” Stern answered.
“I did it the way you said. Handled it myself. I even got Margy to cut a check in Chicago to pay the trucking company.” The trucker, characteristically, had refused to take the safe any farther than the very center of Stern’s office. Not much more than a foot square, the gunmetal cube must have weighed 150 pounds. After a week, Stern and Claudia had struggled to get the safe as far as it was now, behind his desk. Out of an arch impulse, Stern had begun using it as a footrest.
“Where’s my key, by the way? You said you’d send one.”
“Shortly,” said Stern. He would have to remind Claudia, inasmuch as Dixon remained intent on keeping the contents to himself. The dial of chrome and steel on the safe looked as if it could withstand a dynamite charge. At odd moments, Stern had examined it already. Dixon, meanwhile, had floored the cart, racing toward Stern’s ball. Stern held his hat again and yelled over the wind, “I warn you, this situation is perilous.”
“You’ve said that about other situations.”
“And I was correct. You were fortunate.”
“So I’ll be fortunate again.” Near Stern’s ball, they came abruptly to a halt. “Can’t you do something, file something? Make some kind of motion?”
“There are no credible motions to make for the time being, Dixon. Judge Winchell will not put up with delaying tactics. It would be unwise to irritate her, as we may need her patience later.”
Dixon dismounted from the cart and lit a cigarette, his back to Stern as he suddenly took to studying the woods. Stern went on, notwithstanding.
“Dixon, your records give clear indication that someone at MD was trading ahead of your largest customer orders.”
Dixon pivoted. With his chin lowered, he looked like a glowering fighter on a magazine cover, the whites of his eyes showing large and luminous with a smoldering shrewd anger. He never enjoyed being found out, one of many reasons that Stern had avoided any further mention of Margy.
“No kidding,” said Dixon.
“Indeed, I am not,” said Stern. “It was very cleverly done. Smaller orders were placed on the Kindle Exchange just before you went into the Chicago markets with large orders that would affect prices everywhere. And these Kindle orders were always written with botched account numbers, so that, after clearing, they would end up being credited in the house error account. Countervailing buys and sells, leaving a profit just a few pennies shy of $600,000. It was a brilliant scheme.”
“Six hundred thousand,” said Dixon. He pointed to the ball. “Your shot.”
Ralph was behind the cart a respectful distance with Stern’s five iron. Stern’s drive had traveled downhill, but it had trailed to the right of the fairway—the wrong place to be on this hole—so that Stern was required to play left. He sliced naturally and positioned himself at an angle to the hole.
Dixon credited misfortune to various deities, like wood elves. Losses on the trading floor belonged to the bean god. Here he paid homage to the god of balls.
“Ball god!” screamed Dixon as Stern’s shot tore off for the deepest woods. Ralph turned to watch it go, like an outfielder pining after a homer.
Stern took another from his pocket and hit his shot cleanly. The ball faded, not quite sufficiently, toward an area left of the green, hit the uneven ground there, and kicked, as if drawn magnetically, into a sand trap.
“Beach,” said Dixon, in case Stern had not noticed.
They parked the cart in the left rough while Ralph crashed around in the woods, making a hopeless search for Stern’s ball.
“So what happens?” asked Dixon. “With this thing? They want the money back, right?”
“That is merely the starting point, Dixon. If the prosecutors employ the RICO statute, as I expect, the government will attempt to forfeit the racketeering enterprise—you understand: take it from you as punishment.”
“What’s the racketeering enterprise?”
“MD.”
“The whole fucking business?”
“Potentially. Not to mention a term in the penitentiary.”
“Oh, sure,” said Dixon, jumping down from the cart again for his shot, “you couldn’t expect them to go easy.”
Dixon’s bravery was admirable. Stern had actually been asked twice in his career by other clients facing the rigors of forfeiture about the legal consequence of suicide: could the government still grab their dough if they were dead? Stern avoided answering, fearing the consequences of a truthful response, since all phases of a criminal prosecution were, in fact, terminated by death. With Dixon, of course, there was no risk of self-destruction. He probably could not conceive of a world he did not inhabit. But Stern knew nonetheless that he had struck a nerve. To threaten Dixon’s business was to toy with the obsession of a lifetime. He had begun thirty-some years ago, driving all over the Middle West in search of clients, soliciting the small-town businessmen whose livelihoods depended on farm prices—the merchants, the feed-lot owners, the rural banks which could use commodity futures to hedge their loan portfolios. Dixon’s strategy, he explained to Stern later, was to sign up the fire chief. The firemen were volunteers, fought flame and death together; the fire chief was the captain of their souls. If he liked something, all would. No trick was too low for Dixon. He carried a fireman’s helmet in his trunk.
Now he flew between the coasts, doing deals, but his first love remained sitting in the office, plotting strategies for the managed accounts, the commodities pools, the large customer orders. He made money and lost it with every tick, in each future, but Dixon never lost his interest in the game, a mixture of street savvy and balls poker. Three or four times a year, he would grab his dark jacket and badge and go to the floor for part of the day. Even in the chaos of the trading floor, the news would go out that he was there. He stepped into the tiered levels of the pits, shaking hands and tossing greetings like Frank Sinatra onstage, commanding the same reverence, or, in some quarters, subverted loathing. Dixon did not care. Stern had been in the Kindle office one day when Dixon had lost $40,000 in less than half an hour and he was still exhilarated by the tumult of the floor, the jumping and shouting of the trading crowd, what he took as an essential moment in life.
Dixon lofted his ball between the extended foliage of two tree boughs. The ball did not bite well and ran about twelve feet past the cup.
“Tough par,” said Dixon, thinking of his putt.
Ralph stood at the edge of the sand trap like a well-armed soldier, Stern’s sand wedge in one hand and the rake in the other. Stern trod down dutifully into the pit, then bedded himself in, dog-like, shaking his fanny. These shots, hit an inch behind the ball, were all acts of faith. Stern thought of fluid motion, then swung. Amid an aura of sand, the ball rose from the bunker. It traveled almost sideways when it hit the green, but it came to rest within two yards of the flag.
“Making it hard on me,” Dixon said. Stern had a stroke on each hole.
Ralph handed them their putters, then drove the cart off toward the next tee.
“They have to prove it’s me, don’t they?” Dixon asked as the two men stood on the green. “All this crap, taking the business—they don’t take my business away because somebody else did this without me knowing. Right?”
“Correct,” said Stern. He moved his putter near his shoes. “If that is what occurred.”
“Look, Stern, everybody in the place puts on trades that end up in the error account. There are a hundred, hundred fifty trades a month that go through there.” This was the point which Margy had seized on. “Maybe somebody’s trying to screw me, make me look like a bad guy.”
“I see,” said Stern. “The government, Dixon, not to mention a jury, is rarely persuaded that an employee is willing to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars and then give it to his employer out of spite.”
“Me?”
/>
“It is your account, Dixon.”
“Oh, bullshit, it’s the house account.”
“It is your house, Dixon. And it is logical to attribute all of this to you, if the money remains in the account.”
Dixon suddenly showed a quick, scornful smile.
“Is that what they think?” he asked. He tossed away his cigarette and removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue, while he fixed Stern with a dry look. The message was plain: I am not that dumb. Apparently, Dixon had exercised more care than Margy had made out. There was another layer of involvement in Dixon’s scheme, one that somehow isolated the error account and the unlawful profits. A flash of something, say a smile, passed between the two men before they moved off on either side of the flag.
Dixon putted first, and swore freely as the ball danced around the cup. Stern, with a short putt to halve the whole, shocked himself by making it.
“Goddamn it,” said Dixon, not for the first time.
They moved onto the next tee and sat on a bench under a tree, holding their drivers, while the foursome ahead approached their second shots. The fairway was long, gleaming under the sun on the par-five hole. There were ten traps—Stern called this hole ‘the march across the desert.’ Idling there, he briefly reconsidered the government’s scrutiny of Dixon’s bank account. Perhaps that had to do with the devices Dixon had used to conceal the money. In all likelihood. They were still looking.
“There is another problem,” Stern said.
“Naturally,” his brother-in-law responded.
Stern told him that John had been subpoenaed.
“Meaning what?”
“They want to ask him questions about this matter.”