Craxer Must Steal
A Novel
by
Dave Whellams
Book 1 of The Craxer Chronicles
Craxer Must Steal
By Dave Whellams
Published by Dave Whellams at
Smashwords
rev February, 2012
Copyright 2012 Dave Whellams
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
If you would like to share this book with another person,
please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re
reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was
not purchased for your use only, then please return
to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Cover design by Cal Sharp at Caligraphics
Provided free: At the end of Craxer Must Steal you will find the first chapter
of Craxer Just Kills, Book 2 of The Craxer Chronicles. Just click on “excerpt”:
Craxer Just Kills read excerpt
Craxer Must Steal
This story takes place in 2009 . . .
Chapter 1
“I want you to steal.”
“Say wha?”
“I want you to steal ‘em blind. Until it’s empty. Leave a desert in our wake.”
“Say whoa! We just met. And there are people around.”
“Nevertheless.”
Craxer had been drinking Costa Rican beer for two hours. It was impossible to get drunk at a Costa Rican regional airport on just the local beer, it burned off too fast, but earlier he’d been into the coloured rum drinks. They had mostly burned away too, leaving trace elements of red dye No. 2 and green dye No. 36. He in fact appreciated the toxic residue still lurking down there in his system; it took his mind off what was going to happen next. He was still trying to get drunk when Cathcart showed up.
Craxer hated to fly and so, stuck on the patio with its oily runway and exhaust-coated palm trees, he was particularly disconcerted by the prospect of a delayed flight out of this hellhole, all the more so because he would be flying out alone, whereas he had arrived with a delicious girl who had abandoned him the day before, and with whom he might have been in love. It seemed the cigar-tube fuselages became narrower each time he flew and this airline had been the worst, a cheap outfit that his ancien girlfriend had described oxymoronically at the time of booking as a “regularly scheduled special charter”. The carrier had a reputation for running short of fuel, arriving late and failing to compensate passengers for delayed luggage. Once, three flights in one month were scandalized by food poisoning incidents, a problem the outfit neatly finessed by declaring it would no longer serve free meals, except for pretzel packs. The fuel miscalculation was an understandable mistaking of metric numbers for imperial measures regarding the gas tank on an Airbus 360, understandable unless you were one of the paying, now praying, passengers on board the glider as it attempted an approach to the Tenerife landing strip.
There was no sign of the plane but Craxer knew that he would not share the elation of the rest of the tired and browned tourists who currently crowded the airport lounge, when it finally landed. It would be all he could manage to refrain from freaking on the return trip and doing something that would necessitate plastic handcuffs, something like opening all the overhead bins in a search for carry-on sedatives. But, for the moment, he sat out on the terrace, a carelessly laid out platform with broken terracotta tiles and cinder block walls, and drank beer. He was making the best of it. The crowd of Canadians, and a few Americans, mostly stayed inside the terminal. It was hotter inside, but out on the patio periodic swirls of tawny dust got in the eyes and ruined the day-glo drinks. Beer in the bottle was okay; Craxer now understood why wedges of lime were jammed into Latin American brew – to keep out the grit.
He watched a line of green and brown geckos trail diagonally up the partition wall in stop-and-start movements. Earlier, some of the kids tried to catch them in their complimentary Beach Joy Resort ball caps, but they never caught a one.
Only four fellow passengers shared his terrace. The only married couple, off at a table nearest the runway, were in their seventies and remarkably reminiscent of the old pair in the nightclub scene in Casablanca who have just obtained their letters of transit, and are celebrating by practicing their fractured English on the head waiter, played by S.Z. Sakall. They were kind of fictional, Craxer blearily thought, as if cast for the occasion. That got Craxer playing a game with himself to pass the creeping time. If this was a Graham Greene novella, something involving deracinated, gin-soaked Catholic expats expatiating their guilt in barely reachable colonial outposts, what would each of the passengers’ story be?
Just then, a Graham Greene denizen said in his face: “May I join you? I am Cathcart.”
Craxer turned. The man proffered his hand and Craxer shook it with welcoming warmth. He would have welcomed a talking gecko. The man, who wore a rumpled white suit, pulled up a plastic chair and set it next to him, so that they would both be facing one end of the runway. He deposited his beer on the table but remained standing. Craxer looked around and noted the four identical empties on the fellow’s old table.
Craxer had trouble speaking through his sand-scoured lips, but he took a sip of beer and said: “‘Cathcart.’ One name, like Mantovani, or Madonna?”
“Or Prince, or Cher? Or the Mantovani previously known as Prince?”
Craxer beckoned him to sit down, which he did. “Craxer.” They shook hands.
“Great. A pleasure. Let’s leave it at last names only, shall we?”
“Don’t mind. My first name is John, but everyone calls me Craxer, or Crax.” Clink.
“What genius has planes landing directly into the setting sun?” Cathcart looked over his shoulder at the molten orange horizon, although it would soon be black.
Craxer toasted the runway. “I believe this was once a facility used by Contras in the Reagan era wars. The Nicaraguan border isn’t far.”
People talk to each other at airports, in the lounges and on the planes. Airports inspire verbal affidavits, even if the evidence is destined to fade like invisible ink when the plane lands. But airports are a pleasurable place for conversation. And so, Craxer was quite willing to chat with Cathcart about anything and everything with an open demeanour. He had learned from many new voyageur acquaintances about their intimate and interior lives, their sins, their hates and dreams, their indiscretions, their politics and suppressed memories. It turned out that Cathcart had lots of every kind.
“I can’t help noticing that you’re alone,” said Cathcart. So was the uni-named Cathcart, Craxer observed. On the evidence, he did not belong with the others in the Rainforest Ecology Fun Tour and the complimentary tote bag would have clashed with his linen suit, seriously wrinkled, and the rattan hat that he carried in his hand now, with the hatband of red satin accented with a feather. With his background in insurance fraud, Craxer wondered if his new friend was hiding out – Costa Rica resisted extradition, he knew – much more the Graham Greene Central Casting figure than he would admit.
“I came with my girlfriend. She left me in mid tour,” Craxer said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I notice you’re a solo act too. What brings you to Quesada?”
Cathcart smiled and hailed the teenage waiter for two more beers. “Without being rude, may I ask you why you think I’m here?”
Craxer assessed his new friend. “Okay, you’ve gotta be here on business. Your suit is top line, so you’re not just a stodgy tourist who comes here every season, and you aren’t trying to impress a wife or longstanding girlfriend. So that leaves business. I’d guess you were meeting with government officials but in that case, they wouldn’t have allowed you to take a cheap charter back home, assuming you were representing a big corporation or one government or another. Costa Rica has no armed forces, so you aren’t selling guns and tanks. You’re traveling under the radar. You certainly weren’t on my flight down here, therefore you have some particular reason for latching on to this departure. I’m guessing real estate. Selling condos, maybe developing a resort for Canadians and Yanks looking to retire in the Central American sun.” He took a swallow of beer.
Cathcart stared at Craxer neutrally, not at all irritated at his suppositions. Then, he clinked Craxer’s beer bottle to acknowledge that he was on the money.
“So, why did your girlfriend leave you?” Tit for tat, reasoned Craxer.
Cathcart somehow inspired trust, or at least disclosure, and Craxer was in less and less of a mood to be cautious, feeling mounting panic at the impending flight, and realizing that he had sort of been cuckolded by a leatherback turtle.
“This was our first big vacation together. If it worked out, we’d likely move in. But it was a bad idea from the get-go. I hate flying, she hates driving around to Civil War battlefields. Mind you, I’m not a fanatic about that, I don’t go in for re-enactments or anything. But at least you can drive there.
Her name is Gloriana. Some call her Gloria, but I prefer the full Latin thing. She wanted to go to the Caribbean. Costa Rica, she said. I pointed out that this respected member of the U.N. was not in the Islands, was not even an island. She got out the map and fell in love with the place, get this, because it was “bicoastal,” bordering both the Atlantic and the Pacific. If we didn’t like one ocean we could go to the other one. How do you deal with logic like that?”
“That was enough to kill the trip?”
“No. it was the turtle. She was determined to do everything “eco,” since it was an eco-tour. That included wading over to an island at midnight to watch a leatherback tortoise give birth to a bunch of billiard balls. I fell asleep during the birthing. But, hell, the turtle fell asleep too. She moved out that night – that dawn, to be precise. Haven’t seen her since.”
“Sad story,” Cathcart said.
“Your turn.”
“You were right, but don’t tell anybody. I am here to sell real estate. That’s my secret deal in Costa Rica. There’s a new development up in the Tiliran mountains, on the shallow slope where they grow pineapples, at least until Cimarron Estates is built. Twenty-nine spanking new houses, villas really. A beautiful spot and the virtue of it is the farmers will be able to shift their pineapple growing a couple of hills over. In one direction, you can see the Arenal Volcano, and further up the hill the Cloud Forest begins.”
Craxer sensed that the sales pitch was just habit, not edited for him, but was threaded with a bit of regret for exploiting this beautiful country. Still, Craxer thought, I wouldn’t mind retiring here, if I had any money. “Why this flight? It’s a charter.”
“I decided not to use my first class ticket on United. Keeping a low profile. Turns out this flight had a spare seat. I imagine it once belonged to your girlfriend. Then I found out . . .” He eyed the passenger lunge.
“You mean some of these people bought a villa?”
Cathcart smiled broadly, with increasing respect for Craxer’s perspicacity. “Very perceptive. I’m sitting out on this terrace for a good reason. Six of those couples back inside will be carrying a fresh deed in their zippered compartments on their journey home. My having sworn them to secrecy – such a deal, getting on the ground floor! – they won’t be divulging their purchases to one another. At least, I hope not. But I’d like to avoid any buyer’s regret. So I sit out here. Hoping.”
“Do they have cause for regret?”
“Not at all. The houses are fine, well-constructed examples of Mediterranean modern, all verandas and vistas, terracotta on terra firma, all the mod cons merged with the pleasures of rusticity and ethnicity. Hopefully, the rains on the hillside will not be heavy.”
“How many did you sell?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“All of them?”
“Sure.” It was Craxer’s turn to clink congratulatory bottles. They paused and listened for the plane. Nothing. There was something that didn’t add up in Cathcart’s saga.
“You said you wanted to keep under the radar. But I imagine most of the villa sales are pretty locked in anyway?”
There was a long pause. Cathcart wasn’t drunk, and he was no sweatier – he never seemed to sweat above his neck – but for a brief minute he looked defeated, hangdog weary. And determined to change the subject.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m in insurance investigations. Questionable claims, that sort of thing. Freelance. But I’ve been laid off for a few weeks. A small problem with the last job.” Craxer reminded himself that airport confessions worked in both directions.
“Wow,” Cathcart said. “Do you have a criminal record. Ever committed a crime?”
“Nope. Why?” said Craxer.
“I’m a businessman, I deal in sales contracts, land, investments. But there’s a competitor out to get me.”
“Go to the RCMP fraud squad. Or the Ontario Securities Commission. I assume you’re HQ’d in Ontario.”
“Yes. But that’s not it. He’s undermining me everywhere I go, everything I do across the country, and internationally. This development seems like small potatoes to you? Me too, but if he knew I was here, he’d scuttle it, approach the Costa Rican Ministry or something.” Cathcart didn’t look afraid but he sounded half afraid, the other half bitter.
“Are his actions criminal?”
“Worse than criminal. They’re evil. I work in the corporate world. He operates in the stratosphere lurking over the world of mortals.”
“There isn’t room for both of you?”
“You have to understand. He’s perverse, stamps out competition. I can handle myself with the big boys, but he’s unscrupulous and, yes, he commits crimes. In this situation, I’m doing my best. But he’s unprincipled. Suborns governments, slanders good people. Maybe commits a few crimes against humanity along the way.”
“How can you get back at him?” Craxer had seen many corporate takeovers turn ugly and punitive. The insurers tried to clean up the stains. He would have been willing to believe the story this time, old as it was, had Cathcart disclosed even one fact. Bottom line, he was intrigued, and it was a lonely airport on a hot night in April, but he would wait for more information.
“Hit him where it hurts,” Cathcart finally said, with acidic resolve.
“His reputation?” Craxer said.
“What supports his reputation. Take what he loves most, that makes him look good. Wouldn’t you treasure the opportunity to face down pure evil?”
All bets would be off on the snowy Ottawa tarmac anyway and so Craxer ventured: “I’d want to hear more.”
“Craxer, we have our Moriarty. You have to make a commitment in life. Join me on this.”
The beer was finally getting to Craxer. “How much is the down payment?”
“I want you to steal.”
“Say wha?”
“I want you to steal ’em blind. Until it’s empty. Leave a desert in our wake.”
“Say whoa! We just met.”
“Nevertheless . . . Cathcart looked straight at him with his sincere salesman’s eyes. “I hear the engine of the plane.”
Chapter 2
It was the best flight Craxer had ever had. Cathcart talked in a stream the whole trip, distracting him from his claustrophobia. He’d been right that the businessman had gained Gloriana’s old seat, and so the two men were placed next door anyway. Craxer took it as a good omen; he’d feel better about clutching his seatmate’s hand if he panicked.
Cathcart waited until they were in the air to begin. Airborne, he leaned in, looking furtively both ways – and one of those ways was out the porthole.
“Jerry Bramma!” he hissed, above the thrumming engines. “Heard of him?”
Indeed. Third or fourth richest man in the country. Mover. Shaker. Donator of millions. Medici-like patron. Benign philistine. Craxer’s work over the years for Great North Liberty (formerly Great White Liberty, changed for obvious reasons) had forced him to brief himself, and keep up to date, on the concatenations of the Canadian corporate universe. It was a pretty tight weave in Canada, with a few companies dominating each subsector of the economy, from forestry to newspapers, telecoms to insurance, and Jerry Bramma, a man with more than ten fingers, it was often said, had begun in mining but now was dipping into every corner of the corporate world.
“Jerry Bramma,” Cathcart repeated, “stays one step ahead of the law, barely. Jerry Bramma,” a refrain now, “knows where the bodies are buried.”
“Where are the bodies buried?”
“In my back yard.”
“Pardon?”
“Figuratively. Have you heard of EnterprizersOut, dot, ca.?”
“Not familiar with that, no.” Craxer would check it out when he got back to his apartment.
“I’m the guy behind it. Set it up a year ago.”
“It monitors the corporate comings and goings of Jerry Bramma?”
“Exactly!”
“And his personal life?”
“There is no distinction between his personal life and his business life.”
The answer wasn’t satisfactory – they were talking skulduggery, predatory behaviour and paparazzi here – but Craxer let it go for the moment.
Cathcart proceeded to relate Jerry Bramma’s rise. “Bramma loves his mother but even that’s not certain. Little known fact, he ran for city council once in some British Columbia town, when he was in his twenties. Promised publicly to “eviscerate” his opponents. Well, the only thing visceral was the voters’ repulsion. His only setback in a charmed life. He’s in his fifties now. Still seethes about that old loss. You see, ordinary folks – voters – respond instinctively against oiliness like Jerry’s. Not a people person, not a human person.”
“If he projects evil and turns people off, how did he become successful?”
“Chinese money. He discovered China the same time as Marco Polo.”
“I thought he was in mining mostly.”
“That’s his chosen front. Bramma owns a few holes in the ground but he mostly works behind the scenes. He’s a packager, not a builder.”
“I hate to argue, but wasn’t it the Edam-X scandal that almost got him prosecuted? Great North hadn’t been an insurer in that mess but Craxer had read about it in the Business section of the Globe and Mail. “That wasn’t exactly staying in the background.”
“In fact, that’s when Jerry Bramma and I first locked horns. I will tell you something . . .” Cathcart paused and looked around at the sleeping, red-faced passengers across from them. “Jerry Bramma personally salted the claim in that scam. He personally went out there and adulterated the core samples, resulting in false assay results. I don’t expect you to believe me. But you will when I give you my reports. I know, you’re wondering how I got involved with this. Well, I worked on the original land package in Guatemala. Think Costa Rica is a coincidence? I know this part of the world. He handed my company the geology summaries for that section of jungle. They were works of fiction and at the time, that didn’t matter to us. We just accumulated the land he wanted.”
“Full disclosure,” Craxer interjected, “Was your company an investor?”
“Yes, but the real point is he defrauded hundreds of stockholders with his empty shell, not just my company. Workers died down there, back there from whence we came, from unsafe working standards. There was never any palladium. It was a total scam.”
“Yet he recovered. How?”
“Chinese money. Call him the most successful broker in the history of Sino-Canadian relations. Look, China has billions in its Sovereign Trust account, pent-up cash looking for places to invest. Canada is looking good to them. Jerry finds placements for the money. The 1.6 billion buy-in to the Oil Sands last month? Jerry Bramma all over it. But the secret lies in his talent for working it both ways. How many people in China? We’ve all lost count. An incredible market and the West is largely closed out, not only in starting or owning companies, but in the local stock market too. The Shanghai Exchange will soon be the second largest trading floor in the world. It’s going mad, even with the recent recession. Shares in China are trading at thirty times trailing earnings. Bramma has found ways to get Canadian, American and EU money into the Chinese stock market.”
“Illegally?”
“A lot of it.” Cathcart paused yet again, saying finally, “Blood diamonds. Child labour in Bangladesh. Teenage soldiers in Sudan. Guns for butter. Bribery and shady accounting are pretty common in a cynical world, you’re right, but bubbling under the surface is black-and-white morality and immorality.”
Craxer was a true Canadian. He sought the middle ground and didn’t like to think too much in absolutes, and that included absolute evil. There was Conrad Black and that ponzi guy in Quebec, and various stock swindles. These had sorted themselves out, with the courts and ultimate prison sentences restoring order and plastering over the personal tragedies behind them. But he did not like to think that there was larger evil out there, or that the marionette was being pulled by some all-powerful manipulator unseen above the cloud cover.
“You make him sound like a mastermind,” Craxer countered.
“That’s exactly it. Amoral is as amoral does.”
Craxer was, in fact, half persuaded, not that he knew what Cathcart wanted him to do. He would check out the allegations on the Internet when he reached home, would make a few calls to a few contacts in the insurance forensics business, and he was willing to read whatever Cathcart supplied in written form. Then they could talk.
But Cathcart wanted to talk now. “I mentioned stealing,” he continued. “How do you bring down a house of cards? Poke one at the bottom of the stack, of course. I have information that Bramma is involved in bribes that are being funnelled to armed militias that are conscripting child soldiers. He has people working for him who have to be described as enforcers, no other word, who intimidate with physical violence. A finger in every pie.”
“Somali pirates?”
“Sure.”
“How do you bring down a man like that? How about an OSC investigation? I know some guys . . .”
“No, no. You hit him in his reputation, Craxer, like we agreed. Jerry started out poor. His aim, now, then and forever, is to achieve and maintain respectability. He tries to purchase class with cash. New Money isn’t Old Money but it’s the best he can do. Buy an old mansion, join an old tennis club, marry into an old Family Compact family.”
“And?”
“Buy some brand new art. Have you heard of the Birnbom?”
It was an art galley, Craxer recognized. Privately owned but open to the public. He had never been there. Where was it? In that vague zone west of Toronto, with all those “B” towns. Bracebridge. Burlington. Brantford.
“Sure. It’s an art gallery in Barnstable.”
“It’s Jerry Bramma’s art gallery. It’s very good in a spotty way. Typical Canadian approach to collections. Buy a Picasso, a Braque, a Monet, a Kandinsky, one of everything. Have you heard of Nathan Okabeecho?”
“No.”
“Nathan Okabeecho is the finest artist in Mozambique. World class. Shows at the MOMA, the Tate. I love his stuff. Well, Jerry Bramma owns what is accepted as the greatest painting Okabeecho ever attempted, “Mozambique Ocean.”
“If I recall,” Craxer said, “Mozambique is pretty dry.”
“That was his point. Irony. But everyone loves the picture for the colour, the passion in it. Jerry saw it as well and, naturally. had to possess it. He bought it three months ago and placed it in the featured hall of the Birnbom. You know why he bought “Mozambique Ocean”?”
“You said it was beautiful, and a good investment.”
“Jerry loves the painting, yes. But he also loves blood diamonds. He just happened to see it when he was in Rwanda. So, you could say blood diamonds turned around directly to pay for a national treasure. How sick is that?”
Craxer was willing to think on it, “it” being the principle of the matter. Somehow, the immorality of stealing “Mozambique Ocean” didn’t niggle at him as much as he expected; there was an adventure to be had. But was the excitement of the caper enough to outweigh the shame of being caught? It concerned him that he might be agreeing that his own reputation and sense of integrity weren’t worth two cents. And, oh, by the way, what was the caper?
“I presume the Birnbom has modern security?” Craxer knew a fair bit about security systems. These days, fraud investigators had to know; warehouse thefts were seldom pulled off without some insider knowing the ins and exits of the alarm triggers and the surveillance cameras.
“Better than most, camera-wise. Front and all side doors. Panorama view of the parking lot. Sensors on all the windows. Six hour loop system on the tapes. Back-up storage at the end of the day on HD-CD.”
Craxer decided that some bonding was in order. “Six hour loop on one tape?”
“No. I meant the tape shifts over to the next one when it’s full, about two hours each. Like the shift-over in a projection system at the movies, from one reel to the next.”
“They keep the tapes on site?”
“Yes, the originals, not the backup. Soon they’ll be entirely digital on disc. And get this. There are no security personnel there most of the day. They are that confident in their technology.”
“Which sounds pretty tight. Staff overnight?”
“None. The era of the lonely night watchman is over. You’d get bored to death sitting there. Spooky, too. The place is out in the woods at the end of a long dirt road. Again their excessive faith in technology. A patrol car goes down the road twice a night, usually local cops, or more likely off duty cops earning a buck.”
“Why wouldn’t the same security company do the job?”
“Night shift costs double time. There’s no local office of the security company. So it’s cheaper to hire off duty police officers. They just cruise by; don’t see any cars around, they don’t go in, don’t even test the door locks.”
“Any advantages?”
“Well, it’s at the end of a long, dark path. You can whistle while you work. That’s also a drawback if you’re trying to hide a vehicle. But here’s the big one. “Mozambique Ocean” is held to the wall by the equivalent of thumb tacks. Wire alarm, but no different than the other paintings on the walls. In full view of the entrance, of course – you see it through three open doorways from the front door, so the visitors are drawn to it from the first – but, hey, shorter distance to get back out.”
“If you use the front door. Any motion sensors or photoelectric triggers?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so?” Craxer said.
“I learned they have a field mouse problem, which must drive the curator apoplectic.”
“We’ve started our descent,” the female flight attendant announced.
Perhaps we have, Craxer thought. There were many holes in Cathcart’s plan, not least of which was his obsession with Jerry Bramma. There was history here, professional jealousy and personal ego. That could all be dangerous. He wondered how long, through how many crises, Cathcart would have his back. He would be on the Internet a while when he reached the apartment.
Yet, he already yearned to share Cathcart’s zeal. Craxer needed something to believe in. On the other side of it, it was early days. Cathcart was probably right that Bramma was both professionally and personally reprehensible. But Craxer had learned to distrust obvious villainy, those convenient hate objects out there; the world was just too complex. Yet, he did yearn to simplify. He had no job. No girlfriend. Mosquitoes had flown in from Contra bases in Nicaragua to bite him all over his sunburned arms, and he had a touch of crotch rot. There was only the future. It was maybe time to take a few risks in a good cause.
And he was on the edge of I Don’t Care.
Chapter 3
“If God doesn’t play dice with the universe, why is he playing marbles with my balls?” Cathcart said as he looked out the window of his office on the second-from-the top floor of the skyscraper.
He and Craxer had disembarked at Ottawa International as the sun began to rise. Craxer was relieved to be safe on solid ground, if not relieved to be home. Cathcart had offered him a lift in his catered limo but the real estate mogul lived in the far west end of the city, by the stadium, while the airport shuttle took Craxer downtown to within a few blocks of his apartment. Cathcart handed over his business card, with the number of his direct line added, and suggested they get together later in the afternoon.
As he stepped out of the bus, Craxer tuned in, as all Canadians could, to the nuances of cold. The April chill grasped at his throat and made Central America a receding memory, sobering him up, too. Still, evidently the thermometer had breached zero for some days now, exposing the sidewalks and the asphalt. He dodged standing pools of snow melt as he walked to his apartment from the drop-off. Dirty snow was clumped in piles like used cat litter.
He arrived at his apartment downtown. He was ready to plunge into a great day’s sleep, get up about one and stroll to the appointment. His phone wasn’t blinking, he could see from the hallway; no call from Glory, who could still be in Costa Rica for all he knew. He stood in the open doorway and remained there two more minutes before entering. The cold light of dawn had left him in limbo, his gear in neutral. He went into the bathroom and examined his face close up in the mirror. His bloodshot eyes were redder than the steady red light on his message box. He did what every modern citizen did first thing in the morning: he booted up the Internet.
There was no e-mail from Gloriana either and the rest of the box held only a few lunch invitations, a testament to his diminishing pool of friends and associates, now that he wasn’t employed. But he knew where he wanted to go. Nonetheless, he wrote the topics down on a pad in rough order. He was an inveterate maker if lists, a habit perhaps inculcated from an incomplete accounting degree, but more a part of his ingrained nature; his father had been an orderly man. First, he Bing-ed Jerry Bramma and found only the blandest of Wikipedia Entries – Had Jerry got to them too? – and an uninformative coffle of corporate releases in which he was named. Rather than refine his search, Craxer shifted to a word call for “Edam-X”. The defunct mining company had been a stockholder’s darling in the early Nineties. Founded by Jerry Bramma and several others, Edam-X had struck it big in the jungles of Guatemala. Palladium had been the grail. A subsearch revealed that palladium is used in electronics, catalytic converters, and so on, and is a sister mineral to platinum, plenty of which had been found as well on site. They talked thirty-year leases on the claims, and with the Guatemalan regime on side, bigger Canadian mining companies bought large shares of Edam-X. When it went south, the scandal provoked an international incident between Canada and Guatemala and ambassadors were temporarily recalled. Prominent officials in the company began to die in gruesome ways: one fell from a helicopter, another was eaten by a panther. But these were local managers and Jerry Bramma, as key stockholder and member of the board (but, significantly, neither CEO nor Chief Operating Officer) was never prosecuted, nor was he cited by the Ontario Securities Commission; Craxer would have been interested to know when Bramma had disposed of his Edam-X shares. In fact, if Craxer had run a word count regression on “Edam-X,” he would have found, he was willing to bet, fewer and fewer hits for “Jerry Bramma” as the months wore on.
He turned to a search for “Topcastle,” the holding company owned principally by Bramma. The data were pretty spare, providing on the fine print subsites only the minimum financial and voting information demanded by provincial and federal Corporation Acts. Twenty companies operated under the aegis of Topcastle, and they ranged from lumber companies, to auto parts manufacturers (for example, the chemical putty used to refashion damaged fenders), as well as construction, data management and building cleaning. No high tech per se. Topcastle wasn’t into insurance, as far as Craxer could tell, but they did have a real estate arm, mainly commercial. This was perfectly logical for a conglomerate like Topcastle, which undoubtedly accumulated factory and office space as it bought, developed and sold off manufacturing facilities in the course of its expanding acquisitions. Craxer wondered where the specific point of friction had been with Cathcart’s real estate empire.
He was surprised at the lack of counter-sites, perverse blogs that might track and hector Topcastle. The company had overt stakes in several European operations that, Craxer was aware, did business in armaments. Other subsidiaries promoted genetically modified foods. One smaller, yet very profitable, company within the skein of interests was an Antwerp-based corporation that explicitly did business in diamond finishing and wholesale marketing of diamond jewellery. Normally, this, however deeply buried in the corporate summaries, would be a tinderbox for self-styled watchdogs of the diamond trade. The company, moreover, Diamond Find PLC, owned exploration mines in the Yukon. Legitimate Canadian companies, such as Aber, were very careful about links to African diamonds and etched ID codes into each of their retailed Canadian stones. A Canadian-African-Netherlands trail of corporate linkages back to Topcastle should have been a trigger for the Internet trackers, who saw exploited blood diamonds everywhere.
And maybe they would have unearthed reasons for suspicion. Diamond Find, a subsidiary within the Bramma empire, it was reported in small print, had interests in Botswana, not far from Mozambique, the home of Nathaniel Okabeecho.
Craxer now approached the climax of his corporate hunting expedition. He cued in EnterprizesOut.ca. A dramatic red title came up against a royal blue field. There were dozens of exclamation marks on the home page, with blued links to reports on the individual companies within Topcastle; other mining and manufacturing companies were dragged in through hot buttons. Much of it was padding, such as the federal government’s summary report on the Edam-X fraud, and corporate reports, undifferentiated by any analysis. Still, the author’s effort was impressive. Bramma’s involvement with Edam-X was frontally criticized; Craxer could imagine Bramma's anger, and his efforts to compromise this gnat of a rebel website. But finally, Craxer left the site wondering why Bramma hadn’t just ignored Cathcart’s sniping. Or maybe he had done just that, leaving Cathcart the one raging with impotence.
Craxer wasn’t yet convinced of Jerry Bramma’s perfidy, but he told himself to keep an open mind. Let Cathcart make the case this afternoon, he mused.
He was exhausted. He decided to keep the best for last, and for that he wanted a rested mind. He was saving his search for the paintings of Nathaniel Okabeecho. It had been a while since he had seen a thing of beauty.
He awoke three hours later in a fresh frame of mind. The cool sheets were now warm with sweat and wrinkled anew from his tossing and turning. He decided to take a shower. He often found when standing under the relentless sprinkler flow, his head soaking, that his thinking turned a little feverish. Cleverly, he thought, he had left his Big Decision until after his nap, but now here it was: what was he going to do? He was excited, stimulated by the simplicity and focus of Cathcart’s outrage and the plan that went with it. Drive to the Birnbom and snatch “Mozambique Ocean” from the wall. Stoke your own outrage first with reports from EnterprizersOut. But Craxer worked in insurance fraud and he needed more. It wouldn’t play without moral dudgeon driving him forward. Bramma was a bastard, Cathcart was right about that. The one thing missing, so far, was the personal tragedy. Craxer needed the human dimension if the caper were to be justified. Cathcart’s situation, however brutal and worthy of resentment, didn’t yet qualify. He was a victim of corporate wars and, frankly, his allegations of blood diamonds and pillaged cultural heritage were a tad convenient.
Craxer kept searching the Internet. He wondered what Nathaniel Okabeecho thought of his greatest painting being mounted on a wall by an arriviste Canadian financial magnate for the enjoyment of middle class Canadian tourists. Par for the course, Craxer supposed. Did the artist even know about it? Craxer plugged in the painter’s name and found at the top of the Google list a central clearing house for African art. Several pieces by Okabeecho were tagged. Some of his works hung in government buildings in Maputo, although most of his output seemed to go to Nairobi for sale.
And they were all beautiful. The artist unapologetically used bright reds, blues and the favourite African colour, green. The paintings evoked village life and landscapes but there was nothing primitive or sentimental about them. Craxer at once wanted to know Nathan Okabeecho. He could only guess at the man’s age; there was no photo on the web site.
But there was a representation of “Mozambique Ocean.” Craxer noted that there was no footnote, no attribution anywhere to indicate that the original now hung in a chamber of the Birnbom Gallery in Barnstable, Ontario. He wondered again what Okabeecho would think about the diaspora of “Mozambique Ocean” from its homeland to Canada. Craxer stared at it. The picture contained more blue than the others, for perhaps obvious reasons, and it was light-hearted in a way the others were not, a nod to the ironic title.
I’ve pretty much decided to do it, Craxer told himself. He had no cat to talk to, certainly no girlfriend, and so he spoke to the silence in his cold apartment. He would take the offer, and drive down to the gallery and check out “Mozambique Ocean.” He would emphasize to Cathcart that all this was exploratory.
But, nonetheless, he would launch this adventure, he was pretty sure.
Craxer engaged in one more mental exercise, which he sometimes did to determine what he really felt about a looming decision. It was a bit like rolling the old Magic 8-Ball for advice. In this instance, he punched in the word “intrigue” into the search engine. It occurred to him that the word had at least a double meaning and that, at least, he was truly intrigued (the verb) by Cathcart’s proposition. Three definitions topped the called-up list: cause to be interested or curious (v.); a crafty plot (n.); a clandestine love affair (possibly abstract n.).
That seemed about right, he decided.
It was a short walk to the Gilman Building on Slater Street, and it was a nice piece of coincidence that Cathcart’s offices were located one floor above those of Cormick Insurance, a company Craxer had been fired from more than once. Seniority by height counted in terms of corporate prestige and Cormick had only the 11th, while Cathcart, his business card promised, occupied the 12th, perhaps all of it. There was a thirteenth level but Craxer had never thought to explore it. Perhaps it was a phantom thirteen; one never knew what builders would do with the Unlucky Floor.
He entered the lobby and without hesitation crossed to the bank of elevators. Security wasn’t tight in the building, a sign that no government agencies worked out of the tower, and so the security guards had an uncertain job description, never knowing whom they had authority to block. The best policy was to enter like you owned the place. No one else noted Craxer’s arrival, although there were several former colleagues that he recognized. Obviously, Craxer, old news, wasn’t in a position to do them any good.
He took the elevator to Floor 12 and the doors ping-ed open to carpeting that was one or two grades plusher than the entrance to Cormick’s had been. But otherwise, the main characteristic of the hallway was its emptiness, and in fact there were only two business doorways, at each end of the corridor. A receptionist, cool and silent, sat at a desk at one end; she looked up but concealed any eagerness that might have revealed her boredom.
“Mr. Craxer to see Mr. Cathcart.” He handed her the card. She was smooth-skinned, a type Craxer’s mother used to call a “cold cream blond.” Craxer liked her smooth efficiency, and remembered the week-long failure to meet his lust quota. She buzzed him in without waiting for Cathcart’s buzz back.