Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Jorge
Liesel’s wary as she approaches me. I see the flash of surprise, then anger before she glues in place her poker face from our meetings. She casts an imperious expression at me. It’s easy to tell she doesn’t want to discuss what Joaquin uncovered.
“Is that what your phone call was about earlier? Not investigating what happened to my father but looking into me?”
“You know one can’t happen without the other. I need to discover anyone with a motive for this. I already know your father and uncle are into some shady shit. I didn’t want to believe that about you, but there’s a ton we don’t know about each other, isn’t there?”
“Yet, you think one day I’ll fuck you.”
I flash her a smile that’s let me get away with murder—literally. I may avoid crowds like the plague, but there’s tons to learn at busy nightclubs and bars. A little come-hither smile gets me a long way.
“I don’t have to think that.” I really am a smug fucker.
“Never.”
“Sure—” I flash her that smile again and then become deadly serious. “—but we digress. Liesel, you need to tell me the truth. If you want to be sure we all survive this, then I need to know what’s going on. No half-truths, no sort-of-truths, no maybe-truths. All the truth. Who do you work for?”
Her eyes narrow, and there’s practically palpable defiance radiating from her.
I’ve seen this a multitude of times since I became an enforcer.
It’s feigned courage to hide paralyzing fear.
She hates that I’ve discovered enough to ask that question.
Her mind’s zipping around, trying to figure out how to extricate herself from this conversation.
What she can tell me that’s enough to pacify me without giving away anything.
Too bad for her I’ll push until her back’s against a wall, and the only way out is to give me the info I demand. That’s the only way I’ll move aside.
“I see from the transactions that money’s being laundered through Swiss accounts. They are disguising it as commissions deposited into your accounts and then withdrawn as income. Except the one little problem is I can also see where it’s paying for goods and services provided by a syndicate.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“So, you could just lie? Would you have told me the truth? I asked who was spying and was the leak. You didn’t tell me the truth about that.”
“How could you expect me to? That was about my family’s company.”
“And look what good it’s done you to protect a company that won’t protect you.”
I stand with my arms crossed and cock an eyebrow. Does she think I’m new? As though I don’t understand what’s going on.
“You owe me an explanation, Liesel. And as for asking you, obviously that doesn’t work very well, so I had to do some digging on my own. Since I have no concrete evidence—yet—of which syndicate this is, it means you need to explain.”
“Is there any credible reason to believe anything you see now has to do with my dad?”
I unfold my arms and appear sympathetic.
I hate that it’s part of a routine I perfected when I was fourteen and started stirring up shit in our Cartel neighborhood in Queens.
In Jackson Heights, my brothers and I would cause trouble no one knew—half the time still don’t know—was us.
Then we’d show up for the family, offering sympathy before pressuring them into paying protection money to Tío Enrique.
“I can’t know that until you explain, Liesel.”
She pauses, and her shoulders sag. She appears so resigned to misery.
It makes my heart ache, a feeling I’m wholly unused to with people outside my family, but one that is becoming familiar to me today.
I wish I could make all of this go away for her, make it all better, but there’s no chance of that while I’m lacking all the pieces to put together this puzzle. I need her to give me more.
“A syndicate based in Paris approached me, but I think it’s a front for one in the U.S. Like you said, there’s no concrete evidence who, so I can’t be sure.”
Immediately my mind jumps to the other three families, especially the Kutsenkos.
They’ve already tried to fuck me out of a deal with the Schlossbergs.
Did they approach her months ago? Did they extort her?
I want to believe they’d leave her alone and not target her because she’s a woman.
But we know the old rules no longer apply.
Even the saintly Kutsenkos break that promise.
Those fucknuts have always done it. They’re just more inconspicuous than the other families.
Everybody always thinks they’re so angelic, riding around on their moral high horse.
But they’ve used women to do their bidding ever since they rose to power.
They only got pissed when it was their women who got used. Fucking hypocrites.
“How did they contact you?”
“Someone made a massive deposit into my personal account. Then they sent a follow-up email threatening to report me and that I would go to jail for embezzlement. I tried to track its source and return it, but I couldn’t figure out who.”
“Don’t you know any forensic accountants?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to bring anyone else in the firm into it.”
Now that she’s begun to tell me what happened, it surprises me how easily she lets the story flow.
She’s not hesitant like she was before. She’s pulling her walls down and allowing me in.
I feel even more motivated than ever to protect her because she’s finally showing me she trusts me completely.
I don’t want to do anything to ruin that.
It means more to me than I expected it would.
I need my brother to dig back further into the bank records. I suspect this has been an issue for far longer than he and I thought.
“When did this start, chiquita?”
“Two and a half years ago.”
I can’t believe how much rage bubbles inside me. To say I’m pissed someone’s been coercing her that long is a massive understatement.
“What did your father have to say about it?”
“I hinted at it, but he always blew it off. I even flat out told him, and he suggested I give him the money.”
“From what I can see, you didn’t. That’s probably one of the best decisions you could make.”
“I know. I hate saying I don’t trust my father implicitly, but I don’t. They knew I spoke to my father about it. I’m convinced someone’s secretly listening to my conversations. Their emails mention things they shouldn’t know unless they heard me say them.”
“Is that how the information about my deal leaked, and you knew about this all along?”
“No. I searched and found the cameras and microphones about two months into this. I was careful to make sure the cameras never saw me get close enough to record me inspecting my office and the conference room. I’d position people with their backs to the cameras and put things in place to muffle the microphones when certain clients came to the office.
You were one of them. The camera and microphone my father installed in the conference room remained on. I couldn’t shut that off.”
She grimaces and swallows as she crosses her arms. It’s an unconscious reaction to protect herself. It’s our instinct to guard our vital organs when we feel unsafe. She looks away from me as she begins again but soon meets my gaze.
“That leak came internally, and I believe it was my father’s assistant. I’m uncertain yet. Everything points to her, but I never found definitive evidence. I don’t know if she did it at my father’s request or independently.”
“What sorts of things have they said in their emails?”
She grimaces again and shivers. I step closer and wrap my arms around her. She tucks her head and burrows her face against my upper chest as she continues her story.
“Mostly they’ve stuck with business threats of interfering with the various contracts.
They’ve laundered money through my accounts many times, like you said, making it appear as though I purchased goods or services from businesses.
I received nothing in exchange. They controlled me by showing me they were one step away from lodging professional ethics claims against me or reaching out to law enforcement.
They’ve been doing this the entire two and a half years. ”
“How frequently does this happen?”
“Something usually comes in once every couple of months. The longest they’ve gone without intimidating me is four and a half months.”
“Do you have any suspicions about who it is? You said it was a syndicate out of Paris that contacted you, but you really think it might be one based in the U.S.? Could it be the Kutsenkos? How do you know they’re supposedly based in Paris?”
“It’s a Parisian banking number. It goes back to a lesser-known bank.”
“Do you believe they’re also laundering money through that account?”
“Yes. I suspect it’s passing through several stages before it arrives at its final destination.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not a forensic accountant, so I could be missing something obvious.
I’m inferring all of this. It’s the amounts that come in.
When it’s supposed to look like dividends, it’s random amounts.
They’ll let it sit for a few weeks, then it’ll disappear in a series of small transactions.
It’s as though I’m paying for normal day-to-day items. The deductions appear like clothing stores, the grocery store near my apartment, a cell phone bill.
It could be a cleaning service or handyman.
They mask them by using actual businesses’ names.
It’s originating somewhere, then it’s passing through the Parisian accounts to ones in Switzerland.
From there, they’ve made it look like I’m drawing money from my investments.
It goes out through those fake purchases.
It has to make it to them after at least that stage. ”