In the morning I went to my office early: I had a meeting with potential new clients at eleven, and I didn’t want my personal searches to make me late. I looked Morrell up on the Web.
He had written a book about psychological as well as physical torture as a means to suppress protest in Chile and Argentina. He had covered the return to civilian government in Uruguay and what that meant for the victims of torture in a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly. His work on SAPO forces in Zimbabwe had won a Pulitzer prize after its serialization in The New Yorker.
Zimbabwe? I wondered if he and Baladine had met there. Although Baladine probably hadn’t actually gone to southern Africa. He would have directed operations from the Rapelec tower on east Illinois Street, or perhaps met their South African customers in London.
The Herald–Star had interviewed Morrell when the Chile book came out. From that I learned he was about fifty, that he’d been born in Cuba but grew up in Chicago, had studied journalism at Northwestern, and still followed the Cubs despite living away from home most of his adult life. And that he only went by his last name; the reporter hadn’t been able to dig his first name out of him. Although they had his initials—C.L.—he wouldn’t divulge the name.
I wondered idly what his parents had called him. Maybe he’d been given some name commemorating a great battle or economic triumph that was so embarrassing he dropped it. Was he Cuban, or had his parents been there with a multinational or the army when he was born? Maybe they’d named him for some Cuban epic, like the Ten Years War, and he’d shed it as soon as he could. I was tempted to hunt through old immigration or court records to come up with it, but I knew that impulse was only frustration at not being able to get a sense of direction.
To change sources of frustration, I turned to the LifeStory report I’d requested on Frenada. I’d invested in a priority turnaround—not the fastest, which sets you back a few grand, but overnight, which was expensive enough. I saved the report to a floppy and printed it out.
Frenada’s personal finances were simple enough for a child of eight to decipher. He had an interest–bearing checking account, where his expenses more or less equaled the thirty–five hundred dollars he took home from his business each month. The business, Special–T Uniforms, was nine years old. It had grown from annual receivables of six thousand to over four hundred thousand.
Frenada was writing regular tuition checks to St. Remigio’s Catholic school for two children—not his own as far as I knew. At least there was no record of a marriage, or any indication of a child–support agreement. He averaged seven hundred dollars a month each on his American Express and MasterCard, for the ordinary business of living. He held a certificate of deposit for twenty thousand dollars. He was paying a mortgage on a $150,000 two–flat in the Irving Park neighborhood, and he had a life–insurance policy worth a hundred thousand dollars, with three children named Caliente listed as the beneficiaries. Besides that munificence, he drove a four–year–old Taurus that he’d just about paid for.
No holdings in the Caymans, no portfolio of stocks or options. No residue of the drug trade, no unusual income of any kind that might indicate blackmail. Frenada was either extremely honest, or so clever that not even LifeStory’s paid informants could track his holdings.
So what did Murray and Alex–Sandy think was buried here? If it was a juvenile crime, I wasn’t interested in digging that far into his past. Maybe he’d done a quasilegal deal to get preferred treatment in orders or to obtain financing. That didn’t seem any different from Baladine and Rapelec in Africa, except the scale was smaller.
I reached Murray in his office. “I can’t take on this Frenada assignment. Since you came along with Alex to try to hire me, I assume I can tell you without needing to talk to her.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell her. Any particular reason?”
I stared at the floor, noticing the dust bunnies that had gathered around my copier. “I’m busy these days,” I said after too long a silence. “An inquiry like this would take more resources than I have.”
“Thanks for trusting me, Vic. I’ll tell Alex you’re too busy.”
His anger, more hurt than rage, made me say quickly, “Murray. You don’t know what Global’s real agenda is here, do you?”