Fiduciary Duty Read online

  My mouth fell open. The Prince had appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine twice. The second time, the cover shot was taken from inside his 747-400, which from the looks of it appears to be an odd mix of sleek and shiny surfaces, a motley collection of gold and black fiberglass polished to a perpetual gleam. It seemed intended to look futuristic, but instead came out gaudy, and paradoxically, cheap-looking. The Prince appeared in the picture seated in a large, garish and uncomfortable-looking throne in the middle of the plane, a throne that appeared to be the lighter, more modern direct descendent of the one standing not 25 feet in front of me.

  When I saw that throne, I understood immediately why the Prince had bought Torrimpietra Castle. Pictures of the property and stories about the eccentric self-styled doctor must have whetted his appetite, but a photo of the throne would have sealed the deal.

  “Ah. You like the throne,” Rosaura said, catching my eye, “Dr. Torrimpietra made it himself. It is made out of granite, and weighs almost a thousand kilos.”

  A thousand kilos is a metric ton, or about 2,200 pounds. That was one heavy chair.

  Rosaura and I walked to the throne. The closer we got, the more imposing it looked, and the less it resembled the throne the Prince sat on in his airplane. Where the throne in the airplane had rounded edges and a pseudo-futuristic look, this one was blocky, square and distinctly medieval. But no matter, the similarity was still there. I had no doubt that the Prince would be sitting on that chair around midnight on a Monday four weeks hence.

  The throne was made from large blocks of black and gold granite, soldered together with a tarnished metal. From up close, it was clear the throne had suffered some neglect over the years. Some of the stones were cracked, others were loose. The entire assemblage sat on a dais carved from what looked to be a single block of translucent purple crystal.

  I circled the dais. The back of the throne was made entirely of black granite.

  The throne was too heavy for a single man to move. Putting a fake in its place was out of the question. In the movies, the hero could have replaced one of the rocks with C-4 or some other shaped explosive, but even if I knew how to use C-4 and could procure it in Brazil, the impostor rock would easily be discovered when the clean-up crew got to the throne, if not sooner. An explosive planted elsewhere in the room might take out the Prince but it would probably also kill a bunch of innocent Brazilians, possibly including some children. A James Bond-type could have shot the Prince in front of a big crowd and gotten away, but the hall would no doubt be full of security personnel, and even if I got out of the castle I would still have to get out of Ternos.

  When I realized Rosaura was talking I apologized for spacing out and asked her to repeat herself.

  “The picture of Doctor Torrimpietra will be on the wall behind the throne,” Rosaura said.

  “Picture?” I asked.

  She looked dismayed. “The one being restored in London. The self-portrait. But we have prints in the gift shop.”

  We walked back to the gift shop and Rosaura found the print she wanted in a stack of rolled up posters. It showed Antonio Torrimpietra sitting on the throne. Behind him was a picture of Antonio Torrimpietra sitting on the throne, and behind that smaller Antonio Torrimpietra was yet another one, smaller still, sitting on a throne with a picture behind him. By the third iteration, it was impossible to tell by looking what was in the tiny frame, but the suggestion of the scene repeating itself to infinity was clearly there.

  Torrimpietra looked very much like a deranged wizard. He was middle-aged and had a long scraggly beard. His eyes were sunken and of indeterminate color. His hair was wild and unkempt, and though I’ve never in my life said this about a man before, he was in definite need of a manicure. To complete the image, he wore a long flowing robe, not too unlike the Arabic garb the Prince was often photographed in when he wasn’t wearing a suit, but Torrimpietra’s robe was black and gold.

  “The stick, like of a king, how do you call it?” Rosaura asked. She pointed at the object in his right hand.

  “That’s a scepter,” I said.

  I looked closer. It didn’t look like any scepter I had ever seen. For one thing, its diameter was too thick – Torrimpietra’s held it like one would hold a basketball, without managing to get one’s hand around the object.

  “The scepter, it was lost a long time ago. Most people think Torrimpietra hid it somewhere, but it isn’t in the Castle,” she said pensively.

  “We just had a replica made. The replica, it is made of gold. Well, covered with gold,” she said.

  “Gold plated,” I interrupted.

  “Gold plated,” she said, “Dr. Rogerio, the director, said if it was solid gold Torrimpietra would not have been so easily holding it. See how he has his elbow. He is holding the scepter just with his arm.”

  I saw what she meant. Torrimpietra’s arm was not supported. Given the size of the scepter, that amount of gold had to weigh more than fifty pounds but in the picture Torrimpietra was holding it very casually, with no effort at all.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said leaning forward, “I don’t think the scepter was real. It never existed.”

  “Why not?” I asked, “It’s right there, in the picture. Why would he show something that didn’t exist?”

  Rosaura smiled. “Look over there,” she said, pointing at a spot near the edge of the print.

  I hadn’t noticed it before because it was small, but there was a strange looking creature sitting near the corner of the room depicted in Torrimpietra’s painting. Whatever it was, it had the body of a fat bird about a foot tall. Attached to that body was what appeared, at first glance, to be a human neck and head. A closer look told me the head only had a vaguely human shape, and was probably not even a head at all. It seemed mostly featureless, and it leaned slightly forward. At the head’s peak was a wide open maw that showed altogether too many razor-sharp teeth.

  “So what is that thing called?” Rosaura asked. “Do they have them in America? I have never seen one here in Brazil.”

  “I wouldn’t want to see one at all,” I responded, “That thing gives me the creeps.”

  I ended up buying a copy of the print rolled up in cardboard tube, and tipping Rosaura an extra $20 to take a bunch of pictures of me sitting in the throne. As the Fiat and I drove back to Ubatuba, I started to hatch a plan. For the next five days, I jogged along the beach at the crack of dawn, took surfing lessons in the morning, and then drove around the Ternos area every afternoon. Eventually, I knew every back road, every dirt path, and every landmark in the area. And I was eager to get started. It took every bit of self-control I had not to leave Ubatuba early to begin the next step in the process.

  Chapter 5. Making Plans

  At the end of the week, I checked out of the hotel in Ubatuba and drove back to São Paulo. It was a long enough drive for me to do some thinking.

  Since the day H and I brought Jeremy home from the hospital, I always had a niggling of worry in the back of my mind that I would somehow fail my son. I had worked hard to be the best father I could be and to be a good example. I worked out as rigorously as I could for a person with a full time job, I spent as much time with Jeremy as possible and I did everything I could to make myself into the kind of father he would be proud of as he got older. When I lost my job, it was like I had failed Jeremy. Never-mind that the company had been wasting me for years, never-mind that the job was going nowhere, never-mind that with H’s business and our savings we could go for two years without my bringing in any income, losing my job meant I wasn’t providing for my family any more. What was worse was that there seemed to be nothing I could do about the situation. The more jobs I applied to, the more rejections I got. My confidence was shattered and I developed a hard, cold stone of despair in my stomach.

  All along, I tried to stay cheerful and to remain opt
imistic. H had a tendency toward depression and I didn’t want to let any worries show. But more importantly, I didn’t want Jeremy to feel anything was wrong. I didn’t want him to doubt his father. But now, after a week in Ubatuba, I was feeling fit and my confidence was back. I was, once again, a man worthy of my son’s respect. And I intended to keep it that way.

  It helped that my cause was just. I knew I was on a long and difficult mission, and that the Prince was just the start of it. But I knew how to begin. I knew how I was going to get the Prince. I was going to exploit his weakness, his love of adulation and control. The painting was the key. The Prince was going to imitate Torrimpietra – he would sit on the throne and he would hold the scepter. And because I couldn’t do anything with the throne, it all came down to the scepter.

  Back in São Paulo, after selling the surfboard at a second hand shop (for exactly the price I had bought it in Santos!!), I bought a scanner and checked into a hotel in the Morumbi neighborhood. I downloaded some free CAD software and imported one of the pictures of me sitting on the throne. Knowing my height I was able to get precise dimensions of the throne and the room. I then scanned the print of Torrimpietra’s self-portrait and downloaded that into the CAD freeware. By comparing the size of the throne with the scepter, I got the precise size of the scepter: a gold cylinder with a diameter of 2 and three quarters inches, and a length of just over three feet. I expanded the image of the scepter. It seemed to have a black band not quite half an inch wide at the spot where Torrimpietra gripped it, which was about ten inches from the bottom.

  On a hunch, I worked out the volume of that sphere and multiplied it by the weight of gold. It turns out my earlier estimate of the scepter’s weight had been wrong. The scepter that Torrimpietra was so easily waving about would have weighed just shy of 150 pounds if it were made of solid gold, barring the band of course. Clearly Rosaura, the woman at the gift-shop was right – either the scepter had been hollow or gold plated, or it had never been real in the first place. But Torrimpietra was not the sort of person for half measures. If he had made a gold scepter, it would have been solid gold, excepting of course the black band, whatever that was. That meant that the “real” scepter didn’t exist so I wouldn’t have to worry about it turning up.

  Getting back to work, I pulled up some mapping software of the town of Ternos and its environs. Things matched up very closely with my recollections. I ran some numbers, did some sketching, and then went for a walk. It was a short walk. São Paulo, unlike most of Brazil, is not exactly a tourist destination, and for good reason. A reasonable facsimile of the city could be created by merging the charm of Fort Worth with the traffic of Washington DC and the Bay Area combined. Then take the mix and make it as disorganized as Mexico City. Finally, add in the classic picture the New York City skyline, but make it grimy and stretch it out as far as you can see in every direction, and you have São Paulo.

  But there is one thing that adds a different feel to São Paulo: a law against outdoor advertising on billboards and signs. It is kind of disconcerting, at first, but I could definitely get used to it. São Paulo also has some other things going for it. It’s the business capital of Brazil, if not South America. And it is said that you can get a better Italian meal in São Paulo than in Italy. I had never been to Italy, but people who had invariably said the statement was true. So when I got back to the hotel, I had the receptionist recommend a place and hail me a cab. The restaurant turned out to be a family-owned neighborhood favorite. It was early for dinner by São Paulo standards, but at 6 PM the place was already boisterous. I had a three cheese tortelloni in a many colored wine-and-walnut-cream sauce that was absolutely incredible.

  At one point, the patriarch of the family that owned the restaurant came over to ask about the meal.

  “Magnificent,” I replied in my best non-Caipira Portuguese, “The most amazing pasta I have ever had.”

  “Ah, you are an American,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Your Portuguese is very good,” he said, “You are here on business.”

  I nodded.

  “And your family?” he asked, pointing at my wedding band.

  “They are at home, in Ohio,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and showed him a picture of H and Jeremy. I also unfolded the sketch H had made on Jeremy’s first birthday, the one of the three of us walking across a footbridge on Jeremy’s first birthday.

  “Your wife is very beautiful,” he told me, “And your son. Such a handsome boy. He looks just like his mama.”

  I nodded, pleased with the comment. The old man smiled at me and moved on to other tables.

  While I ate, I made a mental list of the items I was going to need to kill the Prince. The two toughest items on the list were a stolen, or at least unregistered, car and my own replica of Torrimpietra’s scepter. I would also need some electronic equipment: a wireless security camera, a radio repeater, a radio transmitter, and two portable televisions. In addition to all that, I needed a small quantity of explosives, some switches, and some wire.

  When I was a teenager in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the 1980s, I would have known where to get all of these items: Paraguay. Paraguay is one of two landlocked countries in South America, but despite that handicap, at one point it was in some ways the most prosperous country on the continent. Unfortunately for Paraguayans, that point was a century and a half ago. There were two catalysts for the Paraguayan decline. One was Francisco Solano López, the third President of Paraguay. Naturally, he was President-for-life, as were his father and his great-uncle before him. The other catalyst was Eliza Lynch, a Scottish hooker Solano López met in Paris. To make a long story short, Lynch helped Solano López convince himself he was destined to be the South American Napoleon, and his subsequent actions soon led to a war fought against an alliance between Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The end result of the war for Paraguay was defeat, widespread starvation and a cholera epidemic. An estimated 300,000 Paraguayans died. Modern historians believe that represents about two-thirds of the population of the country at the time. As to the South American Napoleon, he and his 15-year-old son (clearly a talented boy, having already risen to the rank of colonel in the Paraguayan Army) were killed by Brazilian troops. Eliza Lynch was forced at gunpoint to bury both of them with her bare hands while still wearing the evening gown she was wearing when captured.

  Fast-forward to the 1980s when I was a teenager. Paraguay had become a smuggler’s paradise. It was said that two thirds of all cars stolen in Argentina, Brazil, Chile or Uruguay ended up in Paraguay. Many of those vehicles eventually made their way back to their country of origin, albeit with a new set of documents.

  Somewhere in the process, most of these cars passed through the second largest city in Paraguay. That city, situated a few kilometers from Iguazu and thus on the frontier with both Argentina and Brazil, was originally called Flor de Lis, but President Alfredo Stroessner, a general who had come to power in a complicated coup, decided that “Puerto Presidente Stroessner” had a certain ring to it. Because Stroessner’s secret police had been trained by former members of the Gestapo, dissent for what might otherwise have been an unpopular rechristening was muted.

  Puerto Presidente Stroessner wasn’t just a Mecca for stolen cars. It was also a great place to buy electronic equipment which could then be smuggled into Argentina and Brazil, thus avoiding the massive tariffs both countries imposed on televisions, stereos, computers and the like. But all bad things must come to an eventual end, and that included the presidency of Mr. Stroessner. After he was deposed by one of his confederates, the city was renamed Ciudad del Este. In the subsequent years, Argentina and Brazil eliminated most of their tariffs which made smuggling electronic goods pointless. More recently, under pressure from Argentina, Brazil and Chile, Paraguay enacted a law placing restrictions on importing used cars. If stolen cars couldn’t get into Paraguay, they certainly could
n’t be smuggled out later.

  A short internet search indicated that Bolivia, the other landlocked South American country, had replaced Paraguay as the place where cars stolen throughout South American often ended up. However, because Bolivia is much farther away from Brazilian population centers, the modern Brazilian stolen car industry had evolved in a way that made it less dependent on foreign buyers. In the big cities, chop shops broke up stolen vehicles for parts. Many stolen cars were simply driven to and sold in rural areas where monitoring and the rule of law were still weak. Often, these vehicles mysteriously acquired new license plates and tags. The plates and tags wouldn’t hold up to thorough inspection, but they were usually good enough for day-to-day driving in small towns where everyone knew everyone.

  Most of the rest of the items I needed could probably be acquired in São Paulo itself. Much of it could be charged to my anonymous credit cards. In addition, I had just shy of $10,000 in hundred dollar bills, and a few hundred dollars in Brazilian currency. I also had my US cards, in my own name, which I had used to rent the car and pay for the hotel in Ubatuba and check into the hotel in Morumbi. But the credit cards in my name were for tourist stuff only. I didn’t want items needed for the job to be traced to me.

  Chapter 6. Shopping

  For the rest of the day, I visited store after store, asking questions with my Caipira accent. The way most Brazilians pronounce their “r” is very distinctive, and hard for me to imitate, but Caipiras do it almost the same way as Americans do. It was easier to maintain the personality in my mind if I gave the Caipira a name. I settled on Lincoln (pronounced the Brazilian way, Leen-cone) do Nascimento. I’ve always been fascinated by the sheer number of Brazilian males whose first names are the last names of famous American presidents. Even in Argentina one would run into the occasional Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson, Lincoln, or Kennedy. I remember once talking to a Brazilian couple during a layover at Miami International Airport. The father’s first name was Roosevelt (pronounced Hoos-vahl-chee) and the toddler in the family was Clinton (Clean-tone).