The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [3]
“A China doll.”
“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”
“Another good question.”
Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.
“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”
He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.
“Damp in here,” Graham said.
Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.
Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”
He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”
“Let me guess,” Neal said. “Does the Bank have millions of dollars sunk into AgriTech?”
Graham’s sudden appearance was starting to make sense to Neal.
“That’s my boy,” Graham said.
That says it, too, Neal thought. I’m Graham’s boy, I’m Levine’s boy, but most of all, I’m the Bank’s boy.
The Bank was a quiet little financial institute in Providence, Rhode Island, that promised its wealthy clients two things: absolute privacy from the prying eyes of the press, the public, and the prosecutors; and discreet help on the side with those little problems of life that couldn’t be settled with just plain cash.
That was where Neal came in. He and Graham worked for a secret branch of the bank called “Friends of the Family.” There was no sign on the door, but anybody who had the necessary portfolio knew that he could come into the back office if he had a problem and talk to Ethan Kitteredge, and that Ethan Kitteredge would find a way to work things out, free of charge.
Usually Kitteredge, known to his employees as “the Man,” would work things out by buzzing for Ed Levine, who would phone down to New York for Joe Graham, who would fetch Neal Carey. Neal would then trundle off to find somebody’s daughter, or take a picture of somebody’s wife playing Hide-the-Hot-Dog in the Plaza Hotel, or break into somebody’s apartment to find that all-important second set of books.
In exchange, Friends had sent him to a toney private school, paid his rent, and picked up his college bills.
“So,” Neal said, “The Bank has a humongous loan out to AgriTech, and one of its star scientists has taken a sabbatical. So what?”
“Chickenshit.”
“Yeah, right. What’s the big deal about chickenshit?”
“Not any chickenshit. Pendleton’s chickenshit. Chickenshit is fertilizer, right? You spread it on stuff to make it grow, which sounds pretty fucking gross to me, but hey…. Anyway, Pendleton’s been working for umptedy-zumptedy years on a way to squeeze more growing juice out of chickenshit by mixing it with water treated with certain bacteria. This, by the way, is called an ‘enhancing process.’
“Now it used to be that you couldn’t mix chickenshit in water because it would lose its juice, but with Pendleton’s process, not only can you mix it with water, but you get something like triple the effect.
“Naturally, this would make a nice little item on AgriTech’s shelf. I might even buy you some for Christmas. You could rub it on your dick, although I doubt the stuff could be that good.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t get your hopes up, because just when Doc Guano gets this close,” said Graham, holding his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart, “to inventing Supershit, he goes off to this conference and meets Miss Wong.”
“Is that really her name?”
“Do I know? Wong, Wang, Ching, Chang, what’s the difference?”
“Yeah, so? Doctor This, Doctor That, what’s the difference? I’ll bet you AgriTech has more than one biochemist.”
“Not like Pendleton,