Two Jakes by Lawrence de Maria Page A

“boys” kept her busy with their
travel and active social life. She was always ordering tickets to some play or
gallery opening for them, or catering one of their parties. The other
secretaries and assistants rarely had anything to do. Over lunch or in the
coffee room some of the girls complained about being bored. Once in a while
somebody wondered where all the money was coming from. But since some of that
money was coming their way – the pay was excellent and everyone got a nice bonus
at year’s end – the talk never went past the donut stage.
    It
was well for them that it didn’t. The whole operation was a sham and
hemorrhaging money. The brokers – the men and women who occasionally showed up
– were all legally registered with Series 7 and 63 certificates and were
licensed to buy and sell securities. But they rarely did that. True, there were
a couple of old-timers hired as window dressing. Any clients they brought in,
any assets they gathered, any trades they generated, were gravy.
    For
the main business of the financial services section was laundering money. So
much that the brokerage operations could afford to “lose” $30 million a year.
Jesús Garza and Christian Keitel had their Series 7, but also a few Glock 9’s.
They would argue that of all the executives on their floor, they were the only
ones with real jobs. The company employed many tough characters in its Security
Division, but Garza and Keitel were the problem solvers. They took pride in
their work and made it as entertaining as possible, believing traditional
assassinations too dangerous. A double tap to the back of the head with a
silenced .22 aroused suspicions even in the dimmest cops. But bizarre,
hard-to-explain deaths were usually written off as bad luck. Garza, with his experience
in Castro’s service, was by far the more innovative. That rankled Keitel, whose
only real coup involved the impregnation of one target’s toilet paper with
tetrodotoxin, an instantly fatal nerve poison. And even that he’d borrowed from
the Mossad, something he neglected to tell his partner.
    ***
    Keitel
was lying naked on his stomach on a lounger, his head hanging over the end,
where he had placed a Kindle on a wooden stand. He was half way through The
Old Man and the Sea . Garza had started him on Hemingway; like many Cubans
he revered the American author.
    Keitel’s
body was muscled and golden, broad shoulders tapering to an absurdly thin
waist. His buttocks were taut; he was an accomplished runner, both at sprints
and distance. At the base of his spine, where there was a small knob, a tuft of
golden down waved gently in the breeze provided by an overhead fan in the
covered part of the lanai a few feet away. Keitel knew that the prominence of
his tailbone was caused by too many rough parachute landings (and idiotic boat
rides). It was, literally, a pain in the ass, but the hard little knot couldn’t
be surgically repaired without risk. Besides, he knew that many of his lovers
found the little “tail” attractive.
    Keitel
barely remembered his parents, who died when he was very young. He and his
older sister were taken in by an aunt and uncle who were as kindly as they were
dull. The couple had no children of their own, and apparently few friends, the
result, Christian suspected, of the Keitel family’s rather checkered past,
which included a distant relative who had been Hitler’s chief of staff. That
was a Keitel who didn’t run fast enough; his wartime service earned him a trip
to the gallows. The aunt and uncle were farmers, so both Christian and his
sister, Hannah, grew up strong. There was plenty of good solid food, but farm
work melted off the calories. He rarely saw Hannah anymore, but recent photos
indicated that she should not have given up milking cows. Still, she was a
pleasant enough woman. Keitel regularly sent her large amounts of money with
the understanding that half would go into German and French real estate, and
the rest to