Numbered Account

Schweitzer gave a curt bow and left the room.

Nick collapsed into his chair. Peter Sprecher had been right to call Schweitzer dangerous, but he had forgotten to mention paranoid, psychotic, and delusional. What the hell had Schweitzer meant about his father's "embarrassing behavior"? What had his father done to cause the bank distress? Nick knew only the rudiments of his father's career. Alex Neumann had started in the bank at age sixteen and worked as an apprentice for four years. His first real jobs had been as assistant and then full portfolio manager. According to Cerruti, he had worked under Kaiser in both positions. Could his father have done something to embarrass the bank then? Nick didn't think so. Schweitzer hadn't been referring to any lighthearted shenanigans a junior executive might have gotten up to. He'd been talking about something serious, probably something that had happened after Alex Neumann had been transferred to Los Angeles to open up USB's branch office there.

The only clues Nick had to his father's practices in Los Angeles were inside the two agendas he'd found in Hannibal; first there was mention of one Allen Soufi, a private banking client, whose every visit occasioned a stern afterword. One time labeled a Schlitzohr- Swiss slang for crook, another time simply "undesirable." And later, his name underscored by the chilling reminder "Bastard threatened me," written not in his father's usual looping script but spelled out in bold block letters. There was more. A company named Goldluxe that he had visited, apparently in response to a demand for commercial credit, and about which he had written a frank appraisal. "Dirty." "Impossible sales." "Hands off." Yet with which, if his entries were to be interpreted clearly, he had been forced to do business.

Nick brought his head forward and massaged the bridge of his nose. He asked himself how the bank could construe actions taken to protect it from unseemly business interests as embarrassing behavior? He only had to replay Thorne's accusations about Kaiser's long-term relationship with one Ali Mevlevi to know how. The bank wanted to do business with those unseemly interests.

Nick sat up straight in his chair. The only place he knew to look for an answer to these questions was in the monthly activity reports his father sent back from Los Angeles. To get those, he'd have to ask Cerberus to generate a request form, which would bear his initials, or find someone willing to retrieve them for him. The first path was too risky, the second closed- at least for now. He'd just have to wait and hope to find another way.

Patience, he told himself in a voice not unlike his father's. Control yourself.

Nick had a hard time guiding his attentions back to his job. He unfolded the paper Schweitzer had been so anxious to discover and laid it on the desk. The list contained the names of those shareholders, both institutional and individual, who held significant blocks of USB stock. He smiled when he came to the name of Eberhard Senn, the Count Languenjoux. The old-timer held a block of shares worth over 250 million francs- six percent of the bank. His votes would be crucial.

There were many other names on the list. For those who kept their shares in an account at USB, Nick would request a copy of the client's entire file. This he would study, assimilating a maximum of pertinent detail about the client, before telephoning. Needless to say, those shares of USB stock held in discretionary accounts managed by the bank would be voted in favor of reigning management.

The vast majority of USB shareholders, however, did not hold an account with the bank. In these cases, Nick would contact either the individual shareholder or more frequently, the fund manager responsible for voting the shares, and preach the bank's doctrine of increased profitability. The names on his list were primarily American institutional investors: the New York State Teachers' Retirement Fund, California Employees Retirement Fund, Morgan Stanley European Equity Fund.

Nick grabbed a stack of file request forms and began filling them out. Name of portfolio manager, department, date requested, signature. The paperwork left nothing to chance, nothing unclear. The only spaces missing were for his height, weight, and tipple of choice. Each request was to be signed by Kaiser prior to being forwarded to the responsible executive. Client information was treated as confidentially within the bank's walls as it was outside of them. Nick wondered if he would ever be able to liberate his father's monthly activity reports from Dokumentation Zentrale. Not if he needed Kaiser's signature, he wouldn't. Not if Schweitzer was tracking his every move within the bank.