The agency can only do so much to figure out Fazzina’s whacko business deals. They “acquire” a nice guy remarkably similar to a bear trap to help out.
Eventually they did get a private detective. There were too many unanswered questions, and Al was sure that there was something to be gained for David by following the trail. Alan by name, he looked like someone’s kindly old grandfather. That, thought Bill, is probably why he’s such a highly recommended person. There was no reason for anyone to think Alan was anything but a nice old cat out for a stroll. Naturally, with that image, he turned out to be a very alert, sharp thinker, with a way of asking questions Socrates would have liked.
Alan happened to be one of those rare, terrifying, individuals who had a great belief in unfashionable things like facts. Confronted with the unassailable mass of receipts, he set about putting them into time frames and had Carla chasing any identifiable movements by Tony and creating an itinerary of his stay in Australia. This was in the first half hour of his tenure in another of the spare offices. He photocopied, then scanned, everything, even cash register receipts, for the rest of the day. He hardly ever spoke, and would occasionally smile in a way that had Al wondering why he hadn’t thought of his teddy bear for all these years. Carla found herself being a sort of voluntary tea-lady-cum-domestic, and decided it was because she’d always loved her grandfather. She didn’t know why she wanted to bake things, though. Bill, who was anyone’s idea of a competent manager, instantly confessed to Alan for some reason that he was totally lost in the sort of impossible business practices that the mass of paper represented. Alan said that should tell Bill everything about himself as a manager that he’d ever want to know, and left it at that.
Joe, who was chasing the receipts, had more to do with Alan than anyone else, and was suddenly struck with an image of his father that made some sort of sense. That, he counted, would make it the second image of his father that had ever made any sense. Ian had the dubious privilege of being the sort of person called in to sort out corporate collapses, and the cool dispassionate mode he adopted certainly worked for him. He wondered what Ian would look like being avuncular. Why he’d made that connection between his father’s professionalism and Alan’s kindly silence, he had no idea.
The third day generated a tide of emails across Sydney. These had to be signed off by Bill or Al, and were mild requests to confirm transactions. Similar to Carla’s earlier efforts, but more selective, with an “any other information you may be able to provide” stuck onto them. This resulted in a small avalanche of routine replies which contained far more detail than Al quite believed. Joe had found the enigmatic Sean Smith, who was a photographer, and the remarkably non-mythical Jean McIntyre, who was a producer/graphics designer with a long pedigree. Al was horrified. Innocence had reared its quite unexpected and presentable head. Was it really as simple as that? No hidden agenda of some devious plot to overthrow Stone Gold? Tony really was just an idiot?
“It’s never as simple as that,” said Alan, and went back to work.
Whatever else, they seemed to be getting a lot of work out of Alan for their money. He wasn’t cheap, but Bill wished the people that had renovated his house had worked like that. Like an old perpetual motion machine, he never seemed to stop. The next identifiable event was a policeman who dropped in, a man with a very nice badge and surprisingly easygoing personality. He spent hours talking to Alan, who he evidently knew rather well. It was generally agreed that policemen do not frivolously waste hours on anything if they can help it, which left them knowing very little about this development.
Joe had been rather nonplussed to be included in those discussions. The policeman, Stan, had asked if he thought people like Smith and McIntyre were bona fide professionals, to which Joe answered that he did. He’d had a bit of a chat with both of them, and they seemed to know their stuff, he thought. That was his total input. There was a lot of discussion of costs of productions, which if Stan hadn’t been a policeman would have sounded like a somewhat cynical review of people’s rates. Joe wondered where that was going. Alan said that the police tended to be somewhat caring about what information they released to whom. That sounded reasonable. Far less obvious was a lengthy digression about restaurants, massage parlors, and night clubs. Joe saw little or no significance in this, apart from some implied sleaze, but Alan did. So apparently did Bill, later, when Alan let them in on his findings.
“Money laundering. Have you ever wondered why things that a five year old could do with a camera cost millions?”
Al had. He’d seen some pretty insane quotes on productions in his time. That, however, didn’t quite say enough.
“Are you saying he was setting up Stone Gold and White to be a money laundering operation, or that he was laundering our money?”
“No, he was paying for introductions to people. Most of the identified “consultants” have some pretty interesting track records. So do the restaurants, and so on. You don’t just meet these people. According to Stan, Mr. Fazzina was introduced to most of them by a person called Nigel.”
Alan was surprised by the general laughter, but continued,
“Nigel Bottomley is a police topic of great interest, these days. He wasn’t a few months ago, though. It seems he did most of his business in local bars……”.
They had to explain Nigel to Alan as they knew him. They had difficulty visualizing him as the criminal Svengali he seemed to be trying to be.
“Although, he is the classic case of Everyone’s Little Mate. I’ve always despised people like that. Quite transparent, and always totally untrustworthy. However “useful” anyone thinks they are, they’re still vermin.” said Bill, honestly. He’d met too many of them, as a manager, and hated all of them.
“He would make a bit of money doing that,” pondered Al.
“It is a bit hard to imagine him making money out of working,” said Carla.
The rather pathetic quasi-Dickensian revised Nigel was still pretty funny as an idea. Fagan working in a hair salon……..
Alan listened with great interest to this character evaluation. Mr. Bottomley might be very helpful, he thought, if he was the insipid sort.
“You still haven’t told us whether Tony was actually laundering money here,” said Al, deliberately returning abruptly to the subject. He didn’t see Tony as a big league anything, and still wanted to know where all this was leading.
“That’s the odd bit. He wasn’t. It seems he was doing all this, albeit badly, to set up something he was going to do.”
Al noticed he wasn’t thinking about teddy bears any more.