Hearts of Sand(4)

Tibor pointed his finger at one of the little stacks, and Gregor picked it up. He read the entire page through, stopped, and then read it again.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“That’s what I said the first time I saw one of those,” Tibor said. “It doesn’t make any sense. But of course it does make sense, you just don’t believe it. And it gets worse, the more of the document you read. This is not a matter of people taking on more mortgage debt than they could handle, getting greedy for a house bigger than they could afford. I think this amounts to deliberate fraud.”

Gregor picked up the stack of papers again, read through the page again, then turned to the next page and read about half of that one. He put the stack down again. “It certainly is something,” he said.

“And it gets worse,” Tibor said. “There is the matter of the ownership of the loan.”

Gregor picked up the papers again. “NationReady Mortgage Finance,” he said.

“Maybe,” Tibor said.

Gregor cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe?”

Tibor sighed. “For hundreds of years, Krekor, if you bought real estate in this country, you got the deed and you took it to your local assessor’s office and you filed it. With pieces of paper, you understand. But these people, these people like NationReady, they did not do that. They used instead a national digital database of deeds.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “That’s not necessarily awful. It’s a digital age. Something like that was going to happen eventually.”

“Yes, possibly, Krekor, but in this case, it does not seem to have been competently run. The mortgages were all bought and sold in packages, and they were bought and sold very quickly, sometimes several times a day. And not all the transactions were properly recorded. So in some cases, nobody knows who owns the mortgage or who owns the house or who has a right to foreclose.”

“Well, that could be good news,” Gregor said. “If they can’t figure out who owns the mortgage, then it shouldn’t be possible to foreclose on the house.”

“Shouldn’t be, but that is not the way it is working out,” Tibor said. “We have been warned by the state attorney general’s office that NationReady and some of the banks have tried to foreclose on properties they could not prove they owned. If the buyer and his lawyer are not very sophisticated about these things, they sometimes miss that. People are forced out of their homes by people who have no right to force them out because they don’t own the mortgage to begin with, and nobody knows who does. But if you get forced out, it’s almost impossible to get back in again.”

“My God,” Gregor said. “This sounds like a Monty Python sketch.”

“Yes, Krekor, I know. But without the funny. And that’s not the end of it, either.”

“What more could there be?”

“The loan officers who set up these mortgages got paid on the basis of how many mortgages they made. So sometimes, when the buyer didn’t have the right credentials for a mortgage, the loan officer would change the application so that the numbers fit. They would change the income, for instance, or say there was no credit card debt when there was.”

“You’re sure the loan officers did this? People didn’t just lie on their applications?”

“First the loan officers tried to get the people to lie on the application themselves, but if they wouldn’t, the loan officers would make the changes themselves later.”

“That’s bank fraud,” Gregor said. “You can go to Federal prison for that.”

“Yes, Krekor, I know,” Tibor said, “but nobody is going to prison for it that I know of, and I have six families in foreclosure, all of them here from Armenia less than a decade. And we helped to bring them to America, Krekor, we are responsible to them. Two of these families are out on the street already, and we’ve had to find them accommodations elsewhere. And everybody has been very good about pitching in, but this is getting to be more than we can handle. And the legal things—tcha.”

Linda Melajian came back with two plates, both of them the full cholesterol extravaganza, as she put it. She looked at the papers strewn everywhere and hesitated. Gregor and Tibor hurried to push papers out of the way.

“Don’t worry about getting them out of order, Krekor,” Tibor said. “There is no such thing as ‘in order’ with these things.”

Linda put the plates down and looked into their coffee cups. “I’ll be back with the pot,” she said, “and if that’s the mortgage stuff, I still say you should just dynamate NationReady and get it over with. We’ve got a whole family staying in our back apartment, and the grandmother keeps threatening to commit suicide. Not that I think she means it, mind you, but this is ridiculous.”