by Burton Hersh
“Tomorrow,” I said. She nodded. I started to say good-by to Dad but he gripped my forearm.
“Stick around,” he said. “We have got to talk.”
Mother went to bed once Anastasia showed up. Dad and I repaired to his study. When I was young and I had screwed up, Dad tended to wait until some of the dust settled. Then he would invite me into his study, and close the door, and chew my ass. We’d gone beyond that – at least I hoped we had – but something in Dad’s tone as the rest of them were leaving hinted that perhaps we hadn’t.
I took my place in the Barcalounger and Dad planted himself behind his desk. Then he clicked his desktop computer on, accessed the internet for a minute or so, clicked the computer off. His face darkening, Dad reached beside himself to lift the top of his humidor, decided against a cigar, and closed his humidor. He put his reading glasses on, knitted his brows, and took the glasses off. His eyes looked swollen, tired and a little bloodshot.
“I drank too much of that wine,” Dad said. “Manishewicz. I guess it’s sacramental, but it ain’t Mouton Rothschild. I have been reading galleys for the Keynes thing all afternoon, and that isn’t helping. I feel a headache coming on.”
“You covered up nicely. It certainly didn’t affect your singing voice.”
“Thank God for that.” Dad moistened his lips. “Michael,” Dad wanted to know, “don’t I always play it straight with you?”
“I’m not sure—“
“Yes you are. I suppose I look stupid, but at this point I like to think I have average intelligence. Wouldn’t you say?””
“You want a yes or no answer?”
“Don’t fuck with me!” Dad was sitting upright in his chair. He settled back. “What would you think?” he demanded. “Let’s review the steps that got us here. First, we decide we want our properties back but Ramon and his partners attempt to stall. Then they – probably they were the ones, we aren’t that sure yet – clean out my records and dynamite Wallaye’s safe. Then you and that Indian kid – who is very astute, a lot sharper even than I had any
reason to believe – pull off that prodigy of breaking-and-entering and actually recover copies of the legal papers. Then we hire Stokes to land on Ramon without any warning so we can reacquire our properties. But Ramon’s guys dig their heels in – which was predictable.
“By then I assumed that that would be that for a while – that we had probably exhausted normal legal remedies. Is that a fair summation so far?”
“I’d say so.”
“Then all of a sudden everything starts to fall in our lap. The Coral Gables braintrust decides that it has lost interest in our properties, on which their financial survival supposedly depended a few weeks previously, and give everything back. Wonderful! Except that just about the time we get to reprocessing our documents somebody blows up Ramon’s car, with two of his youngsters in the back seat. Which was absolutely news to me until the good rabbi brought it up. I see that it is all over the Miami papers. Were you aware of that?”
“Sure. The FBI in Tampa hauled me up there last Friday. The same explosives were used on the car as on Wallaye’s safe.”
“But you didn’t tell me,” Dad said.
“I’m trying to keep this business from wearing you out.”
“Ah. Protect Dad, the senior citizen. Now, let’s be specific. Have you any reason to think that something you did, or said, brought about this dramatic reversal of tactics by those hedge fund people?”
He had me. “I really didn’t want to embroil you in this,” I said. “I know how important you think timing is going to be now that the big banks are tottering. We needed to recover our assets, now. So I wrote a kind of anonymous note to Ramon in which I let him know that we – somebody – was in possession of all those letters from the Comandantes he’d been pipelining loot out of Cuba for. For whom—“
“Skip the grammar. “
“And that’s it. I imagine that what I sent was enough to persuade Ramon to give us our stuff back.”
“Then why blow up the car?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Let’s explore various suppositions,” Dad proposed. “Let’s play around with the possibility that your letter got away from Ramon and into the hands of other interested individuals. It could be those shadowy frigging ‘counterparties’ Rick seems so out of joint about. We can’t rule out the usual flaming Batistiana soreheads around Miami. Or – this is the crowd I’d worry about – veterans of the apparatus inside Cuba, socking it away in Basel and Lichtenstein and the Cayman Islands. They’ve got to keep Ramon cooperating. Keep anybody else from finding out. At least until they’re finished with him. They just made their statement. A bomb carries with it a lot more sincerity than an Easter card, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“But if they really suspect he’s leaking,” Dad went on,”they’ve got to cover their tracks. Take him out.”
“Do you really think”-- my palms were sweating -- “they’d go that far?
“Take Ramon out? Why not? And then anybody else with knowledge -- Enrique, and Wendy, and the baby, and very likely you and me.”
Then neither of us said anything, for perhaps a minute.
“I thought I headed something like this off when we discussed it last time,” Dad said. “Remember: ‘It’s only money?’”
“I remember,” I said.
Dad sighed, heavily. “Well, we’re into it now. We’ll have to figure out who’s behind all this and head for the exits early.”
“I have an idea,” I said. I hoped I didn’t sound as bleak as I felt just then.
15
I had assumed all along that Ramon’s people hired Cedric Bougalas. After that exchange with Dad I wasn’t all that positive. One gravy-spotted adjunct professor I studied with at B.U., who made his bones in real life hammering out custody settlements, confided to me that in the end most lawyers got to be a lot like the private detectives they depended on to scrape up the dreck when marital estrangements became inflamed. “They’d all eat just about anybody’s shit if there was a fee in the offing,” my burnt-out tutor concluded. There was no loyalty. I hoped I’d be able to say the same about Cedric Bougalas.
My situation was compromised to some extent in that I had caught a glimpse of Bougalas himself and given the slip to Olivia de Broulee in Philadelphia. The trick would be to bring off a plausible non-recognition scene, present myself as the preoccupied dupe not likely to have paid much attention that smoggy winter morning at the airport. And then to get them involved as much as possible in our behalf.
With enough exposure, if I were at all shrewd, I might find ways to get them to play back hints as to who their other clients were. What other forces were homing in on us. How they could be of help. If the money was right.
I started things out by running a search for private investigators in the Tampa Bay area on Google. When Bougalas’ firm came up I picked his e-mail address out of a short ad and e-mailed him requesting a list of references in Tampa-St. Petersburg. Somebody in his office replied with several; I actually recognized one of the names as a tennis pal of Wendy’s and called her. She told me that she had hired Bougalas a couple of years before, when a thief had broken into her condo and escaped with most of her family’s heirloom jewelry. Bougalas got it back, somehow – afterwards she heard rumors he had a working arrangement with a fence in Naples. The whole thing in the end cost her at least what the jewelry was worth, but there was always the sentimental value. Besides, the insurance covered much of it.
Next I slipped out of the office and reached Ethan Stokes by cell phone. After buttering him up over the amazingly quick resolution of our action against Sunrise Capital Partners, I wondered whether his lines into Washington were still in good enough shape for him to access the raw 201 file on a Cedric Bougalas, ex-DEA. One of Stokes’ Republican partners at Humper, Fardel remained the deputy attorney general in the expiring Bush administration.
&nbs
p; Then I called Bougalas’ office in Sarasota directly and told the twit who answered that I would like to have a word with the detective personally. I named Wendy’s pal as my immediate reference. I got the call-back around ten the following morning.
It was Olivia. What did I have in mind?
Her inflection, while obviously flattened out a little by her years in America, sounded Germanic to me too. But the name was French.
I told her I was a lawyer whose family had business relations with a banking organization in the Miami area. Certain arrangements had recently gone sour. Once we had a more complete sense of what exactly we were dealing with, everybody on our side of the negotiations would probably be a lot more relaxed. My Google search had indicated that Mr. Bougalas had worked for the government around Miami for many years.
“That is true,” Olivia de Broulee said. There was a huskiness to her response.
Perhaps Mr. Bougalas and I could meet somewhere, I proposed. My office in St. Petersburg?
“It goes better if you come to us,” Olivia decided. “Here we have the records.”
“Works OK for me. Sometime tomorrow afternoon?”
We settled on three o’clock.
Cedric Bougalas’ Strategic Opportunities headquarters seemed to have been put together to guarantee that the potential client remained a little bit unnerved about to what he/she was getting into. It existed behind a blank door twenty-three floors up in a new commercial building a couple of blocks behind the extravaganza of St. Armands Circle, a radiating welter of promenades and boutique arcades and shedding royal palms and bad pseudo-antique statuary and popular-priced hotels that dead-ended the John Ringling Causeway off downtown Sarasota. Potential clients were required to press a large illuminated button; during office hours that elicited some response from inside while simultaneously triggering several cameras, above and below, which shot footage from every angle. A glass rectangle beside the entrance could accept a thumb-print.
I got there early enough to leave my BMW in a garage and walk across to Bougalas’ building, which had a fountain in the atrium and escalators to the lower floors. His was the last office suite at the end of a long corridor. I pressed the large illuminated button and waited. After thirty or forty seconds the voice of the twit demanded my name and I gave it to her. She released the lock.
The waiting room inside was very sterile, carriage-trade Danish modern of the sort Janice liked so much. The twit, who had a fluffed-out gamin haircut, watched me very carefully until Olivia de Broulee came through to usher me into the back. The twit and Olivia paused for an exchange of elevated eyebrows. Nothing I could decipher.
Bougalas had the primary office. A floor-to-ceiling tinted window took up the corner and looked out into the Gulf of Mexico . What walls there were carried bright signed posters of late work by Andy Warhol and a copy of the New World canvas by Salvador Dali. Three leather-covered Barcelona chairs faced Bougalas’ formidable desk. Beside the door was mounted a huge, intricately carved and gilded Baroque crucifix, obviously looted from some medieval chapel, with an expiring savior several feet high hanging out into the room. Its stigmata dripped faded vermillion tears.
Bougalas nodded; I sat down, and then Olivia sat down next to me. Impressively smooth-limbed, she wore an expensive-looking frock and a ruby choker and shoulder-length hair, beautifully cut and streaked. Her rich, European features were large, expressive; except for the suggestion of spider veins in her cheeks she could have been forty. Well cared for, I thought. Then suddenly I found myself fighting the image of Olivia on her back attempting to insert the ferociously buzzing contraption Sonny had discovered in her things, struggling with the final vibrator--
I wasn’t here for that, I reminded myself. Bougalas was obviously waiting. Even without a word he carried authority. While seventy-five or a hundred pounds overweight, he was still on his feet, aggressively bald in the way kings and rock stars go bald these days. That old-Bolshevik fringe of clipped beard, totally silver. He was Perry Mason or Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon -- “By Gad, I’ll tell you right out that I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk….” -- a totally engaging scoundrel. He knew – and he had to assume that I was likely to be aware – that weeks earlier he was the one that light-fingered my briefcase on that platform in Philadelphia. Neither of us had any intention of getting into that.
“We’ve got a depressingly heavy agenda these days,” Bougalas began, “but I have to admit I went ahead and did a little unremunerated snooping. It is just possible we are in a position to help you.”
“Not me so much. Our family. As I think I indicated to – to Olivia here, a few of our investments with some hedge fund managers in the Miami area backfired. We took legal steps to recover important assets. That seemed to be paying off, but just the other day we discovered that a car belonging to the father of my brother-in-law got bombed. My father in particular is extremely concerned. Those people are family.”
“I saw that item,” Bougalas noted. “I go through the Post-Dispatch every morning. Partly, I like to believe, for nostalgic reasons. But also – who isn’t human? – out of Schadenfreude, perhaps?” Olivia snickered; Bougalas opened his palms out: Nothing hidden there.
“You know the world, don’t we all relish a little bad news, especially about the people we thought we trusted? Would you believe that certain of my ex-colleagues in the DEA have fallen into evil practices? Not hesitated to cross the line? In fact, quite a number are doing time. Literally, as we speak. Reflects abominably on our society as a whole. But then, let’s not forget that even Our Lord sometimes spoke ill of those he thought were close to him. Judas?”
I nodded. Sealed records Ethan Stokes had faxed to me spelled out how, once he began to recover from being gut-shot in Salt Lake City in 1996, Bougalas had plea-bargained his way out of at least a dozen years in Atlanta for collaborating with a prominent drug-lord while smuggling Renaissance art works in and out of the country by way of Mexico. Obviously, he had known too much, had too much on too many Iran-Contra-era bureaucrats. The papers never picked it up. He had agreed to forsake his pension, all charges were expunged from the unclassified documents, and nobody thought to go after his off-shore accounts.
“I guess it’s basically blowing up that car that’s got us upset,” I said.
“Nobody really likes violence,” Bougalas said. “For forty years I lived with a woman whose nerves were so delicately constructed a popcorn fart could land her in a sanitarium. It’s just as well she’s in a better world.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Selena? Selena isn’t dead. Not totally. She’s in Oregon. I got hurt badly in the line of duty during the middle nineties, and when I finally made it out of rehab we both decided to consecrate our lives to Jesus. Selena took it all the way. She’s with the Celestine Sisters. They have an encampment.”
“A life of prayer?
“A life of peeling potatoes, judging from her Christmas cards.”
“Heaven is what you make of it.”
Bougalas was regarding me, sizing me up with those warm mocha eyes.
“What we would like,” I began again, “is some sense of who’s behind all this. Who’s all over us. Why.”
“We understand your predicament,” Bougalas said, “but I’m not at all sure—“
I decided to play my ace. “We ought to start with the bombings,” I said. “The top guys in the FBI field office in Tampa have called me in a couple of times this winter. They’ve already established that the nitroglycerine in the charge that blew up that attorney’s place in St. Pete and in the bomb under our relative’s car came from the same batch. They think they know who’s subcontracting this whores’ picnic.“
Bougalas kept very still for perhaps half a minute. This was a shift of tone he hadn’t expected.
“You’re not the whole explanation,” I pushed, “but you and Mata Hari here are definitely in the middle of a lot of it. Whoever blew that safe came dir
ectly out of your Rolodex.
You got delegated to waylay me in Philadelphia and grab my briefcase, except that there wasn’t anything in there. Because we set you up – we have a cassette of videotape of you jostling the briefcase loose, and of your girlfriend here scampering around the subway in Philly attempting to pick up my trail—“
“I find that—to laugh at,” Olivia broke out. “I do not scamper!”
“We even managed to make a home movie of your night in the Sofitel,” I added. “Not entirely fit for family consumption.”
Bougalas closed his eyes. “What do you want?” he finally said.
A lot of what I claimed to have was bogus, but he didn’t know that. At least not which part.
“We want to find out who’s doing what. Ramon and his hangers-on? The Mas Canosa irreconcilables? Somebody in Havana, possibly?”
I had to be very cautious here. The letters were dynamite, and Bougalas wasn’t likely to know about them.
“What if we don’t really know that much?”
“Find out. If we don’t get this thing doped out pretty soon the Bureau will decide to fatten up its arrest record and move in on all of us. They tend to be pretty comprehensive, and before you know it that shootout of yours in Salt Lake City and everything leading up to it could wind up in court. Not to mention the newspapers. I gather the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.”
“When do you want answers by?”
“Soon. Now. Let’s start with who hired the car bombing.”
“That definitely wasn’t us,” Bougalas paused, then took a chance. “There is a contractor in Houston who specializes in break-ins and the demolition of evidence and—the sort of thing that happened in your attorney’s shop. All we did there was pass the money orders through. The car bombing was laid on by somebody else, I assure you we would not do that, I assume that whoever it was hired the Houston team directly. A coincidence. Not that there are that many people anybody can choose from. Explosive technicians willing to go that far aren’t listed in the yellow pages.“
