Broad Street Station was a good place to scout. The hospital was just a few blocks away, there were plenty of doctors’ offices around, and his marks were looking for doctors. In the olden days, Jackson would have been called a ‘tout.’ He’d looked that word up when some irate senior citizen called him that. Jackson preferred ‘liaison.’ It sounded professional, exactly how he felt about his role, connecting old folks on Medicare with two doctors who were looking for patients.
Jackson had a good eye for the right kind of old folks. They got off the train or the bus at the station and looked lost. They hadn’t been to a doctor in a while. They figured whatever ailed them would just go away. But it hadn’t and their kids finally sent them off to a doctor, thinking they’d take a cab. But Jackson knew those folks. They wouldn’t spend good money on a cab. They’d walk. That’s why God gave them feet. Except their feet didn’t work so good anymore. They were tired and ready to take a load off.
He’d put on a nice smile. Talk to them. How ya doin’, auntie? Ask them if they needed help. They’d show him a paper with some address. He’d look at it and say that it wasn’t far, that he’d walk them there. He’d offer the ladies an arm to lean on and talk about the weather.
Sometimes, when he got them to the medical offices of Mulberry and Patel, they said that it wasn’t the doctor they’d come to see. He told them that these days doctors all got consolidated, you know, put their offices together to save money, be more efficient. They nodded. Nobody ever refused to go inside. The receptionist, Marcia, checked their Medicare card. If it was okay, she nodded, took him into the X-ray room, and gave him his referral fee.
It was a way to make a living. The old folks got taken care of—he’d made sure of that. Ripping off old folks really wasn’t his thing. Marcia had told him that the doctors did right by them. Okay, they billed the government for a lot more procedures than they actually performed, but that didn’t hurt nobody. These days, everybody had to have an angle. Besides, the government was wasting money left and right. Compared to that, this scam was nothing.
Lately, he’d been thinking about his fee. It really was nothing, what with the cost of living going up and his having to think about the future. He wanted to ask the doctors for more money, but Marcia told him to be careful, not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Except he only got fifty bucks for a referral, and that wasn’t a goose egg, more like one of those itty birds’ eggs, and definitely not golden. So he’d been thinking about new revenue streams. He’d heard that phrase on TV and liked it. There was plenty of money in the medical field—insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid. He just needed new ideas to see that some of that money ended up in his pocket.
As he considered his options, he saw a man almost fall over, trying to sit down on the stairs. The man didn’t look very old, definitely not a candidate for his doctors. He wore cheap clothes. They weren’t dirty or anything, more like that old-guy stuff you’d find at Goodwill.
Jackson pushed himself from the wall and sauntered toward the stairs. As he came closer he could see that the man was in bad shape. His dark skin was ashen. Sweat shone on his forehead. He could barely keep himself straight on those steps.
“Hey bro,” Jackson said, sitting down on the stairs next to the man. “You don’t look so good. Need any help?”
The man looked at him with difficulty. His face was all knotted with pain.
“Man, you in trouble. What’s your name?”
“Okeyo,” the man said.
“Okeyo? That some kind of African name?”
The man nodded.
“You from there?” Jackson said.
“Kenya.”
“Whatcha doing in Newark, looking like hell warmed over?”
“JFK.”
“You wanna go to the airport? Fly home to Kenya?”
The man nodded again.
“Man, you ain’t gonna make it there. Not the way you look. Lemme take you to a doctor.”
Jackson figured he’d drape the man’s arm over his shoulder and get him up, lifting from the knees. He got as far as putting the arm on his shoulder. It fell right down again.
“Come on, man. Work with me. We gotta get you to a doctor.”
Okeyo didn’t say anything.
“Okay, here we go again.”
The second attempt wasn’t any more successful. He’d put his left arm around the man’s waist to hold him while they were getting up. Okeyo’s left side was wet. Jackson pulled his hand away and stared at it. It was all red.
“Man, you’re bleeding. You got shot or something?”
Okeyo remained silent. Jackson looked into his face. There was no recognition. Something that sounded like a sigh came from his mouth and Okeyo’s eyes froze in place.
“Shit, man, did you just die on me? I don’t need that.”
Holding a dead man was bad news, especially with his priors. It didn’t matter that he just wanted to be a Good Samaritan. He wiped his hand on the man’s jacket. Better get away, now.
Before taking off, he checked Okeyo’s pockets. The man was dead; he didn’t have any use for the stuff in his pockets. Especially not for the envelope with the wad of bills and the passport. They disappeared in Jackson’s back pocket. He got up and sauntered to the underpass. Before he headed under the railroad tracks, he looked back one more time. Okeyo had fallen across the stairs. Two passersby stood by him and a third knelt next to the prostrate body.
Chapter Nine
Jackson found himself a quiet spot in Branch Brook Park, a safe distance from the dead man, before he opened the envelope and counted the bills. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Man, that’d be like, what? Two, three months’ worth of hustling old folks for his doctors? It was his lucky day.
The envelope also contained an e-ticket receipt for a flight from JFK to Nairobi dated five days later and a blue passport. The second page had Okeyo’s photo and said that his last name was Abasi. The photo was pretty bad. Almost any black man, hell, Jackson himself, could have passed for Abasi. He paged further and found the visa for the U.S. and the immigration stamp. It looked like Okeyo had another week before he had to leave. Jackson didn’t know what use he had for the passport, but you never knew. It might come in handy later. On a slip of paper stuck between the last two pages was an address not too far from Broad Street Station, close to the hospital.
Jackson noticed dried blood on his left hand. He’d better find a restroom and get that washed off. If the police stopped him with the man’s money and passport and saw blood on his hand, he’d be in a load of trouble.
On the way to washing his hands, he thought about the odd encounter. All that blood on Okeyo meant that the man had been stabbed or shot. But he still had that money. So whoever hurt him didn’t finish the job. But why? Okeyo didn’t have any fight left in him when Jackson found him. Did he kill the attacker? The man didn’t carry a knife or a gun, so that didn’t seem likely. Maybe the attacker was interrupted.
He found a bathroom and washed his hands carefully, even scraping under his fingernails with a little twig he’d picked up. He stared into the clouded stainless steel mirror. How did a man from Kenya who looked piss poor get all those dollars? Had he brought it from home, like his family pitching in a few bucks each so he’d have a good start here? But the visa was only for a couple of weeks. If he was planning on staying, he’d be illegal. Maybe he came here to earn that money. But twenty-five hundred dollars in a week? Damn, he’d sign up for that job himself. He took the slip with the address from the envelope. Maybe he should check that place out.
Jackson had a nice lunch at a little café on Bleeker Street, close to the address on the piece of paper. A BLT with plenty of bacon, a soda, and then a cup of coffee and one of them Italian cookies. Having the extra bills in his pocket made him feel confident. The waitress, Tami, was kinda cute, too, and they flirted a little. After an hour, he got up to leave. Tami didn’t give him her phone number. He made a disappointed face, but it was okay. He might come b
ack. She wanted to see him try a little harder, and he appreciated that in a girl. Besides, she was probably a student and wasn’t gonna fall for the first guy who walked in the door.
The whole area was full of students, what with the hospital and the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers all bunched together. There had been moments when he thought he should go to college—maybe not Rutgers, but community college—get some credentials and have a career. But then he needed to earn some money. And he was better off. Take his cousin, Jimmy. He was a student and didn’t have a pot to piss in. When he wasn’t studying, he was making sandwiches at Subway. Nah, Jackson was better off making fifty bucks for a referral. And who knew, maybe that address in his hand was his first step to making twenty-five hundred in a week like that dead man from Kenya.
He crossed from Bleeker Street to Central Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. On one side of the street were hospital buildings with all kinds of specialized offices. The address on the slip led him to a three-story brownstone on the opposite side. It was a worn-looking building next to a freshly painted blue house with some Greek fraternity letters across the façade. Next to the door hung a white sign telling everyone that it was Dr. Rosenbaum’s office and that the doctor’s specialty was surgery.
Jackson kept walking until he found a little bodega with a couple of chairs outside. He got himself a soda and sat down.
A surgeon’s office. That wasn’t what Jackson had expected. Why would a guy from Kenya get twenty-five hundred dollars at a surgeon’s office? Doctors didn’t pay you; you paid them. He knew people were getting paid for having drugs tested on them. But the pay wasn’t anywhere near what Okeyo had in his pocket. That’s why Jackson never did any of that. People putting who knows what kinda shit in your body and paying you peanuts. Hell, you had to be desperate.
Maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe Okeyo had all that money in his pocket because he was going to see the surgeon. But why was he full of blood, like he’d already been cut open? Had the doctor screwed up and figured that a poor Kenyan wasn’t going to complain? There was a way to find out.
“You got a phonebook here?” he asked the man behind the cash register.
The man nodded and handed it to him. A minute later, Jackson had Dr. Rosenbaum’s number.
“You sell phones?”
The man pointed to the wall behind him. “What kind do you want?”
“The cheapest kind.”
The man got one from the rack. “Twenty bucks. You wanna buy minutes too?”
“Sure, gimme a ten dollar card.”
It was good to have money in your pocket. It let you do things, make plans, move ahead. He unwrapped the phone and left the plastic packaging on the counter. Outside, he slipped the SIM card in and activated the phone. Once the minutes were registered, he dialed Dr. Rosenbaum’s office. A receptionist answered.
“Dr. Rosenbaum, please,” Jackson said.
“Do you want an appointment?”
“No, I want to talk to Dr. Rosenbaum.”
“Are you one of his patients?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid the doctor is busy.”
“Tell him to get unbusy.”
“Sir, I don’t like your tone.”
“Ask Dr. Rosenbaum why a dead man from Kenya has twenty-five hundred dollars and the doctor’s address in his pocket.”
Chapter Ten
Bengtsson in Nairobi and Dufaux in Vienna called Vermeulen within a half hour of each other. Both had spoken to the people whose signatures were on the four invitation letters. The reports confirmed what Vermeulen had already assumed the evening before. The letters were fake. Neither Salif Traoré in Nairobi nor Frank Wilmot in Vienna remembered sending any invitations. They didn’t know how their signatures ended up on the letters.
Vermeulen suspected that someone had slipped them into a stack of documents needing signatures. People who ran UN divisions had to process so much paperwork, they probably didn’t bother to inspect every piece of paper before signing. The good news was that the conferences and hearings specified in the letters were real events. It confirmed to Vermeulen that someone inside the UN was involved in the scam.
Finding those people was the first step of an investigation. Of course, he still had to convince Suarez that all this required his involvement. That shouldn’t be too difficult. Just the threat of Sunderland holding up UN visitors would be enough. Relations with the host country were always a top concern. Sure, people grumbled about the U.S. and its heavy-handed bullying of the UN, but they all knew to keep their mouths shut and play nice.
He’d been meaning to call Sunderland and tell him that the letters were indeed fake and that Odinga had been killed, but wasn’t looking forward to that task. The decision was made for him when the man called him that afternoon.
“We got another one, Vermoolen,” Sunderland said.
“At JFK?”
“No. In Newark. Today, around eleven, a Kenyan man collapsed and died at the Broad Street Station.”
Another dead man? There had to be something else going on besides getting visas.
“Did he also have a letter of invitation?” Vermeulen said.
Sunderland didn’t answer.
“Well, did he?” Vermeulen said.
“He was part of the scam. We know.”
“Would you care to elaborate? Because I have some news, too.”
“No, I would not. What’s your news?”
“Joseph Odinga was murdered yesterday, about a half hour before I could speak with him.”
“Did you say ‘murdered’?”
Sunderland didn’t sound surprised.
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“I heard only that he died. Cardiac arrest or something.”
“That’s probably what the company wants you to believe. I have it on good authority that he was murdered.”
“Who told you?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Fuck you, Vermoolen. You think you can play with me? I’ll get a judge to force you to tell me.”
“That won’t work. U.S. judges can’t send subpoenas to the UN. Remember, it’s extraterritorial. Besides, as a UN investigator, I have diplomatic status. So you can forget about the judge.”
That last part wasn’t true. The moment he left the UN building, he’d be subject to whatever any judge ordered him to do. But it was worth a try. Sunderland must have bought it because he was quiet again.
“Listen, Sunderland. We should be working together rather than getting into a jurisdictional pissing contest. Given the new information I have, I now concur with you that these were indeed fraudulent invitation letters. I’m as interested as you are in getting to the bottom of this.”
There was more silence. Vermeulen could hear the man breathing.
“Good,” Sunderland finally said. “I can accept that. Tell me what you know.”
“Why don’t you start by telling me why you believe that this Kenyan was part of the same scam? Did he also have a letter of invitation?”
“No, he had nothing. His pockets were empty.”
“So how do you know he’s part of this?”
“The Newark PD ran the fingerprints. Nothing showed up in the usual databases. The guy’s clothes looked kind of foreign, so they had the bright idea of running the prints through the immigration database. Sure enough, they belonged to a Mr. Abasi. He was printed at JFK three days ago and made it through without a problem. The Customs and Border Protection officer who checked him didn’t remember much, but there was a notation in Abasi’s admission record that he had been invited to a hearing. Just like Mr. Odinga.”
“So he wasn’t detained?” Vermeulen said.
“No. Just as I told you, for everyone we catch, who knows how many make it through?”
“How did he die?”
“We don’t know yet. The police report says that he was found lying on the station’s stairs with a bleeding wound. Probably from
a knife. He might have been stabbed during a robbery. That’d explain why his pockets were empty. They’ll do an autopsy. I’ve asked them to keep me informed. Tell me about Odinga.”
“I went to the Elizabeth detention center yesterday. They wouldn’t let me in at two when I got there. When I came back for visiting hours at five, the place was under lockdown. While waiting for an explanation, I overheard two guards talking, saying that the quiet African man had been found dead. I pressed them for more information, but they clammed up.”
“Why did you say he was murdered?” Sunderland said.
“As I was driving home, I got a call from someone working there. He heard from one of the detainees that Odinga had been in an argument with a gang member. The detainee didn’t see what happened after that.”
“That’s pretty thin. It sounds more like some disgruntled employee wants to get the company into trouble.”
“I’ve thought about that, but the man didn’t sound like a complainer. He was more worried that the death would be swept under the rug as heart failure or something like that. It made sense to me, since at two o’clock there was no indication of trouble. I asked to see Mr. Odinga. I was turned away. I came back three hours later and the man was dead. He could have told me who provided the letter. That’s just a little too convenient.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re asking to speak with him caused his murder? Don’t you overestimate your importance just a little bit?”
Vermeulen bit his tongue to keep from hurling a few choice words at Sunderland. “I’m going to ignore that,” he said. “What really matters is that in two days, two Kenyans who came to the U.S. using similar means are dead. I want to know why. Don’t you?”
“Not really. They shouldn’t have come here illegally in the first place.”
Illicit Trade Page 4
