The Extraditionist

by Todd Merer

  “Please sign,” she said. “I want to fly home today.”

  “Today?” I said. “Why?”

  “I can’t afford a hotel.”

  “You can stay with me—”

  “Don’t go there, Benn.”

  “A hotel, then. I’ll get you a suite. Stay as long as you like. Just like I have, the city’s changed, for the better. I’ll show you around. We’ll go shopping. We always had fun shopping, remember?”

  “Thank you, Benn. But I really can’t stay. I just want you to sign the deed and leave. Please do it now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Why do you need to know why?”

  “I don’t need to know. I’m just asking.”

  “Fair enough. Why now? Because I want my house in my name. As I recall, our divorce provided for me to get everything, which wasn’t much, by the way. I believe Casita Azul fits within the definition of everything.”

  “Actually, everything in both our names was to go to you. Casita Azul was in my name. It doesn’t fit the definition.”

  “You’re saying it wasn’t clear Casita Azul was to be mine alone?”

  “It was clear. All I’m saying is, it’s still in my name. You want to discuss my transferring it, fine. I’m just curious as to why now, after so long.”

  “Please don’t try to control the situation. Keep it simple. If you’re willing to sign, do it now. If not, say so.”

  “Is this about the house, or are you here because you wanted to see me? If that’s what it is, I want you to know something. Ever since you left, I think about you every single day.”

  “Honestly, Benn, I just came about the house. Not to discuss our history, or how you’ve become one of the good guys. But, if you must know? Why now is because I didn’t learn that Casita Azul wasn’t in my name until now. Okay? So, let’s get it done.”

  She stood and came around my desk and snatched my pen and put it to the deed, making a small x alongside the conveying party’s signature line. Then she thrust the pen into my hand.

  “Sign, Benn.”

  I looked at her long, smooth fingers, avoiding her eyes. No matter the jerk I’d been—I wasn’t in denial—when it came to money and material things, I’d always been true. All she had to do was ask nicely, and I was butter. But no, that temper of hers, always explosive, always shoving things down my throat.

  “Say please,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, say please.”

  Her nostrils flared. “You haven’t changed at all. You’re as pigheaded and arrogant as ever. There’s still nothing but money on your mind, and blood on your hands.”

  “Blood? That’s not true. I’m helping the government—”

  “The only one you ever help is yourself. Sign.”

  “No.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Do it.”

  “You still haven’t said please.”

  Someone knocked at my door.

  “Tell them to wait,” she said.

  “Come in,” I called.

  Mady snatched up the deed and started out as the guy delivering my lunch entered. She smacked into him, and the delivery went flying.

  I heard her heels hurriedly clicking down the stairs.

  Then the echoed clang of the street door, closing.

  I stood at the window and watched her cross the street, her hair undone now and blowing in the wind. She reached the corner of Madison and was gone.

  I ran a sleeve across my teary eyes. Something small and white lay on my desk. A grain of rice. I looked at it stupidly, then said, “Supposed to throw rice when you get married, not when . . .” My voice broke.

  “I’m so sorry, boss,” the delivery guy said, looking at my lunch, which had exploded all over the office.

  Something red and white lay amid the mess of curried rice: a white napkin with a red heart. It was Valentine’s Day.

  “Me, too.” I picked more rice from my hair. “Me, too.”

  CHAPTER 26

  That night I drank to numb myself. Deep down, I’d always nurtured a spark of hope that Mady and I might someday get back together. Now that slight ember was extinguished, replaced by an alcoholic resolve.

  Fuck it. I was meant to fly solo.

  And in my style. If I wanted a woman, there was plenty of love for sale. Plenty of the best of everything money could buy. And since I had expensive taste, time to get serious about business.

  First, Rigo.

  Tomorrow, he was proffering. The cheap bastard thought he’d played me perfectly: the video nailing General Uvalde would surely lead to a cooperation plea, so he didn’t need to pay a million-dollar lawyer. Wrong. Robinson was a pro who knew to keep cooperators on edge. Rigo could give him a dozen videos, and Robinson would tell him he still needed to vomit up more. There would be a tense moment in which I’d deliver my ultimatum: pay me in full right now, or I’m history . . .

  Maybe he really was ill. If so, I hoped his last days were painful. Fuck you, Rigo. Here’s to you, Nacho. RIP.

  I shifted focus to Bolivar. Nothing to ponder there.

  So I daydreamed about Sombra . . . Zapata.

  A criminal genius but a moron in real life. Thickheaded as a cigar-store Indian. Imagine not seeing the difference between a half-Jew New York mouthpiece and a Miami Cuban lawyer who lights candles on the anniversary of the Mariel boatlift. But given the opportunity, I’d teach Sombra the difference.

  I drank to that.

  Besides, who needed Sombra, anyway? There’s were plenny of fish in the sea. It was just a, ah . . . quesshun of getting the fish to, shwim . . . walk . . . wish me.

  The next morning, my head hurting but clear, I arrived at the proffer my usual five minutes late. As per standard procedure, AUSA Barnett Robinson suggested Rigo and I review the proffer ground rules privately beforehand.

  When Rigo and I were alone, he seemed to crumple. “Doctor, a terrible thing happened.”

  I didn’t reply. No way was I going to bear witness to Stefania’s murder. Far as I knew, Stefania was on a beach taking selfies while getting a pedicure.

  “I’ve been poisoned,” he said.

  It was true that Rigo appeared sallow and bloated, but I doubted he’d been poisoned. More likely jail food and stress, the deadliest of combinations. Once-powerful men in jail are prone to conspiracy theories. I hedged a response that I’d do the best I could to help him, but I doubted anything would come of my request, because BOP sets the go-to-doctor bar high—in the vicinity of plague and other near-death aliments.

  “I’ll get you a doctor visit.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Soon as you pay me.”

  “Mondragon—”

  “Wipe your eyes and listen up. Today’s proffer has rules—”

  “I already know them. I know you think me a stupid man, Doctor, but I studied the rules before I was extradited. Lucky I even made it here, after the piece of shit Mondragon set me up.”

  So I’d been right about Mondragon’s involvement in the attempted hit. He was working for Sombra, then. But why had Mondragon referred me Rigo—

  Then I got it.

  Mondragon wanted to taint me with Sombra by having me represent Sombra’s enemy, Rigo. That way, Mondragon nudges Sombra into hiring one of his Miami Cuban lawyers.

  “Mondragon tried to kill you,” I said. “But you kept him as your lawyer. Why?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Why did you let Mondragon recommend me?”

  “If you must know, I wanted him to think I was doing as he said. I keep my enemies close. Forget Mondragon. We need to discuss—”

  “My fee.”

  “Repeating yourself. Trying to get paid twice?”

  “What? You owe me nine hundred thousand.”

  Color patched his neck. “Mondragon, he—”

  I grabbed a fistful of his shirt collar and spat words like nails into his face. “You killed Nacho Barrera’s family.”

  “No, I
was against that. Others—”

  “Pay me, or you’ll rot here, you son of a bitch.”

  Rigo forced a smile. His teeth were pegged and yellow, like those of a jaundiced child. “I will authorize your fee immediately, but you better do right by me. Now let’s talk importance. You received the video?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gave it to the prosecutor?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, yet.”

  “That’s normal?”

  “There is no normal.”

  “Do your job properly, and you really will be paid twice. We don’t like one another, but we can still do business. You watched the video?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s good, me giving them Uvalde, yes?”

  “It’s very good.”

  “Uvalde is nothing,” he said. “I am going to give them Sombra.”

  I didn’t respond, but my suspicions were correct: Mondragon had sabotaged me out of the Sombra sweepstakes by handing me Rigo’s case. For if Rigo cooperated against Sombra, I was automatically conflicted from representing the mythic kingpin. Not that it mattered, now that Sombra had passed on me.

  “Sombra’s on the video,” he said.

  Was Rigo a whack job? Or was he saying that he was Sombra? Or that Uvalde was? These possibilities were off the charts.

  Or were they?

  Why couldn’t Rigo be Sombra? In the alternative, Uvalde made for a perfect Mr. Big, one who deflects heat by creating a legend called Sombra.

  “I am ready to proffer,” said Rigo.

  CHAPTER 27

  Rigo nodded impatiently as Barnett Robinson introduced himself and the rules of engagement. “Do you understand everything?”

  “I understand everything,” Rigo said. “Did my lawyer explain that I require medical attention?”

  “He did. We’re going to request you be examined. Anything else before we begin? Gus? Benn? All right, let’s do it.”

  “Okay,” Gus said, “how’d you learn about the lanchas?”

  “From persons I sent my lawyer to,” said Rigo. “Everything my lawyer did was at my direction.”

  Robinson said, “This is your Colombian lawyer, Mr. Mondragon?”

  Rigo nodded. “Him. He paid no one for information, just as I instructed.”

  Rigo’s spiel was so textbook, it was a joke: no one was being paid for information; all cooperation was from his personal knowledge; whoever assisted him did so at his instruction. Not that anyone was laughing.

  The opposite. They were working. Forget probing Rigo’s ways and means, Robinson was on his device, Gus on a keyboard. The drug war had been lost for so long that even the good guys go along to get along.

  “Your information resulted in the seizure of two lanchas,” Robinson said.

  “Twenty-four hundred kilos, Rigo,” Gus said. “Thirty percent pure. Worthless crap.”

  Rigo blinked rapidly. “I have no way of knowing the quality—”

  “You’re lying, you dumb, fucking asshole,” Gus said. “The loads were deliberately diluted to save money because you created them.”

  Rigo shook his head. “The shipments were not mine.”

  “Well, then,” said Robinson. “Whose were they?”

  Rigo sat up straight. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. He flashed his pegged-tooth smile and said, “Sombra.”

  Gus exchanged looks with Robinson.

  “The video your lawyer provided?” Robinson said. “When did you meet with General Uvalde?”

  “About four years ago.”

  Gus said, “Where?”

  “In the mountains.”

  Robinson said, “Only one meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  Gus said, “The videotape is brief.”

  “Such meetings are brief.”

  Robinson said, “Who else was present?”

  “The video speaks for itself,” Rigo said.

  “The audio’s erased,” Gus said. “What was said? By whom to whom?”

  Rigo nodded. “In return for this information, I expect to be freed from jail and allowed to stay in this country.”

  “You’re in no position to bargain, sir.” Robinson looked at me. “You may want to talk to your client, Benn.”

  Robinson and Gus left the room. I shook my head.

  “What? What do they want you to tell me, Doctor?”

  “That you’re a fucking moron who doesn’t understand you’re in no position to bargain. Don’t play games with these people.”

  “Not games. Strategy.”

  “Strategy? You need some advice about strategy. Pay me, and I’ll show you the way to go home. Right now, before you lie your way into a hole too deep to climb out of.”

  “Ask them if they liked what they saw. Tell them soon I will show them things they will like even more.”

  That made me pause. Maybe it explained Rigo’s strange remark about Sombra being on the video. Could the video Mondragon gave be a truncated version?

  “I know how to deal with government people,” Rigo said. “Feed them a little bit at a time so they stay hungry.”

  When I emerged from the proffer, I had a new voice-mail message.

  “Passing through, saying hello. Later,” said Laura Astorquiza.

  CHAPTER 28

  I thought a lot about Laura. She hadn’t been blogging lately, but that wasn’t the reason. It was sex. I wanted to have and to hold her. She was a vixen, and I was a fox in heat. Been too long since I burrowed into a warm den. But Laura had passed by, and no one else caught my eye.

  Female-wise, the times couldn’t have been worse. Until they were.

  I was telephoned by a woman who spoke in whiney up-talk—Like, everything’s a question?—compounded by an unpleasant Long Island accent.

  “Mr. Bluestone? AUSA Kandice Kauffman?” she said formally, although we’d been knowingly disrespecting each other for years. “Your client, Joaquin Bolivar?”

  She paused for my reaction, so I deliberately kept silent.

  Indefatigable, she continued. “The presentment is tomorrow, at ten?”

  “What judge?”

  “Trieant.”

  Two five-hundred-pound safes had just fallen on two heads—Bolivar’s and mine—in the forms of AUSA Kauffman and Judge Charleton Trieant, the man for whom a word had been coined: curmudgeon. This was seriously bad news. At the same time, it was a familiar good feeling. I was up for a fight.

  “I assume your client wishes to cooperate,” she said.

  Assume? Bile rose in my throat. Kauffman—or Kandi, as everyone calls her, although there’s nothing sweet or girlish about her—was an unethical bully in the pulpit of the US Attorney’s Brooklyn office of the Eastern District of New York. I despised Kandi for many reasons, but my deepest anger was irrational: her presence desecrated Brooklyn, my hometown, where Flatbushers of my generation spoke about dis and dat.

  “Don’t assume nuttin’,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I know what you said. You have a responsibility to discuss cooperation with your client.”

  “Thanks for the free ethics. You’re going to like my client. I bet you’re salivating over his mug shot.”

  “You’re a pig, Bluestone. If your client chooses not to cooperate, I’m leaning toward a superseding indictment, charging a crime far more serious than marijuana importation.”

  I wasn’t concerned. Kandi’s modus operandi included empty threats. Still, another charge was possible. “That crime being?”

  “Like, the real motive for his marijuana-smuggling operation?”

  I felt a pang of headache behind my eyes. Kandi knew the weed run was a cover to map out a coke route. I assume your client wishes to cooperate. The witch was right. Bolivar would opt to preserve his ass by netting old pals in old conspiracies. The only thing to do in these cases. Why bet your life at trial when you can do a couple of years by cooperating
? Cooperation was fine for lawyers as well, being a tenth the work of trial . . . and yet, I missed trying cases. The joys of victory and agonies of defeat and all that jazz. I’d like to try another case before I’m out of the business. Against Kandi.

  Like, it would be fun?

  “Still there, Bluestone?”

  “No, I’m on Mars.”

  She hung up.

  CHAPTER 29

  The next morning Val drove me south along the FDR. Natty’s phone was off, and Jilly’s disconnected. So much for Bolivar’s bail package. The day was clear and cold, the Manhattan skyline like Alps against the blue sky.

  Mountains.

  For a moment, I recalled the sulfurous reek of Antigua’s volcanic air . . . the earth spewing blackness above old ruins spattered with fresh blood . . .

  I willed the image from my mind. We exited onto the Brooklyn Bridge ramp and zoomed past a sign:

  WELCOME TO BROOKLYN

  LIKE NO OTHER PLACE IN THE WORLD

  Amen. There are two provisions in my will: Mady gets Casita Azul and all my worldly goods, and my funeral procession travels the mean streets of my boyhood.

  The federal Eastern District courthouse fronts a street closed to vehicles since 9/11. I got out a block away and crossed Cadman Plaza Park to the courthouse. Wind in the open space numbed my face. The courthouse windows reflected pale sun. Twenty years ago, the courthouse had been a small, five-story cube. Shortly after, it was enlarged into an adjoining space, three times larger. Shortly after that, it was replaced by the new tower. All in all, a half billion of the trillions wasted in the war against drugs.

  And so my world turned.

  It stopped when the elevator opened onto the third floor and I spotted Assistant US Attorney Kandice Kauffman together with several agents in the corridor outside Judge Trieant’s courtroom. Made me want to spit.

  It’s a reaction based on events of long ago, when I was representing Nacho Barrera’s brother Max. I’d already cooperated his potential life-with-no-parole sentence down to twenty years, and was then seeking another cooperation-based resentence. Kandi had called and said she believed Max had valuable information in a major case she was investigating. Was Max interested in helping himself by helping her? Naturally, Max was interested. I thought if I could get him down to ten years, less good time and time served, he’d be out in a year or two. So Max was taken from his comfortable mid-security-level jail to an eight-by-ten SHU cell in MDC. Best he was there, Kandi said, for his own protection.