by Mark Wheaton
“For you, Padre,” Victor said with gravity before turning to Luis. “And of you, son of the carpenter, may we ask a blessing for myself and my friends?”
Luis nodded as Victor and his cadre knelt like schoolchildren. He made the sign of the cross, said a blessing he didn’t feel, and backed away. Victor rose, nodded to Luis and Father Arturo, and then led his fellows away.
Once they were gone, Luis looked back as his father with even more pride than before. Not only was he able to defuse a potentially dangerous situation, he’d picked a crook’s pocket and made it seem like it was the villain’s idea.
“You should’ve been a priest, Sebastian,” said Father Arturo, articulating Luis’s very thoughts.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sebastian said with a shrug.
The weight of the evening landed on Luis all at once as his adrenaline levels began to ebb. He sought his wheelchair and took a seat. He hadn’t been in it for more than a few seconds when he felt his father’s hand on the push handle.
“Let’s go,” Sebastian said, sounding every bit as exhausted as Luis felt.
As they made their way back through the unlit streets to the hospital, Luis fell as quiet as he’d been when he’d driven his father back to MacArthur Park a few weeks earlier.
How quickly changes the hand on the wheel, he mused.
“I hope you don’t judge me too harshly for extracting money from that man,” Sebastian said, sounding contrite. “Father Arturo was right when he said we are building faster than we can keep supplied with lumber. If we really are to finish by the summer rains, we have to get all the building materials here.”
“I didn’t judge you,” Luis said. “Favorably, if at all.”
Sebastian considered this. “Maybe that’s worse.”
Luis scoffed. “Who was that guy? The local cartel flunky who makes sure the police stay in their barracks and guarantees my safety?”
“This isn’t America,” Sebastian hushed Luis. “Just because he let us walk out of there, doesn’t mean he’s not a big man around here. You curry favor with the big man by ratting out those who talk about him.” Sebastian nodded to the nearby darkened walls and doorways. “These are inches thin. The whole town is a microphone.”
“Even in English?” Luis asked, switching from Spanish for the first time in days.
Sebastian sighed. “He may as well be mayor. He controls the drug trade here and in the neighboring areas. When you have this much poverty, you have many users. Not all of it is shipped to the States, you know. He’s also Father Arturo’s son.”
Luis eyed his father with surprise. “His son?”
“From before he was a priest,” Sebastian explained. “This isn’t common knowledge, however. Father Arturo only told me because he knew I wouldn’t be here for long.”
“It seems the kind of thing that’s hard to conceal,” Luis offered.
“True, but people have seen what happens when you talk out of turn. It’s one of the reasons Father Arturo goes by his first name only.”
Community fund-raising, Luis realized. That’s how you get a hospital and a school built. And the bad guys get to think they’re all Jesús Malverde Robin Hood types, taking from the rich to save the poor from themselves.
The evening’s silence was suddenly interrupted by gunshots. They were close, only a few blocks away. They were followed by the roar of a truck engine.
“Down,” Sebastian ordered.
Luis ducked as Sebastian pushed the wheelchair to the side of the road and helped Luis limp into a doorway.
“Probably not coming this way, but best not to chance it,” Sebastian said.
But the words had barely gone past his lips before more gunshots rang out, these even closer. They sounded like air guns being fired into an empty oil barrel, all metallic echo and punch, hardly the cinematic rat-at-at Luis grew up hearing at the movies. A dull glow illuminated the end of the block, growing wider and wider, until an aged Ford bounced into view.
“It’s coming straight at us!” Luis said.
“Sebastian!” Luis hissed in warning.
“Stay down!” Sebastian cried.
Bullets smashed into the truck from behind, shattering its windows and blowing out its tires even as other rounds bashed great dents in its steel frame. More bullets whizzed past, ricocheting off the nearby buildings, one striking the doorway only inches above Luis’s head.
Someone pressed the truck’s accelerator all the way to the floor. With a last bellow, it bounced off the street, clipped a building, and plowed into the wall a few feet from where Luis and Sebastian were crouched. The air was suddenly filled with the stench of gasoline and antifreeze as the truck tried to burrow farther into the building.
Luis heard footsteps race up to the truck. He rose to cry out, but Sebastian yanked him back down. The driver’s-side door was opened and several bullets fired into the cab. Luis watched as the light pouring in from beyond the truck was now tinted red by blood splattered on the shattered windshield.
The gunmen came around to the other side and swung open the door, but no shots followed. The door was slammed back, and the gunmen disappeared into the night.
Luis got to his feet and hurried around the back of the now-whining vehicle to get to the driver’s side. He opened the door, threw it into park, and silenced the engine.
The driver, a young man, had slumped sideways onto the passenger seat. He’d been shot so many times Luis could barely make out any identifiable features. Then he noticed the boy’s clothes and recognized him as one of the young men who was flirting with the girls in front of San Elias Nieves earlier that night.
Sebastian opened the passenger-side door and almost immediately closed it back. Luis saw why as a few lights came on down the street, illuminating the passenger-side floorboard. A young woman lay in a fetal position under the dashboard. Judging from the blood on the side of the door, however, Luis figured she’d been mortally wounded in the initial fusillade.
Over what? Luis thought as tears filled his eyes. What on earth, Lord? Why did they have to die?
He looked back to the passenger-side floorboard and saw that the dead girl, her eyes half-open, seemed to be asking him the same question. How did it come to this?
Luis stepped away from the truck, overwhelmed with anger and sorrow. When he felt a hand on his shoulder, he shook it off, then saw it was Sebastian.
“Let’s go, Son.”
Luis stared at the bullet-riddled truck for another long moment, then walked away.
XIV
Michael was surprised to learn that Charles Sittenfeld had a favorite among his mistresses. Her name was Livinia and she was from the largest island in the Swedish archipelago. When Sittenfeld was removed from Men’s County in downtown Los Angeles by CIA and told he would be moved out of the country, he said that he wanted to meet up with his paramour, who had left the country the day after he’d been arrested.
CIA said that would be fine.
Michael, naturally, was dumbfounded by this, particularly after learning that Sittenfeld had flown to Sweden on the taxpayer’s dime. Not only this, he’d been put in a hotel in downtown Stockholm when he’d first arrived to the tune of almost a thousand dollars a night. He’d since been moved to more permanent quarters outside the city, where, according to Ravet’s latest, he was enjoying his time hiking and skiing, dining with food brought in from the city that was selected by his young female companion (a lawyer no less), and, a few hours a day, was taking time out of his busy schedule to dictate to his CIA handlers what he knew of international money laundering.
“I’ve had guys like that in custody,” Special Agent Lampman told Michael as she drove him to LAX. “They act like they’re dictating their memoirs. So much of it sounds rehearsed or memorized, like they’ve been waiting to tell someone their juicy story for years.”
“But isn’t he self-incriminating?” Michael asked.
“He’s probably got some kind of ironclad immunity on anything he t
alks about,” Lampman said as she pulled up to the departures gate at LAX. “Don’t you wish you’d become an engineer or something useful?”
Michael climbed out of the car and considered this. The past few days, as he and Lampman had jumped through endless State Department and congressional hoops, he’d come to an awful realization. He was flying halfway across the world to ask a banker for information about the murder of his girlfriend—information the CIA likely already had, and that may have even been known to them before Sittenfeld’s arrest. If the government was in any way functional, he wouldn’t have to make this trip. Lampman could have gotten on the phone with the right person, asked the question, and called it a day.
But no. Sittenfeld was a voluntary informant for CIA, operating outside the jurisdiction of the United States. Michael would be traveling as a special liaison for the law offices of Wasser, Lustbader, something that had been arranged by simply reactivating his long-dormant employee profile. He would then be allowed access to Sittenfeld in an interview that could last no more than ten minutes.
Ten minutes, and then he would return to the United States on the next flight out.
Oh, and none of it would be actionable, as it was gathered independently during a voluntary interview, though secondary warrants could be arranged. In theory.
That was if Sittenfeld actually said anything of value.
“I don’t get it,” Michael said, leaning into the passenger-side window of Lampman’s car. “It sounds quasi-legal on paper, but what on earth does this have to do with justice?”
“You remember how President Obama rode into office talking about how he was going to dismantle the extralegal prison at Guantanamo Bay? He was the president, and it still took him almost two full terms to get through all the legal morass to get anything accomplished there. Sittenfeld is a banker who has made the donors behind some of the most powerful men in politics very, very wealthy over the years. Worse, he knows where their bodies are buried. You’re lucky you’re even getting on this plane.”
Michael wanted to kick the car door in. The saddest part was that he knew she was right. But he thought about Naomi, and his focus returned to him. This was a situation designed to make sure none of the little people ground up in the process saw anything resembling justice.
But Michael thought he might change the game in Naomi’s favor.
“I’ll call you from Stockholm,” Michael said.
“Only if it’s good news,” Lampman said.
Michael thought she was still joking, her persona of the office wiseacre seemingly never to slip. When he caught the look in her eyes, one born of years of investigations that resulted in quagmires like this one, he knew she wasn’t.
“Will do.”
Michael flew first to London, a ten-hour flight, then raced across the unfamiliar airport to the SAS terminal for a two-and-a-half-hour hop to Stockholm. Once there, he retrieved his rental car, a small compact that he thought was completely ill-suited for the frozen conditions, and set off for Sittenfeld’s romantic hideaway.
Being in a foreign country did nothing to assuage Michael’s strange feelings about all the subterfuge. A part of him wished it felt James Bond–ish, but in reality he felt like an errand boy. It took him back to his days at Wasser, Lustbader, with his daily commute, not to their shiny offices downtown but to a medical documents warehouse in Los Feliz or Glendale. His days spent going through what added up to mountains of files, hunting for the one clerical discrepancy that could dismantle the opposition’s case.
Perhaps his mind was on this instead of the road, as he got lost more than once trying to find his way. Stockholm, it turned out, wasn’t so much a single city as a group of islands and peninsulas connected by bridges. His English-language GPS remained ever patient but equally insistent that he was going the wrong direction with every turn.
When he finally made his way to the E4 motorway, which led up-country for a hundred miles, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Though he’d dressed warmly, it was still a shock to his system to have flown from an eighty-degree day in Los Angeles to one that was a mere five degrees above freezing. The car’s gauge displaying the temperature in Celsius as three degrees above zero somehow made him feel even colder.
After about a half hour’s drive through what in the summertime would’ve probably been idyllic countryside but in winter might as well have been the North Pole, he finally saw the turnoff for his destination.
Thank Christ.
The location turned out to be a compound of three old, beautifully architected wooden chalets connected to one another by covered pedestrian walks. Other than the narrow road leading in, the spot was completely surrounded by woods. Michael pulled to a stop in front of the center house alongside two other vehicles, one a van that he took to belong to Sittenfeld’s CIA minders, and the other an expensive BMW. Smoke rose from a tall chimney.
Before he had even climbed out, a middle-aged woman emerged from the house, bareheaded and without gloves, and strode down to meet him. He clambered out and shook her hand.
“I’m Brigitte Ekedahl,” she announced. “Ministry of Justice. Here to make sure everything goes according to protocol. And you are?”
“Michael Story, Los Angeles district attorney’s office,” he offered. When she merely smiled back patiently, he sighed. “Adjunct counsel, Wasser, Lustbader,” he corrected.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Story,” she said, shaking his hand without a hint of irony. “How was your flight?”
Good. My late girlfriend and I talked about flying to London once. We even talked about all the places she wanted to visit. She looked amazing in haute couture, so we even discussed an extravagant shopping excursion.
“It was fine,” Michael said. “Is Sittenfeld inside?”
“He is. He’s anxious to speak to you. He’s been out on a hike this morning and—”
Michael turned on her. “I have a recording of that man explaining in graphic detail what he wanted done to his wife to allay suspicion after her murder. If she was shot, it could be anyone, he says. She had to be beaten. He was ‘okay’ with sexual assault. Anything to make it obvious he, in his advanced age, couldn’t have done it. When asked if he wanted her perhaps knocked unconscious first, he declined, saying that it could ‘lack authenticity,’ particularly the way one’s muscles contracted when faced with real terror. Shall I go on?”
Michael wasn’t sure what Brigitte Ekedahl’s reaction would be. He half expected her to walk him back to his car. Instead he saw something change in her face. She hated being here, too. Perhaps hated being used by the Americans as much as she was surely being used by her own government. More importantly, she didn’t seem to have been privy to the details of Sittenfeld’s murder-for-hire case.
“Do I have to worry about you approaching this interview with anything less than a professional deportment?” she said for the ears clearly listening to them both.
“Not at all,” Michael replied.
“Perfect,” she said, a distant smile returning. “Then let’s get this done.”
The inside of the house was as incredible and inviting as the outside. The fireplace, filled with burning logs the size of tree trunks, was large enough inside for a man to stand up straight. The wooden furniture matched the house itself, and Michael wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it had been built by the same person. Brigitte led Michael through the house to a large dining room, where at long last Michael found himself in the presence of Charles Sittenfeld, and a woman who Michael assumed was his girlfriend.
Michael had never seen Sittenfeld in the flesh, but his photos—the same few reprinted ad nauseam in the newspapers—didn’t do him justice. He looked ten years younger than his booking photo. Slimmer with more vibrant skin. His eyes lit up as he spoke to the young woman next to him, growing even brighter when she smiled.
“Mr. Story, I presume?” Sittenfeld said, rising to his feet.
He was almost six feet tall, wore corduroy pants an
d a sweater over a polo shirt. His hair was thinning but was cut in a way that accentuated where it was still full. He wore stylish glasses that looked European in design and made Michael wonder if he’d been shopping in Stockholm.
This is what $300 million looks like? he wondered.
Then he realized that what the man controlled, had access to, or could put together in a moment’s notice was a hundred times that. That was all it would take to make this sweater-wearing would-be wife killer if not a king, a minor noble among the world’s elite. An untouchable made man in his own modest way.
Michael punched him in the face.
Growing up, Michael had never been that physical. He was not much of an athlete, and the only team sports he took part in were the academic decathlon and a locally televised high school quiz show, Star Academic Challenge. That hadn’t changed in high school, college, or law school. The punch he sent into Charles Sittenfeld’s face was the first he’d ever thrown.
Which is probably why it glanced off his cheekbone and knocked his glasses off rather than broke his nose or teeth or something more dramatic. Still, the girlfriend shrieked. Sittenfeld stepped backwards, lost his balance, and fell on his ass, a sight that more than ameliorated the pain the punch had delivered to Michael’s still healing forearm. Michael saw that, tellingly, Brigitte didn’t move to help him up, despite being closest. He waited for CIA minders to come flooding in, but they didn’t, much to his surprise.
“What the hell?” Sittenfeld said, hand to his reddening cheek.
“The money you laundered originated with Latin American drug cartels,” Michael said evenly. “First the Colombians, then the Panamanians, now at least two competing Mexican operations—the Gulf Cartel and La Linea of the Zetas. Of course, I can’t prove that, but it’d be a pretty amazing coincidence that these organizations would withdraw and transfer money from the accounts they pay all their bribes from in the exact dollar amounts that days later showed up in your own accounts, wouldn’t you say? So who is the person your bosses think you’re working for and who is sending the money through?”
