by Tod Goldberg
"She was visited by Communists today," I said.
"They're like cockroaches. You see one, there's another hundred meeting somewhere."
"I don't think that's true anymore," I said.
"The Red Menace would surprise you, Mikey."
"This Natalya thing," I said. "I've gotta get around that, it seems."
"I saw something interesting today," Sam said. He flipped open his phone and scrolled through the photos until he found the one of Longstreet's map of operatives. South Beach looked like a conflict zone.
"Well," I said, "that is interesting." Particularly, I noted, the cluster surrounding the Hotel Oro. I thought about the meat guarding Natalya. I thought about the morons parking cars. I thought about maybe seeing just how much they'd like seeing their pictures in Palm Life.
Fiona popped out of my car then. She was still talking on the phone. "Pot roast it is," she said. "I'll bring some potatoes."
7
If you're at home and don't have access to the bomb squad, the best way to open an envelopethat you think might contain an explosive charge is to not open it at all. Throw it in a tub filled with water or stick it in your toilet. Within two or three minutes, you'll be able to see precisely what is inside of the envelope.
If you see wires, a stick of TNT, hundreds of ball bearings, nails, a blasting cap, the odds are someone wants to kill you.
Don't open your letter.
If on the off chance the person you think wants to kill you was smart enough to send you a bomb in a waterproof, plastic-lined cardboard mailer, and you still have a latent desire to know for sure if someone wants you dead or disfigured, all you need is a piece of wire and some string, strong nerves, and a few yards of space between you and the envelope.
People who build letter bombs are big on bangs, particularly if they happen to be in the vicinity of the person opening the letter. The sound of the explosion, the flying limbs, the burned corpses, that's their thing. That means they leave the creativity to the bomb itself. The trigger is an afterthought. 80 percent of letter bombs are activated by opening the top flap of the envelope. 15 percent go off when the materials are removed. 5 percent never go off at all, because if you send someone a letter bomb, you're crazy and crazy people sometimes forget important steps in the building of bombs.
Ex-KGB? Not so much. So, as I stood in my mother's bathroom and stared at a wet plastic-lined cardboard mailer that revealed only that the persons who dropped off this package for me knew the same things I did, Fiona stripped apart a length of coaxial cable until she had a span of sharp wire about a foot long. She carefully inserted the cable through the bottom of the envelope and then threaded it back out and looped it around a piece of yarn that my mother swore she couldn't part with, since she intended to use it to knit me a winter scarf, but which I told her I'd replace with a whole ball of yarn if I accidently blew up her bathroom.
I then placed a frying pan on one end of the envelope, fastening it in place on the bathroom floor.
Fiona and I backed slowly out of the bathroom, keeping the yarn slack as we walked down the hall, back toward the kitchen, where the smell of pot roast still hung in the air an hour after we'd eaten.
My mom walked up with a cigarette in her mouth, lighter at the ready. "Be careful, Michael. I just redid that bathroom," she said.
"That was in 1996," I said. "And if you like the way it looks, you'll maybe keep the open flame away."
"I've been smoking all day and nothing happened," she said. "I don't know when you decided you had all the answers, anyway."
"Ma," I said, "you might have noticed that I'm a little involved with something here. Maybe keep back? In case it blows?"
"Don't use that soothing voice on me," she said. "Your father used that voice. It's unbecoming. I don't know how you stand him, Fiona."
"I can't," Fiona said. This got a chuckle from Mom. It was like I was trapped in a surrealist painting, surrounded by melting clocks and such-that's about how much sense it all made.
"Ma," I said. "Please. Go outside. If you see flames leaping from the windows, call nine-one-one."
For approximately the third time in her life, my mother actually did what I asked her to do.
"You could be nicer to her, Michael," Fiona said. "She made you a lovely dinner."
"If nothing blows up," I said, "I pledge I will spend the rest of my life trying to be a better person. Could we get this done?"
Once we were a reasonable amount of space away, Fiona gathered up the yarn until it was taut. She yanked the yarn and split the envelope in half. Nothing went bang. We waited another thirty seconds, in case there was a secondary trigger set to a timer, and when nothing happened we went back into the bathroom. I bent down and picked the package up and pulled the contents-wrapped a second time in plastic, most likely because they knew I'd try to submerge the package in water first-out through the bottom. I then shook the package out over the toilet, just in case there happened to be a dose of anthrax for my troubles.
I opened the package up. There were several glossy, professional-quality photos and a stack of black-and-white photos as well. Today, if you can't get a decent photo of someone from surveillance, you either have early onset Parkinson's, which causes you to shake uncontrollably, or you like kicking it old school with a Polaroid, just to show technology isn't needed if you're savvy, which makes you a useless dinosaur who should be burned versus those who do their job, do it well and lose everything anyway.
We went into the dining room and spread everything out on the table. Out the window, I could see my mother standing on the sidewalk smoking. It was always a strange experience being back in my childhood home as an adult, doing things completely unrelated to the person I was when I lived here as a child. If I closed my eyes and just relied on my sense of smell and the sounds whirring in the background-the smell of cooked meat, old cigarette smoke, damp coffee grounds, the hiss of the refrigerator, the cycling of the dishwasher, the slow turn of the overhead fan-I could easily imagine myself eight, nine, ten years old.
But here I was, fixed on a photo of me and my mother not eating lunch at the Oro.
"A nice establishing shot," I said.
"Two hundred years of espionage and they can't think of anything better?" Fiona said.
She spoke too soon. The next photo was of me talking to a passel of Jamaican drug runners on a dock in the Glades. It was from the air, but you could still see me. Could still see the drug runners. Could make out their boat. Another one with heroin smugglers, ex-Special Forces guys who nearly killed Sam. Again, from high above. There were more just like this. Over a dozen. All from the air.
"How long have they been tracking you?" Fiona said.
"Long enough."
"Drones?" Fiona asked.
"Maybe. Looks more like satellite. See the resolution? That's five, maybe six inches."
"Whose?"
"Could be Russian," I said. There was a photo of me with Philip Cowan, the man I thought had pulled my original ticket, moments before he was shot. "Could be ours. Could be the Chinese, for all I know." There was a photo of me in Little Haiti, meeting with a drug dealer. Another with a member of a notorious Colombian crime syndicate. "Jesus. They've got me with every known drug dealer in Miami. The close-ups, those could be FBI, but this overhead work? With this clarity? It's not like someone was flying a kite with a camera on it. Jesus."
Fiona was silent. Never a good sign. I continued looking through the pictures. There were shots of Nate at the dog track. Nate at the jai alai stadium. Shots of Nate unloading what looked to be an entire rack of men's suits from the back of a semi. Shots of Nate doing just about everything I imagined Nate did in his free time when he wasn't helping old ladies do their taxes and going door to door selling encyclopedias for the blind.
Nate.
My little brother.
The bane of my existence at his worse.
My brother, finally, finally, when at his best. It's been the process of teachin
g him that being at his best is the choice to make. We have the same parents, so I understand how difficult that decision must be.
"What does this all mean?" Fiona asked, though I suspected she already knew.
"That I'm not just burned," I said. "If they want to build a case that I'm running drugs, or at least facilitating such, as they like to say, there's a good amount of evidence. Enough that the Russians are using it to pressure Natalya, maybe make her kill me, or make it impossible for her not to kill me. If I'm Natalya and I get this intel, you know what I think?"
"That you lied to her yesterday," Fiona said. "That you've got plenty of reasons to shuffle anything off on her if it means saving your own ass."
"Exactly," I said.
"Now can I kill her?"
"No."
"She'd never see it coming," Fiona said, but already we both knew that wasn't true. If someone had satellite images of me, there was an above-average chance that she could get a muffled recording of this very conversation if someone, somewhere, thought it pertinent for her to have.
What I didn't understand yet was what any of this had to do with Nate, why they'd even bother mentioning him after I got this message.
I went back and looked at the photos of Nate. The differences between Nate and me are easily boiled down: He has always been obvious. Took chances when he didn't need to. Played the tough guy when he really wasn't one and got beat down for his troubles. And now? Now that I was home? Was it my job to keep him safe? To keep him from his own screw-ups? I couldn't be blamed if he acted according to his nature, which was to act before thinking.
Which, I supposed, they knew as well. Whoever they were. The odds were good that Nate would just open his mail, provided the return address wasn't from a collection agency, and that a few seconds later he'd be missing his hands, or his face, or both.
At the bottom of the stack of photos was a Post-it with a phone number on it.
An 800 number.
"That's nice," Fiona said.
I punched the numbers into my phone. "Yes," I said. "Thoughtful. I keep my brother alive, but they pay for the phone call."
The phone rang three times before it was answered. "Hotel Oro, how may I direct your call?" the operator asked.
"I'd like to speak to the Russian Mafia," I said.
"Pardon me?"
"KGB, please," I said. "Or ex-KGB. Whoever is available."
"I'm sorry, sir, but-"
"Ms. Copeland, please," I said. "If you're unsure who that is, just ask if anyone there has a scar on the back of their neck from a knife fight. It didn't keloid, but you should be able to see it if no one cops."
"One moment please, Mr. Westen," the operator said, because it's impossible to get good help anywhere these days, and then Muzak filled my ear.
"I've been put on hold," I said to Fiona.
"A true lack of disrespect," Fiona said.
My mother walked back inside, saw us sitting at the table and sat down next to Fiona. "Were you just going to let me stand outside all night?"
She shook out another cigarette and lit it off the end of the one in her mouth.
"Yes," I said.
She started fingering through the photos, picked up one of Nate and stared at it. "What's he doing with all of those suits?"
"Ma, I'm on the phone and this doesn't involve you," I said. I tried to gather up the photos, but my mother kept snatching them from me.
"What does Nate need a suit for?"
"He doesn't," I said. As soon as I'd grab a picture, my mother would snap it from me. "It's been Photo-shopped. It never happened."
"Who are these men with the boat? And why do you look so grainy?"
"Fiona, a little help here?"
Fiona put her arm over my mother's shoulder. "Those men in the boat were Jamaican gangsters," she said.
"Oh," my mother said. It wasn't terribly new information to her, but I'd prefer keeping my business life and my personal life and my mother life as separate as possible, for days just like these. You get burned, you make do with certain new realities, like your mother knowing your business. Intimately.
"The photos are grainy because they were taken from outer space," Fiona said.
"By who?"
"Most likely aliens," Fiona said.
Sometimes, Fiona isn't much of a help.
Just when I was about to start explaining what I could-and what was needed-the Muzak stopped. I got up from the table and made my way outside, figuring whatever happened in this conversation, the less Mom knew, the less I'd need to explain later.
"Did you get my package?" Natalya asked.
"You didn't need to involve my mother and brother in this."
"I didn't," she said. "You're right."
"You've made it personal, Natalya."
"I wanted you to understand that if you sic your little pit bull on me, it wouldn't stop," she said. "You've been a busy boy, Michael. I almost believed you yesterday. Almost bought into your Poor me, I've lost my job talk. The pictures tell a compelling story, Michael."
"That's what it is: a story."
"I am expected to believe that you were meeting with those people out of goodwill? This might surprise you, Michael, but I know you. I know what you're capable of. I know what you've done. I know what you do. Goodwill isn't who you are."
"I've had to make a living these last few months," I said. "Not everyone can park themselves in a hotel. You kill enough, maybe you start to think differently of people, the ones who need something. Anyway, I don't require your approval. Or anyone's."
"My sources paint a different picture. You're in the drug trade now. That's fine with me, Michael. It doesn't suit your temperament, but I suppose you need to find your thrills where you can. It can't always be about espionage and sex with the wrong people."
I was standing beside the garage, where I'd spent half of my childhood working with my dad on one failed project after another, including the Charger, listening to a woman I'd once slept with, who'd tried to kill me, who I should have killed the several times I had the chance, telling me who I was, what I was about, telling me that what I was… wasn't.
"Natalya," I said, "I've lost patience."
"I can see that," she said.
"I'm sure you can." It was dark out, but the sky was clear. Since I grew up in your average poorly lit neighborhood, and since no one had bothered to complain to the city about how, after dusk, the streets fell into perfect blackness, interrupted only by the flickering of the same flickering streetlights that have flickered for nearly thirty years, I was able to see a full array of stars. I tried to spot any that seemed to be moving. Or blinking. Or snapping photos. "Your sources have quite an array of satellites," I said.
"Now you can see why I believe him."
"So he's a he?"
"Michael," she said, "do you think semantics are going to solve our problem?"
"This isn't our problem. I know what I have and haven't done. I've done bad things-that's true-but I didn't roll on you to cover my own ass. I don't even have an ass anymore. You're free to believe what you want to believe, but now you're going to have to pay the consequences, too."
"The consequences? Do you want to know the tally of a person's life, Michael? What your lies are worth? What our lives are finally worth to the nations we've worked for? Three million dollars. That's what the cut is. That's what I owe and therefore that is what you owe if you wish to live through this."
"Do not threaten me," I said.
"You should spend more time with your family," Natalya said. "Have you seen your brother lately?"
"Natalya," I said, "Nate is not part of this. My mother is not part of this. You and me, that's all this is."
"Is that true?"
Of course it wasn't. "Of course it is."
"You should watch the news, then," she said. Her accent, so perfect when I saw her yesterday, so British, was beginning to falter. Her inflection had changed. I didn't know if it was her atavistic self coming th
rough her anger, or she was just tired of pretending. Either way, she was the woman I remembered, finally. "Your little assault on Longstreet made the five o'clock. I hope you've learned what you needed. Because next time? Next time they will shoot to kill."
"I'm sorry. I don't get TASS on my cable plan," I said, because suddenly, things were becoming clear to me. My problems, two of them, but not all of them, had that locus point I'd been searching for, that connective tissue. "And just so you know, Natalya, your body? Everything in it? All the skin, all the elements, all the fluids? The final tally is about five bucks. Use it wisely."
Natalya started to say something else, but I was already hanging up.
The time for talking to Natalya?
Done.
I went inside, had another piece of pot roast, told Fiona I wanted her to stay the night with my mother. Called Nate, told him not to open any of his mail and that if anyone came to his door, he should shoot them first, figure out what they wanted second, and if there was any problem to call me and I'd be there, but that I didn't have time to explain everything to him just yet, only that tomorrow, I'd need him. Called Sam, told him to get Cricket and bring her to my mother's, because we needed to keep things close at hand. Told him we needed to get Cricket's house ready for an operation tomorrow. Called an associate named Barry, who handles things like large sums of laundered money, and told him to meet me for breakfast.
Then I called the offices of Longstreet Security and left a message on Brenda Holcomb's voice mail, told her that my name was Hank Fitch and I was the guy who could have killed her and didn't, but would like to return what had been taken from her office, provided that the police weren't still snooping around and that she'd put her shotgun away. "And do me favor," I said into her voice mail, because I was feeling lucky, and because I was feeling cocky, and because I knew I was right, and that eventually I'd need someone like Dixon Woods, whoever he was, to be pissed off and in Miami. "Let Dixon Woods know that I've taken care of that problem his mother had up in Jupiter."
I didn't know if I knew what I was talking about, exactly, but I figured if Brenda Holcomb called me back the next day, I'd be on the right path.
