by Sean Rowe
“It has nothing to do with our negotiation.” He meant the business at hand, I thought. Negocio means “business” in Spanish.
He shook his head, looking sad. I thought he was going to start up again. I tried to give him my napkin, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was looking at the floor.
“You are wearing Florsheim Imperials,” he commented. “The Cadillac of footwear.”
And then I remembered: the shoes. I had seen him in the federal courthouse, in the hallway outside the central courtroom where they have the big mural behind the judge’s bench that shows the history of Miami: fishermen and ocean liners and black guys with baskets of oranges; people in Roaring Twenties outfits getting off a Flying Clipper down at Dinner Key. He was one of Fontana’s confidential informants. But that must have been, what, four years ago?
“My father was a shoe salesman,” he went on. “I myself was an accountant.” He blew his nose. “I married a girl in my village.”
Then he did start up again.
I lit a cigarette. “Hey, Manny? I know how it is, OK?”
He took a pause. “It is—complex.”
I was watching a cop get out of a squad car and walk toward the donut shop.
“My brother-in-law, he thought I was not good enough for to marry his sister,” Manny said. “I was working for him. For him, and for other people.”
“Manny, right now let’s just wander outside.”
He grabbed my arm as I was getting up. His eyes were wild.
“For me it was just a business, like selling shoes. I was an accountant, a bookkeeper. But she was different. My wife. She became corrupted. Later, she went with other men.”
The cop was coming through the door now, heading for the counter.
“I saw her two days ago!” Manny said. “Here in Miami! I could hardly recognize her. She was much younger than I when we married, but not now.”
“Is that why you’re mixed up in this? You’re trying to get back at her? Or your brother-in-law?”
He thought that was hilarious. The cop looked over, leaning against the counter.
“My brother-in-law is dead. There is only one reason I am mixed up in this,” he said, bitter, “which is to get free from your friend Mr. Jack Fontana.”
I must have looked like I didn’t believe him.
“Also the money.” He smiled. “I have told you, I was an accountant.”
Not anymore, I thought. You’re an ex-accountant who’s about to get himself in a shitload of trouble. An accountant who’s too dumb to notice a cop in a uniform thirty feet away.
“Let’s get in the van, Manny.”
When we were out the door and halfway across the parking lot, he asked, “What explicitly will be your role in the operation?”
“I’m not involved in the operation.”
He stopped. “So it is untrue what I have heard?”
“What have you heard, Manny?”
“That Mr. Jack Fontana went to prison in the place of you. That you have now a debit to repay.”
He was letting me know he knew. That they all knew what I owed Fontana, maybe even how it had happened. After he gave me a good, long look, Manny smiled and started walking again and climbed into the van.
We drove down U.S. 1, nobody talking. Then we turned onto a side street into a warehouse district with a long row of shop spaces, mechanics’ bays with roll-up metal doors. Kip pulled up in front of one of them and got out. He fiddled with the lock and then ran the door up, letting the headlights flood the inside. As soon as he did, I wanted to run.
5
THE WAREHOUSE wasn’t much bigger than a two-car garage. We walked inside while Fontana flipped on the overhead lights and rolled the door down behind us.
A pair of .50 caliber machine guns was set up on tripods. Nearby were a shipping pallet stacked with boxes of ammunition and a table full of AK-47s and sidearms, Glock 10 millimeters and some smaller stuff. I could also see a couple of cut-down pump guns, the kind with plated barrels and plastic stocks.
One wall was covered with nautical charts and highway maps. Dive tanks and wet suits littered the floor. Farther back stood a drafting table with a gooseneck lamp and a pile of blueprints and schematics. A portable welding rig had been shoved into one corner.
In the middle of the room was something big draped with an oversize Cuban flag.
Fontana sat down in an old armchair and cleared his throat.
“So. The plan is to hijack the Norwegian Empress and make it look like terrorism. That’s the cover story. What’s really going on is old-fashioned piracy. With your help, Matthew, we’re going to whack a modern-day galleon.”
“Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” Bryant piped up. He seemed to have quit worrying about me wearing a wire. Mellow now.
“I’m sure that in your role of security director for a big cruise line you’ve given some thought to this already,” Fontana said. “Your Empress is a very vulnerable lady, the oldest and smallest member of the Festival fleet. Twelve hundred passengers and crew chugging along through the wild blue yonder with exactly three firearms on board. One locked up in the wheelhouse, one in the captain’s quarters, and one under the chief mate’s jacket. The galleons had cannons and armed escorts.
“I’m sure you’ve also run the numbers and figured out what’s kept something like this from happening. The money just isn’t there. If you took the drop box from the casino, the petty cash from the purser’s office, and the play money out of every passenger’s wallet, it wouldn’t amount to a hundred grand. You guys even stopped carrying crew payroll, what, two years ago?”
I looked over at Manny. He was sitting on a piano bench picking his nose with his pinky and working on a crossword puzzle.
“Let me shift gears for a minute,” Fontana said, getting up from the armchair and starting to pace. “Manuel, you feel free to pipe up. Back in the cowboy days, by which I mean the late seventies and early eighties in Miami, it was pretty simple for the cartels to launder the cash they were taking off the street. They just had their people walk into any bank on Brickell Avenue with a suitcase full of green and write a deposit slip. Then they would wire it offshore. In hindsight it seems incredible, but this went on for years. One day banks had to start reporting any cash deposits over ten thousand dollars, and all of a sudden moving the money became a monumental pain in the ass.
“At the same time the local DEA, meaning me and Kirk Semple and Gaspar González and some other underpaid overachievers, were setting up bogus brokerage houses and mortgage companies and seizing a lot of the swag, sending a message. Nowadays everyone’s heard about how hard it’s supposedly gotten to smuggle cocaine into South Florida. But the flip side of the business is equally tough. What good is selling a kilo of coke if you can’t get the revenue back to Bogotá? The proceeds are harder to move than the product. If it’s street money, it’s going to be in fives and tens and twenties, maybe three times bulkier than powder. Every other week some pathetic mule gets caught at the airport with fifty thousand in cash stuck down his pants. The public doesn’t really get it.
“It’s a big, fat cash-flow problem,” he said. “It’s a problem that hasn’t been solved, and maybe it never will be. If you split up the money and carry it by courier, you involve that many more people, it takes longer, you lose a slice, and you generally have to pay more for delivery. If you put the eggs in one basket and fly it out by prop plane, you cut your costs but increase the risk. You could lose all those eggs.”
I was beginning to see where this was going.
“The Empress has made five trips from Miami to Havana since Congress relaxed the travel ban two months ago. Each time she leaves port there’s a big protest by local Cubans, with lots of screaming and megaphones. And each time—this is the important part, Matthew—each time, she’s been secretly hauling raw currency, a little more every trip. There are seven people on earth who think they’re the only ones who know about this. Or make that six. The guy who clued me in was l
ying on his back in a shower stall where some lifer mongoloid named Credence Breedlove shivved him through the liver over a piece of cornbread.”
Fontana stopped pacing and turned toward me, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
“The money stays on board in Havana and gets off-loaded in Grand Cayman. They’ve got a warehouse about the size of this one a mile from the port. They repackage it and take it straight to the Bank of the Netherlands. It’s gone like clockwork, so far. It’s worked so well that next time around, the fat cats in Cali are upping the ante. A lot.”
I looked around the room. It smelled like cement dust. I knew it was going to be Manny who answered my first question, and no one was going to say another word until I asked it, so I went ahead.
“How much?”
“Thirty million dollars,” Manny said. “Approximately three and one-half tons.”
They were waiting for some reaction, and it was hard not to give it to them.
“They don’t even sort the shit till it gets to the islands,” Bryant snorted. “They just run it through trash compactors and shrink-wrap it in polyurethane. Sloppiest motherfuckers I ever saw. Last time it was packed in tomato-sauce boxes.”
“The inside man is Menoyo, the galley manager,” Fontana said, reading my thoughts. “And your assistant security director, Neal Atlee.”
I was feeling hot. I sat down on a stool.
“Say something, Matthew,” Fontana said.
“This has been very entertaining. You want me to say something? Here’s what I’ve got to say. It’ll never work. And I’m not interested. And right now I’m going to start thinking how to get out of the position you’ve put me in by telling me this shit. I think what I’m going to do is pretend I fell asleep in a cab on the way to the Delano and had a bad dream, because that’s what this is.”
Something on the wall had been catching my eye for the last few minutes. I walked over and looked. It was a statement from Barnett Bank with my name on it. Credit reports listing charge-card accounts were pasted all over the cinder blocks.
“I’m surprised to hear you say you’re not interested,” Fontana said. “To be painfully blunt, Matthew, I think you could use a turnaround play in your life right now. You have two hundred thirty dollars in your checking account. You have an early retirement pension at GS-fourteen that pays you twenty-nine hundred a month gross. You have nine credit cards with a total balance up over eighty thousand dollars. And you have another three hundred twelve thousand to pay on your wife’s medical bills. My condolences, incidentally.”
He paused, and I watched something flicker across his face.
“You’re forty-nine years old and living in a glorified flophouse. Something you may not know is that you’re going to get fired in about three weeks. Tanel’s bringing in Paul Lewis at twice your salary. One thing Tanel likes about him is he doesn’t drink more than eight or ten shots of bourbon on any given weeknight. He even has a driver’s license.”
I turned around and looked at them. Kip was grinning. Krystal had put down her needlepoint and was working on her fingers with a nail file, humming to herself. Bryant was practicing his glare on Manny.
Fontana said, “Your contention that the plan won’t work, I’m going to interpret that as meaning you have lots of questions about logistics. We can talk about that. But when all’s said and done, this plan will work for the same reason smuggling millions of dollars in currency on a cruise ship works in the first place. It’s never been done. No one expects it.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll play along. Let’s say you manage to board a ship that’s doing eighteen knots in the Gulf Stream and somehow get control of twelve hundred passengers and crew. And sever communications. That’s the plan, right?”
“Correct. More or less.”
“What happens when someone hiding in a bathroom calls the Coast Guard on a cell phone?”
“Cell phones don’t work twenty miles out at sea. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. I seem to remember that you and I spent five tedious years on FBI reactive squads in Dallas before I had the good sense to switch over to DEA and you moved up to counterintelligence. Remember the bank robbers who didn’t get caught? Fat Boy Frank? The Midnight Rambler? They were the ones who wore watches. Get in and get out.”
“Matt?” Kip chimed in. “I took over a whole city in Angola one time with twelve guys and a tank, OK? Trust me, this is a can o’ corn.”
“Let’s say you manage to off-load three tons of cash, presumably without anyone seeing you do it,” I said. “Where are you going to run? You’ll have forty-five minutes before the cavalry shows up, if that.”
“You’re probably right,” Fontana said brightly. “The likelihood of getting detained is figured into the deal. We just don’t plan on having anything in our possession that ties us to either the hijacking or the heist.”
Kip had moved to the middle of the room. His hands were shaking again. It was something neurological—too much coke or steroids at some point in the past.
“You may not know this, but the first piece of mail you get in prison is a form letter from your State Farm rep canceling your life-insurance policy,” Fontana said. “When I got done pouting, I decided to cook up a new insurance plan of my very own. You’ve been hearing the basic outline. Now let’s look at some of the fine print. Go ahead, Kip.”
Kip whipped the red-and-blue flag away, and I saw what was underneath. It was a garbage Dumpster, with some big white tubes fastened to the side.
“The war wagon!” Kip yelped.
The rim of the Dumpster was lined with thick rubber, a pressure seal. A box was welded to the lid with a dial, black wires coming off it.
“Positive buoyancy,” Kip said, chucking me on the arm. He meant the white PVC pipes stuck on the sides. “You fill it up with moolah, and it still floats. But when you put a little weight to her, an anchor, she sinks. I tested it with bundles of newspapers. The anchor goes on a cable that clips in here.” He bent down and swung the container around, pointing out a ring on the back. The Dumpster was on casters. “You set the timer. When the timer goes off, it releases the anchor cable, and the whole enchilada floats to the surface. This is just the prototype. The one we’re going to use has a radio tracker on it, so we can grab it fast once it pops up.”
“Tell him how deep it is,” Bryant said. “That’s what blows my mind.”
“That part of the Stream, you’re talking almost a thousand meters,” Kip said.
“I like to think about all that money sitting down there under the ocean,” added Bryant. “In the dark, man. Sittin’ down there just waiting. Whales and shit swimming by.”
“Hey, Matthew,” Fontana said. “All those years you were chasing spies and kidnappers and white-collar bullshit artists. Didn’t you ever want to show ’em how it’s really done?”
6
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when I got home. I locked the door and cranked open the louvered windows, and for a time I stood in the darkness naked to the waist, letting the cool breeze from the beach play over my skin.
I left the lights off and thought about taking a shower, and while I thought about it, I lay on the couch and tried to stop thinking. I couldn’t, though. I wondered about Neal Atlee, how long had he been dirty; whether Hector was involved; and was there anyone else on the inside. Did Fontana turn them, or had they been working for someone else before him? This was all beside the point, I decided.
I closed my eyes. Seeing Kip had stirred up a lot of things I didn’t want to stir up. I dozed off, and below me were rice paddies and jungles full of orange fire. I saw some of the Montagnards in a village up north. Then things got worse. A guy was getting pushed out of a chopper with his hands tied behind his back. For a while I was falling too. Then I got up and went into the bathroom and flicked on the light, and when I lifted the lid of the toilet, it was my wife’s face looking up at me, her whole head there in the toilet. Her hair had fallen out from the chemotherapy, all but a few wisps
, and she wore bright lipstick, a shocking scarlet against her porcelain skin. She opened her eyes very slowly and started to smile, and her eyes were made of emeralds. Then the window blinds clattered against the wall, and I woke up and decided I wasn’t going back to sleep for a while.
I put on some shorts and a sweatshirt and went for a walk, over to Meridian, then up Meridian to Fifth. I cut across to Washington and bought a bottle of bourbon at the market halfway up the block and considered having a pull right there on the street. Thursday night was for locals, and couples and groups of kids were leaving clubs and going to others. Walking north along Washington, I saw one young guy up against a wall taking a leak right out in the open. His girlfriend was laughing, and then she fell down on the sidewalk, but by the time I went over to help her, she was back on her feet, laughing again, leaning against a car. Muscle boys were comparing notes outside the Warsaw Ballroom, having come out to catch some air. At Fourteenth I crossed over to Ocean and turned south again, sticking to the beach side of the street, where I could see all the cafés and neon but not be too close.
I walked right past the Cardozo and almost didn’t see her sitting alone at a deuce, watching me. I crossed the street and stood on the sidewalk. The tables were about three feet up from street level.
“You keep late hours,” she said.
“I was just going out for a jog.”
She smiled. “That must be your bottle of Gatorade, then.”
She meant the bourbon in the paper bag. I had forgotten about that.
“I decided I didn’t feel like jogging.”
She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I thought she looked even better without any makeup. Different, anyway.
“Where’s the sugar baron?”
“He passed out about an hour ago,” she answered. “Back at the Delano.”
“So your shift is over.”
“Very good.”
“He’s staying there, and you’re staying here?”
She nodded. “This place is more my speed, and it’s a lot cheaper.”
