by Tod Goldberg
Fiona crumpled down on Junior’s feet and began to sob even more. That probably would have been fine, really, but when she began to wail and lights started turning on down the street—or, well, more lights than our screaming and hurling of rocks had caused to turn on—Junior said, “Fine, fine. Come in.”
The inside of Junior’s house looked like a model home. The front door opened into a wide entry hall that fed directly into a great room combination of kitchen and living room. There was a beige sofa covered in multicolored throw pillows, a chocolate brown coffee table that was scattered with magazines and newspapers, and a leather occasional chair with a chenille blanket slung over one arm.
“Your wife has a beautiful eye for detail,” Fiona said. She wandered about the living room, touching things and, I assumed, pocketing whatever she could. That was her skill set. Unfortunately, her jeans weren’t exactly baggy. She’d find a way to make do, I was sure.
“I don’t have a wife,” Junior said. He walked into the kitchen and picked up a cordless phone and handed it to me. “Make your call.”
I dialed Sam’s cell phone.
“If this is Yvonne,” Sam said, “I’m not in a position to take your call.”
“It’s us,” I said. “We’re lost. But a very nice man let us into his home to use the phone.”
“Mikey,” Sam said. “How did I get to your house? And why is your mother with me?”
“I’ll have to explain that later,” I said. “In the meantime, if you can just give me your address, we’ll get right back over there.”
“Did you go to Junior’s place without me?”
“I did,” I said.
“And this is his phone?”
“It is,” I said.
“Came up blocked on my cell,” Sam said. “Only person who calls me from a blocked number is Yvonne, usually. I don’t think you’ve met her. Great lady. Phone is her thing, if you know what I mean.”
“Great, great,” I said. “Well, let me get this nice gentleman’s phone number in case we get lost again, maybe you can call him and retrace our steps.” I pulled the phone from my ear. “Excuse me, sir, can I get your phone number to give to my friend? He’s worried we’re never going to get back to his place. Apparently, not too long ago there was a gator attack in these parts, so you can imagine his fear.”
Junior stood in the middle of his living room, watching Fiona weave drunkenly about his house. He wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to me, and I couldn’t tell if he thought Fiona was suspicious or if he was worried she’d break something. I also couldn’t believe that the man I’d seen in the photos Father Eduardo showed us was living in this house and that he seemed, oddly, just as professional and put together in only a robe as Father Eduardo had been in his office. Either they’d learned quite a bit from each other, or Junior had realized that in order to make it big, he’d need to clean up. I could still see that he had tattoos on his hands, and though his hair was thick and wavy, every time he ran his hand over his scalp in exasperation as Fi came close to toppling one thing or another, a flash of ink showed on his head. You can only cover so much of your past.
“Excuse me,” I said again, this time a bit louder, and Junior turned around. “Can I get your phone number? My friends are worried we might get lost again and they’ll never be able to find us.” Just then, Fiona did a nice pirouette into the leather chair and tumbled into it, her legs kicking up into the air and then wrapping around the long, flowing white drapes that hung across the living room windows. She tugged with her feet and down they came.
Fiona has very strong feet.
“555-9819,” he said.
I gave the number to Sam.
“You want me to run incoming and outgoing?” he asked.
“That would be good, if you could,” I said, “and hopefully we’ll find our way back to you in a moment.”
I clicked off the phone at the same time Junior walked over to Fiona, picked her up with one arm and dragged her out of the chair. “Your girlfriend pulled down my drapes,” he said.
“Let me pay for that,” I said. “As soon as I get back to Atlanta, I’ll send you a check. You just let me know the cost.”
“Price is irrelevant,” he said. “I just want you out of my home before she breaks anything else.”
Junior shoved Fiona in my direction—his first action that actually betrayed his true personality—and when I caught her, I had to hold her back from, well, doing what Fiona does.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, but he didn’t respond. He just walked back to his front door, opened it wide and waited for us to walk through.
It wasn’t until we were sitting inside the Charger again that Fiona felt it prudent to speak. “If he ever touches me again,” she said, “I’m going to break all of his fingers. And then—then I’m going to really hurt him.”
“No problem,” I said, since it’s usually better just to agree with Fiona in these situations.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a silver BlackBerry. “Plus, he won’t be so upset about missing this when he doesn’t have workable digits. I understand it’s hard to text with your toes.”
“I knew I could count on you,” I said.
She reached into her other pocket and came out with an envelope with a bank logo on the return address. “I thought this might be helpful, too,” she said.
“That’s my bank robber,” I said.
And from the small of her back she pulled out a set of car keys. “This I just did to be mean.”
7
When dealing with an adaptive enemy, making contingency plans can be a fruitless endeavor. An adaptive enemy is one who can morph his defenses on the fly, can change his goals to meet the situation and is willing, above all else, to make extreme sacrifices in pursuit of victory. In order to have a Plan B against this kind of enemy, you’d need to imagine every possible scenario while also acknowledging none of the things you’ve imagined might actually be the right answer.
In the case of Junior Gonzalez, everything I’d expected to learn about him was wrong. That he was living well in a planned community, that his home looked to have been decorated out of Pottery Barn (albeit a Pottery Barn that offered handsome metal doors covered in a wood veneer) and that he was initially polite (until he wasn’t polite) and uniformly well-spoken ... All of it ran counter to my expectations. I shouldn’t have been surprised in light of who (and what) Eddie Santiago had become, and yet it all had come as a surprise to me that a career criminal could change his outward persona.
Spend enough time locked away in prison, and it’s only natural that you’ll begin fantasizing about the life you’ll lead once you’re free and the lengths needed to fulfill that fantasy. Maybe it will be a life of revenge. Maybe it will be a life of peace. Maybe it will be a life lived out of a catalog. Or, just maybe, it will be a life lived out of a catalog and that is filled with a desire for revenge.
Pottery Barn and revenge seemed like strange bed-fellows, even to Fiona. It was the next day, and we were sitting poolside at the Ace Hotel, waiting for Sam. He’d asked us to meet him at the hotel, which was odd, but he said it would all make sense once he arrived. I had a suspicion that it would only make sense to Sam, but there we sat, Fiona in a bikini that contained roughly the same amount of fabric that goes into a cotton ball, and me wearing an Armani suit, because I assumed we’d be sitting inside. And because I look good in it.
“For a brute,” Fiona said, “he did have a lovely set of chenille throw pillows. How can you want to hurt people when you can put your head down on chenille throw pillows?”
“It’s a great mystery,” I said. I had Junior’s BlackBerry in my hand and was busy going through all of his e-mail and phone contacts. Fiona was busy absorbing UV rays.
“Would you mind getting my back?” Fiona asked. She flipped over and undid her bikini top.
I’d spent the better part of the last hour putting suntan lotion on different parts of Fiona’s body
, enough so that I was pretty sure she could walk on the sun without getting a burn, but then Fiona was always partial to putting on a show for the tourists, and there was a new batch of young men sitting across the pool, ogling her. The Ace was one of those hotels designed to look like it had been built in the 1970s, except that all of the things that were deemed dreadful in the seventies were now covered in glitter and made to look exceptional. Even the drinks had names from the seventies, like the DY-NO-MITE! Mudslide and the Jim Jones, which was basically a Long Island Iced Tea. Most of the pool denizens were born in the 1980s, so the significance (or insignificance) of it all was likely lost on them. But Fiona’s near-naked form certainly wasn’t.
I squeezed out a dollop of coconut-scented tanning oil into one hand and rubbed it into Fi’s back while still perusing the BlackBerry with my free hand. It’s not the kind of multitasking they teach at spy school, but I was able to make do.
“Here’s something interesting,” I said. “Last night, Junior received an e-mail from someone with an Honrado Incorporated e-mail address.”
“Aren’t all of the people working there ex- or current criminals?” She reached around to the small of her back. “Did you get this spot, Michael? I don’t want an uneven tan.”
“You’re all covered.” I opened up the e-mail. It was blank but contained an attachment, which I opened. It was the visitor sign-in sheet that Sam and I had signed as Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin. “This isn’t good,” I said, and handed the BlackBerry to Fiona. “It’s the daily sign-in of people coming to see Father Eduardo.”
“It seems that the Man from U.N.C.L.E has been compromised,” she said.
“And the mayor,” I said.
“The problem with employing criminals,” Fiona said, handing the BlackBerry back to me, “is that they tend not to be very trustworthy.”
The e-mail was from the blanket info@honradoinc .com, which was probably accessed by several people, but it was unlikely that more than one person had immediate access to the sign-in sheet. The receptionist was the only one. I’d have to check with Eduardo on that, but even the process of snooping for that info might tip off the wrong people. Better to take care of that on the down-low.
I scrolled through the rest of the e-mails, but they went back only two days and didn’t provide much in the way of apparent action items. But if you really want to know about a person, read his nonpersonal e-mails, like the e-mails from Amazon.com noting the upcoming delivery of items, which, in Junior’s case, provided even more insight than I could have imagined.
“Would you like to guess what books Junior has headed his way?” I asked.
“I’d like to think he’s got some of those Chicken Soup books. Did they make a Chicken Soup for the Violent Criminal’s Soul yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But he does have The Art of War and The Revolutionary’s Cookbook on a three-day delivery.”
“What is it with men and The Art of War?”
“Have you ever read it?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t need to. Do you want to know what the art of war is, Michael? Kill the other person . It’s really very simple. No reading or extra training required.”
It wasn’t really The Art of War that concerned me. The Revolutionary’s Cookbook wasn’t dangerous as a book, but it was a favorite of garage-based terrorists for years. Most of them didn’t know what to do with it, really, but someone like Junior, who was brighter than I’d given him credit for, just may. At the very least, he had the muscle and the means to acquire the goods required for large-scale explosions that didn’t require weapons-grade explosives. Worse, though, was that if he didn’t know precisely what he was doing, there was a good chance he’d blow up his own neighborhood by accident.
“How did you learn to blow things up, Fi?”
Fi started to turn over—well, she actually gave a half turn, to the delight of the tourists, which I suspect was her plan all along—and then remembered her undone top, which she retied before sitting up so she could see me. “I love it when you ask me personal questions,” she said. “I think my brother taught me. Or maybe some kids down the way, but probably my brother. It was so much fun growing up back then. You could play outside all day and no one complained if you accidentally incinerated an empty shack or three.”
“What did you use?”
“Whatever we could find. Bleach seemed to work well when mixed with other things. Pools of hairspray proved quite flammable, too.”
“What could you have done with a book like The Revolutionary’s Cookbook?”
Fiona thought for a moment. “Personally? I think I could have brought England to its knees, but then I was always a very active child.”
Anyone with an Internet connection can figure out how to build an atomic bomb, or at least procure the steps needed to put it all together, but not everybody has access to enriched plutonium. And anyone with an Internet connection can order The Revolutionary’s Cookbook , but that doesn’t make him capable of actually creating a device that can do anything more than maim himself, but the mere idea that Junior was pondering this was cause for some concern, particularly since he was apparently receiving the list of visitors Father Eduardo was seeing each day.
I couldn’t imagine a reason why he’d want those names unless he planned to shake them down, send them materials related to his blackmail scheme or to stick a pipe bomb in their mailboxes. None of the options were particularly appealing.
“You know what I wonder?” I said. “Just how much Junior really wants to run through Honrado, and how much he might just want to be respected like Father Eduardo. If he really wanted to bring him down, why not just kill him already? There must be easier businesses to run his money through.”
“You said he hasn’t read The Art of War yet,” Fiona said.
She had a point, but it still didn’t quite make sense to me. But, then, revenge isn’t always about the quick fix. Sometimes it’s about torture. Junior had spent twenty-five years in prison. That’s a long time to spend pondering someone else’s suffering.
And if anyone knew about suffering, it was Sam ... or at least that’s what his general countenance suggested when he walked up to where we were sitting, tore off his shirt and essentially beached himself facedown on the chaise longue we’d held for him. He had a manila envelope stuffed into his back pocket, which made him look like a delivery man who’d been murdered.
“Always so graceful,” Fiona said.
“Sweetheart,” Sam said, not bothering to turn over, “I’m doing battle with some demons today. Unless you have a pocket exorcism kit with you, I’d appreciate a bit more tenderness from you.”
“Can I get you a drink?” Fiona said.
Sam lifted his head and turned it to face Fiona. “Now, that’s my girl,” he said. “How about a Jim Jones?”
Fiona slapped Sam’s flank. It sounded wet. “You’re fine,” she said.
“I could do without the kidney slaps,” he said.
“This is a great hotel,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Sam said.
“There a reason we’re here?”
“Blue skies and pretty girls aren’t enough for you, Mikey?”
“No,” I said, though it wasn’t a bad place to scroll through someone else’s BlackBerry. I told Sam what we’d learned.
“You think Junior is working with THRUSH on this to finally get Solo and Kuryakin in their crosshairs?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You think it was the girl with the handsome scar who sent in the list?”
“It could be anyone,” I said, because the truth was that I didn’t want it to be her. “Can you turn over? I feel weird speaking to the hair on your back.”
“Your true colors always shine through, Mikey,” Sam said. “Here’s what I learned while you two were out here enjoying the free vitamin D from the sun, the reason for which shall be made clear as soon as I can move my torso.” He rolled himself—which took some effort�
��until he was mostly flat on his back, and then pulled the envelope out of his back pocket and handed it to me.
“Are you having some kind of problem?” Fiona asked.
“I think I injured myself last night,” Sam said.
I opened up the envelope and pulled out several pages of telephone records. “Quick turnaround,” I said.
“Have I ever mentioned my friend Yvonne before?”
“Last night, actually,” I said. “And in more detail than I was comfortable with.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
Sam shook his head like he was trying to dislodge his brain from a fork. “Well, anyway, she works for the phone company. She’s a good source in times of trouble, and a good friend in times when you just want to be alone, but don’t really want to be alone.”
“More information than I’m comfortable with, too,” Fiona said.
“No one wearing that much oil and that little clothing can have an opinion on what constitutes too much information,” Sam said.
Junior’s phone was registered to someone named Julia Pistell. “Any idea who this Pistell woman is?” I asked.
“According to Yvonne, there’s exactly one person in the United States named Julia Pistell with another phone record,” Sam said. “And she’s a college student in Vermont.”
“So she’s not a Cuban gangster?”
“Doesn’t appear so,” Sam said. “I’m going to guess she’s been the victim of identity theft, particularly since I ran her credit and she’s now the proud owner of ten credit cards, all in good standing, mind you, so that’s good for her.”
There was one number that appeared at least twice a day for a week; some days, it appeared close to a dozen times. There was another number that appeared five times in one day and then not once after that. Sam had circled the most frequent number in red pen, the other number in blue. It was far more organization on Sam’s part than I was used to. “Who’s this in red?” I asked.
“You’re looking at him.”
