by Tod Goldberg
“He called you?” Fiona said.
“No,” Sam said. He waved his arms about. “This him. The Ace Hotel.”
“This isn’t a him. It’s an it,” Fiona said.
“Sister, I’m not real strong on the pronouns right now,” Sam said. “You’re lucky I’m not speaking in tongues anymore.”
“Why is he calling this hotel?” I said.
“He’s got a villa here, or his friend Julia does,” Sam said. “It’s been rented for a month.”
“I want to say, Michael, that I am liking this man more now than I did yesterday,” Fiona said. “He does have good taste in kitsch resorts.”
Renting a villa at the Ace Hotel for a month would cost upwards of ten thousand dollars, but that’s not what had me wondering what his motive was.
“Who is in it?” I said.
“No one answered when I called,” Sam said.
“You get a room number?” I asked.
“I managed to make sweet eyes at the girl behind the counter,” Sam said, “and when that didn’t work, I gave a bartender a hundred bucks and told him to meet us out here when he had the information, and that you’d compensate him then, as well.”
Sam was always happy to spend someone else’s money. “What about this other number?” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Sam said, “the plot thickens. Seems your friend Barry took a few calls from Junior, as well.”
Barry is a friend to a lot of people in Miami, particularly people with money to launder. If you want the best man in the business, he’s the man to go to. But I had a hard time believing Barry was working directly with an organization like the Latin Emperors. He tended to prefer to work with sole proprietors. Less chance of getting snitched out by someone ... or getting shot. Barry could get you what you needed, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to consort too much with the more violent members of his profession, mainly because he wasn’t exactly handy around a gun, or a fist, for that matter.
“How do you know this is Barry’s number?” I said.
“Hours of intensive sleuthing,” Sam said, “and then I called it and he answered.”
“What did he say?” I said.
“First, that he was happy to hear my voice. Second, that he was curious regarding Fiona’s current romantic status. And third, that he was scared to death of Junior Gonzalez,” Sam said.
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“I told him you’d call him, see if you could ease his beating heart a little bit.”
A common misconception about people on society’s fringe is that they have some indelible sum of street smarts that Joe Public does not. The truth is that you usually end up on society’s fringe because you lack a certain facility with the idea of cause and effect. Having street smarts really just means you don’t know how to exist in the real world where people are ruled by the idea that what they do will engender consequences.
That was Barry, in a nutshell.
“I’ll add that to my to-do list, right after saving Father Eduardo’s life,” I said. “What was he doing for Junior?”
“That’s what he wants to talk to you about,” Sam said. “He said it was just a consulting gig.”
“A consulting gig?”
“Ecomony’s tight, Mikey. Everyone’s taking on new job duties these days.”
“It’s true,” Fiona said. “I’m pondering a move into corporate sales and service. Like Blackwater, but with better outfits.”
Luckily, a hotel employee approached us before the conversation could continue between Sam and Fiona. He wasn’t young or hip enough to be one of the bar-tenders (all of whom wore tight black T-shirts and black pants trimmed in white, which made them look like lost, if fashionable, mimes), especially not with his gray hair, salt-and-pepper mustache and rather nervous demeanor. As he walked, he kept looking over his shoulder, as if he thought a tsunami was approaching, and even when he faced forward, his eyes continued to dart. His name tag said PABLO.
“Are you the people with the money?” Pablo asked.
“This your guy?” I asked Sam.
“No,” Sam said. “Where’s Louie?”
“On break,” Pablo said. “He sent me.”
“Why are you so nervous?” I asked.
“I need the money first,” Pablo said.
I pulled out my wallet and examined the contents. I only had about sixty dollars. That wasn’t much of a payoff, but I hadn’t hit the cash stash prior to our visit to the hotel. I handed Pablo the money, anyway, and waited while he counted the ones, fives and the lone twenty.
“This is only fifty-seven dollars,” he said. “My life is not worth only fifty-seven bucks.”
“That’s all I have,” I said.
“I’ll take your watch,” Pablo said.
“No, you won’t,” I said.
Pablo looked from me to Sam to Fiona. He lingered on Fiona for a moment too long.
“The leering you are doing would cost you fifty dollars at any reputable peep show,” Fiona said. “And if you stare a moment longer, it’s going to cost you your kneecaps.”
Pablo whipped his head back in my direction, which caused beads of sweat to fly from his scalp. It was nice outside, but not nice enough to make this man a sweaty mess.
“Your sunglasses,” he said to me. “Your sunglasses, and we’re even.”
When you’re a spy, you sometimes make sacrifices for the greater good. I could buy another pair of sunglasses, so I handed Pablo mine. He put them on immediately. They weren’t quite his look, but he seemed content. “Follow me,” he said. That he didn’t also say “if you want to live” was a great relief.
8
Work for the government long enough and what you realize is that there’s no such thing as absolute privacy. Every moment you spend holding your cell phone is a moment that can be tracked. Every Web site you visit on the Internet can be tracked. Every search you enter into Google can be tracked, so if you spend a lot of free time searching for ways to blow up airplanes, be aware that there’s someone who is now looking for reasons why you might want to blow up an airplane. Everything you do behind the privacy of your front door is really just a sham: If the government wants to know what you’re doing, they might need a warrant to kick down the door, but they rarely need anything more than a couple of keystrokes to get a great idea of what you’re plotting.
If you want even a modicum of privacy, stay in a hotel. The government can’t as easily bug a business as they can a person. And when you’re in a hotel, there are plenty of people willing to do your bidding, so that you may feel even more secure. Plus, the sheer amount of people who might stay in a room, in addition to the number of people who have access to a room, and the amount of government-mandated cleaning that goes on, makes a hotel a forensics nightmare for investigators. Too much opportunity for pollution equals reasonable doubt.
At a place like the Ace Hotel, where looking the other way is a selling point, you could probably do a whole lot of illegal things, provided you kept the right people paid and didn’t make too much noise. And even then, well, you’d probably be just fine.
The Ace Hotel was located just off Collins Avenue in South Beach, and the local lore was that it was once President Kennedy’s Miami getaway, a place he’d go to meet with Marilyn Monroe and the Mafia and probably Castro, too. It was a small hotel—only four stories—but it made up for its lack of size by offering fifteen two-bedroom villas that faced the Miami Beach canal. It was one of those great mysteries of tourism: Why spend thousands of dollars to sleep in a villa that was likely not as nice as your own home?
“It is that one,” Pablo said. We’d followed him out of the pool area and around the back of the hotel and through the (intentionally) overgrown botanical gardens, which subtly hid the villas from sight. Nothing says “privacy” quite like plants grown to twice their normal size. That and water features burbling away in some hidden crevice—boutique hotels are always big on hidden crevices that contain very small fountains—
make celebrities and the very rich feel like they are one with nature.
“Which one?” Sam said.
Pablo pointed in the vague direction of a twelve-foot thrust of fountain grass. “There,” he said. He was still sweating profusely and my glasses kept sliding down his nose, so that he had to continually push them up. He turned to me and handed me a room key card. “Take this,” he said.
“One minute,” I said. He hadn’t said a word since we left the pool and had grown consistently more nervous as we walked, which made me think we were walking into an ambush. “What’s in the villa?”
“Bad men,” he said.
Fiona groaned in exasperation. She reached over and snatched my glasses off Pablo’s face and handed them back to me. They were a bit too damp for my taste. “Pablo,” she said, “I’m not as patient nor as willing to spend money on frivolous information as my two simian friends. So I’m going to need you to speak only in complete sentences now. I know you’re scared of something, but if you aren’t more forthcoming with information, you will actually have a reason to be scared, versus the normal, unfounded fears of your sex.”
“Uh, Fi,” I said, but she waved me off.
Pablo’s sweaty fear was now wide-eyed anguish, so that was a nice change. “The man who rents this room? He tells me not to come and clean. But you understand, if I do not clean the rooms, I can lose my job. They track our security cards, so they always know if we’ve gone in the rooms and villas, you see. So they know. And I cannot lose my job. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Fiona said. She put her hand on Pablo’s wrist. Very gentle. Very caring. She had that ability for kindness, too, but she could also snap his wrist if she decided she didn’t trust him. “Please, continue.”
“So I wait until I see the man leave and I go and just slide my card in, so it registers. You see? But then the door is open and curiosity, you see, it gets the better of me.”
“Killed the cat,” Sam said, which was entirely the wrong thing to say at that moment.
“I know. I know. I know,” Pablo said. “I find guns. Many, many guns. And much money. Much money. But it isn’t real. The money, that is. I find this out the wrong way.”
“Please, tell me you did not steal counterfeit money and then use it to pay your water bill or something,” I said. Pablo’s eyes got wider, if that was possible. He wiped his face with his sleeve, but he didn’t say anything. Whatever he did with the money, it was the wrong thing to do. “How much did you take?” I asked.
“One thousand,” he said. “I bought a round of drinks at the bar here and paid with a fifty that was apparently not such a good copy. So, so, I try to take the money back, but by that time, I’d already spent maybe five hundred, so I cannot afford to pay back another real five hundred.”
“When was the last time you went into the room?” I asked.
“Three days. I slide my card, but I do not go in. But the men who come and go, they do not look like the kind of people I’d like to anger.”
“And what do we look like?” Sam said.
Pablo stammered for a moment, but then Fiona applied a slight bit of pressure to his wrist, which seemed to focus his attention. “I figure you are good guys, or else why would you want to know what’s happening?”
I handed Pablo back my sunglasses. He needed them more than I did. “Fiona,” I said, “give him your earrings.”
“What?”
“Your earrings,” I said.
“They’re diamond,” she said.
“Did you buy them?”
“They were a gift,” she said.
“From who?”
“From a gentleman who didn’t have quite enough money for a fair-priced assault rifle.”
“Consider it karmic reparations,” I said.
Fiona took off her two rather large diamond studs and handed them to Pablo, who didn’t quite know what to do with them, mostly because Fiona was making noises in her throat like a cornered tiger. It can be slightly disconcerting to those who don’t know Fiona’s noises.
“What am I to do?” Pablo said.
“Go home sick,” I said.
“For how long?” he asked.
“Forever,” I said.
Pablo looked down at the diamond earrings in his hand and then back at Fiona. He plucked up one of the earrings and tried to hand it back to Fiona. “Maybe one is enough?”
“They’re a matched set,” Fiona said.
“Go,” I said to Pablo, “before I change my mind.”
Pablo deposited the earrings in his pocket and then scurried out of sight in what must have been record time.
“Guess it’s true,” Sam said once Pablo was gone, “that you can’t trust the help at hotels not to go through your shit.”
I handed the key card to Fiona. “Why don’t you see if you can accidentally open the door to the wrong villa,” I said.
“And get shot?” she said.
“No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini,” Sam said. “And besides, with all that oil on you, a bullet would slide right off you.”
“Or I’ll instantly ignite,” she said.
I had a better idea. I called the front desk and asked to be connected to the villa. I hung up after five rings. “There’s no one there,” I said.
“Would you feel better if Uncle Sam was standing next to you with his big, mean gun, Fiona?” Sam said.
Fiona gave both of us one of her patented “I could live a better life without both of you” glares and stomped off toward the villa. Sam and I followed behind her at a slight distance, and then lingered out of sight in the nuclear-treated fountain grass as she approached the door. Though Fiona didn’t have a gun on her—hard to hide a gun in a bikini—I was certain she could handle herself in the face of danger. Plus, Sam was right: No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini. It just goes against nature.
Fiona slipped the key card in just as anyone might when they’re returning to their villa—which is to say, she portrayed no nerves in the least—and opened the door. I listened for screams or gunshots or even a muffled yelp, but heard nothing. The door closed behind her with an audible click.
A few seconds later, my cell phone rang.
“Darling,” Fiona said when I answered, “why don’t you come back to the room? I’m lonely.”
“I’ll even bring a friend,” I said.
Sam and I checked for unwelcome visitors and then headed to the villa. Fiona stood in the doorway, sipping a bottle of water.
“Where’d you get the water?” I asked.
“The mini bar,” she said. “Just four dollars.”
We stepped inside, and Fi closed the door and bolted it behind us. The villa was decorated just like the rest of the hotel, which is to say, at some point the designers began thinking of the 1970s as a period worth revisiting. For added kitsch factor, the walls inside the villa were covered with framed, blown-up photos of B-list celebrities—Zsa Zsa Gabor, Barbie Benton, Ricardo Montalbán, the guy who played Potsie on Happy Days—partying in Miami during the period.
“Who would pay to stay here?” Sam said. “I had to live in the 1970s. And let me tell you, it was no vacation.”
“Hipsters,” Fiona said, “love to revisit the time period their parents suffered through.”
The living room and small galley kitchen looked lived-in, but not messy. There were cups in the sink, the garbage had take-out containers and coffee grounds in it and the sofa in the living room was dented from people sitting on it. There were no guns and no stacks of money, at least not in the open. The room was well lit by the sun coming in through a sliding glass door, which opened out to a small patio overlooking the canal. I opened the door and stepped outside. On the patio table was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Two chairs were pulled slightly away from the table, as well, which told me more than one person had been here.
I came back inside in time to see Sam open up the fridge. “Uh, Mikey,” he said.
“You can have a
beer when we’re done,” I said.
“I know,” Sam said, “but you’ll want to take a look at this.”
“Please, tell me it’s a human head,” Fiona said.
“No,” Sam said, “just a lot of dead presidents.”
Stacked inside the fridge and the freezer were bundles of bills: twenties, tens, fives and ones and nothing larger.
I pulled out a stack of twenties and examined it. They were pre-1996 bills, which meant they didn’t have the plastic security strip embedded into the fabric of the bill, nor the extra details such as Andrew Jackson’s hidden watermark photo or the shifting color palettes.
I licked my thumb and ran it across the face of the bill. Surprisingly, no color came up. Surprising since these were clearly counterfeit bills, but ones that would easily pass in the circles where they were likely to be passed—in bars and clubs, the streets, maybe even foreign countries—though certainly not in banks. It was doubtful they’d even be accepted in a soda machine.
If you’re going to make your own American currency, the first thing you need to know is that in all likelihood, you’ll get caught. After you get caught, you’ll go to federal prison, and after you’re released from federal prison, you’ll be audited for the rest of your life by the IRS. If you’re still going to make your own American currency, you need to have access to a high-density printer, rag paper and the ability to compress your paper with tons of pressure in order to make it as thin as the common dollar. An automobile wrecker would do the trick.
And then? Then you’ll probably still get caught, because if you’re dumb enough to try counterfeiting currency, you’re probably not smart enough not to spread the money around to people or businesses who might take notice of your fake bills, because even the best fake bill just doesn’t feel like a real bill. Nor does it smell the same. There’s no way to replicate the process an actual bill goes through from the mint to your wallet, nor is there a way to re-create the wear and tear of the bill’s life span—the average fifty dollar bill lives for a decade, a twenty for half that time.
Junior—or his people—had been smart enough to use rag paper, and it looked like they’d had some success pressing the paper, too, as it had almost the right consistency. And by putting the money in the refrigerator and freezer, they’d even managed to add moisture to the bills, which helped seal in the aging chemical they’d apparently used, too. It wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but it was decent enough to fool someone who didn’t know any better or, more than likely, someone who just didn’t care.
