by Paul Batista
“Who was he?”
“Mr. Perez. Funny: he said he was from Mexico City.”
“Did anything happen?”
“Tom told me to get him off the intercom. I did. This Perez guy said he wanted me to call Mr. Perini again and just say he was there from Mr.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Madrigal. I told him to fuck off.
“He went across the street and he waited for Tom. He didn’t know what Tom looked like. He stopped some short, ugly dudes who work in the building who no way was Tom to ask them if they was Tom. ”
“Tell me more,” I said.
“When Tom came down I said, ‘Look, Mr. Perini, let me get you a cab, that dude’s still waiting.’ Tom said, ‘Fine.’ I got him a cab and away he went. The dude waited for another fifteen minutes. And then he wasn’t there anymore.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
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“Never.”
“Did you ever tell anybody?”
“Sure. Few days later some cops without uniforms come over to me and ask about your husband. I told them what I told you. I remember his name, Perez, and the name he said, Madrigal, and I give it to them. I tell them this dude told Tom he was from Mexico and wanted to see him. That Tom asked me to kick him out. And that he waited for Tom for a long time.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much. They listened. ”
“Then?”
“Then they left. They got my name and number and say they might call me again. Never happened. I never heard from them. ”
A measure of how off I am is what happened next. I was so grateful to this tall, kind man I reached for my wallet and found a twenty-dollar bill that I handed to him. He was not even tempted. He shook his head; he then disarmed me and made me feel totally off base when he said: “Hey, Mrs.
Perini, I told you this because I thought I should. Not for money.”
I was so ashamed of myself, yet so grateful, I was barely able to thank him. I asked him for his name: Hector Lopez. Still works in Tom’s building. I came back upstairs, hugged Kim, and double-bolted the doors. And now, as Kim naps, I write this.…
* * *
Fewer than nine hours after Julie wrote these notes, she was wrenched upward from a profound sleep. It was sixty-thirty in P A U L B A T I S T A
the morning. Monday. Men’s hands pounded on the apartment door. At the same time, the doorbell whirred incessantly, on-and-off, on-and-off. Still drenched in sleep, she fixed her mind on the fact that she couldn’t recall a time when the doorbell had ever rung without the doorman from the lobby calling first on the intercom, announcing a visitor. Get to the door, get to the door, she thought.
Draping a robe over her shoulders, she slipped on a pair of old flat shoes and cinched the robe tightly at her waist. Trotting from the bedroom to the apartment door, she caught herself, fear 144
totally replacing her unfocused drowsiness. She thought of her daughter, moved instinctively in the direction of Kim’s room, and stopped. Fists continued pounding on the door, and now there were male voices, calling her name. “Mrs. Perini, Mrs. Perini, Mrs. Perini.”
And then she heard a voice on the other side of the door:
“Federal agents. Open up. Or the door will come down now.”
She approached the door. She looked through the small, circular peephole into a world of horror: there were at least eight men in the hall, where her name resonated… Mrs. Perini, Mrs.
Perini…She unbolted the door.
After all the mayhem in the hallway, the first man to enter the apartment surprised her. He had the bland, blond, earnest style of a Jehovah’s Witness and said, as though mildly entreating her to convert, “Mrs. Perini, we’re agents of the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, and the FBI.”
Clutching the robe’s knot at her waist, Julie just stared at him and the team of men looming behind him. She was wide-eyed, not able to speak.
He continued, “My name is Agent Martin. We are here to take things, things designated in this warrant…” He handed her a single sheet of paper. Her hand trembling, her mind fixated on the concept that this had to be a dream, she took the paper. It had the blocky, black words “Search Warrant” in the upper right-hand corner.
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Sorrentino had used those words, followed, as she recalled, by the word “Nazi.” The mild man, after an interval, said, “We’ll do our best not to disturb you.”
Speechless, Julie turned from him and stumbled to Kim’s room. She heard behind her the team of men enter the apartment. Before she opened the door to Kim’s room, she glanced, her eyes wild, in their direction: they had handcarts and four-wheeled dollies. The iron wheels of the equipment scratched the floors. There were at least six men, all in business suits. They had holsters with pistols in them.
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Kim was awake, standing on her mattress and holding the lowered bar of her crib. There was an enormous smile on her face when she saw her mother. Still more a baby than a small child, she rattled the bar. Julie put on a brave face, said, “Hello, sunshine pumpkin,” and picked her up. As she held her to her chest, she looked at the crumpled piece of paper in her hand. Without reading every word on the partially preprinted, partially typewrit-ten page, she absorbed that it was a warrant directing federal agents to locate and seize all “documents, computers, and computer records maintained, created, or held by Thomas R. Perini, or his agents, including Julie Perini, including without limitation all correspondence, bank records, deposit slips, notes, or memo-randa located in the premises known as 17 East 87th Street, New York, New York 10128, Apartment 18E.” The sheet of paper bore a distinctive signature: “Doris D. Feigley, Senior United States District Judge.”
By eleven-thirty the methodical, deliberate men had finished their work of stacking and removing the transfiles spread on the floor of the spare room. The leader painstakingly prepared short descriptions of the objects on the handcarts on a form labeled Search Warrant Inventory. He counted the boxes, put labels 1
through 47 on the separate boxes, photographed each of them separately, and estimated the number of separate file folders in each box. He even ordered one of his people to put Tom’s trophies on the top of some of the boxes and photograph them outside the P A U L B A T I S T A
boxes. The inventory sheet said about them: “Sports trophies, athletic memorabilia.” They even took the Heisman Trophy.
In the course of the five-hour ransacking of her apartment Julie ran through emotion after emotion: anger, fear, hate, resignation, combativeness, stupor. At one point she screamed, “Why are you taking his trophies?” At another point, as she listlessly trailed behind two agents who roamed through her bedroom, looked under her bed, pushed the shower curtain back in her bathroom, and then opened the doors to the cabinets in her kitchen, she said, in a flat tone that sounded more helpful than sarcastic, “Why 146
don’t you do this right? Take a look in the oven. You might find a head in there.” The men ignored her.
As for Kim, she alternated between crying and wide-eyed curiosity. In her sleeping smock, she walked through the apartment, essentially following her mother in her round-and-round wanderings but sometimes moving away on her own. At another point she wailed in tears when one of the men opened a toy chest in her room.
When Elena arrived for work as usual at seven-thirty, she instinctively recognized what was happening. She said nothing.
Acknowledging Julie with her eyes, Elena immediately took Kim into her arms and carried her to the bathroom that she and Kim used. She closed the door and bathed Kim.
Still dressed only in her bathrobe, emotionally drained, Julie gazed flatly as the last of the file boxes was wheeled on a hand truck from the spare room to the hallway. After all of his men had stepped into the hallway, the mild, deferential leader of the group approached Julie, holding the inventory list in his hand.
He had the demeanor and mannerisms of a clerk who had
just delivered furniture and wanted to leave a receipt and get a tip.
Julie’s fury rose in her as she watched him approach.
“Sorry to inconvenience you,” he said, “but would you initial this copy of the list?”
“Initial? Initial my ass!” she screamed.
“I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Perini.”
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“You fucking little Nazi. Just doing your job! What kind of lousy job do you have?”
He stared at her, expressionless except for the faintest smile.
Quietly he said, “You shouldn’t act this way, Mrs. Perini.”
“Get out,” she screamed. “Get out, get out, get out.”
The man retreated backward, on little steps. She saw that the faint smile on his lips had changed to an expression of deliberate scorn. And she heard the male laughter, derisive laughter, construction-worker laughter, in the hallway. She stepped into the doorway and shouted: “You are all creeps.”
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And they all laughed. Julie laughed, too. The fools never asked about the basement. They obviously didn’t live in prewar buildings in Manhattan that had storage bins in the basements. Her notes and Tom’s computers and receipts were there. They had taken Julie’s own computer: its complex internal mysteries contained little more than revised or rewritten news stories. Tom never used it.
* * *
Just as soon as Julie slammed shut the apartment door Elena emerged with Kim from the bathroom. Kim was still wide-eyed, bewildered, possessed of an expression that Julie had never seen before on her daughter’s face. What has this done to her? Julie thought. It was like worrying about a deep physical injury.
Strong Elena, after one look at Julie near the door, had no hesitation about what to do: she embraced Julie and put Julie’s head on her shoulder, and Julie did what Elena knew she would do—
she cried. Through her tears she whispered to Elena, hoping Kim would not hear: “This is like rape. This is rape. This is terrible.”
And Elena, stroking Julie’s hair, kept repeating: “Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.”
* * *
Ultimately, Julie needed three hours to collect herself to the point where this day began to approach the edges of the normal.
P A U L B A T I S T A
She showered at least three separate times; her bowels were loose, tormented; and she was depleted by wrenching, back-to-back sessions on the toilet. After she was emptied and showered for the last time, she lay down again in her bed for an hour. Elena had organized the apartment while Julie underwent her long ordeal in the bathroom; the bed had been remade and was fresh. Julie slept deeply, briefly.
At six that afternoon—almost twelve hours after she had first been wrenched out of sleep by the pounding on the door and the strident male voices in the hall—Vincent Sorrentino walked qui-148
etly through the apartment. He was still in the suit he had worn that day at trial. Except for the men who had roamed through the apartment during the day, Vincent was the first man who had been inside Kim’s home since her father died. Although she normally engaged strangers, Kim held back from Vincent.
Her mother didn’t. Julie had managed to reach Vince shortly after four, when she knew the day’s trial session would be over.
She told him that men had come to her apartment and boxed and taken away all of Tom’s files. From the backseat of his car, as he listened to her, Vincent Sorrentino heard her controlled but frightened voice. He had asked, “Do you want me to stop by?”
“Yes,” she said. “Please.”
Julie had wondered how to greet Vincent when he arrived. As soon as she opened the door for him, she hugged him. His chest was thinner than she had expected. But his large hands were warm, sympathetic, and reassuring as he rubbed her back and shoulders. She led him through the apartment. Some of the car-peting was torn from the steel trolley wheels. There were holes in some places on the walls, particularly in the spare room where the boxes had been and in the hallway leading to the door.
Julie even took Vince into her bedroom. She opened a closet door, almost at random, and noticed for the first time that Tom’s suits had been searched. All his pockets were inside out. His pants, suit jackets, and shirts were piled on the floor of the usually meticulously arranged closet.
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Julie said, “I hadn’t noticed this before. They went through his clothes? My God.”
“I’m sorry, Julie. Can I help you hang any of this up?”
“God, no, Vince. Elena will help me with it tomorrow.”
Julie asked him to stay for a few hours. She ordered Chinese food. Elena spread it carefully on the kitchen table. By the time they were eating, Kim had adjusted to Vincent. He sat at the table with his suit jacket and tie removed, turning the pages of a child’s book that made music and produced childlike voices. Vincent imitated some of those sounds. Kim laughed and clapped.
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When Elena finally took Kim, covered with fragments of food, away from the table, Vincent and Julie simply stared at each other. At one point Sorrentino’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pants pocket, glanced at the screen, and saw that it was Kate Stark calling from Washington. He pressed the Decline button.
14.
The near-translucent steel curtains in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, suspended at least fifty feet from ceiling to floor, undulated slightly, sifting the early afternoon sunlight. The vast, richly appointed restaurant was spread out below the elevated table at which Stan Wasserman, Gil Thomas, and Hogan Blackburn sat. Even at twelve-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon, men and women were at the Grill Room bar drinking, laughing, talking.
Native to the Upper West Side (his parents, almost ninety, still lived on West End Avenue), Stan Wasserman was always uncomfortable in settings like this: these expensive places struck him as artificial, unworldly, and unfair. At fifty-seven, he had long ago passed beyond the radical tendencies of his youth: when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the sixties he had rebelled against the complacency he saw around him and eschewed the trappings to which virtually all of his classmates felt an entitlement. And in his early years in journalism he deliberately sought out newspapers and magazines that were offbeat, new, and radical: Ramparts, the Village Voice in its early years, Evergreen Review. Although he had crossed over by 1969 to the institutions that dominated the news—he had written briefly for the Washington Post and the New York Times before joining CBS
and then NBC—he still retained a quiet disdain for the aristocratic pretensions of those institutions. Settings like the Four Seasons always aroused that disdain.
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Gil Thomas, thirty-three, and Hogan Blackburn, fifty, didn’t share Stan Wasserman’s uneasiness. A late riser, Gil started most of his days in the Grill Room. It was there that he discussed with Hogan Blackburn, the executive producer of NBC’s nightly news programs, the assignments Gil wanted for the day. Gil was one of the two or three young men at NBC
who had already been designated, even if privately, for the most conspicuous news positions at the station. He was already anchoring
early
evening
weekend
broadcasts.
Sleek,
immensely attractive, he was one of the fixtures of the Grill 151
Room. Together, he and Hogan accumulated a weekly lunch tab at the Four Seasons of more than a thousand dollars. This was one of those rare days when they had persuaded diligent, thoughtful Stan Wasserman—dressed in a somewhat worn, workmanlike blue blazer and regimental red and black tie—to have lunch with them: “a working lunch,” as Gil had described it when he invited Stan that morning.
“She called in sick yesterday,” Stan answered Hogan, who sat facing him as the main course was cleared and the tablecloth cleaned with stylish curved scoops. “When she called this morning she left a message that she might be in by the middle of the after
noon, definitely tomorrow.”
Even as he spoke, Stan had a puzzled expression on his strong features: Hogan Blackburn had never once mentioned Julie Perini’s name to him. Sensing that the long, desultory talk over the last hour had finally found its focus, a focus he immediately disliked, Stan decided to let one of the other men take the next step in the conversation.
Hogan did. “It’s one of those goddamn funny twists of life that we have this remarkable story—the dead football hero who launders money—and his wife works in our very midst. Don’t you see it’s a hell of an opportunity for us?”
Calmly, Stan stared at Hogan’s face and registered for the thou-sandth time that Hogan was himself as smooth-looking and attractive as any of the anchormen he controlled. And then, saying P A U L B A T I S T A
nothing, he shifted his gaze to the tall, translucent curtains. They shifted slightly, sunlight cascading through them.
Gil Thomas, seated at Stan’s left, remarked, “People from the papers have gotten wind of the fact that the apartment was raided by the feds yesterday, tons of boxes rolled out.”
Stan said, “I heard about that. She’s had a hell of a time.”
“Did she tell you that’s why she hasn’t been in?” Hogan asked.
“No.”
“What’s she like?” Gil said.
“Hard to know. She’s not your average East Side Mommy. She 152
has more talent than she shows. I used to think she wasn’t overly bright. That, I now believe, was because when I inherited her four or five years ago she was living for, and in the shadow of, her husband. Then, as time passed, I saw she had a capacity for real work, she expected no favors, and was one of the least Jappy and self-absorbed women in this business. She actually reads newspapers. Isn’t that a miracle?”
Hogan flashed his boyish Robert Redford smile at him. “You like her, huh?”
“No. I admire her. Basically she’s conducted herself with grace under pressure.” Hogan recognized, but Gil did not, Stan’s reference to Hemingway’s definition of courage.
