by Tod Goldberg
“Twenty-three,” she said. “But I feel older.”
“You look like a million bucks,” Sam said.
The girl touched her scar. She was pretty, you could see that, even with the gouge across her face and neck. “Father Santiago says that I could get plastic surgery for this. What do you think?”
“You could,” I said. I pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”
“Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying-when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation-but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”
“I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”
“He have a lot of friends?” I asked.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she asked.
Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.
“Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.
“The mayor,” Sam said.
“Of where?”
“Miami,” Sam said.
Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”
Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.
The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.
I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”
“I knew his wife,” he said.
“A buddy of yours?”
“Of a kind, yes.”
When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.
“Gentlemen,” Eduardo Santiago said, “please, come into my office. We have much to talk about.”
3
There are offices-like the one I sat in with my mother and Eduardo Santiago the previous day-that serve a specific purpose, as a place where one person can sit comfortably to work on a computer. And then there are offices like the one Eduardo Santiago kept for himself at Honrado Incorporated, which was as wide as my loft, contained two leather sofas, a flat-screen television mounted to the wall, a small glass-faced refrigerator filled with bottled water, a round table covered in blueprints and an entire wall dedicated to photos. Eduardo with various celebrities, politicians, athletes and entertainers, certainly, but most of the photos were actually of Eduardo with kids and with young men and women out in the community. There were also framed news stories and features from the Miami Herald, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and even a snappy little color thing from USA Today. I stopped and read a few lines in each. Everything my mother and Sam said was parroted in the pages of the nation’s most esteemed newspapers: Eduardo Santiago had done the impossible and now was using himself as a prime example for the kids coming out of Miami’s battle-hardened neighborhoods.
“You’ll have to pardon my ego,” Eduardo said when he saw me reading his wall.
“It looks like you’ve done some great things,” I said. “My mother didn’t lie.”
“Not this time,” Sam said.
“I’ve been very blessed.” Eduardo motioned to the round conference table. “Please, my friends, have a seat.”
It was very strange. When I had seen Eduardo the previous day, he spoke to me in a kind of refined street patois, but here he spoke as if he’d gone to private schools his entire life. Perhaps that was the surest sign Eduardo Santiago was a different person now-he knew how to change his persona for a given situation. That was a talent I could appreciate.
We sat down at the table, but Eduardo remained standing at first, as if he wasn’t sure this was, in fact, the course of action he wanted to take. How odd it must be to meet with the mayor of the city at one moment and then whatever, or whomever, Sam and I were the next.
The key to making someone comfortable, even in their own home or sanctuary, is to ask him questions about himself. People love to talk about themselves. This is why so many people admit to crimes when police interrogate them-they simply cannot help themselves from themselves.
I picked up one of the blueprints. “Are you expanding?”
“Oh, yes,” Eduardo said. He stood between Sam and me and looked at the blueprint. “That will be our greenhouse. We plan on having more sustainable gardens here in the future, so we can begin providing organic vegetables. Do you know that the average apple you eat contains over fifty trace chemicals in its skin?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And look at yourself. You should know. You’re fit. You’re smart. Now think about these kids in these neighborhoods. You think any of them have any idea about pesticides in their food?”
“I’d guess that’s the least of their concerns,” Sam said.
“You would guess correctly,” Eduardo said. “Whoever you are.”
“Mikey didn’t tell you I was coming?” Sam said. He shook Eduardo’s hand. “Sam Axe at your service. You’ve got the full faith and credit of the United States government right here in my handshake.”
“That’s not an entity I trust, but I assume if you are with Mr. Westen that you are trustworthy.”
“That’s not a good assumption,” I said.
“Ah, but it is an educated guess,” he said. “Educating someone is different from making them concerned about something. Same with the kids and the organic food. People today, they do not know the difference between education and fear-making.” He sighed then and shook his head. He finally took a seat across from us. “This is precisely what I was talking to the mayor about. All of this money to teach children what to be afraid of, and no money to teach them music or art or, well, you know how it is. Do you know I learned how to play the violin in prison? It’s true.”
“Maybe more people should go to prison,” I said.
“Just because it is true doesn’t mean it isn’t a shame, Mr. Westen.”
I laughed.
“You find that funny?” he said.
“I find it funny you just called me Mr. Westen,” I said. “I was trying to remember the last time I saw you before yesterday. And you know what I remembered? You actually turned my brother, Nate, upside down and shook all of the change out of his pockets.”
“Mikey, that’s what kids do,” Sam said.
“He wasn’t a kid,” I said. “Do you remember this, Eduardo?”
“I’m afraid I do not. Not because it didn’t happen, but because I did it to so many people. How old was I?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe seventeen? Maybe eighteen? Old enough and rich enough not to need a kid’s pocket change.”
“It was never need,” Eduardo said. “And where were you at this
time?”
“I was coming up with a bat in my hand to crush over your head,” I said. “Unfortunately, a teacher saw me coming and wouldn’t let me.”
“Unfortunately?” he said.
“Could have saved you and a lot of other people a lot of grief,” I said.
“I get the sense you don’t believe I am a changed person,” Eduardo said.
“You sense correctly.”
“I need your help, Michael,” Eduardo said. “So I hope I can convince you that I am worthy of it.”
“How did you even know I exist?”
“You helped a friend of mine,” he said. “Ernie Paseo. He was having trouble with some gangsters.”
Can no one keep a secret anymore? Ernie Paseo had been one of the first people I’d helped in Miami. He had also been sworn to tell no one that I’d helped him, and had subsequently referred people to me like I was a Merry Maid.
Ernie was not the kind of person to engage with crooks, and the mere fact that he’d mentioned me to Eduardo was a good sign.
“Ernie’s been good for business,” Sam said.
“Remind me not to give him any secret launch codes,” I said.
“He told me I could trust you,” Eduardo said. “He told me you were a good and honest man and that you weren’t scared of anything. Your name sounded familiar, so I asked some of our old… associates… if you were the same person as I recalled from childhood.”
Associates. That could mean only that Eduardo made some phone calls to a few of the less desirables we’d both gone to school with and maybe he’d rolled with. “No one you knew from school knows I’m back,” I said.
“That’s funny,” he said. “You have a friend who sells guns?”
Fiona.
“No,” I said.
“A girl, maybe? Wears short skirts and always has automatic weapons?”
Fiona, for sure.
“Nope. Sam, you know anyone like that?”
“Can’t say I do, Mikey. Sounds like a very dangerous person. If I see her, I’ll call nine-one-one.”
We both gave Eduardo our most professional smiles.
“I don’t care, Mr. Westen, who you know. Just know people are aware of your presence in town. The right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. Just like you and me. The difference is that I have a path guided by the Lord, and that path tells me that at every turn I’ll need to make right the sins of my youth. I don’t think you feel the same way.”
“I’m not a criminal, Eduardo. I never was.”
“Maybe not in your eyes. But, Mr. Westen, you have killed, have you not?”
“I have,” I said.
“That’s against someone’s law,” he said.
He certainly had a way of evening the scales. And the truth is, I believed him. The evidence was all around, and his demeanor suggested a man who’d changed his life and was dedicated to helping others.
“You’ve done an excellent job letting me know that we are cut from the same cloth, that you’ve been saved and that the world is going to be just fine now that you’re on the job. So, Eduardo, what do you need me for? You need help getting out of the sand trap the mayor left you in?”
Eduardo exhaled through his mouth and his entire body wilted a bit inside his expensive suit. He loosened his tie and took off his coat, and then held up another blueprint. “You see this?” he asked. “This is going to be our new library. Paid for entirely through donations. It will be state-of-the-art-computer retrieval system, digital library of every newspaper in America-everything-and we will be training librarians here. It’s true. Library science classes will take place on Northwest Fourth Street. This?” He pointed at yet another blueprint. “This is going to be an auto shop. We had one before, but it wasn’t here. It was out near the juvie, so I couldn’t watch it, and soon it became a chop shop. You know? Kids, they will fall back into bad habits. So many plans. Next year, I’ll have another hundred fifty people working, if everything goes as planned.”
“Who is shaking you down?” I said.
Eduardo got up, went to his desk and came back with a thick manila envelope. “I can trust you?” he asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
He handed me the envelope and then sat behind us on one of the leather sofas. It was as if he didn’t even want to be in proximity to the contents I was pulling out and sharing with Sam. But the thing was, there wasn’t anything particularly incriminating in the envelope, just old photos of Eduardo with various other members of the Latin Emperors. There were several photos that featured pictures of Eduardo with guns and a few that showed drugs, but none of this was a mystery to anyone-it was, apparently, what had made Eduardo such a superstar.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Those men,” he said, “most of them are dead.”
“Did you kill them?” I said.
“No.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“No one knows where their bodies are, either,” he said.
I gave Sam a look. This was where things tended to get dicey. I reminded myself to give Ernie Paseo a call at some point to tell him to forget I ever existed. “Do you know where the bodies are?” I said.
“No, no, of course not,” he said. “But someone does.”
“Here’s the deal, Eduardo,” I said, “I need you to just tell me what the problem is. I’ll tell you if I can solve it, and this will all be over in a matter of moments.”
“I have divorced myself from this life, you understand,” he said.
“I understand. Everyone does. President Clinton does. God does. Now, spill it.”
Eduardo peeled himself off the sofa and came back to the table, went through the photos one time, very quickly, and then stopped when he landed on a picture of himself at maybe twenty-five, his shirtless torso thick with muscles and ink, his eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, standing beside a man who could have been his twin, right down to the prison tattoos. “This is Jaime Gonzalez. People called him Junior. He’s a few years older than me, but was held back two years. Played football, too.”
“He ever smack around Mike’s brother?” Sam asked.
“Most likely,” Eduardo said.
“I don’t remember him,” I said.
“He recruited me into the Latin Emperors, jumped me in, helped me run the set. We both went up at the same time, ended up taking over the prison branch, diversified our interests.”
“He help with El Salvador?” Sam asked.
Eduardo actually twitched backward in surprise. “How did you…” he began. “Never mind. Never mind. But yes. His mother is from El Salvador, so he had dual citizenship. It was his idea to start moving into the voids there.”
It was actually a smart move on Gonzalez’ part, even if it was an illegal one that caught the attention of the United States government and certain covert operatives. I didn’t bother to tell Eduardo that, but I believed it to be true nevertheless.
“Let me guess,” I said, “you snitched on Junior to get a break on your sentence.”
“It wasn’t snitching,” Eduardo said. “It was a calling. It was the right thing. I didn’t know it would reduce my sentence, and I, frankly, didn’t care. It was the right thing to do.”
I took a look at the photo again. Junior Gonzalez had muscles where other people had hair follicles. “Where was he when this all went down?” I asked. “Because I can’t see him not putting a shank in you if he knew about it.”
“I’d already been transferred to the minimum-security section,” he said. “I was a priest, after all.”
“What did you give up?” I asked.
Eduardo did that big exhaling thing he seemed to enjoy. A guy that big, when he exhaled through his mouth, it was like a jet engine starting. “Everything,” he said. “Me, you know, I didn’t get dirty. I kept up above the game, you know? Slang here and there. Set up jobs. Maybe move a little product myself. Maybe make a big deal about someone disrespecting us, but I didn’
t put a cap in anyone, you know?”
There was that weird language shift. It was funny. When Eduardo Santiago was in his element, talking about his mission in life now, he sounded like a CEO, but when he got involved in the old times, he started to sound like a gangster again.
“You talk like that when you speak with the kids?” I asked.
“Like what?” he said.
“You just sounded like you were still on the streets.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Five minutes ago, I thought you were running for Congress. Just now, I thought you were going to ask me to spot you in the chow line.”
“I guess I don’t even notice it,” he said. “The devil, he’s in all of us, or he tries to be. Maybe that’s him trying to weed his way out into the world.”
This devil-and-God talk was wearing thin-if I had a core belief, it was probably one my dad taught me: never write bad checks. He’d done it enough to know, but when applied to every aspect of your life, it was good advice.
“Anyway,” Eduardo said. He cleared his throat, and I could tell he was about to try to tell his story without sounding like a thug. “I told the feds who Junior had killed, what shots he’d called, gave them information on the drug trade we had. But mostly? Mostly they wanted to get control of the prisons. At the time, Latin Emperors ran all the prisons up from Florida to New York. La Eme had the West Coast; Texas Syndicate was running Texas, Oklahoma-that cowboy shit. Black Guerilla Family and all those Blood and Crip sets run the South and places like Rikers. But we were political, too, and that made it different. We had clout.”
“Funny,” Sam said, “I don’t see the Latin Emperors running some Attica game.”
“Not from the outside, you don’t,” he said. “But it’s a whole other culture on the inside. And we ran it. By the time I was running the show, I was like Obama. All hope and change and all that. Junior, he didn’t see it like I saw it. He was down for crime, not empowerment. That’s where we diverged. So I gave up what I gave up and things got easier for me, relations cooled inside, and eventually I got my release and now here I am.”
