Despite the circumstances, he was looking forward to it, Farr realized, surprised, as he replaced the telephone. It was a professional anticipation, he decided. Excitement didn’t seem the appropriate word, but it was the only one he could think of, so he accepted that he was excited at the prospect of moving out of the financial village of Wall Street and Manhattan to test his ability to set a trap and bait a trap and bring tumbling into it men wealthier than he had ever encountered. Farr remembered Mann’s nervousness at today’s meeting and the previous one and honestly examined his own feelings. He decided that he wasn’t scared—in that, at least, he wasn’t disappointed.
Farr was in the bar, waiting, when Brennan and Seymour arrived, gazing around the baroque opulence in obvious admiration and attempting jokes about what was possible and not possible on an FBI salary. Brennan inquired about Howard, which Farr appreciated, and Seymour said he was sorry the initial reaction to treatment hadn’t been better. In the dining room they ate fish, because they were in Boston. Brennan repeated the importance that Washington attached to what they were doing and said headquarters was sure they had selected a good team, of which Farr was part. The broker waited for there to be some comment about Mann’s uneasiness or even hostility, but it wasn’t raised so he didn’t mention it.
“Harry and Bill are terrific technicians,” praised Seymour. “Nothing they can’t do with a camera and a piece of sound equipment.”
“Let’s hope they’ll get the opportunity to prove it,” said Farr.
“Harriet’s a good operator.” said Brennan.
Farr had thought that the conversation would get around to the woman. He said, “Mann’s an accountant; Jones and Batty are technicians. What’s her specialization?”
“She’s not a specialist,” said Seymour. “She’s a field agent, like us.”
“Unusual job for a woman.”
“Unusual women do it,” said Brennan. “There are a lot of them: most a damned sight better than the men.”
“Making sure I don’t stray?” asked Farr, in sudden challenge.
“Sir?” said Brennan curiously.
“You said that Harriet was the decorative part, liaison too. And she’s a field operative, used to case work. Mann’s the accountant—keeping the books, you said. So I’ve got a case officer and an accountant maintaining a constant monitor to make sure I don’t slip.”
Seymour smiled in unembarrassed admission. “You’re an outsider, Mr. Farr. None of our people—not even accountants like Mann—could come near to you as far as your job is concerned. But this is spreading way beyond what you’re accustomed to.”
Farr recognized that this didn’t refer to any possible violence. “Think I might be tempted?”
“You know the checks we made,” said Brennan, extending the admission. “We know the sort of money you usually handle. If this goes half right, you’ll be handling more than you ever have before, even at your level. And it’ll all be in untraceable cash.”
Farr supposed he should feel offended but he didn’t. He was an outsider, so there was an argument for putting other professionals alongside him. And it was understandable they would want to maintain as close a check as possible upon the money. “I promise I won’t put my hand in the till.”
“Just doing our job,” said Brennan.
“That’s been the justification for a lot of mistakes, in the past.”
“That’s what we’re trying to anticipate and avoid,” said Seymour. “Mistakes.”
“Let’s hope we’re both lucky,” said Farr.
“What about our coming down with you tomorrow?” asked Seymour.
“I suppose that’s a matter for you to decide, but there doesn’t seem a lot of purpose. This is nuts and bolts; framework time. We’re not going to start operating for weeks; can’t operate for weeks …” He permitted himself the indulgence. “I won’t even risk your three million, so you won’t have to worry about temptation. I would have thought it better to limit your time there until it is absolutely necessary—when, hopefully, there will be people to see and check out.”
“I think you’re right,” said Brennan.
“Suddenly things seem to have reached an anticlimax,” complained Seymour. “Having lived with this idea for so long and managed to set it all up as we originally intended, this part seems to sag.”
“Why not take a vacation?” suggested Farr. “Like Mann and Jones and Batty should take a vacation: they made points about their families, so they should enjoy them while the opportunity exists.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Seymour.
“Isn’t that what I’ve got to be?” demanded Farr. “Right?”
* * *
Harriet Becker wore jeans and loafers and a wool traveling shirt and Walter Farr felt conspicuously overdressed in a suit and tie, wishing that he found it easier to relax and be casual. She was polite and considerate, making inconsequential small talk as well as responding to it, but when the talk flagged there was a book readily available from a bulging travel bag. It was by someone called Paul Scott whom Farr didn’t know; he wished he’d occupied the empty hours—he considered he’d had more empty hours than most people in the immediately preceding years—by forcing himself to concentrate in the hollow, echoing town-house on the novels and books he’d begun but was never able to finish. Harriet refused any drinks on the flight to Miami. There was a three-hour layover before the Cayman connection. They studied the menus of the airport restaurants and decided against eating. At the bar she took only a soda. His martini was weak.
“Do you resent my involvement too?” he said.
“I don’t understand the question.”
“I get the impression you’re holding back a lot.”
“I don’t understand that, either,” she said. “I thought we were on a job.”
“We are,” agreed Farr. “Chances are that it’ll be a job that lasts a long time.”
“Then over the course of a long time I guess we’ll get to know each other better,” she said. She didn’t speak for several moments, then she said, “There’s a kind of unwritten rule, in the Bureau. Don’t develop friendships that are too close in case something happens to the person you’re friendly with.”
“I’m sorry,” said Farr. “Have I strayed onto forbidden ground?”
“Still-painful ground.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“It didn’t properly qualify, not according to the rules.”
“If it hurts, I don’t expect you to tell me.”
“It was messy,” she said. “Messy in every way. His name was Jack, Jack Bossy. He had dark hair and nearly always a five o’clock shadow and he was the supervisor in the San Diego bureau where I was first posted. He was married to a lovely girl called Julie and they had a little boy called John, who had a brace which made him lisp. I used to go to parties—even at their own house—and try to make John like me because I wanted to be his stepmother, and try to hate her, which I couldn’t, and try not to let what was happening show.”
She was talking in monotone, staring into a glass in which the ice had long ago melted. “It was a stakeout,” she started again. “Drugs, like everything seems to be drugs. We had a tip about a drop and we set it all up but nothing happened. He was control that night so he called it off about one o’clock and I expected us to go back to my place, because the stakeout meant he wasn’t due home at any time and it was the sort of thing we’d done before. But he said no. He said he loved me and that he loved Julie and that he loved John and he realized he had to make a decision—and the decision was that he was going to stay with her.” She looked directly at him but her eyes were still distant. “You know San Diego?”
“No.”
“We were in a late bar, near Balboa Park. I was pleading and he was saying no and we kept drinking. It got so that there wasn’t anything for us to say to each other anymore; what we were saying wasn’t making any sense. We started to argue, of course, saying silly things, t
hings I can’t even remember, not properly, although I’ve tried to, a lot of times since … Wish so much that I could. In the books and the movies it’s always supposed to be the girl who runs out first, but it was Jack who left. He said it had to end and that he was sorry and that we’d have to decide something about the office: about his getting transferred or me getting transferred. There’s a street that runs through Balboa called Pepper Grove Drive. The clock on the car jammed, so they know he was doing 70 mph when he hit the truck. He shot an intersection and went right into the side of it. It was an early-morning garbage truck …” Harriet looked at him again, shaking her head. “it had a new driver and he’d started ahead of time and shouldn’t have been there at all. If he’d been driving on schedule, he wouldn’t have been crossing the intersection and Jack would still have been alive now. Isn’t that the funniest thing?”
Farr could only nod, not knowing what else to say.
“I went with Julie and little John to the funeral. As her friend. Let her cry on my shoulder and hugged him and cried with them and they didn’t know. Do you think that was hypocritical of me?”
“I don’t know,” said Farr, hot with embarrassment. “Maybe not.”
“Thanks for trying to be kind.” said the woman. “I felt like a hypocrite.”
“Why?” said Farr.
“Why what?”
“Until half an hour ago I’ve rarely known anyone so distant. Now this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Didn’t you have dinner last night with Peter and Jim?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“They said you were a hell of an operator.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
She gave an empty laugh, shaking her head. “I thought they would have told you … wanted you to hear it my way.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“Anyway,” she said, with forced lightness. “Now you know.”
“I won’t say I’m sorry. That’s never enough, is it? Worst cliché in the world, in fact.”
“No,” she agreed. “Never enough.”
“How long?” he asked.
“Nine months.”
“Still hurts?”
“Like hell.”
“So now it’s work, work, work?”
“It helps, I suppose. I think I’ll have that drink now. Proper drink, I mean.”
“Why not before?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. No reason.”
“The martinis aren’t good.”
“With tonic then.”
Farr changed his drink as well, and this time the gin was slightly stronger, but only slightly.
“Know the irony?” she said bitterly.
“What?”
“The bust we were supposed to be making? The drop was made half an hour after we called everything off. They’d made us and were just waiting for us to pull out … Informant told us, weeks later.” She snorted a laugh. “Can you believe that!”
They remained silent, neither looking at the other, for several moments, and then Farr said, “Aren’t you surprised at my being involved? An outsider.”
“I know how it happened,” she said. “I won’t say I’m sorry, either. About the boy, I mean. Like you said, not enough …” She drank deeply. “If you want me to say so, I think forcing you along is a bit shitty.”
“I don’t want you to say so unless you feel that way yourself.”
“It’s a bit shitty,” she insisted. She took another drink. “But if I were trying to pull up trees and ring bells, like Brennan and Seymour are trying, I guess I’d do the same thing. It’s a good opportunity.” She finished the drink and Farr gestured for more, for both of them. As they were being served, she said, “I’m embarrassed now about telling you. I wish I hadn’t.”
“We’re going to have to work together for maybe a long time,” he said. “Guess we’ll all discover a lot about each other.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
Farr frowned, not immediately understanding the question. He said, “The court’s given me six months. Howard doesn’t seem to be responding well to treatment, so I guess it’s going to take a long time. The terms are residential.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said.
Farr finally comprehended. He said, “Her name was Ann. I loved her more than I’ll ever be able to make anyone understand. It was cancer of the liver, so at least there wasn’t any pain. She just kind of wasted away. She went into a coma, the last week. The doctors said that it was the actual termination but I expected her to come around, just briefly. I wanted to tell her how I felt. But she didn’t. She just died—died without my being able to tell her that I loved her.”
“Don’t you think she knew?”
“I wanted to tell her at the end. She shouldn’t have died without my being able to tell her. That wasn’t fair.”
“Things aren’t. Ever.”
“No,” he said. “Never.”
“When?”
“Eight years ago.”
“No one since?”
“Not really.”
“If this were a movie, there’d be a lot of violin music and one of us would reach for the other’s hand and say something like how much alike it all was.”
Farr looked at her, frowning at the bitter cynicism. “It must still hurt a lot.”
“I said it did.”
“You can’t stop hurting,” said Farr. “I haven’t been able to. But don’t shrivel up inside.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’m not patronizing you.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
Their flight was called. Farr paid for the drinks and together they walked toward the embarkation gate. He gestured her ahead of him to put her cabin baggage on the televised carousel and then through the electronic security monitor.
She waited for him on the other side of the checks and, as they began walking toward the designated pier, she said, “You won’t, will you?”
“Won’t what?”
“Reach out for my hand. I don’t want this to become difficult.”
“No,” said Farr. “I won’t make it difficult.”
As they belted themselves in for takeoff, she said, “Do you always wear a suit?”
“Why?” asked Farr.
“Jack did.”
10
Gomez’s remark to the American Mafia chief about using the money they would make to earn more money had not been a casual aside. Gomez regarded the creation of the network as only part of the achievement; properly using the money—putting it to work—was the completion, and he went about doing that with the care he devoted to everything else. In the capital, Bogotá, there was the lawyer José Rivera whom Gomez had used, but Gomez decided that he’d bring very little, if any, money into Colombia. The already earned narcotic dollars and José Rivera had created the shopping plaza on the north side of town, with the supermarkets and the imported European and American fashion shops and the car salesrooms—imported vehicles which gave him cash tills and more than sufficient liquidity for anything he wanted in Medellin. The money from the new venture would stay outside and be handled by experts. He would get a higher return outside the country and it made financial sense to diversify as widely as possible. Nothing was going to go wrong, having got so far.
It meant using Scarletti. At first Gomez was reluctant, seeking every alternative to making himself beholden to the American. But finally practical necessity outweighed his hesitation. Scarletti had the contacts and the liaison network nationwide through the other families. He would be able to recommend the understanding lawyers and financiers who knew what to ask and what not to ask about the sums of money he wanted moved without awkwardness or interference from the authorities.
Gomez was fully aware that people from the cocaine-producing countries of Peru and Bolivia and Colombia were targeted by United States immigration and checked out on the comput
er links at customs headquarters. Although he was not personally transporting cocaine—nor had any outstanding indictments against him in America, which would have shown up on the checks—Gomez still entered the country by a circuitous route, to create as little interest as possible. He flew from the Colombian capital to Caracas and then to Brazil. From Brazil he crossed the Atlantic to Switzerland and, after a week in Bern, added another leg to his journey, flying to Stockholm. He spent a further week there, time-wasting to support his cover story, before flying finally to New York. By the time he got to America, Gomez had valid order books that customs and immigration could see if they wanted to—which they didn’t—of European cars and clothes for his Medellin shopping complex. Passed through perfunctorily and told to have a nice day, Gomez was as sure as he could be that his name and visit hadn’t been entered on any computer bank. Despite which he remained careful, knowing that if the FBI or any of the task forces were suspicious, they wouldn’t have intercepted him at Kennedy airport anyway but let him run—to guide them to his people in America. Alert for any surveillance, he toured the New York supply houses, placing more orders for the clothes shops, making only business calls from his suite at the Plaza.
He made contact with Scarletti from a pay phone after four days, confident by then that he was clean and unobserved. The meeting was arranged for the following day. Gomez went by Amtrak; still concerned about being followed, he had decided that he had a better chance of isolating observers on a railway train than in an airport. He detected none. At Scarletti’s suggestion, he booked into the Latham and they ate at Bogart’s, the hotels excellent restaurant. Scarletti insisted upon a table in the center of the room, because he felt it was easier for listening wires and microphones to be trailed around wall areas. Two groups of his people sat at the immediately adjoining tables. Gomez approved of the caution—admired it as professionalism—and told the American of his convoluted journey to Philadelphia.
“That’s careful,” said Scarletti, in reciprocal admiration.
Dirty White Page 8
