by Todd Merer
Today my hand stamp glowed as a readable password: BARN. I’d always wondered who comes up with the passwords, and why: Was BARN a random choice, or a private joke referring to a place where animals are kept—
CONTROL squawked: “Good.”
The inner air lock door clicked open, and I entered the visit room. It was similar to the one in FDC Miami: space in the middle for social visits, vending machines and glass-walled visit rooms along the walls, an elevated guard desk overlooking all. I walked along the visit rooms in search of an empty one.
The next-to-last attorney room was unoccupied. As I entered it, I glimpsed the last attorney room, double-size to accommodate codefendant meetings. There was a sign on its door that said RESERVED. Its walls were stacked with dozens of document cartons—no doubt containing discovery evidence—amid which several lawyers and inmates were seated. The inmates were white guys whose pale, haunted look made them seem recent arrivals to the States. Italians, I guessed, or maybe Albanians. Two of the lawyers I’d seen around but didn’t know. The third was Morty Plitkin, who represented Natty Grable—
Shit. Plitkin had seen me and gotten up. I steeled myself for a request for a referral for Joaquin Bolivar’s case as Plitkin left his conference room, grinning.
“Bennie, my boy,” he said. “How’s the pot case going? Kandi breaking your balls?”
“You know,” I said.
“Ha. Do I. Tell you what, though. When Kandi first came on the scene, I wanted to boff the ass off her. Unfortunately, she’s aged like cheap wine. Not like this PR gal I keep stashed in the Bronx. Going on forty but with the tits of a fourteen-year-old. But, hey, who am I to tell you about Puerto Rican women? Your wife was some kind of beautiful back in the day, and I bet my ass she still is. Am I right?”
I managed a nod.
I caught a whiff of cigar as Plitkin moved closer and quietly spoke in my ear. “Between us? I was pissed Natty didn’t send me the pot case. The selfish son of a bitch wants me to concentrate on his case. See the piles of discovery in there? There’s three times more boxes still to come, and Natty wants me to check every page. But what the fuck? He’s paying a fortune, so who am I to complain? Still, it killed me not doing the pot case. Yeah, I know, the fee’s just chump change. But I wanted to make a run at the eye candy paying it. Some piece, that Jilly. Am I right, or am I right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just ‘uh-huh’? Guys like us, we can’t stop bullshitting. The check’s in the mail. I won’t come in your mouth. Am I right?”
Plitkin love-tapped my shoulder and went back into his room. I sat in mine. Plitkin had a nose for money, but apparently, he knew nothing about the retainer I’d received for Joaquin Bolivar’s case. Like Jilly, who claimed to know nothing about Bolivar’s case at all. Like Bolivar, who didn’t know anyone. Three liars. I already knew that much about Plitkin. Sad to think that about Jilly and Joaquin, though they made a handsome couple. I intuited that they were and that it was she, the wealthy widow, who’d fronted my million bucks to Murmansk-54 Imports, which wrote my retainer check to veil her participation.
I thought this way because creeps like Natty Grable don’t shell out a million clams to help strangers. Who was Bolivar to him, really? Not a fellow ex-Soviet soldier or gulag survivor, that was for sure—
Stop. Back up to Plitkin. Maybe he wasn’t looking to wet his beak because he hadn’t recommended me. Maybe Natty had been lying; maybe it was Foto who’d first recommended me.
So what? Keep it simple. All that needed knowing was if and how I was affected. Natty Grable meant nothing to me; he was just codefendant to a couple of white guys who couldn’t jump bail. But Natty could jump bail. Would he, if his case turned sour? Probably. Would Bolivar jump if I got him out? Definitely. Believing this, would I help him?
Of course. There’s no belief system in my line of work.
Beyond the glass wall, a social visit was in progress. I smelled popcorn and chicken wings heating in microwaves, observed inmates bouncing kids on their laps, their women clucking approval. For all its minuses, jail offered some pluses. Given the class of people, family domestic life could be volatile, if not downright violent, but once the men were jailed, all was peace and love. And the women liked knowing where their males were at night. In fact, an unusually large number of the visiting women were pregnant.
The inmates’ door opened, and a batch of prisoners emerged.
I didn’t see Bolivar but recognized another man among them who had been—until recently—an up-and-coming drug lawyer. With a lot of work and a little luck, he might have made it big, had he not gotten too involved in a client’s drug conspiracy. Every so often, one of my professional brothers crashes. Like this guy. Like another I knew, now doing a hard sixteen for advising—or, as the government put it, conspiring—to murder a witness. Another, doing twenty for being the point-out man for a crew who robbed drug dealers.
The list goes on.
I myself once had a close call when I was picked up on a client’s wiretap, and some bright-boy agent claimed my idle chatter was conversation coded to conceal money laundering. In truth, my conversation was about my client’s money, albeit in the form of a fee passing from him to me. Nevertheless, it ignited an investigation that ultimately went nowhere but whose sleepless nights left permanent bags under my eyes, daily reminders in my shaving mirror that triggered my mantra:
Get out, get out, get out before it’s too late—
The door opened, and Bolivar entered.
His handshake was firm. “You good?”
“I’m fine. What’s with you?”
“One day closer to leaving this shithole. I’m right that the lady prosecutor would want to meet with me?”
“I’m sure she’d be interested in hearing what you have to say.”
“Exactly the way I figured. Go ahead and set up the meeting.”
“Slow down. First, tell me what you can cooperate about.”
“Crimes and criminals. What else is there?”
“Which crimes? Which criminals?”
“Lots of both. Long story.”
“I’m in no rush.”
“Benn, with all respect? I know how things work. I understand about cooperation being first party, and the need for total truthfulness and providing substantial assistance. I got everything nailed. Just set up the meeting.”
“I will. But tell me, anyway.”
“You got paid a lot of money for my case. Things work out right, you’ll be paid a whole lot more. I appreciate you wanting to do things by the book, but I’m a piece of literature you’ve never read.”
“Proffering is not an automatic pass. The first thing the prosecutor will say is that just because you’re talking, that doesn’t mean you’re getting a cooperation agreement. Especially from this prosecutor. Bounce your cooperation off me. Think of it as a rehearsal. We may want to tweak a few things.”
He flashed a white smile. “Okay, my lawyer. Ask away.”
“Most foreign weed is transported by land from Mexico. How come you go-fasted a load all the way up to New York?”
“Not a go-fast. A sailboat. Black-hulled. I called her the Swan. Old but built beautiful, the way they used to build them. That boat was a woman, I’d’ve married her.”
“Smuggling all that way via sail seems weird.”
A shrug. “I like weird.”
“Sailboats don’t fit the maritime drug-running profile.”
“You’re spot-on.”
“So why not run cocaine, where the real money is?”
“I don’t like blow. Weed, I love.”
“I don’t think she’ll buy that.”
Bolivar cocked his head. “You have a better story?”
“Try this one for size. Weed, not coke, because you were dipping your toes in the water. Making sure the route was cool. Worst-case scenario, you get tagged and dump the pot. No great loss, investment-wise. But, if things go well, you go to stage two, in which the load is coke.”
Bolivar smiled. “You’re good.”
“I’m not finished. There’s a problem. Conspiring coke exposes you to more time than pot.”
“You’ll find a way around that.”
“Bear with me. I’m correct that stage two—running loads of coke—never progressed past your innermost thoughts?”
“Of course it—”
I held a forefinger in front of his mouth. “Listen carefully. You never actually did anything about stage two, right?”
“How could I? The route was blown—”
“You never spoke to anyone about it, right?”
“Aha.” He gave another brilliant smile. “Never.”
“Because the scheme existed only in your head. Because conspiracies are like tangoes. It takes two to dance.”
“Exactly the way it was. In my head.”
Perfect. Without directly saying so, I’d conveyed Bolivar’s position to him. “Good. I’ll set up a proffer.”
“In the courthouse?”
“No. In the US Attorney’s office, just across the street from the courthouse.”
“So they’ll probably take me in an unmarked white van, the same as when they first took me to court, yes?”
“That’s how they do it.”
“Take me in the morning? Or afternoon?”
“Depends whether the meeting’s in the morning or afternoon.”
“Bet they got unmarked cars following the buses, huh?”
“I believe so. Randomly. At least some of the time.”
“They say every third day. Cops operate according to patterns. Like when they stamp your hand when you visit. Left, right. Pico, placa, like in driving in Bogotá. Odd, even.”
“Who told you about the hand stamps? Jilly?”
“Who’s Jilly?”
“Never mind. Why all the questions about how and when they take you? You planning an escape, or what?”
Bolivar grinned. “A: that’s impossible. B: why should I try? I got me a lawyer who’s going to spring me legitimately. The reason I’m asking questions? Because if you’re done proffering after the noon bus leaves, you wind up waiting for the late bus, without lunch, in a holding pen filled with bad criminal types.”
I grinned. “As opposed to good criminal types.”
“You get the point.”
CHAPTER 33
When I got back to the office, I kicked my feet up and did my daily reads. Laura Astorquiza had a new entry on Radio Free Bogotá:
Citizens: According to General Uvalde, the woes of our nation arise from the mysterious personage of the bandit known as Sombra, whose imminent capture or surrender has been announced for nearly a year. But could it be that Sombra does not exist? That he is a myth perpetuated to deflect attention from the real drug lords, whose wealth is shared with General Uvalde?
For once, Laura was wrong. There was a real Sombra, and I had fifty thou to prove it. I wondered why well-informed Laura would posit such a dubious possibility.
My phone rang. I answered.
“Me,” a man grunted.
“How are you?”
I knew the caller well. He was a long-term client of mine and extremely circumspect, as befitting a most-wanted personage. I kept his file stored in a fold of my brain labeled PF, as in Permanent Fugitive. PF called me every once in a long while, and when he spoke, I listened, because he paid me a lot of money for very little work.
“Read,” he said, and hung up.
I left the office, walked a few blocks to Lexington, went into a copy shop that rented computer terminals. I bought some access time and hunched close to a computer screen so no one could see over my shoulder. I opened a certain Hotmail account and read a brief message. Just three words:
THE BAD PLACE.
The following day, I was ensconced in 1-A on a southbound flight. I napped for a while, and when I awoke, I saw five miles below the green flatness that was Florida giving way to shining sea. I could not help but look eastward, in my mind’s eye seeing the ocean breaking on the rocks below the city walls of Viejo San Juan, one thousand miles away.
Drug agents refer to Honduras as downrange and its Mosquito Coast as battle space. Those were compliments compared to Honduras’s San Pedro Sula, aka the world’s most violent city. I’d been there before but always been lucky enough not to have stayed overnight. Downtown was a traffic circle amid bad vibes. The Hilton, supposedly the best place in town, was a dump.
It was late when I arrived, and I was hungry. Dinner was a buffet. The meat looked suspect and the chicken undercooked, so I went with the fish, which I was assured was fresh off a local boat. Snapper. Their pupils were black and they smelled briny, so I acted according to tropical rules: eat fresh or don’t eat. I was cleansing my palate with a beer when a man sat across from me.
“Anything?” PF said.
PF was an elegant man, although at the moment slightly threadbare. Understandable. He’d been living in the boonies ever since the Justice Department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs Section had indicted him in DC for running the Central American branch of a large DTO.
He had a big problem.
If he surrendered and cooperated, he’d have to testify against his family. If he didn’t cooperate, he’d have to go to trial, which was a sure ticket to a life of hard time. Therefore, he was a fugitive, and my job, which I chose to accept, was to periodically update PF on the continued availability of witnesses against him. Unfortunately, these particular rats in waiting had long sentences, so the chances of them being unavailable were nil.
Before flying down, I’d checked with the BOP’s inmate-search site. The witnesses against PF remained in general population, alive and well.
“The same,” I said.
“Fuck,” he grunted.
PF was well educated. When I first met him, he spoke a pure, eloquent Spanish. But years of life on the run in solitary places had reduced his vocabulary to single-syllable sounds.
He poured himself a glass of wine and drank it in one long swallow. Then dipped a napkin in a water glass and wiped his teeth. The napkin came away blotched purple.
He put the napkin down, looked at me for a moment, then smiled the way he used to. “Look at us, drinking swill like this. How are you, Benn?”
“I’m good.”
“As befits a man intelligent enough to live on the proceeds of crime, without suffering the consequences of being a criminal.”
I smiled at PF’s return to his old style of diction.
PF sat back, finally relaxing a little. I was not only his sole link to the civilized world, and the possibility of his returning to it, but also a life preserver offering him a grip on sanity. A cultivated discussion over dinner and wine—simple human contact—was a vacation from the madness of his everyday life.
In truth, I enjoyed our visits, too, PF being as close to me as anyone. He knew my history, my ups and downs, the way I’d once been and now was.
It was late when he stood to leave.
“Sobrino,” he said.
This was a reference to his nephew, who would pay me seventy-five large for my trip. I figured the trips earned me roughly two thou an hour, including sleep time—easy money for a day of discomfort—but on this trip, I earned every penny. It rained all night, water running down the wall of my room and puddling the floor. Lightning knocked out the power, and the AC went off. The windows didn’t open, and the room became a steam bath. My dinner fish decided to escape, so I spent five or six hours hugging the toilet bowl, counting water bugs between retches.
I slept on the flight back home, and when Val picked me up, I curled up in the back seat, slept some more, and as soon as I got home, I crawled into bed.
But the next day, everything abruptly improved.
First, Paz called: Sombra was seriously considering me. Second, Rigo’s son Omar called: the family was putting my fee together. Third, PF’s nephew delivered 750 Franklins, the fee for what had been little more than a social visit to my old c
lient and friend.
Who said money doesn’t buy happiness?
CHAPTER 34
One thing worried me. If Rigo truly could cooperate against Sombra, I was conflicted from representing Sombra. But then again, Rigo was a nutjob, and AUSA Barnett Robinson would not buy either Rigo or Uvalde as Sombra.
I considered this while riding shotgun with Val as he steered the Flex beneath the elevated tracks columns on Brighton Beach Avenue in south Brooklyn. Natty’s man Andrey had gathered the people with the property for Bolivar’s bail. Not that it was necessary, since Bolivar was going to cooperate, but that fact was not something I could reveal. Better to go with the flow.
It was a bitterly cold night, but the street was bustling with Russian speakers, for whom it might as well have been spring. Ahead, red neon glowed above a restaurant. Val pulled over, and I got out and entered the Red Star.
They were expecting me.
Behind the street door hung a heavy velvet curtain. It parted—a brief din of crowded diners—then closed as Andrey appeared, slicked hair gleaming. He raised a hand in greeting, and on the inside of his wrist I glimpsed the same jailhouse tattoo as Natty’s: the Murmansk-54 mark, a red star within barbed wire.
Andrey led me upstairs to a narrow corridor with two doors. One door had a Star of David and some Hebrew lettering painted on it. The other door was unmarked. We entered it.
The room was dusty, dim. Stacked cartons, filing cabinets, cleaning supplies. A single light above a small table, at which eight people were seated. Four men and four women. They stopped talking when we entered.
Andrey introduced them by Russian names that sounded alike. Broad and fleshy faced, they looked alike, too, as if they came off the same Soviet-era assembly line. But that was then and this was now, and they had become naturalized American citizens: four married couples who jointly owned several buildings, including the one that housed the Red Star, and had the tax returns to prove it.
