The sun that had filled the room was growing weaker. As it sank in the sky, a shadow from the window crawled slowly up the wall. When it reached the ceiling, I couldn’t take the waiting or the silence any longer. I had to deal with the situation while I could. Alajeh wasn’t going to send lawyers or bail. That was stupid wishful thinking. I didn’t know how much time these fools thought they had before my sister and I were dead, but it was more time than we thought we had. I started banging on the bars with my Birkenstocks, buckle side up, yelling and crying out whatever nonsense I could get out from the blender in my head. “You’re going to get everyone killed!”
12 Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round
I STARED AT A SMALL BLACK ASHTRAY sitting on a wooden end table. Both looked completely out of place in the bright sterile room my cell was in. The ashtray was old and chipped, made of plastic, and scarred from its former life probably in a Burger King smoking section. Is it possible to smoke in the post office? Every time I stood up again and started pacing, I saw this empty promise, this stupid piece of plastic, and it made me want to scream. I knew nicotine withdrawal was intensifying my panic, but the wave would pass. I sat down and tried not to look in the direction of anything that bothered me: the door, the ashtray, or the clipboard sitting on the end table next to the ashtray. What is on that clipboard?
I imagined similar clipboards somewhere in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, each containing a list of everyone they were arresting today, and I got angry. I recalled the risks I had taken in Jakarta to make sure Alajeh never got to know who my friends were, and just like that, these morons could produce a handy list for him. I had no doubt he would find out we were all in custody and he would find a way to get to that list if it existed, especially if there was a copy available in Chicago. There were plenty of people in law enforcement who were working with Alajeh or for the organization that owned him. I had to find out two things fast: who all had been or were about to be arrested, and were the guys who had me in this cell squeaky clean. The answer to the first question determined what I hoped was the answer to the second.
The two men finally came through the door. The marshal stood against the wall, and Opie, the U.S. Customs agent, pulled a wooden straight-back chair in from the outer room and placed it in front of my cage. I don’t know why, but I remembered Eliot Ness, the guy who went after Al Capone during Prohibition. Maybe because he was a government agent too. I wished it were Ness here. Eliot Ness hadn’t been corrupt, and he’d been invincible. But the government had sent Opie Taylor to question me, not Ness. Can I trust him? Even if I can trust him, can he handle this right? And what about his young, handsome comrade, the marshal? Opie sat down and told me a story about the limited seating on a bus. If I got on his so-called bus, I might still get a seat. He explained it was too late to be first, but I didn’t want to be last. What he was really explaining in his condescending analogy was that they already knew I was an accessory to a serious crime and there was a race on between me and everyone else they had arrested to get seats on his bus.
I asked him who else had been arrested. He assured me that everyone had been picked up already or would be soon. But I still didn’t know if he really even knew who “everyone” was. Maybe, to him, “everyone” just meant me. Maybe it meant me and Phillip, and maybe Garrett. It didn’t seem likely though. He had made it sound like they had a bunch of us.
I looked for clues to Opie’s true nature as he spoke, watching for a wink or a nod, some indication as to whether he was a pawn of Alajeh’s or not. I could hear his watch ticking when he leaned forward to talk and held on to the bars near my face. My heart was in my throat. These seconds slipping away might determine whether my sister and I, and my friends, lived through the night, not whether I would get a seat on his stupid bus. Alajeh was impetuous. His response to this situation would be quick. I couldn’t predict what he would do when he found out all of his escorts and couriers were in custody at the same time.
It became clear the only hope I had, if they really had all of us, was Opie. If he was on the right side of the law and wasn’t a pawn of Alajeh’s, he was the only way I could make sure nobody got to the others, especially my sister. If Opie was somehow connected to Alajeh, then I reasoned we were all dead anyway.
If that was the case, I might as well get my inevitable demise over fast. But my poor sister. I had to push out of my head the idea of her being afraid like I was at the moment, dying alone, being murdered in some cell in Texas, or I could not function. I wished Phillip was with me—not that he was arrested, but that we could sort the dilemma out together one more time, to know for certain what was the right move. If I was about to die or cause the same to happen to Hester, and Opie here was my assassin, surely he’d let me smoke my last fucking cigarette. It’s not like I might slip away. Hmm. If Opie let me light up in a federal building, that would be pretty telling.
“Can I smoke a cigarette?” I blurted out my first response to his incessant storytelling and stood up from my bench.
“Yeah. Go ahead.” He turned and grabbed the ashtray that had been taunting me for hours. I didn’t have any fucking cigarettes though. Of course. Time wasn’t going to stop while they found me a cigarette and I tried to figure Opie out.
“I don’t care about the seats on your fucking bus. If you want my help, there are some people you have to protect.” I sat back down and paid very close attention to Opie. Whatever his response, I couldn’t miss a word of it or a gesture.
He adjusted his position in the seat, uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, and asked, “From who?” The question infuriated me. He was either a fucking idiot or thought I was, no matter which side he was on. He knew who I needed protection from.
“If you don’t know, then we need protection from you!” My filter was gone. My reply made sense to me, sort of. But his question was like a firefighter asking why he’d been called while standing in front of your world burning to the ground. Apparently, though, Opie didn’t realize how stupid his question sounded to me.
“Who is ‘we’?” He moved closer still.
“We are the people who will be dead soon, because he knows we are all sitting with someone like you right now being asked dumb questions.” Then I fell apart. I was crying so hard I couldn’t speak if I had wanted to. My nose was running and I started pacing back and forth like a caged animal. I found the toilet paper and blew my nose. “I want a cigarette.”
Opie looked at the marshal still standing by the door, and the marshal shrugged his shoulders and left the room. Oh shit! Opie asking the marshal to leave him alone with me got my attention and scared me. Meanwhile, Opie got up and searched around the room we were in. I watched, wondering if he was looking for a weapon. He eyed the small end table sitting against the wall where the old black plastic ashtray had been sitting and pulled the table over to the bars. I couldn’t figure out how he would use the table to kill me. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of matches, and placed it in the ashtray, both an inch beyond my reach. “Catherine, we can’t help you, your sister, or your friends unless you let us.”
He didn’t return to his bus analogy and now I knew they had Hester and at least some of my friends. Either Opie was trying to confirm he should kill me or he was for real, just a law-abiding agent trying to get me to confess. If he was for real, I think he knew I didn’t care about his bus seats. He stopped talking about them. “Can I call my lawyer?” I asked.
“You have a lawyer?” he asked this as though I had actually admitted to murder. “He’s not going to warn your boss, is he?” I wondered how he knew my lawyer was male and it spooked me. I thought for a split second that Alajeh might have gotten to my lawyer too. It had been two years since I’d retained him. Did I ever tell Alajeh my lawyer’s name?
“No. I need a lawyer and I have a number in San Francisco for one.”
The agent explained that if I needed to, I could also have a lawyer appointed by the court. I could do this at my arraignment, but
as soon as my arraignment happened, it was a game-changing event. I didn’t know what he meant by that. He was very clear, though, about my right to have a lawyer present during any conversation that we had. He looked back toward the door and then put his hand on his own forehead like he was checking himself for a fever. “I want to help you.” He sounded tired and frustrated.
It didn’t seem like his frustration was directed at me or my refusal to cooperate with him or was about whether he should kill me or not. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. I recalled the children’s book in his car. Opie was just doing a job. At the end of the day, he would go home, get drunk, and forget the day. I was probably making him late for the babysitter or something. He looked like he lived in Vermont, not California or Chicago. He was not part of Alajeh’s long reach. I couldn’t say what it was exactly that made me so certain Opie was on my side. I just was.
“Alajeh is going to know we have all been arrested,” I said.
“How will he know that?” Opie asked.
“Somebody who works for you guys will tell the wrong person or is the wrong person. I don’t know, but he will find out. As soon as he does, he’ll just finish us all.” By “you guys,” I meant law enforcement in general. I had no idea exactly who Alajeh’s connections were, but on my last trip for him a couple of years earlier, when he’d sent me not to smuggle anything but to check out the viability of smuggling drugs into various entry points in the United States, he had said he got his information about the best and worst places straight from the horse’s mouth: people in Customs.
“We are not going to let that happen.” His young comrade, the marshal, walked back into the room with two packs of generic cigarettes; one pack was menthol. I was happy to see him. The fact that Opie knew what I meant by finishing people had worried me for a second. That was an odd way to describe killing someone. I had never heard it from anyone but Alajeh.
Opie held the two packs up and I picked the red one, not the green menthols. He opened the pack, handed me a cigarette, and lit a match for me. “Smoke your cigarette. I will be right back.” He got up and left, ignoring my objection to his leaving me. The young marshal stood by the door, leaning against the wall, and said nothing.
The marshal was my age, I thought, but at thirty-three it’s hard to tell. He could have five years on me, plus or minus. He was very tall and really good-looking, and he had a sweet smile. “Everything is going to be okay now. You’re making the right choices.” It wasn’t a choice. I wanted to try to explain to him how that was not the case. I didn’t want him to confuse me with a good person. I did not feel like one at all, and there was no choice here. I was doing exactly what I had to do, the only thing I could do.
Opie came back into the room with one of the big clunky black phones from the desks we had passed on our way to my cell, the cord trailing behind him, and a notebook under his other arm. He plugged the phone into a jack on the wall outside my cell. He looked at his watch. It was a little after seven, so it would be after four in California. He handed me the receiver. “It’s before five in California still. Do you know the number or do you need information?”
“I know it.” I had been calling this number once a month for two years and had it memorized. I think Opie almost rolled his eyes when I said this but tried to pretend he was looking for something in the corner of the ceiling.
I considered what I could say in front of Opie while the phone rang, and I realized I hadn’t followed the attorney’s advice at all about saying nothing till he was there. I never really thought I would ever get here. But now, here I was. I realized we hadn’t really thought this event out very carefully. Or we would have considered what to do about the distance between here and there. I got his answering machine. I left a message and hung up.
Opie called the assistant U.S. attorney—AUSA—in San Francisco who was in charge of the case and told her I was willing to make a proffer. I had never heard the term before. Opie told me a proffer is a statement that is inadmissible in court. It is what would make it possible for him to help me, my sister, and my friends without losing any precious time, while I tried to reach my lawyer. The AUSA apparently agreed to make sure that if my proffer—the inadmissible statement Opie had just told me about and that I was going to make—showed that protection was needed, she would do everything in her power to make sure that it was provided and quickly.
Once the call was over, the agent took the phone back into the other room and closed the room’s door when he came back in. I assumed the marshal was right outside of it and that Opie was trying to make me feel a little safer about communicating my fears with him. Either that or he didn’t trust the young marshal. Either way, I did feel a little less anxious.
“Okay, Catherine, so what are we looking at here?”
“I don’t know exactly. But if the guy I used to work for finds out that a bunch of his former employees have been arrested at the same time, he will do whatever he has to, to make sure we don’t talk.” I knew my face was beet red. It made no sense that I would feel this way, but I was suddenly embarrassed.
“This is the African, Alajeh?” Opie sat with his hands on his hips, all ears, the clipboard and a pen just resting on his thigh.
“Yes.”
“Do you think you are in danger now?”
“Yes. So is my sister. Please, you have to get to her. He will use her if he thinks he can and I think he might kill her if he can’t use her. Did you arrest her?”
“No. We haven’t arrested your sister.” As he told me this, he seemed to think that this would make me happy. It didn’t. I didn’t want my sister to be arrested; it’s not that. But I didn’t want her unprotected. If she was completely unaware of what was happening right now, and . . . I saw an image of her in my head again, except now it was nighttime, and she didn’t know someone was watching her. My heart started racing again. I could feel the emotion bubbling up like I was a soda and someone had just shaken me up. Opie asked, “What do you mean he will use her?”
“If he gets to her, I can’t talk to you!” I started sobbing again and couldn’t stop it. There were hiccups getting mixed in with my sobs too, so I couldn’t speak. I had tried so hard to remain calm the whole day, but I was falling apart.
Opie reached through the bars and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Catherine, I want to help you. It’s going to be okay now. Tell me who we need to protect. We can get someone to them to keep an eye on things if that will make you feel better.”
“Yes.” I gave him an abbreviated list of names: Hester, Phillip, Piper, Garrett, Bradley, Henry. Just the ones I knew Alajeh knew for certain, Garrett cause I wasn’t sure, and Piper because I didn’t want to be responsible for her murder. I said she had been my lover, that’s all, but like my sister, Alajeh might try to use her. Opie wrote the names down as I rattled them off. He told me not to worry, he was going to put things in motion, and we would all be okay.
About a half hour later, he came back, opened the cell door, and let me out. I followed him and the marshal out to the larger room. We sat at a big table with a big old cassette tape recorder sitting in the middle of it. Their questioning began by reading names off a list, one at a time, and asking me how the person was involved in our enterprise or with me. They had everyone’s names, even people who I hadn’t named and who didn’t belong under their microscope, like some hooker I had met once in a hotel bar in Lagos. I had given her my address in the United States and told her she should come to America. I hadn’t slept with her. She’d worked the bar at the hotel where Phillip and I had stayed. I felt betrayed by this, that Opie had already known so much. But for me to honor the proffer agreement with the AUSA and for them to know who really needed to be considered for protection, I had to answer their questions.
When we were done talking it was late, maybe ten o’clock at night. Opie asked if they could search my house. They were going to send two agents there and I could have them bring me back an outfit to wear. By agreeing to
this, they would not have to get a search warrant. I would also be able to pick out the clothes I wore to court. Going to court? I would be going to court in California. I was still going to be extradited. I assumed I was on their hook now until they got Alajeh. I was about to agree when the other guy added that otherwise, I would be stuck with whatever the agents brought back for me to wear and I would have to spend the night in jail. That rubbed me the wrong way for so many reasons.
I was wearing what I had slept in, my sweatshirt and cutoff sweatpants. I hadn’t planned on visiting with people that day, only two quick hops out of my car. All I had meant to do after the bank was grab a sandwich, get cat food and cigarettes, and pump gas. For these activities, my grungy getup was haute couture for Brattleboro, circa summer 1996. I was fine with what I was wearing, and they had just made it clear I wasn’t going home to stay, so insinuating that letting them search my house meant I wouldn’t be in jail was disingenuous if not outright deceitful. That is what irked me. I was entrusting these guys with my life.
Opie was quick to pick up on the damage his idiot friend might have just done to the trust he had taken all day to build with me. He recovered quickly, though, by smacking the other agent on the back of the head in a big you-dumb-ass gesture, and said, “Marshals!” as if he already knew all marshals were morons.
I agreed to the search, but only if I could be there when they did it. I feared they would leave my cats outside. I didn’t want my Edith and Dum Dum to be eaten by a coyote, a fox, or a bear. They were not country girls and didn’t have the sense to run. Edith would pick a fight and Dum Dum might want to play.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 21
