The Giveaway bn-3

by Tod Goldberg

  Alternately, it might help if you knew someone in the FBI, if the person you were looking into happened to be one of the most successful bank robbers ever. Fortunately, Sam knew a lot of people in the FBI.

  “You know what I had to do to get this information?” Sam asked. It was the next day and we were sitting on the patio of the Carlito having lunch. I was eating mine. Sam was drinking his. There was a manila file folder between us that was thick with documents. I didn’t bother to open it as Sam’s favorite part of the day was always show-and-tell.

  “Nothing you haven’t done before,” I said.

  “Let me ask you something, Mikey,” Sam said. “You ever feel shame for anything?”

  “Not a lot, no,” I said. The truth was that, of course, I felt shame for small things in my life. It’s the small things that tend to bother you. Things you wish you hadn’t said. People you wish you hadn’t hurt. Governments you wish you hadn’t helped topple. “But I’m human, Sam.”

  “See, that’s the thing,” Sam said. He opened up the folder and pulled out a picture of the inside of a safe-deposit vault in a bank. All of the drawers were pulled out. “I look at this picture and I think, man, now that’s pretty impressive. Goes in. Doesn’t bother grabbing dye packs. Doesn’t stick a gun in anyone’s face. Just pops the boxes and gets out with untraceable loot. I feel some shame in that admission. I mean, if the world were different and I hadn’t pledged allegiance to peace and justice and the American Way.”

  “And here I thought you were talking about what you had to do to get the information,” I said.

  “I don’t feel shame about that,” Sam said. “Just sore.”

  “More than I need to know,” I said.

  Sam looked off for a moment and I got the sense that he was trying to draw me into his sense of whimsy, or debauchery, or whatever it was he was trying to convey by looking off into the distance like a person in a perfume ad. Sam has many “friends” who are able to get him information by virtue of his long standing in various overt and covert positions. Some of them just dole it out because of the kindness in their hearts. Some do it because Sam gives them something. And some do it because, apparently, Sam has certain superhuman skills best left undiscovered by those who are unwilling to hear a play-by-play, which would include me.

  “You ever heard of the Flying Lotus?” Sam asked.

  “Is that a restaurant?”

  “Oh, no, my friend. It is not something you pay for,” Sam said.

  I picked up the photo Sam had been looking at and hoped that would end the portion of the conversation that Sam seemed intent on explaining. The picture showed a Crocker Bank in Walnut Creek, California. The date stamp was March 23, 1983. Over twenty- five years ago. That didn’t seem right.

  “How old is Grossman?” I asked.

  “Sixty-five,” Sam said.

  “A sixty-five-year-old man robbed someone’s stash house? How’d he get out alive?”

  “Bruce Grossman could break into a prison and steal the bars,” Sam said. “The guy is a legend.”

  Sam handed me a stack of photos. Bank of America in Deer Park, Washington. Wells Fargo in Chicago. Lincoln Savings in Tonopah, Arizona. Citibank in Miami. University credit unions in about thirty different small towns across the middle of the country. And this was just the 1980s. All safe-deposit boxes. The last photo he showed me was Grossman’s booking photo. He looked like an accountant: Trim black hair, no facial hair, woolly eyebrows, a funny smirk on his face.

  “What’s he smiling about here?” I asked.

  “Probably just surprised he finally got caught,” Sam said.

  The photos of the vaults all had one thing in common: Apart from the missing items in the boxes, the vaults looked otherwise untouched. No blast marks. No broken doors. No blood or bodies or crazy writing scrawled on the walls declaring a death to capitalist pigs. Nothing. “How’d he get in?”

  “They think he rented a safe-deposit box, disabled the cameras and went to town. They also think sometimes he worked at the bank. There’s some thought he worked for a janitorial service. And some people think he’d spend the night in the air ducts. Sometimes, it looks like the Starship Enterprise beamed him in. All of this is supposition. Guy never admitted anything. They assume these are all his jobs, but he only got nicked for the last one he did.”

  One thing bank robbers and spies have in common is that you’re only as good as your last job. There’s a reason you don’t hear much about old bank robbers or old spies: Botch the job and there’s usually someone with a gun waiting for you.

  “He ever hurt anyone?”

  “No,” he said. “Way he got caught? Technology crept up on him. Years and years he’d been busting into these old branch offices, or banks in small towns, tiny credit unions, that sort of thing. In 1997 they found him inside the safe-deposit vault of that old Seminole Savings and Loan out in Doral. He got in through the roof but broke his leg on the way down. The bank had just installed laser-lock doors on the vault and that was it. Boy was stuck.”

  “And they weren’t able to put these other jobs on him?”

  “Nope,” Sam said. “Never even left a fingerprint. They only tried him on the Doral job.”

  Sam handed me the rest of the file and I spent a few minutes reading through the documents. “Says here the FBI tried to bring him on to help their bank robbery unit,” I said.

  “He would have walked after six months,” Sam said. “Did his whole bid instead.”

  “Twelve years is a long time,” I said. “Glades isn’t exactly Club Fed.”

  “Maybe he’s one of those guys who believes in rehabilitation.”

  “Maybe he’s one of those guys who believes it’s safer on the inside,” I said. “He stole a lot of stuff from people if these photos are to be believed. Have to think there are some people who’d like to see him dead.”

  “That’s the crazy thing,” Sam said. “He found things he thought had some significant sentimental value for someone? He’d mail it back to the bank with a note of apology.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?”

  “Why do you eat yogurt?”

  “I like the way it tastes.”

  “Maybe he liked apologizing.”

  My cell phone rang. It was my mother, Madeline. Just like always. I hit the MUTE button. Sam’s phone rang twenty seconds later. He looked at it and hit MUTE, too.

  “You give my mom all of your phone numbers now, too?”

  “Mikey, she can be very persuasive.”

  Since returning to Miami, my mother, Madeline, has inserted herself into all of my deepest-and most mundane-relationships. It’s as if all the attention she didn’t give me or Nate as kids she’s trying to make up for now, which is a nice sentiment, if not a completely exciting thing to actually live with. “Attention” for my mother often means me coming to her house and repairing the toaster oven or the top-loading VCR.

  Anyway, my mother’s call reminded me of something important. “Anything on his sick mother?”

  Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that had his scribbles on it. “Bruce’s release address is registered to Zadie Grossman, age eighty-eight. I’m going to guess that’s not his hot young wife.”

  He handed me the paper. It was an address in Aventura, a section of North Miami known for its extensive Jewish community, notably a large senior citizen population. Not exactly the kind of locale one wants to find themselves in after doing more than a decade of hard time, but then maybe he missed his mother’s cooking.

  Still, there was something interesting about this. I owed Barry a favor or two hundred, but I had to think that a sixty-five-year-old man, ex-felon or not, living with his mother meant something.

  If you really want to know about somebody, meet them when they are around their parents. When you’re a spy, this isn’t something that happens very often. You walk into the Libyan Embassy in Qatar and ask for Salim and Salim’s momm
y, the odds are you’re not going to get either of them. But follow Salim for a few weeks and you’ll see how often he eats at his mother’s house, how often he complains to his wife that she doesn’t make Sharba Libiya as well as his mother does, how often he calls his mother to just check in, make sure everything is okay, and how little regard he gives to his wife’s welfare, you know you’ve got someone you can manipulate.

  Or at least someone who isn’t going to stray too far, lest his mommy needs him.

  I needed to get out of Miami.

  I flipped through the file and came up with several photos of a house. The address matched the one Sam gave me.

  “Why is the FBI still watching him?” I asked.

  “The FBI doesn’t watch people, Michael, you know that.” Sam reached across the table and took the file from me and fished around for a few moments and then pulled out a photo of an older gentleman wearing a red V-neck sweater, tan pants and red loafers. He carried a black satchel in his hands. “This is what Mr. Grossman looks like now.”

  “Looks like time did him,” I said. There were lines around his eyes that brought to mind the inside of trees. The weird thing was that he was missing most of the pinkie on his right hand. “What happened to his hand?”

  “Belt-sanding accident inside,” Sam said.

  “What kind of accident?”

  “Someone tried to take off his face with a belt sander, got his finger instead.”

  “They keep him separate from the population after that?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it. Records show he was in general population the whole time,” Sam said. “So, doesn’t look like he snitched.”

  “There goes your rehabilitation angle,” I said, though the truth is that if you’re in prison, it’s probably better for your long-term mortality to not snitch.

  “Hey, maybe he had a revelation upon release,” Sam said. He had a point, though not much of one. “Any guesses on what’s in that satchel?”

  “Girl Scout cookies,” I said.

  “Guess again.”

  “A chisel and hammer.”

  “One more,” he said.

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “You’re not fun to play games with,” Sam said. “Anyway”-he was excited now, which was obvious since he stopped drinking the multiple beers he’d been nursing since we sat down and was now just toying with a knife-“that satchel contains the current membership list of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club. Your friend Mr. Grossman is in the process of surreptitiously dropping it off in front of the FBI field office on Northwest Second.”

  “Why would he have…” I began, but then stopped. “They’re not watching him, are they? They’re protecting him.”

  “Not quite,” Sam said. “They’re just curious how an ex-con living with his mommy happened to run across this information and then felt compelled to drop it on their doorstep. Especially since he could have just as easily dropped it with some members of the Banshees and solved a lot of problems.”

  The Ghouls and the Banshees were the biker gang equivalent of a family feud gone wrong. The Banshees splintered from the Ghouls a decade ago, and the resulting war between the two groups was one of those organized-crime wars that the authorities were usually happy to let happen; as long as they just killed one another, there was a net gain for society.

  “He had to know there were cameras,” I said, which made me realize: He had to know there were cameras. And there it was. The extenuating circumstance Barry mentioned. The stash house belonged to the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, an outlaw gang whose propensity for violent crime made even the Hells Angels seem like an esteemed group of kind and generous fellows with a shared interest in motorcycles. If he was dropping off their materials at the FBI office in broad daylight, and in a bright red sweater no less, that meant he was scared.

  I came back to the photos of the house in Aventura. From the outside it looked like a standing set from Miami Vice: the facade was faux Art Deco and statues of pink flamingos dotted the lawn. In the driveway, however, was a yellow Ford Fairmont station wagon, replete with wood paneling and a luggage rack.

  “How sick is the mother?” I asked.

  “Gets radiation five days a week,” Sam said. “Maxed credit cards. Looks like Medicare is picking up some of the rudimentary stuff, but I guess cancer isn’t all that rudimentary.”

  I thought about my mother, who smoked like Chernobyl but miraculously didn’t have cancer. Meeting Bruce’s mother might be a nice object lesson. Or it might just give her someone to smoke with. “Is she dying?”

  “Old people die,” Sam said. “Old people with cancer don’t have improved odds, they just die more painfully.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Why should I take this job?”

  “All the people you’ve ever helped, you think he’s half as bad as most?”

  “He’s a bank robber,” I said.

  “So is Fiona,” Sam said. “And for a terrorist organization, I might add.”

  “That’s not been substantiated,” I said. “There’s some muddy area concerning whether or not she knew she was working for the IRA.”

  “She also sells guns to criminals,” Sam said. “As in she had me watch her back yesterday while you were meeting with Barry. Sold a trunkful of Russian GSh-18 pistols to some Cubans.”

  “Cubans?”

  “Planning a revolution or something. Real beauties. Anyway, I admit that when Fiona does a little crime, it’s hot, real hot, but you can’t pick and choose your bad guys. Plus, while Fiona probably wouldn’t smother her dying mother, she’s not known for her Florence Nightingale tendencies, Mikey. At least Grossman is doing all he can to save his mother. Or at least make her comfortable.”

  When Sam is the voice of reason, I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. But then he added, “And you owe Barry, Mikey.”

  Again with the voice of reason…

  I took out my cell and called Barry.

  “I’ll meet with Grossman on one condition,” I said. “I take this, I need some cash, you pay my fee. I don’t want whatever money he’s holding on to.”

  “That makes me think you don’t trust him,” Barry said.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You realize I don’t work nights at a Christian charity, right?”

  “Your stolen money is cleaner,” I said.

  “That’s kind.”

  “I also know where you live.”

  There was a pause on the line. “You do?” he said finally.

  “Tell Grossman I’ll be at his house in two hours,” I said and hung up. Best to leave some questions unanswered.

  3

  No spy wants to work with a double agent. Even if you might want to give off the impression that you’re only in the game for the money or the glory or the opportunity to visit lovely Third World nations and assassinate their leaders, even the most jaded spy probably still has a love for his country. You spend too many years training to suddenly realize you hate everyone and everything about the country you’ve been sworn to protect.

  A double agent, however, has allegiance only to himself, and thus goes through the training because he sees a way to prosper personally. This makes trusting him nearly impossible, cornering him unrealistic. The best way to get a double agent to acquiesce to your demands, or just play nice in the sandbox, is to present him with another double agent to confuse him. Two people out for only themselves causes a certain amount of friction, particularly when there’s only one of whatever they both want.

  Which is why I brought Fiona with me to meet Bruce Grossman. And why I first gave her a tour through Aventura’s hottest suburban spots. There’s something about suburbia that makes Fiona homicidal, and Aventura is one of those master-planned communities developed in the 1970s and 1980s to remind people what they thought the world was like in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the future occupants of Aventura lived in Chicago or New York or Detroit and had an idea that the suburbs would be a good p
lace to retire to, only to find that by the time they actually retired, the suburbs were filled with the people that now scared them.

  Shops and outdoor cafes dotted the streets, and every few feet there was a cluster of octogenarians in close conversation. In front of a retro-cool-looking joint called the Blintz there were two women who literally had blue hair, which would have been surprising if not for the other two making their way along Northeast 207th toward the Shoppes at the Waterways. Across the street was a cluster of high-rise condo complexes, and I imagined that at night the windows glowed blue, and not from all of the running televisions. Beside me in the Charger, Fiona made a clucking sound with her tongue, which she sometimes did when she was particularly sickened by something.

  “Promise me you will shoot me if I ever do that to my hair,” Fiona said.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Mean it,” she said. “Tell me what you’d use. I want to be sure I will die.”

  “I’m going to guess a Russian GSh-18 would do the trick,” I said.

  Fiona slapped her hand against the door. “Does anyone know how to keep a secret anymore?”

  “Selling arms to Cubans doesn’t seem like a great idea.”

  “They were using them for strictly democratic aims,” Fiona said. “And they paid double.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me to cover you?”

  “Because I didn’t want you skulking in the background,” she said. “Cubans would think you were bad juju. Sam emits good juju.”

  I could only shake my head. Used to be Sam and Fiona hated each other, or, at the very least, distrusted each other immensely. Now they probably pinkie-swore on their mendacity. “Fi, you don’t know what could have happened.”

  “Michael, are you saying you were worried?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s very sweet,” she said. She reached over and squeezed my cheek. Hard. To the point that I had to really focus with my left eye so that I didn’t slam into the traffic in front of me. “I like that you were worried for me long after any danger had already passed.”