The Giveaway bn-3

by Tod Goldberg

  Fiona shook her head slowly, like she couldn’t believe how utterly daft I was. “Right, right,” she said. She still hadn’t bothered to put down the magazine or look at either me or Sam. “What I’m saying is that the man is near a legend, Michael. I heard of what he was doing in Ireland. He broke into every bank imaginable. And so smart about it, too. Safe-deposit boxes are bank robber nirvana, Michael.”

  “And?”

  “And maybe he’d be good to keep around,” Fiona said. She looked up finally, smiling, flirting, batting eyelashes, doing that thing she does with the tip of her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip.

  “No,” I said.

  “No, what?”

  I could see the wheels turning in her mind.

  “No, he will not rob banks with you. No, you will not sell his services to other people who rob banks. No, you will not put him in a box and ship him to a small town in Iceland where there are very old banks. No, no and no.”

  There’s not much about Fiona that remains a mystery to me, apart from her total nihilism. But it’s unusually cute, so there’s that.

  “I’m just saying that in the position you’re in,” she said, “where revenue streams seem inconsistent, it might be wise to look at all avenues, Michael. It’s not every day someone from history shows up.”

  “Duly noted,” I said, “and still, no.”

  I went back to eating my yogurt and thinking about how to un-swallow Bruce’s problems. Fiona went back to reading her magazine, presumably thinking about the fashion shoots she’d missed in Bora Bora all these years. But Sam wasn’t doing anything. That was troubling, particularly since he’d finished his beer and hadn’t gone foraging in my fridge for another.

  “Is he really from history?” Sam asked.

  “The Safe-Deposit Bandit,” Fiona said. “There are probably textbooks about him.”

  “As a kid, I always thought it was ‘safety’ deposit box,” Sam said.

  “That’s because your American education never put the proper emphasis on enunciation. Both of you sound like you learned to speak with dirt in your mouth.”

  Sam gave me a look that said, basically, What the hell?

  “Something else troubling you, Fiona?”

  “If you must know,” she said, “I’d like it if you found a way to describe me that didn’t make me sound like the help.”

  “That’s my cue,” Sam said and headed for the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do with Bruce.”

  “I can’t stand to hear you two fight,” Sam said, already halfway out the door of my loft. “It just breaks my heart.”

  “Sam,” I said.

  All that was left was his waving arm. “Call me later,” he shouted. “We’ll do some covert stuff together and it will be a great time.”

  And then he was gone completely, leaving me alone with Fiona, who, in the last year or so, had become an inconsistent emotional concern. One minute she loved me, the next minute she hated me, a minute after that she was kissing me, two minutes later she was punching me in the head, five minutes later we were in bed… and always, always, there was some guilt on both ends.

  And now this.

  “If we’re going to talk about this,” I said, “you’re going to need to put that magazine down.”

  “If I do that,” she said, perfectly calm, “I might be inclined to use it as a weapon.”

  “Fine,” I said. I sat down on my bed, across from the chair she was sitting in. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well,” she said, “do you consider me your friend or your associate?”

  “Yes, technically, I believe both are accurate descriptions.”

  Fiona hurled the magazine at me, but fortunately she hadn’t slipped a sharp piece of broken glass into the pages beforehand, which is a nice trick if you want to really hurt someone. So the magazine just fluttered to the ground.

  “Wrong answer,” she said.

  “Fi, look, I’m not comfortable categorizing who we are to complete strangers, particularly not people like Bruce Grossman. He’s not exactly a confidential source.”

  “I’m not speaking of him solely,” she said. “It would just be nice if, every now and then, I knew where I stood before I was offended by your boorish behavior.”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking, I have no idea where we stand, moment to moment. “How would you like me to describe you?”

  Fiona stood up then, went into my kitchen, poured water into a teapot and began preparing a cup of tea. It was as if I wasn’t even in the room. I watched her for a few moments, the simple, fluid motions of her actions, the lack of wasted space she conveyed. After about five minutes, the water came to a boil and she fixed her tea. She sat back down in her chair and played absently with the steeping teabag. “Any ideas come to you yet, Michael?” she asked.

  “A few,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Remember them when next the moment arises.”

  I nodded. “In the meantime”-I paused-“most elegant Fiona”-I paused again, to see how that went over; well, it turns out-“we need to figure out what to do with Bruce Grossman.”

  “How much time do you presume he has left until the Ghouls figure out who did the job?” she asked. “Assuming Balsalmo didn’t tell them?”

  “How many people living in Miami that they don’t already know could do the job?” I said. “Someone in Miami, other than Barry, other than Balsalmo, likely knows who Bruce Grossman is, especially if you did and you’re not even from these here parts.”

  “Then maybe you should just go tell them before they find out.”

  “You are elegant,” I said.

  “I know,” Fi said. She got up from her seat again and poured her tea down the drain.

  “You just made that,” I said.

  “Merely as an instructional tool,” she said. She looked at her watch. “Have you called your mother lately?”

  “No.”

  “You should,” she said, “seeing as I am the only person who has the kindness to actually return her calls.”

  “What does she have you doing?”

  “I’ve agreed to take her shopping for lamps this afternoon.”

  “You have fun with that,” I said.

  She walked over and kissed me once on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For watching,” she said, “and for wanting to watch.”

  Sometimes, just like a real person, all Fiona wants is to be appreciated.

  After Fiona left, I called Sam. “That was fast,” he said.

  “You just have to know the right words,” I said.

  “I’m not even at the Carlito yet. Right words or not, I figured this for a good day-or-two-long fight. Maybe with injuries. You have all of your limbs?”

  “Present and accounted for.”

  “She even hit you?”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  “She’s full of surprises,” Sam said. “When she does hit you, though, that actually hurts, right?”

  “It never feels good to get punched, Sam.” Sam started to respond, but I stopped him before he could begin exalting again the pleasures of the Flying Lotus, and instead I asked, “How long would it take for you to get your hands on a few bikes?”

  “I got a guy I could talk to,” he said.

  “Talk to him,” I said.

  “How many?”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Sidecars?”

  “This isn’t World War Two, Sam.”

  “If we’re planning a full frontal assault here, Mikey, we might want to plan for every contingency.”

  “I don’t see us needing sidecars,” I said. “No matter the contingency.”

  “I’ll look into it. They had them at the last inauguration. Looked pretty sharp, Mikey, can’t deny that.”

  “Not really the look I’m aiming for.”

  “What’s the plan here? Shock and awe or more spit a
nd shine?”

  I told him Fiona’s idea-delivering Grossman, or at least delivering his identity, and maybe some of his stolen goods-to the Ghouls, and then that way we could control the situation. What that situation happened to be depended upon how much they already knew.

  “First thing, though,” I said, “I need to look into the mortality of Nick Balsalmo. If he’s alive, we need to make sure he stays that way and stays quiet.”

  “Gotcha,” he said. “I suppose just UPSing the Ghouls their stuff is out of the question.”

  “Not going to work,” I said. “That’s why we need the bikes.”

  “We’re talking choppers only here? That the look you want?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Chuck Finley rides again,” Sam said and hung up.

  When you’re dealing with motorcycle gangs, you have to understand that they aren’t like normal criminals. It’s an entire culture-a culture that demands loyalty above all else; and if that means someone has to die for merely being negligent, that’s not a problem. It also means if you disrespect them, it’s like disrespecting Hezbollah: They will fight you forever, wherever.

  In order to help Bruce out, it wouldn’t be as simple as giving the Ghouls back what was taken. We’d have to direct them to something larger than Bruce. Another gang. A snitch within their ranks. Someone directing Bruce’s actions for something bigger, more destructive. Get them thinking Bruce was just an instrument and they’d focus their attention on fighting that war. I’d need to get close to them to figure out just what that trigger might be.

  In the meantime, we just had to keep Bruce and his mother safe. And that I had a plan for.

  I looked at my watch. Not enough time had elapsed, so I did some push-ups, a few sit-ups, a hundred crunches and some light tae kwon do in the mirror. When it seemed like Fi would have had enough time to cross the city, pick up my mom and then head off to Lamps Are Us, I called my mother’s house.

  “Ma,” I said into her answering machine (a Record-A-Call from 1979, to be precise), “I have some friends I’d like you to meet. I’ll bring them by around dinner-time. You’re just going to love them both.”

  6

  Urban warfare isn’t any fun. Ask any soldier what they’d prefer and they’ll tell you that a clear, fixed target on a battlefield with a linear objective, replete with a front and a rear, is much easier to control than going door-to-door in a burned-out city. Gettysburg or Fallujah, basically, and if you’re a betting man and you’re betting on your life, you’ll take Gettysburg every time.

  Problem is, no one fights conventionally anymore. They’ve all seen Black Hawk Down and Full Metal Jacket, they’ve all watched CNN and Al Jazeera and they all play first-person shooter video games. Thus they all know that fighting inside buildings and alleys is the great equalizer to light manpower.

  So when you’re in a densely packed urban environment and looking for possibly hostile targets, it’s wise to look as nonthreatening as possible. Most spies spend their whole lives in slacks and a button- down shirt. It doesn’t matter if they are working in the Pentagon or Darfur: Slacks and a button-down shirt are almost always plain enough to be completely unnoticeable, because when you’re a spy it’s important never to dress to bring attention. You want to blend in.

  On the rare occasion you need a disguise, it’s imperative to remember that it’s easier to look older than younger, poorer than richer and that if you want people to think you have a limp, put a rock in your shoe. That way, you’ll actually limp.

  So when I went to the apartment of Nick Balsalmo’s girlfriend in Little Havana, I tried to look as innocuous as possible, since I wasn’t sure if I was going to stumble onto a dead body, or a booby trap or a bunch of bikers waiting to kill whoever showed up at his house. I opted for jeans, a T-shirt, a straw hat and ugly shoes with no socks. Looking obviously lost is a good way to avoid trouble, even in a war zone.

  I also had two guns on me, because there’s never been a single person who thought being overly armed was a bad thing. When you’re not sure how many bullets you might need, bring as many as you can hold.

  Little Havana is just that: little. Densely packed with businesses, shops, bars, the streets of Little Havana feel like they’ve been cut and pasted into Miami from any of a dozen towns in Cuba. Salsa and merengue bleat through cars and the open windows of small apartments above storefronts and there seems to be an open-air restaurant on every corner.

  For the most part, Little Havana is safe. There are plenty of families, which means people tend to look out for their own, but then there’s also plenty of Families, too, so the crime in Little Havana can be organized and brutal. That Nick Balsalmo, who wasn’t Cuban, was living in Little Havana with his girlfriend didn’t necessarily mean that he was being protected, but a guy like him living in the same neighborhood as Cuban crime families meant something.

  The address Bruce gave me was a three-story stucco apartment building not far from the domino park off of Calle Ocho where, even though it was getting late in the afternoon, old-timers in guayaberas were still throwing bones and whooping at one another. On one side of the building was a liquor store and on the other was a cigar shop and then two doors down there was a McDonald’s and a Domino’s. That was the weird thing about Little Havana-it looked like Cuba apart from how much it looked like any neighborhood in Any-town, U.S.A.

  Nick and his girlfriend-whom Bruce only knew as Maria-lived on the second floor of the building. The front door of the building was locked and required the person living in the apartment to buzz you up, so I found Maria’s name and hit the button. The system rang their number and a mechanical voice announced that their voice mail was full.

  Not a good sign.

  The door had an electric strike lock activated by discontinuing the electrical circuit by hitting a number (or a series of numbers) on the phone’s keypad. These locks usually confound people intent on breaking in because they don’t understand how easy they are to break. Most electric strike locks in older buildings are fail-safe, which means they need electricity to stay locked, which gives you two easy options:

  Find the electrical path to the door in the wall and yank out the cords.

  Go to the side of the building, find the power box, and turn off the power. You might need to pick the padlock on the box, but as long as you have two paper clips, this should take only about five seconds.

  Or you can do what I did: Wait three minutes for a young woman to walk out the door, smile at her, say “thanks” and she will hold the door open for you while you gather your materials and walk inside. The nice thing about people is that they are usually very polite and helpful, even when letting perfect strangers into their home.

  I climbed a flight of stairs to the second- floor landing and made my way down the hall. There were six apartments on the floor and all of them, except for the one at the end of the hall, had their front doors wide open. As I passed each one, I could hear the drone of televisions, the cacophony of too many people in a small space having arguments and the wail of more than one child. I peered into each apartment and was struck by how similar they looked-a galley kitchen opening into a large living room, which opened onto an outdoor balcony. I could smell cooking meat and deep- fried vegetables, human sweat and something that smelled vaguely like vinegar, but more pungent.

  The closer I got to the last apartment, however, the more I began to notice a different smell.

  A smell that reminded me of Kosovo. Of Iraq. Of Afghanistan.

  You never get used to the smell of decomposing people. Smell it once and no amount of deodorizer or lye or bleach will hide the smell from your nose for too long. Dead bodies smell like rotten lamb, and fecal matter, and rotten fruit, and spoiled milk, wrapped in burning garbage, but worse. Dead people smell like no other dead animal for simple evolutionary purposes. It gets the living moving… and fast.

  In this case, however, someone had gone a long way to hide the smell, because as I stood outside the d
oor, I could decipher it only as an undertone. My guess was that whoever was dead inside the apartment-and my guess was that it was probably both Nick and Maria, because biker gangs aren’t known for leaving witnesses-was being absorbed by an acid, probably in the bathtub.

  “You know the guy who lives there?”

  I turned and saw a balding man of about fifty. He had about fifty keys on a belt chain and wore a short-sleeved work shirt that was pocked with sweat across the chest. It said RAY in cursive over the breast pocket. I had the sense that he wore this shirt every day but didn’t bother to wash it.

  “Know him? No,” I said. “Just know that he owes me money.”

  Ray nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked me up and down once but didn’t convey any emotion.

  “Have you seen him?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t normally answer questions from people dressed like you carrying two guns but who have to sneak into my building.”

  Interesting.

  “Jackie Roach,” I said, extending my hand. The man shook it but didn’t put much effort behind it. He wanted to hear my story. I had one. I always have one. “I work for the banks, tracking down people who’ve skipped on their foreclosures. Mr. Balsalmo, he owes Seminole Savings and Loan a considerable amount of money.” I pulled up my shirt and showed him the locations of my two guns, which he really shouldn’t have been able to see, but I had the sense that this guy had been around a gun or two in his time. “You gotta protect yourself when you have my job. You understand?”

  “I understand,” he said, and lifted up his left pant leg, revealing a Saturday night special in an ankle holster. “You do property management for long? Packing is just like brushing your teeth in the morning.”

  “Been there, done that, bought the bootleg off eBay!” I said and gave the man a full belly laugh. “One thing Jackie Roach knows is property management. Doing God’s work, buddy, God’s work.”

  Ray still wasn’t smiling, still wasn’t exactly happy to see me and still didn’t know quite what to make of me. Being a property manager is a lot like being a prison guard: You see all kinds of miscreants on a day-to-day basis and everyone lies to you.