Magic City

by James W. Hall

  A month after delivery, when half the steam turbines Machado Tool delivered seized up right on schedule, the Guiteras plant had to be taken off-line. It stayed out of action for a total of eight months. Blackouts began to roll throughout the island. Without the Guiteras plant, the Ministry of Basic Industries could produce electrical power at only 50 percent capacity when 65 percent was needed to meet the nation’s demand. Machado Precision Tool closed up shop shortly after the problems were discovered, and as far as Pauline knew, the Cubans never discovered the CIA’s involvement.

  While sabotage against Cuba was not official U.S. policy and might not have played well in middle America, it served a crucial purpose in sustaining the support, financial and otherwise, of the fervently anticommunist Cuban-American community. A central feature of Pauline’s job was to keep the exile population under the impression that their concerns were being honored. Miami was the only American city with an official foreign policy—to make Castro’s life as miserable as possible. The pressure to fulfill this mandate had grown steadily over the years as Miami’s Latinos gained increasing muscle.

  TransAmerica Construction’s corporate headquarters occupied the upper two floors of the south tower a few blocks from downtown Miami. Pauline’s own suite consumed a third of the top floor. Leather furniture in muted grays, swanky architecture—several generations more refined than the Miami Vice style that still plagued the city skyline. Those outlandish buildings with their gaudy primary colors and chest-thumping innovations—like the cut-out sections mid-building, as though an errant missile had opened up a wound that never healed. That was all so passé.

  Claughton Towers consisted of four smooth barrels of smoked glass and gunmetal steel, staggered in height like the pipes of a church organ sprouting along Biscayne Boulevard. Pauline had been told by the architect that her floor-to-ceiling view commanded exactly three hundred degrees. To the south were the downtown spires of banks and legal offices and insurance firms, and to the east across the glimmer of the Intracoastal Waterway she could keep abreast of the daily count of new high-rises soaring along Miami Beach. Northward there were the posh man-made islands, the sprawl of North Miami and the blue haze of the Atlantic.

  Though she mostly ignored the wraparound view through the long hours of her busy days, Pauline was not indifferent to its symbolism. In her business, such a sweeping vista was as close to an acknowledgment of status as she would ever have. Anyone stepping into her office for the first time quickly realized that Caufield had clout unequaled by anyone in the Agency outside of Langley.

  It was ten-thirty on Monday morning, a new work week well under way, and Pauline was finishing her fourth café con leche and had toiled halfway through the latest stack of intercepts that had come in overnight from Ecuador. American oil executives were growing anxious at the gathering crowds in the streets. The throngs of demonstrators had been moving inexorably from peaceful displays to window breaking and rock-and-bottle attacks on the national militia. From the intercepted cell phone calls and e-mails, it was not completely clear what stage the citizen outrage had reached. Was a coup attempt imminent, or were they simply looking at more marches?

  The two agents working out of the Quito station were in prickly disagreement about the level of opposition to President Manuel Cevayano, the general whose government had been cooperating so smoothly with Gulf + Western for these past three years. So far the current U.S. administration had put its chips squarely on Cevayano, but Pauline was tasked with moving those chips the instant the situation tilted the other way. One of her tasks. One of hundreds.

  When her console buzzed she was just dashing off an e-mail to Silma Herrera, the Quito station chief, requesting that she shake the banana trees a little harder. Surely they had more penetration into the leadership of the opposition. If they didn’t have a source inside, why not?

  “Can’t talk right now,” Pauline said. “Take a message.”

  “It’s himself, Ms. Caufield, the Big Cheese.”

  Pauline’s hand drew back from the console.

  Big Cheese was the handle they’d given Hadley S. Waters. A Wisconsin native, and die-hard Packers fan. More important, Waters was a forty-year vet of the intelligence service, now occupying the top spot at Langley. In this tricky election cycle, Waters had emerged as a top contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Although still two years out, the campaign was already under way, broadsides being fired, and Hadley Waters had grown touchier every week. Finding fault with veteran agents, even terminating a couple of highly placed clandestine ops working out of the Beijing station for a trifling slipup. Though Pauline and Waters went back four decades, they hadn’t spoken in years. A call from him during his period of intense public scrutiny didn’t bode well.

  Pauline reached out and clicked open the secure line.

  “Director Waters. What a pleasant surprise.”

  That’s when she first learned of the photograph. Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston, 1964, Miami Beach.

  And the floor beneath her chair began to sway.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On his way to Harbor House to pick up Lawton, Thorn got lost. Double, triple lost.

  Turned north when he should’ve gone south, east instead of west. Crossed highways he’d never seen, headed toward landmarks he thought he remembered but didn’t recognize once he got close. He drove into suburban neighborhoods, mazes with one cul-de-sac after another, the sidewalks deserted. No one to ask.

  Twice he stopped for directions at gas stations, and both times got directions in machine-gun Spanish, but must’ve confused a direcho for a direcha, got even more lost, and found himself stuck on a freeway, heading in the wrong direction, traffic inching ahead for ten minutes till he reached the cause of the bottleneck.

  Some guy standing beside the highway holding up a sign:

  GOD IS PISSED

  Thorn thinking, Yeah, if he’s paying attention.

  An hour after Thorn left Alexandra’s house he located Old Cutler Road, a shady, winding historic lane that connected Coconut Grove with points south and snaked along the coast through lush neighborhoods. Ten minutes later he was pulling into the parking lot of Harbor House.

  He found a space, switched off the engine, and sat for a moment to gather himself. From the east a breeze carried the sweet, rank scent of brine and seaweed and exposed tidal flats. Years earlier Thorn had spent an entire summer exploring the fishing grounds out there on Biscayne Bay, an hour’s boat ride from his home in Key Largo. A summer of poling his skiff around the mangroves of Elliott Key, within sight of the gleaming towers of downtown Miami. That weird clash of wilderness and urban flamboyance.

  There were bonefish in the skinny waters of the bay, good fishing. That summer he spent every daylight hour peering across the dazzling sheen until he spotted the telltale shadows of schools of bones muddling across the flats, the riffle of their wake. Then he poled to intersect, get within casting distance.

  For a hundred consecutive days, Thorn fished those shoals, always the long, slow hours of hair-trigger vigilance, drinking in the quiet and the endless underwater theater. A hundred days, with no two identical: the tenor of the light, the flood of scents carried on the breeze, the riffles, the tricky geometry of that landscape was always fresh, always rearranging.

  It had been a while since Thorn indulged in such day-dreams. He’d been holding fast to discipline—fixed on his goal. Making a new life in the city, one that embraced Alexandra, one that came to terms with asphalt and traffic and density. As focused as he could manage, maintaining a strict partition between his old ways and the world he was entering. He could have both. This wasn’t either-or. That’s what he’d told Sugar and what he continued to remind himself, his fortifying mantra. But his resolve was starting to fray.

  Maybe Sugar was right. He should pick up Lawton, haul him down to Key Largo, entertain him for the week, delay major decisions.

  If it hadn’t been for the screeching tires, he might have done just t
hat.

  Two lanes over, a yellow cab fishtailed across the parking lot, heading for Old Cutler. Same kind of taxi the two tough guys used. Thorn slammed the Toyota in reverse, peeled out of the space, and caught up to the taxi a second after it found a gap in the traffic and swerved north onto the two-lane road. Thorn made out two heads in the car, both in the front seat. Maybe a third slumped down in the back, but he wasn’t certain.

  At the nearby corner, the traffic light had turned red and the cars formed an impenetrable wall, blocking Thorn’s exit, nobody even looking over to acknowledge his honking.

  At the last instant, as the taxi fled, Thorn got the number off the side of the Friendly Service yellow cab: 4497. But the car was probably stolen, and with such a head start, there was no way he was going to catch them.

  Of course, he wasn’t sure these were the two shitbrains from earlier, or whether they’d abducted Lawton. Could be just a stray paranoid synapse firing.

  Cranking the wheel, he cut back into the lot, reclaimed his space, and trotted to the entrance of the two-story pink building.

  “Lawton Collins!” he bellowed at the lady behind the front desk. She looked up, startled.

  He was huffing from his sprint, and when the woman didn’t immediately respond, he jogged down the main corridor, into the heart of the building.

  A glassed-in aviary filled one corner of the reception area, parakeets and songbirds thrown into a wild fluttering from limb to limb at Thorn’s sudden approach. An ancient woman in a wheelchair was parked before the glass cage, watching the action. Around the corner, lunch was being served in a cafeteria with two televisions blaring the noon news.

  Thorn scanned the dozen tables—lots of silvery hair, pale faces, people slowly munching, but no sign of Lawton.

  As he reached out to tap the shoulder of a woman in an official-looking smock, two arms grabbed him from behind and squeezed Thorn into a breathless bear hug. The voice at his ear had the jingly lilt of Nassau.

  “We backing up now, mon, you with me? Backing up, getting you around this corner, where you don’t distress the folks eating their Happy Meals. Okay, we together on this, are we? Say yes, why don’t you?”

  Thorn planted his feet and tested the man’s strength with a hard wriggle, but the guy tensed his meaty arms and Thorn’s rib cage crackled.

  “Okay, okay,” he grunted as the guy dragged him out of view of the lunch crowd.

  For half a minute he was in the solid embrace of the orderly. In that time he got down a single swallow of air and was starting to feel woozy when finally the lady in charge came marching around the corner.

  She was taller than Thorn, with broad shoulders and a clipboard gripped tight against her bulky chest. She wore a black pantsuit and had the scowl of someone whose greatest joy was handing out demerits.

  “Let him go, Marvin.”

  The man released him, and Thorn stepped away and looked at his captor. Marvin gave Thorn a gold-toothed grin and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Welcome to Harbor House,” the woman said. “I’m Marion Davies, the director of the facility. Is there a reason for this disturbance?”

  Thorn managed to drag down a full breath.

  “I’m looking for Lawton Collins.”

  “Popular guy,” Marvin said.

  “And what business do you have with Mr. Collins?”

  “I’m his guardian for the week,” Thorn said. “Is he here?”

  A small gathering of noontime diners had assembled in the hallway nearby. A couple had carried their plates and were still spooning their food while they spied on the ruckus.

  “Look, I appreciate your caution. I don’t have any ID. But my name is Thorn. Alexandra Collins and I are friends. I’m up from Key Largo, staying at her house in South Miami for the week while she’s in Tampa doing some police work. I just need to know Lawton’s here and okay.”

  “What makes you think he’s not?” Ms. Davies said.

  “Were there two men here looking for him?”

  For a moment the woman’s gaze roamed his face as if searching for some fault line in his innocent expression.

  Then without a word, she headed down the hallway beside the aviary.

  Thorn followed and Marvin stayed close behind.

  “Those two guys,” Thorn said. “They were here, weren’t they?”

  Marvin’s smile fluttered on and off like a loose connection.

  “A couple of bad mamma jammas,” he said. “Tried to bullshit their way in but, no, sir, not with Marvin on duty.”

  Lawton was perched on a high stool at a round desk. The room was sunny and spacious and had a high ceiling. Lawton was using pinking shears to snip the tips off flower stalks before handing them one by one to the ladies assembled around the worktable.

  In front of each woman sat a vase with a bouquet that more or less resembled the one displayed on a podium in the center of the table.

  As Thorn and his custodians approached, a wave of cooing and rustling erupted. Crookedly applied smiles turned his way and widened, while here and there a hand reached up to touch a white coiffure.

  Ms. Davies walked over to Lawton’s side.

  “Mr. Collins, do you recognize this gentleman?”

  Lawton shot Thorn a look and shook his head more in disgust than denial, then snipped the tip off a daffodil and handed it to the white-haired lady beside him.

  “Looks like common street scum to me,” Lawton said.

  “He says his name is Thorn and he’s your guardian.”

  “My guardian?” Lawton looked around at the assembled ladies. “Hell, this nitwit couldn’t guard a dead possum at the side of the highway.”

  A couple of his elderly fans tittered.

  Davies tapped Thorn on the shoulder and steered him a few feet away.

  “He’s playing games,” Thorn said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Lawton’s famous for his humor.”

  “In half an hour or so Alexandra will be landing in Tampa. You can call her, double-check.”

  “That won’t be necessary. She left your name, description. Even said you wouldn’t be able to produce any ID, which I still find exceedingly strange.”

  Thorn offered no explanation. Like a lot of Keys citizens, he’d never bothered to register his presence on earth with the federal government or the state of Florida. With his property taxes paid by a trust Kate Truman set up before her death, Thorn didn’t even require a bank account. No doubt he had a birth certificate filed somewhere, a high school transcript, but as far as he could figure, that’s the only trace he’d made. No other bureaucratic fingerprints. Thorn was ghosting through, without a nine-digit number dragging behind. Living happily an inch below the sweep of radar.

  For him, keeping a low profile was no paranoid fetish. He wasn’t running from anyone or trying to hide. He wasn’t some secret agent changing his name every day. Thorn was only living as simply as possible, maintaining a pleasant isolation, staying clear of the sticky web of officialdom for which he had no patience. Why should he carry around half a dozen plastic cards to prove who he was when everyone he truly cared about or who cared about him knew exactly where to find him?

  “I’m taking Lawton out of here till we find out what this is about. That okay with you?”

  Inside Marion Davies’s jacket a cell phone played the opening notes of Beethoven’s Ninth. She flipped it open, spoke her name and listened, then shut it without a word and slid it back inside her coat.

  “Marvin, would you please escort Lawton out to Mr. Thorn’s car?”

  And she was gone without a fare-thee-well, which suited Thorn just fine.

  A minute later, waiting for a break in traffic at the edge of Old Cutler, Thorn said, “Flower arranging?”

  “It’s where the babes are. Ones that still remember their name. You got a problem with that?”

  “Kind of surprising for a hardened old homicide guy like you.”

  “A man makes do the best he can.”


  Thorn saw an opening and peeled into the heavy flow heading north.

  “Why isn’t my daughter picking me up? What’d you do with her?”

  “She’s in Tampa, Lawton. She flew up this morning.”

  “Yeah? And what’s your game? Do I know you?”

  “I’m Thorn,” he said. “You and me, we’re old buddies.”

  “You look like a certain peckerwood I arrested back in the eighties. Bad checks, breaking and entering. Possession of a controlled substance.”

  Thorn slowed for a car turning left. He glanced over at Lawton, who was massaging his forehead as if trying to ward off a headache.

  “Okay, now listen, here’s the plan, Lawton. We’re driving over to your house, pick up some clothes, then head down to Key Largo. Stay there a few days, go fishing. You like fishing, right? Snook, grouper.”

  “Don’t go switching subjects on me. I know that game. Used to run it myself, getting the lowlifes to talk. It won’t work, peckerhead.”

  Lawton’s detour into hostility seemed to tire him out. His head slumped against the headrest, a look of melancholy weighting his features. Alex had coached Thorn on these sudden mood swings, telling him to stay on course no matter which direction Lawton veered. Be consistent, don’t respond to the outrageous accusations. Be a beacon of normalcy so Lawton could use Thorn to chart his way back to safer waters.

  “Me, a beacon of normalcy?” Thorn said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But try to fake it, okay?”

  At the next red light Thorn reached into the backseat and got the black-and-white photo and laid it on Lawton’s lap.