by Paul Batista
“FBI agents,” Draper continued, “came to my apartment early one morning and asked if they could take me for coffee at a nearby Starbucks. I said yes. They asked me many questions there. About the Senator. About her office suite. About her visitors. About her fund-raising. About super PACs. About Robert Calvaro. And about someone they called Oscar Caliente.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I knew nothing about fund-raising for the Senator, except that it was obvious to me it was her main preoccupation. And I told them I never heard the name Oscar Caliente.”
“You weren’t in a position, literally or figuratively, were you, Ms. Draper, to know what the Senator’s main preoccupation was, isn’t that right?”
“No.” She paused, a trace of hatred in her expression. “When we were at Starbucks, the agents showed me a spreadsheet with dollars in each column. It was a computer printout. It had the title Donations to Presidential Fund. They asked whether I had seen it before.”
For the first time, Naomi Goldstein did what many judges did. She asked her own questions. “Had you seen that spreadsheet before, Ms. Draper?” Goldstein interrupted.
Draper looked at the judge. “One very much like it.”
“Maybe I wasn’t clear in the question, Ms. Draper,” the judge whispered, her voice clearly audible because of her microphone’s projection of sound and the utter absence of any other sound in the courtroom. “Had you seen that particular spreadsheet before?”
“One very similar to it. But not the same one. It contained different columns, different numbers, but covered the same time periods. The dollar amounts were larger. Both for what came in and what went out.”
Judge Goldstein, looking at Raquel through big, circular glasses, said, “You can resume, Ms. Rematti.”
“Ms. Draper, a few minutes ago you told these jurors that your job in the Senator’s suite was to speak politely to any of her constituents who called the Senator, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. That was my job.”
“Yet now you are saying you looked at the Senator’s financial information, correct?”
“I did. Even for a woman of a certain age like me, I’m pretty adept with computers. I had the first Apple computer Steve Jobs put out on the market in the early 1980s. I’ve bought two or three generations of Apple computers since then. Computers are a passion of mine. I’m just too old for anyone to hire me for that skill.”
“Did the Senator ever give you permission to look at her financial information?”
“No.”
“How did you get access to it?”
“One day the Senator was on a speaking tour—or a series of listening tours, as she liked to call them—in Iowa. Her suite was pretty much empty. She takes many staffers with her when she travels. She left me behind.”
“And you did what you had no permission to do?”
“I don’t know that I needed permission, Ms. Rematti. I worked in her suite, after all. I had the run of the house. Her inner office wasn’t locked. I went to her iMac and I found the information. Two summaries that were in the computer. It was easy to see that one of the summaries was filed with the Federal Election Commission. And that the other, even though it covered the same period, was not.”
“And why did that mean anything to you? You’re not an expert on campaign reporting requirements, are you? Nor are you an accountant, isn’t that so? Is that part of your resume, Ms. Draper?”
“No, it isn’t. But I knew the forms when I worked for President Spellman during his first campaign for President, the one that failed. He was honest. Anything he filed with the FEC was accurate.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Experience and instinct, Ms. Rematti. Your client does not have the qualities Mr. Spellman has. When I looked at Senator Baldesteri’s computers, it was clear as day that she had two sets of books, one for the FEC and the public and another, more detailed, richer, and secret one for herself and people like Mr. Calvaro and Mr. Gordon Hughes. Like a candy store owner with a phony set of books for sales tax examiners. In other words, another set of shadow books, but also secret real ones, for private use.”
“What did you do when you, with no authority to do so, saw this? Did you print the spreadsheets out?”
“No. I quit, I left her staff. Never went back.”
Raquel asked, “These reports never existed, isn’t that right?”
“Oh, they sure did, Ms. Rematti.”
“But you never had them, right?”
“I don’t. I didn’t take them. I could have put them on thumb drives, but I didn’t. They felt dirty to me, like a toilet as you’re cleaning it.” She waited. “But the FBI does have them. The agents showed them to me at Starbucks. They told me they took copies of her computer drives with a search warrant when they started investigating your client.”
“Did you tell President Spellman or his people about this conversation with the FBI or the reports after this Starbucks conversation happened, if it happened?”
“It happened, Ms. Rematti. And, yes, I told the President’s Chief of Staff.” She waited again. “And I showed the Chief the pictures I took at Starbucks with my cell phone of the agents and the printouts. I asked their permission to take the pictures. The agents said, ‘Sure.’ I wanted to protect myself, Ms. Rematti. Your client, the Senator, is ruthless. She loves to demean and hurt people. Maybe more than that, even. As much as she can, whenever she can, and wherever she can.”
“Who were the agents?”
“They gave me business cards. One card was for Giordano. The other was for Curnin.”
CHAPTER 16
TEN MINUTES AFTER Georgina Draper stepped down from the witness stand, Angelina and Raquel were alone in the women’s bathroom on the floor where the trial was taking place. It was a public restroom. Any woman—reporter, observer, the future Government witnesses who were banished to the hallway while waiting their turn to testify—could be there so long as the Secret Service agents stationed at the bathroom’s entrance let them pass. The room had three stalls. Angelina opened each of the stalls with heavy oak doors from another era, examining them. They were empty. The old bathroom, with chipped black-and-white tiles on the floor and an immovable translucent window, was in effect soundproof; it was a relic of a time when public buildings were like the Parthenon.
The Senator, an arm fully extended so that Raquel couldn’t enter the stall whose toilet she so badly needed after three uninterrupted hours in the courtroom, blocked her lawyer’s way.
“Do you realize,” Angelina asked loudly, “how much you just fucked up?” Her expression was rigid and furious. “How much you just fucked me up?”
In her long and varied career, Raquel had represented the capos of the Lucchese and Genovese crime families, Latin drug lords, a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers accused of securities fraud, Willie Nelson when he faced apparently insurmountable tax evasion troubles, which Raquel had remarkably resolved, and even the bizarre but beguiling Oliver North at the start of her career when he was at the heart of the Iran–Contra trial in the long-ago era of the last years of the Reagan administration.
No client had ever spoken to her in the way Angelina Baldesteri now spoke.
Raquel said, “What the Christ are you talking about?”
“You don’t listen to me. That prim little bitch Draper is a whore. She fucked President Spellman more times than you fucked pretty boy Hayes Smith.”
“And how am I supposed to know about her and Spellman?”
“I wrote it on a piece of paper for you when you stood up to cross-examine her. I even underlined the words: She fucks Spellman. You ignored it. You ignored me. You had a perfect chance to destroy her. You didn’t do it. Instead, you fucked me.”
Raquel, who was nearly six feet tall and had regained much of the inherent strength her breast cancer and horrific treatments had drained from her, easily pushed away the Senator’s arm.
“Let me tell you a few thing
s, Senator, just to make sure you get it. First off, nobody but nobody blocks my way when I want to go somewhere. Not a man, not a woman, not anybody. If you do it again, you’ll get your arm broken.
“Second, I’m a lawyer. And that involves ethics. One of the things I need is what’s called a good faith basis for asking a question. I can’t ask her as a throwaway, Hail-Mary question if she killed JFK. Just because you scribble on a piece of paper the word fuck and the word Spellman does not give me a good faith basis for asking a question about whether she fucks Spellman. How, in any event, would I know if Spellman fucks anybody?”
Angelina, defiant and angry, now stood against one of the old marbled sinks, its original white texture bearing dozens of intricate fault lines from years of use. Angrily quiet, she glared at Raquel.
“Third,” Raquel said, “we’re bound at the hip for this trial. Even if you hated me as much as you seem to, or thought I was as incompetent as Goldie Hawn in a physics lab, Goldstein would never let me out of this and let you get another lawyer. It’s gone too far. We are in too deep. If she bought any of your bullshit grievances, and she won’t, her attitude would be too little, too late.
“Fourth, Senator, where were you when I needed you? I got the list of Government witnesses four weeks ago. Her name was on it but with no word as to who she was, where she worked, what she did, what she might testify to. I’m not a mind reader or a seer. I’m not clairvoyant. I had no idea who she was. You were too busy on one of your campaign ‘listening’ tours, whatever that means, to Iowa to even glance at the list. You said not one word that would give anyone any reason to know that she was one of Spellman’s lovers if, in fact, she was.”
Baldesteri finally said, “Maybe I haven’t made as much of an impression on you as I should have. Maybe it’s you who just doesn’t get it. I have to win this trial and this election.”
“All I can deal with is the trial. Your election, whether you get to be the first female president and lead us all to the Promised Land, is about as interesting to me as a rat’s ass.”
“That’s totally irresponsible—”
“Save it for the television shows, Senator. And, by the way, don’t ever mention the name Hayes Smith to me or anyone else …” She stared at Baldesteri. “You know, I never asked you, and you never volunteered to tell me, about Robert Calvaro and Hugo Salazar. Maybe, just maybe, you don’t know who they really are. I do. Caliente and Suarez.”
“Who? I never heard those names before this trial. So, lady, what do you know?”
“They’re killers. They’ll kill you if they decide to. It’s a sport and a pastime for them. Let me give you a word of unsolicited advice. Whatever you’re doing, whatever deals you may have with them, you are playing games with the most dangerous men in the world. What was it that Shakespeare said? The gods kill us for their sport.”
Just then the heavy twin doors to the bathroom opened and then closed, and Kimberly Newsom, the Fox newscaster who had attended every day of the trial, walked in, obviously not expecting to see Senator Angelina Baldesteri and Raquel Rematti there, and obviously, too, not having heard a word of their conversation.
Like consummate stage actresses, Raquel entered her stall and locked the door and, without skipping a beat, the Senator opened her purse and began applying lipstick at the hazy and time-tinged mirror above the sink.
Kimberly Newsom said, with the tone of a college-age sorority sister, “I didn’t mean to intrude. I had no idea you were in here.”
Angelina gave a welcoming, campaign-style smile to Kimberly as Kimberly looked into the same big, cracked mirror. The Senator said, “Just girl talk. Isn’t that right, Raquel?”
Just before flushing the powerful toilet, Raquel said from the closed stall, “That’s right, sweetie. Pure girl talk.”
CHAPTER 17
THE BLACK MERCEDES SUV moved, almost noiselessly, through the sheets of rain on the glistening roadways inside JFK. Powerful halogen lamps on tall poles lit everything as if in a perpetual screen image, the silver rain descending through the artificial glare. It was late, two in the morning. In the almost deserted airport, the experienced driver sped with no hesitation to the KLM terminal in the international airlines row. In the back seat, Raquel Rematti, weary from a difficult trial day, held the left hand of Hayes Smith. Also weary, Hayes raised her hand to his lips as the empty KLM terminal drew closer. The only sound in the powerful Mercedes was the steady, rhythmic rub-rub of the windshield wipers.
Quietly Raquel expressed her concerns, as she had several times over the last two days after Hayes told her that his NBC producers had directed him to fly to the refugee camps in Lesbos where thousands of Syrian, Iraqi, and other migrants had gathered and were confined in detention camps so that he could make his twice-yearly broadcasts from the “field” rather than from the air-conditioned studio on the 18th floor of Rockefeller Center. “You’re going to a dangerous place, Hayes. I’m afraid for you.”
“This is part of the way I make my living, baby. Remember, I’m a journalist, not just a pretty boy cosseted in a studio five nights a week. These assignments give me credibility.” An urbane man, he was laughing at the absurdity of his own words. “Besides, this is part of the reason I make the big bucks. They even had me bring the phony flak jacket they bought from the Beretta shop on Madison Avenue. It has pockets for my ammunition. Of course, I don’t have ammunition and couldn’t fire a BB gun.”
Raquel, when seized by a thought, was never deterred. “There are hundreds of confused, trigger-happy Greek soldiers on Lesbos with no idea how to handle thousands of restless, fearful, angry Muslim migrants. You could get caught up in anything. Why couldn’t they send you to Paris, Brussels, or Berlin instead to cover the hunt for the ISIS guys who shot up the cafes, bars, rock and soccer stadiums, and drove big trucks into vacationers in Europe?”
“That’s old news, countless cycles ago. Besides, mine is not to reason why,” he said, quoting Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” like the good Yalie he was, “mine is but to do and to die. If it makes you feel any better, the network has hired about ten guards, all former Marines, who used to work for Blackwater. They’ll be inches away from me.”
Raquel said, “Blackwater? Jesus, now that’s the part that worries me most.”
They both wanly smiled. As the SUV’s door opened at the KLM terminal, they kissed. “Have a safe trip,” she whispered.
“You be well,” he said. “And go on kicking ass in that trial.”
Those were the last words they ever spoke to each other. And the kiss was the last time they ever touched each other.
* * *
Raquel asked the NBC driver to take her to her apartment on Riverside Drive. She hadn’t been there in more than three weeks. Her relationship with Hayes had deepened, not suddenly or unexpectedly, but naturally over those last weeks. She had realized as she waved at him while he passed through the terminal’s oversize revolving doors that she didn’t want to be without him during any part of the next days in which he’d be gone. When was the last time, she wondered to herself as the Mercedes made its swift and practically solitary drive from the far regions of eastern Queens to Riverside Drive on the Hudson River, that the thought of not seeing the same man each day filled her with a sense that was close to deprivation, to a sensation of void?
Raquel had been married while in law school to a man who later became a famous movie producer. The marriage lasted fewer than two years; without rancor, she had simply avoided being in the same space or room with him and now, years later, remembered him only when at the start or close of a new movie his name appeared on the credits. She held no resentment, no anger, simply no real memory of him. Life and the passage of time change people: he was now bald and much heavier, almost unrecognizable to her on those few times she had glimpsed pictures of him in glossy magazines.
And, before Hayes came into her life and as her own fame grew, she had known other men, some famous, some not, all interesting in their o
wn ways, who said they loved her. Nothing had lasted for more than a year, most for fewer than six months. They were all men whom she enjoyed but in whom she gradually—or sometimes suddenly—lost interest. With the advent of iPhones and computers, she found it easier just to “ghost” them, simply not answering when they continued to reach out to her until they stopped and disappeared. There was, she believed, no point in misleading them by even sending one-word responses.
Not one of them until Hayes was a man whom she wanted to see and be with every night. And, despite his deserved or undeserved reputation as a womanizer, he, too, wanted her with him all the time.
As the Mercedes pulled up under the green awning of her old-world West Side apartment building, she said, “Thanks so much for the drive, Nick. I’m sorry I took you out of your way.”
“No problem, Ms. Rematti. This is what I do for a living. You and Hayes are beautiful people together, by the way, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
She smiled gratefully at him. Nick had been Hayes’ driver for eight years. Instinctively, she wanted to believe Nick had never said that before to another woman, despite all of the opportunities Nick must have had to do that with all the other women who had traveled with Hayes and Nick as his loyal driver.
Through the revolving doors to her own building emerged Jose, the talkative and engaging Puerto Rican night porter, carrying a big open umbrella. It was three in the morning. He held the umbrella aloft over her as she stepped out of the car.
There was not another person on the sidewalk or on sinuous Riverside Drive. And there was no one visible in Riverside Park, that long, narrow, sublimely landscaped urban space dividing Riverside Drive from the majesty of the Hudson River.
In Spanish, Jose said, “God, Ms. Rematti, you work too late. You ask me, you need more free time. More fun.”
Speaking in Spanish, she joked, “When this trial is over, I’ll let you take me to a dance club, is that a deal?” It was impossible not to like him. He was a homely, vibrant little man.
