by A. C. Fuller
“Cougar drove past the lot, parked down the block. I watched them enter but kept my distance and called you right away. When I approached the kid, he lied at first, then took me back. When I got there they were gone. By the time I got back to where they’d parked, car was gone. They didn’t see my face. Couldn’t have.”
He faced WB, who stood in the doorway. “There are empty duffel bags in my trunk. Bag up all this shit and throw it in my car.”
“Boss?”
“Do it, and tell the kid you need the security footage from all the cameras they could have passed. Double check the route. Make sure you have the footage, and that it’s erased. And tell the kid not to speak with anyone else. Give him your card. Anyone else shows up, you’re his first call. Got it?”
“Got it, LT.”
WB disappeared down the hall, leaving Mazzalano in the center of the unit, head spinning.
9
They were halfway to Philadelphia when Warren took his eyes off the mirrors long enough to give her his attention. “So, how’d you come to know that piece of shit Mazzalano?”
Cole had been watching him watch the mirrors, impressed by his precision but concerned by his hypervigilance. She’d used the time to write an email to Martin Goldberg, an old acquaintance in D.C. They’d interned together twenty years earlier and he’d since become one of the most influential lobbyists on K Street. She’d requested a meeting for the following morning. Next she’d taken notes on everything she’d seen in the storage unit and studied the photos. The ones of the desks hadn’t yielded much of interest—receipts, shipping orders, and a few handwritten notes that didn’t make any sense. But the photo of the map, and its implications, startled her. Shocked her to a point where she wasn’t even ready to share it with Warren. So she was happy to answer his question.
“Met him at a dinner at Antonio’s. I’d gotten an interview with a crusty old guy named Mikey Patisi, who’d just beaten a parole violation charge. He co-owns the restaurant. He’d served a few years on a drug charge way back and had been accused of ‘associating with known criminals’ because he’d hosted a dinner that involved some shady figures. Defense got him off on first amendment grounds, believe it or not. Anyway, he was in a celebratory mood and invited me to a party at the restaurant to celebrate beating the case. Mazzalano was at that party.”
“A cop in a mob restaurant?”
Cole nodded. “This was maybe ten years ago. Right when I moved to the city. I was green. I had no clue how reporting actually worked in a city like New York. It’s...well...different than they taught us in J-School. Anyway, I guess my natural inclination is to side with the accused, and I thought Mikey was an old restaurateur who shouldn’t be judged for who shows up to eat in his restaurant. Anyway, Mazzalano was at the dinner, was sauced, and gave me his number. Things kinda went from there.”
Warren’s face was pinched, like he was searching for the right words. “How much do you know about him?”
“He’s a sleazeball, if that’s what you’re getting at. But I can take care of myself.”
“He hit on you? I mean, I assume so, but—”
“You think he’s the first male source to hit on me, to try to trade a scoop for sex?”
“You comfortable using your sex appeal for a story?”
“Screw you.” She glared at him, but his eyes were back on the mirrors. “I always had a policy: I let men know I was happily married, completely off limits. If they wanted to embarrass themselves by leaking me info in hopes they could win me over, that was on them. Women get accused of using our sex appeal when most of the time we don’t need to bother. You have any idea how dumb guys like Mazzalano are? He stumbles through the world, led by his Amaretto-soaked libido. I just sit back and watch the train wreck.”
“I guess that’s a way to navigate the ethical gray area, while also getting the job done.”
“Like I said, I can take care of myself.” She was defensive about her relationship with Mazzalano, and she didn’t like how it felt. Despite her protestations, she had used his attraction to her in ways she didn’t feel great about. Dozens of times she’d wanted to smash a bottle of grappa over his head and delete his number from her phone. But she’d always felt she could control him, and he’d always delivered scoops. Lately, his behavior had escalated from creepy to downright abusive, and it was getting hard to reconcile her need for information with her self-respect.
Warren slowed, allowing a car to pass on the left, then broke the long silence. “Mazzalano raped my friend.”
His face was hard, eyes straight ahead. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d lie or exaggerate, but still, she had a hard time believing it. “When? Who?”
“Gabby. The woman you were texting. And this is so far off the damn record you need to erase your memory when I’m done telling you this.” He shot her a look to let her know he was dead serious. “I’m talking Men in Black, neuralyzer-level forgetting. It’s not my story to tell, but you need to know who you’re dealing with.”
Cole nodded slowly. “Got it.”
“She’s JTTF now, but when the OCCB was dissolved in 2016, she did a bit with the Patrol Borough South when they gobbled up OCCB’s organized crime cases. Thought she was gonna bring down what’s left of the mob. She was my training officer in Brooklyn a few years before, and I respected the hell out of her, so I was sad to see her go. Two months later, she was back. No explanation. Just said, ‘It didn’t work out.’ Come to learn that she’d worked under Mazzalano—a captain at the time. One night they were working late, going over photos or some shit, and he came up behind her while she was standing at a desk. He pressed himself into her and…”
“Don’t finish. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Sounds like you need to hear it.”
Cole closed her eyes. “I don’t want to hear because you’re right, it’s not your story to tell. If Gabby told you that, and you believe her, then I believe you.”
Dozens of interactions with Mazzalano ran through her mind. She’d always been careful to meet him in public places, telling herself that made it safe. For her, it had. But she’d also let his sleazy advances go because she could handle them. Now, she pictured all the women who couldn’t. Those who worked under him, those with less power than her. She doubled over, wracked with a wave of shame. All those times she’d just played along with his leering, grabby pig routine, ignoring it because of what she could get from him…and all those women who didn’t have the luxury of doing that. “Did Gabby report it?” she asked quietly.
“Asked her the same question because I could never figure out why he was still working after that. She was always vague about it. Said, ‘It got swept under the rug.’” He shrugged. “Not like Gabby to be vague about stuff. You gotta understand, she’s a badass. I don’t know the details, but if she says it happened, it happened. And if she couldn’t get justice on it…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Means he’s protected. Plus, way she told it, it was only one of his many crimes.”
“I got the sense he was corrupt, but he’s also a fool. I thought he was too stupid to do much harm.”
“Don’t be naive, Cole. ‘Corrupt’ is looking the other way for a buddy’s DUI, or accepting a pair of Jay-Z tickets from a store owner for looking out for him. Mazzalano occupies a space somewhere between common thug and straight-up psychopath. You’re right that he’s a fool, and fools usually get caught. But they can do a lot of damage before that happens.”
“Now I feel like a fool.”
They rode in silence, passing occasionally under an overpass or a flashing billboard, but the road ahead was dark except for the taillights of a single car far in the distance.
She couldn’t think about Mazzalano anymore, and wasn’t ready yet to share the map. She needed to know for sure that she could trust Warren. His story about Gabby had moved her in that direction, so she shared something that had been weighing on her. “You know much about mi
litary records? Military communications?”
Warren glanced over, nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“It’s something I didn’t tell you. When Michael Wragg emailed me. He used my nickname. Monkey Tree. Only my husband called me that. And not in front of people. I was stupid for letting it lure me, but…”
“I get it.”
“And you heard what he said when we were in his apartment. Matt used to email me. We didn’t do paper letters. Could Wragg have gotten access to military email servers or something?”
“Possible, though it would take a sophisticated hacker. I don’t think he was that.”
“But he had partners.”
Warren nodded.
“I had no connection to him before I wrote that story. Within a day, he’d found the one thing that would get me to show up and meet him. That nickname. I just…”
She trailed off. There wasn’t anything else to say.
10
Warren watched shadows dance on Cole’s face as they passed under the lights of an overpass. She appeared lost in thought. Talking about her husband wasn’t easy for her. That much was clear. But there was something she wasn’t sharing, and he needed her to trust him. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse, not the way you did. But I lost my wife. Drove her away.” He shook his head. “I’m straightened out now, but she’s seeing someone.”
“Who?” she asked, absently.
“Dunno.”
“How do you know?” Before he could answer, she continued. “Never mind, I know. You just know, right? I would have known if Matt was, well...”
“What’s your background?”
She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Did you always live in New York City?”
“Nah. Moved around a bit. Raised in the city, though. Brooklyn. College in Florida, year in D.C., then moved around when Matt got transferred from base to base. You?”
“Bay Area. Oakland. Scholarship to study criminal justice at John Jay, then 9/11 happened and I joined the Marines. To be honest, I was flunking half my classes and the scholarship was about to go away. But I loved the city. And I met Sarah there.” He’d wondered about Cole’s background since they met, and the next question he wanted to ask could offend if he asked it sloppily. Sarah had been raised in the Bronx, but her parents were Puerto Rican. Warren himself was black. The first day of preschool, his daughter had gotten the question, “What are you?” from a classmate, and hadn’t known how to answer. Hadn’t even known it was a question. She’d been four and hadn’t taken offense. But Cole was an adult, and adults offend easier than children. “Your parents? New Yorkers?”
Cole eyed him. “Mazzalano had a way of asking me that, you know. The line from The Sopranos”—she switched to a bad Tony Soprano impersonation—“‘What part of The Boot you from, hon?’”
Warren chuckled. “So you’re Italian?”
“Mom’s parents were. Dad’s parents, my grandparents, were German Jews who escaped in 1938. Albert and Avigail Kohlberg.”
“Kohlberg? Lemme guess. Ellis Island happened?”
“Nah, I hear a lot of people’s names got lost in translation there, but this was a business decision. Grandparents had been married only a year and my grandfather had taken over his father’s bookstore when the Kristallnacht happened.”
“The what?”
“The Night of Broken Glass. Nazis burning synagogues. Smashing Jewish storefronts.”
“Damn.”
“They were lucky to get out. Kohl was a German name, maybe French-German. At some point the ‘Berg’ was added, so he figured he’d drop the Berg, but he didn’t want to take a German word as his name. So he went with Cole. He figured he could be whoever he wanted in America. He told me before he died that he regretted it. Wished he’d kept the name.”
“Was it a thing back then? A Jewish guy and an Italian woman?”
“I don’t really know. Not a huge thing, I don’t think. Mom’s parents were lapsed Catholics, and my mom wasn’t practicing. Might have been a bigger issue if she was. I mean, it was the seventies by then. Bigger issue was the Brooklyn versus Lower Manhattan thing.”
“The Italian thing, that why Mazzalano leaked to you?”
“To me he was a source. A sleazeball asshole of a source, but just a source. I don’t know what I was to him. For all the crap journalists get these days, I don’t think people realize just how much shit we have to put up with.”
Warren checked the gas gauge. Just over half a tank. “I wanna get gas soon.”
Cole leaned over and checked the gauge. “We have like two-thirds of a tank left.”
“Had a run-in with a cop in Nevada once that started when I ran out of gas. Don’t like falling below half, especially in this gas guzzler. Half a tank in this thing won’t take us a hundred miles.”
“Still, we can probably wait. What was the run-in about?”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
He’d been on his way to college, with a stopover in Las Vegas. A city kid who didn’t quite comprehend how far apart gas stations can be in the vast empty spaces of the West. He’d run out of fuel on Route 15, seventy miles outside of Vegas, and been stranded for an hour before a highway patrol officer rolled up and approached him, gun drawn. He’d stood in the blazing sun for twenty minutes while the cop checked and double-checked his ID. Finally, he’d been cleared and dropped at the nearest gas station. Before driving off, the highway patrol officer offered a weak apology. “You understand, kid, we don’t get a lot like you out this way. You look like a guy wanted for a robbery ’round here.”
The interaction had crystallized his desire to become a cop himself. If the system is broken, don’t complain. Never complain. Fix it.
“Racist cop in Nevada?” Cole asked, and he realized he might as well have told the story, since she’d guessed it. “Rob, I write about police for a living. Nothing shocks me.”
Warren shook his head slowly, a sign he used to indicate definitively that he was done talking. It worked on most people in his life, but not on Cole.
“Tell me this,” she pressed, “why D.C.? I quit my job and need to write, need to track this story. But you seem like a by-the-book guy.”
“Try to be.”
“Driving a crazy reporter lady to D.C. isn’t exactly by the book.”
“I guess not.” He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He was still in the Nevada desert all those years ago.
“That’s it?”
“I’m a man of few words.”
“I’m not, so lemme guess.” She eyed him for permission and he nodded, cracking a slight smile. Cole prided herself on being able to read people, but he had a pretty good poker face.
“I was thinking about it when you wouldn’t come into Wragg’s storage unit. You believe in the law. Despite the fact that I screwed you, my paper screwed you, then the department screwed you, you respect the law. Am I right so far?”
Warren gripped the steering wheel tight, then noticed and relaxed his hands. She was right, but he wouldn’t admit it. He offered a non-committal sideways nod.
“My guess is, like most cops, you figured out pretty quick that the world isn’t split into good guys and bad guys. There’s a lot more gray area than you used to think, than you’d like to think. Matt said that about the Marines, too. Take your interaction with that pedophile. If we took a poll, half the people in New York City would say you should have blown that guy’s head off. No trial. Just execution. Instead, you gotta cuff him and sit back and take it as he makes those disgusting comments about your daughter. Now he’s eating meals paid for with your tax dollars. Same time, you lost it for five seconds and a nosy reporter—me—wrecks your career. My hunch is, despite all that, you’re still a believer. You gotta believe that the department is good, the Marines are good, even though you see the bad.”
A quick glance at the speedometer showed they were going nearly ninety now. He’d lost track of his speed. He eased
his foot off the gas. Something in what Cole said was right, but something was also way off. He couldn’t put it into words, though. “Interesting theory.”
“That’s it?” Cole wore a squint that said, “That ain’t it.”
The gas gauge needle now stood nearly flush with the halfway line. A sign indicated gas and food at the next exit. “That’s not it,” he said. “I’m just…I’m trying to figure out how to say it.” He took the exit and slowed, following a roundabout to a brightly-lit gas station. “It’s not that I have to believe, despite all the shit I see. I do believe. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of disillusionment. But this system—monumentally screwed up though it is—is literally the best thing we’ve got.” A sigh leaked out of him, like a tire going flat, and he turned into the station. “We need gas. Was hoping we’d make Philly on one tank, but…”
“I could use coffee anyway.”
“Real coffee, or a liquid candy bar?” Warren hoped the joke would break the tension.
“Call it whatever you want. There’s something I need to tell you, but I need sugar first.”
11
Cole waited in line to pay for snacks, watching through the window as Warren filled the tank. But this system—monumentally screwed up though it is—is literally the best thing we’ve got. His words echoed in her mind. He’d been talking about the thin blue line between violent criminals and their potential victims, a line she’d wanted to believe somehow existed a priori. What Warren meant was that it had to be drawn every day, by flawed individuals. She’d always considered journalism at its best to be another kind of line, a line that connected secretive governments, corporations, and other institutions to the people they claimed to serve. Lately, sifting through the sea of digital detritus that made up the modern media, it was difficult to find much reporting that fit that description. Like police officers, reporters and the media institutions they served were flawed. But she needed to believe they were better than the alternative.
