by Burton Hersh
I’d heard of limpet mines. I couldn’t remember where.
“Prick took no prisoners,” Hardagon said. “Went through everything, the computers especially. Poured some kind of oily shit all over every one of ‘em, then lit it. Stank more or less like kerosene. Knock out the storage disks, what we could tell.”
“You are looking at a law office,” Prescott Wallaye said gently, “on which a lobotomy has been performed.”
* * *
“That wouldn’t have helped anything,” Dad said when I apologized for not having gone immediately to Wallaye’s offices to pick up copies of our documents. “He’d have wanted one of his girls to copy them, and nobody is ever in a hurry over there. You know how it is in the South. The real problem is, we’re a day late and a nickel short altogether. We’re kind of bouncing around still, and they’re going to swat us like a couple of flies.”
I was cocked back in the Barcalounger. “They being Rick and his father?”
“They being all those Cuban meshuginas. At the very least. I talked with Wallaye just before you showed up and he said they had a pretty good security setup at the office -- remote cameras, motion detectors, entry sensors, what have you. Wired into one of the services. When those guys finally got there there was nothing – the sensors had been blocked, nothing on the tapes, never even a peep back at their command center. That wasn’t just Ricky doing his pa a favor. They’re bringing in the specialists. By the way, where were you last night? I called your house.”
“I was…I had a date?”
“The Indian girl?”
“She’s a woman.”
“I can see that. When you flounced in here your feet weren’t touching the floor. I never saw anybody so cuntstruck--”
“Dad, look—“
“I’m sorry. You’re right. That was off the reservation. So to speak.”
We both broke out laughing.
“I’m just….,” I said, “She gets to me like nobody I ever ran into. Authentic, she is absolutely authentic.”
Dad fiddled with his letter opener. “We need some help,” he said, finally. “We’re operating on very bad intelligence. For example, can you tell me whether our real estate bonds are registered someplace? With the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example?”
“I can find out. Maybe we can get some kind of lead from that FBI team. I finally remember where I first heard about limpet explosives. That reporter in Miami kept talking about stuff like that in connection with the Cubans.”
“Freddy Wilmot.”
“Yes. Rick’s dad, Ramon, had worked for a guy who at one stage anted up enough cash to get them started in the munitions business.”
“Riiight! You mentioned that. How is it that all roads in Miami lead back to the late, great Jorge Mas Canosa?”
“I could go talk with Wilmot and maybe shake out more background. Then – I also thought it might not be too bad an idea to see if we could come up with somebody in the trade, maybe a private investigator, to go down there and infiltrate their operation. So they would, like, back off—“
“Back off or kill us all. What we’re probably getting this week is the Havana version of humane treatment. No blood just yet. The family exemption.”
“And you intend to just..look away? Just let them clean us out? This is fucking war!” I was getting carried away; I couldn’t help it. “I really am astonished at how you’re reacting to this!”
“What you’re really doing is losing your sense of proportion. It’s only money, Michael. I never saw you when your blood was up like this. Where did you get that from?”
“Look. They want war, this isn’t going to stop. Why did I think your standing as a veteran—“
“You’re challenging my manhood? Jesus, that woman is bringing out in you a level of hutspah I honest to God never saw before. OK, not a Comanche word, but you know what I mean.”
“I appreciate the banter, but how about this? We reconnoiter a little. First I go see what the forensics guys in Tampa might have turned up. Then Sonny and I take a drive across Alligator Alley and he spooks out Mr. Perez y Cruz’s business files in Coral Gables. My guess is, Ramon’s got a copy of everything we had. And at the same time I could hunt down your friend Freddy Wilmot and see if he has anything else on your Cuban partners.”
“Our Cuban partners.” Dad grimaced. “ It’s all in the family.”
“Wendy is your daughter. I’m just the assistant zookeeper.”
“Already deserting the sinking ship?” Dad knit his brow. “Sonny. That must be Buffalo Whatshisface. The girlfriend’s brother. How could he help?”
“That’s what he does, I thought I told you. He infiltrates, he’s a professional scout. Get him to show you Mullah Omar’s dentures sometime.”
Dad looked sideways, reflecting. “You want to just, sort of, reach in.”
“They’re reaching in.”
Dad looked at me and let his heavy eyelids close slowly. “We would pay Sonny, obviously,” he said after a moment.
“Obviously. Just don’t bring that up if you’re talking to him. My sense is that he has a very highly developed sense of honor. We’ve got to go slow with anything that looks like buying him off.”
“You’re operating on very thin ice, and on a very limited acquaintance,” Dad concluded after a moment’s thought. “You’re right about one thing, though. Whatever we do, we definitely better get our butts in gear. The stock market lost more than two hundred points this morning. The real estate market isn’t going to lag things by a hellova lot.”
9
Early the next morning I pulled into the secure visitors’ parking area under the FBI field office in Tampa. Special Agent in Charge Vincent Hardagon had left my name with the attendant, who had a four-hour clip-on badge with my name printed on it ready in his stall. The moment I left my car a tall well-groomed man stepped out from behind a concrete pillar, patted me down matter-of-factly, and accompanied me to the elevator that took us to the second floor. Special Agent Hardagon’s office was all the way down the corridor.
Hardagon had his suitcoat hung over the back of his swivel chair and both his feet crossed at the ankles on the blotter of his desk. He looked very pink underneath the florescent lights. His belly obscured his belt. As I walked in he nodded.
“I appreciate your making time available on such short notice,” I opened.
“Your government is on the job twenty-four hours every day of the entire goddamned year.” Hardagon said, and passed me a very fat wink. Behind him, flanking the window, were official photographs of FBI Director Robert Mueller and J. Edgar Hoover as a young man. Hoover looked impressively clean-shaven and steely-eyed. On a side wall I noticed a framed diploma from Boston College Law School.
“I got my legal training in Boston too,” I said. “BU. We had a lot of regard for the BC faculty,” I said. “A couple of my most outstanding professors came over from there.”
That certainly sounded lame as hell to me, but I could see Hardagon responding. With evident effort, he returned both feet to the floor. “We can hold our own,” Hardagon said.
“You definitely got to Wallaye’s offices fast enough.”
“We don’t like bombings. You run those douche bags down within forty-eight hours or the next thing you know those Terrorism Center lunatics start showing up and the next thing after that you have to subpoena your own evidence out of Washington.”
“It’s a bureaucratic world.”
“You can bet your ass on that. Mister Hoover would not have cared for any of it, these days.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Not really a hellova lot, so far. No prints. Nothing in the carpets, nothing like that. ATF agrees that it was a limpet bomb, one of those old Navy numbers got stolen thirty years ago from a warehouse in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and most of ‘em been floatin’ around the Third World black market ever since. Al Qaeda probably used one of ‘em on that destroyer in the Persian Gulf.” Hardagon folded his tongue double in his ope
n mouth, and bit it. “Prick that took out that safe knew his onions, though. Surgical, definitely surgical.”
“I think I know who was behind that,” I said. “Wallaye had worked up the boilerplate when our family transferred a number of prime real-estate properties of ours to a hedge-fund outfit in Coral Gables. We had the right to buy them back if we wanted to. You have to infer that the Cubans who ran the fund had already put them up as collateral, and when they heard that we were thinking about redeeming them it made sense to obliterate the document base.”
That got Hardagon’s attention. He sat up in his chair. “Holy shit, that’s what this is about? You really think that?”
“Absolutely. Two nights earlier they got a man into my father’s study at home and rifled his files there.’
“How come you didn’t you report that?”
“Personal reasons. We had…connections with those people. We still thought we could work everything out.”
“So what’s your next step?”
“Get down to Miami. Maybe talk some sense into somebody. What are the chances you could get in touch with your counterpart down there in case I need something?”
Hardagon looked me in the eyes. “I could do that,” he said slowly. He picked a card out of a translucent organizer on his desk next to a leather-framed snapshot of a worried-looking woman with a large family lolling on the sand. Hardagon wrote down two names, both Hispanic, and several e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. “These lads work out of North Miami Beach.“ His voice dropped. “Be careful with those Miami cowboys of ours. Off the record, you are dealing down there with spiks from the community. They have a way of playing it a little political, if you know what I’m getting’ at.” Hardagon paused for emphasis. “You’re takin’ a hellova walk on the wild side, Buddy, I hope you realize that. I hope and pray you know what the bleep you’re doing.”
From Tampa I went directly to the St. Petersburg courthouse, where I was well known. A steely-haired matron from one of the better old families around town, Miss Daphne Millsap, ran the archives. She had expended a lot of energy over the previous two years attempting to introduce me to her niece, whom I had already encountered, repeatedly, and preferred to duck.
I explained to Miss Daphne that we were updating our office files, and needed fresh copies of the deed for every property Dad had acquired since we showed up in town, whether we still had title to it or whether we didn’t.
There was something mule-like about Miss Millsap’s long face. It had years earlier fallen into dry, luxuriant gray folds. She could be stubborn. When I set forth my request Miss Millsap looked a little aggrieved. That could take time, she only had one girl and that annoying colored teenager they made her hire, Obediah she thought his name was, poor soul couldn’t really read properly, one more federal regulation….
I couldn’t be more sympathetic, I told her. The problem was, I needed the information before I left town in a day or so. How was her niece? Lorna, wasn’t that? I had hoped to get in touch with her once I got back.
Miss Daphne studied me a moment through her milky cataracts. I was about to leave town? This was an emergency? Well, Lord knows she was sympathetic. Miss Millsap declared that she would pull those files personally. Would two o’clock be soon enough?
I said I could live with that.
Back in our office Buckley had already returned from lunch. One of his clients, a tackle with the Buccaneers until recently whose bonuses had long since departed up his nose, Andy Brunosovich, was developing fast at another high-paying sport. His athletic reflexes were intact enough still so that he could lie in wait for an eighteen-wheeler to jump a traffic light and dodge in under the tires and emerge with enough contusions to demand a hell of an insurance settlement. Buckley had already won him a couple of lucrative payouts. “This time it’s Travelers gonna pay the piper,” Buckley crowed as he danced by my door. “Up to their alligators in assholes, like the man says. You ought to see how that bozo has mucked up his legs this time. He’s got some raw clots going to sure ‘nuf knock any jury flat. Where have you been all morning?”
“Running down some paperwork for Dad.”
“Better you than me. Hear about that explosion on Second Avenue?”
“I went by to check it out. Prescott Wallaye does most of the corporate fine-tuning for Dad.”
“Could you tell what happened? Somebody said a pressure tank blew up.”
I looked at Buckley. It made sense that he would be out of the loop. “Whatever it was,” I said, “you ought to see the mess. Look, I’m going to be in and out for a while. Dad wants to pick up a little property on the other coast.”
“Sounds like fun stuff to me,” Buckley said. I never had seen him in a better mood.
Knowing Daphne Millsap, I was not surprised when she pulled all the files I requested before two. The whole pile ran to perhaps a thousand pages, way, way too much to reproduce on the antiquated machines around the courthouse. It was municipal policy that no documents were to leave the building. I pushed my status as an officer of the court -- tinctured by a few dropped references to Lorna -- and prevailed after a few minutes. Everything would be back in her hands inside an hour.
There was a Mister Speedy up 31st just beyond the central Post Office. The huge, cheerful, raffish beast in charge of the place did a fair amount of duplicating for us. He reproduced the entire groaning armful I brought in, collated and stapled, in triplicate, in less than forty-five minutes. I turned the originals back over to Miss Millsap ahead of time. Then I stashed one set in a safe-deposit box, wrapped one set up for Dad, and mailed the last to an Amherst classmate in Connecticut. I intended to call him before it got there.
* * *
Linda Meadows had given me Sonny’s telephone number in Clearwater. He indicated that he was free, and I agreed to wait for him at one of the rib houses on upper Gulf Boulevard. They were still serving the lunch menu when he arrived.
There are critical moments in life when you have to take a chance on somebody. By then Sonny had impressed me enough so that I told him everything. He sat there cocked back in his captain’s chair, watching me working down my Margarita and looking a little bemused, obviously taking everything I told him in.
“How about you,” I asked him when I had finished talking. “Could you use a drink?”
“With my bloodlines? How can I take the chance? That’s how you palefaces finally got us down, you know. Passing out bad whiskey and free beef and blankets from corpses who died from the smallpox. Christianity, maybe.”
“Linda will take a drink.”
“She’ll take a drink with you. Whatever she thinks you want she’ll do it your way. You’ve turned her into a squaw. Overnight, I can’t believe it. First she watched Charlie degenerate into a total boozehound, and in the end he takes away her little boy, and all of a sudden the spirit moves her and she is in love again?”
“I know what you’re trying to say,” I said. “Please understand it’s very much the same on my end.”
Sonny seemed to smile, perhaps a little grimly. “She is unprotected,” he said finally. “I went away, and she got dragged through those horseshit schools on the reservation. When she was thirteen they began to train her up as a powwow dancer. She had those quick moves, and the tribe made money every time she performed. She wound up what they call a Gallop Tribal Princess. Except that it wrecked her knees and ankles, it got so bad she was pretty much addicted for a while there to Flexeril. One day she was dancing in a pavilion on a beach off Lake Okeechobee and Savage Owl – Charlie – was playing the bass and that was that. He got a job up here, but then he dumped her. “
“She told me some of that.”
“If you wind up making it worse,” Sonny said, “I will probably kill you.”
“Big Brother is watching.”
Sonny broke into an enormous smirk. “I read that book,” he said. “I’ve got a thing for Orwell.”
The waiter had returned, and both of us decided on the sala
d bar. Sonny got back to the table first, and I could tell from the look of resolution on his hollow face that he had made up his mind. “What you want,” Sonny said, “is for me to penetrate those Cubans’ office and take their documents. So you can sue.”
“Something like that. Maybe both of us.” I think that surprised me at least as much as it did Sonny. “Wouldn’t it be safer if I were involved to at least, you know, keep watch…?”
Sonny picked at his cottage cheese. “I took too many bacon bits,” he said. “They taste artificial.” He ate a segment of canned peach. “Are you in any kind of shape?”
“Better than you might think. A lot of time on the bicycle.”
“We’re going to need a number of things, equipment-wise,” Sonny said.
“There is a mall not that far from here. We could start there. I hope you understand” -- I decided to risk it – “any expenses, certainly including your time, we expect to take care of—“
“My God I hope so,” Sonny said.
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping. Sonny had a rented Chevy Equinox, which we used. It would be harder to identify with either one of us once it had been turned in. I had been able to come up with the street address of Mr. Perez y Cruz’ headquarters by tracking down correspondence between Dad and Ramon. Sonny had his laptop in his car; it took him the best part of an hour to hack into the Coral Gables telephone records and nail down the supplier and the regulation voltage range it took to service the building.
Then I stopped off at my bank and withdrew a couple of thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties. After that we scrounged around the Tyrone Mall, dividing up Sonny’s checklist. It took just over an hour to acquire boots, coveralls, a sewing kit, small, high-intensity flashlights, some kind of graphite spray Sonny found in a hair salon and a number of caps machine-embroidered with the Verizon emblem and made-up names, Sam Pinchot for me and Bob Roundtree for Sonny.