by Burton Hersh
I remembered a big gun shop just off the 54th St. Exit of the turnpike where the outspoken proprietor would sell you anything this side of a howitzer, no questions asked. I had no permit to carry. Gun law prohibitions in Florida are probably a little less stringent than those in Northern Mexico, but they remain in force. Sonny looked skeptical, but I was able to sweet-talk the proprietor into parting company – allegedly a “private sale,” in the alley behind the place -- with a couple of snub-nosed nickel-plated thirty-eights along with a box of jacketed hollow-point cartridges. Technically a private sale, no registration required. I pushed about half of the cartridges immediately into the clips.
One sideline of the shop was a locksmith. Our place of business had a lot of corroded locks that tended to jam sometimes, Sonny explained to the grizzled clerk. What would he charge for a set of picks and angle bars? They settled on $23.
We paid for everything with cash. Our shopping spree ended at the familiar Home Depot off 22nd Ave. We each ended up with a black, jumbo-sized tool kit with a top handle and deep drawers, along with pliers and screwdrivers and alligator clips and a lot of latex gloves and a box of the discardable elastic booties painters wear. “The Marx Brothers man up for a life of crime,” I attempted to joke to Sonny, who grunted uneasily.
Just then Sonny was living day by day, bunking with a fellow veteran in Clearwater. Around five he lugged his duffel bag into my bungalow off the Oval Crescent Annex in the Pink Streets. It needed picking up. “You must have some kind of a printer with your computer here,” he suggested as he rather delicately relocated my rain gear and a plate that had recently held most of a carrot cake onto the floor and off-loaded his duffel bag onto my couch. “We’re going to need some kind of telephone-company credentials.” My computer was in the bedroom. He clicked onto Paintbrush immediately and pieced together two fairly convincing Verizon ID cards, each embellished with serial numbers and grainy portraits we took with my cell phone. Then he dug a two-inch roll of translucent packaging tape out of his duffel bag and covered the cards and trimmed the edges.
“The Army taught you all this?” I asked.
“Some of it. For the kind of duty I tend to wind up catching I put in a couple of semesters with the Agency’s Technical Services Division. Safe-crackers, guys with breaking-and-entering PhDs, forgers, arsonists. More often than not on restricted furlough from San Quentin or Sing Sing.” He had already settled down on the bed and was fastidiously clipping the embroidered names out of several of the hats we bought and sewing them onto the coveralls. “Actually, a lot of this stuff I figured out earlier. Busting guys out of dear old Valley Forge Military Academy. After a while even those grungy rich-kid classmates of mine got sick of beating their big-deal meat. Not to speak of the maggots in the oatmeal. There was a strip joint not that far down Eagle Road.”
“It’s all about preparation,” Sonny picked it up once we were on the road around five the next morning. “Whatever you are able to anticipate won’t bite you in the ass. Tribal wisdom.”
“Which tribe?” I was starting to pick up on Sonny’s variety of leg pull.
“The Levites, actually. You’ll find it in Leviticus.”
“We must be from the same tribe.”
“I don’t think so,” Sonny said. “You haven’t got enough of a nose.”
We were passing over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge; early morning glare was turning the Gulf into one endless sheet of pewter all the way to the horizon. Pelicans were capering, hungry. “I think I mentioned this,” I said after a while. “You’d like my father. He’s also very good at putting people on.”
“Maybe I would. What’s his nose like?”
“Bigger than mine.”
“I suppose there’s hope.”
* * *
We got off the turnpike just east of Naples and gassed up and ate breakfast quickly at a Dunkin’ Donuts before starting east on U.S. #41. A lot of coffee helped. Merely passing through the Everglades makes it evident that most of the interior of Florida is basically a bog of grasslands punctuated by cattle ranches and orange groves. Looking out the window of the BMW made Sonny thoughtful. “I keep reading that the communities on the coasts are sucking up the water from the Swamp,” Sonny said after a while. “People are afraid the entire shootin’ match is going to parch out. I would bet you that long before that happens we’ll all be dead of cow farts. Have you ever seen so many Black Angus?”
Then we kept still for a while. Just before the Tamiami Canal was some kind of Welcome Center, complete with a dock for airboat rides and rental canoes and a makeshift zoo you could tour for five dollars. Sonny pulled a couple of Orange Crushes from an upright freezer and handed me one and extended a ten-dollar bill to the cherubic soul behind the counter, a short woman with a barrel of a belly and amazingly thick, spatulate fingers. “I been workin’ here since I was three years old,” the woman volunteered immediately. “We got a messed-up family, it goes every whicha way. Dad is an alcoholic, but none of us youngsters drink. I mean – all that much. Them there is genuine native panthers.”
Both panthers pushed up onto their haunches and stretched.
“Mother raised us kids to love the Lord and keep our knees together, if you know what I’m hintin’ at there. Not that I been completely pure, entirely. I got a kid by one o’ my – you know where I’m goin’ with this – childhood encounters. Erskine. He out there terrifying the livin’ excrement out of some o’ them slaphappy tourists we get to stop off here sometimes. In one of our finest leaky airboats.”
One of the panthers yawned. The air was sultry as noon approached, harder to breathe. A pair of bottle-nosed African crocodiles lay one across the other, too sluggish to mate. Next to them a flock of cockatoos squawked at us, resenting the interruption. We moved along quickly to the adjacent black bears. Their cages stank.
Back outside the cage area a scrawny old redneck was waiting with a squirming two-foot alligator clutched in front of his overalls. Its jaws were taped just behind the nostrils. “This here’s my hubby,” the woman said. “He used to wrestle them ugly, brainless critters. Gettin’ a little bit old for shit like that these days, not that he can’t still – you know – get his you-know-what to salute like a goddamned trooper when I give him his justification.”
The husband smiled, revealing very few teeth.
“I suspect you give him five dollars he will permit you to hold that varmint there while he snaps a photograph.”
“Maybe next time,” I said. I gave the woman the five dollars anyhow. We went to use the facilities, which smelled only a little more rank than the bear cages.
10
U.S. 41 intersected with the turnpike south of Miami, at the northern edge of Coral Gables. Just after we turned right into the commercial downtown Sonny spotted a run-down gas station piled up with discarded mufflers and a stack of crank cases beneath a banner announcing USED CARS. We gassed up and Sonny explained in surprisingly precise Spanish to the cubanita at the cash register that we intended to move his cousin out of her apartment now that her boyfriend had flown the coop and we would like to lease one of the vans in the back until the next morning. The deal went down for $400, no exchange of information necessary, $200 back on the return of the van.
Sonny eased the van out from among the weeds in the alley that threatened to clot the almost bald tires and jacked it around a diesel truck body on blocks. I followed him down the alley in the BMW and around a corner and into another alley, where he stopped.
“Your Spanish is terrific,” I said, pulling over.
“Everybody picks up a lot of it on the rez. They hit it hard in the military because our people spend so much time sniffing around the Americas. Especially the cocaine belt.”
“No small asset.” I watched him transfer his stuff from the trunk of the BMW into the van. “What happens now?” He was rummaging through one of the side pockets of his duffel bag and promptly slid out a stencil set and masking tape and a pint can of spray paint.
“Where�
�d you get that?”
“At the Home Depot. While you were in the checkout line.”
“I didn’t see you get that.”
“Nobody did. I boosted it.” I must have looked at him. “I have to keep my hand in.” Sonny pursed his lips. “Now that you mention it, I thought the mama at the counter spotted something. She couldn’t really have believed I was that heavy hung.”
“Just wasn’t going to make a fuss.”
“Why would she?”
Sonny had already started taping stencils onto the van’s less dented left forward door. It was going to read VERIZON, with Specialty Subcontractors below that. He laid a heavy coating of white paint across the stencils. “We’re doing this mostly for the security types,” Sonny explained. “They won’t really bother to check out the identification, especially if they see a vehicle across the street. That’s almost always enough. By their cars shall ye know them, like the man said. We’re Americans, after all.”
Within a couple of minutes the paint was dry enough to strip the tape off the stencils. In another of the pockets of his duffel bag Sonny eased out something that looked like the pelt of a dead rat but turned out to be artificial facial hair, which he daubed lightly with a stickum that smelled like gum arabic and applied to his face while squatting in front of the van’s tall driver’s-side mirror. The transformation was astonishing. “You look like the Grand Vizier in Ali Baba,” I said.
“Works fine most everywhere, especially in the Muslim world. I was the flavor of the month in Mogadishu for quite a while. Everybody I ran into thought I might have been his nephew. Where did you put that spray-on graphite?”
I took my blazer off and Sonny told me to pull in my lips and sprayed both cheeks and around my mouth. “We’re after that five-day-growth look. I’ll tell people I picked you out of the welfare pool.” He cleaned up the margins with a handkerchief. “Just grunt, no considered legal opinions.”
“You make it fun. Humiliating, but fun.”
We put the coveralls on, and the caps. I started to extract the .38s from my rucksack when Sonny stopped me. “Leave those in the car,” he said.
“What if somebody catches us?”
“So—what would you do then? Blow away the janitor? Maybe the cleaning lady?”
“I guess.”
“We’ll be OK.”
The older office building in which Sunrise Medical Ventures/Capital Partners maintained its headquarters was on a side street a block and a half off Ponce De Leon Boulevard. I stowed the BMW in the long-term parking section of a garage a couple of blocks south. Sonny looked over the office building while I circled the block in the van. “It’s pretty clear both the electrical entrance and the land-line hookups come in on the left side, somewhere towards the back,” Sonny decided. Around 4:30 I parked the van itself in front, conspicuous, in one of the delivery bays. The late-afternoon sky threatened to cloud up.
According to the directory inside, Ramon operated out of Suite 306. The foyer itself was mock-Venetian, polished marble floors and red velvet chairs with griffin faces carved into the arms.
Lugging our tool kits, we roamed the entry floor until Sonny located the primary storage closet. Inside, across from an inside wall of steel shelves stacked up with mop-heads and jugs of Lysol, there was no mistaking the array of junction boxes and circuit breakers that fed the offices. “Here’s an antique touch,” Sonny said, picking open the cover of one. “Threaded fuses.” He reached up and unscrewed the hexagonal glass fuse beneath #306. Then he screwed it back. After a few minutes he unscrewed the fuse again, then tightened it up. “Just a little flicker,” Sonny said. “We’ll get a better welcome.”
“You’re not going in now?”
“Just a peep. Only way to find out whether there’s battery backup.”
“How about me, though? They’ve seen me. At least Ramon has.”
“Never make the connection. Just – you know, slouch. My Neanderthal apprentice. Mumble whenever I speak to you. Glare a lot. Don’t touch anything.”
My mouth was going dry. We took the stairs up. My ears were pounding as we reached door 306. Inside, a receptionist was picking at papers on her desk and freshening up her lipstick. Another woman with big hair and a world of cleavage was filing.
“Hey, you have problem with the power, I think, hunh?” Sonny demanded of the receptionist in a heavy glottal accent. “Kaput, comes and goes.”
The receptionist looked up a moment, glanced at the Verizon IDs we’d concocted, then returned to the image in her compact.
“Mucho problema,” Sonny said, and leered. “Si?”
Ramon, in an open shirt, stepped out of the inner office. I turned away.
“Big storm,” Sonny assured him. “Big storm. But not to worry.”
Ramon brushed by Sonny without bothering to nod. “Caridad, no se olvide, todos los documentos para manana, O.K.? ” he muttered to the woman who was doing the filing, and gave her shoulder a squeeze and left.
There was an enclosed panel mounted next to the main door into the suite. His long back blocking everybody’s view, Sonny scraped at something a moment and pocketed whatever came loose. “No worries now,” he announced to the women. “We protect every-things.” After one gallant flicker of his hand he led me into the hall.
We waited by the stairwell until the building had pretty well emptied out. I reparked the van, blocks away. Both of Ramon’s secretaries left minutes after he did. “What was that accent?” I asked Sonny.
“Albanian. Nobody gets ‘em where they live like an illiterate Albanian speaking horseshit Spanish.”
“They bought it, obviously.”
“Now that I copped the battery,” Sonny said, obviously elated, “We turn the alarm off.’’ We repaired to the storage closet, where Sonny quickly loosened a couple of set screws and killed all telephone service to suite #306. A couple of minutes after seven we took the stairs up and pulled on the latex gloves and the booties. Sonny picked the lock and we let ourselves in.
Originally we had decided to wait until eleven or so to ransack the place. But there were louver blinds on all the windows; better yet, one of those sundown monsoons that splash down suddenly along the Florida coastline was sweeping in from Biscayne Bay, punctuated by a lot of lightning. Our little diode-encrusted penlights weren’t going to attract any attention on the street.
Sonny made his way from file cabinet to file cabinet, picking open the locks drawer by drawer. I followed him going through the files. Halfway down the second cabinet I spotted what I was after. The dozen or so deeds, bills of transfer, affidavits, letters of commitment, securitization boilerplate, statements of intent: everything that constituted the blood and bones of our understanding with Ramon’s hedge fund, bulging, sequestered in one place. I eased the entire hanging file into the bottom drawer of my tool kit.
“OK?” Sonny said. He flashed a light in my face. “You’ve stopped sweating.”
“Let’s keep going. I’m getting into this.”
The fourth and last cabinet dealt primarily with family affairs. I found a file full of the authorizations Rick needed to pass back and forth between Florida and Cuba. Some dealings with the property-holders in La Playa del Perro, the location of most of the shoreline the Toronto intermediaries were after. I grabbed that too.
“You ought to take it easy,” Sonny said. “You need to leave enough so that nobody catches on at first that anybody’s been through this place. Even then they’ll never be that sure. Leave ‘em confused. These are heavy-duty muchachos. You really don’t want this thing to escalate. We haven’t got any limpet mines.”
“You sound like my father.”
“You’re calling the shots.” The storm was driving at the windows; Sonny was re-locking the file cabinets. “You know,” Sonny said. “I hate to bring it up, but there’s probably a safe around here someplace.”
The safe was in Ramon’s inner office, behind a sliding panel adjacent to a small bar. It was a Mosler, not that formidable.
“Not that I’m interested in hanging around, but I could probably find my way into that box.” Sonny speculated. “It’s still early.”
“You’re showing off.” I was again starting to feel my stomach sinking. “Maybe a few minutes.”
Sonny crouched in front of the tumblers, extracted a stethoscope from his tool kit, and peeled off the latex glove on his right hand. He had some emery paper, with which he seemed to polish his fingertips. Listening, spinning left, then right, then left again, he elicited the thunk of release on the second series. The heavy door swung open, revealing several hard-wood cases, a shoe box, and what looked like a rack of specimen bottles.
The cases contained jewelry – emerald and diamond bracelets and necklaces, a number of uncut stones, five Rolex watches. The shoe box looked much more interesting. It was entirely hand-written letters and print-outs from various ministries in Cuba. Sonny eased his glove back on and looked the letters over. “What seems to be going on is that Ramon here is doubling as a contact man for a number of Castro’s bureaucrats. They know the ship is sinking. It’s obvious to everybody down there – you can’t miss it, I’ve been into and out of Havana a couple of times recently on hit-and-run missions. So -- these guys have been sitting on assets confiscated since 1959. Ramon is the key guy in getting them smuggled out and into depositories all over the place – Montreal, Bern, the Cayman Islands…. Enrique comes up a lot – that’s your brother-in-law, right? As a courier. Ramon appears to be scarfing up a third as his commission to help haul out this stuff. Hey, even a couple of notes from Raul!”
“Can you imagine how all this would play in the Miami Cuban community? I said. “Jorge Mas Canosa would rear up bullshit out of his mausoleum. What’s in the specimen bottles?”
Sonny put his light on them. They seemed to be filled with sand, with a label on each; what looked like a map was very carefully folded and propped up next to the bottles. Sonny picked a bottle up. “Yttrium,” one read, with the subscript Matanzas. “Yttrium is a rare earth,” Sonny said. “The kind of crap you need for superconductors or microwave filters. The Chinese have been hogging the market, so the hunt is on to find reliable sources in the West. Advanced physical chemistry is a requirement for my environmental studies curriculum. Matanzas is a province in Cuba, probably where they pulled this core sample.”