by Louis Begley
I said there was a restaurant I liked on Madison Avenue between Seventy-Seventh and Seventy-Eighth that served dinner late and, at that hour, would be quiet. We agreed to meet there at nine-thirty.
While I was making the reservation, Jeanette let in the Agency’s technicians, two very polite former army infantry noncoms who reminded me of my platoon’s explosives specialist in Helmand. That was, in fact, where they had previously honed their skills, taking apart IEDs. Their examination of the Amazon package took no time at all.
It could be anything, sir, said the older of the two, really anything other than a charge of explosives. With your permission, we’ll take this baby to the lab. The report will go directly to Langley, possibly even this evening.
I called Scott, told him that Abner seemed to have thought of something less crude than a bomb, that the Agency people, who seemed first-rate, had taken the package to their lab for further examination, and that I was seeing Heidi later that evening.
All right, he said. Call me in the morning. I really want to talk.
—
Jet lag? Release of nervous tension? Some other reason? A tremendous fatigue overcame me, to the point that I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open. When Jeanette asked what time I would like to have dinner, I apologized for not letting her know earlier that I’d be going out—it was a plan I had just made—but first I’d lie down for a nap in the library.
That’s a good idea, Captain Jack, she answered. If you don’t mind my saying so, you look bad. Pale and haggard.
There was no hiding it. I admitted that I was worn out and looked forward to a good rest under her care.
I had expected to fall asleep at once. Instead, I found myself wide awake, unable to stop thinking about Abner.
If the package had contained an explosive device, obviously the wrapping and the shipping labels would all have to be fake. That was clear even in my befuddled state. Amazon doesn’t sell bombs, not yet. But according to the Agency’s specialists, there was no explosive in the package, and the package looked one hundred percent genuine. Why had Scott and I both suspected it wasn’t? The fact that I hadn’t bought anything from Amazon, and couldn’t think of anyone who’d send me a present purchased there and timed to arrive just as I returned to the city, a circumstance of which only Scott, Jeanette, and I were aware? If that was the reason, it didn’t seem compelling. Especially since making a fake Amazon package would be quite an undertaking. A skilled operator working with a forger would have had to take apart a real package, put in the place of its original contents whatever horse’s-ass gizmo Abner had decided would make an impression on me, paste on the outside counterfeit shipping labels, and find an appropriate way to put the reconstituted package in the hands of UPS or FedEx, however my package happened to have been delivered. Was it reasonable to suppose that even someone like Abner, a man of endless means and malice, would devote so much effort to one more practical joke in the campaign of harassment he had unleashed against me? The effort would be justified if the package were going to explode when I opened it. It might still seem justified if it turned out there was ricin in it or some other equally noxious chemical or biological agent. We’d find out soon. If the package was inoffensive, chances were that it was also genuine, whatever it contained and whoever sent it, and that Scott and I had overreacted. Scott was taking his role as a nanny too seriously. As for me, clearly I was on edge. I needed to calm down and think more clearly.
But suddenly I saw the other side of the coin. It wasn’t necessarily true that if the package was inoffensive it was likely to be a genuine Amazon article, and, if it was both inoffensive and fake, there were implications going far beyond any campaign against me or my whimsical notion of a solitary forger employed by Abner in his effort to harass me. They derived from the ubiquity and, for lack of a better expression, all-American respectability of Amazon’s packages, and the doors to a whole world of crime that dispatching convincing fakes through seemingly normal Amazon channels would open for Abner and his businesses. One sees an Amazon package, and what does one think is in it? A book, a DVD, a scanner, a toy, mouthwash, power tools—an endless and growing array of products available in normal commerce. But suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that, instead of the foregoing, this parallel Amazon shipped heroin and cocaine and cash on behalf of drug cartels and money launderers. And explosives, as well as fuses, timing devices, and the whole gamut of other paraphernalia you can look up on jihadist websites for use by terrorists and copycats. I was willing to bet any amount that Amazon’s packages weren’t tested for explosives and weren’t processed through whatever apparatus is used to detect the presence of large amounts of cash in boxes such as Amazon uses, for instance, to ship paper for home printers. Why would they be? Arguments over collecting state sales taxes, working conditions in its warehouses, and the effect of its sales tactics on book publishing and independent bookstores all put aside, one doesn’t think of Amazon as a criminal enterprise. Now shift the focus and look at Abner Brown’s businesses, such as my uncle Harry’s road map revealed them to be. You’d find that each of his myriad legitimate “good” businesses had an evil twin, also owned by Abner, sometimes sucking its good sibling dry and always usurping its identity for criminal purposes. That, in simplest terms, was his business model. I didn’t think for a moment that Abner owned “good” Amazon. But given his wealth and power and his “interests”—smuggling, drug manufacture and distribution, evasion of North Korea and Iran sanctions, and money laundering, to mention just a few, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to hypothesize his having created a “bad” Amazon, concealed somewhere in the state of Washington or whatever other place worked best for the purposes of camouflage and verisimilitude, creating on an assembly line fake Amazon packages charged with the mission of facilitating, through shipment of proscribed illegal merchandise in the U.S. and internationally, the business of its evil siblings. One could imagine it also as an independent contractor of sorts, distributing heroin and cocaine, and other more modern drugs, on behalf of the Mexican cartels and Italian and Eastern European crime families. If that nightmare vision approached reality, nothing could have been simpler for Abner, if he was in the mood to amuse himself, than to ship to me in that innocuous Amazon package whatever had struck his sick fancy.
These thoughts led back to the basic question that had been nagging at me since the last days in Torcello. Why did Abner choose this time, so soon after having arranged to have Kerry murdered, to show his hand? Since he had apparently decided to have me killed too, why advertise that intention? Why the cat-and-mouse game? When he sent Slobo to kill Harry and Harry’s secretary, Barbara Diamond, he gave no advance notice. I couldn’t believe that he had told Kerry she was next on his list. She was a smart girl, and she’d seen how dangerous he was. If she’d been told her number was up, she’d have sought help. She would have called Scott. She knew he’d have her back; it didn’t matter that she and I were no longer together. She had kept up friendships with former colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office and had connections at the New York office of the FBI. At the very least, she would have gotten hold of Martin Sweeney, the retired FBI agent I’d hired to be her bodyguard after I made Brown understand I had the goods on him. What was different about me? Why bother with the letters I received on Torcello and as soon as I returned to New York? And why send that Amazon package? If it was genuine, but its contents were the equivalent of a drop-dead note or one of his habitual billets-doux, I’d still guess he was the sender. What was the point? If on the contrary it was a fake, he was plenty smart enough to know that I would come to the conclusions I had just reached and wouldn’t keep them to myself. Why would he decide to reveal this new and terrifying aspect of his empire, the mere existence of which was bound to galvanize law-enforcement agencies?
Sadism would have to be a component of any explanation of his dealings with me—perhaps it was the motor that drove most of his actions—sadism and its corollary, the desire to dom
inate, to abase. If Abner thought that, rattled by his antics, I would stumble, he underestimated me grossly. On the other hand, nothing I had seen so far had shown him to be a good judge of character. When it came to me, add rage and loathing to sadism. He must really hate my guts. How could it be otherwise? Each time he thought of the countless investigations, enforcement actions, and lawsuits targeting his businesses and possibly threatening him personally, my face must appear before his eyes. It was I who figured out that Harry’s suicide was disguised murder, who found the phone on which the murder scene had been recorded, who got Slobo to confess that he had killed Harry and Barbara Diamond, and I who in turn killed Slobo. Worst of all, it was I who found Harry’s road map to Abner’s criminal enterprises and turned it over to the government.
Perhaps in order to get away from these thoughts, at some point I did doze off and for at least half an hour slept very hard. The telephone awakened me. It was Scott.
You won’t believe this, he said. Inside the package, wrapped in all the usual bubble wrap, as though it were a jar of Stilton, is a can of rat poison. “Bonham’s Just One Bite. Kills rats and Norway rats.” Scotch-taped to it a card with a message typed in solid capital letters: ENJOY!
Scott was laughing his head off.
Holy shit, I said. Can you trace the sender?
Inside, I was cursing. So the package was genuine. My elegant theory about Amazon’s evil twin was going up in smoke. Amazon sold rat and every other kind of rodent poison. After Slobo killed Harry’s cat, I’d ordered mouse pellets from Amazon for the house in Sag Harbor. It had never been necessary before.
Scott laughed again. We’re a step ahead of you; we’ve already tried. Amazon has no record of such a package. The information on it doesn’t correspond to anything in their database. Plus, so far as we’ve been able to find out, there’s no such thing as Bonham’s rat poison, and, much more to the point, no such product is sold by Amazon. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! The name, though, is similar to that of a couple of popular products. Somebody’s got a great sense of humor.
We do have a lot to talk about, I told Scott. I can’t thank you enough. Or the Agency. Can one send the Agency a thank-you note? Or flowers?
You can skip the flowers if you manage to stay alive and get your ass over here. This is a big deal.
No kidding! I replied. I’ll call you first thing in the morning.
I suppressed a guilty feeling of self-satisfaction as I hung up. So I was right: Abner ran a counterfeit Amazon! A fact so mind boggling that it suggested an answer to the questions I’d been putting to myself about why he chose to send me stupid messages and now this package. One that perhaps trumped all others. It came down to this: the possession of a fortune estimated on the basis of officially known assets at in excess of sixty billion dollars—and surely far greater if you added the value of the illegal businesses and the billions in cash he probably hid in secret accounts at banks operating in jurisdictions that welcome them—and his ability to impose his extremist views on members of Congress and state legislatures had imbued him with a sense of power and personal invulnerability so limitless that he no longer paid attention to normal concepts of prudence and risk. They were made for little people and had nothing to do with him. Why shouldn’t he then play with me like a cat with a mouse? He was going to kill me, but in his own way and in his own time. In the meantime, he was having fun. That’s why he hadn’t yet told Jovan or one of the Torcello archer’s brothers or cousins to kill me with a well-aimed hollow-point bullet.
But wait. Might it not also be true that this game gave me a chance to turn the tables on him, despite all his power? I’d watched plenty of real-life and animated cartoon cats trying to catch mice. I knew the strange moments of vacancy and absentmindedness that punctuate the hunt. The cat has the mouse cornered, but suddenly, instead of pouncing, he has some other idea. Or his mind goes blank. The mouse scurries away. Sometimes the cat regains his concentration quickly enough to corner the mouse again. Sometimes he loses her, and, in real life, if you’re there, looks at you with a puzzled air that says: Come on, stupid, help! Where’d that mouse go? All right, Abner Cat: I will wait for that moment when your playfulness will mix with distraction. Because that’s when I, Jack Dana, will get you. Just what that meant, I wasn’t sure. I hoped it meant I’d kill him, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d get to use the switchblade or the Ka-Bar on him, or even to put a bullet between his eyes. He was too well guarded. Unless I got very lucky, I’d have to settle for sending him to a supermax. Which would I prefer? Seeing him put away for life with ample time to contemplate his disgrace and ruin or watching him die? I wasn’t sure.
—
Sometime during that interminable afternoon, I did fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, and thirty pull-ups on the bar Harry had installed for me in the bathroom when I first moved in with him after the months spent at Walter Reed, showered, and dressed. I arrived at the restaurant where I was meeting Heidi five minutes early and ordered an extra-dry Gordon’s gin martini straight up with a twist. Not waiting till she arrived wasn’t very polite, but, given the lateness of the hour, I thought she’d forgive me. Nine-forty. No sight of Heidi. Glad that at least I had my drink, I checked my iPhone. Lots of junk mail but nothing from her. She was good and late, but I had no doubt that she’d show up. How many hours was it since the lunch with Simon? I was feeling seriously hungry and asked the waiter for bread. Both my father and Uncle Harry had been strong believers in not drinking hard liquor on an empty stomach. I shared their belief, but it had become difficult to put it into practice, bars no longer serving nuts or crackers to nibble on. According to a bartender I’d asked about it, the reason is hygiene! It was now considered unsafe—if not disgusting—to have more than one customer stick his unsterilized fingers into a bowl of peanuts. Whatever. I’ve never heard of a barfly catching typhoid fever from a pretzel, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen or hasn’t happened. For instance in Karachi. If the alternative consists of having Purell wipes dispensers on bar counters or having to slip on latex gloves before fishing out a peanut, I’m willing to give up nibbles.
The issue became moot when the waiter, after what had felt like a long wait, at last brought the bread basket. I wolfed down a piece of focaccia, went on sipping my martini, and daydreamed about the first time with Kerry. It had been the evening of my return from Brazil. I had spent four weeks incommunicado, working on my third novel, on a cattle ranch in the Mato Grosso belonging to a client and friend of Harry’s. When the time came to go home, the ranch manager drove me to the Cuiabá airport. The propeller plane I was taking from there to Brasília connected with a flight to New York. There had been no Internet access at the ranch, and cell-phone reception was virtually nonexistent, so that the first time I was able to read my email since I arrived in the Mato Grosso was when I settled down in the Cuiabá departure lounge. Right away, I saw the message from Kerry. Three weeks old, it said that Harry was dead. I called her immediately, and she told me the circumstances, which defied understanding and belief. A suicide by hanging, he’d killed his adored cat before taking his own life, no letter left for me or anyone else! There was no reason, absolutely no reason, I had told myself as I thought about it obsessively, for Harry to have taken his life. Kerry and I had lunch the next day at a Japanese restaurant in the city and agreed to have dinner that evening at her apartment to talk about what had happened in greater detail. Until then I’d been aware of her as Harry’s favorite associate, the cynosure of his eyes, whom a year or so earlier he succeeded in having elected to partnership at his law firm. I had seen her no more than twice—at parties given to celebrate the publication of my first and second novels, and at a large dinner after the second party. She was athletically built and almost as tall as I. Her pale face, her eyes more green than blue, and a huge chignon of curly black hair made for a striking appearance. But except for that formidable chignon, she looked and dressed both times I saw her previously, as well as at th
e Japanese restaurant, like other successful young women partners in top New York law firms or investment banks. That evening, though, when she received me at her own apartment, she’d let her hair down to her shoulders and wore a long blue-and-green sheath of Indian silk and gold lamé ballet slippers that drew attention to her feet, which were extraordinarily large even for such a big girl. It has seemed to me since then that a sure sign of falling in love is the realization that aspects of a woman’s appearance she isn’t proud of, like those oversize feet of Kerry’s—anything that she makes halfhearted efforts to keep out of sight—become the aspect of her body you single out and particularly cherish. That is what happened to me later that evening when we were having drinks seated at the opposite ends of her living room sofa. By habit or design, she stretched her legs so that her naked feet were an inch or two from my left hand. I dared to caress them, as if they needed reassurance. To my astonishment, the feet were not withdrawn. They began, instead, to rub against my hand, a gesture like that of a cat rubbing his back against your leg to show he is pleased or, on the contrary, to remind you that there is something he wants to which you have foolishly forgotten to attend. The acceptance of my caress, her way of reciprocating—both incontrovertible signs of trust—filled me to the brim with tenderness and gratitude. Later that evening, we made love, then resumed our conversation about Harry and the discovery of pervasive criminal behavior in Abner Brown’s businesses he had made in the course of acting as Brown’s principal lawyer, and before morning made love again twice. A couple of weeks later, I asked Moses Cohen to prepare a new last will and testament for me and left to Kerry almost all my earthly goods, just as though she were my wife. That was how I thought of her, never doubting the solidity of our love. Then came the misunderstanding. The catastrophe. She left me, and the dream shattered.