by Daniel Pyne
Kirby reached across the table and put his hand lightly on Colter’s shoulder, making her jump. “Can we talk? In private?”
Her hand jerked up to where he touched her, as if she’d been burned. “Don’t do that.”
Kirby glanced away, uneasy, and found Mahrez staring at him. Deadpan.
“I don’t like to be touched,” she said.
Mahrez shifted his gaze to Colter, and looked almost bemused. She got up quickly and went out the door. Kirby started to follow her into the hallway, but before he left the room:
“I’ll wear a wire for you, sure,” Mahrez called after them, weirdly cheerful.
—
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Kirby asked.
They were alone outside the interview room, but Kirby and Colter nevertheless kept their voices low. The door was closed. The guard who had escorted Mahrez over from County had retreated all the way down to the elevators, and stood smoking beside a standing ashtray, blowing fat rings and watching them float away.
“Doing? Well, I think I just made a deal with a suspect you said was uncooperative,” Colter said. Mahrez, visible through the window in the door, slouched and stretched his legs out and waited for them to come back.
“No no no. Wire him for a talk with the mayor? When did that become an option?”
“Excuse me, I thought I was in charge here. Do I have to clear everything with staff?”
Kirby let the sarcasm slide. “And what does the mayor have to do with anything? I thought this was about crack cocaine and the drug pipeline from Mexico to the States.” But as he said it, he already understood that it wasn’t.
Colter measured her words as she might trying to explain something complicated to a child: “Mayor Poole is one target of a federal anticorruption investigation being coordinated out of the Justice Department. As part of my assignment here, I’ve been tasked, by Ed Meese himself, one of several priorities I received with my marching orders, to help facilitate that investigation by gathering evidence and testimony about Mr. Poole’s alleged hijinks during his turn in City Hall—and, apropos of your question, in so doing, help clean up our local government, which, in turn, should make it more difficult for drug dealers like Mr. Mahrez to operate with impunity in this community.”
“Alleged drug dealer.”
Colter smiled dismissively. “You’re an advocate, Mr. Kirby. Not an arbiter. And your client is the American people. Never forget that.”
“Don’t you think that was a little too easy, though? I mean. He jumped at your offer. Like a trout. Which he isn’t.”
Colter tilted her head, cute, condescending. “By informing on his friend to squirm out from under a three-strike beef? He’s jumping to exactly what I want, I’m not sure I follow your logic, Mr. Kirby.”
Kirby wasn’t sure he had any. He just had a feeling, born of too many prosecutions gone sideways, or too many cases, period; too many lies and compromises and devil’s bargains in which justice was a dream somebody had once and forgotten when they woke up. He wanted to say to her: You’re young, you see the world in primary colors and assume that your simple, self-serving dictums are unimpeachable, when the truth is that everything’s confusing, real life is a swirling vortex of a million colliding aspirations and intentions over which we have no real control, we can only hope to endure them, and try not to be crushed by them, or do irreparable harm. Instead, he said, “I just think you are in way over your head with this guy. He’s smart. He’s playing you. He’s a survivor.”
Colter brushed it away like lint from her blouse. “I admire that about him. Call your girlfriend at the FBI,” she said. “Let’s not give him a chance to change his mind, shall we?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Something in the sidelong way she looked at him made Kirby unsettled. Did she know about Tina? What else did she know about him? He felt like some poor bug flittering to its doom against a humming patio electronic discharge device.
He felt a current go through him.
“Add Agent Zappacosta to the Task Force, tell her we’ve got a body wire surveillance she can run point on,” the U.S. attorney continued. “It’ll look good, come performance-review time.”
Kirby made one more lifeless run at it: “He’s playing you.”
“Well, I don’t play. So.”
They said nothing for a moment, then she went back inside the room to finish up her deal with Mahrez, and Kirby stayed in the hallway, in the faint wake of her perfume, in the stolid institutional quiet, ignoring the static, trying to focus on controlling the body count in this new unwinnable war, and resign himself to his foot soldier’s role in it.
—
THE SECRETARY WHO ANSWERED the phone at City Hall sounded baked. A raspy, high, hollow voice: “Office of the mayor.” Mahrez pictured a mousy young college grad who’d gone door to door getting out votes and maybe engaged in some oral extracurricular with the bachelor candidate a couple times—hennaed hair pulled back lopsided, delicate, doper-deliberate, professional, betrayed only by pupils gaped a little too wide and sclera still faintly bloodshot pink despite repeated baths of Visine—and then realized that he was actually conjuring up Poole’s high school girlfriend, Cheryl, who drowned off Todos Santos one stoned, hot night in ’75.
“Hi. This is Nick Mahrez. Is he in?”
The polite pause of nonrecognition, but hedging her bets, because it could be Someone Important. “What was the name again?”
“Nick Mahrez. M-A-H-R-E-Z. But pronounced like the home-run hitter.”
“I don’t know him. Does he play for the Padres?”
“No.”
The slightly annoyed hesitation. “Can I ask what this is regarding?”
An ambush, Mahrez thought. But he said, “I’m an old friend. It’s personal.” Then he added, “Tell him it’s about a fin key.”
In the office with him, where they’d prepped him and rigged him up, the FBI agent named Tina and U.S. Attorney Colter listened in on a common line, recording the call, trading a baffled look: fin key? Mahrez winked at them.
Now the secretary was confused. “Oh. Okay.”
Mahrez said, “It’s just I need to get the fins off my stick, and he’s got my only key.”
“One moment, please.”
The hold music was Roxy Music. Poole’s stubborn commitment to Bryan Ferry, Mahrez mused. He looked down at the typed page of questions in front of him. Stared at them blankly, wondering if the Feds, watching from across the room, expected him to memorize them.
The secretary clicked back on. “He’s just getting off the other line. Can you hold?”
“All day,” Mahrez said. “All day.”
—
DRIVING THROUGH STOP-AND-GO downtown traffic in his Aston Martin, Mahrez kept wiping the palms of his hands on his jeans. In his rearview mirror: the federal sedan containing Agent Tina Z. and her associate—what was his name? Bingham or Ingram or something. With the mullet and soul patch.
—
STILL PHOTOGRAPHS and surveillance video would afterward show him hurrying up the steps and into City Hall. Tina Z. had a slick little listening rig through which she could hear the filtered rustling of Mahrez’s clothing, the hard rattling echo of overlapping voices in the main hallways, his footsteps clipping on tile. A door opening and closing. Faint whisper of his breathing. “Hello. Nicholas Mahrez. I have an appointment with the mayor?”
“I’ll let him know. Please take a seat.”
Mahrez could be heard sitting down, and, after a moment, turning the pages of a magazine.
FBI surveillance specialists had set up, in addition to the body wire, directional audio capture, plus SLR and VHS cameras in an empty office across the street from and more or less level with the mayor’s office windows in City Hall, well suited for a telephoto lens. The video capture was continuous but suffered fro
m autofocus problems exacerbated by the high contrast between the bright sunny day and the cool recesses of Poole’s inner sanctum. The still photographs were crisp, however, and would clearly show the mayor get up from his desk—the mayor opening the door—Mahrez entering—smiles all around—a friendly embrace; this soft collision of bodies would muffle the initial audio feed:
“Stix! It’s great to see you, man!”
Tina Z. patched in from her car, parked on a side street, couldn’t tell without corresponding visuals if any of this was heartfelt or just cheerful political habit. She couldn’t ask Binghamton, he was dozing. There was an irritating high-frequency squeal of interference that would need to be filtered out.
—
“HOW LONG’S IT BEEN? Ten years?”
“Longer. Vic’s wake.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Yeah.”
Mahrez was not surprised by Poole’s modest, workaday office. His childhood friend seemed smaller, telegenic, incredibly hyperkinetic and intense, also older, which was no surprise, and unhappy, despite the smile.
“Man, what kind of screwed-up world do we live in where two longtime friends can’t get together because—”
“Well, it was Vic, was the friend, you and me we kinda—”
Stubborn: “—friends can’t get together because—”
“—one of them’s toxic?”
“—that’s not what I—”
“—doesn’t matter, sorry—”
“—there was never, on my end, any—”
“—I know.”
“Well, then.”
“Is what it is.”
“I guess.”
Mahrez said, “Dicky?”
“What.”
“Look at me.” Still photographs and the soft-focus video would both show Mahrez—he didn’t care—opening his shirt at this point and revealing to the surveillance subject, Richard Poole, the thin dark threads of insulated wire that veined his torso, and terminated in micro-microphones.
“Good God, what’s that?”
“What does it look like? U.S. attorney’s got me rigged for sound, Dicky. I’m sorry. Apparently they’re coming after you for graft and whatnot, part of some big federal corruption sting.”
—
IN HER CAR, Tina Z. nearly choked on her Diet Pepsi.
“Oh, no. Oh, shit. What is he doing?”
Her associate awoke with a throaty snort.
Voices crackled on her comm. She couldn’t sort them out.
“We’re blown.”
“Wire’s out—”
“—totally blown.”
“Fuck this guy.”
“—Opened his whole goddamn shirt.”
“Damn, he’s fit, though.”
Binghamton sat up and wiped his mouth. “What?”
Mahrez’s voice ran on, brighter, cleaner without the filter of his shirt over the body wire, “I’ve gotten a little tangled up in something myself, Dicky, got myself over a barrel and they bartered with me to come in here wearing this rig to ask some pretty pointed questions about your campaign finances and associations with certain foreign nationals and their narco-dollars, but I came to warn you instead because, you know me, that kind of shit doesn’t fly, it’s politics, it’s sour grapes because you’re a flaming liberal Democrat who won an election in the heart of the Elephant Graveyard, so, yeah, well . . .”
—
“. . . YEAH.”
In his office, struck motionless, staring oddly at Mahrez, the color had drained from Poole’s face. He opened his mouth to say something, but Mahrez saved him the trouble.
“No, man. Don’t talk. They’re listening right now.” An awkward silence settled. “Bottom line, I decided before I agreed to do it that if they’ve got questions they should tell you to your face. Call me old-fashioned”—Mahrez wiped his hands on his jeans again—“or naïve.” This made his smile genuine; he felt as good as he had in a couple days. “You know, Vic always made a big deal of how you were a straight shooter. It got up his ass, for sure, but it didn’t ever surprise me even after, you know, everything that went down with us.”
“Vic’s dead, though. Isn’t he?”
“Yeah. Long time.”
“What kind of trouble?” was what Poole had been trying to get from Mahrez since he flashed the wire.
Big Stix shook his head and started to rebutton his shirt. “You got a bright future, Dicky. Do good. Stay clean and watch your back. This will pass.” Mahrez turned to leave, had his hand on the doorknob, when he remembered something and turned back to say, “Oh, but—yeah, trouble, it’s mostly mine and I doubt I’ve helped my cause much here, but—if you got any bright ideas on how I can shake these pesky Federales, I’d be ever so grateful.”
It couldn’t, Mahrez thought to himself, then, have gone any better.
—
TIMECODE BURNED into the surveillance stills later would show that less than five minutes had passed. Artfully framed in the office window, stills and video showed Mahrez walk out. Showed Mayor Richard Poole turning toward the window, numb, and staring right into cameras, as if sensing them there. He moved stiffly, with the illusion of gliding, to the window itself, and gazed emptily out at his city.
The marine layer was burning off. Twenty minutes to another perfect day in paradise.
Zoom in. Refocus. Searing haze-smeared sun reflections glinted angular off the glass.
In the head-and-shoulders shot, foreshortened by the full-stop 500mm lens: Mayor Poole looked very tired, and very worried.
4
KIRBY WAS IN HIS BEDROOM, boxers and socks, closet door slid open, the rack hung heavy with his so-called junior college teacher’s wardrobe, when Colter phoned, spitting fire:
“He screwed us!”
“Yeah, well. We’re screwing him with a bad snitch.” Kirby was indifferent, almost serene. “What did you expect?” He’d received a heads-up from Tina Z. on what had happened in City Hall. He couldn’t say he was surprised by Mahrez’s pyrrhic insurrection. Some part of him hoped that this would cause Colter to dial things down, but most of him had understood this would only calcify her resolve.
“DO NOT LECTURE ME!” The full measure of her anger manifested mostly in phone receiver distortion; it rang out, then she came through calmer, icy and clipped. “Set a trial date for Mr. Big Stix on the drug traffic beef.”
“We won’t win, we barely can show cause to file.”
“I don’t care. You’ll think of something. Take him back into custody, the deal is off.”
Kirby stared at himself in the mirror on the closet’s front sliding panel. Farmer’s tan, love handles, and pale, hairy legs. Jesus H. Christ, he was turning into somebody’s creepy uncle. “I think he knows that,” he said softly.
Colter, seething: “Get me an indictment.”
“Even if he’s innocent?”
Colter hung up on him. Dial tone.
Kirby tossed the whole phone on the bed, and the handset unracked and tumbled to the carpet, where a dial tone purred. He ignored it, reversed the closet doors, hiding the mirror and exposing, like a cheap magic trick, two dozen bespoke handmade suits in clear plastic protective sleeves. Tailored shirts on narrow shelves, silk ties, Italian shoes.
From another life. For an unmet future.
Kirby sighed. The dove-gray Armani pinstripe was as good a place to start as any, he decided.
—
HIS VEGAS LOUNGE ACT. Earnest, ingenuous, and open-faced. Saad Fanous worked the interrogation room. Only a whiff of desperation, Tina thought. Desiring to please:
“I understand how this goes. My cousin fell in love with a girl in Cairo. But her family was rich, so. And very, you know, well connected. It was not a good situation. Consequently, he tried to run away with her, but he was arrested and
put in prison and tortured until finally he told them that his best friend was a Zionist spy, and they set him free.”
A surprisingly subdued Kirby (resplendent in a handsome Armani suit she’d never seen before) sat with Tina Z. and the federal public defender, Bob Khorshandi, an effervescent Iranian-American (with scruffy Sonny Crockett stubble) for whom Saad Fanous was the last of two dozen clients he’d seen in a single day.
“Not to worry, my cousin’s friend had police as relatives, so he also was safe, insha’Allah.”
Big yawn, Bob’s eyelids fluttered with fatigue. Kirby sighed. “I need you to tell the truth.”
“My cousin? He married a French girl and moved to Tangiers. She is a gnarly bitch, but terribly fertile.”
“No, Saad—”
“Truth? How can you, or me, or anyone but the Creator know what that is?” Saad snapped. “Truth? Please.” Saad Fanous had told Tina he was convinced that the outcome of his case had already been determined by these government functionaries, as it always was, always would be, so he had nothing to lose. She tried not to think about her scuttled domestic terror case. Her section chief had told her not to worry over what clearly was a jurisdictional clusterfuck, but when her next performance review came up, she knew this whole thing would look bad.
“In our country, a jury decides,” Kirby was saying. “They have to believe you. And I have to believe that they’ll believe you, or I won’t put you on the stand and I can’t help you with your indictment.”
Saad’s laughter was bitter. “Believe. Me? The Muslim selling drugs? Tell me how this is even possible.”
—
ONE BLOCK EAST of the Federal Building, Stix Mahrez perched uneasily on the edge of his hard-mattress Metropolitan Detention Center bed, listening to the dull roar of the cell block. Back in the day, a healthy fear of prison had been what drove him to be pathologically attentive to every detail of his illicit life. Now here he was locked up, his legitimate life proving to be no protection from the wryly subtitled surrealist black comedy he’d tumbled into.