by Jose Latour
Brent Hart called Nathan Smith at 10:44.
“Sorry to wake you up, sir, but things have taken a turn for the worst.”
“What is it?”
“Maria Scheindlin is dead. Probably murdered.”
Smith swung his legs out and sat up in bed. “When?”
“Between eight and ten hours ago.”
“Hold it.”
Smith placed the handset on the mattress, rubbed his face, pressed his eyelids, recovered the handset. “Lay it on me.”
Hart rattled off what the North Miami PD photographer had said.
“This happened after the gardener left?”
“Apparently.”
“You checked him out?”
“I did.”
“Tell me.”
“Eugenio Bonis. Cuban by birth. Boatlifted in 1980. Served time in Havana for privately cultivating and selling flowers, or so he said. Owns a landscaping business. Naturalized in 1986. No criminal record, married a WASP nurse in 1991. No children. Contributes twenty dollars a month to the Cuban American Foundation but is otherwise indifferent to politics. Lives at Fifty-seventh Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, Hialeah.”
Smith processed the information in silence for a few moments. “When did he leave the house?”
“12:56.”
“You got him covered now?”
“Two cars, one on each corner of his block. They got there fifteen minutes ago. Except for the porch, lights are out; air conditioners too.”
“Phone?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Okay. Any chance the killer got in and out unseen?”
Thirty years married to the man had not inured Smith’s wife to such exchanges. She turned on her right side and covered her left ear with her hand.
“Theoretically, yes,” Hart said. “He could have jumped the backyard fence. Also, had our guys been reading girlie mags or playing cards …” He left it there.
“I’ll be at the office in thirty minutes.”
“Okay,” Hart said and hung up.
…
At a Cyber Net Café in the NW section of the city, seven minutes away from the airport by car, Victoria and Pardo examined the terminal’s map onscreen. There were two multilevel, long-term parking garages, rather flippantly named Flamingo and Dolphin, connected to the terminal by a moving walkway on the third level. The map, however, lacked specifics concerning their perimeter, the number of cars each level could hold, or any other significant information, so they decided not to print it. They walked out of the café at five minutes to nine.
Their taxi arrived at the terminal at 9:15 and they got out at the entrance to Concourse E. After some pepperoni pizza and sodas, they used the restrooms. An elevator took them to the third floor and they entered the Flamingo garage through the moving walkway at 9:55. The sheer size of the square-shaped area surprised them. It seemed capable of storing over one thousand automobiles although only a few dozen were there at the moment. It had the usual ramps for vehicles and elevators for pedestrians. Despite the lighting, the place was gloomy.
“The floor below is probably exactly like this,” Victoria whispered, her eyes roving all over the place, searching for surveillance equipment and dark corners. “We’ll hide behind one of those columns.”
“No, this part’s too bright,” Pardo said, looking around. “We should go all the way to the back, crouch behind a car, and hope the owner is in Shanghai.”
“I think halfway might be better. Let’s go down.”
“Just a minute, Vicky. Are you telling me we’re going to stand around here for over three hours?”
“Yes, macho. I want to see Bonis come in, have a minute to see how he acts, walks, and moves around. In Burdines he was too alert, distrustful. Something’s amiss here. We are using him for our own ends and I don’t know whether he has grown suspicious, wants to ask what’s the money for, feels entitled to decide whether he should trust us. In my book he’s a fanatic, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he has changed over time and wants to keep the money for himself. Or maybe the Feds got to him and turned him. Either way, I want to preempt him.”
They were just strolling now, taking in the place.
“Is that possible?” Pardo asked.
“Everything is possible. And without that money and a passport for me, I’d be stuck here.”
“Only for a few days, darling. I’d fly to Europe, open an account here, transfer some money from the Jersey Islands bank into it, then fly back. Three days tops.”
“I hope we can stick to Plan A. The sooner I leave the United States the better. The INS catches me, I get fingerprinted and photographed; leave a sample of my handwriting, too, in the forms I’ll have to fill out.”
“I know, I know. But Vicky, he arrived at Burdines on the dot. Why should he be early tonight?”
“That’s the point; he shouldn’t be. If he gets here five minutes ahead of time, everything’s fine. But the earlier he comes, the more reason we’ll have to worry. It means he wants to stake us out, or to check if we arrive early to stake him out. Either way, it’s a sign he is up to something. He walks in one or two hours early, you get ready, and I mean ready, for the unexpected.”
Pardo scratched his temple and looked off thoughtfully. “How should we deal with him in that case?”
Victoria’s gaze kept scanning the place. “I don’t know. Let’s consider it. What do you think we should do?”
…
Elliot and Fidelia were experiencing the early, non-REM stage of sleep, in which the brain does whatever it is that unplugs people completely, when the phone rang. Elliot started dreaming he was sitting behind the wheel of his car at a railroad crossing, watching two blinking red lights and hearing a bell clang stridently. He would be late for the meeting now. The train was nowhere to be seen. There had been ample time to cross the tracks safely. Trains here were endless, had dozens and dozens of freight cars. A hand shook him by the shoulder and he woke up.
“It’s for you,” Fidelia said, extending him the handset.
He reached for it. “Hello.”
“Mr. Steil?” a female’s quivering voice.
“Speaking.”
“It’s Jenny.”
“Who?”
“Jenny, the daughter of Ruben and Maria Scheindlin.”
“Of course. Excuse me, Jenny. I was sound asleep. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, Mr. Steil …” her voice choked.
Elliot could virtually see the remaining cobwebs in his mind fall away. A sobbing Jenny Scheindlin calling him at home in the middle of the night?
“What’s the matter, Jenny?”
He heard her blow her nose, sniff. “My mother is dead.”
After a moment of total immobility, Elliot slid his feet to the floor and sat up in the bed. “I beg your pardon?”
“My mother was murdered, Mr. Steil. She was taken to the morgue half an hour ago.”
Elliot rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair. Confusion made his mind go blank. He wanted to say something, but nothing came.
“Mr. Steil?”
“Yes, Jenny.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, yes I did. I’m … stunned. I don’t know what to say. How did she … ? I mean—”
“She was shot in the face.”
“And … and … who did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are the police there?” He had not finished saying it when he realized he had asked the most stupid of possible questions. The body was in the morgue.
“They were. House was full of cops. The last two left a while ago.”
“Jenny, listen. Are you alone?”
“No, I called two friends of mine. They are here now.”
“Good. I’ll be right over.”
“There’s no need, Mr. Steil. Really. I called Sam first; I didn’t know he was in New York, his wife told me. Then I thought you, as company manager, should be
among the first to learn the news. I found your home number in Mom’s phone book.”
“You did right. I’ll be there in a while. Wait for me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Bye now.”
“Bye, Mr. Steil.”
Elliot broke the connection.
“What happened?” Fidelia asked as he stood.
“Maria Scheindlin has been murdered,” hurriedly putting on slacks.
“What?”
“That’s all she said.”
“Said who?”
“Her daughter. Get me a clean shirt, will you? This seems like a bad dream to me.”
…
Eugenio Bonis parked the Chevy on the Dolphin garage’s first floor at 10:07 and entered the terminal six minutes later holding the tote bag that now stored a hundred thousand dollars. To his complete surprise, he found there were no red-eyes to Ottawa from Miami International. After one that had departed at 4:00 P.M., the next would be a Delta flight at 6:45 A.M. to Atlanta, where it would connect to another flight to Ottawa. Well, he thought, that forced a change of plans. He would drive north, then fly from Orlando in the morning.
At 10:35 he doubled back to the Dolphin parking building, took the elevator to the second floor, and through a connecting passageway crossed to the Flamingo garage. He devoted a minute or two to glancing over the parked vehicles, ramps, and emergency stairs, choosing the place in which he would ambush the traitors. Not knowing which of the six elevators they would take, any dark corner would do; trying to find him, they would pace the garage over. No surveillance cameras or parking attendants were to be seen. While at this, an elevator discharged a woman who hurried to a red Toyota 4Runner, heels clicking on the cement floor. She boarded it, started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove down the ramp.
Bonis had been warned that Miami was one of the places the two deserters might be heading to. If they got there, they could try to contact him and, through him, other agents or informers. Nobody in Cuban Intelligence knew that he had unwittingly liaised for Victoria for years, nor that Pola Negri had loaned her cash and that a new loan was in the making. On May 2 an unsuspecting Cuban-American visiting her frail parents had taken to Havana an encrypted message in a diskette. The order sentencing to death the two traitors came in a similar diskette, brought to Miami by another innocent Cuban who had spent a week with his relatives in Santa Clara. That message ordered the gardener back home, his mission accomplished, once he had tracked down and executed the two traitors.
Bonis chose one of the farthest support columns to hide and wait behind. He ambled to it leisurely, the tote bag on his left, resigned to the long, precautionary wait. Although Havana had not given away what the deserters had been, he believed them to be Intelligence or Counterintelligence officers who were well versed in the tricks of the trade. He couldn’t afford to give them an edge. He was forty yards away from the chosen column when the short, unattractive female in the unbecoming glasses he had first caught a glimpse of at Burdines emerged from behind a Mercedes.
“You are way too early, comrade,” Victoria said, smiling insincerely.
Bonis used to carefully plot every step of the way well in advance, leave to chance only the unforeseeable. He had shunned unpleasant surprises for so long that he felt astounded. The cunt was perceptibly uneasy, though. Her hands were empty. Good. Where was the guy? Close by, for sure.
“Where’s your comrade?” he demanded to know, his eyes not quite meeting hers.
“Somewhere else. No reason for him to be here tonight. Why did you come so early, comrade?”
“My instructions are to give this” he lifted the tote bag, “to both of you. He’s not here, I take it back to Pola Negri.”
The gardener turned around and started to leave. Without breaking stride, his free hand slipped under the sport jacket. Prodded into action by Bonis’s refusal to hand over the money, Pardo stepped out from behind a light gray Buick Park Avenue, pistol aimed at the fleeing man. Neither he nor Victoria noticed that the spy had been reaching for a gun.
“Here I am, Bonis,” he said. “Now put the tote bag on the floor.”
Bonis turned his head and laid eyes on the cutout’s face first, the gun next. The pistol—a Tokarev?—and the wristlock grip to reduce recoil confirmed that he was confronting a professional. Bonis’s Beretta had the safety on—he had meant to turn it off once he hid behind a car or a column—and he would lose half a second switching it off, enough for the traitor to put two rounds into his chest, maybe three. It peeved him to discover that he had underrated them. His hand came out empty.
“You point a gun at me?” off the top of his head, letting the palm of his hand rest on his chest to show how offended he felt. “I run risks for you and you point a gun at me? I can’t believe you call yourself my comrade.”
“Put the tote bag on the floor, Bonis. Then leave,” coming loose on him.
“What’s eating you? What’s going on? After all the work and effort I went through to get this?” lifting the holdall.
“Bonis, don’t give me a hard time and put the tote bag on the floor. Maybe someday you’ll learn why I’m doing this. Just put the tote bag on the floor.”
Victoria watched, mesmerized.
“What are you getting excited about? You know how many years of my life I have devoted to the cause? I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
“Put. The. Tote. Bag. On. The. Floor.”
“This is as good as it gets, right? Okay. But I’ll report your attitude to Havana,” Bonis said before dropping the tote bag.
“I have no beef with you, Bonis. Go take a walk now,” Pardo ordered him.
“Screw yourself.”
Pretending to be deeply angered, the gardener stomped off—five, six, seven heavy strides toward the closest elevator door. Pardo kept glaring at his opponent, but, relieved that things had been solved peacefully, he lowered the gun. Victoria moved toward the tote bag. Pardo threw a sidelong glance at his wife at the precise moment that Bonis turned and dropped to the floor.
“PARDO!” Victoria screamed the instant she clutched the bag.
Her husband swirled and fired two shots, aiming too high. Bonis, supported on his elbows, squeezed the trigger three times. Victoria watched the flashing muzzle in gruesome fascination, frozen. Two bullets hit Pardo: the first just below the left clavicle, the other one inch above and two inches to the left of his right nipple. Knitting his brow in surprise, Pardo felt his knees buckle and then slumped over.
Bonis turned his attention to the unattractive woman. In a crouch, she was scurrying to the column, still three or four feet away from it. The tote bag lay where he had dropped it. He fired once and missed her back by an inch. Having lost count of the cartridges remaining in the clip, but remembering he would need two for the coups de grâce, Bonis stood erect and dusted his knees before starting to retrace his steps. Had she been carrying a weapon, she would be firing at him right now. He would get to her, there was no hurry. He had taken five or six paces when a 7.62mm slug drilled his left cheek in an upward angle, trepanned the temporal bone, perforated the brain, and, repelled by a too-thick occipital, bounced back. It gradually lost momentum while worming its way through both cerebral hemispheres, shattering into millions of tiny fragments the zealot’s determination and his swirling reminiscences of a faraway land. Bonis stumbled, dropped the gun, and felt his legs beginning to give way beneath him. He was brain-dead before his face thudded to the floor.
It had been a lucky shot. With his vision blurred and in burning pain, Pardo had aimed for the midsection. When he saw his opponent drop, Pardo tried to take a deep breath, failed, and rested his forehead on the coarse cement floor. Was this what his wife suffered when she had an asthma attack? Feeling utterly winded, extremely weak, and having a strange foreboding, he wondered whether Bonis could still shoot Victoria. He wanted to lift his head and take a look, but all he managed was to scrape his left cheek against the concrete.
Behind the support column, the realization that her husband was hit made Victoria snap out of her immobility. She had recognized the loud gun report of the Tokarev. Had Pardo shot Bonis? She took a peek and, seeing the gardener lying inert, hurried to where Pardo was. She hunkered down by his side. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled when she noticed the blood trickling out of his nostrils and mouth.
“Pardo? Are you okay, my love?”
“I don’t … think so. Are you … hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Did I take … the sonofabitch out?”
Victoria lifted her eyes to Bonis’s corpse and stared at it for a few moments.
“He’s not moving,” she reported.
“Fine. Bring the … tote bag here.”
“What for?”
“Bring it here. Now.”
She went for it, returned to her husband’s side, and crouched again.
“Open it.”
She unzipped it.
“What’s in it?”
“Cash. A lot of it.”
“Did he bring … your passport?”
It took her nearly a minute to check the pockets and make sure there was neither a passport nor other identification.
“No, Pardo. He didn’t. He came to kill us and keep the money for himself.”
“Okay. Take the … cash with you … and hide. Take the … CD, too. It’s in my … breast pocket. Wait for me. I’ve got a passport. They’ll take me … to a hospital … and cure me. Later I’ll … search for you … in Naples?”
“I’m not leaving you, Pardo,” as she took his pulse.
“Don’t argue … with me. I need to … save strength. I’ll say … this man … tried to … hold me up. Get going. Call an ambulance … and go away.”