Tower of Babel

by Michael Sears

  Kenzie looked at Ted with raised eyebrows.

  He nodded. “It gets complicated. It looks like Jackie—Jacqueline Clavette—did a piss-poor job of protecting her client’s interests.”

  “And maybe she’s behind the surplus-money angle,” Lester said.

  “This is all speculation,” Ted said. “Without the full file, I can’t say for certain that Jackie screwed up. Intentionally or not.”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Lester said. “I’m not. Jackie did it. Guilty.”

  “Either way, she’s key,” Kenzie said.

  “But here’s my question,” Ted said. “If she is the one who put it over on Miller, and she’s the one who managed to hide a million plus bucks in surplus money . . .” He paused.

  “No ‘if’ about it,” Lester said.

  “Then why aren’t the Russians beating her up?” Ted asked.

  Lester grunted, which Ted took for support. Outside an ambulance went by at speed, the siren’s Doppler effect peaking in an instant and the sound immediately fading into the background of what passed for normal in the city. The three of them, all deep in thought, took no notice.

  Kenzie spoke first. “I see three possibilities. One, she’s working for the Russians. The surplus money will end up in their pockets. She’ll find some way to deliver it.”

  “Based on character alone, I’d have to rate that unlikely,” Ted said.

  “I agree,” she said, “but not based on her character. Theirs. Those guys wouldn’t trust a woman.”

  Lester nodded his agreement.

  “On the other hand,” Ted said, “those guys seem to be incredibly well-informed about our interests. Suppose that’s her role.”

  “Hold that thought,” Kenzie said. “Two, she’s playing her own game. Somehow she’s keeping the Russians at bay with promises, lies, or distraction.”

  “Dangerous,” Ted said.

  Lester nodded again. “Those guys would break your arms for trying to cheat them out of the change on a cup of coffee.”

  “Which brings me to number three,” Kenzie said. “She’s protected. There’s some Mr. Big pulling strings. Someone who can tell the Russians to back off. Someone who knows about the money and just doesn’t care because he’s focused on the bigger payoff.”

  “Reisner,” Lester said.

  “Or some higher-up at Corona Partners,” Ted said. “Or a politician or banker with pull. Someone senior who they’d all listen to.”

  Or someone who cared more about Jackie’s well-being than about the money.

  They discussed the setup for the next day until Lester’s discomfort became obvious. He was in pain. He reluctantly took a pill, and they sat silently until he fell asleep.

  “Why is he doing this?” Kenzie asked when Lester’s breathing indicated he was deep in dreamland.

  Ted wanted an answer to that question also. “I’ll ask him that someday.”

  “They messed him up.”

  “Why him? Why not me? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “No, but that’s another good question.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You dragged him into this.”

  “Not exactly. Is it my fault he got beat up? Do I feel responsible? Is that your point?”

  “No. I’m concerned that you might be feeling that way . . .”

  It came down to trust. Ted had had suspicions when Lester first appeared. They had not entirely gone away. Now the two of them were bonded by the Russians’ assaults, and the questions had become moot.

  “If I thought he needed an apology, I’d give it to him. We’re good.”

  She nodded once; she understood.

  “I need a walk.” Kenzie said. “I’ll go nuts sitting here.”

  “Go,” Ted said. “I’m still in hiding until tomorrow.” And he found he was exhausted. He cradled his arms on the desk and rested his head. “Wake me when you’re back.”

  “I’ll find us some dinner,” she said.

  He was asleep before Kenzie made it out the door.

  Dinner was takeout from the Polish deli down the block. Lester managed a bowl of mushroom soup and an order of mashed potatoes. Kenzie and Ted finished off a platter of pierogi. A black-eyed old woman who muttered angrily to herself delivered blankets but didn’t stay long. The priest kept his distance. Ted and Lester were potentially toxic.

  “You’ll have to sleep on pews, but you’ll be safe here,” Kenzie said.

  “Do you snore?” Lester asked.

  “My ex never mentioned it,” Ted said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Lester said.

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “If I snore?” Lester asked. “Only when I’m asleep.”

  -38-

  Ted’s nap had upset his internal clock. It was the middle of the night and he couldn’t sleep. Lester seemed to have no such problem. The pain pills must have helped. Lester’s admission that he snored was confirmed. In triplicate.

  Too much hung on their success the next day. Ted knew the best thing he could do was relax and rest. He would need all his faculties to outwit the Judge. Ted somehow needed to get him to implicate himself or one of the other actors in this convoluted drama. It wasn’t going to be easy. Another beer might have helped Ted to think—or sleep—but he’d finished his one long ago. Water wasn’t having much effect other than to give him an urge to revisit the toilet.

  The bathroom was a closet-sized room with a single small window a few inches above eye level. Ted was not a short man. He had to look up at a sharp angle to see out.

  The view wasn’t much, but at that moment it was magic. A full moon hovered above the church steeple, bathing the ancient slate roof in mercury. Ted couldn’t move. Moments when he took the time to look up at a New York night sky were as rare as good luck. There was never much to see.

  He washed his hands in the bowl-sized basin and crept back to the dark church sanctuary. He found his pew and sat, adjusting the thin blanket as best he could in the vain hope of creating comfort. Something had changed. There was a strange stillness in the air.

  Lester was no longer snoring.

  “You mind if I ask you something?” Lester spoke quietly, his voice almost dreamy from the medication.

  “You breathing?” Ted said. “For a second there, I wasn’t so sure.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Come again?” Ted said.

  “You don’t need this. You went to school. Law school. You got to play with the big dogs. Hell, man, the only thing I’ve ever done was serve two years working in an army warehouse in Stuttgart, where I wrenched my back. Never worked a straight job again. But you had it made. Why? What happened? Who’d you piss off?”

  Ted was sure it was written—somewhere. Thou Shalt Not Divorce Thy Boss’s Daughter.

  They had not spoken to each other in months, but he was not surprised to see her name appear on his phone. Jill would have heard. Someone in that family of sharks would have been delighted to deliver the news.

  “Security took my notebook, laptop, work phone. They wouldn’t let me touch anything on my desk. I was out the door, on the street, by eight-twenty.” Ted pried the top off the second bottle of Bass ale and took a long swallow.

  Jill sounded less concerned than perplexed. “Didn’t they offer you a different job? You’re too good for them to let you walk.”

  “They did offer me something.” It was a cut in pay. He would have had to surrender his junior partnership and accept a counselor position—in a dead-end department with no hope of advancement, opportunity, or challenge. It was less an offer of employment than a test to see how low he was willing to stoop. He’d walked instead. “It was not what I want. As a matter of fact, I would rather tend bar if I had to.” That was a stretch. As he rarely drank anything str
onger than the occasional beer, he wouldn’t know the difference between a martini and a Manhattan.

  “What are you saying? You could still be working there.”

  “It was not a real offer, Jill. The job was a dead end. Worse.”

  “What? Not up to your standards? You’re unemployed, Ted.”

  “If you were to design a job that I would truly hate just to screw with me, this was worse. Trust me, Jill. I would have gone postal in no time.”

  When she spoke again, she was less adamant and argumentative. “Why would they do that? I don’t understand. You’re a good lawyer. Can’t they always find room for a really good lawyer?”

  “Actually, no. But someone thought long and hard before offering me something that I would never in a million years accept.”

  “But why? I don’t get it?”

  “Revenge. They could have cut me loose, and I would have walked away with a fat severance package and a year’s health insurance. As it is, I’ve got about three months’ savings and my IRA.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said.

  “There’s no such thing.” He had always believed that. For all his drive and hard work, the world owed him nothing. But he’d been targeted. Screwed.

  “I’m going to speak to my father,” she said.

  The thought of his ex-wife begging her daddy, a man whom Ted had never liked, respected, or felt any kinship with, to intercede for him was nauseating. He was a lawyer and desperately wanted the opportunity to practice again, but he was also a poor kid from the streets of Queens who’d made it out, and his pride was what had always carried him.

  “Please don’t,” he said. “I’ll land on my feet. If I’m going to ask for help, I’ll do it myself, and it won’t be through your father.” Ted was already thinking of bypassing the father and asking for her grandfather’s help instead. Ted had earned the Judge’s assistance in the past, and there was no shame in seeking it now.

  “No, Ted. It’s not right. I told him I wanted you taken care of. He said he would see to it.”

  Ted’s stomach did a somersault. “Wait. What are you saying? You knew?”

  “Well, I knew they were going to be making some cuts. Everyone did.”

  “Everyone” meant everyone in the family. Jill’s worldview could be very limited in some ways.

  “And you made him promise to offer me a different job?” Ted said. “To keep me on?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Of course, Ted thought.

  Nine years later the memories still pained.

  Lester cleared his throat. “You still with me? I thought you checked out for a minute.”

  Ted shook his head in a forlorn attempt to dispel the ghosts. “Bad choices, Lester. I don’t blame anybody but myself.” Which wasn’t entirely true, but Ted wished it were. “I kept making bad choices until the bottom fell out. In the end, I settled for a bad deal rather than take my chances fighting an injustice.”

  “You’re not the first. The deck is always stacked.”

  “I wish I could say I’d make better—stronger—choices next time around. But I really don’t know.” Ted found his bottle of water and took a long slug. “Now it’s my turn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The day we met. You were waiting for me. Meeting you—hiring you—was no accident. You made it happen.” The question was implicit.

  “Truth?” Lester asked.

  Ted laughed softly. “We’re talking after midnight, sitting in a church, and it’s a full moon. What do you think?”

  “Truth is never as pretty as you think it’s going to be.”

  “I’m listening,” Ted said. In the faint light from the sanctuary lamp, Lester’s bruises faded, and years were stripped away. He appeared younger, healthier, and a touch sadder. The rollback of time removed a layer of forbearance, revealing a man who had not yet learned to hide his disappointments.

  Lester sat up and took a deep breath. “Richie Rubiano was a dope. Everybody knew he was working on something worth a million bucks. I didn’t know what it was about or how this shit worked, but I wanted some of it. I’ve got nothing else. An ex-wife and two kids who wouldn’t know me if they had to step over me lying on the sidewalk and a room in a flop that’s only mine as long as I can pay a week in advance. So I put myself in front of you, figuring you were my best shot at getting a piece of that.”

  “You wanted a cut?”

  “Truth, right? A cut? At a minimum. If I thought I could have conned you out of all of it, I was ready to go down that road. Hell, you worked with Richie. I figured you must be a scammer yourself, and that meant fair game.”

  Ted let a beat go by, waiting for Lester to continue. When he didn’t, Ted asked, “What changed your mind?”

  “Who says I changed my mind?” Lester gave the question a touch of bravado.

  Ted smiled at him. “You’re here.”

  Lester looked away, taking his time to frame an answer. “It was the old lady. Miller. You were straight with her. She’s prime for a good con. They already got to her once. You could have spun her a story and taken her for everything she’s got left. Only you didn’t. I realized that despite the strange way you have of making a living, you’re not a crook.” Having finished his speech, Lester lay back on the long pew and closed his eyes. Moments later he said, “Of course, if you were to offer me a percentage, I wouldn’t say no.”

  -39-

  They found Lester a baggy suit at the parish thrift store, disagreeing briefly on whether blue or brown was more convincing. Lester won with the argument with the point that stains would show up better on the brown. Ted didn’t haggle, paying too much and earning disapproving looks from both Kenzie and the church volunteer at the checkout.

  Kenzie claimed the job of distressing the clothes based on her as-yet-unrevealed artistic talents. She attacked with ketchup, coffee, and the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. She balked at urine, but Lester persevered, though insisting, reasonably, that only his own be used. Ted withheld an opinion. Verisimilitude in costuming was out of his jurisdiction. And he wasn’t going to be the one posing as a wino.

  Mohammed dropped Lester off two blocks from the address, leaving him to shuffle the rest of the way in his bedroom slippers, carrying an ass-pocket flask of Relska Vodka. He was in place by eleven o’clock. Two hours early, but they agreed he needed the time to fade into the background.

  Kenzie stayed hidden in Mohammed’s car with her camera and telephoto lens. It was coming up to noon, but the wide streets were nearly bare. The pathways between the projects on the other side of the boulevard, however, were crowded with young black men wearing white Stanley Kowalski shirts and black jeans and young black women minding toddlers. Ted did not see one person look at him, but he could feel that they all knew he was there and did not like it. A white man in a suit was an affront or possibly a threat. Ted recognized all the societal reasons why this hostility existed and empathized. But on this day the malice was focused on him. He imagined the towering structures as buttes in some John Ford western, smoke signals rising and alerting one and all of his presence.

  He crossed the street, avoiding any chance of confrontation. This was their neighborhood, and he was the intruder. Moving on was all he could do to return normalcy to their world.

  The advantage to Ted and his coconspirators was that Russian mobsters would be even more apparent and less welcome.

  Ted kept walking. Once out of the shadow of those tall buildings, he was able to concentrate on the meeting ahead. Lester would have identified the best place for a private conversation held in public view and settled in there.

  East New York had clawed its way back from the worst times, but the terminal disease of inescapable poverty hung about. There were no abandoned or burned-out cars, though once there had been plenty, as the remains of stolen, stripped vehicles had been l
eft, wheelless, seatless, and engineless on side streets, windshields plastered with parking tickets. Many of the boarded-up buildings had been taken down or revitalized with paint, plaster, and panes of new glass. But the pall of hopelessness was evident in the iron bars on first floor windows and steel grating around every bodega. These people were not going to be shopping in LBC’s giant mall—they’d be lucky to get jobs there sweeping the floor.

  Lester was splayed across a concrete bench in the shade of a struggling gingko tree. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was slack, but he registered Ted’s approach with a snort and a whisper. “He’s late.”

  Ted checked his watch. One o’clock, on the nose. “Not yet,” he whispered. He stepped away and waited next to a street sign. no parking, 12pm–2pm, tues & thurs.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” Lester said.

  Ted sat down next to him. “Ten minutes.”

  -40-

  The squad car came slowly down the block. There was no other traffic and no one on the street other than Lester and Ted. Lester—dirty, disheveled, smelling of booze and urine, with his sling hidden beneath his jacket—appeared to be sleeping on the bench. The cops ignored him. Ted was the anomaly. The car stopped in front of him.

  “Are you lost, sir?” The young cop who spoke, a light-skinned black man, was riding shotgun.

  “No.” Ted didn’t think the question warranted further explanation.

  “Do you have business around here?” The cop had an attitude. The politeness was overdone. He wasn’t there to help.

  Ted tried smiling. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  The two cops conferred for a moment. The sunlight, reflecting off the windshield, created a shimmering blind. Ted couldn’t see the driver. He wished they would keep rolling on down the street. If the Judge saw them, he would cancel the meet.

  The young cop opened his door and sauntered over. The driver got out and stood behind the car. He was older, white, fifties. Grey brush cut. Probably had had the same haircut since he left the army. He squinted against the sun, watching Ted intently.