Godchild

by Vincent Zandri

  I took a drag off the cigarette, drank some black coffee.

  I asked Tony to give me the short of it. So I could get back to my motel, get a shower and a shave. Maybe a nap before I headed south to Stormville. From there, who knew where.

  Tony looked directly down at the tops of his tassel loafers. Loafers identical to my own. “Richard’s wife, Re-nata, was busted by Mexican police for attempting to smuggle cocaine outside the country,” he explained. “From a border town called Monterrey into Brownsville, Texas.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette, sipped more coffee.

  “I thought Barnes’s wife was a writer,” I said, while Tony went back into the kitchen and came back out with his own cup.

  “That’s part of the point,” he said, blowing into his cup with pursed lips.

  I made a time-out T with my hands, shook my head from left to right and back again. “Maybe I’m missing something here, but anyone with half a brain knows the penalties for running dope across the border.”

  Tony drank some coffee and set the cup down on the grand piano beside the briefcase. “She wasn’t interested in selling drugs so much as she had an interest in experiencing the process of selling drugs.” A bewildered wave of his hands. “At least, that’s Richard’s story.”

  “She took a chance like that for a book?” I asked.

  “For an article, actually. But that’s not important.”

  “What is important?”

  “There are two kinds of drug runners presently operating in Mexico,” Tony explained. “There are the so-called burriers, a term derived from burro, or mule, combined with courier. The burriers are usually rich women who like to move cocaine not for the money, but for the sheer thrill of it.”

  And the second kind?

  “The second group,” he said, “is made up of poverty-stricken women who have no choice but to move small amounts of cocaine paste.”

  I drank some coffee. It was getting cold.

  “If the burriers are rich already” I asked, “then why risk taking that kind of chance? They need the rush that badly?”

  “I suspect Renata was on her way to answering that question, paisan, before she was nabbed at the border.”

  It all came back to me in tidal waves: Renata Barnes. A petite woman with short auburn hair and wild blue eyes. I pictured her on the set of the Today show a while back, when her best-seller Godchild had just stormed the country, thanks to Oprah. I recalled how she was forced to respond to allegations about the suspicious drowning death of her own kid. How it mimicked in absolute detail the fictitious drowning death of the child in the novel—a drowning death that was the result of murder. In my mind I saw Renata once more, storming off the set of Today in tears.

  When Tony went upstairs I got up from the couch, stretched. I felt silly and somehow dirty, still dressed in my wrinkled wedding blazer and slacks. I wanted a shower and maybe a drink. Both would have to wait.

  I stood by the window wall. Outside, a clear blue sky. A layer of fresh snow covered the front lawn of the governor’s mansion. The snow contrasted sharply with the black parking lot directly beside it. It hurt to look at the snow when it reflected the sun. I ran my hand over the small bruise on my chin. It must have formed when Tony walloped me. I looked down on the guard shack at the mansion gates and the tall, wrought-iron fence that spanned the perimeter of the property. Despite what Tony had told me about Renata, he never once pressed the matter of my walking out on him and Val. Not really.

  While I fingered the business-size envelope folded up inside my jacket pocket, I half wanted to blurt out what had happened. How the black Buick had just shown up. Then maybe beg forgiveness, as if Tony were in the business of forgiving. But I knew he was smarter than that. In his own way, I knew he’d get to what went wrong with my second wedding in due time. For now the thing to do was concentrate on the business at hand, absorb all he had to tell me about Renata, regardless if in the end I decided not to take on the job.

  When Tony came back down, he was dressed in a clean blue suit. He was fixing the sleeves of his jacket by tugging on the cuffs with the tips of his fingers.

  “So what is it you want from me?” I said.

  “Renata was busted three days ago.”

  “In the desert.” A question.

  “Just outside Monterrey,” he said. “Far as we know, she’s locked in a holding cell in the basement of the town’s maximum-security prison, where she’s awaiting trial.”

  “You’re sure of this.” Another question.

  “I have a communication from the Mexican Attorney General. Man by the name of Jorge Madrazo.”

  “Anyone tried to contact her?”

  “She was allowed one phone call. She used it to call Richard.”

  “If she’s indicted?”

  “Full indictment will result in a very lengthy prison term. A lengthy prison term could very well be a death sentence.”

  I looked out the window once more. A limo was pulling out of the gate beside the guard shack. Probably the governor himself, hightailing it to New York City and civilization.

  I turned back to Tony.

  “Barnes is a powerful guy,” I said. “Why doesn’t he strike a deal with the Attorney General, negotiate her out? At least try and have her extradited?”

  “Richard’s business has already suffered plenty over the negative press Renata received when she published Godchild.” He was putting on his camel hair overcoat. “The DA was prepared to indict her for second-degree murder in the death of her own baby boy, Charlie. Only he couldn’t find enough credible evidence to substantiate an accusation of murder by forcible drowning.”

  “Then get the magazine to confirm her side of the story. Have them prove she was on assignment in the desert.”

  “What magazine? There is no magazine. She was going to sell the piece on spec.” Now he was putting on a blue fedora, pulling the wide brim down over his forehead, cocking it just slightly over his right eye. “Besides, sounds like a weak attempt at a false alibi.” Outside the window, yet another limo pulling up, the electronic gates swinging open. “Barnes fears that if it gets out about Renata being busted on Mexican soil, he’ll have to go through the same kind of public shit storm all over again.”

  “If Renata is such a great author,” I said, “why risk writing an article about smuggling drugs? Why not hang out by the beach, pump out a novel once a year or so?”

  “Renata is a hands-on writer. Apparently she needs to be in the middle of a battle if she’s going to write about war or in the middle of a homicide if she’s going to write about murder or in the center of a drug-trafficking operation if she’s going to do something on drugs and the women who smuggle them. She’s not content to write a piece based upon outside observations, third-hand accounts and the internet. What she wants is the real experience.”

  “Thus all that commotion over Godchild”

  “She’s what they call a method writer, Keeper. Meaning in order to accurately translate the experience on paper, she must in some capacity participate in the experience.”

  “Thank God she isn’t writing about suicide.”

  “Save those remarks for me, paisan,” Tony said. “Your future client will not find them the least bit amusing.”

  For what seemed a while, I watched the sun shine against the marble floor.

  Then, “What Barnes wants from me is to find a way to get her out. Is that it?”

  “What he wants is for you to go down there and use any means necessary to break her out. And he’s prepared to pay extremely well for it. Two hundred thousand cash, plus expenses, no questions asked, absolutely no press. Plenty of money to repay me for the repairs at Bill’s and for keeping you out of the joint and for protecting your license.”

  I exhaled. “I saw the Buick.” I said. “In the cemetery.”

  “I know about what you think you saw,” Tony said.

  “It happened,” I said. “I was there.”

  He nodded, but like th
e cops before him, I knew he didn’t believe me.

  “Did you see a driver?” he asked.

  “The windows are tinted.”

  “And there was a blizzard,” he said.

  I turned back to the window. The two guards who manned the shack were standing outside in the cold, smoking cigarettes and laughing. I was thinking about risk. How I didn’t stand a chance of getting past the visitor’s gates of a Mexican prison without getting shot to pieces. A plan like Tony’s would require connections inside and out, not to mention maps, layouts, guns, ground and air transport, and a safe house. Just for starters. I was certain Tony had to have considered all this and more even before asking me to take the job.

  I turned back to him. “This rescue in Mexico,” I said. “It’s a crazy idea.”

  He took a breath, secured the closers on his briefcase, and picked his keys up off the grand piano. “I know it’s dangerous. But besides the payday, it could be just the thing you need to put Fran’s death behind you. For good.”

  Outside the window, across Eagle Street, the two guards stamped out their spent butts.

  “At least talk to Barnes,” Tony suggested. “Then make your own decision.”

  “And Val,” I said, facing him again. “Can you arrange for me to see her?”

  Tony suddenly lost the color in his face, like the blood had simply drained out of it. And it had. “There’s something else I have to go over with you,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  I pulled the number-ten envelope out of my pocket. “It has something to do with what’s inside here, doesn’t it?”

  He pointed toward the door, car keys dangling from his fingertips.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  She knows she’s on an elevator. Because she can feel herself falling. Slowly. The hot, airless box shuddering. Invisible wheels and gears grinding, cables stretching, straining. Like at any moment the cable is going to snap and send the car plummeting to the concrete bottom.

  She is blind.

  The black hood they pulled over her head in the desert prevents her from seeing anything. Her present world is black. The soldiers have been leading her around, one on each arm. They act as her eyes. She can feel the stifling heat of the elevator car, can feel her wet breath soaking the cloth where her lips press against the fabric. She tries to keep her cool, tries to keep her head. Because if she gets out of this mess alive, she might just write about it. What a story it could make. A firsthand account. Busted in the Mexican desert and alive to write about it.

  When the elevator stops suddenly, she feels her knees buckle. She feels the compression of her stomach wall. She is forced to swallow. The world inside her hood is still black, still stiflingly hot.

  When the metal doors slide open, she feels the rush of cool, damp air. There is the steady buzz of mechanical equipment coming from somewhere off in the distance. She knows she must be at the bottom. The basement. But then, the machinery cannot drown out the distant voices. Hundreds of them. Shouting, laughing, crying.

  The soldiers yank on her arms, pull her out of the compartment into a concrete corridor she has no way of seeing. They lead her closer to the voices. The closer she comes, the louder the voices get.

  And while she walks blindly, the mornings events come hack to her. From the very moment the mission went all to hell:

  The bright halogen headlamps that burned bright on the cab roofs of the big trucks; the wail of the sirens; the voice of the soldier who stood foursquare on the exterior flatbed, screaming “Alto, alto, alto,” through a bullhorn over and over again while the military trucks proceeded to form a tight circle around the Land Rover and her motorcycle.

  The dealers had turned their backs on her to get a good look at the dozens of soldiers who now blocked any path of possible escape. But the tall dealer was not intimidated in the least, as he positioned his shotgun at the hip, began blasting a hole in the line. That is, until a burst of automatic fire tore him in two at the waist.

  The second, shorter dealer was not so gutsy. He dropped his weapon to the ground, raised his hands in surrender. She raised her hands too, although she was not carrying a weapon.

  A moment later, a soldier broke away from the line and approached the two (she was not at all certain if they were soldiers or police, because they were dressed in green fatigues and combat boots. They carried automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. But, then, the word POLICE had been stenciled onto the white side panels of the four-wheel-drive trucks in big bold, black letters).

  What happened next happened fast. The soldiers poured all over the Land Rover and motorcycle like ants on sugar. They aimed their rifles at her and the short man, forced them to lay down flat on their stomachs, hands locked behind their heads. It was while she was on the ground, all those black shiny jackboots shooting past her line of sight, that she first noticed the short man’s sobs. He whispered to her through the tears, “They will kill us all. You and me. We are all dead.”

  She laid there on the ground, the cool sand touching her lips. What happened to the tough guy, she thought. Where’s the hard son of a bitch who ran his filthy fingers down my chest?

  It would please her to see him die. Even if she had to die along with him.

  That is the last thing she remembered before being picked up off the ground, carted over to one of the flatbed trucks, thrown down on her back—on a mattress, of all things, as if they had been planning this all along. Two soldiers aimed their M-16s at her while another man ordered her to unzip her jumper. “Do it now,” he said, in English. On her back, she swallowed something hard, began to unzip the jumper, slowly. All the time she was watching the eyes of her captors, watching their Adam’s apples bob up and down with every inch of bare skin revealed. But then, just as she was about to remove the jumper, another man appeared from out of the twilight.

  He was not a soldier. At least, he was not dressed like one. He was wearing a suit. A black suit in the desert, with alligator shoes. He was a dark-haired, mustached man with a tiny diamond earring in his left earlobe. He carried a black pistol. A six-shot .45 maybe, or a .9 millimeter. Whatever it was, he pressed the barrel of the pistol up against the temple of the soldier to her immediate left.

  “That’s enough,” the suit said in broken English. “We’re taking them to the pit.”

  Several bumpy miles later, she found herself standing on the very edge of a wide-open pit. A mass grave really, dug out of the desert. Maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. There must have been a hundred bodies stacked inside, like cord wood. Bloated bodies covered with some kind of white, sulfurous powder. The smell was revolting. Rotting meat and skin.

  She stood there, shivering in the early morning coolness, but it was not the air that made her tremble. She was reminded of the old films she once saw of the Holocaust. Black-uniformed Nazis surrounding entire groups of Jews who had been stripped naked to the waist. Women, children, and men shot pointblank in the back of the head, their bodies slumping lifelessly, one by one, into the grave.

  And then it happened. Two soldiers dragged the short dealer to the very edge of the pit, he kicking, screaming, clawing the entire way. He didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this. Then a third soldier coming up on him, pressing the barrel of an M-16 up against the back of his skull, triggering off a round that sent his forehead into the grave just a couple of seconds before the rest of his body followed.

  She stood at the edge of the pit, watching the short man’s body rolling end over end, like a rag doll falling down the stairs, until it joined the others. So this is what it’s like to die, she thought. This is what it’s like to just disappear off the face of the devil’s earth.

  She waited for her turn. But then she discovered that they had something else in mind for her. The suit approached her once again. He was carrying something in his right hand. A piece of black cloth. When he opened up the black cloth, she could see that it was really a hood. When he
pulled the hood over her head, everything went black. He dragged her across the sandy floor, until he told her to stop. She heard the sound of a truck door opening. “Watch your step,” she heard the man say as he helped her up into the seat.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” came an accented voice from out of the near distance.

  “She rides with me” said the suit as he got into the driver’s side seat.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you and your men are pigs,” he said, slamming the truck door closed.

  Now, as the two soldiers tug on her arms, signaling for her to stop, she is startled by a sudden electronic buzz and an equally loud clatter of metal slamming against metal. Like gates being electronically opened.

  She feels a hand shove against her back, pushing her inside. Then abruptly, the hood is pulled off. Her eyes burn and she is forced to cover them with the flats of her palms. She goes to her knees on the concrete floor as the soldiers leave and the prison gate slams closed.

  Chapter 5

  The first time I saw Tony Angelino—the lawyer— in action, he was being dragged to county jail for contempt of court. I’d been going on my seventh hour perched up in the marble balcony of the State Supreme Court in Albany when the presiding judge referred to Angelino’s murdered client, Corrections Officer Donna Payton, as a promiscuous femme fatale: “A woman who had no business being a prison guard regardless of New York’s acceptance of what common sense tells us should be a male-dominated field.”

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  But the assessment had caused Tony to shoot up from his chair, raise his left hand, point it directly at the shackled prisoner seated at the defendant’s table. “Your honor, this piece of scum deserves the death penalty,” he shouted. “And since we can’t get him that, he deserves castration.”

  That’s when Tony pulled a stiletto out of his jacket pocket, triggered open the six-inch blade, causing the black inmate to duck down under the long wooden table and to start screaming for someone to get that “madman” away from him.