The move cost him forty minutes, and the counter clerk eyed him like he was crazy. But by the time he was again headed south for Miami he had regained at least a semblance of peace of mind. Maybe all he had needed was to begin taking action, no matter how minor. Gitmo had a way of smothering such impulses, but here on the mainland he needed to think differently.
DESPITE ITS NAME, the Mar Azul Motor Court was nowhere near the ocean. It hadn’t changed a bit, except that rooms now cost thirty dollars more per night. Otherwise there were the same watermarked walls, the same stale smell of cigarette smoke, and the same rubbery shower curtains. There were even the same palmetto bugs—Florida’s chamber-of-commerce name for cockroaches—running for cover when he switched on the bathroom light.
Falk hadn’t even unzipped his bag when the phone rang. If it was Morrow or Endler he was going to go ballistic. Instead it was a husky voice with a Cuban accent—nothing unusual here—but it definitely wasn’t Paco. Even after all this time, he’d have known.
“Mr. Falk?”
“Speaking.”
“Tomorrow. Twelve thirty, for lunch. You have a pencil?”
“And a notebook.”
“Café Casa Luna, 100 block of Northeast First Street. It’s downtown. Sit at a table out front. Carry a Walgreens bag with a bottle of water. If there are others in your party, even those who might not be with you at the table, place the bag beneath the table. If you are unaccompanied, put the bottle on top. Here is what you will wear. Blue jeans, a white oxford shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow, sunglasses, and a blue Miami Dolphins cap. It won’t be hard to find one.”
Nor would the rest of the wardrobe. Except for the cap, it was exactly what he was wearing now. He leaned toward the window from the bed and flipped back a curtain to scan the parking lot. Nobody in sight with a cell phone, and no one in the phone booth. His car was still the only one parked.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Come alone, or put the bag beneath the table. Otherwise the meeting is off.”
After hanging up, Falk found the location on his city map, then went for a stroll, taking his briefcase as a precaution. Before he knew it he was back on the route into Little Havana, just like old times. He stopped at the next pay phone and punched in Morrow’s number.
Endler answered.
“What happened to the errand boy?”
“Easy, Falk. He’s not in the know. Just a facilitator.”
“Anyone who knows my name is in the know as far as I’m concerned. I’m on for twelve thirty tomorrow, by the way. Lunch date.”
“Paco?”
“That’s what Harry said. Someone else just phoned to set it up.”
“Got a location?”
“A café downtown, Casa Luna on Northeast First. A block north of Flagler.”
“Got it.”
“I won’t wear a wire.”
“We’re not asking you to. It’s the first thing he’d check for.”
“They said no babysitters.”
“Of course they did. What’s the all clear?”
“Water bottle in a Walgreens bag on top of the table. Goes underneath if I’ve got company. Said they’ll take a pass if they spot any lookouts.”
“Which is why we’re going to be extra careful. You won’t even know we’re there. Anything else?”
“There’s a dress code. Jeans and a white oxford, sleeves rolled, plus a Dolphins cap.”
“They told you what to wear?” Endler chuckled, the reserved patrician laugh of a cocktail guest. “If I didn’t know better I’d say that he’s forgotten what you look like. Maybe he’s not as good as I thought.”
“You sound like you know all about him.”
“We’ve heard plenty over the years, but no one has ever gotten his name, address, or photo. Every time we stake out a mailbox he leaves it alone. He’s careful, he’s good, and he’s pretty much a lone wolf. This is our one chance to blow his cover.”
“Or blow mine.”
“Which is why I’m torn. I’d very much like to gig this frog—that’s what they call them, you know, these autonomous operatives like Paco. Las Ranas del Árbol, the Tree Frogs. But I also want to protect you, and I’d certainly like to know what he has in mind for you. One last thing. We have a parcel for you. A cell phone, which would do you some good anyway. Save you a few quarters.”
“I’ll stick with pay phones.”
“You don’t have to use it, or even turn it on. Just carry it.”
“A locator beacon?”
“In case he’s cleverer than we think. Where do we make delivery? The No-Tell Motel, is it?”
Falk hesitated, but figured they’d be on his trail tomorrow in any event. And if they got what they needed, maybe this would end the affair, a welcome conclusion.
“The Mar Azul Motor Court.”
“You travel in style. Room number?”
“Twelve.”
“It will arrive in a pizza box. Hope you like pepperoni.”
“It better not be Bureau people making delivery, or doing the babysitting tomorrow. I know about half the Miami field office.”
“We have our own resources.”
“Yours or the Agency’s?”
“I’ll sweat the details, Falk. You just show up. And bring the phone. If this works out, it’s your curtain call. I’d expect you’d like that.”
“Understatement of the year.”
Falk returned to his room, and the pizza arrived cold twenty minutes later with a knock at the door. The delivery man was mid-twenties, blue and red Domino’s uniform and a face that Falk didn’t recognize, thank goodness. The phone was taped inside in a Ziploc bag. He was hungry enough to eat a few slices right away, and then he went shopping for the hat, which indeed was easy to find. Afterward he drove up Calle Ocho and stopped off for dessert at the Versailles. Its mirrored walls were just as garish as he remembered. The babble of Spanish was all around him, and he scanned the room as he dipped into his flan, half expecting to spot Paco lurking in a corner. In his current mood Falk wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see the shaved head and sunburned face of his younger self seated at another table—the eager explorer with a thousand questions but, when push came to shove, none of the right ones. And now Paco was about to reel him in a second time. Maybe this time he would pull the fisherman out into the deep with him.
He returned to the motel at dusk, needing a drink. He tore the paper cap off a motel glass, then filled a plastic bucket with ice from a humming machine down the breezeway. The minibar was chock-full, and he began working his way through the selections, starting with a gin and tonic. Except for the occasional beer, Falk generally avoided drinking alone. He had witnessed far too much of that earlier in life. But as he drained the gin, and then a bourbon, and then the first half of a Scotch, he began to get an inkling of just what had driven all those blurry sessions by the woodstove for his dad. At some point, he thought, propped against a pillow, the only place left to hide was within. So you worked your way deeper inside, a swallow at a time.
He reached for the remote, which was bolted to a swivel on the bedside table, in the manner of all cheap hotels. After flipping through a few channels—no news of more arrests at Gitmo, thank goodness, either in the headlines or on the crawler—he turned off the TV. Then he took the remains of his fourth drink to the bathroom sink and poured it down the drain with a clatter of ice cubes. There was no refuge, after all. Nothing but confusion and worry. It was time to get some sleep, uneasy or not. See you in my dreams, Paco.
But his last waking thoughts were of Pam. Chin up, he told her. And sleep well, wherever you are. He hoped it was someplace where they actually turned out the lights.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HE AWAKENED AT SEVEN, still on Gitmo time, even if his stale breath and throbbing head reminded him immediately of his poor OPSEC of the night before. He dragged himself to the shower, where a huge brown bug skittered down the drain when he threw back the curtain.
During the night someone had shoved an advertising flyer for another pizza joint beneath the door. Falk was about to throw it away when he saw handwriting at the bottom: “Ditch the phone. Too risky.”
Just as well. Now he wondered if it had been a ruse just to get his location. They’d probably been watching him ’round the clock since. He pulled the curtains tight.
Before breakfast he checked the papers for news of Pam, but there was nothing. He supposed that was a good sign. On the cable news channels they were again buzzing about Boustani. Fox was already referring to him as “the traitor translator.” He wondered what they’d say about an FBI man with long-standing ties to Cuban intelligence.
Badly needing coffee, he walked into Little Havana for a sugary double shot of café cubano and a greasy tostada. The place was just waking up, traffic building and the heat still at bay. The music vendors were silent. Without the pulse of salsa, an air of suspended animation prevailed.
He debated the idea of another circuit through the neighborhood, but any nostalgia had dissipated the night before, so he returned to his room. Checkout time was in two hours, and the meeting was another ninety minutes after that. The day seemed destined to move at an agonizingly slow pace, so he might as well do some work.
Opening his briefcase he came across the letters to Ludwig. From here—better still, from a pay phone—he could call the banker and Ludwig’s wife. Unless one of them blabbed, no one at Gitmo would be the wiser. If Van Meter and company were going to lock up his friends, then what was the harm in a little retaliatory poaching, especially if it killed time? He walked back to the pay phone up the street.
There was no point in calling Farmers Federal on Saturday, so he got Ed Sample’s home number from directory assistance. His wife answered. Falk identified himself as a special agent for the FBI, and she warily told him to call back at eleven.
Doris Ludwig answered on the third ring, and sounded angry from the get-go, although she calmed a little when he told her he was still looking into the matter.
“Well, it’s about damn time, but I’m glad they reconsidered.”
“Reconsidered?”
“They told me the case was closed. ‘Drowning by misadventure,’ or some crap like that. As if he’d really go for a swim at night.”
“Somebody must have gotten their wires crossed. Who told you that?”
“What was your name again?” Now she, too, was wary.
“Revere Falk. Special agent. I’ve got about a dozen different numbers you can call, both in Washington and Guantánamo, if you need to verify my credentials.” But please, please don’t, he thought.
“Sounds like you fellows don’t know what you’re doing. One guy calls to say everything’s taken care of. Swept under the rug, if you ask me. I guess I’m just glad somebody came to their senses.”
“This earlier call. That was from … ?”
“Captain Van Meter. Officious and rude, under the circumstances. Two kids and a widow and all he wanted to talk about was protocol and due diligence. You name it, he had some official excuse for it.”
“But he said the case was closed?”
“Don’t you fellows talk to each other?”
“Not always, dumb as it sounds. He’s Army, I’m Department of Justice. Sometimes we get our wires crossed.” Or that’s what he’d tell Van Meter if questions arose. He could always finesse the date and time of the call, at least for a while.
“Well, if you knew Earl, you’d know it’s crazy for him to be swimming in the middle of the night.”
“He didn’t swim?”
“He swam. It wasn’t like he was afraid of the water.” A tad defensive now. “Hold on a minute.” Falk heard a squalling child. The receiver drummed on a countertop. She was probably in the kitchen, a summer Saturday morning in the Midwest. She shouted a command to the daughter, the one who had been missing her dad at the time of the letter.
“Misty, put that down before you break it! Now!”
Given that tone of voice, Falk bet, Misty would shape up pronto. It occurred to him that maybe Ludwig hadn’t minded his little Cuban vacation all that much. He would have been deployed just as the weather was getting cold, leaving behind a nine-to-five bank job, a new baby, and a wife who sounded like she knew how to keep people in line. Or maybe she was just having a bad day, one of many. There were probably a lot of those when you’d just heard your husband was dead, drowned while guarding locked-up kooks more than a thousand miles from home.
“Where were we?” she said.
“You said he wasn’t afraid of the water.”
“Right. He could swim. Usually in a pool. Sometimes in the town lake. It is true that the ocean gave him the creeps. Lake Michigan, too. Any place where he couldn’t see the other side. It was the undertow he hated. That’s why the idea of him going in at night is crazy.”
Or suicidal. He thought again of the suspicious letter from the bank.
“Who else feels this way? Anybody who knows him pretty well who I should talk to?”
“There’s my brother, Bob. Bob Torrance. They’ve been friends longer than we have. Says he can’t believe the Army’s not doing more. And I can’t either.”
He remembered Bob’s name from her letter, the guy who’d asked about the fishing in the Caribbean.
“Got his number?”
She rattled it off, then asked a question.
“The funeral’s in two days. Will you be coming?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, and heard a sigh of exasperation. “Who’s the Army sending?”
“A color guard. A few guys to shoot off some rifles. His CO’s flying in from Cuba, but everybody else has to stay at Gitmo. I hear they did a little memorial service for him, down on the beach.”
That was the first Falk had heard about it, which made him feel pretty stupid.
“Stay on top of this, please,” she said. “And let me know what you find out.”
“Will do.” Another stretch. “But, look, there’s one last question I have to ask.”
“Go ahead.” Terse, as if she had already guessed it.
“Was there anything going on—at home, at the bank, at Gitmo, anywhere—that could have made him feel like he had to do this?”
“My God, you’re just like the other one. You’re all in this together, aren’t you? The goddamn Army and everybody else. Point the finger at anybody but yourselves.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not like that at all. We just …”
Click.
He could hardly blame her. Yet another doubter suggesting her husband had wanted to escape this world—and, by implication, her and the children. So of course she’d be grasping at any straw that might suggest otherwise.
Falk got an answering machine at her brother’s place. He still had time to kill before calling Ed Sample back, so he went up the street for a second jolt of coffee and then checked out of his room. He was already dressed in the day’s mandatory uniform—jeans and white shirt—and had tossed the Dolphins cap on the front seat of the car. He left the cell phone behind.
He began making his way toward downtown, and soon spotted a Walgreens, so he pulled in to pick up the required bag and a bottle of water. Then he waited in the car until the dashboard clock rolled over to 11:00 before he called Ed Sample from a phone outside the store. This time Ed answered.
“Mr. Sample, I assume you’ve heard about Captain Ludwig’s death down in Cuba.”
“Yes, sir. We were all pretty shaken up. Our bank’s kind of like family. Not at corporate level, of course, but around here. We were pretty much a mom-and-pop outfit until Farmers Federal bought us out.”
“And when was that?”
“About a year and a half ago. Earl was one of the few local managers they kept and promoted, mostly because there would have been a depositors’ revolt if they hadn’t.”
Just like the old Building and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life, Falk thought, although it was hard imagining George Bailey appr
oving a wire transfer to the Caymans. He wondered if Sample would bring up the subject without prompting.
“Was he staying in pretty close touch with bank business while he was down there?”
“About as much as you’d expect. He always wanted to see the monthly totals, hear about any special problems.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, I don’t know. This and that. I guess you’d have to know the business.”
“Would ‘this and that’ include foreign banking transactions? Like wire transfers?”
There was a sigh at the other end.
“Look … What’d you say your name was again?” Falk heard him scribbling on a pad.
“Revere Falk. FBI.” He repeated the song and dance he’d done for Doris Ludwig about numbers and verifications. Hardly anyone ever took him up on the offer, and Sample was no exception.
“I’ll cut to the chase,” Falk said. “I read your last piece of mail to him, and I’d wager you were as curious about those transactions as I am.”
Sample paused, perhaps weighing the bank’s reputation against his loyalty to his late boss.
“Is this part of some banking investigation?”
“Banking’s not my area, Mr. Sample. That would be Treasury, or other people at the Bureau. If you hear from anyone on that matter—and I’m not saying you will—it would most likely be an assistant U.S. attorney. But I won’t be in touch with them, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Sample exhaled, presumably in relief.
“It’s the amount that surprised me most. I mean, two million? Around here that’s more than we might turn over for months.”
“Yeah, that’s a lot, all right.”
“Especially under those terms.”
“Which were what?”
“I thought you knew all this?”
“Only what I saw in your letter. The one dated last Thursday.”
“That was just my way of registering disapproval, in the mildest possible terms but without being too specific. He’d led me to believe that sometimes people read their mail.”
“So you were covering your ass?”
“I guess that’s one way to put it. This thing came out of the blue. No phone call, no letter. Just a transfer form on a fax, followed by a letter he’d signed on bank stationery, giving us the go-ahead.”
The Prisoner of Guantanamo Page 21