by Joe Navarro
“I don’t understand,” Rod says when he can finally get his emotions under control. “You know, I give her a place to live; I do everything—”
“And she’s fucking another guy under your roof?”
“Joe . . . ”
“Rod, can I tell you something?”
He nods.
“You’ve got to let this girl go. This isn’t healthy. You’ve just got to move on.”
“Sure,” he says, seeming to agree, “but I can’t just leave her with no place to live.”
“Rod,” I want to say, “you can leave her with no place to live and secretly pour cayenne pepper all over Romeo’s prick, and no jury of peers in the land would convict you,” but this isn’t what Rod wants to hear, and his romantic and housing problems, I feel certain, are only entry gates to levels of fucked-upness that I haven’t yet begun to imagine. I’m not sure if I want to open them, but honestly, I don’t see how I can help him if I don’t.
“It’s not just the girl, is it, Rod? Not just the camper?”
He’s looking at me now, with tears back in his eyes, a cigarette jammed between his thin lips. If Rod weighs 130 pounds, I’d be surprised. He’s been wasting away in front of Moody’s and my eyes ever since we resumed interviewing him. Without the dinners we’ve been buying him, he might just disappear into his own shadow. But maybe because of the clap, Rod’s worse than ever today. He stinks—there’s no other word for it. His breath is rancid with nicotine and neglect. This is the Campground of Wounded Souls, as I’ve come to think of it, but even here as we walk in the darkening evening, Rod stands out.
“What is it, Rod?” I ask. I’ve got my hand on his shoulder, turning him toward me. “What’s wrong?” And that’s when he loses it completely.
“Everything, Joe,” he says, practically begging me to embrace him. “Everything under the sun.”
And so, with Rod literally weeping on my shoulder, we begin the long unraveling of his utterly fucked-up life. The father he never really knew. The mother he knows he’s let down time and time again. The bank he and some pals robbed when they were eighteen. There’s also the failed drug test, not so funny in this telling when it’s clear to me he desperately misses the army life. And of course the hours upon hours he spends waiting in line at Orlando International every day in a cab he can pay the rent on only if he gets more fares than time permits. (“Why don’t you work the hotels, Rod,” I suggest—“the people going to the airport, instead of coming from it? The distance is the same, but there’s never more than a couple cabs waiting at the Embassy Suites.” “But there’re lots of people to talk with in the cab line,” he counters.) Even ABC News, Rod says, has been screwing him, making him promises (of what, he doesn’t say) then never delivering.
We’re walking again, circling the campground, when a word comes to me: inchoate, that sense of beginning many things but never having a fully formed plan or seeing things through. That’s the story of Rod’s life, I’m thinking. He strives, but he never achieves. He robs a bank (or says he does—I’ll be checking on this) but walks away with pocket money. He torpedoes his army career with cannabis. He moves a girlfriend into his camper without ever considering that she might end up screwing another guy on his bed. He rents a cab so he can wait in a long line and gab with other cabbies, undoubtedly impressing them with his vast erudition. We’ve got no way of confirming what Rod claims to have been paid for his espionage work—two hundred bucks serving as a documents mule, five hundred for stealing the go-to-war plans—but you can bet it’s only a tiny fraction of what Clyde Conrad netted from the same activities.
God, I’m thinking as we close in on Rod’s camper again, Conrad must have seen this guy as a godsend—a brilliant, needy, inchoate sucker, ready to sign up for the riskiest schemes.
* * *
NONE OF THIS IS interviewing the way I’m used to doing it—no chairs placed just so, no order of entry, no script in my head or anywhere else. I’m making this up on the fly, and so when we get back to Rod’s camper, I wing it one more time, pulling out two $20 bills and handing them to him outside.
“Here,” I say, “take it, but I don’t want you to spend this on drugs. I don’t want you to spend it on alcohol, and I don’t want you to spend it on her,” pointing toward the camper door with my chin.
“Of course not,” Rod says. Then he gives me a hearty slap on the back, thanks me for the “super chow,” and walks jauntily away in the direction of his camper rubbing the two crisp twenties together over his head so I have a good look at them. And that’s when it dawns on me that maybe I’ve just been played for a five-star sucker—lured into driving two-plus hours round-trip so Rod can get a square meal and practice his melodrama. What’s more, if I’m reading that slap on the back and upbeat exit, Rod wants me to know exactly what just happened.
That’s the thing with Rod: Even if his sobs are for real, you never, ever know for sure what level of truth you’re playing at.
* * *
I BEGIN THE RETURN drive to Tampa with a hideous cup of carry-out coffee from the campground convenience store, thinking that I’d rather have a stomachache in the morning than do another off-roading adventure on the way home tonight.
By the quarter-way mark, I’m convinced I have, in fact, been conned, scammed, sucker-punched, wheedled, and cajoled not just out of my time and forty bucks but out of my emotional and intellectual comfort zone. Rod wanted to unsettle me—set me up, make me feel for him, then spring the joke. That’s what this whole thing was about. Ha ha. Who knows, maybe even the clap was part of it. God knows, I never checked his pecker personally, and never would, for that matter. But I did make that first call about securing drugs for him. And of course, looked at one way, I’ve also just bribed him for testimony.
By halfway, I’ve swung the other way. The whole fucked-upness of his life is far too real to be staged and far too deeply seated to be part of some plot to (a) ruin Joe Navarro’s life and/or (b) assure that any case ultimately brought against Rod will be thrown out.
That leaves me free for the rest of trip home to concentrate on the paradoxical nature of what I’m doing. The fact, for example, that I’m both Rod’s therapist and confessor—the one who must help him find some stability in his inchoate life, and the one who’ll eventually write the affidavit in this case, be the lead witness testifying against him in court, and, hopefully, cause him to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Cognitive dissonance? In spades.
There doesn’t seem to be an out, though. At this point I’m the only one who can coax the rest of the story out of Rod. (Not even She-Moody, I’m guessing, can pry loose the secrets buried in him, though I wouldn’t tell her that.)
As I approach the glowing lights of Greater Tampa, I punch in the local all-news station. Flash! While Rod and I have been pacing his Wounded Souls Campground in almost-exurban Orlando, 4,900 miles away in divided Berlin, Germans on both sides of the famous Wall are sledgehammering it to the ground.
Great, I think. So long, Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism, etc. But bears are never more dangerous than when they’re wounded, and this reeling Soviet bear still has enough kilotons of nuclear explosives to level every major European and American city from Vienna to LA, and more than enough throw-power to reach the surface of the moon and beyond. What do the crazies left in the Kremlin really have on us? I’m wondering. And will they panic and start something with whatever they know? Inevitably, that line of thought leads me back to one person: Rod.
14
“SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE”
November 10, 1989
“If you’re lost . . . la, la, la.”
Stephanie is singing at the breakfast table, an echo of the days when we were stationed in Puerto Rico. She and Luciana loved to watch Cyndi Lauper on VH1. They would sing these lyrics over and over again. I can hear traces of Luciana’s Brazilian-accented Portuguese in Stephanie’s voice. I see Luciana, too, in the way Stephanie taps her wrist with her index finger a
s she repeats the chorus: “time after time . . . ”
I have a memory of Stephanie singing this very song at some talent show—belting it out, fearless, giving it her all—but where and when? It couldn’t have been more than a few years ago. She’s only eight. But it seems almost like a memory from another lifetime.
I’m showered and dressed after another night of broken sleep. Over at the toaster, Luciana is holding up a sliced English muffin as if it were a question mark.
“Maybe with some yogurt and fruit?” she asks, hopeful that I might for once sit with them for breakfast and, judging by the sound of her voice, almost certain that I won’t. Her eyes, I notice, aren’t quite on mine, as if she’s chosen another me, a few inches to my right, to talk with.
“Sorry, dear,” I say, “not today. Places to go, people to see, like always.”
I think I hear her say “What day, then?” as I give Stephanie a kiss on the top of her head, inhaling deeply to capture her scent—something to take with me into a beautiful morning, the air scrubbed clean by a late-season storm.
But I don’t get away quite so cleanly. Luciana is tapping on my window as I slip the car into drive.
“This case,” she says as I’m lowering my window, “whatever it is, it’s like an obsessão, an . . . ” She struggles for the proper English rendering.
“An obsession, amada. I know it seems that way, but it’s not. It’s duty, that’s all. It’s my job. This case was poorly handled. I need to make it right before bad people walk away.”
“Ramsay,” she says, “the name you mumble in your sleep . . . ”
“You have to forget that name,” I tell her. Our hands are joined at the window, our closest physical contact in months, it seems. “I never should have said it, even in a dream.”
“I know,” she says, still not quite looking square at me. “Segredos.”
“No, no,” I say, “not secrets, need-to-know.”
“I hate not knowing, Joe. I hate what this case is doing to you.”
I want to explain it all—how badly Rod Ramsay has damaged this country, how far behind we are, what’s at stake. But that can’t happen, and Luciana has lived through this before. Still, she’s not alone. I also hate what this case is doing to me, personally and at home. Driving away, thinking of Stephanie and how little time we have together, my eyes well up with tears, so I force myself to think of something else.
* * *
THE ZACK STREET SANDWICH Shop must have been a nice place thirty years ago, I’m thinking, as I drop gently down on my usual stool at the far end of the counter, but time hasn’t stood still. I can feel one of the springs in the seat just itching to burst through the cracked red plastic cover. Half a year ago, I was sitting in one of the booths toward the back when that very thing happened. By the time I untangled my pants from the coiled metal, they were, in Bureau terms, non-salvageable. More than a few snickers trailed me as I walked back to the office covering my behind.
“Where’s your better half?” Linda asks as she plops a watery coffee down in front of me. This morning, she’s even more bristling than usual with piercings and ear studs and the oddest damn assortment of nature-themed tattoos I’ve ever seen. “You make her park the car today?”
For an instant I’m wondering if Luciana has ever been here. And if so, why?
“Oh,” says Linda, slapping me on the hand, “here she comes,” and as I turn, I see She-Moody winding toward me through the crowd.
Then I get it. “Moody? She’s not my wife!”
“You could have fooled me,” Linda says, utterly surprised. “You guys are tighter than pointed shoes.”
“That’s her husband over there—the redhead,” I tell her, pointing to He-Moody already sitting in the back with a gaggle of criminal-division agents.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” Linda says loudly. “I’ve never seen those two together—he’s always with those other wet-behind-the-ear agents.”
Somehow Moody has picked up instantly on the drift of this conversation, because the first thing she says as she sits on the stool next to me is “Believe me, Linda, I couldn’t be married to this man—ever. No sane woman could.”
“Nice, Moody,” I say, but with no real resentment. I’ve long since abandoned any illusion of popularity.
Linda breaks the silence for us.
“Well, if you guys aren’t married, you sure as hell sound like it. The usual?”
“With grits today,” Moody says, patting her belly. “The Bump has been doing somersaults all morning. I need to feed the beast.”
The reality, of course, is that Terry and I do spend a hell of a lot of time together—here, laying out the daily Rod strategy; back and forth between my office on the fifth floor and hers on the sixth, often whispering because we’re talking about things that most of our fellow agents aren’t cleared to hear; in the Bu-Steed, God knows, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth to Orlando; even (to get back to the romantic theme) in hotel rooms, although most of that time in the voluble company of a narcissistic traitor to his country.
Is Linda the only person who thinks we’re hitched, or at least having an affair? Probably not. If you strip out the Rod part of the equation, all the telltale signs are there. You wouldn’t have to be a genius to read them. I’m wondering if Luciana has considered the possibility, maybe even Rod.
“Do you think we’re spending too much time together?” I ask, as Linda heads back our way with tea for Moody.
“Think so? I know so. How does your wife put up with your hours?”
“Not well,” I say, remembering this morning’s failure to even make full eye contact. “I don’t blame her. This past year I haven’t been a great husband or father. This morning Stephanie was singing her favorite song, and I realized I hadn’t heard her sing in months—not just weeks, months! That sucks.”
“When was the last time you and Luciana went on a date or to a movie?” Moody asks.
I’m searching my mind for any such moment when Moody answers her own question. “I bet it’s been over a year. Joe, you never take time off. You’re pulling double and triple duty.”
“I know, I know.”
“And you look like shit today, by the way.”
“Thanks. People keep saying that.”
“No, really, you look terrible.”
She stops, looks down at the floor for maybe half a minute while I watch more of my office mates trickling in for the breakfast, and then looks back up and stares at me straight on.
“You’re doing it, aren’t you?”
“Doing what?”
“Studying me as I talk, checking out the arch of my eyebrows, whether I put my hand near my mouth. You’re probably hoping I’ll take up cigarettes so you can study my smoke contrails, for God’s sake.”
“My ‘body-language shit’?”
“Not shit, Joe. Not shit at all. This stuff works. But me, Joe?”
“Habit.”
“I’m your partner, Joe. You’ve got to trust someone. You’ve got to believe in someone.”
Trust? Believe? Suddenly, they sound like words from some lost tongue of the ancients.
“I didn’t tell you. I went off the road two nights ago, coming back from Orlando—I fell fast asleep behind the wheel.”
“Joe!”
“Well, I blame you for wanting to go in separate cars. If you’d been with me, I would have been wide-eyed awake all the way home.”
“Nice try. More likely we would have both been killed. What happened?”
“There’d been a wreck on I-4. I was on US 60 near Lakeland or Plant City—I can’t even remember exactly where. The next thing I knew my face was bobbing up and down and my teeth were chattering like a dashboard ornament on a low rider as I plowed through a strawberry field.”
“Are you okay? Did a doc check you out?”
“No, I’m not okay, but I survived, and more important, the Bu-Steed did, too. The rain had washed it almost clean by morning.”
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“You going to report it?”
“Ask me in a few days, and I’ll tell you what my conscience says. The only damage was to my pride. The field had about sixty yards of Goodyear tire marks, but that was about it—no fence knocked down.”
“How about that shoulder you keep rubbing? You don’t look very comfortable.”
“I sprained it maybe—the clavicle feels loose. I might have torn a ligament. The seat belt caught it pretty hard.”
“Okay, that does it,” Moody says as Linda sets our plates in front of us—bagel and cream cheese for me, the Hungry Girl special for Terry. “You’re going to see a doctor this morning.”
“Right,” I tell her. “And who’s going to find me the time to do that?”
“Joe, something’s got to give, or you’re going to end up in the ER one of these days, and it’ll be for something a hell of a lot worse than a bad shoulder.”
“Everything is starting to give, Moody,” I tell her as she begins diving into her fried eggs and sausage.
“Like?”
“Don’t play analyst. Things are tough at home. Luciana keeps telling me this is unfair—how I need to spend time with Stephanie, how she needs help around the house. She needs a husband, not a convivado.”
“What the hell’s a convivado?”
“It’s Portuguese for houseguest.”
“Ouch! You need to get your act together at home, Joe, seriously. What did Luciana say about your going off the road?”
“I haven’t told her. How can I? She won’t even make eye contact with me. We haven’t eaten together in months. I’m almost afraid to by now. What are we going to talk about?”
“God, Navarro, you can be a real selfish prick.”
“Thanks again, Moody. Another thing I really need to hear this morning.”
“You need to hear this especially this morning.” Moody has lowered her voice and is almost spitting her words out now between clenched teeth, but I can see the guy two stools down leaning his ear our way, caught up in our morning soap opera. “You could have died in that accident, goddamn it. A lot of good you would do then.”