by Tod Goldberg
Our waiter came by then and dropped off our dinners—veal Milanese for Sam, fettuccini Alfredo with the sauce on the side for me, so, essentially, just a plate of noodles—and regarded the growing scale of Sam’s empty bottle collection. “Anything else to drink, sir?” the waiter asked.
“Whatever else you have,” Sam said.
When building a fortress, it’s important to understand the message you want to send. The White House, for instance, was built with the understanding that people visiting it for the first time would be awed by the size and scale and thus would feel awed by the size and scale of the American government. Your fortress tells unwelcome visitors who you are, what you’re made of and, likely, what you’re willing to risk to protect yourself.
It used to be that you could walk right up to the front door of the White House and ask to pet Calvin Coolidge’s dog. Now, in many Miami neighborhoods, you’re stopped at a gate by an out-of-work cop who demands a DNA sample before you’re allowed inside. And yet Eduardo Santiago’s fortress projected no such audacity. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a college campus. A very small college, and one filled with tatted-up ex-gangsters sitting under trees, but a college no less.
“I didn’t know they still had trees in this part of town,” Sam said. We were a few blocks from the Orange Bowl, just off of Northwest Fourth Street, in an area mostly surrounded by stucco warehouses, three-story apartment complexes and small houses behind chain-link fences. In comparison, Eduardo’s church and the buildings for Honrado were bunched around a bucolic expanse of green grass, towering shade trees and discreet water features. There were picnic tables and Adirondack chairs placed seemingly at random in different areas, though it had a designer’s touch for what randomness should be, hallmarked by the fact that the chairs and tables were bolted onto concrete slabs. It was still Miami, after all.
There were seven buildings in all and each was a modern steel-and-glass structure, even the church. There wasn’t a spot of graffiti anywhere, nor was there any visible security. The adults and kids who sat on the grass and walked between the buildings looked tough from afar, which is to say that they looked like they thought they looked tough, but really just looked like they’d been terribly misguided at some point. Who walks with a limp when they don’t need to?
For the most part, however, everyone wore clothes that fit and most of the men, women, girls and boys wore identical gray polo shirts with the logo for Honrado Incorporated on the left breast pocket. If you want to build an army, the first thing you need to do is get them into uniform. This is true if you’re in the marines or if you’re in the Bloods. People like to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves, and even here, at a business run by a church, those rules still applied.
“What was this place before it was this?” I asked.
Sam looked around. “Nothing. That would be my guess.”
“Five acres of nothing?”
“Sure wasn’t a great, big park with Adirondack chairs.”
“No,” I said, “I would have remembered that.”
“Seems to me I remember parking here before football games. It was one of those vacant blacktop lots that some industrious soul decided to sit in front of with a sign offering parking for five bucks less than at the stadium.”
“This couldn’t have been cheap to renovate,” I said.
We made our way across the lawn to the church’s administrative offices. Double doors opened into a rounded portico where a young woman with a headset on sat behind a small desk. Unlike the young women who had the same job at the hotels along South Beach or the busy offices in Coconut Grove, this woman had a ragged scar that stretched from the corner of her right eye, crossed over her nose and continued all the way over her left cheek and down across her jawline. It was rippled and red and maybe half an inch wide. It was unmistakable: Someone had slashed her face with a razor blade.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to see Eduardo,” I stopped myself, considered the surroundings, and then corrected, “Father Eduardo.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said, “but he’s expecting me. Tell him his friend from the car wash is here.”
The girl touched her ear and spoke into the headset. “Father Santiago? Your friend from the car wash is here. Would you like me to take them to the conference room? Yes, no problem, Father.” The girl tapped her ear again and smiled up at us. “Father Santiago is running a few minutes behind schedule. He says he’ll be right out to see you in a moment. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”
“What do you have in a bottle?” Sam asked.
“Evian or Dasani,” she said.
“He’ll have Evian,” I said before Sam could answer.
“No problem,” she said. She slid a clipboard toward me and asked me to sign in, which I did. Except that I said my name was Napoleon Solo, because I thought it prudent not to have my name on the official visitor’s list of any organization. I handed the clipboard to Sam. He signed it Illya Kuryakin and handed it back to the girl, who then proceeded to not even bother to look at it, which Sam clearly viewed as a shame. The girl then got up and walked down the narrow hall to her left, and I saw that her scar actually stretched around her neck, too.
Sam and I sat down in the lobby, and a few moments later, the girl returned with our waters.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
Immediately, the girl’s hand flared up toward the scar on her face. “Sure,” she said, though I could tell she felt uneasy. “I get asked questions all the time.”
“Do you like working here?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Do you like your job here? Has it been good for you to work here?”
“Working for Father Santiago is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said.
I looked at Sam to see if he was gloating, but he was too busy trying to figure out the twist top of his water.
“How long have you been here?”
“A year. Maybe a little more. Soon as I got out, Father Santiago told me I could work for him.”
Got out. So comfortable telling a stranger she’d done time. “Where were you?”
“Homestead,” she said. “You ever been there?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s south of here. It wasn’t so bad. You know. It was actually safer for me. Crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” I said. “How old are you?”
“You don’t ask a lady that,” Sam said, which made the girl smile. “You ask how young they are, right?”
“Twenty-three,” she said. “But I feel older.”
“You look like a million bucks,” Sam said.
The girl touched her scar. She was pretty, you could see that, even with the gouge across her face and neck. “Father Santiago says that I could get plastic surgery for this. What do you think?”
“You could,” I said. I pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”
“Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying—when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation—but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”
“I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”
“He have a lot of friends?” I asked.
“Don’t you
read the newspaper?” she asked.
Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.
“Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.
“The mayor,” Sam said.
“Of where?”
“Miami,” Sam said.
Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”
Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.
The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.
I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”
“I knew his wife,” he said.
“A buddy of yours?”
“Of a kind, yes.”
When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.
“Gentlemen,” Eduardo Santiago said, “please, come into my office. We have much to talk about.”
3
There are offices—like the one I sat in with my mother and Eduardo Santiago the previous day—that serve a specific purpose, as a place where one person can sit comfortably to work on a computer. And then there are offices like the one Eduardo Santiago kept for himself at Honrado Incorporated, which was as wide as my loft, contained two leather sofas, a flat-screen television mounted to the wall, a small glass-faced refrigerator filled with bottled water, a round table covered in blueprints and an entire wall dedicated to photos. Eduardo with various celebrities, politicians, athletes and entertainers, certainly, but most of the photos were actually of Eduardo with kids and with young men and women out in the community. There were also framed news stories and features from the Miami Herald, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and even a snappy little color thing from USA Today. I stopped and read a few lines in each. Everything my mother and Sam said was parroted in the pages of the nation’s most esteemed newspapers: Eduardo Santiago had done the impossible and now was using himself as a prime example for the kids coming out of Miami’s battle-hardened neighborhoods.
“You’ll have to pardon my ego,” Eduardo said when he saw me reading his wall.
“It looks like you’ve done some great things,” I said. “My mother didn’t lie.”
“Not this time,” Sam said.
“I’ve been very blessed.” Eduardo motioned to the round conference table. “Please, my friends, have a seat.”
It was very strange. When I had seen Eduardo the previous day, he spoke to me in a kind of refined street patois, but here he spoke as if he’d gone to private schools his entire life. Perhaps that was the surest sign Eduardo Santiago was a different person now—he knew how to change his persona for a given situation. That was a talent I could appreciate.
We sat down at the table, but Eduardo remained standing at first, as if he wasn’t sure this was, in fact, the course of action he wanted to take. How odd it must be to meet with the mayor of the city at one moment and then whatever, or whomever, Sam and I were the next.
The key to making someone comfortable, even in their own home or sanctuary, is to ask him questions about himself. People love to talk about themselves. This is why so many people admit to crimes when police interrogate them—they simply cannot help themselves from themselves.
I picked up one of the blueprints. “Are you expanding?”
“Oh, yes,” Eduardo said. He stood between Sam and me and looked at the blueprint. “That will be our greenhouse. We plan on having more sustainable gardens here in the future, so we can begin providing organic vegetables. Do you know that the average apple you eat contains over fifty trace chemicals in its skin?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And look at yourself. You should know. You’re fit. You’re smart. Now think about these kids in these neighborhoods. You think any of them have any idea about pesticides in their food?”
“I’d guess that’s the least of their concerns,” Sam said.
“You would guess correctly,” Eduardo said. “Whoever you are.”
“Mikey didn’t tell you I was coming?” Sam said. He shook Eduardo’s hand. “Sam Axe at your service. You’ve got the full faith and credit of the United States government right here in my handshake.”
“That’s not an entity I trust, but I assume if you are with Mr. Westen that you are trustworthy.”
“That’s not a good assumption,” I said.
“Ah, but it is an educated guess,” he said. “Educating someone is different from making them concerned about something. Same with the kids and the organic food. People today, they do not know the difference between education and fear-making.” He sighed then and shook his head. He finally took a seat across from us. “This is precisely what I was talking to the mayor about. All of this money to teach children what to be afraid of, and no money to teach them music or art or, well, you know how it is. Do you know I learned how to play the violin in prison? It’s true.”
“Maybe more people should go to prison,” I said.
“Just because it is true doesn’t mean it isn’t a shame, Mr. Westen.”
I laughed.
“You find that funny?” he said.
“I find it funny you just called me Mr. Westen,” I said. “I was trying to remember the last time I saw you before yesterday. And you know what I remembered? You actually turned my brother, Nate, upside down and shook all of the change out of his pockets.”
“Mikey, that’s what kids do,” Sam said.
“He wasn’t a kid,” I said. “Do you remember this, Eduardo?”
“I’m afraid I do not. Not because it didn’t happen, but because I did it to so many people. How old was I?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe seventeen? Maybe eighteen? Old enough and rich enough not to need a kid’s pocket change.”
“It was never need,” Eduardo said. “And where were you at this time?”
“I was coming up with a bat in my hand to crush over your head,” I said. “Unfortunately, a teacher saw me coming and wouldn’t let me.”
“Unfortunately?” he said.
“Could have saved you and a lot of other people a lot of grief,” I said.
“I get the sense you don’t believe I am a changed person,” Eduardo said.
“You sense correctly.”
“I need your help, Michael,” Eduardo said. “So I hope I can convince you that I am worthy of it.”
“How did you even know I exist?”
“You helped a friend of mine,” he said. “Ernie Paseo. He was having trouble with some gangsters.”
Can no one keep a secret anymore? Ernie Paseo had been one of the first people I’d helped in Miami. He had also been sworn to tell no one that I’d helped him, and had subsequently referred people to me like I was a Merry Maid.
Ernie was not the kind of person to engage with crooks, and the mere fact that he’d mentioned me to Eduardo was a good sign.
“Ernie’s been good for business,” Sam said.
“Remind me not to give him any secret launch codes,” I said.
“He told me I could trust you,” Eduardo said. “He told me you were a good and honest man and that you weren’t scared of anyth
ing. Your name sounded familiar, so I asked some of our old ... associates ... if you were the same person as I recalled from childhood.”
Associates. That could mean only that Eduardo made some phone calls to a few of the less desirables we’d both gone to school with and maybe he’d rolled with. “No one you knew from school knows I’m back,” I said.
“That’s funny,” he said. “You have a friend who sells guns?”
Fiona.
“No,” I said.
“A girl, maybe? Wears short skirts and always has automatic weapons?”
Fiona, for sure.
“Nope. Sam, you know anyone like that?”
“Can’t say I do, Mikey. Sounds like a very dangerous person. If I see her, I’ll call nine-one-one.”
We both gave Eduardo our most professional smiles.
“I don’t care, Mr. Westen, who you know. Just know people are aware of your presence in town. The right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. Just like you and me. The difference is that I have a path guided by the Lord, and that path tells me that at every turn I’ll need to make right the sins of my youth. I don’t think you feel the same way.”
“I’m not a criminal, Eduardo. I never was.”
“Maybe not in your eyes. But, Mr. Westen, you have killed, have you not?”
“I have,” I said.
“That’s against someone’s law,” he said.
He certainly had a way of evening the scales. And the truth is, I believed him. The evidence was all around, and his demeanor suggested a man who’d changed his life and was dedicated to helping others.
“You’ve done an excellent job letting me know that we are cut from the same cloth, that you’ve been saved and that the world is going to be just fine now that you’re on the job. So, Eduardo, what do you need me for? You need help getting out of the sand trap the mayor left you in?”
Eduardo exhaled through his mouth and his entire body wilted a bit inside his expensive suit. He loosened his tie and took off his coat, and then held up another blueprint. “You see this?” he asked. “This is going to be our new library. Paid for entirely through donations. It will be state-of-the-art—computer retrieval system, digital library of every newspaper in America—everything—and we will be training librarians here. It’s true. Library science classes will take place on Northwest Fourth Street. This?” He pointed at yet another blueprint. “This is going to be an auto shop. We had one before, but it wasn’t here. It was out near the juvie, so I couldn’t watch it, and soon it became a chop shop. You know? Kids, they will fall back into bad habits. So many plans. Next year, I’ll have another hundred fifty people working, if everything goes as planned.”