by Tod Goldberg
“If I were you, you know what I’d do?” Fiona said.
“Rob a bank?” Leticia actually smiled when she said that, which made Fiona happy. Somewhere was a person inside there.
“No, I’m not doing that anymore,” Fiona said. “I’d pick up your son from school tomorrow and I’d just keep driving. Don’t stop until you get to Atlanta or Charlotte or New York or Canada. And then when you get to wherever you are, you call Father Eduardo and tell him that Killa was making you do things you didn’t want to do and that he threatened to take your son and that you’re not coming back until he’s gone.”
Leticia nodded and then welled up again. “That’s my dream. But that takes money, and I don’t have enough to even get gas in my car to make it to Sarasota.”
“If I could get you money,” Fiona said, “would you go?”
“Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”
“I was you,” Fiona said. That wasn’t strictly true, but it was for the role she was playing, and it was also what life could have been like if she’d been the type of woman who let other people rule her.
“Anyway, I got a parole officer,” she said. “I can’t just relocate like that. It would take a lot of paperwork. And you know Killa? He’s got visitation rights. It would be kidnapping, wouldn’t it?”
That someone named Killa had any rights made Fiona sick. But the reality of the situation made Fiona sicker. She needed to do something for the girl. She’d just have to tell Michael that she’d picked up another client for him.
“Let me talk to some friends I have,” Fiona told the girl.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Someone has to be.” Fi reached into her purse and pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and scrawled out one of her safe numbers. “This is my cell,” she said. “You find yourself in a bad position, you feel like you need help before I can get you the help you need, I want you to call me.”
“This is crazy,” Leticia said. “You don’t even know me.”
“We tough girls have to stick together,” Fiona said.
Leticia smiled faintly, and for the first time she looked to Fiona like the young girl she absolutely was. She took the piece of paper with Fiona’s number on it and slipped it into her own purse. “I better go or I’ll be late to get back to the phones,” Leticia said. “I don’t like to disappoint Father Eduardo if I can avoid it.”
10
When plotting a counterinsurgency, it’s important to recognize that not all of your decisions can be based on what would be considered, in everyday life, acceptable ethics. Breaking the law for the good of the country is practically a right of passage for American presidents, so imagine how often it happens with spies.
But if you’re leading a counterinsurgency operation, you must gauge the moral well-being of your subordinates after these activities and be prepared to act as a sounding board for them or, if needed, remove them from duty. What this means is that in a war zone, you may need to order a Black Hawk in to medevac a soldier to an appropriate mental facility. But if you’re fighting in close quarters, with a small fighting unit, a good leader may have to serve as the mental health provider.
Which is why when I called Barry—a man with exceptionally questionable ethics and usually very little guilt about it—I could tell that he needed the equivalent of two Xanax and a good nap, but that he was pondering something more along the lines of a guy with two guns showing up at his door and offering him a dirt nap. So I did the one thing I could think of: I invited him to my mother’s house for lunch. Sometimes a guy just needs a sandwich with crusts cut off to feel better about himself.
Plus, my mother’s house was a safe place. If anyone from the Latin Emperors happened down the street, the neighborhood watch commander would scuttle an F-16.
I’d been at my mother’s for only a few minutes when Barry knocked on the door. My mother opened it, saw him looking pitiful there on the front porch and did the one motherly thing she could do in this instance: She gave him hell.
“Did someone kill your dog?” she asked by way of greeting.
“No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I’ve just had a hard week. Busy time in my line of work.”
“You think you have it any harder than anyone else?”
Barry looked over my mother’s shoulder at me—she hadn’t let him in yet—and I gave him the universal sign of surrender. “No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I guess I don’t.”
“Well, then wipe off your feet, take off those ludicrous sunglasses and come inside. Michael’s been waiting for you for hours.”
It’s not that my mother had no concept of time—since I’d been there only fifteen minutes on the outside—it’s that she’d been saying the same thing to me and my brother, Nate, for so long that it was just second nature. Someone was always waiting for hours to give us hell.
Barry did as he was told and then sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He had bags under his eyes, and his normally sculpted facial hair had a bit more scruff than usual to it. “You look good,” I said.
“I haven’t been sleeping too well.”
“Conscience bothering you, Barry?”
“Before I make my confession, would it be possible to get something to eat?”
“Ma,” I said, “can you make Barry a sandwich?”
My mother came into the kitchen and gave Barry another once-over, as if she hadn’t seen him just a few seconds earlier. “You look like hell,” she said. “When was your last proper shower?”
“Two days,” Barry said. “I’ve been staying on a boat.”
“The Atlantic Ocean out of water now?” she said.
Barry looked at me for help, but I’d been on the blunt end of this weapon before and knew to stick out. “Could I get a grilled cheese?” he said.
“Could you?” she said.
“May I?”
“That’s better,” my mother said. “I’ve got two types of cheese: American and Velveeta. Which would you like?”
“Velveeta isn’t a kind of cheese,” Barry said. “It’s a brand. Right, Michael?”
“Popular misconception,” I said.
“Then I guess I’ll have both?” Barry said, more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. He’d finally caught the drift of my mother’s tough-love approach ... which usually contained a lot more tough than love. “And could I get a glass of milk? You don’t happen to have any strawberry Quik, do you?”
“I think there’s some in the pantry,” she said. I was going to tell her that that strawberry Quik had been in the pantry since 1983, but opted not to. If a dying man wanted strawberry Quik, who was I to withhold his wish? It was just a good thing he didn’t ask for a Sanka, because she had a vacuum-sealed can of that, too, that hadn’t seen the light of day since Carter was in office.
While my mom prepared Barry his schoolboy lunch, I thought it might be prudent to figure out just what the hell he’d done.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.
“That’s a good thing, right? Means both of us have been able to live our lives without need for too much trouble.”
“Sam tells me you’re in the consulting business now.”
“I thought I’d try to diversify my interests. Make sure I’ve always got a good revenue stream. It’s just smart business. Like how sometimes for you, you’re helping little old ladies or sick kids, or other times it’s someone who’s got pimp problems or just escaped a Russian prison. Same kind of thing.”
“Right,” I said. “I see that. Exactly the same thing.” I got distracted for a moment by the smell of burning paper. I turned and looked, and my mother had started a small fire on the counter where she was making Barry’s grilled cheese. She’d gone for the old-fashioned touch and was cooking the sandwich using a clothes iron. The problem was that she had the sandwich on top of a stack of newspapers. And now there were flames.
“Uh, Ma,” I said. “You maybe want to shove that in the sink.”<
br />
“You think I don’t know how to put out a kitchen fire, Michael? You’re not the only one with some training around here.” My mom slid the sandwich and the newspapers and was just about to drop the iron into the sink, but fortunately, the power cord wasn’t long enough and so she opted to leave it on the counter so she could electrocute herself at a later date. Barry and I both stared in stunned silence until she finally realized the near-fatal error of her ways. “What?” she said. “I didn’t do it.”
“Do you have peanut butter?” Barry asked.
“I have a jar of Peter Pan in the pantry,” she said.
“Crunchy or creamy?”
“Barry,” my mother said, “you’ll eat it either way. What does it matter? And once it’s in your mouth, it’s all creamy.” A few moments later, my mother set down a sandwich—minus the crusts—and a glass of strawberry Quik in front of Barry. “Eat,” she said, and Barry did.
When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Now, this really did feel like therapy. “You ever ask yourself, Mike, what is simpler than just being at home?”
“No,” I said. “Street fighting in Tikrit was simpler than being at home.”
“Simple pleasures,” Barry said, ignoring me. “Peanut butter and jelly. Strawberry-flavored milk. Why’d I ever leave home in the first place?”
“I’m going to guess it was to go into juvenile hall,” I said.
“It even smells like home here, Mike,” Barry said.
I reached across the table and grabbed Barry by his shirt collar and yanked him back to real life. “Welcome home,” I said. “Time to start talking, or my mother will give you a spanking.”
Barry straightened himself out, emptied the remnants of the strawberry Quik and then leaned forward on his elbows. “Truth? I wasn’t made for the consulting business. I’m a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of guy. Independent contractor.”
“What did you tell Junior Gonzalez?”
“Look, he came to me, said he had some questions, could I give him some advice. And I said, ‘Sure,’ named a price; he came back and offered double, and we were in business.”
“And let me guess—he paid you double by giving you a bag of skank bills up front.”
Barry raised his eyebrows, but he wasn’t really shocked. He couldn’t be. If he was sitting here with me, he knew I probably had a fair idea of what had already happened. I was looking for the more salient details.
“Not just skank bills,” Barry said. “‘Skank’ implies some basic ability. No, this was like Monopoly money.”
“How long ago did he first contact you?”
“Six weeks, maybe.”
“And he just came to ask you about making money?”
“Not exactly,” Barry said. “You know, I’ve diversified my portfolio since you got back into town and began using my services. So I’ve been letting people know that if they have needs regarding certain government rules and regulations, well, I now have a bit more expertise and can negotiate sensitive areas.”
“Barry,” I said.
“So I might have told Junior about how best to avoid wiretaps, a couple of things I’ve picked up regarding the Patriot Act from that credit card thing we did with that terrorist bank in Myanmar, and may have navigated him toward ways he might avoid using his identity. The guy had been in prison practically since disco, so he wasn’t exactly up on a lot of the new technology. And his guys—well, more like henchmen, really—weren’t exactly top of their class at MIT, so, well, I might have intimated to him that I could provide additional services outside the consulting I was providing.”
“Barry,” I said, “there’s no ‘might have’ involved here, is there?”
My mother came by and picked up Barry’s plate, then surveyed the damage and went back into the kitchen to make him another one. That she’d managed not to sit down with us and pound questions into Barry was a sign of major growth on her part. That she was clearly listening to every word, however, and showed herself in time for Barry to come up with a suitable answer was a kind of charity I frankly wasn’t familiar with.
“It’s like this, Mike,” Barry began, but I reached over and grabbed his collar again, which stopped him.
“Barry,” I said, “we’re friends. I like you. I’m happy to help you. I’m happy to get your help. But if you dance around the truth any longer, I might hurt you. So just tell me something definitive.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Yes. There is no ‘might’ here.”
I let go of him and said, “Barry,” again, because sometimes just hearing your name reminds you that you’re a real person and that you’ve disappointed someone. Your name is the one word in the history of language that has the power to mean about five hundred different things depending on inflection and the person speaking. In this case, I wanted “Barry” to mean “you idiot.”
“I know, I know, I’m stupid,” Barry said, getting it. “But, Mike, it’s not like I’m flush with business right now. I’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of comfort and, as such, my station in life requires that I continue to grow my brand.”
“Your brand,” I said, “has worsened a substantial problem.” I told him about Father Eduardo and Junior, about the Latin Emperor compound out in Homestead, what we’d discovered at the Ace Hotel, what Sam had uncovered and about Fiona’s fact-finding mission at Honrado, which I’d learned just prior to Barry’s arrival had yielded us plenty of information and, apparently, another damsel in distress ... in addition to Barry, of course.
Barry took in all of this information without saying much. At first he just calmly ate the second sandwich my mother dropped off; then he attempted to drink a second glass of strawberry Quik, wisely gave that up midway through and asked for a beer and, finally, began to knead his hands together.
“Just to clarify,” Barry said when I’d finished, “I didn’t know that Pistell girl was some college kid. I had good intel that she was a very wealthy Connecticut business woman.”
“She’s not,” I said. That Barry was using the word “intel” was not a good sign. Apparently he’d decided his consulting business should include military words.
“Well, I can fix that one. Now that she’s got such good credit, it won’t be a problem.”
“Is that a joke, Barry?”
“Yes. Just attempting to find some levity here.”
“Tell me what Junior wanted to know,” I said.
“First, just to be clear, I told him that I couldn’t get involved with a criminal organization,” Barry said. “I didn’t come right out and say it, but I intimated to him that the snitch factor was too high for my liking, and he seemed agreeable to that. Some kid off the street gets pinched, and all of sudden I’m doing fifty years.”
“Probably only ten,” I said.
“I couldn’t do ten minutes,” Barry said. “You know you’re not allowed any kind of skin lotions in some prisons? I’ve got an eczema thing on my knees that, untreated, could be a real problem.”
“Barry,” I said.
“Right. So he asked me about the best way to launder his money so that he could still invest it, so that he could make his money work for him. He actually said that. I told him the only positive illegal marketplace right now was in religious groups and faith-based non-profits. The FBI and IRS are so busy chasing all the shady mortgage lenders and refinancers and sham banks that they just don’t care about the little guys when there are billions of bad dollars floating around in the banks and the automakers and the insurance companies. You don’t see any churches asking for bailouts. So I told him, kind of joking—you know, levity, like I said before—that he should start a church. How much could it cost to start a church?”
“It could cost eternity,” I said.
“Hey, I don’t play the morality card with these people. They want to defraud God, have at it,” Barry said. “I’m just offering opinions. Good, solid, fact-based opinions.”
The sad truth was that Barry wa
s correct. Running an illegal operation through a church is one of the safest routes an enterprising businessperson can take. Cash donations are difficult to track, but they are the stock and trade of many small churches and one of the easiest ways to clean dirty money. It’s also one of the easiest ways to defraud people. If you want to get someone’s personal information, tell them you’re working for God and that you need their help. Offer to pay someone a small amount of money for a task, and they’ll give you the keys to their entire life in return, all in the form of the W-2 and I-9 forms they’ll need to fill out to get paid. It’s a small investment for the possibility of a wide return.
It also made his shakedown of Father Eduardo all the more clear-cut: He didn’t just have a church; he had an entire faith-based organization of small businesses and had the ear of important people ... which meant the mere idea that the FBI, IRS or any other organization might decide to investigate it without probable cause seemed remote.
Of course, working the money through a church had a side benefit: It’s nearly impossible to get a warrant to bug a church. It’s not that the idea of sanctuary still exists from medieval times, but what someone says to his clergy is privileged, just as if he were speaking to his lawyer. Even the nice relic from the Bush administration—the warrantless wiretap—would be pretty far out-of-bounds inside a church, but particularly since this was a church that was actively helping people with the aid, probably, of government subsidy.
Junior was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to know all of this from his perch inside a prison. But Barry, well ... Barry knew his industry better than anyone in Miami, so everything I knew, Barry had imparted to Junior, too. Junior was wise enough to go to him; Barry wasn’t wise enough to run the other direction, which I told him, with more than just a little regret.