“Okay. So, just the head of the IMF.”
“Alright, now you’re fucking with me again.” Brendan put his nose back in his book. He felt the hairs on his neck standing up. “This more about the pigeon population dropping just before the cafeteria serves chicken cacciatore?”
“Didier Lazard. Here for an alleged sexual assault of a housekeeping employee at the Waldorf-Astoria. Awaiting trial, just like you. Though I imagine his will get moved to the head of the docket, no offense. Guy’s loaded.”
Brendan looked up from his book. “He’s been in protective custody?”
“Yep. For two weeks.”
“Okay. So what? And this guy is in the same category with me, how?”
Tremont stepped away from the bunk and sat down on the toilet. He’d lost weight, but he was a still a big man, getting on in years, and the flesh seemed to hang on his bones. He turned his dark face to Brendan, who sat on the bottom bunk, tucked into the shadows. “Word I heard was that Lazard was here to meet with the head of the CSS. Guy named Wick. That’s why he was in town. But, seems he got touchy-feely with the maid and is taking a ride for it.”
Brendan felt his skin crawl. It wasn’t exactly fear or distaste, it was the sense of something coming together, like an electric charge turned up in the room.
“How do I get to him?”
“You don’t. He’s in the protection wing.”
* * *
“What is it, Healy? You’ve got something for me?” Grimm looked desperate. The pouches beneath his eyes could hold pennies. The heat in his office was stifling. Outside, the late March afternoon was gray and cold. It looked like it was about to snow.
“I need to see Didier Lazard.”
Grimm blinked, straight-faced. “That’s funny, Healy. I didn’t know you were so funny. The fuck do you think you need to see him for? Get an autograph?”
“Because of the smuggling going on in here.”
Grimm pursed his lips and exhaled through his nostrils. “Healy, goddammit. Three months I get nothing from you. You want to fuck around with me? Fine. Let’s see how you fair out there in gen. pop. with Laruso after you.”
“Just hear me out, sir.”
Baker appeared in the doorway. Brendan turned to look at CO Baker’s mouth curled into a sly smile, as if he’d been waiting for Healy to screw up and to get the opportunity to punish him for it. He entered the room and Brendan turned quickly back to Grimm.
“It’s not because Lazard is involved directly,” Brendan said quickly. “It’s the facility. The protective custody cells in West Facility are your major gateway.”
Grimm’s expression shifted from rage to interest. He held up his hand, and Brendan sensed Baker come to a stop just behind him, looming there, ready to pounce.
Brendan hurried on. “Think about it, sir. The rest of your facility is overpopulated. Men everywhere — guards and inmates. West Facility is far less populated. You’ve got special ingresses and egresses for inmates in custody — places where the security is isolated.”
“Then how is it being distributed?”
“Through the laundry,” Brendan lied. “You’ve got all those cots set up to handle the overflow. The machines there are running practically around the clock, so you’ve got laundry service making trips over here to wash that extra bedding and fatigues. Then the washed stuff goes back to the other facilities, and contains a little something besides clean sheets.”
Grimm leaned back in his chair, which squeaked beneath his considerable weight. He skewered Brendan with his glare. “And how do you know this?”
Brendan took a breath. “Sir, I’ve been quietly interviewing dozens of inmates. I’ve been taking all this time to build a case that gives you everything you need. But if I give you information now and you, in turn, do a little in-house cleaning, stave off this tactical search probe — which you and I both know is going to hit the jackpot with all the bug juice running through this place . . . You’ve got, what? Two years until social security and full pension, you said? You really want the Corrections Commissioner pulling you two years before retirement, the whole thing splashed all over the media? Because that’s what will happen.”
Grimm was as silent as a tomb, unmoving, watching Healy with dead mackerel eyes. For a moment Brendan thought his life might be over. Grimm would just do away with him. Change his mind on the whole thing and have Baker drag him down into the laundry where the rest of the guards would beat him to death. Or stick him in segregation and let them pay him visits over a period of weeks, maybe months. He’d already threatened as much.
“Who was talking?”
Brendan felt his heart thumping. “I would like to protect my sources if I could, sir.”
“What are you, a fucking journalist for the Times? Protect your sources? What do you care about what happens to some other scumbag in here? I put you together with Tremont for a reason . . .”
“I don’t, sir. I care about myself.” He paused and swallowed down the bile rising in his throat. If he involved his cellmate in the scam, Tremont’s nerves would prove accurate, his obsessively folded sheets auguries — Grimm wouldn’t let him go anywhere. He would trump something up to keep Tremont inside until things were resolved. “If I disclose my sources,” Brendan said, “I’m as good as dead. But you let me do this, let me go to the protective wing, it circumvents the source. We can say you put me there, for whatever reason you want to come up with, and I found things out on my own.”
Grimm took all of this in. He even brought his hands up and tented the fingers together, as if he were the Godfather. After a full, ostentatious, thirty seconds of this, he nodded. Brendan could feel Baker breathing down his neck. The man’s desire to throttle Brendan was palpable, as if it were the source of the heat in the room rather than the clanking radiator.
“Alright,” Grimm said at last. “So we send you into the protective wing to talk to Lazard. First of all, what’s your cover? And second of all, if we already know the contraband is being distributed via the laundry, what are you going to find?”
“Glad you asked, sir. Good questions. My cover is that you’re moving me into protective custody.”
Grimm changed his posture to sit up straighter and was waving his hands in the air. “I don’t like that. Too much paperwork. It will look suspicious if we get a probe audit, which we’re bound to, because if they’re waiting to pounce on the raid, and I’ve got to tell you, I can feel the cocksuckers ready to pounce, and when they do and they find nothing, they’re going to know I beat them to the punch and then they’re going to get their paper-pushers in here and look through every one of my files . . .”
“You won’t do the paper work on me, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“Inmates bounce in and out of the protective wing all the time. No one is going to notice I’m gone for two days. Three, tops. Then I’m right back to my Cadillac.”
“Your celly will notice.”
“Tremont will go along with whatever story you feed him, sir. He wants to do right by you, wants to do his time and be out of here tomorrow.”
Grimm laughed. It was a wicked, humorless laugh. “Everyone wants to get out of here.” He grew straight faced again. “So if this happens and if you get in, what indisputable evidence are you going to get for me so I can move on this?”
“I’m going to get you contraband.”
Grimm blinked. “How?”
“Lazard. He has the one occupied cell in your private wing. And that’s where they’re storing it right after it comes in, before it gets moved down to the laundry with his sheets. Storing it in the other cells would be recorded — every time one of these cells opens or closes, you have an account of that. So it’s the one cell that’s occupied. The one you usually reserve for these celebrity-types. No one bats an eyelid when their cell is opened. And they’re not complaining that they’ve got the freshest bedding in town; they expect it, they’re used to being treated like royalty. That’s probably why Laza
rd figured he’d pinch a little tail and get away with it.”
Another chuckle from Grimm, a sinister sound. Brendan felt a surge of nervous excitement. It might work.
But Grimm frowned. “And how are you going to get the contraband from Lazard’s cell? If I put you in there, then I’ve got to move him, and we’re back to the whole paper trail problem, Healy.”
“I’m going to talk him into giving it to me.”
Grimm’s eyes remained glassy and serious. “You are?”
“Yes.”
“And just how are you going to do that?” Now Grimm’s face contorted into a violent mask. “You’re telling me your plan is to have the director of the IMF turn over the illegal contraband in his cell to you? What if when he gets out of here in two months, he decides to tell the whole goddamned world that drugs were being stored in his fucking cell at Rikers-fucking-Island?” Grimm was shouting.
“He won’t. Or, even if he thinks he can, he’s the former head of the IMF. No one is going to give a shit about what he has to say about his time in jail for sexual harassment, especially not the global organization he used to represent.”
Grimm sat back again, slowly, never taking his eyes off Brendan. Outside, the first flakes of snow started to drift down.
“Okay,” Grimm said. He looked at Baker. “Let’s make it happen.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / THREE MONTHS AGO
If the West Facility was a quiet, less-populated building than the rest of Rikers Island, the protective custody wing was a morgue. Baker led Brendan along a narrow corridor which pitched gradually down into nothing but the echo of footfalls and odorless pumped air.
Brendan was to wait two hours until yard-time when he would be able to see Lazard.
The time passed as slowly as his first night inside. He’d been transported by bus after being processed out of the 11th precinct in Manhattan, driven in the back of an NYPD cruiser to another jail in midtown where he’d spent three nights, and then from the midtown jail up to the bridge over the East River to Rikers. He remembered the way it had looked in the haze, like some medieval island fortress. The flat, grey buildings, the chain-link fences bent on top with an interminable coil of cyclone wire. As the bus had drawn him across the long bridge, he felt a deep ache in his chest. He was utterly alone. He’d always been an outsider, even when he was married to Angie he would exile himself emotionally. But there was a time when he’d had a wife, a mother, a father. He’d had a child. And it had all been over in ten minutes, a flurry of scrapbook images he’d filed away to perhaps appreciate later, sometime down the road when he arrived in some elusive place.
Here it was. Doing time in an island jail complex, a place of lost souls, violence, and desolation. A place he knew he deserved to be. A place where the present would find him at last and unfurl into painstaking eternity. This new purgatory even lonelier than the last. No cellmate, no noise, no life.
It had been so long since he’d studied a picture of his wife and child that their images had left him. He tried to trace their faces in his mind and found he couldn’t.
He suddenly wanted a cigarette. He fantasized about lowering his head to light the cigarette, the flash of lighter flame in his eyes, cupping it in his hand. The taste, the smell, the moment, the relaxation. The time-out from the torture.
He tried to focus on something else. He decided to mull over what he knew about the IMF.
In their own words, the IMF promoted financial stability around the world, sought to reduce poverty, promote economic development, high employment, and facilitate international trade. They called themselves “financial firefighters,” and sought to put out the economic fires around the world by deploying emergency loans. The IMF was composed of 188 countries worldwide, and the organization described itself as working to foster global monetary cooperation and to secure financial stability. Didier Lazard had been its head.
And then there was the other point of view about the IMF, probably one Tremont would share. Seamus Argon, too. Detractors considered them economic slave masters, that the loans deployed were highly conditional, unrealistic for the struggling nations they were supposed to be helping. They would drag the indigenous workforce into endless debt and wage slavery while exploiting the natural resources and fleecing those nations dry.
Claims were made that the monetarist policies of the IMF towards low inflation and low budget deficits prevented developing countries from being able to scale up public investment in public health infrastructure. Indebted countries were also said to damage their own environments to generate cash flow from oil, gas, coal, and forest-destroying lumber and agricultural projects.
It was global economic slavery.
Brendan heard a guard approaching, the whispering of starched fabric and the jangle of keys. The sound roused him out of his reverie. The time had passed.
A shape appeared outside of the cell, a dark face, eyes shining.
“Healy. Yard time.”
The door opened.
* * *
As if he’d been waiting for him, Didier Lazard watched Brendan emerge from the jail and into the yard. He had thick, black eyebrows and silver hair. He probably weighed over two hundred pounds, filling out the jail-issue winter coat, his thick legs stretching the fabric of his pants.
He was smoking a cigarette.
Lazard looked Brendan up and down, and then took a pull from the tobacco. Brendan couldn’t help but stare at it.
The yard was nothing but a dirt square surrounded by three stories of brick and barred windows. The sky was a low, bruised rectangle of clouds. Snow flurried down and dusted the ground. Brendan stood a few feet away from Lazard, but he could smell that cigarette.
Lazard pulled a pack of Dunhill from his pocket. He pulled the lid back and shook the pack so that a few cigarettes slid halfway out. He thrust the pack in Brendan’s direction. “You want?”
Brendan practically licked his chops.
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
His inner voices screamed in protest.
Lazard shrugged and tapped the cigarettes back into the pack and returned the whole thing to his jacket pocket. “Probably think I’m a prima donna — smoking, special privileges.” Lazard had an accent, French, though Brendan had read he was of Hungarian descent. He took another drag and squinted through the smoke pirouetting up from the glowing tip. “So, who are you?”
“Brendan Healy.”
“Okay, Brendan Healy. I’m Didier Lazard.” The last name sounded like Lassald. He looked upwards towards the sky. “It’s pretty, you know.”
They stood like that for a moment, looking up, Brendan suddenly full of doubt, wondering why he had done this, what he thought he was really going to get out of it. Grimm was going to expect results and he would have nothing to show. The whole thing had been a ruse to get in here and talk to the ex-head of the IMF. All based, really, on the rumor that Lazard had been in the city for a defense department meeting, one that had included the Deputy Chief of the CSS.
Brendan watched the falling snow as Lazard smoked. He decided the best route was the direct one.
“I’m in here because of the CSS.”
Lazard turned and looked at Brendan with the same detached expression he’d maintained since they’d met. “You don’t say.”
“Were you in the city to meet with them?”
The big man narrowed his eyes. “And how is this your business?”
“Did you do what you’re accused of?”
Lazard broke into a smile, and then he laughed. He had a jolly laugh, like someone’s uncle. Then Lazard pursed his lips and looked down and shook his head.
“Ah,” he said, “the prisoner’s taboo question: ‘Did you do it?’” His shrewd eyes focused on Brendan again. “Maybe I was a bit intoxicated and I made a pass at one of the hotel staff. Hmm? Beautiful woman. I have a weakness for women, you see. I can never get enough. And so I think, this woman, she is something quite special. Honey-colored skin, big eyes, the perfect f
igure; she is in the hallway and I am coming in from dinner where I drink too much. I see her and I say, ‘I have lost my key card. Can you let me in?’ And we go to the door and she opens it. And I ask her to come in for a drink. And she says — polite, she is very polite — no, she prefers not.”
Lazard shrugged and inspected the ash on his cigarette. “So I take her by the arm, I lean into her and I give her a little kiss on the neck, and whisper in her ear. You know, I say, ‘you won’t regret it.’ And I feel her swell against me. But then she pulls away. The blush is off the bloom. And I reach for her and grasp her arm firmly, and I try to persuade her. But now she is unhappy.”
Lazard lifted his shoulders again and then, with the hand holding the cigarette, pointed around him in the air, into the sky. “Cameras. Cameras in the hotel record everything. She tells her superior, and the police come and take me later that night, knock on my door while I sleep.”
“Don’t you travel with security?”
“Well, yes. But, they are not going to go to jail, too. So, the police come in. And here I am.”
“You weren’t set up.”
“I admitted my mistake. I’ll do a little waiting, deprived of women here in this stone city of hard men, I’ll go to trial, I will pay, and pay some more, but, it will be alright.”
“Will you get your job back?”
“No.”
Lazard dropped his cigarette into the dirt and stepped on it with his Velcro prison shoes. After he was finished he put his hands in his pockets and drew a whistling breath through his nose and looked up at the sky. Snow had collected in his hair and bushy eyebrows. “It’s definitely coming down.”
Brendan glanced up again. The snowfall was intensifying. Lazard was watching him with a little smile playing on his lips.
“Now you tell me why you’re here,” he said.
It was amazing, Brendan thought. Here was Lazard, and the man was charming, friendly, if perhaps a misogynist pig. Brendan had expected a razor-sharp financier, inaccessible, dry as toast, probably uncommunicative. Lazard had a natural warmth to him, it seemed, or, he was a good actor. It wasn’t that long ago, Brendan reminded himself, that Alexander Heilshorn had seemed like a decent man, caring, even vulnerable. And look where that had gone.
DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) Page 10