Black River

by G. M. Ford

  Corso didn’t know what to say, so he merely nodded. She lifted her chin.

  “We never had this conversation. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced at Rogers. “Ms. Rogers tells me you think you have a scenario by which we might be able to salvage our present untenable position.”

  “I believe so, yes,” Corso said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It goes back to the second trial,” Corso began.

  The Attorney General raised an eyebrow. “If Ms. Rogers can stand the mention of it, I guess I can too.”

  “It starts with a man named Donald Barth. He was a juror at the second trial.”

  She looked at him over her glasses. “And how would you come to that conclusion, Mr. Corso? The identities of those jurors have been destroyed.”

  He told her about Balagula having the master list of jurors from the beginning. About Berkley Marketing, Allied Investigations, and Henderson, Bates & May. And finally about Marie Hall’s admissions. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “Go on.”

  As he talked, she took a lens-cleaning kit from the storage area in the door and began to clean her glasses. She looked older without the thick lenses magnifying her eyes. She didn’t speak again until he’d finished and had settled back in the seat.

  She adjusted the glasses on her nose and sighed. “When I told your publisher, Noel Crossman, that I’d allow you to sit in on the trial, I was hoping for a sense of closure to this whole thing.”

  She allowed silence to settle in the car’s interior.

  “There can be only one answer, of course.” She shot a glance at Renee Rogers and then back at Corso. “This scenario that you envision—were it to come off as planned”—she shrugged—“then it most certainly would have to be part of an overall strategy by my office to finally bring Mr. Nicholas Balagula to bay.”

  “Of course,” Corso said.

  “And if something were to go awry?” She flattened her generous lips. “Then—” She looked over at Corso with a flat, emotionless expression.

  “Then the secretary will disavow any knowledge of our actions,” Corso finished for her.

  She cocked her head at him and smiled. “Where’s that line from?” she asked.

  “The original Mission Impossible. The voice on the tape recording always said that right before it caught fire.”

  The smile disappeared. “That is precisely what the secretary will do,” she said.

  “Ms. Rogers is going to need the authority to make a deal. She’s going to have to be able to offer—”

  The Attorney General held up a hand. “If the matter reaches a successful conclusion, Ms. Rogers’s actions will be regarded as part of the overall plan and her authority to make legal concessions will have been granted directly through me.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Corso asked.

  “Then she will have substantially exceeded her authority and any agreement into which she may have entered will necessarily be null and void.” She waved a hand. “At best…” She hesitated for effect. “Even if it works out exactly as you envision, Mr. Corso, major elements of the constituency are going to have their noses bent out of shape.” Corso began to speak, but the Attorney General cut him off. “They prefer their justice simple: good guys win, bad guys lose. This one is going to raise some hackles.” She sat for a time having a discussion with herself. “We never had this conversation,” she said, after a moment. She resettled herself in the seat and stared out the window.

  They rode without speaking. “Understood?” she asked, finally.

  They said it was. She must have had a signal arranged with the driver or a hidden button that she pushed. Ten seconds later, the car slid to a stop at the curb, directly across Royal Brougham Way from where they’d picked him up, twenty minutes earlier. The car door opened. “If you two will excuse me,” the Attorney General said. “I have a press conference at eleven-thirty.”

  Corso stepped out into the rain, leaned down, and offered Rogers a hand. She took hold and joined him on the sidewalk. They stood side by side in the steady drizzle and watched the big black car disappear into the mist.

  Tuesday, October 24

  2:51 p.m.

  Marie Hall read through the script again. “I don’t know if I can do this.” She brought a hand to her throat. “I’m so nervous.”

  “That’s good,” Corso said. “You ought to be nervous. You’ll sound authentic.”

  “What if he—”

  “Just follow the script.”

  Corso attached the microphone to the telephone and checked the tape recorder volume. “Ready when you are,” he said.

  She took a deep breath and began to dial. After a moment, a cheerful voice said, “Weston Hotel.”

  “Room Twenty-three fifty,” she said.

  “Thank you,” the voice said.

  The phone rang twice. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Ivanov?”

  Silence.

  “I saw your picture in the paper today.”

  “Who is this?”

  “You came to my house.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “You put a gun to my head.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You and those other two men. Last year. You made me call my husband at the hotel.” She waited a minute. “You remember. I know you do.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The paper says you and that baby killer are gonna get off.”

  “What do you want,” Mikhail Ivanov said again.

  “I want a hundred thousand dollars,” she said, “and I want it tonight.”

  “You must be crazy.”

  “Crazy,” she said, nearly in a whisper. “I’ll show you crazy when I tell the goddamn cops. You hear me? I’ll go right now. Don’t you think I won’t.”

  Ten seconds of silence ensued before Ivanov said, “Perhaps we can reach an area of accommodation.”

  “We better,” she said.

  Tuesday, October 24

  3:09 p.m.

  Mikhail Ivanov dropped a ten-dollar bill onto the room-service cart as the waiter rolled it toward the door. “Thank you, sir,” the man muttered. Ivanov walked over and held the door open. The waiter thanked him again and disappeared.

  Nicholas Balagula generally napped right after lunch, so Ivanov’s presence in his room at this time of day was unusual. Balagula wiped the corners of his mouth with a linen napkin. “So?”

  “We have a serious problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “The woman whose husband—the one who became unburied.”

  “His wife.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about her?”

  “She called. She says she saw my picture in the newspaper. Says she recognized me from when the Cubans and I went to her house.”

  “And?”

  “She’s demanding one hundred thousand dollars for her silence. She wants it today or she says she’ll go to the authorities.”

  “The timing is awkward,” Balagula said.

  “Couldn’t be worse.”

  Balagula shook his head. “What makes these people think they can hold me up?”

  “Greed seems to run in this woman’s family.”

  “She takes no lesson from the Barth fellow?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “She cannot be allowed to interfere,” Balagula said. “This farce ends tomorrow.” He looked up at Ivanov and shrugged. “Set something up. Send our Cuban friends.”

  “That’s also a problem.”

  “What problem is that?”

  “I can’t reach our Cuban friends. They don’t answer their phone.”

  “Since when?”

  “This morning. An hour ago, I had the maid at their hotel check the room. They didn’t sleep in their beds last night. I also had the bellman check the parking lot for the car.”

  “Not there.”

  “No.”

  B
alagula rose from the chair and paced around the room. “The problem must be handled,” he said, after a minute. “We’ve come too far to allow anything to interfere.”

  “I know.”

  Nicholas Balagula stopped pacing and shrugged. “It appears, Mikhail, that you’re going to be forced out of retirement.”

  “Yes…it does.”

  “She’ll be alone,” Balagula said.

  “You think?”

  “If she’s foolish enough to try to hold me up, she’s foolish enough to want to keep the money for herself. If she brings anyone, she’ll have to split the money. No, she’ll be alone.”

  “She said she’d call back tonight with where she wants to meet.”

  Nicholas Balagula thought it over. “Get the money. If the situation allows, kill her. If not, pay her and we’ll send the Cubans for her later.”

  40

  Tuesday, October 24

  11:03 p.m.

  Mikhail Ivanov recognized her from half a block away. She’d gained a bit of weight, but even under the streetlights she still had those narrow blue eyes like his mother’s. He recalled the look of terror in those eyes when Gerardo put the gun to her head and led her into the bedroom, and how she couldn’t stop crying as she listened to her husband’s voice on the phone. He’d never have guessed she had the nerve for this.

  She’d chosen her ground poorly: some sort of open-air church monument, three fluted stone columns standing at the edge of a bum-infested park. He’d been nearby for an hour and a half and, while the car traffic was unrelenting, the foot traffic was spotty. Those who did walk down Pine Street favored the opposite side of the street, where they did not have to cross freeway on-ramps. He was confident his task could be accomplished.

  The bum was the only problem. Curled up asleep on the bench closest to Pine Street, he’d be no more than thirty feet from where Mikhail Ivanov envisioned making his move. During the past hour and a half, the tramp had risen three times: twice, early on, to stumble down into the park and relieve himself, and finally, half an hour back, to cross the street to the market and buy three tall cans of what appeared to be malt liquor. Since downing the contents of the cans, he had been snoring contentedly away. Perhaps if all went according to plan, he would awaken to find a bloody knife in his hand.

  She wandered into the far corner of the park and looked around. Silhouetted against the black sky, she appeared to stand in some ancient ruin, left to rot amid the urban squalor. Mikhail Ivanov shifted the black athletic bag to his left hand and started forward, only to have a baby stroller nearly run over his feet. “Sorry,” he mumbled to the thickset woman who acknowledged his apology with a smile and a nod. Watching her swinging her hips for a moment as she moved downhill, he breathed deeply and collected his wits. Satisfied with his state of composure, he waited for a lull in the traffic and then started across the street.

  She was walking in small circles, staying just where he wanted her, on the Pine Street side, where it was dark and the traffic sparse. The half dozen cars, trucks, and vans along the curb had all been in place when he’d arrived and were probably parked for the night. Even better, Nico was right. She’d come alone. His right hand fondled the flesh peddler’s stiletto in his overcoat pocket.

  As he stepped up onto the sidewalk he began to visualize the move, the embrace of death he’d learned so long ago in the prison yard, so smooth and easy that, under the proper conditions, the victim could be leaned against a wall or a fence, standing up, stone dead.

  As he passed the sleeping bum, he hesitated, leaned over, and looked down into the filthy face. A tiny piece of pink tongue hung from the side of the mouth. He was snoring quietly. Satisfied, Mikhail Ivanov strode across the uneven stones toward the woman moving among the columns at the far side.

  He saw her eyes widen as she recognized him in the darkness. Saw her search her soul for courage as he came close. A final peek over his shoulder revealed the bum still unconscious on the bench. Across Pine Street, the woman had stopped walking and was making adjustments to the baby. On the Boren Avenue side, the sidewalks were bare.

  He lengthened his stride, walked right up in front of her and set the bag on the bench. As he’d hoped, so much money, so close, was too much for her to ignore. She reached down and grabbed the bag’s handle, at which point he slipped his arm under hers and drew her tight against his chest. His left hand was now on the back of her head, forcing her face hard against his coat, muffling her cries, as he brought the stiletto forward and up in a motion designed to eviscerate. She grunted from the force of the knife’s impact. Had he not been holding her, she would have dropped to her knees. And yet…something was wrong. He could feel it.

  He felt the knife penetrate the coat, but that was all. The sudden lessening of tension when a knife penetrates the body’s outside wall, when the hand can feel the blade, wet and at large in the innards…it wasn’t there. The point had somehow been deflected.

  He drew the knife back and plunged again with all his might. Again she grunted. Again her legs buckled. Again the knife was deflected by something beneath her coat. Then he heard the scrape of a shoe, followed by the sound of a door sliding open, and before his eyes the street came alive around him. With all his strength, he tried to pull the blade upward.

  A hand grabbed his wrist: the bum. The bum’s other hand grabbed him around the waist and began pulling him backward. From the corner of his eye, he could see the woman with the stroller sprinting his way with a gun in her hand. He released his victim and turned to face the tramp. He lashed out once with the blade, heard a wail, and dropped the knife on the stones. His hand was on the automatic in his pocket when he felt the kiss of cold steel on the side of his face.

  “Don’t move a fucking muscle,” the voice said. Ivanov shifted his eyes toward the sound. The man had thinning black hair and a scar running the length of his left cheek. He also had a sawed-off shotgun pressed to the side of Ivanov’s head.

  “Fucker cut me,” the bum wailed. Marie Hall’s mouth hung open as she struggled to her feet. She walked unsteadily over to the bum, pulled the scarf from her head, and began to wind it around his damaged wrist.

  “Goddamn it. Goddamn it,” the bum chanted.

  Another hand grabbed Ivanov’s arm and began to pull it from his coat pocket.

  “Better be clean when it comes out of that pocket, buddy,” Shotgun said. Ivanov relaxed his hand and allowed it to be pulled from his pocket. He felt fingers slide into his pocket and remove his gun and then felt the steel bracelet snap around his wrist. The shotgun ground harder into his temple as his other hand was forced behind his back and cuffed. “Go over him good,” Shotgun said.

  The woman dropped to one knee and began to frisk her way up to his groin. Took her five seconds to find the Beretta strapped to his left ankle. She set it on the uneven stones and completed her search.

  “I want to see an attorney,” Ivanov said.

  In the darkness, someone laughed. Ivanov turned toward the sound. Frank Corso stepped out from behind the nearest pillar. “He’s clean,” the woman pronounced.

  “Let’s go,” Corso said, picking up the athletic bag.

  The shotgun was pulled away. The woman grabbed his shackled wrists and pushed him forward, toward the red minivan sitting at the curb with its sliding door agape. Behind him, he heard Corso’s voice.

  “Mary Anne, you and Marie take Marvin to Harborview.” When Ivanov tried to turn and look, Shotgun grabbed him by the arm and forced him forward, causing him to stumble on the rough stones and nearly fall.

  Shotgun got in first, all the way back in the third row of seats. The woman helped Ivanov up onto the big bench seat and then rolled the door closed. Outside in the park, the tramp cradled his arm like an infant. Marie Hall had shed her coat and was in the process of removing a Kevlar vest. The yawning barrel of the shotgun rested icily on the back of Ivanov’s neck as Corso climbed into the passenger seat. A capped figure at the wheel put the van in DRIVE.


  41

  Tuesday, October 24

  11:17 p.m.

  The driver pulled the van to a halt.

  “What’s this?” Ivanov demanded.

  The street was deserted. Corso swiveled the passenger seat around to face him. “This, Mr. Ivanov, is the proverbial offer you can’t refuse.” He gestured with his head. “That building across the street is the King County Jail.” He held up a video camera. “I’ve got your attempt to murder Marie Hall on tape.” The camera dropped from view and was replaced by a small gray tape recorder. Corso pushed the button. Marie Hall’s voice said, I’ll show you crazy when I tell the goddamn cops. You hear me? I’ll go right now. Don’t you think I won’t.

  Ten seconds of hissing silence, and then Ivanov’s voice: Perhaps we can reach an area of accommodation.

  We better.

  It will be difficult to obtain that much money at this time of day.

  Don’t start with me. I’ll go right to the damn cops.

  I didn’t say it couldn’t be done, merely that it will be difficult. Perhaps if—

  Corso snapped it off. “Sounds a lot like you, to me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nicholas Balagula,” Corso answered.

  Were it not for the barrel pressing against the back of his neck, Mikhail Ivanov would have thrown his head back and laughed. “Be serious.”

  “You’ve taken the fall for him twice before. You gonna do it again?”

  Corso turned to the driver, who until that moment had neither turned Ivanov’s way nor spoken.

  “He’s looking at how much for jury tampering and attempted murder?” Corso asked.

  The driver reached up and removed the blue baseball cap, sending a wave of brown hair cascading down onto her shoulders. She turned and looked directly into Mikhail Ivanov’s eyes. “They’ll call it twenty to life. He’ll serve a minimum of sixteen years in a federal facility,” Renee Rogers said. “Minimum.”

  “You’ll be nearly eighty when you get out,” Corso said. “That going to work for you, Mr. Ivanov? We combine what we’ve got on tape with Ms. Hall’s testimony, and this is a slam dunk. You willing to spend the rest of the time you’ve got left behind bars to protect Nicholas Balagula?”