Payoff

by Douglas Corleone

  The Pink Tide had premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where its reception was largely split along political and geopolitical lines.

  “And there’s been no progress whatsoever in the search for Olivia,” Emma said breathlessly. “They’re not even looking, Simon. Even though they’re not saying it outright, it’s clear that they think Edgar has her stashed away somewhere, or that she’s in hiding.”

  I offered my sympathies, then followed with a condensed version of the events that had transpired in Colombia, ending with the words supplied to me by Don Óscar, specifically that the order to take Olivia had come directly from a government official supposedly acting on behalf of the president of Venezuela.

  “My God. Should I tell the FBI?” she said. “Maybe they can send some agents down there, I don’t know. Maybe the CIA?”

  Trust me, they’re already listening, I wanted to tell her. But the fact was, it didn’t matter. Once the feds liked a suspect enough to bring charges, they stopped looking for leads and only continued searching for evidence that fit neatly into their theory of the case.

  “Forget the feds, Emma. They can’t do anything in this country anyway. Venezuela isn’t exactly an ally. Besides, if our government intervenes, Olivia’s as good as gone. Once the U.S. is involved, whoever has taken her will have no choice but to cut ties and run.”

  “Jesus,” she said, breaking down.

  Sure enough, as I drove up a street parallel to the parade route, there he was—Jesus Christ carrying what looked to be a long, heavy wooden plank. Surrounded by Roman soldiers in plastic helmets, the bearded, loin-clothed messiah was gently being whipped with modern-day cotton belts from Banana Republic. Atop his head sat a plastic crown of thorns.

  “Christ,” I said.

  Emma instantly became alarmed. “What is it, Simon?”

  “Nothing. Listen, Emma. I’ll call you as soon as I have some news. I don’t want my BlackBerry’s battery to lose too much juice; I don’t know when I’ll be able to charge it again. On account of Carnaval, there’s not a single vacancy in all of Venezuela.”

  Once Mariana and I reached the end of the next city block, I had no choice but to pull over and double-park. A frustrating number of roads had been blocked off for the festival, so we’d have to hoof it the rest of the way to the embassy.

  “Beware of the pickpockets,” Mariana said as we walked toward the main road. “They will be everywhere today.”

  Ironically, Carnaval was a religious festival leading into the Christian period of Lent. In reality, what it amounted to was one final gust of hedonism before the traditional forty days and forty nights of self-denial. In Europe and South America—even as far north as New Orleans—hundreds of thousands of people dressed up in odd and provocative costumes, shook their bare asses and breasts, and customarily imbibed until they collapsed. This, of course, also resulted in a fair amount of both petty and violent crime.

  “I don’t have much cash on me anyway,” I said. “Maybe enough for a bite. Remind me; I’ll have to stop at an ATM before we can grab a decent meal.”

  On the next street, we had to wade through a sea of people wearing elaborate papier-mâché masks and little else. Men and women alike bared enough flesh to make you feel as though you were walking through a coed strip club without having to flash any dollar bills. Everyone in sight was gyrating to Latin music blasting from speakers hidden in high windows and aboard mammoth floats. No matter how conservative the country, Carnaval was the one annual party unlikely to be broken up by cops.

  I gripped Mariana’s hand as we shoved through the crowd. When I glanced back at her, I noticed tears in her eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I am fine,” she said.

  But clearly she wasn’t fine. Behind the tears I could see anger in her eyes as she watched hordes of highly intoxicated young men groping women of all sizes and ethnicities, shouting at them to pull up their shirts and skirts, hurling beads at their heads as though they were throwing food at feral animals.

  I thought I could read her. I tried to imagine what she’d gone through a year ago, during Mardi Gras in Costa Rica. I had no doubt that throughout the four-day festival, she and the other girls had been used like throwaway paper plates and plastic utensils.

  The walk was slow going, and it became worse the deeper we penetrated the city. For ten minutes straight we stood idle as a colossal float exhibiting no less than two dozen dancing women made up like seed-eating birds froze everyone in their place.

  “They are cardinals,” Mariana said as she gazed up at the spectacle. “There are more than forty species of cardinals around the world. Nearly twenty of them exist in this part of South America.”

  “You’re a bird enthusiast?” I said, intrigued but anxious to move forward.

  “When I was young,” she said loudly in my ear so that I could hear her over the music, “I would watch birds with my mother. All kinds of birds—pelicans, herons and egrets, hawks, doves, plovers, woodpeckers, ravens, jays, sparrows, larks, even hummingbirds. But the cardinals, for some reason, they were always my favorite. When the winter approached, I would wait for the rose-breasted grosbeaks. The male of the species has a black head and wings, a black tail and back, and a white underside with a bright rose-red patch on his breast. They are beautiful, these birds. They are songbirds. I used to pray for them to fly me and my mother away with them at the end of the winter when they returned north to the States.”

  I placed my arm around her and held her tight.

  “Look,” she said. “That woman there, she is a redbreast.”

  For some reason I couldn’t quite put a finger on, inside I ached. It was the kind of ache that would bring me to my knees if I were sitting alone in my D.C. apartment. Here all I could do was fight off the pain and do my damndest to stand up straight.

  That, and continue to wait.

  Chapter 52

  The U.S. Embassy was guarded like the gate at the White House. Understandably, U.S. officials weren’t taking any chances during Carnaval. The United States wasn’t exactly popular in Latin America, particularly here in Venezuela. For eight years, the previous administration and nearly all U.S. media outlets had accused the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela of being a rogue nation, and dubbed the country’s leader a buffoon.

  To the first American guard I came across, I flashed my U.S. passport.

  “What’s your business here today, sir?”

  To get inside I’d have to lie or risk being told to contact the FBI back in the States. The best lies, of course, are short and simple. So I simply pointed to Mariana and said, “My wife had her U.S. passport stolen last night.”

  The guard held up a clipboard. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, we don’t have an appointment.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to go online and make an appointment, then come back at the scheduled time.”

  “I’m afraid this is an emergency,” I said. “It can’t wait.”

  “Passport Services isn’t open today, sir. It’s a Venezuelan holiday. The passport section will be closed until Wednesday morning.”

  “We don’t have until Wednesday morning,” I said. “This is urgent. I need to speak to the chargé d’affaires right away.”

  The United States didn’t currently have an ambassador in Caracas. The last one appointed by the White House was sent home because the Venezuelan president hadn’t liked him. Said the ambassador had spoken ill of Venezuela some twenty years ago. Instead of trying to come to terms, the White House tossed the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States out of Miami in retaliation. It’s hardly a secret that it’s often politically expedient for U.S. leaders to appear hostile to other nations.

  The guard wasn’t sure what to do, but I remained patient. Because I was sure that he possessed a certain amount of discretion—and that he was the only chance I had of seeing an American official today. Maybe Jason Bourne could break his way into a closed and heavily guarded U.S. Embassy, b
ut I wasn’t likely to get past the front door. Chances were I’d end up dead—maybe in custody, if I was lucky.

  No, sometimes you just have to kill them with kindness.

  “Please,” I said. “I’m a retired U.S. Marshal. I’m just trying to get home.”

  He nodded, but his face remained noncommittal. “Let me see what I can do, sir.”

  * * *

  After more than an hour’s wait and several varying explanations (that became more truthful the deeper I made it inside the embassy), I was finally led into the office of the chargé d’affaires, Walter Brewer. Brewer was a slight man, closer to sixty than fifty, with thinning blond hair and large red spectacles. His navy blue suit didn’t contain a single wrinkle; the same couldn’t be said for his skin. There are men who age well and men who age badly; Walter Brewer was unmistakably one of the latter.

  As I took a seat in front of his desk, he fell into his chair with a heavy sigh.

  “Now,” he said, straightening his muted red bow tie, “I’m not sure what it is you think I can do for you, Mr. Fisk. You told my assistant you lost someone down here? Your teenage daughter, was it?”

  I did my best to conceal my frustration. “Let me cut to the chase, Mr. Brewer. I need a face-to-face with Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.”

  He smirked. “Oh, you do?”

  “I do, Mr. Brewer. An American girl’s life hangs in the balance.”

  “Who are we talking about here?”

  It was a catch-22. I wanted to tell Brewer as little as possible until I received his assurances that he would do whatever he could to help. But it seemed fairly clear that I wouldn’t receive any such assurances until he knew precisely what was going on—if then.

  “Olivia Trenton,” I said. “The girl who was recently snatched from her home in Los Angeles during a violent home invasion.”

  Brewer frowned. When he did, his entire face seemed on the brink of caving in. “I read something about the kidnapping online yesterday.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders and checked his watch. “What in the world makes you think she’s here?”

  “Whoever took her ultimately received their instructions from the Minister of Foreign Affairs down here.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because I had a long conversation with the man who passed those instructions along. A drug lord operating out of Cali, Colombia.”

  Brewer chuckled. “Who exactly are you working for, Mr. Fisk?”

  “I was hired by Edgar and Emma Trenton.”

  “Ah, I see. And by Edgar Trenton, you mean the suspect.”

  “I mean the girl’s father.”

  “Who, if I’m not mistaken, is also the FBI’s prime suspect. In fact, hasn’t he already been indicted?”

  I leaned forward. “Look, Mr. Brewer. I don’t know exactly what’s happening back in the States. But I believe Edgar Trenton was indicted on charges relating to the eight and a half million dollars he paid in ransom.”

  “And by ‘paid’ you mean hid, don’t you, Mr. Fisk?”

  “No, I mean paid. I was there. I witnessed the phone call demanding the ransom, I watched Edgar Trenton step inside the bank where the transfers were made. And I confirmed in person that the money was received by a financial institution in Grand Cayman by a teller who was working there that evening.”

  Brewer shook his head. “Sounds to me like Mr. Trenton’s lawyer is sending you off on a wild goose chase, Mr. Fisk.” He folded his hands on his desk. “Who is his lawyer anyway? One of those Hollywood hotshots, right?” His index fingers turned up to form a steeple. “You know, this sounds an awful lot like Johnnie Cochran’s argument in the O. J. Simpson trial twenty years ago. ‘It wasn’t my client; my client’s innocent,’” Brewer said in a voice that sounded like a cross between George Jefferson and Muhammad Ali. “‘It was South American drug lords that slaughtered Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson in Brentwood.’ Do you even realize how ridiculous you sound right now, Mr. Fisk?”

  I leaned back in my chair, kept myself from jumping over Brewer’s desk and simply beating the information I needed out of him. After all, sometimes Jason Bourne’s way does work best.

  “This isn’t a ploy, Mr. Brewer. I was hired long before Edgar’s lawyer even came into play. I’m telling you—the trail leads here to Venezuela. It leads directly to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, if not the Venezuelan president himself.”

  “And you expect me to do what about this?”

  Finally we were getting somewhere. “Either arrange an emergency meeting with the minister and bring me along as an attaché, or simply tell me where I might be able to find him today.”

  “It’s a holiday, Mr. Fisk. I don’t suspect you’ll find him anywhere today.”

  “Surely you have an address or an emergency contact number for him.”

  “Contact number? Mr. Fisk, I don’t even know his name.”

  I leaned forward. “Excuse me?”

  “The president down here changes ministers like he changes socks. I don’t know who the current Minister of Foreign Affairs is, let alone where you could find him.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “What the hell kind of embassy is this?”

  “This is an embassy in the middle of a capital city in a country in which the president hates us. Not only that, but he’s paranoid and delusional. He thinks there’s an infestation of CIA agents in his country just waiting for the right moment to assassinate him. That we’re here at all is something of a miracle.”

  I stood. I couldn’t afford to waste any more time with this imbecile. “The real miracle,” I said as I turned to leave, “is that eight percent of the population in the States is out of work, and yet an asshole like you somehow manages to remain gainfully employed.”

  Chapter 53

  Ten minutes after leaving the U.S. Embassy, I felt as though I’d taken a kick to the gut. In the past year I’d gone up against the Polish Mafia, Ukrainian gangsters, former Russian KGB, Costa Rican sex traffickers, and the Colombian cartels, but how the hell do you take the fight to the Venezuelan government, particularly during a worldwide celebration that has taken over the capital city’s streets?

  Mariana and I moved slowly through the chaos: men with their heads wrapped like Islamic terrorists firing massive black water guns and throwing water balloon grenades into the crowds; women wearing hardly anything at all shaking their goods atop floats that looked as though they had just broken free of a Hunter S. Thompson acid flashback.

  We needed help.

  But there was no one to turn to.

  No one who could lead me to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  I scanned the masses. So many colors, my head was beginning to spin. We paused as a dozen shirtless child devils marched past us, holding pitchforks, displaying horns atop their tiny heads, their entire bodies painted blood red.

  I’d never felt so helpless in my life.

  That’s a lie, I reminded myself. At least an exaggeration. Eleven years ago I’d felt every bit as helpless as this, sitting alone in our home in Georgetown, trying to come to grips with Tasha’s suicide only weeks after Hailey’s disappearance.

  In those days, I felt as though my heart had been ripped from my chest and was being held in front of my eyes as I ran on a forever treadmill without a moment’s rest.

  “We must find someone who opposes the regime,” Mariana said, bringing me back amongst the living.

  She was right. But I knew too little about the politics of Venezuela to make the call. Or did I? I knew that wealthy businessmen opposed the socialist regime, including those businessmen who used to run the petroleum industry. I also knew that nearly all the Venezuelan media had supported the president’s opponents in the past several elections.

  “The church,” Mariana said.

  I turned to her. “What?”

  “The Catholic Church.” She must have read the reluctance in my eyes. “The bishops of Venezuela for years have criticized the pres
ident, accused him of trying to install a Marxist regime that was not in line with Catholic teachings.”

  I surveyed the crowded street. As in Bogotá, Catholic churches were everywhere in Caracas. Although only a quarter of the population actively practiced Catholicism, nearly all Venezuelans considered themselves Catholic. For that reason, the president had had to walk a fine line during his tenure. But he couldn’t fully close the rift. Because of his lax social stances, the more power the president attempted to amass, the greater the pushback from the Catholic Church and its representatives from the Vatican.

  “All right,” I said. “Who do we go to?”

  “The Archbishop of Caracas,” she said without hesitation.

  “Where do we find him?”

  She grabbed my waist, went under my shirt, and pulled me toward her by my belt loops. She stared into my eyes as she dipped her hands into my front pockets and fished my BlackBerry out of the left.

  She handed it to me with a smile that I felt in my chest. “Must I think of everything, Simon?”

  A brief while later, after getting directions and brushing up on the clash between religion and politics in Venezuela, we were standing on the corner of Plaza Bolívar, outside the Caracas Cathedral, staring up at its bright white Romanesque façade.

  “It is so beautiful,” Mariana said.

  I didn’t reply, though an image of the dilapidated buildings and shantytowns on the edge of the city flashed through my mind as we crossed the street and made for the entrance.

  The interior of the cathedral, of course, resembled that of a palace—all tall pillars and high arches and tremendous chandeliers, the pews carved meticulously out of a fine dark wood. Natural light gave the immense space the feeling of being outside, the vaulted ceiling rising at least two or three stories into the sky.