by James Lepore
Marshall had even called the Miami Herald reporter, who had refused to name his source inside the FBI, although it was not hard to infer from her story that it was Markey, whose name she used prominently. But how did she get the idea of a planted story in the first place? Only his team members knew about it, and only Gary Shaw had a link to Cassio. Gary Shaw, Angelo Perna, Frank Dunn, the more these names ran through his mind the more incensed Markey became. He would not be surprised if they knew where Cassio and Isabel were, and if they were behind the story in the Jersey paper.
When he was working for the CIA Markey was able to put an end to this kind of interference with brutal finality, restrained only by the fear of being caught, in which case he would die by the sword as he had lived by it. But now the rule of law restrained him as well, that is, that portion of it that applied America’s laws to the government as well as to its citizens. Still, Markey was good at bending the rules, and clever at breaking them when necessary. Shaw was in the hospital, a hero for the time being, and Dunn had gone underground, but Angelo could be dealt with, which is why Markey and his assistant, Ted Stevens, were, at five p.m. on Thursday, six days after the Shaw-Feria shootout, turning into the El Pulpo parking lot on 17th Avenue in Little Havana.
Sam was behind the bar, drying glasses; Maria was in the dining room helping the busboys set tables; Angelo was in his office. Markey stated his business to Sam, who pointed to Angelo, who watched as the agents approached him. Angelo had met Stevens the Saturday before when he stopped by to talk about the Shaw shooting. Stevens introduced Angelo to Markey, who gestured for the FBI agents to sit.
“Were you ever a New York cop?” Angelo asked Markey once they were seated. “You look familiar.”
“No,” Markey replied, “but we know you were, and that you and Frank Dunn are friends.”
“Good friends.”
“Where is he?”
“He went home to Jersey.”
“When was that?”
“Last week.”
“How did he get there?”
“I think he took a bus.”
“Did you meet Cassio?”
“Yes. Would you guys like something to drink?”
“Why was he here?”
“I guess you don’t want a drink.”
“Why was he here?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was Shaw doing here Friday night?”
“We’re friends. He stops by for a drink sometimes.”
“You never saw him that night?”
“No. I went to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me see him. I talked to his wife and daughter and came home.”
Markey watched as Angelo broke off eye contact with him and looked over at the bar, probably at his brother, the former boxer.
“You had a waitress named Isabel Perez working here,” Markey said.
“Isabel Sanchez,” Angelo replied, looking back at Markey.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t show up for work on Friday night. We haven’t seen her since.”
“Where was she living?”
“In the apartment upstairs.”
“Upstairs here?”
“Yes.”
Markey glanced at Stevens, sitting to his right.
“We’d like to look through the place,” he said to Angelo.
“You mean search it.”
Perna’s contemptuous attitude was a surprise. He apparently thought that being some kind of minor nobility in Little Havana immunized him from the kind of pressure Markey could bring to bear.
“Yes,” he said, remaining outwardly cool, “I mean search it.”
“You’ll have to ask Sam, it’s his place.”
Markey nodded to Stevens, who got up and went to the bar to talk to Sam.
“How did Isabel come to you?”
“A friend of hers brought her in, and asked us to help her out. Alvie Diaz.”
“Who’s conveniently dead.”
“He died in his sleep.”
“Your wife is the hostess here.”
Angelo nodded.
“She didn’t work last Friday night.”
“No.”
“Where was she?”
Sam and Stevens walked past the table on their way to the back stairway that led to the garret apartment above the restaurant.
“She was with me. We had dinner at home.”
“Isn’t Friday a busy night here?”
Angelo didn’t answer immediately. A trained observer, Markey saw the slight flare of Angelo’s nostrils, and the flattening of his eyes as he considered his answer.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” was that answer.
“I could subpoena the restaurant’s records to find out.”
“You could do a lot of things.”
“I could put you, your brother, and your wife in jail for harboring a fugitive.”
“You could try to do that, I suppose.”
“I’d like to speak to your wife.”
“I think not,” said Angelo. “I think we’ll hire lawyers, and then your lawyers can speak to our lawyers.”
“If you helped this woman, Perna, or your wife did, or your brother, rest assured I won’t stop until you’re all in jail.”
“We’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it.”
On the drive back to the field office, Markey told Stevens to begin the paperwork needed to obtain a court order for taps on the phones at El Pulpo and the two Perna residences. Back at his office, he picked up his phone and made an appointment, for the next day, to see the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, to discuss impaneling a grand jury to inquire into events at El Pulpo beginning in September and culminating on the evening of Friday, December 17. He had to find Isabel, and one way to do that was through the Pernas. Maria Perna was their soft spot. Angelo would protect her with his life, that was obvious from the way the tenor of the conversation had changed once she was brought up. Markey hoped the taps would yield good stuff. If it looked like they were all going to jail, Maria Perna’s caveman husband might make a deal in order to save her, assuming he knew where Isabel was. But even if he didn’t, it would be satisfying to bring the asshole to his knees.
44.
9:00 AM, December 22, 2004, Puerto Angel
The next morning, Jay, sitting on the cottage’s veranda, opened an old-fashioned leather satchel with the initials B.S.P. engraved in the brass handle. It contained seven folders labeled Banking, Correspondence, H.S. & Company, Photographs, Cash Payments, Miscellaneous, and Banque de Geneve, Etc. At the bottom was a dime-store composition book filled with dated, handwritten entries, starting in 1970 and ending in 2004. This he took up first. At noon he stopped for lunch—steak and eggs brought by Hector—and two hours of sleep. The sun, the food, and the sleep were good medicine. His rash had not subsided, but at least it had stopped spreading, and the aloe cream that Hector also brought up was cool and soothing. In a day, maybe two, he would be well enough to do what he came to Mexico to do. In the meantime, he would go over what looked to be a treasure trove of documents and other evidence in Bryce Powers’s beat-up old briefcase.
Jay had slept most of the previous day and night, and had woken this morning feeling oddly serene, accepting of life’s vicissitudes, as if his delirium and night sweats had wrung the anxiety from his soul. His mood changed, however, as he came to the end of Bryce Powers’s diary and looked at his photographs.
Sam Perna had given Jay a survival kit: two fifth bottles of Chivas Regal, a carton of Marlboro Reds, a vial of Valium, and a vial of Black Beauties. Jay showered and shaved, and brought a pack of the cigarettes and one of the bottles of scotch out to the veranda. Isabel had gone down to the Vista del Mar to pick up dinner. Among the twenty or so eight-by-ten prints in the Photographs folder were two of a young Bryce Powers—in his late twenties or early thirties—hav
ing sex with a teenage girl.
Jay put ice, made with bottled water, into a glass, and splashed some scotch into it. The day was lovely. The sun, starting its descent over the mountain behind him, warmed his head and shoulders as he sat in his khaki shorts, old white shirt, and sandals. Sipping his drink and smoking, the notebook and the folder containing the pictures on the table next to him, he pondered the rat’s nest he had gotten himself into.
In 1971, two years after he arrived in Mexico City, Powers began bribing a government official named Rafael de Leon, then the minister of Interior Development for the Federal District of Mexico, which consisted of the heart of Mexico City and its surrounding prime real estate. All approvals for development plans, and all building permits, in the Distrito Federale, were issued by de Leon’s office. Powers, unable to get a shovel in the ground for two years, met de Leon at a party, and soon Gentex was a prime player in the building boom that swept the capital in the early seventies.
De Leon’s good friend, Herman Santaria, also in the government at the time, handled the cash transfers, but occasionally, beginning in 1971 Rafael sent his daughter, Christiana, then fifteen, to Bryce’s apartment overlooking Alameda Central to pick up money. Bryce and Christiana, mature beyond her years and ravishingly beautiful, became lovers. In early 1977, Christiana was pregnant. She told her mother, who told her father, who ordered her to continue the affair, and to tell him when and where she and Powers would be having their liaisons. Pictures were taken. Powers was confronted with them, and with the hard fact that in Mexico, statutory rape was punishable by twenty unreduceable years in prison.
De Leon told Powers that his ship had come in: he would quit Gentex, leave Mexico, and start his own development company in the States. Rafael and Herman would loan Bryce the money for his first project, which he would then be expected to leverage into many others. The price: one million dollars per year, funneled through H.S. & Company, first as phony consultant’s fees and eventually for “maintenance” of properties—plus various future services to be rendered by Bryce. Those services came to include the laundering of cash when Rafael and Herman entered the drug business in the early nineties.
Ten years later, the pressure on Powers was enormous: he was going through a nasty divorce; his Arizona property was failing; he still had to find a million dollars a year for de Leon and Santaria, and the cash he was laundering for them had reached alarming numbers—over ten million in 2003. If the Arizona partners forced an audit, or if the IRS decided to look at his books, he would be ruined. On top of all this, he was in love with Isabel Perez, de Leon’s cash courier du jour, twenty-seven years younger than him.
Isabel returned with the food, in brown paper bags, which she placed on the table outside. Seeing the bottle of scotch, she went into the kitchen for a glass with ice, came back out, sat down across from Jay, and poured herself a drink. She was wearing white shorts and a navy blue halter top, a simple outfit that accentuated her long legs and her heavy, unmistakably lovely breasts. In the shadow of the faded awning, her teeth were whiter than the foam on the breaking surf below, her eyes bluer than the sky above. Looking at her sipping her scotch, touching the glass gently to her lips, Jay understood why Bryce Powers had contorted his life even more than it already was in order to have her.
“Have you seen this?” he said, handing her the composition book.
“No,” she replied, putting her drink down and taking the book. “What is it?”
“Bryce’s diary.”
Isabel opened the notebook randomly, recognized Powers’s precise handwriting, then thumbed through a few more pages before looking up at Jay, her face unreadable.
“How about these?” Jay asked, handing her the photographs of Bryce and the teenager.
Jay watched Isabel closely as she looked at the pictures, and saw the ceramic mask of composure that she usually wore slip for a second, to reveal the confusion and pain that anyone would feel on seeing a former lover in such a situation. It was the reaction he had been hoping for: hurt for hurt, pain for pain.
“This is Bryce,” she said, “as you know. And Christiana Santaria, Lazaro’s wife, Rafael’s daughter.”
“De Leon.”
“Yes.”
Picking up the diary, Isabel thumbed casually to the last entry, which Jay knew was dated May of 2004. She put the book down, and looked at Jay, the look in her beautiful eyes speaking to him of both pride and deep, resigned sadness.
“He mentions his love for you,” said Jay.
“I don’t doubt it. He compulsively recorded the events of his life.”
“Was it Bryce’s idea to steal from Santaria?”
“Yes.”
“When did he start?”
“A few months before meeting me.”
“How much did he take?”
“Two or three million. I’m not sure.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. Probably in a bank in Switzerland.”
“Did you love him?”
“For a moment, I did, yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“That girl in the picture looks a lot like you.”
“I wasn’t born yet.”
Jay poured them each more scotch, lit a cigarette for himself, and handed Isabel one. The sun had set, and they were sitting in the quick, dreamy twilight of the tropics. Jay leaned over the small wooden coffee table that separated them to light Isabel’s cigarette. He watched as the smoke from her first drag drifted across her face, which had recomposed itself into its usual unreadable mask.
“Did you do the same thing for Herman that de Leon’s daughter did?”
“I’m not playing this game anymore.”
“What game?”
“Whatever game it is you’re trying to play.”
“Did you tell Danny that de Leon had his fifteen-year-old daughter fuck Powers so he could blackmail him?”
“I never knew that.”
“The thing is, you knew the cesspool these people lived in, and you lured Dan into it.”
“You dishonor your friend. I told him enough for him to assess the danger. He made the decision of a man, and consequently he died like a man.”
Jay rose and walked to the stone wall. The moon, getting on to full, was shining bright as it hung above the sea in the night sky. Watching him standing there, his back to her, his long hair lifted at its edges by the night wind, Isabel felt something stir in her heart, something she had suppressed since the night on the beach in Sabancuy. She rose as well, took a step toward him, and then stopped, thinking of her dark secret, immobilized by its terrible weight.
45.
8:00 AM, December 23, 2004, Puerto Angel
“What time did you get up?” Isabel asked.
“Seven,” Jay replied.
“I thought you had left.”
“Left? You mean run off with Bryce’s papers?”
“Yes.”
“We’re not done here.”
“Bueno. How do you feel?”
“Better.”
They were sitting on the veranda, drinking coffee. It was eight a.m. Isabel was wearing a denim shirt and her white cotton shorts. Her hair, growing in, but still cropped to above her ears, was damp and glistening from her shower. She wore no makeup, and knew that she could be taken, from the neck up, for a pretty teenage boy—but only from the neck up. Jay was wearing his shorts and no shirt. His rash was almost gone, and it was hot.
They had been in Mexico five days. Frank Dunn had insisted on knowing where Isabel was taking Jay—“at least we can come down to pick up your body,” he had said—but Isabel had refused, knowing that the torture tactics employed by Herman and the Feria brothers had a 100 percent success rate. Jay was to place a call to Victor Ponce at El Caribe— they agreed that it was likely that Angelo’s phones would be tapped once Markey learned that Jay, Dunn, and Isabel had vanished on the same night that Gary Shaw was gunned down in front of E
l Pulpo—if he needed help.
Except for Isabel’s short walks to the Vista del Mar to pick up food, they had not left their hillside retreat. Jay’s strength had not fully returned, but they could not stay much longer. Jay was the only American within a hundred miles, and Isabel did not exactly blend in with the natives, mostly impoverished Mixtec Indians. They were bound to attract attention, and there was always the possibility that a Dominican Sister would show up, requiring Isabel to do some fast talking.
“I’ll rest one more day,” said Jay. “I’ll read the documents, listen to the tapes. Tomorrow you will call Herman.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. You can take the jeep after you make the call. I’ll figure something out.”
“Would you like me to stay to help you kill the Feria brothers?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That wasn’t our deal.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why are you not married?”
Isabel watched as Jay’s beautiful gray eyes turned inward, surprised at his reticence. He drummed his fingers on the wooden arms of his patio chair, as if giving the question more weight than she intended. Much more.
“I was married once,” he said, finally. “For a short time.”
“What happened.”
“My parents died in a plane crash.”
Isabel said nothing, not realizing, until this moment, that Jay had been a puzzle from the start. And here was a key piece of that puzzle floating in the air toward her, its contours handles she might grab and hold on to.
“When?” she asked, finally.
“Fifteen years ago.”
“And you left your wife?”
“No.”
“She left you? Are there children?”