Dirty White

by Brian Freemantle

  “I’ll come back to you, either way,” undertook the lawyer.

  Farr wondered if the man saw a role for himself, even if Scarletti and Gomez weren’t involved. He stood abruptly, determined to conclude the meeting on his terms. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Scarletti and Gomez arrived an hour later, in response to Lang’s telephone call to the Plaza.

  Diplomatically Lang stopped short of saying openly that Farr appeared reluctant to proceed because of Scarletti. He gave a brief summary of his talk with the broker, saying that the man had spoken of others interested in the linkup.

  “Who?” demanded Gomez.

  “There were no names,” said Lang, impatient with the other man’s arrogance.

  “It could be bluff,” insisted the Colombian.

  “Where’s the ante?” argued Scarletti. “It’s a straight trading agreement, as we understand it. Our cocaine for their heroin. There’s no benefit in their trying to drive up any stakes: there aren’t any stakes.”

  Gomez was irritated at having his point put down. To Lang, he said, “Did you believe him?”

  “Like Mr. Scarletti has said,” repeated the lawyer, “what’s the point in lying?”

  “What did he say about none of his people being known?” asked the American.

  “That that was exactly how they wanted it to be,” said Lang. “The company disappeared in Hong Kong. I’ve checked the names out every way I can and there’s absolutely nothing …” He smiled briefly. “The effectiveness of the cover, incidentally, shows how well protected you are.”

  “So they want a meeting?” mused Scarletti.

  “Farr thought you would, too.”

  “I would,” said Gomez. “Certainly for something as big as this.”

  “He didn’t offer any suggestions for where it might be?”

  “To be agreed, mutually,” said the lawyer.

  “Medellin would be safe,” insisted Gomez. “I could guarantee Medellin.”

  “I think I could guarantee Philadelphia,” said Scarletti. “But Medellin might be better.”

  “You want to proceed then?” asked Lang.

  “I sure as hell don’t want to lose the opportunity,” said Scarletti. “What do you think about it?”

  “I’m unhappy at how little we know,” said Lang.

  “Farr’s proved himself, surely?” Gomez pointed out.

  “He seems to have,” admitted the lawyer.

  “I didn’t just leave it to you, when we started checking Farr out,” said Scarletti, “I asked around to see if there’d been any stories spread about, suggestions that Farr was a good guy. That’s the way the bastards have operated before, with their phony companies. There wasn’t a whisper.”

  “Certainly Farr’s company isn’t phony,” conceded Lang.

  “If we could dictate the meeting place, I don’t see the danger,” said Gomez. “Medellin would be perfect.”

  Conscious of Farr’s reluctance, Lang said, “What if we can’t dictate the meeting place? If they don’t agree to Medellin?”

  Neither Gomez nor Scarletti spoke for several moments. Then Scarletti said, “We’ll have to be extremely careful: it’ll have to be somewhere I’m very sure of.”

  “Me, too. I wouldn’t like Europe. Or Asia.”

  “Which is why they might not like Medellin,” pointed out Lang.

  “We’re talking in circles,” said Scarletti. “I want it. Tell Farr that …” He looked sideways, to Gomez. “You in any hurry to get back to Colombia?”

  Gomez shook his head.

  Scarletti went back to the lawyer. “Twenty-four hours?”

  “That’s what he said,” agreed the lawyer.

  “Like it was an ultimatum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t go back at once; it makes us look too anxious. Let him wait awhile. I don’t like being pressured. Tell Farr that we want to go ahead and let the suggestion for a meeting place come from them. And let’s take it from there. We’ll both stay in town; liaise from here.”

  Farr would reject them, Lang knew; he was sure of it, from the broker’s attitude. Just as he was sure that what he’d learned so far was a fly-speck compared to what was possible if this thing went through. He said, “I’ll do everything I can to make sure it works out.”

  It could not be an easy meeting—initially, at least—but the fact that it went as well as it did was entirely due to Harriet. They caught the early afternoon shuttle to Boston, Farr going directly from his meeting with the lawyer, and Howard ducked a class and admitted it. Farr accepted it. The broker wasn’t sure where they should meet, so he left it to Howard. The boy chose a restaurant-bar on Memorial, across the river in Cambridge. After the handshakes and the immediate uncertainty, Harriet said to the boy, “You’re looking OK. How is it?”

  Howard’s face clouded momentarily. “So he told you?”

  The woman moved at once, not just to stem the obvious annoyance but to prevent a dispute arising between them. “Course he told me, yo-yo. I’m going to marry your father: you expect him to lie about you to me?”

  The fixed expression remained and then broke into a reluctant smile. “Suppose not.”

  “You’re not a kid, Howard,” said Harriet. “We’re all grown up. You had a problem, which I hope you’ve got over, but whether you have or you haven’t we’ve got to get something straight between us, you and I. I’m an intruder into your family. I love your father like crazy, so much that it hurts. I don’t know about you because I don’t know you. If I could learn to love you, in time—and you to love me—then it would be terrific. I’d like that a lot. If not, it’ll have to be a situation we need to sort out. Not with your father. Between you and me. I’ve made your father a promise and I’ll extend it to you. No cheating. No lies. No fucking around. I want to be your friend.”

  The boy blinked at her in surprise. Finally he managed, “Christ!”

  “You’ve got to do better than that,” encouraged Harriet.

  “You nag a lot?”

  “Not a lot. Only when I think it’s necessary.”

  “When it’s necessary?”

  “When it’s necessary: don’t smart-ass me, boy!”

  Howard laughed in genuine amusement, and Farr sat to one side, his head moving back and forth between the two people—the only two people—whom he loved in the world, thinking how lucky he had been to meet Harriet.

  Howard said, “I don’t know how to handle you.”

  As if to compound his uncertainty, Harriet said, “You didn’t answer me: how is it?”

  “OK,” said the boy.

  “No, it isn’t,” she countered at once. “Despite the detox and the therapy and all the determination, it isn’t easy. So how is it!”

  “Not easy,” he conceded. “Shit, you are an awkward woman!”

  “Why didn’t you say so, in the first place?”

  “Didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  Howard did not reply for several moments. “Guess I wanted to impress you.”

  “Wanna know a secret?”

  “What?”

  “I want to impress you too.” Harriet extended her hand toward the boy, but with her little finger crooked, so that he had to crook his as well. “Hopeful friends?” she offered.

  “Hopeful friends,” he agreed, shaking the offered finger.

  “Slipped?” she demanded.

  “No!”

  “Sure?”

  “Why the …!” he started, but she broke across him and said, “Because we’re not fucking around, remember?”

  The boy looked down into his lap, composing the words. When he looked up it was to both of them and he was serious. “OK,” he said. “Honest-injun time. I thought I’d cracked it and that I could resist but now I’m not sure. So far, I have. But Jesus, it’s been difficult! I’ve actually gone out, twice, to score: once I even got to the place and saw the dealing and managed to turn back …” He was now speaking not to Farr but to Harriet. “I
t frightened the shit out of me,” he admitted.

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Then you won,” said Harriet.

  “That time,” said Howard. “What about the next?”

  “If you did it once, you can do it again.”

  “That sounds like the therapy crap.”

  “It wasn’t crap,” said Harriet. “There are only a certain number of ways you can arrange words to try to say what you mean. Often they come out the same way, so OK, it sounds trite. It doesn’t affect the sincerity.”

  “What do I call you?” said Howard.

  “Harriet’s good.”

  “You’re wrong, Harriet, about being an intruder. I don’t think you’re an intruder at all. I think you’re terrific.”

  “So do I,” said Farr. He made the remark in the cab, just as they were entering the cross street into 63rd: throughout the homeward shuttle they’d talked and talked again about the encounter with Howard, Farr intent upon analyzing every word of every sentence. Harriet led her way into the house, still unable fully to accept this was to be her home.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You were,” insisted Farr. “You were absolutely terrific.”

  “No lies, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I acted,” she admitted. “Not much, but I acted.” They had walked automatically into the main room and she turned to look at him. “You were frightened, when we got here first; when we came in and I saw everything?”

  “You know I was,” he said.

  “So was I,” she said. “I was frightened then and I was frightened when I met Howard. I wanted so much to make him like me. So I went over the top.”

  “No, darling,” he said. “No, you didn’t. You surprised me and I’m sure you surprised the hell out of him, but you weren’t over the top. You were marvelous.”

  “Not even saying fuck?”

  “Not even saying fuck.”

  Outside the terraced house, Ramos ensured that the watching Colombians were properly emplaced and could observe the property throughout the night, as they had been instructed to do since Farr returned from the Caymans. The Colombian remained for a moment, beside the observation car, staring up at the house, in which only the ground-floor light was currently showing. Lang’s investigation of Walter Farr had been extremely detailed and it was completely accurate—as Ramos knew because he’d done what Gomez ordered and checked every fact, and he had found not one mistake. But there appeared to be one oversight. There was no reference to the woman, whom Ramos knew to have arrived with the broker, gone to and from Boston with the man, and to have returned that night to the house. Maybe, thought Ramos, she was just some passing screw. Then maybe again, she wasn’t. It was important he find out. He enjoyed Gomez’s dependence on him: the place he had in the organization. So he did not want to fail in something as important as this.

  24

  Farr spent the day at the Manhattan office, finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate upon the things that Angela Nolan felt necessary to bring up. The time passed without any contact from Lang. He was growing positively nervous, concerned that he had overplayed his hand, when the call came: the relief moved through him but he was sure he kept any indication of it from his voice. Testing his strength, he suggested that the lawyer come to him on this occasion—rather than he go to Pearl Street—and Lang agreed after some hesitation. He was there in thirty minutes, which was fast, despite the nearness of the two offices.

  “They want to meet,” announced the lawyer.

  “Oh.” Maintaining his attitude of reluctance of the previous day, the broker sounded disappointed. He said, “You know the difficulty. I’ll put it to my people. I can’t guarantee they’ll agree.”

  “We’d both benefit.”

  “I will anyway.”

  “Yes,” said the lawyer tightly. “I’ve a suggestion, if they agree to a meeting. Gomez said he could guarantee absolute security in Medellin. Scarletti’s agreed.”

  Farr registered the Colombian city. He smiled, shaking his head. “I know, even before consulting with them, that Medellin would be out of the question. They’d laugh at me.”

  Lang’s concern was obvious. “Have they suggested anywhere?”

  “Hong Kong?” proposed Farr. Brennan did not want it there at all, but Farr knew from his rehearsals with the FBI supervisor that Lang had to be convinced that some sort of bargaining was in progress.

  “Gomez was specific about not wanting to go to Asia,” said Lang. “Nor Europe.”

  “There doesn’t seem a lot of purpose in continuing these discussions, does there?” said Farr. “Gomez particularly seems to imagine he can impose all the conditions.”

  “They’re not conditions,” said Lang quickly. “Suggestions, attitudes, nothing more than that.”

  Time to concede, Farr decided. He said, “We need something neutral, don’t we? Neutral and safe.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But what?” asked Farr, not wanting to appear too well prepared.

  “It’s not easy,” admitted Lang.

  “There was one thought that crossed my mind.” In immediate qualification, he said, “Not perfect, of course. But it might go some way toward reaching a compromise.”

  “What?” demanded Lang.

  “A boat,” announced Farr. “Let’s be blunt. They’re worried about arrest. What about a foreign-registered boat, in international waters? They’d be beyond any jurisdiction … beyond seizure.”

  Lang gave one of his cat-with-the-milk smiles. “I like it,” he said, “it’s a good idea.”

  “Maybe my side won’t like it. Maybe Gomez and Scarletti won’t like it.”

  “It meets the requirements,” said Lang. “I’ll tell them that. How soon will you know?”

  Farr gave a purposely vague shrug. “I’m returning to the island tonight. I should be able to establish contact within a day or two; I’m supposed to be arranging something, after all.”

  “I’ll know by tomorrow,” assured Lang. Scarletti and Gomez were still in town, awaiting his report of the meeting.

  “Call tomorrow. I’ll try to get a reaction by then.”

  Harriet had remained at the house and Farr went through the entire meeting with her, while it was still fresh in his mind, so that he would forget nothing and she would be able to remind him when he told it again to Brennan, later.

  “Wonderful, darling,” said the woman. “Absolutely wonderful.”

  “They haven’t agreed yet,” said Farr cautiously. “And we don’t know if Brennan will think it wonderful.”

  He did. They got back to the Caymans on the late plane, so it was almost midnight before they reached the bungalow. Farr recounted the two meetings without any need for prompting from Harriet and the FBI supervisor said, “You did well. Damned well.”

  “You sure Lang’s hurting for it?” asked Seymour.

  “Like hell,” said Farr. “He’s a greedy bastard.”

  “But it still comes down to Gomez and Scarletti,” said Brennan. “Just how far can we go with them?”

  “There’s no way of telling.”

  “Definitely Medellin?” queried Seymour.

  “Definitely.”

  “We’ll run another check to satisfy that son of a bitch Harrop, but we came up with a blank last time.”

  “If we get an actual seizure, the background won’t be necessary,” said Harriet.

  Brennan held up his hand, forefinger narrowed almost shut against his thumb. “We’re that close,” he said. “I can feel it. We’re going to get them!”

  “Let’s hope,” said Farr, suspicious by now of Brennan’s enthusiasms.

  “Five bucks says Lang’s in touch before midday tomorrow.”

  It was a bet the supervisor would have won, if anyone had taken it. The lawyer tried to be circumspect, on an open telephone line, using words such as clients and mutual discussions, but Farr intruded the names of Gomez and Sca
rletti, for the benefit of the recording system, and managed to get a grunted confirmation from the other end. Farr retained his feigned reluctance, saying that, while there seemed to be tentative agreement from his end, his people still wanted more details and further time to consider the idea. Lang came back that his clients also wanted him to come to the Caymans again, personally to satisfy himself of the arrangements. Already briefed by Brennan about how long it would take to set up the arrest procedure, Farr proposed the end of the week and Lang at once accepted.

  It meant spreading the operation beyond the immediately involved FBI personnel to include customs, coastguards and U.S. air force. Brennan flew to Washington to act as liaison, leaving Seymour to organize a boat. Fleetingly the man considered utilizing one of the fleet of seized drug-smuggling vessels held by the U.S. customs and coastguard, but discarded the idea because of the necessity for foreign registration, and mindful of Lang’s attention to detail. He inspected and rejected as too small a yacht anchored off Georgetown. The second time he had better luck, locating a British-registered—essential for the plan—sixty-foot motor cruiser called the Mary Ann, anchored and available for charter in the protective lagoon off Rum Point. Farr had to be the hirer, of course, to satisfy any investigation Lang might undertake. He paid in cash and went through the unnecessary ritual of providing a victualing list; he said he would be assembling his own crew, whose seamen’s certificates would be produced to satisfy the insurance requirements. The men—all coastguards—arrived the following day with the returning Brennan.

  “We’re all set,” said the man, tense with an excitement which caused him to keep smiling, as if at some private joke. “Everything. An air force AWAC surveillance plane, two coastguard cutters and a coastguard helicopter. Customs plane and helicopters as well. We could invade Europe with what we’ve got.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t leak,” said the more cautious Seymour.

  Brennan clenched his fist. “It’s tight,” he promised. “Very tight.”

  The FBI surveillance of the Mary Ann was fully mounted and absolute when Lang arrived. Batty and Jones were operating concealed still and movie cameras and Seymour, apparently working on the next but one mooring, had a directional microphone aimed at the cruiser, to pick up as much conversation as possible; they’d decided against trying to install an eavesdropping system on the vessel in advance of the lawyer’s visit, in case he located it. Lang asked the coastguard crew to leave, which they did at Farr’s instruction, and the lawyer went carefully through the cruiser, making the sort of checks that might have detected a wiring system. The man carefully studied the registration documents and noted their numbering for a later independent check, and after three hours said, “It looks all right.”