Rip Crew

by Sebastian Rotella

  “Washington just shut us down.”

  “What?”

  “Isabel went to the bosses and laid out what we have. They got mad. They said she was insubordinate, she didn’t have any business investigating the Blakes.”

  “But we connected the two cases!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s as far as we go.”

  Méndez felt as if he had walked into a wall. His thoughts swirled. Standing behind Pescatore were two of the prosecutor’s bodyguards. They leaned on a parked Alfa Romeo, keeping a vigilant eye on their guests.

  Isabel had been curt and careful on the phone, Pescatore said. Her superiors wanted Pescatore and Méndez to stop what they were doing and come back.

  “I said, ‘Isabel, somebody just came damn close to killing us over here. And it’s gotta be related to what we’re doing. They can’t just ignore the attempted murder of two U.S. persons.’ She said the FBI will get a briefing from the Italians and talk to us eventually.”

  “What about the Tecate investigation?”

  “The Justice Department says we’re overreaching. Some of the DHS and FBI supervisors want to hammer the Blakes, but their hands are tied. The heat is coming from way above them. The problem is, we don’t know who El T is. And we don’t have Abrihet, the victim, the key witness. We don’t have a statement from her brother. So Isabel had to tell the truth: we can’t nail Blake for the massacre.”

  “Perhaps not in court, not yet. But still…there’s circumstantial evidence. This is obscene. Isabel acted courageously, and they punish her. Has she lost her job?”

  “They told her to take a couple days off. They’re, uh, reviewing her situation.”

  Méndez ran a hand down his face. He relived the blind whirl of the shootout.

  “It’s like Mexico,” he said disgustedly. “The public mafia protects the private mafia.”

  “It sucks, no doubt about it.” Pescatore tilted his head, a challenge in his look. “But Leo, there’s a big difference. The U.S. feds aren’t a mafia. People don’t get away with stuff like this in the United States. Even rich people.”

  “Oh, they don’t?”

  “Not mass murder. No way.”

  He wants to believe, Méndez thought. So do I. But I’m starting to wonder.

  “I should publish an article about this,” he said. “Right now.”

  “I told Isabel the same thing. Unleash Leo.”

  “And?”

  “She said we gotta think hard before going public. Because of Abrihet. If you do a story, it could endanger her more and blow our chances of finding her.”

  “True.”

  “What do we do, Leo? Washington wants us to stop working with the Italians.”

  Méndez smiled his wolflike smile. He took Pescatore by the arm, turning his back to the bodyguards, and lowered his voice.

  “I assume, Valentine, that your instinct is the same as mine. We do the opposite. Above all, we stay very close to our new friend the prosecutor.”

  As Méndez had hoped, Maio did not take the news well. Méndez and Pescatore did their best to paint the picture that the authorities in Washington wanted to push him out of the case.

  During the ride back from the restaurant, the prosecutor sat by the window in silence. It was interrupted by his cell phone.

  “Ciao, Philip,” he said. “No, for me it is not very late. Dimmi tutto.”

  As the prosecutor talked, Pescatore leaned toward Méndez. He whispered that he believed Philip was the FBI attaché at the U.S. embassy. It soon became clear Pescatore was right. Maio said it was early in the investigation. He wouldn’t have anything to share for days. No sense in Philip coming down from Rome. Maio listened as the agent spoke at length.

  “Excuse me, excuse me, Philip, my friend,” Maio said in English. “Let me remind you one thing. This is not a hotel. I am not the man you call for room service…Exactly…Well, that’s what it is sounding like. Whether you meant or not…yes…fine. Apology accepted. Yes, I prefer you wait there…the American and the Mexican? They are cooperation witnesses under jurisdiction of the magistrate. They stay as long as I need…It doesn’t matter, your instructions to send them home. If necessary, I confiscate their passports. Hai capito?…Calm down. Go have a nice lunch tomorrow and watch the belle femmine at our place on the Piazza del Popolo. We talk soon.”

  Maio hung up. He watched the coast rush by in the night. He undid his tie knot completely, muttering to himself in dialect. Pescatore gave Méndez a furtive elbow in the ribs.

  So far, so good, Méndez thought. Fortunately, we teamed up with a Sicilian. In Italy, that’s as Mexican as you can get.

  The cars returned to the courthouse. Maio said he wanted to show them something inside.

  The dilapidated elevator groaned its way to the top floor. The doors opened onto a short hall. A sleepy young uniformed cop sat at a desk. He had slicked-back hair and wore an armored vest. The desk contained textbooks and a machine gun. The cop stood at attention, then unlocked a steel-reinforced door.

  The apartment had apparently been fashioned by knocking down walls and combining offices. It had a linoleum floor, fluorescent ceiling lights, and dull green walls. The grillwork on the windows looked better suited for resisting a bomb blast than letting in light. The furniture consisted of Ikea basics and office castoffs. They sat down at a table in a long rectangular space with living, dining and kitchen areas. There were a few personal touches: plants, a Sicilian warrior puppet on a hook.

  As Maio prepared espresso in a machine that sounded like a helicopter taking off, he explained that his ex-wife lived in Palermo. His children were grown. The easiest, safest option had been to set himself up in these makeshift quarters above his office.

  “A short commute,” he said.

  The place smelled like coffee, cigarettes, and solitude. It felt familiar to Méndez. While leading the Diogenes Group, he said, he had sent his family to live in safety in California. He had often spent the night in a bedroom in the unit’s headquarters.

  “I think I would be at home in Tijuana,” the prosecutor said, rubbing his thick stubble. He had lapsed back into Italo-Spanish. “It’s strange, Dottore. People think this life is glorious—fame, power, press conferences, bodyguards. They don’t see the reality: eating alone, living in shitty rooms, indoors all the time, unable to walk in the sun or sit in a café without a paramilitary deployment. La vita blindata.”

  “In Latin America, we call it la vida blindada.”

  The armored life. Assassination plots, grinding menace, a suffocating security cocoon. Méndez had endured it. He had gone into exile to escape it.

  Maio sipped coffee. “And the pressure, the envy. I remember telling a colleague about a trip to the United Nations. He says, ‘Ah, how nice. Did you take a plane? Or just put on your cape and tights and fly over?’ It’s like they are waiting for you to fail, to be humiliated. Sometimes I think the best thing would be to die violently. That way, at least, they will speak well of you.”

  “I’ve had that feeling myself,” Méndez said. “But I prefer criticism, humiliation and dying peacefully of old age in bed.”

  Maio leaned over, retrieved a thick accordion folder from his briefcase, and plunked it on the table.

  “Allora,” he said. “I propose a pact of honor. I have a printout here of documents that were in Mr. Anbessa’s pen drive. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t show this to you. However, I wouldn’t have it if it weren’t for you. Also, I think you know my mood after talking to the FBI.”

  Hesitantly, Pescatore said, “Incazzato?”

  “Exactly. I don’t appreciate being told how or what or when to investigate. The FBI wants me to send you home. They want to participate in my investigation because it has sensitive repercussions. I’m not averse to cooperation, but I consider the request to be unacceptable interference.”

  Maio lit a cigarette and narrowed his eyes.

  “These Blakes…” he continued. “They are megabosses. White-collar American bosses.
The kind of criminals you dream about getting your hands on. A once-in-a-career, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He accompanied his words with jabs of the cigarette. “These figli di puttana made an enormous mistake—they tried to kill you on my turf. They gave me a shot at them. They opened a door, and I don’t intend to let it shut. The pact I propose is this: I share with you, you share with me. We collaborate and coordinate. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Méndez said.

  “Assolutamente sì,” Pescatore said.

  Maio pulled a pile of papers out of the folder. He selected two sets of stapled documents and gave one each to Méndez and Pescatore.

  “This comes from the pen drive that Anbessa’s sister took from Perry Blake. We found a receipt in Solomon’s office for a FedEx package she sent from New York. These are interesting items. Please give a look. I will make more coffee.”

  A half hour later, Méndez was wide awake, and it had little to do with the caffeine. One document was a roster of individuals, companies, and government agencies, mostly in Mexico. He recognized names of Mexican officials and businesspeople, including, to his satisfaction, his old nemesis Senator Ruiz Caballero. There was a list of “service charges” and “administrative payments” to law firms in Houston, San Diego and cities in Mexico. The total was in the millions. Méndez tried to contain his excitement.

  “I am not a forensic accountant, but I believe it is a record of bribes paid by the Blake Group,” he said.

  “We think the same,” Maio said.

  “They’re in the shit now,” Pescatore said. “The Justice Department prosecutes Americans for payoffs overseas. That’s what the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is for.”

  “As brazen as it looks, there are precedents,” Méndez said. “Walmart was involved in a massive bribery scandal in Mexico. The mechanism was similar, and the executives were accused of documenting kickbacks this way. And there is a huge Brazilian construction company that even had an international department of bribery.”

  “I remember,” Pescatore said. “They were paying out all that cash. They had to keep track of it, right?”

  “In the Walmart case, the bribes went to local officials around the country for things like zoning and construction permits. I see some of that here, mostly a few years ago, when the Blakes were expanding in Mexico. The difference is the names in the federal government, in national politics. The merger has needed backing at high levels in Mexico City.”

  “Bellissimo,” Maio said.

  They discussed the second document, a series of internal reports and e-mails analyzing the progress of the merger and the political and regulatory process.

  “An expert writing to a client,” Méndez said. “Discreet enough not to identify the author or the recipient. But who else can the client be? It’s the Blakes, or someone close to them.”

  The most incriminating passages were accounts of using campaign contributions and “other expenditures” to cultivate power brokers and bureaucrats in both nations. There were profiles of critics of the proposed merger. Other reports described, with great specificity, the developing investigations of the Blakes in both Mexico and the United States, and outlined defensive strategies.

  “Whoever put this together had privileged information about what the investigators were doing,” Méndez said.

  “Damn right,” Pescatore said. “Inside sources.”

  “It is a manual for obstruction of justice.” Méndez turned to the prosecutor. “Giancarlo, could you give us a copy?”

  Maio patted him on the arm. “Not yet, caro. You can take notes, but I can’t give you anything. When it is possible, I will.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Maio yawned and stretched. He suggested they get some rest. The next day he would talk to Anbessa’s doctors about allowing a visit.

  A uniformed driver and two plainclothes officers drove Pescatore and Méndez to their hotel. A plainclothes officer escorted them into the lobby, said good night, and settled into an armchair with a newspaper.

  In his room, Méndez typed up his notes and everything he could remember from the documents. When he checked, it was four a.m. Almost dinnertime in San Diego. He called home. Renata talked to him about Kermit the Frog. Juan reported that he had landed a starting position on the school soccer team and asked him for a vintage Naples jersey with Maradona’s name on it. Estela said everything was calm. The San Diego Police checked in now and then. She asked how he was doing.

  “A roller-coaster day.”

  “Go to bed, Leo. You have to sleep. Are you eating, at least?”

  “Never fear. The Italians shovel food into me at all hours.”

  With one hand, he pulled open a curtain to look at the sea. His reflection, grim and haggard, startled him.

  His wife was silent. Although hearing about the shootout had muted her anger, things between them had not returned to normal.

  “Estela,” he said. “How is the house? Does the yard need mowing?”

  “What? Since when do you care about the house or the yard?”

  “Well, I’ve been away for a while…”

  “As if that makes any difference.”

  It was true. He was useless in the domestic arena. He called a handyman or a gardener for the slightest chore. Estela was better than him at assembling furniture and setting up appliances.

  “I was thinking what it would be like to spend time working around the house.”

  “Your office is in the garage, in case you forgot.”

  “No, not journalism. Puttering around, using my hands, planting a garden. A calm, simple activity. What would it be like to have a regular anodyne job: normal hours, no drama, no insanity? Spend time thinking about mortgages and gas mileage and home improvement and the stock market. Whatever normal people think about.”

  “What would it be like? Like being a different person. And therefore you’d be married to someone else.”

  “Vaya. You prefer me the way I am.”

  “What are you having over there, a predawn existentialist reflection?”

  “When people shoot at you, it makes you philosophical. I was thinking about when Juan was little, two or three years old. I was a reporter. You were finishing your dissertation. I remember those years vividly.”

  “I remember we didn’t have any money. Not that we do now.”

  “Things were pleasant, though, Estela. Kids that age force you to focus on the basics. They make things simpler. And happier, don’t you think?”

  “Renata is the same age now that Juan was then.”

  The sharpness in her voice stung him. He thought about Renata, about reading to her the last time he had seen her.

  “You are right, mi amor,” he said quietly. “During my existentialist reflection, as you call it, I came to a conclusion. I have been struggling with something. I’m a journalist who prefers being a policeman. Even though I became a policeman only because I was a certain kind of journalist. A hopeless dilemma. Then I had an epiphany. I need a drastic change. I don’t need to slow down. I need to stop altogether. Maybe I should teach. Or write a book. Or be a househusband.”

  “Or a fading Mexican gigolo.”

  He laughed gratefully. The humor was like a peace offering.

  “An excellent suggestion. What I should—”

  “What you should do, Leo, is stop talking now. Get some sleep…mi amor.”

  She said the words as if she were giving him a gift she had been holding behind her back.

  He slept three hours. When he went down for breakfast, the plainclothesman was still in the lobby. The squad car was still parked in front.

  Whatever his future, Méndez thought, for now he was back in the past. Back in the armored life.

  Chapter 13

  In the medical center, statues and murals of saints, Christs, and Madonnas stared down as if they knew how long it had been since Pescatore’s last confession—and his last checkup.

  High ceilings amplified the hubbub in the halls. The chie
f doctor was a white-coated woman with a stylish auburn helmet of hair and a sophisticated northern-sounding accent. Heels clicking on tiles, she led a small parade through the intensive-care ward: Maio, Pescatore, Méndez, detectives, bodyguards, orderlies, nurses. A policewoman hurried by in the opposite direction leading three East Africans: a woman in a white gauze shawl in her forties, a teenage boy, and a woman in her early twenties. The youths were sad-faced and slender, dressed in the stylishly casual, brand-conscious uniform of young Italians. They held the arms of the older woman as if she were weak on her feet. The group had disappeared around a corner by the time Pescatore realized they were Solomon Anbessa’s wife and children.

  Two uniformed police officers flanked the door of the room. The doctor told the visitors to keep it brief. Maio ushered in Pescatore, Méndez and his chief investigator. He instructed the others to stay outside.

  Propped up by pillows, Solomon Anbessa resembled a statue of an Abyssinian noble in repose. He nodded gravely at Maio, who wore a beige sports jacket with jeans. Maio addressed him as Captain Anbessa. He said he did not expect full testimony, but he had to ask some urgent questions.

  “We believe you acted in legitimate self-defense,” Maio said. “Of course, there remains the issue of illegal possession of firearms. What you do to help us now will be taken into consideration.”

  Solomon’s nod said, I’ve survived a gun battle, a death-boat, and a dictatorship. Excuse me if I don’t get all anxious about a charge of packing heat.

  Maio skipped the throat-clearing biographical-type questions.

  “Where is your sister?”

  “At this moment, I do not know.” His Italian was tinged with the broad Neapolitan accent. “She was in Tijuana. With the priests. They are hiding her. They were going to move her to a new place.”

  The priests, who belonged to Padre Bartolomeo’s religious order, ran a shelter for migrants in Tijuana similar to the one Pescatore had visited in Tapachula. Pescatore was impressed that they were harboring Abrihet. Apparently Padre Bartolomeo wasn’t the only stand-up guy in the outfit.