by Paul Batista
“I doubt it, Ms. Rematti.”
Calmly Raquel said, “Judge, I’d ask the videographer to turn the brochure to its page three.”
Naomi Goldstein gave the slightest wave of her index finger, as if mimicking the turning of a page.
Under the heading “A Word from Our CEO” was an airbrushed photo of a handsome and dapper man. “Agent Grover,” Raquel Rematti said, “is that man Oscar Caliente?”
“Does it say he is?”
“Can you read the name printed below the picture?”
“Sure. It reads Robert Calvaro.”
“You are an experienced detective, aren’t you, Agent Grover?”
“I’ve been in the business for a long time.”
“In your trained eyes, does the man depicted as Robert Calvaro look like Oscar Caliente?”
“Lots of people look like Oscar Caliente.”
“Really? There are about one hundred people in this courtroom, Agent Grover. Do any of them look like Oscar Caliente?”
Grover was a man with a supercharged internal anger beneath the surface of an impatient Irish beat cop. He didn’t even make a pretense of looking around the room. “No,” he said. “Not a single one of them.”
“Have you ever investigated America Renewed?”
Hunter Decker stood. “Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“Have you ever investigated Robert Calvaro?”
“You mean the guy whose picture in the brochure is next to the words Robert Calvaro, Our CEO?”
“That’s right,” Raquel said. “That man.”
Decker, who knew how tenacious Raquel Rematti was, hadn’t sat down. “Objection,” he repeated.
“Sustained.” Naomi Goldstein, ordinarily terse, stared for a few seconds at Raquel. “Ms. Rematti, you know an agent can’t testify about ongoing, current investigations, if there are any. Or even if there aren’t any.”
“Have you investigated Hugo Salazar?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“Have you investigated a man named Juan Suarez?”
“Objection.”
Naomi Goldstein said, “Ms. Rematti, are you asking about current, active investigations?”
In her long career, Raquel had lost all fear of the consequences of challenging a judge. She simply ignored Goldstein’s question. “Have you ever investigated Juan Suarez?”
“Objection.”
The judge, too, was tenacious. “Sustained.”
“Have you ever attempted, or do you know of any attempt, to subpoena Robert Calvaro to appear at this trial?”
“Objection.”
Even Raquel was surprised when Judge Goldstein said, “Over-ruled. He can answer that question.”
Impatient, Grover folded his arms. He said, “To tell you the truth, Councilor, we’ve tried to subpoena him.”
“Have you subpoenaed him?” Raquel asked Grover. She never allowed herself to be distracted.
“We can’t find him.”
“There are more than four hundred FBI agents in this district alone, aren’t there, Agent Grover?”
“I don’t know. There may be. I wouldn’t tell you that even if I knew.”
“And not one of them has been able to find Robert Calvaro, is that your testimony?”
“It is. You have to hand a witness a subpoena, Ms. Rematti, you can’t email it to him. You still have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Is he hiding?”
“How would I know? He could be on vacation in New Zealand. Anywhere in the world. He gets around. The leaders of drug rings travel. They have more houses and apartments than Donald Trump.”
“There’s an address in the brochure for America Renewed, isn’t that right?”
“There is.”
“What is the address?”
“275 Park Avenue South.”
“Have you gone there to find Robert Calvaro?”
“I have. Personally, which I don’t often do at this point in my career. Nothing called America Renewed has ever been at that address.” Grover took a sip of water. “Ask your client where the man is. Until three weeks ago, we saw your client with the man in the picture many times. They seemed to be able to find each other whenever they wanted to. Like lovers.”
Naomi Goldstein leaned ever so slightly forward to speak into the slender microphone in front of her. “Agent Grover,” she said, “your role here is to answer questions. Not to volunteer information, not to make comments. I’m instructing the jury to disregard your last comments. Please control yourself.”
Raquel had long ago learned not to open doors in her questioning of a witness. At her law school seminars, she often warned her students: Be careful not to open doors. They can lead to dangerous, unknown places. She had already done the job she set out to do. She had sown doubt as to who the men in Government Exhibit 673 were, including the man on whose shoulder Angelina Baldesteri’s hand rested. For a defense lawyer, it was always important to generate confusion at every stage when the prosecution was presenting its case. Make the prosecution’s case twisted, she instructed her Columbia students, not linear, not easy to follow, not a road map. Where there’s confusion, there’s a potential for an acquittal. All it takes to win is one juror who says, “No, I can’t convict. I’m not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Raquel said, “No further questions.”
CHAPTER 10
IT WAS ALREADY dark when she and Hayes Smith arrived at his shingled, two-hundred-year-old house in East Hampton. It overlooked the crystal-clear pond, surrounded by sloping lawns and well-tended trees, at the end of Main Street. Swans and geese abounded there, and in the winter, it iced over so firmly that skaters glided on its surface. “In the winter, it looks absurdly like a Currier & Ives postcard,” Hayes had told her. “It’s impossible not to love it.” Raquel and Hayes had not been together long enough for her to have seen the pond in winter. Who knows, she wondered each time she was there, whether I’ll ever see it again? She loved Hayes, and believed him when he said he loved her. Yet he had never been married, he had no children, and any Google search of his name made it clear that he was an inveterate, lifelong practitioner of multiple love affairs, many of them with famous women, many at the same time. In an old-style word, a womanizer.
Raquel was astute. Hayes Smith, one of the most recognizable men in America, had an undeniable reputation as a serial, short-term lover. She knew from articles embedded eternally in the Internet that he had once had a two-year, apparently exclusive relationship with a very attractive, well-known movie star. That affair had almost evolved into a marriage that never happened.
As at the end of every week of every trial, Raquel was exhausted but always rallied herself to be bright and alert for a weekend’s reprieve whether she was alone or with someone. She had spent time, before Hayes picked her up at her apartment on Riverside Drive, carefully applying her makeup. Her Italian mother, despite the fact that the family lived in a working-class area of the long-decaying, pollution-ridden Lawrence, Massachusetts, was very skillful in applying makeup to her own Sophia Loren–type face, a skill she passed to her attentive daughter. “Don’t let those feminists tell you that a pretty face isn’t important,” her mother told her when Raquel was a teenager. “It is now, always has been, and forever will be.” And, much later in her life, when Raquel became more and more of a television presence on CNN, CBS, Fox, and other networks as a talking head for legal stories, she had spent a great deal of time in rooms with genuinely experienced makeup artists. Despite her clear, private recognition of the vanity involved in it, Raquel practiced and perfected the skill of transforming her face in the years since her fearful, body-ravaging struggle with cancer.
Hayes was a news junkie, an addict for current information. Even in the privacy of his immaculate saltbox house in East Hampton, there were television sets in every room, including the two bathrooms. After they brought their small weekend bags into the bedroom, they stretched out on the quilt-
covered bed. Hayes immediately turned on the television.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, Angelina Baldesteri was on the screen. She was being interviewed live by Anderson Cooper on CNN. Raquel herself had been interviewed many times by the slender, silvery Cooper.
Raquel groaned. “How many times, Hayes, do you think I’ve told her not to do TV interviews while the trial is on? Seventy times at least.”
Hayes held up his hand, signaling that he wanted to listen. He heard Cooper ask in his whimsical, not completely grammatical, curious-boy style, “Why do you believe that you could ever get Congress, even if it was controlled by your own party, to pass a law requiring all employers to pay all employees a minimum wage of $20 per hour?”
“Although President Spellman doesn’t recognize it, we have reached the point in our country’s history, Anderson, and in the world economy, where our private employers can afford to pay every worker at a level that will enable them to take care of and educate their children, to send them to college, to plan for retirement. Contrary to what the Republicans say, this is not a giveaway that will enable every American worker to vacation in the Caribbean.”
“Republicans argue, don’t they,” Cooper asked, “that a minimum wage at that level will result in loss of jobs and destroy small businesses?”
“That,” Angelina Baldesteri said, “is what the Republicans of 1933 argued about Social Security when FDR introduced it, and the Republicans of the 1960s argued about Medicare and Medicaid. Same old song, new singers. All wrong.”
In Hayes’ beautiful, fragrant bedroom, Raquel Rematti, dressed only in an unbuttoned bathrobe, sat up in bed, watching the screen and touching her toes. Hayes, naked, lay beside her, his head propped on two pillows. Raquel said, “You know, I’ve often in the past sent packing clients who don’t listen to my advice. She’s the worst offender.”
“Sweetheart,” Hayes said, “this is a special client. You’re not as free as you usually are. She is a famous First Lady, a Senator, and a serious candidate for President of the United States. Or at least she was.”
“Sure, and she could also become federal Bureau of Prison inmate 007. She makes it difficult for me to do my work.”
It was Hayes who held the remote-control device, which, like a magic wand, controlled the screen. “Do you want to watch a movie instead on Netflix?” he asked.
“No,” Raquel said. “Gloria Vanderbilt’s little boy is bound to ask her about the trial. I need to hear it.”
And at that moment, Cooper, in his customary taut black suit and black tie, said, almost tentatively, “And I have to ask you, Senator, about your ongoing trial for fund-raising fraud. How do you feel it’s going?”
“Here we go,” Raquel whispered.
Angelina Baldesteri smiled calmly, as if she were Nigela Lawson being asked a question about a recipe. “You know, Anderson, the trial is a blessing in disguise. I’ve said from the beginning that it’s like a third-world show trial. A Republican President whose policies are bankrupting the middle class and deepening the miseries of the unemployed and the most unfortunate millions in our society has his Republican Attorney General let loose a Republican prosecutor to persecute me. And what evidence do they use? A liar who was once one of my husband’s most trusted people who will now say anything in a pathetic attempt for leniency and a comical octogenarian who, in telling the truth, does nothing but help me. And an FBI agent whose long history includes many, many demonstrated cases in which he’s falsified evidence to send innocent people to jail.”
“But the trial will take five more weeks, Senator. Aren’t there risks for you and your candidacy?”
“The only risk, Anderson, is that I have to sit in a courtroom in Manhattan when I should be in the Senate chamber and traveling the country to lay out for the people my vision for restoring the prosperity and peace and security that the United States enjoyed during the years of Jimmy Young’s presidency.”
As the screen dissolved into a commercial, Raquel said, “In which world is that woman living?”
Hayes lowered the volume of sound on the television almost to silence. He said, “She is a better politician than her husband was.”
“And the worst defendant,” Raquel said, reaching for her iPhone. On it she typed a text message to Angelina. The note read, Call me.
The Senator’s text appeared almost immediately: Have a great weekend.
* * *
Raquel and Hayes passed the entire weekend in East Hampton. They went to the library, they walked holding hands down the exquisite Main Street, and they watched two movies at the East Hampton Cinema. They ate at the restaurant at the ancient Huntting Inn where, although they were recognized, they weren’t bothered.
Raquel and Hayes never detected the listening devices and minute cameras implanted everywhere in Hayes’ sweet, tidy house.
And they never noticed the two men who followed them. Uncannily similar, both were slightly over six feet tall. They were blond, and each had close-cropped hair. Just above his left ear, each had a zigzag mark shaved in his hair almost to the scalp. They were dressed casually in Ralph Lauren–style clothes. East Hampton had a large gay community, and these two large men could easily have been taken as part of it, apparently bonding with the “Z” in their hair as some men would with wedding rings.
They had an assignment. It was to become familiar with Hayes Smith’s physical presence, his styles of movement, his gestures. They were to return that information, as well as the sounds on the listening devices and the images on the tapes, to a man they knew only as Mr. Jones, obviously a fake name because “Mr. Jones” was plainly South American as his accent conveyed.
Mr. Jones had shared some information with the men with the blond “Z” markings faintly etched in their hair. At some point someone was going to “reach out and touch” Hayes as a way to “set on fire” the mind, emotions, and fears of Raquel Rematti. Raquel needed to be conditioned to fail, particularly since failure had rarely been part of her experience. She had spent a lifetime evading failure. She had always sought out success. If her life was altered, Mr. Jones had said, she would now fail. The men with the “Z” did not even question the bizarre “Mr. Jones.”
It was only later the men marked with the zigzags learned his two names: Robert Calvaro and Oscar Caliente.
CHAPTER 11
IT WAS ONE in the morning when Hugo Salazar stepped down from the black SUV at the corner of Greenwich Street and Vestry Street in downtown Manhattan. Three large men, also dressed in black clothes, left a nearby SUV when Salazar emerged from his. They separated and formed a loose triangle around him as he walked casually, confidently, along the white cobblestone street toward Le Zinc. They were far enough away from him, and yet close enough that they didn’t seem to be with him but could still protect him if anyone posed or seemed to pose a threat.
A dense mist had settled over Lower Manhattan. It was, after all, an island surrounded by immense bodies of water—the Hudson River, New York Harbor, the East River, and, at its northern edge, the narrow estuary known as the Spuyten Duyvil that separated Manhattan from the Bronx. The mist made the brick-shaped cobblestones glisten, creating magical halos around the city streetlights.
Hugo Salazar was a night lover. Night was his element, his ocean of possibilities, the river in which he loved to swim. It was when he felt most safe, most alert, most fun-loving. Although a throng of men and women waited in the chilly mist for entry through the velvet ropes, the club’s bodyguards unfastened the clasps as soon as they saw Hugo. His three bodyguards also entered just behind him as the velvet rope was again fastened to its pole. The line of people who stood behind the velvet cord was very long.
Hugo was there for a reason. Lydia Guzman was twenty-five, from the Bronx, and a fun lover. Hugo also knew she was one of the jurors in the trial of Senator Angelina Baldesteri. Even though the prosecutors hadn’t wanted her on the jury, they had used up all their automatic challenges before her name gradually rose to the surface fr
om the old-fashioned wooden box that a court clerk spun on its axis when someone in the large jury pool was disqualified. Dozens of potential jurors had been excused for a variety of reasons—financial hardship, travel plans, caring for sick relatives, and in some cases mental, emotional, or personality disorders that were evident to the prosecutors, the judge, and Raquel Rematti. No one wanted a patently screwed-up, utterly unpredictable man or woman on the jury. So Lydia Guzman’s name, as the wheel revolved, began its gradual climb through the painstaking selection process.
Since Naomi Goldstein was a meticulous judge who knew all the rules, one of which was that each side had only a limited number of times it could reject a possible juror on instinct for any reason or no reason at all. After those peremptory challenges were used up there had to be a coherent, nondiscriminatory, legitimate reason to reject a juror. Lydia Guzman was eventually seated as one of the actual jurors because there were no nondiscriminatory grounds on which to reject her. Hunter Decker had wanted an anonymous, sequestered jury. Naomi Goldstein refused after Raquel argued that sequestering a jury in a hotel room for at least five weeks, deprived of all contact with the outside world, sent a subtle message that the defendant was dangerous or guilty or both.
For several years, Hugo Salazar had casually seen Lydia in various all-night clubs but had never made an effort to dance with her, “to hook up.” He didn’t know her name until the trial started. Her exotic looks were unmistakable, as was her fluid dancing style, her ravishing body, and her love of cocaine. As he entered Le Zinc, a club on the ground floor of a renovated century-old warehouse, he wasted no time. She was on the dance floor, illuminated in flashes by strobe lights. It appeared she was dancing with no one and every one. The music was loud, amplified from tall black speakers strategically placed throughout the immense club. There was only one man on the stage who controlled the thunderous dance music, most of it rap and hip-hop, solely through a silver Apple laptop perched on a glittering music stand. There was no need for a live band.