by Paul Batista
“Best I ever heard of,” he answered, laughing. He pressed the elevator button for her in the ornate lobby.
CHAPTER 18
AS SOON AS she entered her apartment on the seventh floor, even before she turned on the light switch adjacent to the door, she knew something was altered, radically, about her home. In the living room, there was no overturned furniture, yet the sofa and chairs were all slightly out of the exact places they had long occupied. The curtains facing Riverside Park and the Hudson River were drawn closed, something she never did because she loved at all times the outside light that suffused her home, whether daylight or the nighttime lights from the outdoor street lamps on Riverside Drive.
Raquel’s body tingled with fear as a profoundly uncomfortable and rare wash of cold water coursed through her blood. She thought of fleeing the apartment and taking the elevator to the lobby to find Jose. Instead, Raquel, trembling, ran through all six rooms of her home, turning on light switches and shouting, pointlessly as she knew it was, “Where the fuck are you?”
There was no sound, no answer.
Some of the rooms were in greater disarray than the living room. The sheets, blankets, and pillows of her old bed—the only remaining relic of her long-ago marriage—were scattered over the floor.
She rushed to the kitchen and opened the freezer door. Groping among the stored ice cubes, she discovered what she intuitively knew. The twenty thousand dollars she always kept there, that secret reservoir of cash she stored in plastic baggies for emergencies and for reassurance, was missing. This wasn’t a surprise to her. She had long known it was an obvious, almost useless hiding place that any common thief with enough time would find. She actually laughed out loud when her cold right hand quickly determined that the big internal ice reservoir contained only ice cubes.
Raquel was far more worried about the fate of the Ruger pistol she had bought not long after Theresa Bui was shot in Montauk. On her knees, she opened the kitchen cabinet doors below her gleaming sink. She leaned forward, her torso twisting without strain, and, palms upward and groping, found what she had hidden taped into the corrugated underside of the sink. The Ruger. Once she had stripped away the adhesive masking tape, she felt that surge of safety’s reassurance pulse through every muscle of her body. Her sense of relief, of grabbing a rope attaching her to safety, only increased when within a foot of the unloaded pistol she reached out for the six magazines, also taped to the sink’s underside, containing bullets that made the Ruger such a powerful weapon. Before Theresa was murdered, Raquel had never touched any kind of weapon. Indeed, the sight of assault weapons carried by soldiers in camouflage at airports after 9/11 made her uneasy and never reassured her.
And now, in the sickening disarray of her own home, she made a deliberate decision to carry it and several of the bullet-packed magazines everywhere. Her permit was a nationwide conceal-and-carry license that a friend in the Secret Service arranged for her after Theresa’s death. The pistol and several of its bullet-filled magazines would fit easily into the large over-the-shoulder briefcase she always carried while on trial. It would only be in the courthouse that the pistol and magazines would have to be turned over to the U.S. Marshals—many of whom she had known for years—who scanned everyone entering the building. Not one of the seasoned U.S. Marshals at the court’s security entrance ever seemed fazed or surprised that she carried a pistol and ammunition. Indeed, they felt a kind of camaraderie with her, especially because of the rarity of a universal, carry-everywhere license. That impressed them.
In her violated apartment, at four in the morning, exhausted but fully alert, she began the long, but to her, essential process of putting her desecrated home back in order—a place where she would never feel safe again.
CHAPTER 19
HUNTER DECKER LOCKED the door marked Juror Conference Room: Private. Almost deferentially, he said, “Sit down, Raquel. Make yourself as comfortable as you can. These rooms were never made for ease and that sense of coziness, you know. I think the idea was to force jurors to work quickly and get their jobs done. If you make them feel as though they’re in their living rooms, they want to stay.”
“If you think this is bad,” Raquel answered, “try a case across the street in state court. The juror rooms there are medieval.”
Raquel was tired from the rigorous day in the courtroom, dismayed that Decker had fully reached his stride with a dozen witnesses, all of them financial forensics experts, who testified in rapid succession about many millions of undisclosed, unreported waves of cash and checks that had made their way into Angelina Baldesteri’s multiple campaign accounts and safe deposit boxes without being reported to anyone.
Most of all, Raquel couldn’t overcome the visceral dislike that continued to grow in her for the Senator. That day’s testimony, like much of the other testimony and documents in the case, made it increasingly clear that Baldesteri had lied to Raquel every step of the way. For weeks they had sat fewer than two feet from each other at the defense table. There was never a time when any one of the hundreds of often sleazy, often vicious, often charming men and women Raquel represented through the years made her feel this queasy and repelled.
Now Raquel and Decker were the only people in the locked room. They had been together with many others at working sessions before the trial but they had never been alone with each other.
Raquel’s mood was somber and irritable. Without veiling her annoyance at the day’s accumulation of events, she said, “You didn’t call me in here, did you, Hunter, to tell me how great your day was?”
“I’d never do that, Raquel. I’m not a baseball fan, but you win some innings and lose some. Today I won the inning. You’ve won other innings.”
“I’ll bet,” she said, suddenly almost with charm, “you’re a squash player. You never went to a baseball game in your life.”
“Is it that obvious? Yes, I’ve played squash since age eight.”
“I didn’t know what a game of squash was until I went to college at seventeen. And then I thought it was a rare vegetable you tossed around like a Frisbee.”
Were they flirting with each other? With a deliberate effort, Raquel, suddenly businesslike, said, “What do you want?”
“Not a deal. I want your client, as I’ve always told you, in jail and out of office. Nothing’s changed on that. It’s the only deal.”
“Good. Simplicity itself. No deal. She said that months ago, as I told you.” She waited. “So, now that we’ve cleared the air on that again, I need to get back to my office.”
“I had no intention of interfering with your time.”
“I’m tired, Hunter. Tell me what you really want to tell me.”
“It is, as they say, complicated.”
Raquel ever so slightly raised her face, expecting more information while saying nothing.
“We think your life is in danger.”
She continued to stare at him. Her face was impassive.
He said, “That man in the picture which is one of the exhibits, the man talking so engagingly with the Senator who has her arm over the shoulder of Robert Calvaro, is Juan Suarez, or Anibal Vaz, or whoever. The man you represented so successfully a few years ago. The Blade of the Hamptons, as the Daily News and the Post and every other paper and TV network in the world called him.”
Raquel didn’t respond.
Hunter continued, “Now he’s back. Some plastic surgery, different hair. He made the mistake not long ago of tossing espresso cups into wastebaskets on the street. We picked up the cups. The DNA match is perfect. He has a new name. Or perhaps it was his original name: Hugo Salazar.”
Raquel in many ways had the ethics of an old-fashioned lawyer: when she was given secrets and information by clients, she kept them. It was a client, Juan Suarez, who had told her that Oscar Caliente wanted her dead because, during the trial of The Blade of the Hamptons, she had revealed Caliente’s identity and his role of ruthlessly seizing all of the drug trafficking in all five boroughs
of New York City and had been then given the same task of dominating the cartel for all the drug-traffic in the rich and drug-hungry Hamptons. She also knew, from Juan Suarez, that Oscar Caliente had given the order to a sharpshooter to kill her at her seaside run-down house in Montauk; it was that bullet, meant for Raquel, that had killed Theresa Bui.
And Raquel knew that Oscar Caliente, a driven, single-minded lunatic who never wavered from orders he gave, hadn’t lifted the edict that she must die. She kept that a secret, too, because Juan Suarez, in the last conversation they had in the federal prison overlooking the Brooklyn waterfront on the day before he was deported, told her that. It was a fatwa, an order that would never be revoked. The sharpshooter in the dunes who, through sheer mistake, had killed Theresa, had never been found. He still was in the world. Or someone just like him or her was.
“How do you know that?” Raquel asked Hunter.
“Wiretaps.”
“Who is speaking on the tapes?”
“I can’t tell you that, you know that. We think we know who they are.”
“Let me listen to the tapes.”
“I wish we could. But we can’t.”
“Why don’t you arrest them? If you have wiretaps, you know who they are.”
“The taps by themselves don’t give us enough information to arrest them.” He stopped. He had the quiet sophistication of a New England prep school headmaster. “Now if you were a federal judge, a federal agent, or a federal lawyer, we could detain them on the basis of the inconclusive talk on the wiretaps. There is such a thing as the freedom of speech. These people are talking about taking you out, which could mean an invitation to dinner. But we’re not naïve. We do know who the people are. They’re talking about killing you. No, they haven’t used that word and there is nothing about specific plans, nothing about where, when, or how.”
“Then why are you telling me this? To knock me off my stride?”
“We can offer you a deal to save your life. They may be stupid, but they seem to have it in their sick little heads that Caliente thinks that if you are taken out, Goldstein will declare a mistrial, there won’t be a retrial, and Baldesteri can put this all behind her and that will open the path for her to become President. Caliente apparently has it in his mind that with her as President, some of the pressure on him will be alleviated.”
“That’s all magical thinking,” Raquel said.
“Maybe,” Decker answered. “But I think—we think—a deal for you makes sense.”
“A deal? For me? Why would I need a deal?”
“We know from several sources that Lydia Guzman is being bribed not to convict.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Raquel asked.
“The sources say you know it and are facilitating it. Meaning, of course, the bribery.”
“That’s a lie,” Raquel said, her clenched fist striking the plastic table. “You could even be making it up. Prosecutors, with impunity, can make up lies out of thin air.”
“I’d never do that.”
“Then your informants, whoever the idiots may be, are lying to you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“And bribery of a juror? Get real.”
“Do you want our help?”
“I don’t want it.”
He said, “As you wish.”
“Any other bullshit you want to tell me, Mr. Decker?”
Again, she waited. She was always a listener. Hunter said, “Hugo Salazar is still as seductive as ever. After all, he got you under his spell even when he was in jail. Now that he’s free, he has wined and dined and bedded the juror. He has also arranged to give her—Lydia Guzman—cash and all the cocaine she needs to feed her addiction.”
“What a surprise. Dogs keep company with dogs.”
“But there’s more, Raquel. Some of our investigators believe you are the conduit for the money.”
“You must be on some illegal substance yourself, Mr. Decker. Anyone would be out of his gourd even thinking I’m a bagman or would help a bagman. Do you believe for one second that I’d risk throwing away a thirty-year career on anything, especially as stupid as paying off a juror?”
“Do you want to hear the terms of the deal we have for you?”
“No.”
Hunter Decker ignored her answer. “You give us cooperation by telling us what Baldesteri has told you. You of all people know how cooperation works. If your cooperation is complete, truthful, and of use to us, we will let you plead guilty to one count of obstruction of justice, not bribery, a far more serious offense, and we’ll recommend a sentence of probation for you. Of course, you’ll be disbarred.”
“I wish I had a tape recording of this garbage,” she said, utterly exasperated and angry.
“You’re making a mistake, Ms. Rematti.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said. “Nor will it be the last.”
“And you made another mistake,” Hunter Decker said.
“Which of many?”
“You loved Juan Suarez.”
“You basically said that garbage just a second ago. It’s horseshit, Mr. Decker.”
“Hugo Salazar, The Blade of the Hamptons, was in prison for a long time during your Richardson trial. There’s no privacy in prison, Raquel. There are guards, surveillance equipment, rumors, talk. Prisoners love to talk.”
“Let me follow this. Juan Suarez was scapegoated as a killer of one of the richest men in the world precisely because he was an outsider, an illegal alien. I defended him. Free of charge, by the way. Once his conviction was tossed out, he was deported. Miracle of miracles, he may have found his way back to the United States. I never imagined I’d see him or anyone like him again until you put up a picture on a big screen at this trial. In that picture a Latin man with a ponytail is talking or appears to be talking to my client. I’m not sure who the man is who is talking to the Senator. I’m not sure, in other words, that it is the man I saved. And because of that picture of a man whom I don’t really recognize, you not only think I love him but I’m a bagman for an airhead cocaine addict like Lydia Guzman because you didn’t have brains enough to keep her off the jury.”
“My, look at you,” Decker said. “Look at how excessively upset you are.”
Raquel pushed her chair back and stood. “Can it be that you are as stupid as your dumbass investigators are?”
Hunter Decker, as a seventeen-year-old incoming prep school kid at Choate, had been taught that men never reacted to insults or taunts except by responding in a patient way, as if to help the other person to learn the virtues of self-control. “You shouldn’t be so provocative, Ms. Rematti.”
“Let me tell you what I mean, because there is a charming candyass element in your personality. For good and sufficient reason, at least in his fluid mind, some not-so-nice man wants Angelina to be President. Think hard about this. If something happens to me, Naomi will call a mistrial. It doesn’t mean Baldesteri is acquitted. If somebody shoots me, there will also be a retrial.”
Still standing, she said, “You think all the risk is on me. It’s on you. If there’s a mistrial for any reason, such as my having a heart attack or sleeping with the judge, you will have to handle the next trial. Unfortunately, for many reasons, you and you alone hold all the cards. But if, in fact, there are not-so-nice men out there, men who didn’t learn their manners at Choate or Groton, then they will figure out that without you there will never be a realistic chance of winning a retrial, or even of having one.”
“Are you threatening me? I am the United States Attorney, don’t forget that.”
Raquel said, “You’ve had a charmed life, Mr. Decker, by anyone’s standards. The men you say who want to take me out are the ultimate egalitarians. They kill people with charmed or derelict lives—they are equal-opportunity murderers.”
As he watched Raquel move to the closed door, Hunter Decker calmly said, “I think I failed to mention the pictures we have of you and Salazar and Lydia Guzman. All to
gether. At a party. Just a week ago.”
“Shove the pictures up your ass or arrest me.”
CHAPTER 20
HAYES SMITH WAS a man who never displayed a great deal of emotion, except recently for his loving attachment to Raquel Rematti. But as the helicopter crossed the blue Mediterranean—why had Homer centuries ago called it the “wine dark sea”?—and approached the ancient island of Lesbos, he was astounded. He had never had to develop the experienced, seasoned journalist’s skill of accurately estimating the numbers of people in a crowd, whether it was a demonstration, a football game, a presidential inauguration, or an immense gathering of men and women standing at a concert of the Grateful Dead.
From two thousand feet above ground, as the helicopter pivoted in dazzling sunlight and sky in search of one of the three landing zones on the sterile island, Hayes saw a scene he had only previously witnessed in broadcasts and pictures of refugee camps—thousands upon thousands of densely packed people occupying every inch of miles of land. It was almost biblical, he thought, like the ancient Jews gathered on the shore of the Nile, waiting for Moses to part the waters.
Yet there was nothing biblical about the world Hayes encountered when he stepped out of the air-conditioned helicopter, its rotors still swirling above him and driving down an intense, steady stream of air as hot as a furnace. As soon as he moved out of the conical range of the rotor’s downward rush of wind, the world changed. The first difference was the overwhelming stench emanating from thousands of people who had been gathered densely together for months. They lived among steadily accumulating, never-cleaned human debris—emptied cans, tampons, soiled diapers, abandoned and decaying clothes. And, above all, human waste—shit, urine, menstrual blood, vomit. The few portable latrines had long ago been filled to overflowing and were now useless; many of them were knocked over, oozing their contents.
It was obvious, too, that most of the thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and others slept on soiled blankets, sheets, and rugs. During the day, innumerable men, women, and children simply stood, squatted, lay down, moved as much as they could—essentially the inactivity of masses of people, stricken by sunlight and dust, with no end date in sight and nothing to do. Smoky fires burned in empty oil barrels.