The Warriors

by Paul Batista

  CHAPTER 31

  RAQUEL HAD A tremendous sense of relief forged by years of experience. Even though it was Angelina Baldesteri’s decision to testify—it was her right and all a lawyer could do on the issue was recommend, warn, or suggest—it was Raquel who did have the right to select the approach to the questioning and do the best that was possible to make the Senator likable and convincing. Raquel also knew she wanted the jurors to have an aerial view of Senator Angelina Baldesteri. It would be a mistake to have Angelina “hack around in the weeds” by looking at the Federal Election Campaign reports line by line, category by category. It would also have been a mistake to have Angelina even glance at the hundreds of bank statements of her campaign that Decker’s assistant lawyers had introduced as evidence through government accountants who tried to convey to the jurors that the bank statements contained gaps and inconsistencies or were deliberately obscure in order to veil the real source of the money and how and where it was spent. The jurors, as Raquel had observed, were profoundly bored by those documents and that testimony.

  Less is more was an Ernest Hemingway adage she shared with her Columbia students. As Senator Baldesteri remained in the witness seat after Raquel announced, “No further questions,” she momentarily felt relief for another reason. It was three thirty on a Friday afternoon. For decades Naomi Goldstein had suspended her trials at three thirty on Fridays. She was an observant Jew who lived from her birth in the largely Jewish neighborhood in the peaceful old-world area of Manhattan’s West End Avenue from West 79th Street to 96th Street. For every Friday of her seventy-five years she had always observed the Friday Sabbath that made it essential that she not travel by car, subway, or any other means after the setting of the Lord’s sun.

  So Raquel was surprised when she heard Naomi Goldstein say, “Mr. Decker, I assume you have questions. You may start now.”

  Hunter Decker had many skills, even though like all experienced lawyers, he was capable of mistakes. One thing he sensed for certain was that Senator Baldesteri—carefully controlled by Raquel Rematti—had created a swift and favorable impression on the jurors. Another truism among trial lawyers is that a witness who left a good impression at the end of a trial week gained the benefit of having the jurors reflect during the weekend that the witness was nice.

  But the flip side was also true. A closing Friday witness who conveyed annoyance, menace, hostility, unjustified pride, arrogance, or falsehood left those smoldering traces for the weekend, too, and they festered to become perceived realities.

  Hunter Decker had just been handed a gift by Naomi Goldstein—at least thirty minutes to begin the work of degrading the image of Senator Angelina Baldesteri before the weekend break.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Baldesteri.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “We’ve never spoken before, have we?”

  “I introduced myself to you, Mr. Decker, at the start of the trial. You said hello but refused to shake my hand. That’s the extent of the communication we had.”

  Decker ignored that: he was a lawyer, not a politician. He had never won a single vote; Angelina Baldesteri had won millions of votes. She had that endearing Southern accent; she had been the First Lady of the United States. Her assassinated husband’s popularity was almost astronomical at the time he was killed.

  But Decker knew other things about this highly attractive woman. Hundreds of people—FBI agents, Assistant U.S. Attorneys, informants—had worked for him for months to dig for her vulnerabilities. No one was perfect. Certainly, as he knew, Angelina Baldesteri wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot.

  “Ms. Baldesteri, you just answered Ms. Rematti’s questions about Robert Calvaro, you remember that, don’t you?”

  “Certainly, I remember that, Mr. Decker. It just happened.”

  “And you told the jury you couldn’t remember meeting with Mr. Calvaro after that picture which has been marked Government Exhibit 673?”

  “I may have talked to Mr. Calvaro by cell phone a few times after. I can’t rule that out.”

  “You’re lying,” Decker said.

  Angelina, unfazed, immediately answered, “Is that a question? If it is a question, you are even more of a charlatan than I thought.”

  Hunter was above insult or challenge. He asked, “You’re staying while this trial is going on at the Waldorf Astoria, correct?”

  Angelina Baldesteri’s coolness was disarming. In her past, that coolness and calm had frightened many people. But it had impressed many thousands. It had also confused many. She said, calmly leaning forward to the slender microphone and staring steadily at Decker, “The Waldorf was where President Young and I stayed when we were in New York. And now it is the hotel that is about eight blocks away from my lawyer’s office. I don’t own or rent an apartment in New York City. The Waldorf is familiar to me and convenient for me and Ms. Rematti. So, yes, I’ve been staying there.”

  “How long has this trial been underway, Ms. Baldesteri?”

  “Five and a half weeks. Almost forty days, Mr. Decker.”

  “And how many of the nights during this trial has Mr. Calvaro spent with you at your suite in the Waldorf?”

  “None, Mr. Decker. None. Mr. Calvaro put a distance between himself and me when you and the President and the Attorney General you work for decided to indict me for no reason other than political vengeance. You wanted to isolate and dehumanize me and alienate me from people.”

  “Why don’t you turn your attention,” Decker smoothly said, “to the computer screens.”

  Identical images illuminated the large and small computer screens throughout the courtroom. The first was a precisely delineated silent surveillance recording of a man in an oversize baseball cap and wearing a Waldorf Astoria janitor’s uniform as he used a card key to open the door of Room 801. His left profile was partially visible. The surveillance footage bore distinct and legible words and numbers revealing that it was recorded at 7:01 p.m. on the first day of the trial.

  Raquel, knowing it would be futile to do so because Naomi Goldstein would rebuff her effort at an objection in the jury’s presence, sat silently as the fifteen-second scene unfolded.

  “Ms. Baldesteri, isn’t it true,” Decker asked, “that on the first several nights of the trial you stayed in Room 801 of the Waldorf?”

  “I did.”

  “Do you see the man depicted on the video?”

  “I do.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He looks like a hotel employee, a janitor.”

  “Isn’t it true that the man in the Waldorf uniform and baseball cap is Robert Calvaro?”

  “Not as far as I can see.”

  “Do you see three Secret Service agents near the door to Room 801?”

  “I see them, I know them.”

  “Is it part of the training of Secret Service agents to simply let janitors enter your room in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t train Secret Service agents. As I recall it, the air-conditioning was malfunctioning and I had asked one of the agents to call for a handyman.”

  “Is Robert Calvaro a handyman?”

  “I don’t answer stupid questions. That man in the work uniform fixed the air-conditioning.”

  “And that took him all night?”

  “Please, sir, don’t play silly games with me.”

  “Next image,” Decker instructed seamlessly. The screens then were illuminated with the image of the same man in the Waldorf uniform. The words on the footage stated in white letters that the film was recorded the next morning at 6:37. Emerging from Room 801, the man in the recording for five seconds was not wearing the baseball cap. His full face as he glanced casually down the eighth-floor hallway was on the screen. He then pulled the brown Waldorf baseball cap from his rear pocket and tugged it tightly over his head, lowering the front brim so that its outer edge was well below his eyes. There were three different Secret Service agents near the door to Room 801. The agents paid no attention to him.

&
nbsp; “Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Baldesteri, that the man we just saw on the surveillance tapes is Robert Calvaro?”

  As she gazed at her client, Raquel remained seated, her expression as reassuring as she always tried to maintain it while watching one of her clients being flayed on the witness stand. There was no point in objecting. Goldstein undoubtedly would have overruled it.

  Decker, holding a computer wand, had the screens throughout the courtroom display the image of Robert Calvaro in Government Exhibit 673 alongside the face of the man on the surveillance footage.

  “Do you see those two photographs side by side, Ms. Baldesteri?”

  Transfixed, every juror was staring at the computer screen image. Angelina Baldesteri said, “I see them.”

  There was a long pause. In absolute silence, everyone in the courtroom gazed at the parallel images.

  Finally, Hunter Decker asked, “Where is Mr. Calvaro now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Decker looked at the judge. “Your Honor, the Government asks to resume the cross-examination on Monday morning.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  CHAPTER 32

  LYDIA GUZMAN COULDN’T remember a day in her twenty-five years when she had enjoyed herself so much, and she was a young woman who was determined to live out the message of the Cyndi Lauper song, first popular long before Lydia was born,

  Girls, girls just wanna have fun.

  Early on that Saturday morning, even before dawn, Hugo Salazar arrived in a Mercedes limousine in front of her apartment building on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The driver—one of the blond men with the zigzag symbol engraved into his short hair who had walked with Raquel Rematti a few days earlier as she crossed 72nd Street at Madison Avenue before they were joined by another well-dressed man with the identical zigzag marking—left the Mercedes to ring the buzzer to Lydia’s apartment. She was in the back seat of the luxurious car within three minutes.

  Just after dawn they were on the spotless yacht in the marina on the bay near LaGuardia Airport. The yacht, all gleaming white with burnished fittings and on the yacht’s prow an American flag snapping brightly in the clean and refreshing morning breeze, was named the Golden Seahorse. Acres of tall salt grass swayed in the freshening dawn breeze on the marina’s shores. A bright sliver of moon still gleamed in the deep blue expanse of the sky. An early-arriving jet made its graceful, almost noiseless descent into LaGuardia.

  Lydia had never been on a private yacht. Hugo gracefully held her hand as he guided her through the gently rocking Golden Seahorse. She saw a linen-draped table with breakfast food covered by silver platters at the top of the galley that led to the yacht’s interior. There was a blond man with shorn hair, smiling and dressed in a white tuxedo, who waited for Hugo and Lydia. He was the other man who a few days earlier had walked alongside Raquel Rematti on Madison Avenue. Both of these men were completely unknown to Lydia, who was impressed by the fact that two blond men worked as a driver and waiter for Hugh Salazar. She paid no attention to the zigzag images engraved in their close-cropped hair. In her experience almost all men under the age of forty had distinctive tattoos, and for her the zigzags were nothing more than a unique form of tattoo, a body ornament.

  As she and Hugo ate, the Golden Seahorse made its steady way from the marina. Its massive engine was virtually soundless. Within minutes the skyline of Manhattan in the early morning rose over the horizon like the Emerald City, an otherworldly spectacle. The heights of the legendary buildings glinted in multiple bright colors. The top of the Chrysler Building, which had always looked to Lydia like melting ice cream on a cone, was blue, green, and silver in the dawn light, and the pinnacle of the Empire State Building was a startling blue against the blue sky. Farther downtown, barely visible beyond the skyscrapers, was the upward-pointing spear of the new World Trade Center building.

  By early afternoon the yacht passed under the two-mile span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. Gloriously and brazenly naked, Lydia lay on the Golden Seahorse’s white deck. Hugo, a man with the body of an Olympic decathlon champion, lay beside her, wearing only a taut black bathing suit. He held her hand, almost chastely. The Statue of Liberty, Governor’s Island, Ellis Island, and the Battery all passed by, as if in slow motion. The huge yacht rolled gently on the calm waters of New York Harbor and the Hudson River.

  It was two in the afternoon when Lydia happily said, “Hey, Hugo, let’s do a few lines of coke.” Still naked, Lydia, in all her physical glory, walked down the galley, unconcerned about the two blond men who discreetly watched her. Eager and swift-footed, Hugo followed her. The cocaine, in a silver chalice, had pride of place on the coffee table. She inhaled through a silver spoon. She settled deeply into a suede sofa. Her smile deepened, she held her nostrils closed, and her eyes luxuriantly widened as if she were suddenly viewing a world of verdant upland pastures. She patted the sofa. “Sit down, man, next to me. Come on.”

  Lydia used the tiny silver spoon to renew the cocaine’s profound loosening of her muscles, nerves, brain, vagina. By four, as the boat was returning to the marina, Hugo and Lydia were watching a Jason Bourne movie with Matt Damon on the flat-screen television.

  Still naked, she said, “Baby, forget all this boom-boom, shoot-it-up shit. You know, I never saw that movie with that Linda Lovelace broad. Deep Mouth? Deep Throat? Deep Shit?” She was laughing; her laugh was honest, infectious. Hugo played ten minutes of the grainy, low-tech, too brightly colored Deep Throat. For Lydia, the film had a silly plot, which took too long to unfold before Linda Lovelace unfastened the anonymous man’s pants. Lydia said in Spanish, “That lady doesn’t know how to do it. I do.”

  And she took Hugo Salazar’s heavy penis from the slender bathing suit he wore. Within fifteen seconds, her lips, tongue, and mouth made him fully erect. The rest was magic.

  CHAPTER 33

  THEY HAD DINNER in his penthouse apartment: pinto beans, green salad, filet mignon. Lydia was not a heavy drinker, but she joined Hugo when he sipped Pinch Scotch, without ice, from a crystal Cartier glass.

  More often than he would have expected, but not enough to concern him, Lydia went to the marble bathroom near the dining room. Each time, as Hugo knew, she was inhaling a line or two of cocaine. She was, as she had been all day, happy, energized. Hugo had actually come, over time, to enjoy her: she was sexy, playful, a little haughty, but also attentive to him, wanting to be sure he was comfortable and well satisfied.

  At nine, after Lydia had volunteered to clear the dining room table and put the dirty dishes and glasses in the gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen, Hugo sat on the sofa in the living room. He didn’t turn on the television set or the music system. It was quiet. The penthouse was thirty floors above Manhattan’s busy Saturday night traffic. As he waited for her, he stared out the immaculate windows that encircled the living room. Millions of lights gleamed and glittered everywhere throughout the great city. Here I am, he thought, as if unimaginable wonders had happened in his life. He had been raised in a village in Mexico that had no electricity. His family’s cinderblock house, painted all pink, had no internal toilet. There was running water in the faucets, but it was never heated. Chickens lived in the shallow basement; their pungent odor permeated the small house. The only ornaments were a crucifix and colorized photographs of Jesus and John F. Kennedy.

  “Lydia?” It had been thirty minutes since he had last seen her when she carried the dishes to the kitchen. He walked there to tell her that one of the maids would arrive at ten the next morning to finish the cleaning.

  Lydia wasn’t in the kitchen. “Lydia,” he said again. Just casually curious, he went to the bedroom. She was not there either. He noticed that the door to the bathroom was closed.

  Despite the fact that he was a highly skilled killer, there was a strange, gentlemanly delicacy to Hugo Salazar. When he first crossed the border into the United States, he slept on a deflated air mattress in a two-room apartment in East Harlem that he s
hared with seven other men, most of whom worked at the car wash on First Avenue and 108th Street. Hugo, then using the name Juan Suarez, worked on the graveyard shift as a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant on Second Avenue and 89th Street. He spent his days watching an old television that wasn’t linked to a cable but did have an out-of-date DVR machine and, incongruously, a leftover stack of old Cary Grant movies. Watching the movies again and again taught him some oddly aristocratic English and also a repertoire of the mannerisms of the fluid-gestured gentleman Grant always enacted.

  Now, in this penthouse apartment, he hesitated, as he imagined Cary Grant would if he were about to knock on the door to a room in which Eva Marie Saint might be combing her radiant hair.

  Hugo finally knocked, discreetly, with the joint of his bent right index finger, the finger that was the most useful of the multiple ways he wielded knives and machetes. “Lydia,” he gently said. “You okay, amor?”

  No answer.

  Hugo turned the knob. The door was unlocked, and he opened it.

  Lydia Guzman was sprawled facedown on the marble floor. She was fully dressed.

  Hugo knelt beside her. He stroked her neck and shoulders. In Spanish he said, “Wake up, sweetheart.”

  There was no movement, there was no pulse.

  Gently Hugo turned her gorgeous body over. He looked at her face.

  Hugo had killed so many people, and had seen so many dead men and women, that he instantly recognized by a glance at her utterly relaxed and faintly blue face that Lydia Guzman was dead.

  The drugs had overwhelmed her.

  * * *

  Hugo calmly walked through the apartment. He took out the expensive leather garment bag he used whenever he knew he would bring Lydia to the apartment, where he did not in fact live. He put in his garment bag the few personal items, such as a change of clothes, cologne, and shaving equipment that he carried back and forth to the apartment when Oscar Caliente told him to use it.