by Paul Batista
“That’s interesting, Ms. Rematti, very interesting.”
“Except that there are no guarantees, particularly when your guarantee is from a junkie. Junkies forget their promises. And many of them die before they can keep their promises.”
“You know, I’ve heard you talk about bribing Guzman before. And the last thing I am, Ms. Rematti, is naïve. Whenever you talk about bribery, you make it clear you want to lay it at my feet.”
“Obviously there are people in the government who think she was being bribed, and now she’s dead.”
“Think about this: What if people were to say that it was you who arranged to bribe her? What if I went to Hunter Decker to tell him I just learned that you and your former client—Suarez or Vaz or Salazar or whatever his name was—and Robert Calvaro arranged to bribe her?”
“Nobody would believe you.”
“Really? You always seem to lose sight of who I am. I have power. You don’t. Imagine what it would do for your career if you had been able to get a former First Lady, a sitting Senator, and a presidential candidate acquitted. The great gods Clarence Darrow, Atticus Finch, and Johnnie Cochran would have to make room for you on the throne.”
“Let me take you back to the world of the living, Senator. You are a woman in immense trouble. You need to make a decision by nine tomorrow morning. Do you take your chances with eleven jurors? What was the Clint Eastwood movie where he said, Are you feeling lucky today, punk? Wasn’t it Dirty Harry?”
“Maybe when you’re disbarred you can become a movie critic,” Angelina said.
And Raquel responded, “We know your get-out-of-jail-free card—the card dealt to Lydia Guzman—is off the table.”
Angelina stared at Raquel. “First Casablanca, now Dirty Harry. I’ve talked to other lawyers. It’s amazing to me, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise given what I know about the world, that you’re in a backbiting profession. Let me tell you something, Ms. Rematti. Most of the lawyers have criticized your performance up and down. Some have said you were never any good, that luck and good public relations and political correctness all combined to give you an out-of-size reputation you never deserved.” She stopped, waiting for a reaction from Raquel, who showed none. “Do you know what? One or two of these lawyers—and they are people who don’t like you—think I am in a good place, that I now know what the Government’s case is, and that you did a solid, simple, succinct job when I testified about Gordon Hughes and how I had too much to do with the overall strategy of the campaign to be held responsible for the details of how it was financed. So, they say, go with the eleven.”
“Do what you want. The jury thinks you’re a liar. And I know you’re a liar. And don’t forget: if you go on with the trial, there’s more cross-examination.”
“I’m much smarter than Hunter Decker.”
“Really? That somehow escaped my attention when he made it clear to the world, if not to you, that you were lying about Calvaro’s nocturnal visits.”
“We live in the modern world, Ms. Rematti. You just said it yourself. So did Guzman. So do the jurors: a woman is entitled to have male visitors and to deny it.”
“And to lie about it? The judge, like any judge, will instruct the jurors that if they find any witness lied about one thing they’re entitled to believe the witness lied about other things or everything.”
“No matter what I decide to do, you are, and I want you to understand this, a woman with no future.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Of course not. You’re out of business. Take that any way you like. No one has ever pissed me off as much as you have.”
“What a privilege. Now stand up and get the fuck out of this room. I’ll see you at nine tomorrow morning.”
CHAPTER 38
A GENTLE, REFRESHING rain was falling, almost a mist from the nearby Hudson River, when Raquel left Ken’s Broome Street Bar fifteen minutes after Angelina opened the door to the private room and waited for the Secret Service agents to surround her and leave the building. Although it was only five in the afternoon as Raquel walked on the street of rounded, glistening cobblestones, it was inordinately dark. Broome Street was practically empty. There were just a few other walkers, almost all of them in their twenties.
She welcomed the rain. The coolness settled her. Although she had taken an Uber car from her apartment building on Riverside Drive, she decided to walk the ancient wet streets to the station for the number 1 subway train at Franklin Street just to the south of Canal Street. Even though she rarely used them now, she had always found subway rides soothing, even when they were still graffiti-scratched and legendarily dangerous in the mid-1980s at the time she had first arrived in the city and had to use the intricate, rigid grid of subways because she couldn’t afford taxis. The comfort she found in subways must have stemmed, she believed, from the presence of other people despite their absolute, self-protective silence and the rhythm of the passage from station to station.
Just as she reached the subway entrance, she felt her cell phone vibrate. She stopped under the frail awning at the front of a dreary Korean grocery store on ancient Franklin Street. Rainwater poured through slits in the awning, but she found enough protection so that her cell phone wouldn’t get soaked when she retrieved it from her bag.
What had caused the vibration was a text message from Willis Jordan. Can I c u at ur apartment for a few minutes tonight? WJ.
Slowly, using only her right thumb, she typed: Sure. 7:30 – 728 Riverside Drive between 83 and 84. RR
* * *
In the two hours she spent after reaching her apartment before Willis arrived, she kept active to fend off what she recognized as her anxiety. She peeled off her rain-drenched clothes and stuffed them into the nylon bag that she would leave in her building’s lobby the next morning for the dry cleaner’s weekly pickup. Naked, she spent half an hour making sure her always orderly apartment was completely neat. She showered, washing her hair. She emptied the clean dishes, glasses, and utensils from the dishwasher and carefully stacked them in the kitchen cabinets. She opened a bottle of white wine when she saw that, even after all of her activity, she had another half hour to wait before Willis arrived. Never more than a casual drinker, she surprised herself by pouring the expensive wine into a water glass and quickly drinking half the glass. She felt the warmth, the pleasant numbness, suffuse her body.
Like all the people Raquel knew in the television business, Willis was always on time. He lived in a world of deadlines. When she opened the door for him at precisely 7:30, Willis—a large and powerful black man—spread his arms and embraced her, chastely, like a brother. She’d last seen him six weeks before Hayes was killed. As she disengaged from his hug, she closed the door. She turned to look at him fully. His suits were always perfectly tailored, even for his huge size. She had always seen him in a suit in an industry where his mentors were ghosts and role models such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Brokaw who always wore suits, as their producers and news writers did. Over the last twenty years, the new style at the level below broadcaster and anchors began to transform to the geek style. Those younger people were talented, fun, willing to devote long hours to news-gathering through computers and technology, but they never emulated Willis’ inherited old-fashioned style. Even though he was only in his forties, Willis knew he was a relic. He liked that. Raquel had always felt respect for, and trust in, Willis Jordan. She said, “I can’t believe you don’t have an umbrella. You’re soaking wet.”
There were beads of dissolving wetness on the blue British suit that covered his shoulders and chest.
He smiled. “What’s a little rain to a Georgia peanut farmer?” he asked.
There it was: that mellifluous, formal, articulate voice. Had it been just slightly deeper, he, too, could have been a broadcaster. But he never wanted that. He enjoyed the power of control and command, as he learned in his two years at Harvard Business School. He never desired to read the news in the isolation
of a television studio. He savored making decisions as to the news to be broadcast or not, not to broadcast it himself.
“I should have seen you face-to-face before this, Raquel. It was remiss of me.” There it was again, the subtle surprises in the words Willis used. Raquel had never in a private conversation heard the word remiss.
“You called, Willis, after it happened. That was really all you could do. We’re both busy.”
“I did ask to see you right away today, Raquel, not just out of a lingering sense I’d failed to do the honorable thing. I have another reason.”
She surveyed him. She had nothing to fear from him. How many friends did she have in the world? None, she thought, except him. “It’s fine, Willis. I’ve been overwhelmed with the trial.”
“You didn’t pick an easy line of work.”
“I think,” she said, “we should sit in the kitchen. Do you want coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“How about some wine?”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink.” He hesitated. “I wish,” he said, “that we had had a memorial service for him.”
“The brothers were adamant, as I told you. The irony is that Hayes hadn’t been in touch with them for years, possibly ten. But they were in control. Who knows? They may never have looked at Google. They knew nothing about me, I assume.”
“Did it hurt? Not having a memorial?”
“No. It was enough that we loved each other.” She looked into Willis’ eyes and decided to say nothing about Angelina’s profoundly wounding disorienting words about Hayes: the truth was shattering. “But you want to talk to me, Willis, about something else. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen. Are you sure you don’t want coffee?”
“No, Raquel, we just need to talk.”
Jordan filled one of the kitchen chairs with his football player’s bulk. Abruptly he said, “Two men were killed last night on one of those cutoff areas on the West Side Highway, not far from here. They had knife wounds, expertly delivered. They were both big men, with years of military training. They never had a chance to resist. Their guns were still in their shoulder holsters. The killer had the speed of a jaguar.”
“Why are you telling me this, Willis?”
“NBC News, no matter what some people may think of it, is still a powerful news-gathering organization. One of our local reporters was immediately assigned to the story. We assumed the two dead men were plainclothes police officers, and the cold-blooded assassination of police is always big news these days. Every dead police officer is a hero.”
“And weren’t they police officers?”
“No, or I wouldn’t be here except for a simple family-style visit.”
“What is it, Willis?”
“It took only a few hours to put it together, but the two dead men were members of the guard team NBC sent with Hayes to Lesbos.”
Raquel stood up from the kitchen table and began searching through her bag on the kitchen counter. She took out her cell phone and scrolled through the phone’s icons as she returned to the table. She tapped the icon for photographs. It took only seconds to find the three photos she had taken of the men who stopped her on Madison Avenue.
Willis sat patiently. He was a skillful listener.
“I want to ask you something,” she said. “Are these the two men?”
She pushed her cell phone in front of Willis. He made no effort to conceal his surprise. Using his own phone, he placed a call. “Victor,” he said, “send me as soon as you can—right now, in fact—pictures of the two dead men.”
Within ten seconds, his cell phone vibrated. He opened the incoming email and its attachments. As though moving chess pieces, he slid the two phones, side by side, to Raquel.
“These two men,” Raquel said, “are the same two men who stopped me a few days ago on Madison Avenue. They told me they were FBI agents.”
“I came here,” he said, “to bring you information I thought you should know. And now you are giving me extraordinary information our reporters need to know.”
“I even have the business cards they gave me.”
“You do?”
“Didn’t you know, Willis, that FBI agents love to hand out their business cards?”
“I didn’t.”
“I’ll give you the cards in a second. But the names on the cards were Curnin and Giordano. Do your people know the names of these two dead men?”
“Yes, we think so. Curnin and Giordano. They had business cards.”
“Have you asked the NYPD or the Medical Examiner who they really are?”
“I’m not following. They’re Curnin and Giordano.”
“No, they’re not.”
Confused, Willis stared at her. “I’m not sure what you are telling me.”
“They aren’t,” Raquel said, “Curnin and Giordano.”
Willis repeated, “I’m not sure what you are telling me.”
He moved the two cell phones to his side of the table again. He stared at the pictures. Even though the photos on his cell phone were less distinct and lacked the clarity of the pictures on Raquel’s phone—the pictures on Willis’ phone were, after all, pictures of two recently dead men—there was no doubt in his mind they were the same people. “It’s odd,” Willis quietly said. “The FBI took possession of the bodies immediately, not the NYPD or the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. We’re trying to find out why.”
“What about the car they were driving?”
“Our reporters do know sources who have told us it’s a United States Government–owned vehicle and not an unmarked New York City police car.”
Raquel again sipped her wine. “I have to tell you, Willis, something I almost never say out loud to anyone.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“I’m afraid.”
Willis’ eyes were absolutely black. They were reassuring. “We can help,” he said. “You lost a man you loved. We lost a man we cherished. We have resources at NBC that you don’t have. And you have a resource we don’t have.” He stopped for two seconds. “Courage.”
“Really, Willis? I wonder. It’s the desperation of isolation. When I had breast cancer a few years ago, and a year of treatment, the only people I saw or spoke with were my doctors and nurses and therapists. No one else ever called or visited. I’d had a twenty-year career by then of representing everyone from Oliver North to Michael Jackson. They worshipped me, or my skills. Their families and friends adored me. I had hundreds of students who flocked to my courses. I had lovers. But none of my friends called me. You and Hayes didn’t know me. I’m grateful for your friendship now and wish I had it then.”
Motionless, staring steadily at her, Willis said, “Cancer is a frightening disease, Raquel. It scares others away. They fear, irrationally, about their own fate.”
“It’s sweet of you to say that, Willis. But, in that awful, lonely year I realized I had never done anything to develop genuine friends. I’d been surrounded by people for years. Clients, their families, my students, judges, other lawyers, law school professors, television producers and anchors. I had thought of myself as open and accessible. And then for a year, in my late forties, I saw myself as dying, alone.”
“Did you ever,” he asked, “think of calling anyone?”
“I did think of that. But I didn’t have that kind of special courage: the courage to ask for help.”
Willis said, “This is all surprising to me. When Hayes introduced us to you, you seemed the most accessible person we had met. He wanted to marry you.”
She thought again about Angelina’s spear-sharpened, poisoned words about Hayes. Only a woman who had made love to him would know about Hayes Smith’s intriguing birthmark, unless somebody else had mentioned it to Angelina in the often-lurid world of gossip of famous women who sometimes collected lovers in the same way professional basketball players gathered women. “Willis, Hayes was never going to marry me.”
“Well, there are different states of togetherness other th
an marriage.”
“Sweet man you are, Willis. But that wasn’t going to happen either. I’m a realist. And one reality I do know is that I loved him. He did not love me.”
He folded his big hands on the kitchen table and said nothing. An acute observer, Raquel saw that his huge knuckles were almost white, like the calluses on a boxer’s hands.
“I’ll say it again even though you don’t like it. We can offer you protection. I have room in my budget for that. You’re afraid. A woman of courage is afraid.”
“No, Willis, my father taught me how to protect myself. I grew up in a tough factory town. He made me a street fighter.”
“The swordsman who took out these two guys—the two guys who tracked you on Madison Avenue of all places—is not a street brawler. He is an expert in the art of killing.”
“I want to be open with you, Willis. The man who did the stabbing—and I just feel this by instinct—was a man whose name was mentioned several times at the Senator’s trial. Hugo Salazar, that associate of the elusive Robert Calvaro.”
Willis exhaled. “Why do you think that?”
“Come on, Willis. You’ve followed my career. Hugo Salazar is the first man I represented when I came back from the dead. I knew him as Juan Suarez. The Blade of the Hamptons.”
“How can that be? He was deported on immigration violations after he was acquitted.”
“Don’t you think a man who knows how to kill so skillfully could slip through any immigration barriers, even Trump’s proposed Mexican wall, especially when men like Suarez, or Salazar, or Harry Houdini work for men with enormous dark power?”
“Like Robert Calvaro?”
“No, Willis. Oscar Caliente. Robert Calvaro is Oscar Caliente. I never met Caliente, but I saw lots of surveillance tapes of him when I did the murder trial in the Hamptons.” She looked more intently at him. “And I’m going to break one of the cardinal rules of my business. My client in that case—The Blade of the Hamptons—told me that Caliente is a prince of the Sinaloa cartel. There, I’ve just broken commandment one. I’ve told a reporter—you—what a client told me.”