Ian Rose had wanted to make it to Pro Bono’s on time, so as not to waste any part of his quota of minutes, and at 12:20 p.m. he was seated on a fine Chippendale chair upholstered in bottle-green velour in the middle of a waiting room of the office that took up a whole floor of a flawlessly remodeled Brooklyn Heights doorman building. The office had been furnished with heavy mahogany furniture, Persian rugs on the parquet floor, a vase of fresh roses at the entrance, and a ruling equestrian motif, evident in ashtrays, curtains, pillows, and various other objects. It was one of those places made up to appear British and that seemed to smell of wood and leather, but in reality didn’t smell of anything. More aptly, it was an old-school den of scheming lawyers through and through, with over sixty years of experience litigating criminal cases in New York and other cities around the world, very high profile, “assertive and aggressive,” known for its ethical and professional conduct, with a confirmed reputation for knowing the law backward and forward, fully understanding the penal system, and promising little but delivering much. The firm was known by three names, the first of which was Pro Bono, the principal and oldest partner. Although he had retired, his younger partners were still making use of his prestigious name and had allowed him to continue to use his old office, the most spacious one and the only one with a full view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ming had told Rose that Pro Bono had an apartment in the same building on the lower floor, where he stayed when it got too late to drive back to his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife. It’s really something, Rose thought, that there are people like that.
While he waited, Rose began to read one of the copies of The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita. Damn, my boy was talented, he thought, and once more big tears welled up in his eyes that he quickly dried with the sleeve of his coat.
“I’ve become an old crybaby, Cleve,” he said aloud, but he was alone in the waiting room and no one heard him.
He waited for twenty minutes, twice as long as he had been promised for the meeting, and he imagined that this lawyer must be a phony, who would’ve thought? As if Rose didn’t know that he was retired with nothing to do but cross his arms and sit on his ass in the office.
“I’m Ian Rose,” he introduced himself when he finally met the man.
“I know, Mr. Rose,” Pro Bono replied, impressing on his words a certain tone that Rose didn’t quite get. “You’ve come to see me about María Paz, the Colombian girl. Look, my friend, don’t waste your time with this. She’s fine. As fine as can be, if you get my drift; and in any case there’s not much you can do for her.”
“I just want to know if it’s true that she killed her husband,” Rose asked.
“I’m sorry,” Pro Bono said, but Rose sensed that he wasn’t. “But I can’t divulge that information.”
Apparently, the charm of that lawyer who had been so kind to María Paz would not be on display for Rose. Ming had warned him that it was very likely that the lawyer would not be willing to break attorney-client confidentiality for a stranger. That was understandable, but there was an aggressive streak about him that Rose couldn’t quite figure out.
“If that’s all, Mr. Rose, let me show you out,” Pro Bono said, gesturing toward the door.
“You promised me ten minutes, sir, and not even two have passed.”
“You’re right. We can just remain in silence for the other eight minutes. Or talk about the weather. You choose.”
It seemed that this would be it. For Rose, a failure, a waste of time, in some ways an insult. The silence was tense and the air heavy. Pro Bono stood by the window, and facing the light he checked the Cartier Panthere on his wrist for the minutes left that would put an end to this impasse. Rose commanded himself to come up with something, but his mind remained blank. He had thought he’d get some solace from the lawyer, or at least some direction for his investigation, but instead he had been treated like a nuisance. Who was this Pro Bono after all, and what role did he play in the story? He may well have been a champion for the hungry of the world, but something was rotten in Denmark. Rose could not understand at all why he was being kicked out. María Paz said such flattering things about him and showed him so much respect and gratitude that Rose began to suspect that something had happened between them, something outside of the attorney-client relationship. Something in her tone alluded to the type of intimacy that those who have shared a bed cannot hide. Is that what it was then? A tussle in the sheets? Maybe that’s what it came to. But on seeing the hunchback’s figure silhouetted by the window and then taking into account that the difference in age between this guy and his client must be enormous, Rose wondered if the secret they shared wasn’t about a sexual tryst at all, but was a secret nonetheless. He decided that Pro Bono looked honorable enough not to be sneaking quickies behind the guards’ backs. But there was something between those two, perhaps some intrigue more subtle than sex, although he knew anything was possible. It was likely that María had been won over by the attorney’s masculine vibes, with his fine wardrobe, and the keys to the Ferrari or Aston Martin that he had parked outside, but more than anything by the dignified solemnity that the protuberance on his back lent him.
As the clock wound down, Rose was able to gather himself enough to play one last card. If this guy has secrets, he thought, he’s not going to want them revealed. So he mentioned that he had María Paz’s manuscript of confessions about her life.
“You are in it,” Rose asserted, thinking it would be taken either as flattery or as a threat.
“What?”
“Her manuscript. Very long and detailed. And you’re mentioned in it. A few times. I have it here.”
“May I see it?”
“Only if you tell me what she was accused of.”
Pro Bono sighed, took a couple of sips of coffee, of which he had not offered Rose any, and made a gesture like a rabbit, wrinkling his nose and showing his teeth before responding.
“Alright, Mr. Rose. You win. What you’ll hear is off the record,” he warned, after he had the manuscript in hand and had browsed through it quickly. “I’m going to tell you what happened only once. Don’t ask me to elaborate upon or repeat anything. If you are not familiar with the legal terms that I use, don’t bother asking me about them because I won’t explain them. Understand as best you can and commit it to memory, because I will not allow you to record this or take notes. Is this understood?”
Bingo! Rose congratulated himself. Pro Bono had taken the bait.
Rose was indeed unfamiliar with many of the legal terms, so much of the lawyer’s yarn went over his head, but he nevertheless felt that he got a clear sense of the big picture. María Paz, an illegal, undocumented Colombian immigrant, marries Greg, a white American ex-cop, thereby acquires US permanent residency and employment rights. Behind her back, the guy is involved in dealing arms, complicit with other officers and ex-officers. In reality, this Greg is just a link in what little by little becomes clear is a huge net of arms trafficking within the police department. On the night of his birthday, Greg walks out of his house and is shot and stabbed to death. The knife, one of the murder weapons apparently, is found in the couple’s apartment and the Colombian wife is arrested, questioned, and beaten by FBI agents, who ignore due process and human rights guidelines and keep her locked up for a few days, without reading her her rights, contacting the Colombian consulate, or providing her with an interpreter. And they don’t allow her to contact a lawyer or her family. They literally disappear her as they question and torture her. And then they officially charge her with the murder of her husband. At first, they assume that the motive was racially motivated, and afterward they claim it was a crime of passion. Pro Bono calls four of the neighbors to take the stand and testify to having seen the murderers—three tall men, all of them African-American—commit the crime. He thus invalidates the prosecution’s version, according to which the ex-cop was killed by the short Latino woma
n. But there is the issue of the knife found in the apartment, and this becomes the showpiece and central evidence for the prosecution. But it is a flimsy piece of evidence. On the one hand, there are no fingerprints on it, or even blood, as if it had been meticulously cleaned, and the card accompanying it says, “To Greg from your brother Joe.” It doesn’t incriminate María Paz directly. On the other hand, it’s not the murder weapon. The stabs are not deep and they were inflicted after the bullets had killed the victim instantaneously. So the knife goes from being the main piece of evidence in the entire investigation to being relegated to the background.
“It happens quite often,” Pro Bono told Rose, “that when some proof is offered, everyone gets all excited, but it’s soon disallowed and forgotten because it leads nowhere.”
Thanks to the testimony of the neighbors, the Colombian woman is declared innocent of first-degree murder. Although the authorities succeed in preventing the revelation of internal corruption and arms trafficking within the police department for a while, it is eventually revealed, and Pro Bono cannot prevent María Paz from being found guilty of complicity, although there is not a whole lot of evidence for it, except for answering the phone in the apartment and that sort of thing. They also charge her for past crimes such as forging work permits. Once the trial is over, she returns to jail. Pro Bono then asks the judge to redo the entire proceedings to honor the fundamental rights of the defendant for a competent and fair defense. In other words, Pro Bono asks the judge to declare a mistrial and begin the whole thing again from square one. The judge agrees; he has no choice given that it is difficult to imagine more crooked methods than the ones used on this woman. So the whole thing is a do-over. There’s hope again for María Paz. But until the new trial, she must remain in prison.
“So she didn’t kill her husband,” Rose said, trying hard to take in everything the lawyer told him.
“She’s a beautiful woman. Admirable also, in a way. And no, I don’t think that she killed anyone.”
“Who did it then?”
“No one knows.”
“The murdered man’s brother?”
“He’s white, like the dead man. He was cleared right away.”
“But what about the knife?”
“Again with the knife.”
“Then it wasn’t a crime of passion?”
“You think what you want and keep those thoughts to yourself.”
“A crime related to the arms trafficking?”
“It could be, but they wanted to make it out to be a hate crime, at first, and then a crime of passion. To cover up things, my friend. They’d have done anything to cover it up. The police would rather no one knows how much they’re drowning in shit.”
“And she’s still in Manninpox?”
“You should know.”
“Me? Why would I know?”
“You messing with me?”
“I’m just asking.”
“No, she’s not in Manninpox.”
“They let her out?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“They transferred her to another prison?”
“Look, my friend, I’m guessing you already know the answer to all these questions, and if you don’t know, go figure it out,” Pro Bono said, glancing at his Cartier Panthere to signal that the time had long run out.
“It was a crucifixion,” Rose managed to say, “a crucifixion without a cross. The husband was crucified.”
“What makes you think such nonsense?”
“A wound on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side. The five wounds of Christ . . .”
“The thing with the knife was just some grisly detail meant to distract.”
“I think it was just the opposite, it was a very important detail. Did the witnesses not see this? The stabbings I’m talking about, did they see that?”
“It was four members of the same family. They come out of the building just at that time, see the murder, and go back in; they’re not going to stay there like idiots so that the murderers do them in as well. They call the police from their apartment, which doesn’t face the street but a courtyard in the back, and for obvious reasons do not poke their noses out again. They don’t see anything that happens afterward. Is that good enough? A pleasure to meet you then,” Pro Bono said, ending the meeting.
“Remember, I still have the original,” Rose told him, not knowing where he got the gall at the last minute to continue to put pressure on the lawyer, fanning himself with a manila envelope that contained an identical manuscript to the one Pro Bono had in his hands.
“Are you blackmailing me?” Pro Bono asked, a flash of rage in his eyes.
“Let’s say I’m asking you a favor. I just want to know where she is.”
“Very well, you win again,” Pro Bono said. “Look for her at the Olcott Hotel, 27 West 72nd Street.”
Rose jotted down the information and was on his way out, muttering his thanks, when he heard a burst of Pro Bono’s laughter behind him.
“The Olcott Hotel isn’t there anymore,” he yelled. “It shut down years ago. Go, look for her there; see if you find her.”
From Cleve’s Notebook
Paz says that her work is what she most misses from her life before Manninpox. She worked taking surveys about people’s cleaning habits, and the stories she tells are very interesting, and in the end they’re about a social, ethical, and aesthetic hierarchy of the world according to the standards of cleanliness and dirt. I have been pushing her to write about work, about the kind of people she met, but she’s hesitant. At first she completely refused, saying this wasn’t a good topic. I asked her which topic was a good topic, and she said love was, that any novel that wasn’t a love story was boring. That’s what she told me, and in the end she’s probably right. In any case, little by little I’ve gotten her to write about her work. And I see how she’s transformed when she does it. It’s as if the whole human being that she once was, before she was chewed up by authority and justice, rises to the surface. For a time she was taking surveys on Staten Island, and the other day she told this horrific story in class that made us laugh nonetheless. She said she had been knocking on doors in West New Brighton, one of the most foul-smelling neighborhoods on the island because it is right next to what used to be the Fresh Kills Landfill.
Fresh Kills was not only the largest landfill in the history of mankind—it was also the cyclopean monument that outdid all of them, more massive than the Great Wall of China and taller than the Statue of Liberty. This feat was accomplished by dumping thirteen thousand tons of daily garbage on the site for half a century. There is a grisly symbolism that humankind’s most expansive handiwork was this immeasurable mountain of filth, which in the end remains as our American trademark, as a seal that legitimizes our ownership over this entire section of the planet, because the great paradox is that the more we soil things the more we own, and the more we own the more we soil things, and as Michel Serres says, that which is clean belongs to no one. Take an empty hotel room between guests, all cleaned up and disinfected by housekeeping and that will only become Mr. Doe’s Room 1503, or Mrs. Smith’s Room 711, when Doe and Smith leave the mark of their sweat on the bedsheets, the fungi from their feet on the bathtub, their hair in the drain, their cigarette butts in the ashtrays, the packaging and receipts from their purchases in the garbage can, and their drool on the pillowcases. Because that’s the way it is, we only own what we soil, and what is clean belongs to no one. Pushing this logic to its extreme, one can conclude that a great portion of the earth, sky, and water we call America is buried to the hilt with our garbage, our shit, our smells, and waste. That’s why it is ours, more so than because of land titles, and invasions, and aggressive defenses or the actions of border guards. Here we have deposited the filth that generation after generation has come out of or passed through our bodies; I’m referring to industrial amoun
ts of semen, rivers of blood, tons of used Kotex and tissues and condoms, discarded diapers, obsolete televisions and computers, paper napkins, old cars, plastic bags, and rolls of toilet paper. And, above all, shit. I get dizzy thinking of the inconceivable amount of shit, because just as tigers and dogs mark their territory with their urine, so we have conquered an entire country through shit. With garbage and shit. It is not just us, of course; all the other people in the world do the same, but none of them at our level of magnificence and abundance. Our dead are buried in this earth on whose surface there hardens in geological layers the mountain ranges of crap that our civilization has left behind. Ergo, this land is ours. My reasoning has just proved it. Then there is the name, Fresh Kills. That mega garbage dump was called just that, Fresh Kills, because before it was a landfill it must have been a slaughterhouse, that is, a place bathed in and impregnated by the blood of thousands of animals sacrificed for mankind. Like any ancient sanctuary, from the Temple of Jerusalem to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, dyed crimson and stinking of blood. All of which shows—and what a discovery—that for all intents and purposes, inherently, Fresh Kills must have been a sacred spot, sanctified by sacrificial blood, and on that sacred land we built our temple, our huge dump, an ultimate cathedral of garbage, the tallest and widest by any measure that mankind has built upon the earth, a Notre Dame of filth, a Sagrada Família of waste. And there’s T. S. Eliot, of course, with his most apt quote: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”
Side note: Yesterday I decided to try out my theory about Fresh Kills on my father, and he tore it to pieces. According to him, Kills doesn’t have anything to do with slaughtering; he says the term comes from the Dutch occupation of NYC and it simply means water or stream. Fresh water or something like that. Too bad, my version made more sense.
Interview with Ian Rose
Upon leaving Pro Bono’s office, Rose decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan instead of taking the subway. Very nice, the whole thing. A splendid view, impressive feat of engineering, gentle sunlight, and pretty girls who jogged past him and made it difficult for him to concentrate. “Look, Cleve,” he said, “look at all the lovely girls, and all about your age.” The warm breeze and the bright day partly mitigated the bad taste left by the hostile encounter, and, replaying it, Rose realized that the most difficult thing had not been to put up with the irritability or lack of understanding from the guy—after all, he had been able to draw out a good part of the information he needed. The hardest thing had been finding out María Paz was no longer in Manninpox. Up until that time he had not even considered going to visit her, at least not seriously, but the news made him feel as if he suddenly was losing her, that her trail was vanishing. In the manuscript, she had mentioned that despite everything it had been a relief to be taken into Manninpox with a number and a photograph, because it allowed her to exist anew on the face of the earth, have an identity once again, even as a prisoner, and a direction, even if in prison. Would leaving Manninpox then mean she was returning to the limbo of the disappeared? For Rose, losing her trail meant losing Cleve definitively.
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