The Informant

by Marc Olden

  “Shire?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get somebody to talk about that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man who’d given Neil that order was Berger Picard, a white-haired jowly man in a brown suit, who sat directly in front of Neil, his arms and legs crossed as though keeping the world at bay. Berger Picard, fifty-three, six-feet-two, and only five pounds over his college football playing weight of two hundred and fifty-five, was the number-three man in all of federal-narcotics-law enforcement, and because of his size, along with his power in enforcement, it was inevitable that he be obeyed. Berger Picard had long ago developed the habit of rarely raising his voice. A request from him came carved on a stone tablet.

  Neil knew that this Mas Betancourt case was important, because men from the Justice Department wouldn’t have flown all the way up to New York to talk to him if it weren’t. They would have read his reports or talked to him on the telephone or ordered him to hop a shuttle down to D.C. and present himself to them in their expensively carpeted offices. Instead, they had come to see him. And so had everyone in the bureau’s New York office who mattered. True, the case was important, big and getting bigger. But there was another reason for the full house this morning, and Neil knew it. If there was any glory in this case, if there were going to be headlines, Neil would have to share them with certain people.

  They wanted to be in on the kill and the credit. Which meant that Neil was sitting on something big.

  He grew more confident as he talked. “Intelligence has been gathering information on these names we’ve turned up, and those reports have been made available. The Cubans, as usual, are the best organized, the smartest, the toughest. They stick together, help each other, and usually don’t use outsiders. What Mas Betancourt is doing now is an exception. An example of their sticking together is Mas borrowing talent from Miami, these names here at the bottom—Cristina Reina, Carlos Boyd, called Carlos El Indio, and René Ateyala. They all work for John-John Paco in Miami, but because Mas Betancourt’s lieutenants are all out of the country, he’s being given the loan of these three. Only two have jackets, El Indio and René Ateyala. Their priors include everything from dealing to rape and murder. The woman, Cristina Reina, has no priors. She’s one of John-John’s lieutenants, and the way we reach her is through Jorge Dávila, a C.I. from Miami who was just reassigned here.”

  Berger Picard interrupted in his soft voice. “Who’s the controlling agent on Dávila?”

  Neil frowned, now knowing what to say next. Saul Raiser, sitting directly behind Berger Picard, leaned forward over the large man’s shoulder. “Sir, we’re assigning him to a team in intelligence.”

  Berger Picard didn’t turn around. “Give him to Shire.”

  Raiser pressed his lips together as hard as he could. “Yes, sir.”

  Neil moved his eyes quickly to the blackboard. The Razor had been cut by somebody with a sharper knife. Dávila belonged to Neil. All right!

  Neil kept on talking, forcing himself to slow down and not get so excited that he ended up babbling like a parrot on Benzedrine. “Dávila mentioned seven and a half million as the price of Betancourt’s white. He got the figure from Cristina Reina, who got it from Barbara Pomal. At the going price for white in Marseilles, which is twelve to fifteen thousand a kilo, we figured that Mas is buying five hundred kilos or more.”

  That got a reaction from the room. Some small whistles, an intake of breath, whispers, some head-shaking. Oh, sure, there were people in the room who didn’t believe that anyone could get his hands on that much white, let alone seriously consider bringing it in. But the doubters kept quiet; there were too many people in the room who believed it was possible, and these people were more powerful than the doubters.

  “With five hundred keys,” said Neil, “Mas isn’t taking chances. He’s looking for twenty mules, and it’s a good bet he won’t be having them come in all at once and on the same route. We’ve found a couple of Mas’s routes in the past, but it goes without saying that he’s come up with some new ones. We’ve got nothing so far on his mules or routes. All we’ve got is names of distributors and subdistributors, the people who’ll probably be buying when the load comes in, the people who are putting up the money in advance. I’ve met some of them, scored dope from some of them, Cuban and black. I’m moving up. It’s taking time, but that’s how it’s done.”

  A voice to Neil’s right said, “When do you think you can meet a top lieutenant? I know you may never get to an importer, but what about one of his lieutenants?”

  The speaker was Chester Herzen, Berger Picard’s assistant. Herzen was forty-eight, slim, developing a paunch and kept fingering his rimless glasses while Neil spoke. Herzen rarely spoke unless absolutely necessary, and he seemed to know everything about everybody. The word on him was that he was one of the few men alive who wasn’t afraid of Berger Picard, which is why the big man kept him around.

  Neil said, “I can’t say, sir. It helps that they think I’m loaded, that they think I’m an up-and-coming Italian.”

  A few laughs, snickers.

  Herzen said dryly, “If they ask, you’d better have some dirty books to show them.” More laughs, louder ones. Italians were heavily into pornography, massage parlors and pornographic bookstores, theaters, and film companies, particularly in the East.

  “Yes, sir. I think they’ll want to trust me more, before I can meet anybody heavier. I don’t want to push, so I can’t tell you how long that’ll take. The deeper I get in, the more careful I’ll have to be.”

  Berger Picard said, “You’ve done fine, agent Shire. We’ve got twenty-five names, and we can make cases on them—possession, sale. We can even sic Internal Revenue on them, but what we want is conspiracy, and for that we’ve got to get them all in the same bed at the same time. You give us one top lieutenant, and we may have something. It won’t be easy rolling him over, but we can try. If we link him into the distributors we already have, that might be the beginning of conspiracy. Might be.”

  Conspiracy meant getting enough evidence to prove that three or more people were teaming to sell or smuggle dope. With a conspiracy case, you could take down a roomful of people, even if some of them never went near dope. But you needed a good case of conspiracy to impress a jury.

  Picard turned to Oliver Barth, forty-five, lean and handsome, the man who ran the bureau’s New York office. “Any taps?”

  Barth shook his head. “No. You have to bleed to get a court order for one of those, so I thought we’d save our wiretaps for a lieutenant or somebody heavy.”

  “Put one on Mas and his three lieutenants. You have any trouble with a judge in this town, call me.”

  Barth nodded. He didn’t impress easily, but he was impressed by Berger Picard. So was Neil. There were twenty-five men in the room, and all of them seemed to walk quietly and talk softly around Berger Picard, even Oliver Barth, who’d worked his way up from the street to forty thousand dollars a year and was rumored to be next in line for any top position the bureau might have open down in Washington. Meanwhile, Barth waited and made a lot of people at the top nervous every time he was called down to Washington. He jogged five miles a day, was married to a woman with money, owned an excellent gun collection of early-American flintlocks, and had spoken to Neil Shire only once in the nine months Neil had been in New York. That had been on the elevator, and Barth had said to Neil, “You dropped your newspaper.”

  Neil cleared his throat. What he had to say next might go down wrong with some people, but it had to be said. No sense holding back and making trouble for himself later. “Dávila said Cristina Reina’s been approached three times this, year by the CIA to put them in contact with people she knows in Cuba. Apparently she’s been asked to do favors for them before.”

  “We know that,” said Berger Picard.

  “They’ve approached her since she’s been in New York,” said Neil.

  The reaction in the room indicated this was the first time anyone ha
d heard this bit of news. “Dávila told me that this morning.” When I met him coming out of Lydia’s apartment, the bastard. Did he sleep with her? Maybe he just dropped by to help her trim the tree. Sure.

  Oliver Barth frowned, lining his handsome forehead. “You saw Dávila this morning?”

  “Yes, sir. I dropped by to see my informant, and he … he was coming out of her apartment.”

  “I see. What else did he say?”

  “Just that he was having lunch with Cristina Reina today, and he’d be checking in with us.”

  Berger Picard stroked his nose with a large thumb. “He’ll be checking in with you from now on, Shire.” And it hit Neil: no one in the room had asked whether or not Neil thought the CIA was involved in Mas’s plan to smuggle perhaps a quarter of a ton of white heroin into America. No one had asked, because no one had wanted to hear the answer. Would there be a cover-up if “The Company” had a piece of Mas Betancourt’s action? Neil didn’t think so. You couldn’t really cover up these things forever, you could only delay the news getting out. You have just seen a whole lot of caution going down, folks. You kept those kind of thoughts to yourself, acting on them when the time came. From what Neil had heard about Berger Picard, he wouldn’t cover up for anybody; whoever had to go down would go down. First, Berger Picard would make sure he had an airtight case, and then he would sneak up behind whoever he wanted to bring down and simply press the person’s skull between his hands, which were the size of a bureau drawer.

  “Shire?” Berger Picard.

  “Sir?”

  “Go for keys as soon as you can. Pull yourself up an extra rung.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Neil talked for over an hour, introducing Katey, Kirk Holmes, and Manny Hammonds, a thirty-year-old white agent who was now taking Walter Dankin’s place on their team. Neil talked about Lydia Constanza, about Cubans, about the bars and restaurants he had been to in Cuban neighborhoods in Manhattan, Jackson Heights, and Union City, New Jersey, the heavily populated Cuban areas in the Northeast. He talked about blacks, about their continued rise in dope in the middle levels, about the loyalty Kelly Lorenzo had inspired, about the stories he had heard about Kelly, about the rumors that the Mafia might try to push its way back to the top of dope dealing sometime in the next year or so. He was challenged more than once.

  “Agent Shire, you said the blacks you’ve spoken to are tying in with Cubans? If this is true, why is it that when you talk about dope in New York, you’re talking about Harlem, which is all-black? Why do blacks need Cubans, when they already own Harlem?”

  Neil said, “They don’t have the overseas connections, these blacks. Right now they’ve got Mexican brown, but they don’t know how long that’s going to keep coming in. Mas Betancourt has given them his word they’ll have white, and white’s the biggest seller of all. Harlem is full of middle-level distributors and lower-level dealers, but it’s not full of importers. That’s what Mas is offering. He’s offering to bring white in for them, and they know his reputation. He delivers.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Agent Shire, you think that forty-thousand-dollar reward for Kelly Lorenzo will ever be collected? You’re talking to his people. Why won’t they give him up?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve been told Kelly travels with eight hundred thousand dollars cash and can get more if he needs it. He spreads that money around, and it keeps him protected. I’ve heard he’s got anywhere from four men to fifteen men around him and that he’s paying them well, and if he gets busted because somebody informs, they say he’s willing to pay his people to kill the informant.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  “Agent Shire, from your experience do you think the blacks will ever challenge the Cubans, I mean do you think they’ll ever go to war against each other, start banging each other out?”

  “Not while this deal is happening. Mas is a good leader, a street-smart man who can organize. If something goes wrong with this deal and people lose their money, look out. Right now, Kelly Lorenzo is the only black dealer who can take on Mas, and he’s his partner. No, I don’t think there’s going to be a war between blacks and Cubans, because from what I can see, the blacks won’t work together with blacks. They’d just as soon shoot each other as shoot Cubans or Italians. Get the blacks together first, then you might have something.”

  When Berger Picard had heard enough, he stood up to indicate the meeting was over. He was the first one to shake Neil’s hand, and others followed, but Saul Raiser was not among them.

  Neil ordered his lunch in, because there was work to do on a buy scheduled for tomorrow, Christmas Eve, the third one from Israel Manzana, who was dealing with Neil while Enrique Ruiz was out of town with his wife. Enrique had taken her to the Bahamas for a rest, to help her get over the death of their son. Israel Manzana was selling Neil a quarter of a kilo of cocaine, fifty percent pure, for ten thousand dollars, but Neil wouldn’t be paying cash. Instead, Israel Manzana had asked Neil for some television sets, and they had argued on how many and finally agreed on fifty color sets at two hundred dollars each.

  With his feet on his desk and a mouth full of tuna fish on whole-wheat toast, Neil said to Manny Hammonds, “How we doing?”

  Manny, blond, muscular from weight lifting, held a quart of milk in front of his mouth. “Downstairs in the garage and ready. We bought the sets at Korvette’s, Macy’s, Gimbels. Had ’em delivered to a warehouse down on Houston, then loaded ’em into some rented trucks, and now they’re downstairs in our garage. Got a twenty-four-hour guard on ’em, two guys with shotguns pulling guard duty, four hours on, two off. They ain’t happy ’bout marching up and down on a cold concrete floor in ten-degree December weather, but I told ’em nobody promised ’em a rose garden.”

  Katey said, “Maybe I’ll buy one offa Manzana. He get to keep the trucks, too?”

  Neil bit into a hard-boiled egg. “No way. But I’m letting his men drive off with them and unload the sets, then Israel’s supposed to call me and tell me the trucks are somewhere in midtown.”

  Kirk Holmes, sitting on the edge of Neil’s desk and eating seedless grapes, said, “Your name’s on the request slip, my man. Them trucks don’t come back, it’s your honky ass.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Tell you one thing,” said Kirk. “Tell you somebody probably forgot to take down the numbers of them color TV’s, bet you that.”

  “Holy shit.” Neil swallowed too fast, choked, and coughed. Katey patted him on the back. “Got to get that done.” He looked around at the three men in his cubicle, all of whom smiled or shook their heads no, they weren’t interested in going down twenty-five floors and freezing their nuts off climbing into trucks and taking down registration numbers on fifty brand-new color-television sets.

  Katey sipped coffee. “You’re it, the honcho, the man of the hour. Tell somebody ’round here you want it done, that you’re busy, goin’ over the buy tomorrow night and can’t spare your team. Let’s see what kinda juice you got, dude.”

  It was a challenge, and Neil read it in the faces of Manny Hammonds and Kirk Holmes as well. Why not? Why the fuck not? Neil grinned at them and reached for the telephone. When he got a secretary, he said, “Walker Wallace, please.”

  He waited.

  “Walker? Neil. Forgot something. Don’t have a record of the numbers on those TV’s. Yeah, the ones we’re using tomorrow.” Neil looked at the three men in his cubicle. “Could you send somebody down there to make a record of the numbers? … No, I don’t remember anybody doing it … Yes, somebody might have done it, but nobody’s told me about it. … Yeah … yeah.”

  Katey whispered, “Tell the bastard to bring a flashlight.”

  “Flashlight, shit,” said Kirk Holmes. “Tell him to bring a broad with him, it’s cold down there.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Neil, smiling, “I thought it went well, too. … Yeah, he seemed impressed. … You’re right, you’re right … thanks, Walker.”

  Neil hun
g up. “He’s sending somebody.”

  Kirk Holmes held out his palm, and as a grinning Neil slapped it, a secretary buzzed him. Still grinning, Neil picked up the telephone. “Agent Shire.”

  He listened, and suddenly his face changed. The men in front of him saw confusion, disbelief, pain, anger. They stopped talking, stopped smiling.

  Neil said, “Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Mrs. Sánchez. We’ll be right over.”

  Neil hung up but kept his hand on the receiver, his voice small and flat, his eyes glazed and seeing nothing. “Lydia. She’s in the hospital. She’s been beaten and raped.”

  25

  IT HAD HAPPENED LESS than an hour after Neil left her.

  “Lydia?”

  She turned, and at the sight of the man who had just called her name she almost dropped the bag of groceries she carried in her arm. She shivered. Her eyes saw him even as her mind fought to reject the sight of him. Him.

  It took all of her courage to say his name.

  “Dominic.”

  “Lydia, mi linda mujer. My beautiful, beautiful woman. Ah, I see you still spend money. Last-minute Christmas shopping, right? You still like pretty things, jewels, shoes?” He walked slowly down the stairs, where he had been waiting in darkness in her apartment building, and now he was in the light, in her life once more.

  He said, “I saw you drop something off next door. Playing Santa for your neighbors?” His smile meant nothing, but he gave it to her anyway.

  The power Dominic León always had over her reached out once more, touching her in corners of her mind she thought he would never reach again. She forced herself to speak.

  “Uh, I do shopping for Mrs. Sánchez.” Lydia jerked her head toward the old woman’s apartment. “She’s over seventy, she don’ get around so well, specially in this kinda cold and with the ice on the ground, so I help her, and she baby-sits for Olga.”