Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

  Then he opened the partition between the front and the cargo area, stepped back, and opened the lockbox. He pulled his Mets hat on, got back into the driver’s seat, and checked his appearance in the mirror. Then he got out of the van and walked west on Forty-Seventh Street. At this hour all the shops on the street were still closed, even the Starbucks on the corner. He circled the entire block looking for alternative service entrances but didn’t see any.

  When he got back into the van, he took the hat off, found a notepad on the floor, and set it on the seat next to him. He pulled out a small battery-operated radio from the glove compartment, turned it on, found some sports talk, and began watching the front door.

  At fifteen minutes after ten, Billy began to suspect his target had stayed home that day. He put the hat back on and turned the radio off. In the back of the van he took the toolbox out, hopped out the back door, and crossed the street. The prospect of not getting results was already bringing on a kind of guilty feeling.

  When he got close to the door, he pulled out his cell phone, and for the next five minutes pretended to have a conversation on it. If a person passed, he repeated phrases like, I know, I know, and Yeah, sure, let me know, no problem.

  Finally, after five minutes, a young woman walked up to the door, rang, and was buzzed in. Still holding the phone to his ear and lugging his toolbox, Billy caught the door and followed her.

  On the third floor, he found a piece of paper taped to the door of the American iPhone Repair shop. The note read Temporarily closed. For phone pickup call (917) 258-4312. Billy pulled the paper off the door, folded it, and put it in his pocket. He then looked at the lock, a dead bolt. It would take him less than three minutes to get in.

  Elizabeth Carlyle’s breakfast consisted of whole wheat toast with peanut butter and honey. She ate it alone standing at her kitchen island feeling a buzzing kind of dread. Still chewing, she poured coffee into a pint glass, added skim milk, dropped in three ice cubes, and then tapped her fingers on the counter while she waited for it to cool. She then drank the entire thing and set the glass in the sink.

  Her husband was upstairs getting dressed. She hadn’t told him anything about what was happening at work. She couldn’t stand the idea of seeing any kind of amusement in his eyes. The man could find amusement in anything. A fine trait, except when it wasn’t. Before leaving, she called up the stairs to him, “I’ve got to run, I’ll see you later.” He didn’t respond.

  Their marriage could be defined by these moments of one-way conversation. Elizabeth spoke, Tyler listened—at least he seemed to. The man was truly stuck inside his own head. Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t a great conversationalist. He could be—in fact, that’s what initially drew her to him. The man could speak on any subject when he wanted to. Or he could be his perfectly unbothered silent self. I’ll see you later, Elizabeth repeated in her mind as she backed down her driveway. He could have easily answered, Yes, dear, I’ll see you later. Anything would have been better than silence.

  They’d been together since Elizabeth was thirty years old. She still lived in the city back then, and one night on a whim she went to the birthday party of a colleague’s friend. The party had been at the Odeon. The birthday boy had been Tyler. They got married in 1992, barely surviving Tyler’s insistence on voting for the first Bush. She had a baby—a daughter, named Genevieve—while she was still at Heller, Bromwell, Burgess, Drake. Her second daughter, Mary, was born a year after Elizabeth joined Mooney, Driscoll, Hathaway, Evans, Miller. The two maternity leaves were the only times she’d ever taken off from work. She hated staying home. It didn’t suit her.

  It took ten minutes to drive to the Pleasantville Metro-North station. She arrived that morning six minutes before the 6:22 train. She walked past a group of bleary-eyed commuters and stared north up the tracks. The sky was gray and there was no wind.

  Her plan, when she got to the office, was to corner Scott Driscoll—the most influential of the senior partners—and explain to him exactly what was happening. She’d then have him recruit two other partners—Iverson and Rosen seemed like the most likely candidates—and loop them in. With that small group, she could call an emergency meeting and have Scott ask the partners to sign off on a $750,000 discretionary investigation fund.

  She could already see the twisted expressions that would appear on their faces: Wait, what? What the hell kind of investigation fund? Nothing illegal, she’d have Scott say, but nothing you want to know about either. Iverson and Rosen—on cue—would weigh in: Yes, they’d say. Do it. The other partners, God willing, would fall in line. Elizabeth thought the plan might just work.

  When the train arrived, Elizabeth sat down next to a white-haired old woman who appeared to be headed off on a hike. The train rolled south. Elizabeth kept her eyes on the back of the seat in front of her. She had no desire to pull out her computer and work. She didn’t want to read the news. She wanted to sit in silence.

  While she sat, her mind bounced back and forth between the problem at hand and random, disconnected questions: Was her jaw more masculine than her daughter’s? Did she currently have breast cancer? If the partners said no to the request for money, would she need to call Calcott immediately?

  Then her thoughts shifted to Valencia. She pictured her getting dressed. Elizabeth had been to her apartment, but she’d never seen her closet. Now, she imagined it as large and airy. Her suits and dresses would be arranged by color. They would hang perfectly. There would be built-in lights. Her underwear and bras would be new and expensive. Smoothly sliding drawers would hold her jewelry. Elizabeth’s own closet was nice, but not like that.

  Right then, a man walking down the aisle interrupted her thoughts. The man looked similar to Michael D’Angelo; that was enough to start her mind racing. What had he learned? She took out her phone and called him.

  “So?” she asked when he answered.

  “He left the office a little after nine,” said D’Angelo, referring to Chris Cowley. “He walked a few blocks to a juice stand, took a cab home, stayed there until at least one thirty, when I left.”

  “Did you check his emails?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Not yet, Liz, I got home at two thirty this morning.”

  “Okay, do it when you get in. Thanks, Michael,” she said, hanging up before he could respond. The man worked hard; she appreciated him for that, but he moved slowly.

  She called Valencia next.

  “Walker,” said Valencia, sounding wide-awake when she answered.

  “Tell me you have a plan.”

  “Did you talk to the partners?”

  “Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “Tell me the plan.”

  “Okay, presuming you get the money and decide to go that route, it isn’t complicated. Our goal is to find out who is doing this. I’ll make the payment. My men will be monitoring me. We’ll sew GPS rats into the bag. We’ll have drones in the sky watching the field.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” asked Elizabeth.

  “I talked to my guy,” said Valencia. “He’s available tonight for whatever we need. I outlined the basic scenario, and he thinks two drones should be more than enough.”

  Elizabeth scooted in her seat, looked out the window at the dark trees. “This is absolutely absurd,” she said.

  “Liz, sweetie, this is war. We need to find out who they are and shut them down. If this sounds like too much, I think you should call John Braxton at the FBI. He’s good, discreet; he’ll keep it quiet.”

  “You’ve cleared your day, I assume?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Honey, we are in full-fledge war mode,” said Valencia.

  “Good,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll call soon.”

  Elizabeth put her phone down and closed her eyes for a moment. She could feel panic in her chest: she felt it in her lungs, under her heart, above her stomach; it was in her brain, her temples, and her jaw. This was uncharted territory. Steps, she told herself. There are steps that need to be taken. First, get the partners
to sign off—

  “We’ve got a bird-watching group,” said the old woman next to her. Elizabeth opened her eyes and turned her head toward the woman. “We meet once a month,” she said, as if she were answering a question Elizabeth had asked.

  Elizabeth pursed her lips and nodded.

  “But not in the winter,” said the woman. She appeared to have cataracts; her blue eyes were milky. “We’re going to good old Central Park.” The woman then scrunched her face up, as if a flood of beautiful memories were passing through her mind. “I’m trying to spot a hooded warbler,” she said.

  “It’s good to have hobbies,” said Elizabeth, squeezing her mouth into a smile, leaning her head back against the seat, and closing her eyes again.

  The Rabinowitz brothers lived in a large four-bedroom house on Homecrest Avenue, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Their uncle owned the house; they still had to pay nearly market rate to stay there.

  That day, as noon approached, Yuri Rabinowitz, the older of the two brothers, had been awake for almost four hours. He’d been nervously watching MMA on TV, and he turned it off now. The fact that his brother was still sleeping annoyed him. This was not a day to sleep in. He shouldn’t have to explain that. It should be self-evident.

  Yuri got up from the couch and climbed the stairs, two at a time, to the second floor. Surely, some girl would be in Isaac’s room; he could already imagine her, head turned away, long hair, shirtless. The idea of walking in on them caused an unwelcome feeling of shame to well up inside him.

  Still, he knocked hard on the door, and called out, “Wake up, fuck head.” After not hearing anything, he turned the knob and looked in. He was surprised to see his brother sleeping alone. “It’s time to get up, bitch.”

  Isaac put a pillow over his head.

  Yuri stepped to the bed and pulled the blanket back. “You shit,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” said Isaac, in English.

  “I told you not to get drunk,” said Yuri.

  “I didn’t.”

  The air around the bed smelled like a homeless man; it smelled like vomit. Yuri wanted to slap him in the head. “We have to go to the gym,” he said. “You have to snap out of this shit. Get your head right.”

  “It’s my off day,” said Isaac. He turned and tried to go back to sleep. “I did legs yesterday.” He then turned back, looked at his brother, and said, “Besides, you should relax”—then, switching to Russian, added—“Treat every Monday like a Monday and you’ll be rich by Friday.”

  It was something their father used to say. Isaac was saying this to shame his brother. He was weaponizing the phrase to highlight Yuri’s fear. A neutral observer probably wouldn’t have read it that way, but both brothers understood it plainly. They had their own coded language. A shot had been fired.

  Yuri walked over to his brother’s closet and picked up a pair of his jeans that had fallen to the floor. An all-consuming anger filled him. His diaphragm felt pinched. Did his brother not understand what they were going to do that day? Did he have no fucking clue? They were about to blackmail a major New York law firm. What the hell was he thinking?

  He pulled the leather belt out of the pants, let the pants fall back to the floor, and began looping the belt around his fist, tightening it with each turn. When he finished, he faced his brother, but Isaac had already hopped out of bed and was pulling on a shirt.

  Yuri weighed whether or not he should still whip him. Sometimes it was the only way to get through. He hadn’t hit his brother in a few weeks. Lately, he’d just been pinning his head to the ground. The last time he whipped him, he’d left pink welts on the younger man’s back and made him cry. It had been a pitiful sight.

  Their father, before he died, used to whip Yuri. It was what they’d always done. If things escalated beyond yelling, a whipping was in order. One couldn’t allow anarchy to rule. Still, he couldn’t strike his brother if he was actually getting ready. That would violate their unwritten rules. A mixture of relief and disappointment washed through him.

  In the kitchen, he texted his friend Moishe Groysman: Gym half hour.

  Yuri stood there for a moment, breathing and staring at the wood on the cabinet. You need to get a hold of yourself, he thought.

  He pulled out the protein powder and began making smoothies. They couldn’t be fighting today. A peace offering was in order. He was, after all, the older brother; he had to act more mature. Internal discipline. He scooped out the whey powder and dumped it into the blender. Treat every Monday like a Monday. Fucking cocksucker. He poured milk into the blender, cracked four eggs into it, peeled four bananas and put them in. After turning on the blender he stood there staring at it, watching the bananas swirl and disappear.

  Upon waking that day, Chris Cowley experienced a tranquil few seconds of amnesia. A moment later his problems came barreling back. The prospect of being publicly charged with possession of child pornography wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the injustice. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d looked at pornography; that was it. Now his family was being threatened. Now he’d been pulled into a criminal conspiracy. He was ruined. A very specific and lonely kind of helplessness seeped into him and the only way he could think to fight it was to curse uselessly in his mind.

  At work he spent most of the morning at his desk, wondering just who the hell he was dealing with. Besides giving their first names—and lord knows if those were even real—his handlers hadn’t identified themselves. The skinny one, the leader, had said he was called Jonathan. He didn’t catch the shaved-headed one’s name. The small, ugly white guy was called JP or PJ.

  Nothing more was given. No badges had been shown. He had no way of contacting them. On the two occasions they’d wanted to make contact, they’d simply approached him: once on the train, and once on the street outside his apartment.

  Chris suspected they were working for some kind of intelligence agency; some kind of NSA-type group. They seemed too bold to be mere criminals. Besides, the Calcott case, with its Arabian Peninsula entanglements, was surely being monitored by some intelligence agency. Elizabeth hadn’t filled the team in on exactly what that was about. She firewalled it, but Chris had heard enough to know that it involved Oman, shell corporations, and access to oil-licensing fees.

  Elizabeth had made it clear that CDH wasn’t going to address any of what the special opportunities fund was doing. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, when one of Chris’s colleagues had asked. “It isn’t relevant to this case.” The few junior associates seated at the table exchanged glances, but nobody ever brought it up again.

  Still, Chris found it hard to believe that any U.S. government agency would act so unlawfully. For God’s sake, he was a member of the New York State Bar; he worked at one of the most powerful law firms in the country. Would they do that? Was that even possible? He didn’t know.

  At noon, on his way to the restroom he was approached by one of his coworkers, David Moss, a mid-level associate who was two years his senior. “You’re off the case?” Moss asked, grabbing his arm while they walked.

  “Yep,” said Chris.

  “Why?”

  “Conflict,” said Chris, politely freeing his arm. “I have a cousin who works at Emerson.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  That was the script Elizabeth had given him last night: Conflict. A cousin. I didn’t know.

  “Lucky bastard,” said Moss. “I’d give up my firstborn son to be off this case.”

  “So quit,” said Chris, ducking into the bathroom.

  At the urinal an obvious question occurred to him: Why hadn’t Elizabeth fired him yet? Why wasn’t he fired yesterday? Why not today? More questions: What would happen if he was fired? What would those men do if he lost his job? He’d be useless to them. They wouldn’t need anything else from him. He’d be free.

  That thought provided comfort for less than two seconds. The men who were running him wouldn’t wa
nt some useless lawyer walking around knowing they were involved in this case. In fact, he remembered the ugly guy saying: “You gotta stay in the game, though. Once we sub you out, we can’t sub you back in.”

  He hadn’t understood what that meant at the time. Everything they’d said had washed over him; now it was beginning to make sense.

  A few hours after his hallway conversation, he had another disturbing encounter. Michael D’Angelo, CDH’s investigator, stopped by his office to ask more questions.

  “Hey, knock, knock,” said D’Angelo, opening the door and poking his head in. “Let me ask you a question?”

  “Yeah,” said Chris, turning from his computer. He hoped the expression on his face would suggest he was busy, but the man seemed blind to hints.

  “Had you ever seen that pickpocket before?” asked D’Angelo.

  “Why would I have seen him?”

  The investigator stepped in farther, closed the door behind him. “Look, Chris, I’m sure you know what’s going on here. This is big. This is a really big problem.” He lowered his voice, like he was letting Chris in on a secret plot: “We think you may have been targeted.”

  A silence hung between them for a moment.

  “Maybe you would have seen someone hanging around?”

  Chris’s mind flashed to the idea of the surveillance footage from his own apartment building. Would someone eventually look at that and see his unwelcome visitors? Had they taken care of the video? Surely, they would have thought of that. “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Any strange emails?” asked D’Angelo.

  Chris’s eyes went back to his monitor. He let his head drop to the side a little, pursed his lips, pretended to think. “Not that I know of.” He shook his head, looked at the investigator, pushed himself back in his seat a little. “Do you think I’m going to get fired?” he whispered.

  “I think that’s the least of your worries.”

  Chris rubbed around his eyes. “I’m so fucked,” he said.