Bitter Truth

BITTER TRUTH
WILLIAM LASHNER

In memory of my father and partner,

Melvin Lashner,

who knew right from wrong

and lived each day as if it mattered
.

A taste for truth at any cost

is a passion which spares nothing.

—ALBERT CAMUS

Part 1

Ailurophobia

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake
.
—JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

1

En Route to Belize City, Belize

I
SUPPOSE every hundred million dollars has its own sordid story and the hundred million I am chasing is no exception.

I am on a TACA International flight to Belize in search of my fortune. Underneath the seat in front of me lies my briefcase and in my briefcase lies all I need, officially, to pick my fortune up and take it home with me. I lift the briefcase onto my lap and open it, carefully pulling out the file folder, and from that folder, with even more care, pulling out the document inside. I like the feel of the smooth copy paper in my hands. I read it covetously, holding it so the nun sitting next to me can’t steal a peek. Its text is as short and as evocative as the purest haiku.
“Default judgment is awarded in favor of the plaintiff in the amount of one hundred million dollars.”
The document is signed by the judge and stamped in red ink and certified by the Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas of the City of Philadelphia and legal in every state of the union and those countries with the appropriate treaties with the United States, a group in which, fortunately, Belize is included. One hundred million dollars, the price of two lives plus punitive damages. I bring the paper to my nose and smell it. I can detect the sweet scent of mint, no, not peppermint, government. One hundred million dollars, of which my fee, as the attorney, is a third.

Think hard on that for a moment; I do, constantly. If I find what I’m hunting it would be like winning the lotto every month for a year. It would be like Ed McMahon coming to my door with his grand prize check not once, not twice, but three times, and I would get it all at once instead of over thirty years. It would be enough money to run for president if I were ever so deranged. Well, maybe not that much, but it is still a hell of a lot of money. And I want it, desperately, passionately, with all my heart and soul. Those who whine that there is no meaning left in American life are blind, for there is fame and there is fortune and, frankly, you can take fame and cram it down your throats. Me, I’ll take the money.

For almost a year I’ve been in search of the assets against which my default judgment will be collected. I’ve traced them through the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Liberia and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, from where payments had been wired, repeatedly, to an account at the Belize Bank. From the Belize Bank the funds were immediately withdrawn, in cash. Unlike all the other transfers of funds, the transfers to Belize were neither hidden within the entwining vines of larger transactions nor mathematically encrypted. The owner of the money has grown complacent in his overconfidence or he is sending me an invitation and either way I am heading to Belize, flying down to follow the money until it leads me directly to him. He is a vicious man, violent, deceptive, greedy beyond belief. He has killed without the least hesitation, killed for the basest of reasons. His hands drip with blood and I have no grounds to believe he will not kill again. When I think on his crimes I find it amazing how the possibility of so much money can twist one to act beyond all rationality. I am flying down to Belize to find this man in his tropical asylum so I can serve the judgment personally and start the collection proceedings that will at long last make me rich.

In a voice equally apathetic in Spanish and English we are told that we are beginning our approach to Belize City. I return the document to the briefcase, twist the case’s lock, stow it back beneath the seat in front of me. Outside the window I see the teal blue of the Caribbean and then a ragged line of scabrous slicks of land, spread atop the water like foul oil, and then the jungle, green and thick and foreign. Clots of treetops are spotted dark by clouds. For not the first time I feel a doubt rise about my mission. If I were going to Pittsburgh or Bern or Luxembourg City I’d feel more confident, but Belize is a wild, untamed place, a country of hurricanes and rain forests and great Mayan ruins. Anything can happen in Belize.

The nun sitting next to me, habited in white with a black veil and canvas sneakers, puts down her Danielle Steel and smiles reassuringly.

“Have you been to our country before?” she asks with a British accent.

“No,” I say.

“It is quite beautiful,” she says. “The people are wonderful.” She winks. “Keep a hand on your wallet in Belize City, yes? But you will love it, I’m sure. Business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

“Of course, I could tell by your suit. It’s a bit hot for that. You’ll be visiting the barrier reef too, I suppose, they all do, but there’s more to Belize than fish. While you are here you must see our rain forests. They are glorious. And the rivers too. You brought insect repellent, I expect.”

“I didn’t, actually. The bugs are bad?”

“Oh my, yes. The mosquito, well, you know, I’m sure, of the mosquito. The malaria pills they have now work wonders. And the welts from the botlass fly last for days but are not really harmful. Ticks of course and scorpions, but the worst is the beefworm. It is the larva of the botfly and it is carried by the mosquito. It comes in with the bite and lives within your flesh while it grows, grabbing hold of your skin with pincers and burrowing in. Nasty little parasite, that. The whole area blows up and is quite painful, there is a burning sensation, but you mustn’t pull it, oh no. Then you will definitely get an infection. Instead you must cover the area with glue and tape and suffocate it. The worm squirms underneath for awhile before it dies and that is considered painful by some, but the next morning you can just squeeze the carcass out like toothpaste from a tube.”

I am lost in the possibilities when the plane tilts up, passes low over a wide jungle river, and slams into the runway. “Welcome to the Philip Goldson International Airport,” says the voice over the intercom. “The airport temperature is ninety-three and humidity is eighty-five percent. Enjoy your stay in Belize.”

We depart onto the tarmac. It is oppressively hot, the Central American sun is brutal. I feel its pressure all over my body. The air is tropically thick and in its humidity my suit jacket immediately weighs down with sweat. There is something on my face. I am confused for a moment before I realize it is an insect and frantically swipe it away. We are herded in a line toward customs. To our left is the terminal building, brown as rust, a relic from the fifties, to our right is a camouflaged military transport, being loaded with something large I can’t identify. A black helicopter circles overhead. Soldiers rush by in a jeep. Sweat drips from my temples and down my neck. I shuck off my jacket, but already my shirt is soaked. I brush a mosquito from my wrist but not before it bites me. I can almost feel something wiggling beneath the skin.

After we hand our passports over for inspection and pick up our bags we are sent in lines to wait for the dog. I sit on my suitcase and pick at the amoebic blob swelling on my wrist. A German shepherd appears, mangy and fierce. He is straining at his leash. He sniffs first one suitcase, then another, then a backpack. The dog comes up to me and shoves his nose into my crotch. Two policemen laugh.

Even inside the terminal it is hot and the sunlight rushing through the windows is fierce and I feel something dangerous beyond the mosquitoes in the swelter about me. I wonder what the hell I am doing in Belize but then I feel the weight of my briefcase in my hand and remember about the hundred million dollars and its story, a story of betrayal and revenge, of intrigue and sex and revelation, a story of murder and a story of redemption and a story of money most of all. Suddenly I know exactly what I am doing here and why.

2

I
T STARTED for me with a routine job in the saddest little room in all of Philadelphia. Crowded with cops and shirt-sleeved lawyers and court clerks and boxes of files, a dusty clothes rack, a computer monitor with plastic wood trim and vacuum tubes like something out of
Popular Mechanics
circa 1954, it was a room heavy with the air of an exhausted bureaucracy. I was sitting alone on the lawyers’ bench inside that room, waiting for them to drag my client from the holding cells in the basement. My job that morning was to get him out on a reasonable bail and, considering what he was being charged with, that wasn’t going to be easy.

I was in the Roundhouse, Philadelphia Police Headquarters, a circular building constructed in the sixties, all flowing lines, every office a corner office, an architectural marvel bright with egalitarian promise. But the Roundhouse had turned old before its time, worn down by too much misery, too much crime. At the grand entrance on Race Street there was a statue of a cop holding a young boy aloft in his arms, a promise of all the good works envisioned to flow through those doors, except that the entrance on Race Street was now barred and visitors were required to enter through the rear. In through that back entrance, to the right, past the gun permit window, past the bail clerk, through the battered brown doors and up the steps to the benches where a weary public could watch, through a wall of thick Plexiglas, the goings on in the Roundhouse’s very own Municipal Court.

“Sit down, ma’am,” shouted the bailiff to a young woman who had walked through those doors and was now standing among the benches behind the Plexiglas wall. She was young, thin, a waif with short hair bleached yellow and a black leather jacket. She was either family or friend of one of the defendants, or maybe just whiling away her day, looking for a morning’s entertainment. If so, it was bound to be a bit wan. “You can’t stand in the back,” shouted the bailiff, “you have to sit down,” and so she sat.

The defendants were brought into the room in batches of twenty, linked wrist to wrist by steel, and placed in a holding cell, with its own Plexiglas view. You could see them in there, through the Plexiglas, waiting with sullen expectation for their brief time before the bar.

“Sit down, sir,” called out the bailiff in what was a steady refrain. “You can’t stand back there,” and another onlooker dropped onto one of the benches.

“Hakeem Trell,” announced the clerk and a young man sauntered a few steps to the large table before the bench that dominated the room.

“Hakeem Trell,” said Bail Commissioner Pauling, reading from his file, “also known as Roger Pettibone, also known as Skip Dong.” At this last alias Commissioner Pauling looked over the frames of his half-glasses at the young man standing arrogantly before him. There was about Hakeem Trell a.k.a. Roger Pettibone a.k.a. Skip Dong the defiant annoyance of a high school student facing nothing more serious than an afternoon’s detention. Where was the anxiety as he faced imprisonment, the trembling fear at the rent in his future? What had we done to these children? My client wasn’t in the batch they had just brought up and so I was forced to sit impatiently as Commissioner Pauling preliminarily arraigned Hakeem Trell and then Luis Rodriguez and then Anthony O’Neill and then Jason Lawton and then and then and then, one after another, young kids almost all, mainly minority, primarily poor, or at least dressing that way, all taking it in with a practiced air of hostility. Spend enough time in the Roundhouse’s Municipal Court and you begin to feel what it is to be an occupying power.

“Sirs, please sit down, you can’t stand back there,” shouted the bailiff and two men in the gallery arranged themselves on one of the forward benches, sitting right in front of the young blonde woman, who shifted to a different bench to maintain her view of the proceedings.

I recognized both of the men. I had been expecting them to show, or at least some men like them. One was huge, wearing a shiny warm-up suit, his face permanently cast with the heavy lidded expression of a weightlifter contemplating a difficult squat thrust. I had seen him around, he had grunted at me once. The other was short, thin, looking like a talent scout for a cemetery. He had the face and oily gray hair of a mortician, wearing the same black suit a mortician might wear, clutching a neat little briefcase in his lap. This slick’s name was Earl Dante, a minor mob figure I had met a time or two before. His base of operations was a pawnshop, neatly named the Seventh Circle Pawn, on Two Street, south of Washington, just beyond the Mummers Museum, where he made his piranha loans at three points a week and sent out his gap-toothed collectors to muscle in his payments. Dante nodded at me and I contracted the sides of my mouth into an imitation of a smile, hoping no one noticed, before turning back to the goings on in the court.

Commissioner Pauling was staring at me. His gaze drifted up to alight on the mortiferous face of Earl Dante before returning back to my own. I gave a little shrug. The clerk called the next name on his sheet.

In the break between batches, Commissioner Pauling strolled off to what constituted his chambers in the Roundhouse, no desk of course, or bookshelves filled with West reporters, but a hook for his robe and a sink and an industrial-sized roll of paper to keep his chamberpot clean. I stepped up to the impeccably dressed clerk still at the bench.

“Nice tie, Henry,” I said.

“I can’t say the same for yours, Mr. Carl,” said Henry, shuffling through his files, not deigning to even check out my outfit. “But then I guess you don’t got much selection when you buying ties at Woolworth’s.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I’m here for Cressi. Peter Cressi. Some sort of gun problem.”

Henry looked through his papers and started nodding. “Yeah, I’d guess trying to buy a hundred and seventy-nine illegally modified automatic assault weapons, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop would constitute some sort of gun problem.”

“He’s a collector.”

“Uh huh,” said Henry, drawing out his disbelief.

“No, really.”

“You don’t gots to lie to me, Mr. Carl. You don’t see me wearing robes, do you? Your Cressi will be in the next batch. I know what you want, uh huh. I’ll get you out of here soon as I can.”

“You’re a good man, Henry.”

“Don’t be telling me, be telling my wife.”

They brought up the next batch of prisoners, twenty cuffed wrist to wrist, led into the little holding cell behind the bench upon which I uneasily sat. In the middle of the group was Peter Cressi, tall, curly hair flowing long and black behind his ears, broad shoulders, unbelievably handsome. His blue silk shirt, black pants, pointed shiny boots were in stark contrast to the baggy shin-high jeans and hightop sneakers of his new compatriots. As he shuffled through the room he smiled casually at me, as casually as if seeing a neighbor across the street, and I smiled back. Cressi’s gaze drifted up to the benches in the gallery, behind the Plexiglas. When it fell onto Dante’s stern face Cressi’s features twisted into some sort of fearful reverence.

I didn’t like Cressi, actually. There was something ugly and arrogant about him, something uneasy. He was one of those guys who sort of danced while he spoke, as if his bladder was always full to bursting, but you sensed it wasn’t his bladder acting up, it was a little organ of evil urging him to go forth and do bad. I didn’t like Cressi, but getting the likes of Peter Cressi out of the troubles their little organs of evil got them into was how I now made my living.

I never planned to be a criminal defense attorney, I never planned a lot of things that had happened to my life, like the Soviets never planned for Chernobyl to glow through the long Ukrainian night, but criminal law was what I practiced now. I represented in the American legal system a group of men whose allegiance was not to God and country but to family, not to their natural-born families but to a family with ties that bound so tightly they cut into the flesh. It was a family grown fat and wealthy through selling drugs, pimping women, infiltrating trade unions, and extorting great sums from legitimate industry, from scamming what could be scammed, from loan sharking, from outright thievery, from violence and mayhem and murder. It was the criminal family headed by Enrico Raffaello. I didn’t like the work and I didn’t like the clients and I didn’t like myself while I did the work for the clients. I wanted out, but Enrico Raffaello had once done me the favor of saving my life and so I didn’t have much choice anymore.

“All right,” said Pauling, back on the bench from his visit to his chambers. “Let’s get started.”

There were three prisoners in the column of seats beside where I sat, ready to be called to the bar, and the Commissioner was already looking at the first, a young boy with a smirk on his face, when Henry called out Peter Cressi’s name.

“Come on up, son,” said Pauling to the boy. Henry whispered in the Commissioner’s ear. Pauling closed his eyes with exasperation. “Bring out Mr. Cressi,” he said.

I stood and slid to the table.

“I assume you’re here to represent this miscreant, Mr. Carl,” said Pauling as they brought Cressi out from the holding cell.

“This alleged miscreant, yes sir.”

When Cressi stood by my side I gave him a stern look of reprobation. He snickered back and did his little dance.

“Mr. Cressi,” said Commissioner Pauling, interrupting our charming little moment, “you are hereby charged with one hundred and eighty-three counts of the illegal purchase of firearms in violation of the Pennsylvania Penal Code. You are also charged with conspiracy to commit those offenses. Now I’m going to read you the factual basis for those charges, so you listen up.” The commissioner took hold of the police report and started reading. I knew what had happened, I had heard all of it that morning when I was woken by a call to my apartment informing me of Cressi’s arrest. The arrest must have been something, Cressi with a Ryder truck, driving out to a warehouse in the Northeast to find waiting for him not the crates of rifles and weapons he had expected but instead a squadron of SWAT cops, guns pointed straight at Peter’s handsome face. The cops had been expecting an army, I guess, not just some wiseguy with a rented truck.

“Your Honor, with regard to bail,” I said, “Mr. Cressi is a lifelong resident of the city, living at home with his elderly mother, who is dependent on his care.” This was one of those lawyer lies. I knew Cressi’s mother, she was a spry fifty-year-old bingo fiend, but Peter did make sure she took her hypertension medication every morning. “Mr. Cressi has no intention of fleeing and, as this is not in any way a violent crime, poses no threat to the community. We ask that he be allowed to sign his own bail.”

“What was he going to do with those guns, counselor? Aerate his lawn?”

“Mr. Cressi is a collector,” I said. I saw Henry shaking in his seat as he fought to stifle his laughter.

“What about the flame-thrower?”

“Would you believe Mr. Cressi was having a problem with roaches?”

The commissioner didn’t so much as crack a smile, which was a bad sign. “These weapons are illegal contraband, not allowed to be owned by anyone, even so-called collectors.”

“We have a constitutional argument on that, your honor.”

“Spare me the Second Amendment, counselor, please. Your client was buying enough guns to wage a war. Three hundred and sixty-six thousand, ten percent cash,” said the Commissioner with a quick pound of his gavel.

“Your Honor, I believe that’s terribly excessive.”

“Two thousand per weapon seems fair to me. I think Mr. Cressi should spend some time in jail. That’s all, next case.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, fighting to keep all sarcasm out of my voice. I turned to Earl Dante, sitting patiently on the gallery bench behind the Plexiglas, and nodded at him.

Dante gave a look of resigned exasperation, like he would give to a mechanic who has just explained that his car needed an expensive new water pump. Then the loan shark, followed by the hulk in his workout suit, stood and headed out the gallery’s doors, taking his briefcase to the waiting bail clerk. As my gaze followed them out I noticed the thin blonde woman in the leather jacket staring at Cressi and me with something more than idle curiosity.

I turned and gave Cressi a complicated series of instructions. “Keep your mouth shut till you’re bailed out, Peter. You got that?”

“What you think, I’m an idiot here?”

“I’m not the one buying guns from cops. Just do as I say and then meet me at my office tomorrow morning so we can figure out where to go from here. And be sure to bring my usual retainer.”

“I always do.”

“I’ll give you that, Peter.” I looked back up to the blonde woman who was still watching us. “You know her?” I asked with a flick of my head to the gallery.

He looked up. “Nah, she’s not my type, a scrag like that.”

“Then if you don’t know her and I don’t know her, why’s she staring?”

He smiled. “When you look and dress like I do, you know, you get used to it.”

“That must be it,” I said. “I bet you’ll look even more dashing in your orange jumpsuit.”

Just then a bailiff grabbed Cressi’s arm and started leading him back to the holding cell.

“See if you can stay out of trouble until tomorrow morning,” I said to him as the Commissioner read out another in his endless list of names.

But Cressi was wrong about in whom the blonde was interested. She was waiting outside the Roundhouse for me. “Mr. Carl?”

“That’s right.”

“Your office said I could find you here.”

“And here I am,” I said with a tight smile. It was not a moment poised with promise, her standing before me just then. She was in her mid-twenties, small, her bleached hair hacked to ear’s length, as if with a cleaver. Black lipstick, black nail polish, mascara globbed around her eyes like a cry for help. Under her black leather was a blue work shirt, originally the property of some stiff named Lenny, and a thrift-shop–quality pleated skirt. She had five earrings in her right ear and her left nostril was pierced and she looked like one of those impoverished art students who hang outside the Chinese buy-it-by-the-pound buffet on Chestnut Street. A small black handbag hung low from her shoulder. On the bare ankle above one of her black platform shoes was the tattoo of a rose, and that I noticed it there meant I was checking her out, like men invariably check out every woman they ever meet. Not bad, actually. Cressi was right, she was scrawny, and her face was pinched with apprehension, but there was something there, maybe just youth, but something.