Nature of the Game (52 page)

For a long time the two old friends watched each other.

The man at the bar laughed, walked out with his arms around two young girls. He didn't give Jud a glance.

“We'd have to see how you worked out,” Jud told Wendell.

“No problem! You call the shots!”

“You say you can move an extra ounce a week,” said Jud.

“Easy.”

“Show me,” said Jud. “This one we go fifty-fifty. The future we work out then. Do this right—no flash, no strangers, no funnsies, strictly business.”

“No problem. My connection says his people are a clear pipeline, no supply woes. I'll need eight hundred—”

“You front this one yourself,” ordered Jud. “I don't pay for your audition.”

Wendell blinked; shrugged.

“Give me your phone number and address.” Jud passed Wendell a pen. “You don't tell them
shit
about me or any deal. Secure communications. You work out, I'll let you bring them in on it. Everything goes all right, you get everything you want.”

“How about the waiter?” said Wendell, smiling.

“That's your problem,” said Jud, “not mine.”

“I always thought that was too bad.”

“It always will be,” said Jud. “Get our tab, show him some flash, leave a big tip …”

They laughed. Jud stood.

“One thing,” said Jud, leaning close. “You're a friend. But you fuck up, you front me out—you pay the tab.”

Wendell's eyes said he
understood
.

Jud could barely concentrate enough to drive to Lorri's salon. She frowned while he told her boss they'd be glad to close the place up, but said nothing: Lorri had an instinct for a riff.

“I don't get it,” she said when they were alone. “You made me stop popping pills, now we're going to deal cocaine?”

“Whole different league,” said Jud. “And we're doing business, not pleasure. It's our way out of the shit. Besides, they owe me. This is how they'll pay.”

“Who are ‘they'?”

“Don't worry, baby. It's okay. I love you.”

“What if we get busted?”

“I got that covered,” he said. “I got that covered.”

She looked at him, laughed. “What the hell, everybody's doing it. Even Marie who does perms sells grams on the side.”

“Already you're earning your way,” said Jud, his subconscious scheming for ways to pull Marie under his umbrella.

Lorri called the L.A.
Times
, charmed a weekend editor with a story about her UCLA term paper's needing a few details about communists and guerrillas in South America. The bored man checked the clip files, read her a story, told her about sushi at a great place on Sunset. Lorri lied and agreed to meet him there for dinner, hung up, and laughed with Jud. They drank beer from the salon refrigerator. She read fashion magazines while he coded the message:

Previously highly reliable source informed this agent re: involvement in cocaine trafficking of communist terrorist groups possibly M-19, others, in S.A. armed and hostile to U.S. international and domestic interests. Follow-up reaction penetration initiated. Advise operation, complete penetration, maximum cover, deniability. Zero cost projected, minimal contact, minimal support. Operation Plan upon sanction.

Just enough
, thought Jud. A polygraph would say he didn't lie. He signed it
Malice
, the code designation of a veteran American intelligence agent of the highest sensitivity.

“What did you just do?” asked Lorri after he mailed the envelope to a suburban Maryland post office box.

“Don't worry,” he said, though his heart trembled.

He'll take it and use it in his hand, deal it around his table
, thought Jud, remembering the face of the general he'd glimpsed months before.
It's too sweet to turn down
.

Three weeks later, in the supermarket tabloid, Gemini's horoscope said “rainy days”: activate. Contact. Go.

He was already gone. America couldn't imagine how far.

Jud flipped his profit from Wendell back into the market.

Ounces became pounds. Marie joined Jud's team. She and Wendell recruited customers who Jud screened into associates.

Pounds became kilos. Marie and Wendell introduced Jud to their connections. In four months, he was their only outlet; in five months, they were working for him. Jud and Lorri quit their straight jobs, moved into a beach condo. Jud enlisted managers to handle the actual sales. He found Dean: between the two of them, corporate discipline became tight and rip-off artists got the word.

Kilos became loads. Jud did business with
the boys from Illinois
, with
the guys from Vegas
, with
the families back East
. Jud dealt with the bikers, barrio brothers. Big men in Miami vouched for him. Nobody asked about Art Monterastelli, and Raul sent his regards. Jud forged alliances; where hostilities appeared, federal busts materialized.

Loads became shipments. Jud organized safe houses, bank-rolled a mescaline anarchist whose imagination and computer skills were light-years beyond law enforcement budgets for electronic intelligence. Jud bought money counters, a secret interest in a Florida bank, two Mercedes sedans, and a Porsche convertible. When his gold Rolex broke, he dropped it in a panhandler's cup on Sunset Boulevard, got another one. He bought $500 bottles of wine and carryout dinners from French restaurants, complete with gold-inlaid china that went into the trash. Jud met with men who controlled planes flying the Gulf of Mexico, trucks rolling across the Mexican border, cargo from Alaska.

He and Lorri bought a Spanish mansion on a hill overlooking the ocean. There were cases of Chivas in the pantry and a crystal decanter in Jud's office. The big-screen TV was always on. Lorri roamed the house, from the bedrooms to the Jacuzzi to the TV. The women she knew were like Marie, or crystal-slick women on the arms of men like Jud. A Mexican maid who feared Immigration and loved a hundred dollars a day took care of the house. Lorri could drive her black Mercedes anywhere she wanted, as long as she followed security procedures. She wore silk blouses, tight jeans, high heels, kept her purse with her, her compact full of white powder in case Jud played a power trip and locked up the house supply. Uzis and magnums and 9-millimeters were stashed in every room; there was an alarm system, a Doberman, and a bodyguard who stayed awake all night. Outside, peacocks roamed the streets.

Jud became a wild man: restaurant scenes, racing through the streets, buying shopgirls flashy gifts, flirting with them for weeks, demanding their adoration, never seeing them again. He gained weight, fat around a wall of muscle. He was a gorilla striding through discos, alone or with dead-eyed men who laughed only with their mouths. Sometimes Nick was in L.A. and cruised with him; for a while, a famous Hollywood director who loved cocaine rode along, but the movie man's promises of redemptive
deals
never came through. Those
in the life
knew Jud as a legend, believed that somehow he had it all
wired
, and that somehow that wire would not tighten around their necks.

“I hold it all together,” he once told Nick. “You don't know. I'm doing it, I'm making it, I'm covered and it's cool and it doesn't bother me—fuck 'em—but you just don't know.”

“I don't think I want to,” replied Nick. He shook his head. “These are the days of madness.”

In November 1980, on a Saturday, Jud married Lorri in a chapel by the sea, tuxedos and no visible horror-show. Dean flipped his Harley and missed the ceremony. Lorri's family came from Nebraska skeptical; went home scared. By then, her smile was a sly grin, her skin was pale and she had black holes in the oceans of her eyes. At the service, the Hollywood director was an usher and Nick Kelley was Jud's best man.

Once a week, Jud locked himself in his study and coded a report to the Maryland post office box. At first, he reported only
infiltrating
. He sometimes requested information, never reported names of his allies or details of his operations: the other end didn't need to know; didn't want to know. Jud assumed that when a cop typed his name into the computer, someone visited the cop and erased the entry. Sometimes a coded letter in his post office box that not even Lorri knew about warned about someone or something; identified specific intelligence needs.

Nine months after his wedding, Jud began meeting
down South
with the marketplace czars who would soon dominate cocaine production in South America. He began to report substance akin to the hypothesis he'd raised in his brief Operation Alert: arms shipments, warfare and cooperation between the coca industrialists and the entrepreneurs of revolution. He gleaned tidbits from the swirl of black-market secrets and gossip: what foreign minister was owned by whom, what Middle East arms dealer was prospering in Paraguay, who the Cuban attaché in Bogotá was courting, what the Israeli advisers were doing in Panama, which Chinese tankers in Argentina had captains with hungry eyes.

Each time he looked in the mirror of his mansion's ornate bathroom, he told himself this life was
justified
. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else, some independent who gave nothing for what he got, a creep who didn't care. Outside, a white blizzard swirled through his country. He told himself it didn't matter, that the cries beginning to echo in the snow-burned streets came from losers who would have fallen to booze or to heroin, if they'd been brave enough for a needle. Cigarettes, hell: he'd quit smoking. He was a businessman providing a product; he wasn't to blame for its abuse. The intelligence gained justified the means expended, plus he was finally getting paid for years of terrible risks. He'd gotten a sanction. So what if it was a seduction.

Then he'd have another drink.

I'm owed
, he swore.

They
slipped up. Three coded messages ordered him to provide funds: $20,000 each time. Each time he mailed the cash to the Maryland post office box. The fourth time, he sent the cash—and requested a receipt covering all disbursements.

No receipt ever came. And no more requests.

Got you, General
, thought Jud.
Even you
.

In October 1981, Nick came to L.A. He asked Jud to meet him at the hotel he'd insisted on taking instead of the room at the mansion Jud offered. Jud didn't like the tremor in Nick's voice. The night before the meeting, he had the anarchist put a tap/trace on Nick's hotel phone. Three of his men whom Nick didn't know staked out the writer and his hotel room.

Before the meeting, Jud checked with the anarchist.

“He called some producer's office where he's got a two-o'clock; his agent, who wasn't there; and some chick in D.C. who wants a gold ring, which I don't think she'll get.”

“I know about her,” said Jud. “She'll be history soon.”

Nick had dined alone. No one suspicious had a room anywhere around him. He'd met no one, was not surveilled. While Nick was eating, Jud burgled his room, found nothing incriminating.

They met in the hotel restaurant. It was sunny, between breakfast and lunch. Nick had coffee. Jud had a Bloody Mary.

“Look,” said Nick, “this isn't easy.”

“Don't worry,” said Jud. “Everything's fine.”

Nick shook his head.

“You leaving me for another girl?” joked Jud.

And Nick had to laugh.

“I love you like a brother,” said Jud. “We've been through a lot together. I know it hasn't been easy on you, but—”

“You're my friend,” said Nick. He sighed. “I don't like what's happening to you.”

“What do you mean?” Cool, Jud was very cool. And friendly. This was the only man not
in the life
whom Jud could trust—which meant he was the only man Jud could trust at all.

“Used to be once, twice a month, a late-night call—”

“I'm sorry about that, it's just the pressure—”

“Now it's every night. Usually you're drunk, crazy. I keep expecting to hear UFO stories! Spirit-world shit!”

“I live in California.”

“Wherever you are, it's gone bad. It's eating you up.”

“I got it under control.”

“Then you've lost control of something else. This shit you're doing: it's wrong.”

“You never complained before,” said Jud. “You like the product.”

“Those are my sins,” said Nick. He looked into Jud's eyes. “I don't do coke anymore.”

“Did you find Jesus?”

“No.” Nick shook his head. “Coke's …
intoxicating
. Exciting. I don't think it would hook me like I've seen it hook a couple people.”

He paused, said, “People we know.”

Jud's gaze didn't falter.

“But bottom line,” said Nick, “when I get high, I support goons and corrupt politicians and killers, prop up people and things I've spent my life fighting or hating.”

“Like me,” said Jud.

For a long time, Nick didn't answer.

“I don't know what you're doing here,” said Nick. “I tell myself it's more than it seems. You tell me that, too. I can't afford to know. If you're my friend, I guess it has to be enough for me to believe. But that doesn't mean I like it.”

“So what now?” asked Jud.

“I don't know,” said Nick. “But you know where I am. And it can't be as close to you as it was.”

They told each other they were still friends; swore to keep in touch. Nick insisted on paying their bill.

From then until he became a gutter drunk, Jud called Nick only about once a month, and then usually during the day.

November 1981. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Out the mansion's picture windows, the sun hung low and red above the sea. The TV was on. Jud slumped on the couch, flicking channels. Perched in the steel chair, Lorri used a glowing butt to light a fresh cigarette.